Episode #277
Lindsey Lusher-Shute: GrownBy + The Future Of Farmer-Owned Tech

Lindsey Lusher-Shute traces how a farm family’s struggle with land access, marketing, and long-term survival helped lead to GrownBy, a farmer-owned tech platform built to serve growers instead of investors. Drawing on her work at Hearty Roots Community Farm, the National Young Farmers Coalition, and Farm Generations Cooperative, she explains why farmer ownership matters in software, how GrownBy grew out of real frustrations with existing CSA tools, and what its expanding wholesale, register, SNAP, and marketplace features could mean for small farms trying to stay viable.

Lindsey Lusher-Shute’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Linley Dixon interviewed Lindsey Lusher-Shute in the winter of 2026:

Linley Dixon 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. Lindsey, thank you for being here.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 0:03
Linley, thanks for having me again. It’s great to be back.

Linley Dixon 0:07
Yeah, you’ve been on the podcast before. I wanted to get an update about GrownBy, but for those guests who haven’t heard your original podcast, just tell us a little bit about Hearty Roots Community Farm. I’d love to know why you’re so politically active at some point. It’s such an incredible story.

Linley Dixon 0:25
I told my husband I was interviewing you today, and he goes, “I’ve been getting emails from her since we started farming,” and it’s so exciting to watch your career evolve. I’d love to dive into the things that happened before Farm Generations Cooperative and GrownBy, too.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 0:43
Yeah, of course. We have Hearty Roots Community Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York State. My husband Ben and I started the farm in 2004, so this is our 22nd year as an organic operation. We grow mainly CSA vegetables as our primary product, and we distribute to the Hudson Valley and New York City. We also have pastured hens, sheep, some pigs, and some goats.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:07
Ben has always been the leader of our farm operation, along with our incredible crew. My role on the farm has evolved over the years, but it has primarily been around advocacy, organizing, and working on agriculture more broadly in support of our farm, and also young farmers, organic farmers, and small farmers across the country.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:57
My journey before farming was in advocacy and policy work, and when Ben started our operation, Hearty Roots Community Farm, the biggest challenge we had was around land access and finding affordable farmland here in the Hudson Valley. We’re so close to New York City that the prices were completely unattainable for us. We couldn’t imagine being able to ever secure land on a long-term basis.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 2:31
We had an amazing farmer that we rented from to begin with, and a couple of farmers helped us along the way, but it was an issue of us not being able to see a future for ourselves in farming. That led to conversations with other farmers, and ultimately organizing and co-founding the National Young Farmers Coalition in 2010.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 2:56
That’s when your husband started getting emails from me, because we worked with farmers in Colorado and across the country on national, state, and local issues like land access, access to capital, and the list goes on. Basically, creating a platform for young farmers to be able to be active and elevate their voices.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 3:20
One of the things that we saw over and over again in our early outreach to other groups trying to get support for these issues was that more established farmers, who knew the system better and knew the policies better, really knew how to advocate for themselves. Their priorities were near the top, but young farmers, who were new to both farming, in many cases, and to advocacy and farm policy, which is immensely complex, didn’t have a place to engage.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 3:56
That’s what we really wanted to do with the National Young Farmers Coalition – have it as a structure and a platform for young farmers. When I was a young farmer, and for young farmers now and in the future, to be able to advocate for whatever they need and the future they want to see in agriculture. That’s how I got my current gig.

Linley Dixon 4:18
It’s so exciting that I’m in the same generation as you, and starting the farm at a similar time. You’re a little ahead of me, but your issues have been my issues on the farm in our farming journey. As you go along, different things become your bottleneck, reasons why you are struggling.

Linley Dixon 4:40
It’s not like, “Oh, phew, we’ve got our land, now we can just thrive.” Then it becomes marketing, and there are all kinds of other issues, like technology, that you’ve been discussing lately.

Linley Dixon 4:53
I’m curious, going back, did you always know when you were farming that you wanted to get back to organizing, or did you try farming and then you were like, “Oh gosh, I have to do policy work because this is so hard?”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 5:08
I think it was some of both. I am naturally an organizer. That is my nature. I love engaging with people. I love policy. I went to school for environmental policy. It’s always been an interest of mine. I did have my own operation alongside Hearty Roots Community Farm for a couple of years. I ran a flower farm, and I enjoyed that work.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 5:42
I was like, “I think I can make more impact if I use these skills that I’ve gained in policy, communications, and organizing, and help people who are in the same situation that I’m in now, trying to find access to a market, struggling with land access, and trying to make a life in agriculture.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 6:08
I have always been an organizer by nature, and that’s where my strengths lie. I think I’ve contributed most, probably, on our farm and in that community generally.

Linley Dixon 6:23
Yeah, not everybody has the skills to go out, and it takes a lot of yourself to really put yourself out there and say, “Will you join me?” Farmers are so swamped with the things that they have to do on their farm. They’re the worst group of people to organize to do things outside of their daily existence, of getting through their checklist on the farm.

Linley Dixon 6:45
Could you talk a little bit about what it was like organizing farmers at the beginning?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 6:49
That is true, although farmers, when you are able to convince them to get off the farm for a day, or make policy a priority, or meet with an elected official, or whatever, are the best advocates for themselves, because they have these incredible stories, and everyone cares about them.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 7:07
Elected officials care about them. The community cares about them. They just want to hear their voices. There are so few farmers, and farmers are so busy that it’s very hard to get that time to have that real conversation.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 7:25
We were lucky to have some issues that were relatively easy to organize around, because we had this incredible, inspiring community of people with the National Young Farmers Coalition to bring to Congress and bring to state elected officials. We had an incredible community of advocates to move issues forward.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 7:54
That’s not to say everything happens overnight. It takes a long time. There are so many issues that continue to build, grow, and find solutions, but the community was what kept me going, personally motivated too.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 8:11
It was an amazing time to be part of the young farmers community, because it was so new, and it was building something new at that time, and also awesome people to work with, hang out with, and get to know as friends.

Linley Dixon 8:28
What did you find worked? It ended up being this chapter thing. Is that something you would still recommend? I know you did nationwide surveys, which ended up resulting in things that were just like, absolutely clear, land access being number one, and how to get farmer loans.

Linley Dixon 8:47
You surveyed broadly, but then you also had this chapter model. Do you still think that’s the way to go?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 8:56
Yeah, totally. You need both. To do federal policy work, in my estimation, you have to have both the broad-scale understanding of the issues. That’s what the USDA wants to see. That’s what, in large part, Congress wants to see. To have that data is essential. It also helped us prioritize, “Okay, these are generally the things that we want to work on.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 9:20
But ultimately it comes down to stories, personal relationships, and the strength of the organizing community. All of those elements are built on the local level. We facilitated those local relationships and that local organizing through chapters.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 9:49
When you just talk about national, federal policy, it doesn’t mean anything unless you can see it on your farm, or something that your neighbor is struggling with, or how it impacted your ability to buy that piece of land and you almost missed out.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 10:09
Whatever it might be, those are the stories that compel people to do something. It’s not that “This law is unfair.” It’s like, “This is what happened because this is how this regulation was written.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 10:22
The chapters were very successful as a model, and my colleague and dear friend, Sophie Ackoff, was the force behind that work early on. She traveled all over the country doing mixers and meeting with farmers who were interested in forming a chapter.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 10:48
All of those seeds that were planted then built small groups. Some of them grew. Some of them stayed smaller. They all had their own interests and things that they wanted to accomplish. As a result, those groups gave a social circle. The Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition still exists and is one of the bigger chapters.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 11:13
They have regular meetings, potlucks, and skill shares. There are all kinds of things that happen. They also have this community when they want to go meet with their member of Congress or state legislator. I was on a meeting a month ago about health care in New York State, organized by the Hudson Valley chapter.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 11:32
That model, like American Farm Bureau Federation and National Farmers Union, is tested, and it works, because you need this multi-layered effect where you have a real community behind something, real stories, and then that filters up to national policy change.

Linley Dixon 11:53
Would you talk about some of the wins? I know there have been wins both on the federal level and locally, too. You’ve had a lot of wins.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 11:59
Yeah, absolutely. Wins across the board on funding. One of the big things, and funding ebbs and flows. That’s exhausting, so you have to keep advocating for the same thing over and over. Every farm bill cycle, “Are we going to dismiss all the programs that help small farms, or are we going to elevate the fact that we need…” Everybody needs these farms for food security, and because they are our communities.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 12:28
One of our early successes that likely had the most broad effect was access to capital and the Microloan Program at the USDA. Prior to the National Young Farmers Coalition, there was a minimum that you could get a loan for from the Farm Service Agency. To do that, there was tons of paperwork involved.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 12:56
For a farm that was diversified, like our farm, growing all these different types of crops and growing for CSA, we’re not doing row crops, and we’re not doing grains. We’re growing a whole lot of vegetables for a lot of different people. It’s a model that wasn’t incorporated into the USDA application process, and the amount wasn’t always appropriate for a small farm that maybe just wanted $10,000 or $20,000.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 13:28
We found through our national survey that access to capital was the number one issue that young farmers were facing. So we asked the USDA to create a new program based on their youth loan program that gave these small loans to young people. They knew how to do it, but they didn’t have a program that fit that model outside of the youth loan program.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 13:58
They developed the Microloan Program, which has now expanded. I don’t even know the list of all the types of microloans that are now offered, but it has been helpful for farmers just starting out to have access to that capital at the most affordable rate possible from the Farm Service Agency.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 14:18
On the national level, we had microloans. Our chapters were advocating for them as well. It also involved some policy work, looking at USDA regulations and saying, “This is possible. You’re doing it here. You can promulgate rules to add young farmers to the mix here.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 14:43
That’s something that I feel proud of, because it endures, no one is getting rid of it, and it has worked.

Linley Dixon 14:50
What about locally in New York?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 14:54
In New York, on land access, one of the laws that we were able to pass, that I was very involved in, was essentially the… One of the issues that we experienced when we were first trying to buy land at Hearty Roots is that we were here in the Hudson Valley, where conservation is very active. There are a number of land trusts that had protected land from development, presumably for agriculture.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 15:29
However, because there are people who are working outside of New York City and telecommuting or commuting, at that time, we were ourselves, as farmers, competing with Wall Street people for this same land. They didn’t want to put houses on it or develop it, either. They just wanted a nice estate. Obviously, we were unable to make a competitive bid.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 16:01
There have been a number of groups around the country. Equity Trust is one of them that pioneered this idea of affordability easements and provisions in a conservation agreement. It reduces the land price further, but requires that a working farmer own that land. It takes out that estate value.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 16:35
At the New York State level, they fund conservation easements, and they were previously not funding this additional affordability provision. I think it hadn’t been brought to them. Because they weren’t offering state funding, it was discouraging our local and state land trusts from being able to pay down that additional estate value to get the land in the hands of farmers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 17:07
We got behind the Working Lands Act, where they said, “Yes, we will start to fund the full value of the conservation easement, including these affordability provisions.” Now land trusts have the option to conserve land truly as farmland for farmers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 17:33
Up the street from me, there’s a piece of land that was transitioned because of this from a multi-generational farm to another multi-generational farm that had been renting that land. It wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, because it would have been too expensive.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 17:50
The cool thing is, because the land was conserved in this way, it’s going to continue that pattern. The farmer is required to sell the land to another individual who is meeting the federal requirement to be a farmer. We were able to do that on our land, too, which is amazing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 18:17
We do have land now, and we’re grateful that that is the case. We’ve benefited from this in a couple of ways. We were able to sell the estate rights on our land, so now it’ll be easier if our kids want to eventually own the land. We are now required to sell our land to another farmer, and we were able to acquire another parcel from a town that conserved their land in the same way, with an affordability provision.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 18:49
It’s out there now that if you’re serious about conserving land for agriculture, you have to do it in this way, where it’s meant for production purposes and for working farms.

Linley Dixon 19:04
Will you explain that a little bit more? You sold your estate rights. Explain that.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 19:10
When we purchased our land, we were able to acquire it right when a conservation easement was put on the land, so it was not competitive with other buyers. It was a CSA member who owned this farm property that she wasn’t using and wanted to transition it to another farm, or figure out another landowner. She wanted to sell the development rights. We made a deal with her, and we were able to purchase that land.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 19:33
It had a traditional conservation easement on it, and we were able to work with a land trust, Zena Hudson Valley Land Trust, and Equity Trust to further protect our land from becoming a future estate or having a non-farm use by putting an additional conservation provision on it that is an affordability covenant.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 20:15
We sold the estate value, as I’m calling it in an informal way, so that the land will remain affordable into the future.

Linley Dixon 20:29
You had already purchased it, and then you sold the estate rights to put it into a conservation easement, and that allowed you to buy another piece of property that didn’t have one.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 20:43
Yeah. It was a source of capital for our farm. Exactly. The benefit to us is it’s a source of capital, but it also makes it easier for us to transition our land, either to another farm, one of our workers, one of our kids, or whatever it might be.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 21:01
Whenever we decide to retire, it’s an easy choice. We’re working on working land, and so we need that condition. That tradition will continue.

Linley Dixon 21:10
I love this because my least favorite model is something that our farm did for six years, which is wealthy people who have lots of land say, “You can farm my land.” I was excited to have that opportunity, but I don’t think that’s a long-term arrangement for success for a farmer.

Linley Dixon 21:30
We were driving, even if it’s short, even if it’s five to 10 minutes, it’s still not conducive to the type of farming that we do to live off the farm. The landowners didn’t have the same aesthetic for a working farm versus a beautiful garden that they wanted.

Linley Dixon 21:51
We had piles of things here and there, and we had an aesthetic disagreement. Traffic was another issue. People weren’t allowed to come to the farm. Over time, we wanted to put in infrastructure. It’s like, if you don’t have long-term security, you’re not going to get the benefits back.

Linley Dixon 22:10
There were so many reasons why, even though these were wonderful people, it wasn’t working for us over the long run. It was a great way to get started. When people ask me, I say, “Fine, if you just want to get started, try it out. See if you want to be a farmer. Go to the farmers market, have a small CSA, but over the long run, you’ve got to figure out a different plan,” and that’s usually what I recommend.

Linley Dixon 22:35
Do you have thoughts about, you’ve got a young farmer and they’re struggling, what do you recommend that they do for land?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 22:45
For land, I would recommend renting land, but be aware of all the issues that you just pointed out. If you want to have livestock, think about all the things that you’re going to need in terms of fencing, when you’re going to be there in the morning, when you’re going to be there at night, smells, sounds, and vehicles, all those things.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 23:09
Most non-farmers, as you experienced, are excited about the idea of renting land to a farmer, but they don’t know what that means, because they haven’t done it themselves. We were very lucky early on to rent from two farmers who understood. Obviously they cared, but they were with us. They were like, “Oh yeah, of course, you’re going to be there whenever. It’s fine, of course.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 23:37
There wasn’t even a discussion. It was assumed. That’s rare, to have that relationship where someone has a full understanding of what it’s going to be, because that’s how it’s always been in our case. But I’ve heard so many stories.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 23:54
In fact, when the National Young Farmers Coalition was first formed, we were sitting around this table at a farmhouse. That farmer was in the process of being evicted from their land by a landowner who did not like how the farm operation was going. It’s a story that repeats itself over and over again.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 24:18
That’s not to say there aren’t great people who will rent you land. You just have to find them. At least in our area, and I know there are many others, there are land-linking organizations that help to train landowners on what it means to host a farm on their land and lease a young farmer a property.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 24:43
They help to facilitate some of that early communication, so you’re not forgetting to talk about the smell of pigs when the wind is moving in a certain direction. Go through all of those details. Renting is the right thing to do. It really is, because land is expensive.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 25:09
When Ben started out, he didn’t necessarily know the soil type that he wanted. He didn’t know exactly the kind of farm that he wanted to build someday. I think working at another farm, apprenticing, and then renting is a great path if you don’t have access to land.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 25:31
It can be painful, and you’ll learn from it. Certainly everything isn’t going to be perfect, but you’ll know what you like and what you don’t like, and that will help to inform whatever might be next. It takes time.

Linley Dixon 25:47
You build up social capital in a community if you’re renting, and when it came time for us to say, “This isn’t working for us,” we had been on a number of different plots. Talking to your CSA members sometimes leads to opportunities that are more long-term. If you’re able to prove yourself.

Linley Dixon 26:05
Your community may end up wanting you there. There have been a number of success stories of the community coming together to help you.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 26:14
That happened with us. Our CSA member said, “Oh, I have someone all the way.”

Linley Dixon 26:20
They don’t want to do it for just anybody who hasn’t necessarily shown that they really want to farm and they’re invested in the hard work it takes to make it work. I have also seen, on the road with the Real Organic Project, farmers later in their careers who have children that don’t want to farm. They would love to pass their farm on, but they also want to leave their kids something, and that becomes really complicated.

Linley Dixon 26:49
If there isn’t a land trust – like it seems you’ve solved some of these problems in the Hudson Valley – what do you recommend for places that don’t have a local land trust that has, what did you call it, Equity Trust, or the ability to pay the estate rights to the heirs?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 27:14
It’s very challenging. The American Farmland Trust and other organizations have a lot of resources around farmland transition. It’s a whole other thing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 27:24
That’s national, right?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 27:26
The American Farmland Trust, yeah, exactly. But that’s something you see over and over again. It can be very stressful for a farm family to figure that out.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 27:37
Yes, it makes perfect sense that a farmer, oftentimes, that’s where their wealth is when they pass. They want to be able to give that to their kids, but that puts the kids, oftentimes, in a tough position to figure out if they want to keep it in agriculture. How can they do that?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 27:59
Conserving land is one option. If you want to see it remain undeveloped, you can work with a conservation easement or a conservation organization to remove some of the development rights or even add affordability provisions.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 28:16
I think the best thing to do in that case is really to find support from organizations in the state or nationally that have developed a whole slew of resources on how to handle those conversations, and various strategies for continuing to keep the land in agriculture if that’s what the kids want to do.

Linley Dixon 28:42
Are there some other organizations besides American Farmland Trust that you’d recommend, or is that the one?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 28:49
That is the one. Then there’s also the Farm Transitions Network as well. There are numerous organizations. Land trusts even offer this support sometimes. There are definitely state organizations as well. Perhaps you can put them in the notes, and I can send you some resources later.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 29:14
A lot of people are focused on it because it is a big moment of transition. As we see so many farmers retire or pass on, it’s a problem that many people are looking to solve.

Linley Dixon 29:29
Sometimes there are beautiful situations where the farmers themselves have to figure out how to survive in retirement financially. Maybe they can carve off a little piece of land for themselves, and there are all kinds of ways to make that work.

Linley Dixon 29:44
We need to share the stories. There are successful models out there, but they need to be shared so that it inspires other people that they can do this and not just sell the land for development. A lot of times, that’s not what they want.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 29:57
Absolutely. Farmers don’t always have the luxury of saving for retirement, so figuring out that plan can be tricky.

Linley Dixon 30:09
Let’s talk about phase two. You’ve acquired your land, and now marketing is the bottleneck. This is kind of leading into… Tell me how you realized that you wanted to switch over and work on online sales platforms for farmers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 30:25
What was that all about? At the National Young Farmers Coalition, we talked about the National Young Farmer Survey that we did a couple of times during my tenure, and it’s happened since. We were asking farmers about their biggest challenges and relating those challenges to policy solutions.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 30:49
But around 2015, and even earlier, we were thinking, “Okay, wow, we’ve created this awesome network of chapters, and we have farmers all over the US. There’s strength in numbers, and this policy stuff is taking a long time.” We were wondering what else we could do to help farmers in a more immediate way.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 31:17
We did another survey just of our membership to say, “What else could the National Young Farmers Coalition potentially do to help you succeed on your farm?” A lot of different things came up. Health care came up, as you would imagine, and that still remains a huge obstacle for growers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 31:39
Another thing on the list was technology, and the opportunity for the National Young Farmers Coalition to stand behind or work on improved technology for farmers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 31:54
At the time, there were a number of software platforms that had popped up to serve this small farm community. I know our farm tried out a couple of them, and we were really excited about their presence initially, but then weird things started to happen.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 32:17
For example, the price of one doubled overnight. Another one actually started competing with us. They were a CSA platform, then became an aggregator and opened up – essentially competing aggregation CSAs – like my husband likes to call them fake CSAs – down the street from our drop-off point.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 32:40
It was really strange. I was like, “Who are we working with here? Are they really on our side, or are they just about paying back their investors?” We were thinking, “Okay, what benefit could the National Young Farmers Coalition really provide in the tech space?”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 33:04
The idea of having a commonly held, cooperatively owned tech platform rose to the top of the list, because it’s something we could roll out nationally. Health care is a huge issue and needs a ton of work; we joined some advocacy groups around the Affordable Care Act at that time. But tech is something that everyone could have access to, more or less uniformly.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 33:34
We got some grant dollars to start a cooperative. So we started the Farm Generations Cooperative, the name of the co-op. Then, with USDA funding, we built the first version of the GrownBy platform.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 33:50
In 2019, I left the National Young Farmers Coalition basically to focus on this full-time and see if we could make it a viable, sustainable business that would meet the idea of a software platform fully working in partnership with growers, affordable, and providing this essential service while moving the space forward in a way that all of us need to see.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 34:17
The market share of local and organic is still so minuscule and could be grown tremendously. So what can we do as a community of growers, as a national app offering their products, to really elevate everyone who’s participating?

Linley Dixon 34:38
I love that you talk about the farmer ownership of it, and that might not be clear why that really matters. The example that you gave is a great one. It’s like the owners of the platform might not have your direct interests at heart.

Linley Dixon 34:54
They might be well intentioned, but then in the end they, like you said, might want to profit or return profits to their investors. Is there any other fully farmer‑owned cooperative platform like this out there?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 35:10
Not that I’m aware of. Open Food Network is an open-source platform, and I think they have a nonprofit structure. But we are the only co-op in the game. We are 90% owned by our farmer members, and 10% owned by employees. Our Class A shareholders are either farmers or employees.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 35:37
It was 100% farmer-owned initially, and then our farmer membership and Board of Directors voted to sell 10% of the company to the employees. The reason being that our engineers are obviously incredibly important to the development and success of the platform and our entire team at GrownBy.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 36:09
We wanted to make sure that their input was represented and that they were really valued in terms of ownership of the company overall.

Linley Dixon 36:21
I love that. Do you have any of these skills, or are you more, “Here’s what the farmers need,” and then you had to find the people who had the skills to put this together?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 36:33
Yeah. I’ve learned a lot. I’ll just say I remain on a learning curve, which has been really fun. I’ve always enjoyed technology, and that has always interested me. But when I started, we hired a consultant to do everything, and I was kind of sitting there as a farmer rep and helped with some specifications.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 37:07
A couple of years into it, we realized that there was just no way we were going to have the pace of development we wanted, and it was going to be way too expensive. We just were never going to get it right if we didn’t have our own in-house team.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 37:14
I was introduced to our first CTO, Robbie Kumar Ramanathan, who was a very highly experienced Silicon Valley engineer and was more towards the age of retirement. He had spent decades in engineering and tech leadership and wanted to have more of a social impact project.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 37:44
He actually went to EcoFarm, and he’s like, “What is this? This is so cool. What can I do to help these people?” We were connected through a mutual friend through the food system Six Network, actually. I told him all about what we were trying to do, and he’s like, “Give me a couple of days. Let me think about it. Am I going to work with this crazy farmer who clearly knows nothing about programming?”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 38:10
He came back to the table and said, “Yes, I will help you. We’ll make this work.” We ended up scrapping the entire first version of GrownBy, which was painful, but it needed to be done. He hired a team of interns to help him.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 38:31
We didn’t have very many resources to hire other programmers who were out of school, so we hired some very young programmers as interns that first summer. They stayed with us beyond that, and we built GrownBy 1.0, which was officially released in 2021. It’s been a journey.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 39:01
My skills now – I actually sit in with the engineering team every day. I do a lot of specification work, data design work, and UI work. I’ve learned a lot about tech. I’m still not really coding, but I work on all the design aspects of the software.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 39:23
You, speaking of EcoFarm, we just saw each other there, and you won an award and were presenting. Tell us what version you’re at now and all the features that farmers should be excited about.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 39:32
Next week, knock on wood, we should be releasing version 3.95 of GrownBy, and then we’re going to have GrownBy 4.0 later this year. GrownBy, what it does today, is a sales software marketplace. Farmers can easily put up a farm store on the GrownBy retail marketplace. They can sell CSA shares and market pre-orders.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 40:09
Then, in September, we created a separate wholesale marketplace. Farmers can sell their products online retail, and now they can sell online through this wholesale-only marketplace. You have to be invited to purchase products through this wholesale marketplace. We developed this with the Culinary Institute of America, so it’s really tailored for what a chef or institutional buyer needs while also meeting the needs of growers.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 40:45
Then, in GrownBy 4.0, and in beta with this release next week, we are offering GrownBy Register, which is a farmers market cash register. It’s basically like Square, except it accepts EBT and connects with all of your other inventory.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 40:46
Through GrownBy, you can now sell your CSA shares, sell wholesale, and sell at market. Rather than texting chefs every week, you can just have a storefront with all your products. At the end of the day, you have a single customer list, a single set of orders, a single set of invoices, and sales records. It’s all in one place, which is just a beautiful thing.

Linley Dixon 40:22
Dollars too, right? EBT and SNAP?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 41:18
We accept SNAP online. We’re the first platform to do so, and with Register, we will accept SNAP offline too – offline meaning in person, when you’re taking a card and swiping it. We have a payment terminal that is compliant with all of the FNS USDA rules for SNAP.

Linley Dixon 42:04
That’s incredible for all the bookkeeping – putting that in one place for taxes and just keeping track of it all, for organic verification.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 42:14
Yeah. I think it’ll be interesting to see what our recommendations should be to make certification simpler. Our farm uses Clover, and we use GrownBy. So now we’ll be able to get rid of Clover and just have the one setup for our farm. We have a very active farm store on site, so we’ll use GrownBy for everything, which is just going to make everyone happy.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 42:46
With CSA customers, using EBT or not, oftentimes they’ll show up at the store to pick up their share and haven’t paid, so they need to resolve an invoice or whatever. They can just do that now at the GrownBy cash register, look up the customer number, find their invoice, and pay right then and there, and its done. It will save tons of time.

Linley Dixon 43:09
Yeah. There’s a farmer-facing portion that allows you to upload all your products, and the customer-facing portion, I’m assuming, is different for chefs and institutions. Your CSA customers can then itemize.

Linley Dixon 43:25
What does it look like when all of that comes back to the farmer for harvest time? Is there a way to just say, “Okay, all of this adds up to five pounds of basil,” and then, at the wash station, package it accordingly? Is there a sheet that tells you the harvest without…

Lindsey Lusher Shute 43:45
There is.

Linley Dixon 43:46
Oh my gosh. That’s amazing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 43:51
Basically, there’s a whole farmer dashboard that we’re constantly adding to and tweaking based on farmer feedback, which is great. We have a fulfillment page where you can get your daily harvest list and know exactly all the things that you need across the board per location. We have sign-in sheets that you can print out or export as a CSV, like for a CSA pickup site.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 44:20
We also have a little app where you can digitally sign in all of your CSA members, or, if you’re on a delivery route, you can mark all the locations that you’ve been to and the customers who have received their products, and then pack those, print thermal labels, and all the things…

Linley Dixon 44:40
…labels and stuff from it too.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 44:41
Yes.

Linley Dixon 44:44
What do you still feel like is a bucket list to work on?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 44:53
We are working right now on WIC, Women, Infants, and Children. It is another federal program that we are incorporating into GrownBy right now. If you’re a WIC recipient, you can save your credentials on the platform and be able to check out. WIC is very inflexible for products like at a grocery store that have a UPC code, but it’s quite flexible for fresh products with cash.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 45:27
We will make it easy for families to buy on GrownBy with WIC. That is something that is coming. There are two areas of work. One is around nutrition benefits. They are so complex. There are so many of them, and just figuring out one more… particularly now that we have this point-of-sale cash register for farmers markets, that’s really important.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 45:51
I think a next chapter for us, and hopefully what we’re going to be able to focus on in the spring a bit more, is all those Nutrition Incentive Programs and incorporating as many of them as we can into GrownBy to both help consumers have access to this fresh food and also the farmers, just to make it less of a headache to engage with all of these programs.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 46:13
We’re also working on Farm to School, which is another area that we’re interested in, in leveraging the wholesale marketplace to support farmers right now who are offering to schools, on a micro-purchasing level, their fresh products.

Linley Dixon 46:31
Wow, that’s incredible. There’s so much energy and passion behind what you do, and I can see that including something like WIC and EBT is also very values-driven in your work. I just wanted to take a step back and talk about the heart and why you do what you do, and what drives you every day.

Linley Dixon 46:58
It’s endless obstacles to overcome, and you have a long history of just staying at it. I’m curious how that works for you, if there’s someone who has inspired you, or if there are daily rituals and why you do what you do.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 47:15
Yeah, I appreciate that question. Of course, this is our family on the farming side of it. We have seen at Hearty Roots Community Farm just the amount of impact that a small farm can have. I have personal relationships with many of our customers who have been shopping at our farm for years and years and years.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 47:47
Some of their kids who weren’t even born yet are now in college. It’s pretty amazing. Having such a long run as a farm, you really develop deep relationships with your customers. We know that we’ve had an impact on so many levels.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 48:05
One is just that relationship, but also customers who shopped with us through COVID traveled great distances to come to our farm because they knew they were getting food that was safe for themselves and available and nutritious for their families.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 48:28
Just last fall, when SNAP benefits were temporarily removed or under threat, and people didn’t know if their balances were going to be available, we already offered at Hearty Roots Community Farm with GrownBy CSA shares at 50% off to EBT customers with a double-up program.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 48:49
But we had this really generous nonprofit, Glenwood, that we work with; they offered to cover the remaining amount – basically free CSA shares for the customers who needed them the most. You just hear these stories about families who can’t even talk or respond because they are so grateful that they still have access to the food they need for themselves and their families.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 49:21
Being part of a community that just gives and gives and gives and gives in so many ways – that’s very special. That gets you up in the morning: “I want to keep seeing more of this in my world.” It’s certainly better than other things we’re seeing in our world right now. As much as we need to push against the things that are wrong, we need to move forward the things that we love and that bring us joy and support other people.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 49:49
In agriculture and food, food access, and food justice, there are so many ways to lift up people who are doing extremely important work. It’s easy to keep going because it’s something good and really important on many levels.

Linley Dixon 50:09
How does the farm integrate with your work? You and I have a similar situation in that we’re working behind the computer a lot of the time with the farming going on around us. That interaction helps drive me because my husband will come in, or my brother, who also does it at the end of the day, and they’ll talk about all their issues or their marketing troubles. It keeps you so connected.

Linley Dixon 50:35
Do you get a chance to go out and do what you love on the farm still?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 50:38
Yeah, I do. I help with lambing and with chores. Particularly with the animals, we always need an extra set of hands, and that’s usually me. Yes, I get to get out and do some work pretty frequently, which is great. Also, if something happens, I’m the first to hear about it: “This didn’t work,” or whatever. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened in a while. I’m very connected because it’s immediate and it matters.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 51:20
But it’s also very rewarding to have the opportunity to just get out and see a lamb being born, or just whatever. I love going out to do a chore after dark. It’s just so peaceful. That’s a pretty amazing way to end your day. If you’ve been in the office, and then you get to go out at night and help with whatever the farm needs to put things to bed.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 51:57
You have two kids, right? How old are they now?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 51:59
Yeah. They’re in sixth and eighth grade.

Linley Dixon 52:03
It’s really hard when they’re little. There are all these phases. I now have a high schooler, so it’s gotten so much easier because she’s so busy with her own stuff that she doesn’t really need us. Do you have any words to help those young parents who are juggling that and farming, that it too shall pass?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 52:31
Sometimes I look back and I’m like, “Oh, God, how did we do that?” We were very lucky to have some really great child care support nearby and great preschools. My mother and father-in-law came up so many times when I was on work trips with the National Young Farmers Coalition. They were keeping our household together because there was no way Ben could have survived at home when the girls were really little. We had a lot of support along the way.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 53:10
I’ve talked to numerous families thinking, “What should we do? Should we move back home? How are we going to get through this with kids?” It’s like, you do need family, I think, as a farmer in particular, because there are so many things happening outside of your control that you can’t predict.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 53:29
There are emergencies, like the power goes out, something breaks, or the tractor, whatever it is. You kind of have to go do that, but your kids also need you. Being able to build in a little bit of slack and community around you to support you – that’s sort of what saved us. But it was hard. I did not sleep enough at all for certain periods of time, which is just women working too. It’s challenging.

Linley Dixon 54:00
I remember there was a time when we were still learning how to grow, because we started the farm the same year my daughter was born. We hadn’t figured onions out yet. We had these little, tiny onions and weeds up to here, and instead of just tilling them under, we were like, “We’re gonna save the onions.”

Linley Dixon 54:18
So there was a week or two where my husband and I just didn’t see each other, because we would rotate every other night, and one would stay with Raina, and the other would just be on our hands and knees weeding onions. It got done. But in hindsight, I was like, “Why didn’t we just till these freaking onions under, leave the plastic out here, and try again?” It’s crazy sometimes when you look back.

Linley Dixon 54:45
Tilling them under I guess is one thing I would say for that one. But just put the top ropes on your hoops. We’ve had so much plastic when I was learning how to do stuff. What are some mistakes that you made that you kind of want to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 55:08
Oh, man. That’s a good question. We’ve made many.

Linley Dixon 55:15
Maybe be okay with mistakes. Forgive yourself.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 55:18
Yeah, I think being able to just have some perspective. It’s like in the moment, everything is about making that bed maybe perfect or whatever. It’s never perfect on a farm, like ever, ever, ever. It’s never perfect. You just kind of have to have some comfort with chaos, I think, at the end of the day.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 55:45
You want to get everything better and constantly improve, but you have to just forgive yourself and give yourself a little grace to just be like, “I’m doing the best that I can today, and that’s what it’s going to be.” The one thing with livestock, I would say, is it’s just such a learning curve.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 56:10
Our sheep are so fragile. It’s like really being aware of as many things as you possibly can, as you were saying, like whatever you can do or whatever it might be. Really take time for preseason organization and preparation, and just try to prevent issues. It seems like that always pays off.

Linley Dixon 56:43
We’ve really kind of dialed it back over time, like reduced. How have you been able to keep such a diverse farm over time? If I remember, you’re mostly a vegetable farm, or am I forgetting a lot of the livestock for more than a vegetable farm?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 56:58
Mostly a vegetable farm, but we have about 30 ewes. Then we do about 15 pigs. This year has been a little bit weird, but we have around 800 to 1500 laying hens. We have a fairly sizable flock. It’s small in the grand scheme of things, but…

Linley Dixon 57:21
You have 800 to 1500 like moving around the pasture?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 57:26
Moving around, yeah. We’ve been able to grow because we have an awesome team. We share the responsibility. It’s just not the two of us – that would be a complete nightmare. But we have our farm manager. One of them, Nico, has been working with us for years. We have a full-time farm store manager.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 57:54
We’ve gotten to the point where we have individuals who are just fully in charge of their domain at the farm, whether that’s livestock, crop production, or the greenhouse. That’s been how we’ve been able to grow – by developing a team within the farm that really takes leadership on their own. So it’s not just us. We are working with an awesome group of people.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 58:24
We also have a crew that is partially H-2A. We have workers that come seasonally, who have been amazing and helped the farm maintain our size and to grow as well. That’s been part of it as well. We just have great people that we work with.

Linley Dixon 58:44
How many CSA members?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 58:48
It’s usually between 800 to 1,000, it just depends how you count it.

Linley Dixon 58:55
You are going to markets too?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 58:58
We do not do any markets. We have a store on site seven days a week. We have done a few farmers markets, but it’s just not part of our business model. A little bit of wholesale, mostly CSA, and then the farm store.

Linley Dixon 59:25
How big is your crew?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 59:30
The peak is about 25, including our Farm Store team.

Linley Dixon 59:37
How have you figured out housing around, because it’s expensive, isn’t it? Is there housing close by?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 59:42
It’s crazy expensive, yeah. When we moved to our current property that we purchased, it had a barn on the land. We renovated the top half of that to be employee housing. There are a couple of apartments there, and it’s adequate for basically all of our seasonal staff to stay on the farm, which is a requirement for the H-2A program to provide that housing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 59:42
That’s another reason for farmers owning land, because the housing situation can really not often be addressed outside of the farm context. Then we purchased another property last year, actually, from the town of Red Hook, New York, and that has some additional housing on it that our workers are living in as well.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 59:48
Just last year, we ended up not being able to hire a livestock manager because two of the people we wanted to hire who accepted the job couldn’t find anywhere to live in the Hudson Valley. So yes, that remains a huge issue.

Linley Dixon 1:00:58
Yeah, I’m sensing that’ll be like another issue you take on at some point in your life.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:01:03
We’re trying to work on it. Affordable housing is just generally a challenge.

Linley Dixon 1:01:07
I just talked with Paul Muller at Full Belly Farm at EcoFarm. He was saying that they’ve been able… They needed an initial input of money to be able to buy housing, but once they were able to do that, the rent would then return to investors, and he’s been able to kind of figure that piece out. It was several years of activism on his and Dru’s part to figure out housing for their farm. I know that’s another really common issue.

Linley Dixon 1:01:41
Do you have one crop that you’re just like, “Wow, we’ve really dialed this in over time,” the way you produce it or something, and you want to share tips with a beginning farmer so they can avoid a lot of mistakes that you’re just proud of how you produce it?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:01:59
I would say there are two products that we produce that are really great. Our eggs are amazing, and they’re amazing because our chickens are outdoors, they’re well cared for, and they get lots of access to pasture. We have a washer. We used to wash them by hand, then we got a little egg washer, and then we have a bigger egg washer. I don’t know if we’ll ever get a larger egg washer.

Linley Dixon 1:02:28
Does it roll the eggs for you and go through something?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:02:31
Yeah. It’s a brush washer. That has been a great investment for us as we’ve grown our egg production over time. I would say the reason that we get so many customers at our farm store is because of these eggs. Obviously, there’s been an egg shortage, and people are worried about eggs. Eggs are a major draw because we’ve been able to produce them in this way.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:03:02
There are lots of other farms that also do this. I think it’s relatively easy to get up and running if you’re able to retrofit a hay wagon with some housing for hens. That’s something that our farm has become known for. I would definitely recommend thinking about egg production because it really can pay off.

Linley Dixon 1:03:33
Let’s dive in there, because I’ve heard that it’s not profitable at all. That’s like the word on the street with farmers. Tell me how you’ve been able to make that work. Certified Organic too. You must compete with non-GMO eggs, where they’re actually not getting organic grain.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:03:51
I have to tell you, Linley, our eggs are non certified organic.

Linley Dixon 1:03:54
Okay, and is that because of the cost of the feed?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:03:55
Because of the cost of the feed, yeah.

Linley Dixon 1:03:59
This is a huge issue where we can’t make it work to buy organic feed and have it be affordable. So yeah, I want everybody to know this.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:04:11
It’s ebbed and flowed. Sometimes we have used organic; sometimes we haven’t. We just buy it from the guy up the street now. It’s produced locally.

Linley Dixon 1:04:22
That’s amazing that you’re able to find a local grain. Even still, I guess some things for customers to be aware of: we have tried several times to make it work profitably, to be certified organic poultry, and that price point just doesn’t map out.

Linley Dixon 1:04:45
A lot of times, the farmer, through no fault of their own, just has to buy conventional feed. I imagine that your local farmer isn’t cheap grain either. How have you been able to make the eggs pencil out? Is it scale?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:05:04
Yeah, it’s definitely scale. Also, our customers are willing to pay a premium for the eggs as well, because they see the difference. But I would say even if it just broke even, it gets people in there to buy our certified organic vegetables. So it is a draw from that perspective as well. It’s not the only thing you should be doing, but it certainly has added a lot to our farm.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:05:35
It’s something that we can get out more broadly to other stores too. We ran a promotion campaign where we put ads for our CSA in all of our egg boxes. Then we were at different smaller retail grocery stores around the area. So it’s like, if you like these eggs, we also check out our CSA that delivers to the same store or somewhere nearby.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:06:06
I think there’s more acceptance of eggs than vegetables. People come into our store and routinely just buy a couple of dozen eggs and nothing else, which is fine. I think it’s helped to round out our operation in an important way.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:06:34
In terms of certified products, we are also very well known for our carrots. I cannot take any credit for how amazing our carrots are. Ben has really dialed that in over the years. He’s doing two cool things with these carrots.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:06:55
One is that he did a SARE project where he experimented with putting compost. Weeding carrots is always such a huge pain, and so he basically buries the weeds in compost. He’s presenting the results of this experiment that he did , which is very successful at the PASA Conference, which is next week, I believe.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:07:26
I imagine they’ll make the results available online. But anyways, he used this compost spreader basically as a means of weeding these carrots, and he had great results.

Linley Dixon 1:07:38
Can you dive into that further? How does one do that?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:07:42
I’m not the person to dive into it further. I can send you some more information about it. That is something that he’s been very excited about. Then also, on the carrot front, we have been working with some researchers at Bard College, and also Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, who have their chemists.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:08:08
They’ve been taking our carrots and dicing them up and basically looking at the chemical composition of them after the frost. They are basically finding that our carrots are extremely highly nutritious because they have this frost breathing stress. There’s all these nutrients that are not available in other carrots. That’s been cool to see, too.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:08:38
It’s not like anything we’re doing is more special than any other form of growing carrots in the Northeast and harvesting throughout the winter. But it’s just cool to be able to see. I don’t know if they’ve done an organic, non-organic comparison.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:08:56
But it’s cool to just know that, “Wow, this weird way that we’re growing carrots and all the pain that it is to harvest them in the fall and in the early winter months, it’s worth it, because our customers are actually getting more nutrients in their carrots too.”

Linley Dixon 1:09:12
I don’t think customers understand why carrots…? First of all, they’ve maybe lost the taste of what a real carrot tastes like, but carrots are one of those where it’s just so much better if they’re grown in maybe soils with a little bit more clay. Then even further incredible taste if it’s harvested after a frost, and the variety selection really makes a difference.

Linley Dixon 1:09:37
I always hear of the candy carrot, Smoke ’Em, that Eliot Coleman kind of praised and has done forever. But for the eater who’s never tasted a local carrot, it’s just like this whole other world of…. Then once you find out, you’ll never go back to the carrots that were grown in warmer climates and sandy soils. It’s just another beast.

Linley Dixon 1:10:02
There’s so many things that go into why that carrot tastes so good, and the care of the farmer, the knowledge of the farmer, the time of year that it’s harvested, the variety selection, all of those things.

Linley Dixon 1:10:13
Dan Barber does a little bit about all of those decisions that go into making this carrot so good. He said that in the end, it’s a very political carrot, that you’ve chosen to buy this carrot, and there’s a lot of politics behind that choice.

Linley Dixon 1:10:30
You’re here on the Real Organic Podcast; I was wondering if you would just talk a little bit about why your farm is certified organic. We’ve been working with Europe, where the policies of the national governments have really invested in organic farming to create a full organic landscape that works for local organic.

Linley Dixon 1:10:52
Like you mentioned, like, “well, I’ve got this local grain, and I know the production of the farmer, but he’s not certified.” We’re sort of missing that whole landscape to make organic farming work at the local farming level.

Linley Dixon 1:11:07
Why did your farm choose to get certified organic? Why has it stayed certified organic? What politically is missing to create that whole supply chain landscape for organic farming to work?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:11:18
That’s a great question. When we started out as young, beginning farmers, we were using all organic practices, mainly, I think. We had an issue because our neighbor did aerial spraying too close, actually, and he sprayed his pumpkins. For that reason, our main fields we could not certify them.

Linley Dixon 1:11:46
You were getting drifted on, and you didn’t have a good enough buffer or something, which falls on the organic farmer to have to create a buffer for the conventional farmer. It drives me crazy.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:11:56
Yeah, it was impossible. It was never going to happen, and it didn’t really make sense for us at that time. Actually, Emily Oakley, who I know you know very well, from Oklahoma, she was on the board of the National Young Farmers Coalition and has always been such an advocate for organic.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:12:19
We at the National Young Farmers Coalition worked with Emily to create a guidebook for becoming certified organic, really laying out all the steps that you needed to take, who the certifiers were, and why you might do it from a farmer perspective. I worked with her on that guide extensively. I think in the process of doing that, I’m like, “Our farm should be certified organic.”

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:12:51
When we had the opportunity to actually have land that was appropriate for certification, Ben went through the steps and got the farm certified. It really means a lot to our customers to be able to see that organic label, that we can call our products organic. It translates.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:13:14
We are at the scale at this point with so many CSA members. Yes, we have deep and long lasting relationships with many of them, but there are others we never meet. They’re down in New York City or in Newburgh, or these other locations where we rarely go to the drop offs, or are there when the folks are getting their product.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:13:42
They might not necessarily know us, but they know the organic label, and that’s very meaningful to them, and that’s why they’ve chosen our farm. For us, those are the practices we want to follow anyways, because we want to do right by our land and our community. It’s like guideposts for us in some way or another, like these are practices that are better.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:14:09
But also for our customers, it is very important that they know that they’re feeding themselves and their kids certified organic products.

Linley Dixon 1:14:19
What are some of the barriers? Like, you haven’t been able to find a local grain that’s certified organic. Maybe for your grain farmer, why wouldn’t he be? Is it cost? Is it paperwork? Or is it he just use of prohibited practices?

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:14:40
He has not sprayed some products because he has been asked not to, but I just don’t think it’s something that they have tried to do. They are a very large scale grain production farm, and it’s not something that they developed. There are some small scale organic grain producers in this region, and there are more that are coming online. But it is…

Linley Dixon 1:15:21
You’re probably going to human grade, because then they can actually get a higher price point, I’m guessing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:15:29
That is certainly part of it. I would say just generally in animal practices, I think it’s very hard to have organic livestock. Following the rules for organic for veg is one thing. The rules aren’t so hard to follow, because it’s what we’re doing anyways. But just like documentation and all that’s required for certification on veg is one thing.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:15:57
But then to have to do that for the livestock as well, I think, is just an area that we haven’t explored. If our sheep or a pig is sick, we want to be able to treat that animal, and we don’t want to have to send them to the slaughterhouse unnecessarily when it’s something that can be treated and the antibiotics are out of their system.

Linley Dixon 1:16:23
That is different in Europe. They have allowed that oversight, so a sick animal can be treated with antibiotics and then reintroduced.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:16:31
That would make a huge difference, honestly.

Linley Dixon 1:16:34
For whatever reason, we haven’t allowed that here.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:16:38
Some of the warmers that are required for sheep in particular, I don’t believe meat or any sort of treatment will be considered organic. You don’t have a choice; you have to make sure you’re… In the Northeast, our soils are so wet that there’s just a lot of pressure from parasites.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:17:01
That is just part of good practice to keep your animals healthy. I think just the complexity of that and knowing some of the rules would make it very hard for us to comply. On our scale, to lose one animal is a big deal. If you have 15 pigs and you have to treat one of them, it’s a significant loss.

Linley Dixon 1:17:26
I feel like Big Ag in the US is so much… We were worried about abuse of allowing antibiotics by these larger-scale livestock operations, whereas in Europe, I feel like that farmer voice is still so involved in the organic standards. They weren’t as afraid of the large-scale kind of confinement coming into organic and abusing the allowance of some of these materials.

Linley Dixon 1:17:58
I just feel like the small-scale exceptions they have for the use of these materials are trusted more – that the farmer really needs it, that the animal really is sick, and it’s not being used for weight gain or preventive purposes.

Linley Dixon 1:18:15
The eaters need to understand. I feel like in a community landscape, where there’s that face-to-face, more direct eater-farmer relationships, that they still have prioritized in Europe, is what we’re kind of trying to revive aagin here.

Linley Dixon 1:18:30
That’s where those conversations come into play, but it’s sort of been missing from the large-scale USDA Organic conversations, just because the eaters are so out of touch and they just want to hear “no antibiotics or whatever” when they’re buying off the grocery store shelves.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:18:48
Achieving no antibiotics at scale is different than I think people might imagine. It’s like having two separate lines or culling, or whatever it might be.

Linley Dixon 1:18:59
It’s like getting rid of the animal.

Linley Dixon 1:19:05
Well, thank you, Lindsey. You’ve stayed so much past your time, probably because I would want to talk to you all day. I’m just so in awe of how much work you’ve been able to do personally, how successful, busy, and diverse your farm is, how in touch with the community it is, and I appreciate you so much for putting yourself out there.

Linley Dixon 1:19:27
We’ll come and hear more about GrownBy maybe next year, whenever you feel like you’ve got more to talk about. It’s all very exciting work and so relevant to small farms. Thank you.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:19:38
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Linley. It was nice to see you in California last week.

Linley Dixon 1:19:42
Yeah, it was. You gave a great presentation. Till next time.

Lindsey Lusher Shute 1:19:47
Til next time. Bye.