Humble Stump Farm
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (interview conducted Sept. 2016):
How did Humble Stump Farm get started?
“My partner Aaron and I, we got into farming right out of college and we moved to Virginia for an opportunity to learn how to farm and start a little farm collective out there with a group of people. We did that for about 2 years but we wanted to live closer to family. We’re both from the Northwest, from Olympia, and we wanted our own piece of land so we moved back in 2012 and we spent a year looking for land and just over the course of that search we found this place and it fit our requirements. We found this place and we knew we wanted to start a market garden and it became Humble Stump Farm.”
How did Humble Stump Farm get its name?
“This property has really large stumps, mainly in [the] back pasture. I think they were some old-growth cedars that were logged because this property was turned into a horse boarding farm before we owned it. And they were logged maybe 20 years ago so there were some pretty established trees growing out of these huge stumps and that image inspired us. I can’t really say so much what our intentions were with the name but it just sort of felt right for this place and us.”
What inspired you to become a farmer? Do you come from a farming background?
“I’m definitely a first generation farmer. I went to the University of Washington and I studied, actually, Oceanography in their College of the Environment. I like to think of it as kind of an applied environmental science. I was really involved in climate research and climate change. By the end of college, I knew that research science wasn’t really the direction I wanted to go in but over the course of my college experience I got really into local food and sustainable food and food justice. It just was a series of walking through different doors that got me to the idea of being a farmer. And meeting the right people and I got this opportunity to move out to Virginia and try it out, and I just, kinda taking a step back, I felt like farming was a way to, on a day-to-day basis, in a really tangible way, to do some good for the earth and for communities and for yourself. It’s actually funny because I’ve just been in the thick of it and haven’t taken a step back recently to think about exactly why I’m doing it. It’s really rewarding work for me and I think it’s really important and I think there needs to be more young, educated, dynamic people in our food system, and it’s so inspiring to me, and I really enjoy the work and I think that it’s totally possible to make a living at it and I think there needs to be more models showing that. That’s kinda a larger-than-just-myself, driving reason to do it and to try to make it work.”
Where can people buy your produce?
“Currently, we sell at West Olympia Farmers Market on Tuesday afternoons, we have our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and we’re at the Harstine Island Farmers Market, but we plan on expanding those outlets into next year.”
“We’re still at the very beginning stages of getting everything set up and really getting our farm established but as far as the way the CSA has been running to this point, it’s just kinda been a word of mouth thing, talking to people at farmers markets and meeting people who are interested in supporting us in a deeper way than just coming to the market every so often. We have an email list and word-of mouth and Facebook, and that’s how we’ve mainly attracted people so far. It’s a weekly share and it works out to be $30 a week for 20 weeks. This year it was really helpful for us because we had a lot more people paying the entire CSA fee at the beginning of the season, whereas last year we did more of a monthly thing or smaller, more frequent payments from people, but it’s really helped us to get it all at the beginning of the season. And that’s kinda how we would like to continue it, but we also like to accommodate people because not everyone wants to write a $600 check.”
“We grow about 40+ different varieties of produce and we try to give people a really nice mix of about 13-15 items in each box, and it’s tailored to feed either 2 people who eat a lot of produce or a family who likes to spread a smaller amount of produce around over the course of the week. Just a good mix of things but enough of each variety. For example, enough beets to have a couple small meals with beets featured or a showcased beet meal. We try not to overburden people with too much of one thing, we really go for a lot of different things in a share.”
“We’re just about to launch our website and there will be a contact page on that. It’s going to be humblestumpfarm.com. We communicate with a lot of people through Facebook; it seems to be a really convenient platform to connect with people easily about that sort of thing. We have an email list and we have a sign-up sheet for that at the market so people that want more information sign up for that and we send out updates like “hey, let us know if you’re interested in the CSA for next year” and then we communicate a lot through email too.”
What hurdles have you had to overcome as farm owners?
“The biggest challenge so far has been we’re farming as a partnership, myself and my fiancé Aaron, and we really didn’t want to take out a lot of loans to start the farm up. So Aaron has worked full-time off the farm and I for the first year did some part-time work off the farm but I’ve been pretty much doing full-time on the farm for the last two years. And that balance of having enough labor on the farm to get it off the ground while having to work off the farm to bring in money to invest and build it. And we’re kind of at that transition point where we have a lot of the major infrastructure investments in place but this year we didn’t really have enough labor to really make the farm grow the way it needs to be. So balancing financing the farm with the farm and outside sources. Hopefully next year Aaron and I can be doing this full-time come mid-summer but we really wanted to do it without taking out loans so we’ve both been spread really thin- me doing more farm work than one person can do and Aaron working off the farm and not being able to put the time into the farm that needs to be as well.”
“I learned how to farm in Virginia and then I worked on a farm in Olympia and then coming to this piece of land, it’s been made so clear to me how every piece of land is so different in its microclimate and the soil, and there’s no perfect formula for how to make things work. That’s been a challenge but an exciting challenge, just figuring out this piece of land and how to really dial in the soil and how to manage it. I think we’re just now really getting a handle on the soil and feeling confident that it can produce what we need it to.”
What motivated you to contact Mason Conservation District for assistance?
“Just hearing about the programs out there available to farmers to help them… being made aware that there are grant opportunities out there. I was connected to someone from the conservation district and I had them out and they came out to the farm, and the first thing they pointed out was our above-ground water and how because we’re in the Oakland Bay watershed- you know, it’s a pretty sensitive area- and if we were planning to have animals on the property, we were vulnerable to being in violation of water quality issues because we don’t have a really large property and we have a stream that is along the back of the property and a drainage ditch that comes through the middle of the property and there are restrictions of how many feet animals can be from your above-ground water. So the agent I was working with at the time really impressed upon me you should put these things in place now before those boundary requirements increase. So we put up a 30 foot buffer fence between the water and where we would have any animals running and that developed into a larger program where we not only built the fence but we also planted that buffer and it’s turned out to be really useful to us beyond just the conservation value of these projects. Because of the way the water kind of creates a boundary around our property, we basically got 1500 feet of deer fencing. In addition to that, we planted 1 ½ to 2 acres in that buffer area and it’s a mix of a lot of native plants, but we also put some food-producing perennials, so lots of berries are kind of smattered around in there, a lot of fruit trees, and that’s a value to us because we were going to plant some fruit trees anyway, so these projects have worked for us in a few different ways.”
How did you find out about Mason Conservation District?
“It was really actually a pretty casual thing. One of my friends met this guy that worked for the conservation district at [a local bar]. And they mentioned how I was starting a farm out here and he said ‘I’d like to speak with this person. There are a lot of programs out there for farms.’ So it was really a word-of-mouth thing.”
Any exciting plans for the future of the farm?
“We definitely want to expand our production and develop this perennial buffer. We’d like to interact more with our direct community. We really want the CSA to serve a lot of people in Shelton, and we’d like people to come to the farm for their produce. We were talking about in the future maybe creating a farm stand along the road. We’d like to maybe do a plant sale for vegetable starts in the spring and interact with the community in that way. Those are the main big plans. We just want to get better at what we’re doing too.”
What sets Humble Stump Farm apart?
“We’re not Certified Organic but I like to say we use Deep Organic Principles. We like to view our farm as an entire ecosystem, not just this isolated row crop system. That was another reason we were really motivated to pursue these projects with the conservation district early on because we saw this polyculture buffer surrounding our vegetable production area as a really valuable development for the farm ecosystem, because of all the pollinators and wildlife that that’s going to attract and just over time help keep this system in an ecological balance. We also like to think of our farming as more or less ecological and our practices really try to keep things in balance so that we don’t have to spray anything. There’s plenty of sprays out there that are approved for organic production but we would really like to not have to do any of that because we really want to produce the cleanest food possible. We really believe in maximizing not only the basic fertility of our soil but really working to balance the minerals and making sure that we have all the trace minerals in the soil because that’s going to produce the most nutrient-dense food. I don’t know what other farmers in the area do but I know that that’s not entirely common across the board. That’s our main mission: the most nutrient-dense food.”
How old are you and Aaron?
“I am 28 and Aaron is 30.”
Being new here, have you noticed anything that is more of a challenge or maybe a benefit compared to someone who has a farm that’s been in their family for generations?
“I think there are two sides to it. In some ways, when I do get to speak with people who are involved in agriculture who have been here for a long time, they have just a regional knowledge and that is invaluable, just when they plant things, when they do this and that; that’s not stuff you can read out of a book. At the same time, though, I’ve come across a lot of roadblocks with the entrenched regional knowledge because people are content to be stuck in their ways about how something can be done, how you can grow this and how you can do that. I think that’s one exciting thing about being a younger, newer farmer, we can be a little bit maybe more innovative and not necessarily feel like we have to do things the way people have always done them. I feel mixed about it. I do, in terms of Mason County, because we’re not from Shelton, we don’t have a big community in Shelton at this point. We feel sort of isolated here and that I guess is a potential challenge. Whereas if we had grown up here, it might be a different game.”
Any last words about Humble Stump Farm, about farming in general?
“I guess it’s just kinda coming to me, thinking about the first question, why we named our farm Humble Stump Farm and all these subsequent questions. We just want to grow good food. It’s humbling. It’s a humbling profession. We just want to do something good for ourselves and our community.”
“We farm in the best way possible for ourselves, for the crops, for the land. That’s a humbling process. We’re not trying to say this is the best and right way to do it, this is just what we’re trying to figure out. But we’re super excited to grow into this area and community.”
The farming experience, has it been everything you hoped it would be?
“In some ways, totally. I think the whole romanticism of it has definitely worn off, from when I first started to get into it. I was just telling Aaron the other day, it’s been a couple years now that we’ve been raising and butchering chickens for ourselves. And I remember the first time we did like 100 birds and it was such an exciting day because it was the first time I ever did that. And the whole time we were like 'oh my god, we get to do this! We’re butchering our own meat! It’s so exciting!' And this last time it was just like 'I need this to be over'. You’re just slogging through it. And I guess that’s just kinda the biggest change. It’s just hard work. It’s awesome work, but it’s work.”
How did Humble Stump Farm get started?
“My partner Aaron and I, we got into farming right out of college and we moved to Virginia for an opportunity to learn how to farm and start a little farm collective out there with a group of people. We did that for about 2 years but we wanted to live closer to family. We’re both from the Northwest, from Olympia, and we wanted our own piece of land so we moved back in 2012 and we spent a year looking for land and just over the course of that search we found this place and it fit our requirements. We found this place and we knew we wanted to start a market garden and it became Humble Stump Farm.”
How did Humble Stump Farm get its name?
“This property has really large stumps, mainly in [the] back pasture. I think they were some old-growth cedars that were logged because this property was turned into a horse boarding farm before we owned it. And they were logged maybe 20 years ago so there were some pretty established trees growing out of these huge stumps and that image inspired us. I can’t really say so much what our intentions were with the name but it just sort of felt right for this place and us.”
What inspired you to become a farmer? Do you come from a farming background?
“I’m definitely a first generation farmer. I went to the University of Washington and I studied, actually, Oceanography in their College of the Environment. I like to think of it as kind of an applied environmental science. I was really involved in climate research and climate change. By the end of college, I knew that research science wasn’t really the direction I wanted to go in but over the course of my college experience I got really into local food and sustainable food and food justice. It just was a series of walking through different doors that got me to the idea of being a farmer. And meeting the right people and I got this opportunity to move out to Virginia and try it out, and I just, kinda taking a step back, I felt like farming was a way to, on a day-to-day basis, in a really tangible way, to do some good for the earth and for communities and for yourself. It’s actually funny because I’ve just been in the thick of it and haven’t taken a step back recently to think about exactly why I’m doing it. It’s really rewarding work for me and I think it’s really important and I think there needs to be more young, educated, dynamic people in our food system, and it’s so inspiring to me, and I really enjoy the work and I think that it’s totally possible to make a living at it and I think there needs to be more models showing that. That’s kinda a larger-than-just-myself, driving reason to do it and to try to make it work.”
Where can people buy your produce?
“Currently, we sell at West Olympia Farmers Market on Tuesday afternoons, we have our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and we’re at the Harstine Island Farmers Market, but we plan on expanding those outlets into next year.”
“We’re still at the very beginning stages of getting everything set up and really getting our farm established but as far as the way the CSA has been running to this point, it’s just kinda been a word of mouth thing, talking to people at farmers markets and meeting people who are interested in supporting us in a deeper way than just coming to the market every so often. We have an email list and word-of mouth and Facebook, and that’s how we’ve mainly attracted people so far. It’s a weekly share and it works out to be $30 a week for 20 weeks. This year it was really helpful for us because we had a lot more people paying the entire CSA fee at the beginning of the season, whereas last year we did more of a monthly thing or smaller, more frequent payments from people, but it’s really helped us to get it all at the beginning of the season. And that’s kinda how we would like to continue it, but we also like to accommodate people because not everyone wants to write a $600 check.”
“We grow about 40+ different varieties of produce and we try to give people a really nice mix of about 13-15 items in each box, and it’s tailored to feed either 2 people who eat a lot of produce or a family who likes to spread a smaller amount of produce around over the course of the week. Just a good mix of things but enough of each variety. For example, enough beets to have a couple small meals with beets featured or a showcased beet meal. We try not to overburden people with too much of one thing, we really go for a lot of different things in a share.”
“We’re just about to launch our website and there will be a contact page on that. It’s going to be humblestumpfarm.com. We communicate with a lot of people through Facebook; it seems to be a really convenient platform to connect with people easily about that sort of thing. We have an email list and we have a sign-up sheet for that at the market so people that want more information sign up for that and we send out updates like “hey, let us know if you’re interested in the CSA for next year” and then we communicate a lot through email too.”
What hurdles have you had to overcome as farm owners?
“The biggest challenge so far has been we’re farming as a partnership, myself and my fiancé Aaron, and we really didn’t want to take out a lot of loans to start the farm up. So Aaron has worked full-time off the farm and I for the first year did some part-time work off the farm but I’ve been pretty much doing full-time on the farm for the last two years. And that balance of having enough labor on the farm to get it off the ground while having to work off the farm to bring in money to invest and build it. And we’re kind of at that transition point where we have a lot of the major infrastructure investments in place but this year we didn’t really have enough labor to really make the farm grow the way it needs to be. So balancing financing the farm with the farm and outside sources. Hopefully next year Aaron and I can be doing this full-time come mid-summer but we really wanted to do it without taking out loans so we’ve both been spread really thin- me doing more farm work than one person can do and Aaron working off the farm and not being able to put the time into the farm that needs to be as well.”
“I learned how to farm in Virginia and then I worked on a farm in Olympia and then coming to this piece of land, it’s been made so clear to me how every piece of land is so different in its microclimate and the soil, and there’s no perfect formula for how to make things work. That’s been a challenge but an exciting challenge, just figuring out this piece of land and how to really dial in the soil and how to manage it. I think we’re just now really getting a handle on the soil and feeling confident that it can produce what we need it to.”
What motivated you to contact Mason Conservation District for assistance?
“Just hearing about the programs out there available to farmers to help them… being made aware that there are grant opportunities out there. I was connected to someone from the conservation district and I had them out and they came out to the farm, and the first thing they pointed out was our above-ground water and how because we’re in the Oakland Bay watershed- you know, it’s a pretty sensitive area- and if we were planning to have animals on the property, we were vulnerable to being in violation of water quality issues because we don’t have a really large property and we have a stream that is along the back of the property and a drainage ditch that comes through the middle of the property and there are restrictions of how many feet animals can be from your above-ground water. So the agent I was working with at the time really impressed upon me you should put these things in place now before those boundary requirements increase. So we put up a 30 foot buffer fence between the water and where we would have any animals running and that developed into a larger program where we not only built the fence but we also planted that buffer and it’s turned out to be really useful to us beyond just the conservation value of these projects. Because of the way the water kind of creates a boundary around our property, we basically got 1500 feet of deer fencing. In addition to that, we planted 1 ½ to 2 acres in that buffer area and it’s a mix of a lot of native plants, but we also put some food-producing perennials, so lots of berries are kind of smattered around in there, a lot of fruit trees, and that’s a value to us because we were going to plant some fruit trees anyway, so these projects have worked for us in a few different ways.”
How did you find out about Mason Conservation District?
“It was really actually a pretty casual thing. One of my friends met this guy that worked for the conservation district at [a local bar]. And they mentioned how I was starting a farm out here and he said ‘I’d like to speak with this person. There are a lot of programs out there for farms.’ So it was really a word-of-mouth thing.”
Any exciting plans for the future of the farm?
“We definitely want to expand our production and develop this perennial buffer. We’d like to interact more with our direct community. We really want the CSA to serve a lot of people in Shelton, and we’d like people to come to the farm for their produce. We were talking about in the future maybe creating a farm stand along the road. We’d like to maybe do a plant sale for vegetable starts in the spring and interact with the community in that way. Those are the main big plans. We just want to get better at what we’re doing too.”
What sets Humble Stump Farm apart?
“We’re not Certified Organic but I like to say we use Deep Organic Principles. We like to view our farm as an entire ecosystem, not just this isolated row crop system. That was another reason we were really motivated to pursue these projects with the conservation district early on because we saw this polyculture buffer surrounding our vegetable production area as a really valuable development for the farm ecosystem, because of all the pollinators and wildlife that that’s going to attract and just over time help keep this system in an ecological balance. We also like to think of our farming as more or less ecological and our practices really try to keep things in balance so that we don’t have to spray anything. There’s plenty of sprays out there that are approved for organic production but we would really like to not have to do any of that because we really want to produce the cleanest food possible. We really believe in maximizing not only the basic fertility of our soil but really working to balance the minerals and making sure that we have all the trace minerals in the soil because that’s going to produce the most nutrient-dense food. I don’t know what other farmers in the area do but I know that that’s not entirely common across the board. That’s our main mission: the most nutrient-dense food.”
How old are you and Aaron?
“I am 28 and Aaron is 30.”
Being new here, have you noticed anything that is more of a challenge or maybe a benefit compared to someone who has a farm that’s been in their family for generations?
“I think there are two sides to it. In some ways, when I do get to speak with people who are involved in agriculture who have been here for a long time, they have just a regional knowledge and that is invaluable, just when they plant things, when they do this and that; that’s not stuff you can read out of a book. At the same time, though, I’ve come across a lot of roadblocks with the entrenched regional knowledge because people are content to be stuck in their ways about how something can be done, how you can grow this and how you can do that. I think that’s one exciting thing about being a younger, newer farmer, we can be a little bit maybe more innovative and not necessarily feel like we have to do things the way people have always done them. I feel mixed about it. I do, in terms of Mason County, because we’re not from Shelton, we don’t have a big community in Shelton at this point. We feel sort of isolated here and that I guess is a potential challenge. Whereas if we had grown up here, it might be a different game.”
Any last words about Humble Stump Farm, about farming in general?
“I guess it’s just kinda coming to me, thinking about the first question, why we named our farm Humble Stump Farm and all these subsequent questions. We just want to grow good food. It’s humbling. It’s a humbling profession. We just want to do something good for ourselves and our community.”
“We farm in the best way possible for ourselves, for the crops, for the land. That’s a humbling process. We’re not trying to say this is the best and right way to do it, this is just what we’re trying to figure out. But we’re super excited to grow into this area and community.”
The farming experience, has it been everything you hoped it would be?
“In some ways, totally. I think the whole romanticism of it has definitely worn off, from when I first started to get into it. I was just telling Aaron the other day, it’s been a couple years now that we’ve been raising and butchering chickens for ourselves. And I remember the first time we did like 100 birds and it was such an exciting day because it was the first time I ever did that. And the whole time we were like 'oh my god, we get to do this! We’re butchering our own meat! It’s so exciting!' And this last time it was just like 'I need this to be over'. You’re just slogging through it. And I guess that’s just kinda the biggest change. It’s just hard work. It’s awesome work, but it’s work.”