In this episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast, we hear from Seth Small of Small Family Farm in Walla Walla, Washington. Seth shares his experiences with a range of trials from cover crops and no-till to innovative and inspiring partnership with a local winery. Listen as Seth also describes his journey into alternative marketing of his farm’s wheat flour. The conversation explores everything from precision ag, to family homesteading history, to the connection between farms and the people who eat the food grown on farms. Don’t miss this final episode of Season 2!
Carol McFarland
Today we’re with Seth Small of Small’s Family Farm outside of Walla Walla, Washington. Excited to have you on the podcast today, Seth. Welcome.
Seth Small
Thanks. Happy to be here.
Carol McFarland
Thank you. Let’s start off by hearing a little bit more about yourself, your farm, who you farm with, and your farming conditions.
Seth Small
So I farm, like you said, outside of Walla Walla. So our home place is at Lowden, just west of Walla Walla. We farm in Walla Walla and then actually up at Dayton as well, so a really diverse area from about nine inch annual rainfall all the way up to twenty-five to twenty-six inch and lots of elevation. Pretty much mostly annual cropping. I farm with my folks, Mark and Kathy, my parents, and then my wife, family, and I have four daughters, so.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Well, maybe we’ll get to hear more about if they like to farm a little bit later. Great. Well, we got to hear about your soil. What’s your soil like across the kind of large area that it sounds like you farm?
Seth Small
Yeah, so it varies a lot from real sandy silt loam soil to heavier clay soils in the heavier ground. And then we have a lot of elevation changes so one of our farms we’re at thirty-two hundred feet, you know, and then we’re seven hundred feet so that mountain ground is obviously a lot different. So yeah we’ve got a lot of variability
Carol McFarland
So do you get that hillside premium package on your combine?
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah. Gotta have that, so.
Carol McFarland
Yeah those hills around Dayton get pretty pretty big too.
Seth Small
Yeah we’ve got some steeper ground. Nothing, nothing too wild, but everybody— I feel like all the guys in the pacific northwest they really like to brag about how steep their hills are, but I would, I would just love to farm a bunch of flat ground.
Carol McFarland
I think a lot of my research colleagues would actually really like to have a little bit more homogeneity just to get less variable data when doing research. As much as we love the aesthetic of our hills and how much it’s just part of our sense of place, there’s definitely some trade-offs.
Seth Small
Yeah, it’s definitely a different thing. It’s funny meeting farmers from other areas and stuff, people that come around. When you grow up around it, you think nothing of it, you know? And so I started driving a sixty-six twenty-two full time during harvest when I was twelve— which those things, you know, small combine with the factory leveler and dog bone— you know they do they do really well on the hills and stuff and so never thought anything of it. And then you have somebody come from somewhere else and just say like hey you guys are maniacs out here and it’s like I didn’t think that, you know.
Carol McFarland
It’s Evel Knievel farming.
Seth Small
It’s what they think. But like I said, when you’re around it all the time, it’s what’s normal to you. But it does make for a lot of beauty.
Carol McFarland
They’re pretty iconic, these hills. And it’s just amazing how much they bring variability to a field.
Seth Small
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
So how about your standard crop rotation?
Seth Small
So most of our ground, we have a few different rotations. We have some three-year rotation that’s winter wheat, spring wheat, and then a legume crop. We try to annual crop everything, and then some that’s just like a winter wheat, spring pea rotation, and then sometimes we’ll have a spring wheat rotation in there, but pretty much legumes and small grains.
Carol McFarland
Great. Now, how about your tillage system? What do you— how do you handle tillage? And what’s your favorite drill?
Seth Small
So we started— my dad started no tilling when I was really young. My family’s always fairly progressive and, you know, not way back as early as some of the folks that have been on your podcast, but pretty, pretty early on anyway. So, you know, I’m thirty-eight. I gotta think about how old I am, but I’ve never pulled rod weeders. I don’t know too much about them actually. I will say that we have in later years with some of the vertical tillage tools and stuff, we’ve started to do a little bit more of that here and there for residue management and things like that.
Carol McFarland
If you have twenty-five, twenty-six inch rainfall zones you might have a little bit more residue management in some places than others
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah and especially in some of the rotations seeding right back into that straw right away, you know, happen to be able to get back into it. I have a— the drill that I run is Great Plains NTA thirty-five ten, so the Great Plains no-till drill with the wavy coulters out front. So they do a pretty good job for us.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. So I heard that your dad farmed. You got the generational family legacy of Small’s Family Farm?
Seth Small
Yeah, so I’m the fourth generation here in Walla Walla. So, and actually before that my great grandmother moved out here with her grandpa. We’re not like the earliest comers to Walla Walla like we were in the nineteen hundreds, so but she moved out here with her brother in search of new farming opportunities. He had some cousins out here and they farmed in Virginia, and their cousins wrote and said hey there’s there’s land out here you can come farm, and so they did and she made my great grandpa into a farmer
Carol McFarland
That’s a good story. I always love a good woman in ag story too that’s a good historic one.
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah she was the, she was from the farm family.
Carol McFarland
So let’s talk a little bit more about— you’ve got some pretty fun stuff you’ve been trying on the farm from what I hear, so but let’s start out a little bit with talking about your— it sounds like you ask other people about what their farm philosophy is so I’m interested in what’s yours, and what are some of the management goals that underlie your interest in trying new things on the farm?
Seth Small
I don’t know if I have a I don’t have like a stated philosophy, I guess, that I can just spit out there but my dad’s still around the farm all the time working. My grandpa like they were, they were both really progressive and so we’ve always tried to, you know, take a look at all the new technology, new things coming along, research all that stuff and kind of figure out you know what fits our farm what makes sense economically what makes sense from an agronomic perspective and, you know, what can we implement and how can we be ahead of the ahead of the curve in some way. That’s kind of the deal and trying to trying to experiment with different cover crops and things. It’s a challenge out here for sure. Different crops and then different market opportunities and things.
Carol McFarland
So maybe this is a good moment to talk a little bit and segue into some of your on-farm trials to describe where we’re actually recording this podcast right now. So we’re on the Echolands Winery, an amazing view of some new vineyards in addition to your wheat field and the beautiful Walla Walla Blue Mountain foothills. So would you talk a little bit about why we’re here in this spot today?
Seth Small
Well, it’s a lot nicer than my house. You know, it’s a great opportunity to have, like, not very many people have, like, such a beautiful wine tasting room and everything kind of set up to take advantage of the view in the middle of their wheat field. And so when you were coming, I was like, hey, we can take a tour around the farm here and look at everything and then also have a nice place to visit and talk about it. So it’s good for our customers and other people we’re working with too, so it’s been a really great partnership and they’re doing a lot of really neat things here with the winery. A lot of— they’re transitioning all of the vineyard to organic and then doing a regenerative organic certification, so obviously you saw all the goats around. The worm beds, the cover crops we installed like, you know, all this kind of thing. So it’s been like, it’s been a really interesting learning process I think in farming and especially here in the northwest some, we’re at least in dryland systems. We as farmers get pretty isolated all the time. We’re thinking about wheat, wheat, wheat and we think of the in between crops as much as we have to. So it’s cool to learn about, you know, different systems and what people are doing and how it ties together with what we do, so.
Carol McFarland
Can you briefly speak to how this collaboration got started?
Seth Small
So it’s just through a mutual friend, just philosophy driven. They were, you know, starting to work on a lot of cover crop stuff and different things in the vineyard and just thinking about how to tie the whole property together, you know, with the portion that they have in dryland grains and the portion in vineyard and the winery. And obviously they’ve got a lot going on here.
Carol McFarland
It seems like it’s going well based on what I’ve seen so far.
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah it’s fun and it’s like I said it’s really neat to be around something different that’s ag related and I feel that there’s a lot of things that I’m learning about from the vineyard installation and things that, you know, have an effect where we’re at. Like they talk a lot about compaction on this long-term wheat ground and the effect that that has on the grapes when they plant them, and so actually prior to that speaking of tillage like really deep ripping tillage, you know, before they put the grapes in and it’s got me thinking a lot more about compaction on our farm and you know what that looks like and how to mitigate it or minimize it and which is very difficult to figure out.
Carol McFarland
Absolutely. Did you say you have canola in or you’re mostly grains and pulses?
Seth Small
Yeah. Mostly grains and legumes. We do have in the cover crop to the north you saw we have the canola and turnips and radishes and then a whole bunch of volunteer wheat in there too. So that cover crop is really covering.
Carol McFarland
I’m hearing some of the deeper rooted crops in your cover crop. Was compaction part of your cover crop goals?
Seth Small
So doing the radishes and the turnips and then also with the with the goats and sheep stuff they have around also some of those good forage items in there too, so yeah.
Carol McFarland
Great. I might have gotten a little ahead of myself here with questions, but what experiments or trials do you currently have going on the farm?
Seth Small
So we’ve been working on cover crops, excuse me, we’ve been working on cover crops for quite a few years with varying levels of success, you know, depending on where they’re at, timing, you know, a little bit of everything. We’ve experimented with several different ways of seeding those crops. One of the first ones we did was, you know, experimented with having the cover crop flown into the standing grain crop prior to harvest and we’ve seeded it with the drill we’ve used, you know, like a harrow with a Valmar box on it, you know, several different things. And so just trying to, trying to see how that can benefit our farm and our ground. And like I said, varying levels of success. It’s always really interesting there’s always, you know you go to different conferences and talk to different people and they’re always like “oh have you heard of this guy?” Or “have you heard of that guy?” Or they bring in a speaker and you know they said, they say “well I drove in here from the airport and I you know I can’t believe I don’t see any cover crops out there.” And it’s like, you know, we’re just in a totally different environment and so just figuring out how do we make those work in a way that works with our cropping systems and works with our rainfall cycle. We don’t get any rain from the first of June to October sometimes, you know, or a negligible amount. And then other years, you know, we get some of those big thunderstorms that come through. And that was one of the years we had the best success was when we had summer thunderstorms come through. By the time we got to freeze, you know, we had, we had big old turnips and radishes out there that were twelve inches long and massive. But from year to year it’s really different.
Carol McFarland
Did you eat them?
Seth Small
Yeah I tried them. Scott, who works for me, is like our full-time guy. We just have one full-time person on the farm besides family, you know, and I took, I took a good bite out of it and it was super hot. It was wicked spicy. And so then I, I tried to pretend it wasn’t hot so that
I could feed him a piece in order to see his reaction. So that’s, you know, you gotta have some fun. You gotta have some fun out in the field.
Carol McFarland
Oh, that’s funny. So yeah. In your cover crop adventures. Did you have a favorite takeaway? I mean, if you’re doing cover crops now, what’s your method after trying some of those different things?
Seth Small
Yeah, still continuing to try. And like I said, it’s varied success from year to year. And then some of the mustard and different things like that, when we don’t get rain, it lays there dormant and comes up with the next wheat crop. We’ve seen a lot of variation. I mean, some of the, you know, funding and stuff that’s available from NRCS and then also like third party sources as well has been really helpful because it is expensive, you know, and it’s hard. I don’t think we’ve really been able to say like, oh, we see this benefit that— or we figured out how to do it in a way that we see this benefit that makes sense economically, that we could continue to do it on our own. I do think there is a way. It’s just a matter of figuring it out and then also what’s an acceptable success rate. If it works five out of ten years is that good enough? Or does it need to be seven out of ten or nine out of ten? You know, what is, what does success look like in that? And that’s, I think that’s the hardest thing to quantify.
Carol McFarland
That’s a really good point. Which trials are you most excited about this year? I mean, we’re here in spring while we’re recording this and what are you, what are you watching on your farm you’re trying this year?
Seth Small
Yeah, the cover crop deal again. So where we’ve done these cover crops here to the north of where we’re at, where those haven’t been terminated, and we’re continuing to let those go as far as is comfortable, and then mow those back, and then seed another cover crop into there, you know. See what that, see what that looks like in the future. That’s kind of the first time that we’ve just let them let them go all the way. Most of the time it’s like “oh it’d be fun to let this go a little further but we got to seed.” So in this situation it’s like letting those things go and letting them build that biomass and so I think that’s going to be pretty neat to see.
Carol McFarland
So we talked about maybe compact— like addressing compaction might be part of your goal with the cover crops. What are your other goals for the cover crops? Sounds like biomass is part of that too.
Seth Small
Yeah biomass, building soil organic matter, you know, yeah compaction and then also getting some different plants in the cycle, you know, and so— we all know that diversity amongst plants is like always going to be beneficial and, you know, we see that every time we grow a legume crop with a wheat crop after it or, you know, we we see those effects and it’s like so how can we how can we multiply those between crops.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, absolutely. What are things that you do now that started as a past trial that are just part of your standard management practice? And I know some of that isn’t just in the field, but it’s also a marketing strategy.
Seth Small
Yeah, so, yeah, you know, a lot of things we were pretty early on in messing around with some of the variable rate applications. We tried, we did for a while, we teamed up with a company that actually took aerial imaging of pivot ground in the basin. So they do this really granular, high-resolution imaging of particularly potato fields from airplanes weekly with NDVI and infrared imaging and everything. And so we actually experimented with some of that on the farm and worked on setting up variable rates.
Carol McFarland
For like zone mapping?
Seth Small
Yeah so we did that. Very early we found out that because it was a partnership with these guys and they were trying to figure out how to break into the dryland ag deal it didn’t cost us a whole bunch, but you know what we found through that was really that imaging was a lot better than we needed in a large dryland system. We didn’t need twelve by twelve inch resolution to figure out where we’re going to put our nitrogen, but we still you know we’ve still worked on that variable rate application for a long time. We did variable rate seeding. We messed with some of that with Dave Huggins. We did some variable rate seeding and then also like section control and seeding in drills that did just move less soil. That was a fun thing to work on. And then also like nitrogen use efficiencies, use efficiency trials with Dave and his team.That was a really fun thing and really interesting to learn about. And then it’s fun to have one of those trials on your farm because we always wonder about the trials that we look at. It’s like, well, you know, I can go online and read a thousand different articles and half of them are from Kansas State University or, you know,there’s some from WSU, but they’re from Washtucna. So to have one of those trials on your farm was really fun. And so they did these crazy strip trials where we did like from zero pounds all the way up to like two hundred and fifty pounds in, you know, in these fifteen foot strips back and forth across the field and then replicated over and over. And it was, it was really neat though and I think I told you about the the hand harvesting. I mean they showed up out there with so many people. It was just, it was really fun to see that research work firsthand and how much you know if anybody ever wonders why that stuff costs so much.
Carol McFarland
There is a lot of human-powered hours behind every single data point on every single graph, especially in agriculture.
Seth Small
It was unbelievable.
Carol McFarland
Sometimes blood, sometimes tears goes into every single one of those data points.
Seth Small
Yeah, so that was really fun. But yeah, I think the cover crop deal, we first messed with that with our local extension agent in two thousand twelve,you know.
Carol McFarland
Is that Wayne?
Seth Small
Yeah with Wayne way back in two thousand twelve. That was kind of the first time we did it, and it was in some dry ground on a really drought year and we got a heck of a cover crop of russian thistles. Luckily, it was a small area. So that was kind of the first foray into it. And then we did some on a little irrigated ground, which, you know, that was really fun to see it take off.
Carol McFarland
Russian thistles might not quite be the type of organic matter you’re looking for to build or biomass building that you’re looking for with a cover crop.
Seth Small
No, definitely not. But if somebody out there can figure out a way to use them, you know, I’m sure there’d be a lot of guys who could grow them.
Carol McFarland
I’ve heard that. You know they’re effective intercropping as well, so they you know and they stack up nice along fence lines— we’ve heard about that before.
Seth Small
Yeah they’re no good.
Carol McFarland
So one of the things that you’re pretty well-known for as well is that you’ve had a lot of adventures in regional grain marketing. Would you like to maybe share a little bit about your trials with that?
Seth Small
Yeah so we started in twenty sixteen is when we got our first, I guess we got our first flour samples in twenty fifteen. And we were really fortunate, for those who don’t know, we’re super fortunate to have the Wheat Quality Lab at WSU. And at the time it was Craig Morris and Doug Engel there. My mom, I’m the oldest of four kids. She always has always done all the book work, everything from the farm, for the farm, helped out on the farm, and then, you know, raised us kids and everything. And when my youngest sibling moved out of the house, she’s an excellent cook, and she’d always wanted to go to culinary school. So she actually went and did the wine country culinary school at the Walla Walla Community College. And it was kind of when the, you know, it’s kind of the time, two thousand fourteen, fifteen in there and some prior. But like, I feel like the farm to fork, field to table,cyou know, movement really, really started to take hold. I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but she said, oh, I was talking to so-and-so, and they were like, well, why don’t you make some of your wheat into flour? And I remember my first reaction was like, that sounds crazy. And I think that’s the reaction I get from quite a few farmers, you know. That sounds crazy. Yeah, we started to research it some more and look into it. We were growing a little bit of red wheat in rotation and just had kind of experimented with it at one of our farms up at Dayton. And so we said, okay, well, let’s grow red wheat there. Let’s try it. And then we worked with Craig and Doug and the folks at the Wheat Quality Lab. Went and learned a little bit about flour and had them mill grain for us, and so they test milled quite a bit of, quite a bit of grain for us. Different varieties. Different things. And then of course they have tons of data and information, and so they were really instrumental and then then they were actually able to mill us some sample product that we went out and, you know, took to a few bakeries and restaurants and said, “hey we’re thinking about making this flour would you buy it,” you know, and everybody was like well maybe. And so that’s kind of how we got started
Carol McFarland
Is your mom still involved with that portion of your farm business?
Seth Small
Yeah, yeah. So the whole family still is. I, you know, I do a lot of the sales portion and stuff, so I go visit Portland and Seattle and work with our different distributors and visit restaurants and bakeries and things like that.
Carol McFarland
What’s your product identity around that can you speak to that more because they have it down here at the Walla Walla Community College now too don’t they?
Seth Small
Yeah they use it in the bakery there. Yeah, most of the restaurants and bakeries, folks in Walla Walla have been, you know, they use our product really supportive over the years and stuff. This is where we started selling it. And then a guy who became a good friend of mine, Mike Easton, he lives in Waitsburg now, but he had initially, he’d used our flour, he’s kind of a pretty well-known, famous pasta guy and so he used some of our flour and he called me one day and said hey what what days do you deliver to Seattle? And I was like I don’t know, Tuesdays I guess. And so we started delivering flour to Seattle. The first trip to Seattle put two bags of flour on the seat and drove it over there. He fed us pasta, and then he gave us a list of restaurants and folks, bakeries, people that are his friends that we should go talk to as well. And so then, every week for about eight months, we were self-delivering like over in Seattle and in Walla Walla at the same time and then stocking all the restaurants. And yeah, and then it grew to the point that we got a distributor there and then we got a distributor in Portland. And so really started to grow the business. But, yeah, it’s really fun. It’s been really eye-opening. People are really interested in what you do as a farmer. And I think that the success of our business has been because of that. You know, they want to know where their food comes from. They want to know how it’s grown, what you’re doing. And so it’s been really enjoyable.
Carol McFarland
What do you tell them when they ask, like, how is this grown?
Seth Small
Well, there’s—I think people are just really, all of the information that’s out there in the world about food, I mean, think of how much of it that you’ve ever heard that actually came from a farmer?
Carol McFarland
Well, I don’t know that I’m a really great representation of that,to be honest.
Seth Small
But like whatever information is out there, whatever, you know, whatever you hear about the food system or anything else like that, it’s like how much of that information has ever been relayed to you by a farmer? And then and then to have that farmer say like, oh, well, come visit my farm. Like come to Walla Walla. Come check it out. Come see what we do. And so, you know, we talk a lot about the things that we work on with the cover crops— regenerative is the big buzzword now and ,you know, sustainability. All these kinds of things that people care about, but at the end of the day when you look at you know all these polls that they have about you know how much people respect people from a certain profession right, farmers are way up there. It’s really, really high but then when you look at the same poll about like well how much do you trust the food system or the agriculture system? Like those are way down the list, you know. And so what that tells me is that farmers should be doing a lot more of the communicating about what we’re raising, how we’re raising it, where it’s coming from, and everything. And the food system you know since World War II, you know, as it’s as it’s grown and consolidated and everything like doesn’t lend itself to that. And then, and then now there’s such— there’s such a divide between like rural life and city life, and people and culture and everything. Or I’m not sure that there is truly a divide. I think there’s a perceived divide, right? And the perception of that divide is far greater than the divide itself. And so I think when you go, when people have the opportunity to interact with you as a farmer it’s really meaningful to them. And so we’ve, you know, I think just based on, you know, and obviously we’re making a really good high quality product and we have abilities to segregate and identity preserve in a way that like, you know, the bigger dogs don’t. So that’s an advantage, but it puts me in a unique position because most farmers, if they go with their family to visit the zoo in Portland or end up in a coffee shop in Seattle or whatever. They’re not just gonna walk around saying hey I’m a farmer ask me questions, you know, and so whereas myself— so even though even when they do interact like they don’t don’t have that ability a lot of times, but with myself, you know, it’s like when I when I do walk into a restaurant or a bakery with my distributor or a product rep or something like that, it’s like I automatically get all those questions and everything. I think it’s really great, but we definitely need to find more ways for farmers to engage and in a meaningful way, not in a dumb Facebook argument about whether or not glyphosate is poisoning the food system.
Carol McFarland
Or the petting zoo farmer schtick. I mean, I think there’s value in that space too, but I think that there’s more depth that could be brought to that equation. One of the efforts that’s kind of an offshoot of this On-Farm Trials podcast is the stories from the field. And that’s where we take some of the, you know, I mean, Wheat Life said we like to talk about drills on the podcast, which I think is true because, you know, it’s interesting what people are running. And soil and all of that sort of thing. But in the Stories from the Field podcast, we’ve taken pieces of more of the stories from the farmers, from our guests on the podcast, and tried to put that into something that someone from not just the immediate agricultural community can listen to and might be interested in, because I don’t know that there are a lot of venues to engage with farmers because y’all are really busy on the farm a lot of times, too. So, you know, giving that chance to put out there a platform for people to hear directly from farmers about some of their stories, the opportunities and challenges around practices. And yeah, and the why. And some of the history, too. That’s part of the effort that we’ve been making toward that.
Seth Small
Well, I will say that I know that this podcast is going to be a lot of farmers listening to it or mostly farmers listening to it, whether or not a lot of them want to hear me. I don’t know.
Carol McFarland
You’re doing great, Seth.
Seth Small
You know, like people do value and respect what you do like very much, and but like I said there’s, there is a lot of good information out there but there’s also a lot of bad information out there. On the marketing side like which I’m really in tune with the business, you know, there’s a lot. There’s a lot of false information.
Carol McFarland
I actually think about your neighbor, Clay Hutchins, who’s been on this podcast. And one of the things that he really underscored in our conversation was his goal to be part of a safe, abundant food supply. And that that really is, that’s the goal.
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s good, you know, for us. We wanted to figure out it’s like okay how do we how do we market our wheat in a more meaningful way for us? How do we, how do we actually figure out what our costs are— or not how do we figure out what our costs are, we know what our costs are, but then how do we like every other business in the world except for farming, how do we put a reasonable margin on that and say like this is the actual price for our product? We’ve grown this grain, we’ve segregated it, it’s milled, it’s in packaging, it’s on pallets, it shows up to your place in a semi, you know, from a distributor who got it like all the way down to the end and then and then how do we put a margin on that and actually make money and set up like a secure income source for our farm that reflects what it costs us to do it. And so I like to encourage other people to explore those opportunities and avenues. When we first started looking at it, you know, there were some people out there doing things along these lines and they’re really secretive on everything. And I think you and I talked about there’s plenty of, there’s plenty of room out there. There’s a lot of flour being bought. There’s a lot of lentils being bought. There’s a lot of peas, beans. I think there’s, I think there’s some excellent opportunity for alternative crops, and that’s going to be a lot of trials. And then some of those products it’s like you know someone’s going to have to create a market for those. And that can be a really daunting proposition when you’ve got your hands full and your head and your heart full and everything just trying to keep up with the farming, but I also see it as excellent opportunity to bring the next generation into the farm and to keep the next generation on the farm and to keep farms economically viable and smaller scale farms too. Because you know we’re looking at the way things are, we’re looking at a system where to have the operational efficiencies needed to be successful, how many acres are you going to have to farm? Well, it depends on where you’re farming, but do you really want to farm thirty thousand acres? You know, or, and maybe that’s your goal. Good, go for it. That’s not me. Finding those opportunities to be able to keep your farm small and a family opportunity operation I think is really important.
Carol McFarland
Well and when you talk about the margin it definitely sounds pretty different than just hauling it down to the elevator and taking market price or trying to time the market for the commodity market, so definitely a bit of a different experience it sounds like.
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah we’re actually able to put a value on our product we can’t be crazy about it, but it’s like it has to be based on real world costs. And like part of those costs that we have to figure because of whoever our competition is it is based on the wheat market, adding value to what we’re doing, and telling a story and getting it out there and then and, you know, getting a little more money for our crop, you know, having people directly supporting our farm but then also like really in a meaningful way. Like I said it’s a good opportunity to get the story of farmers in general out there, you know. And so ninety-nine percent of places I walk into, you know, with a distributor or something they’ve never had a farmer actually walk through the door, you know, so.
Carol McFarland
Wow. Yeah that says something.
Seth Small
Yeah it’s, so it’s really fun.
Carol McFarland
Well, and at the same time, one of our past guests, Wade Troutman, he talks about how he was selling some organic wheat in Seattle and he went in, he was a little bit ahead of the delivery, and he actually met it was the first time he’d met someone that had eaten his wheat.
Seth Small
Yeah. Yeah, it’s absolutely wild. And I mean, I remember— my mom likes to tell this story— she, my mom has so many good things to say about me, you know.
Carol McFarland
That’s good.
Seth Small
The way that mothers do. But she likes to tell this story about how I was eating some bread at home when I was little. And I was like, do you think any of the wheat from our farm is in this? And she was like, no. And the craziest part of it is being in the commodity system we’re in and everything, until twenty fifteen, when we got that test milled product from the wheat quality lab from Doug and Craig, I’d never had anything made with our flour, you know? And so, and now I can go into like, you know, some of the best restaurants in the world, like these killer pastry shops, bake shops, everything, you know, like a partner that I’m really, really proud of, Grand Central Bakery in Seattle and Portland, like every product that they sell,I think I’m getting this right, but every product that they sell has our flour in it. And you know, so relationships like that it’s like it’s probably the most rewarding part of the whole thing. And then, and then having those people come visit the farm and like really seeing that they care about what you do, and it’s so easy to you know— kind of back to talking about growing up in the hills and thinking nothing of it, right? It’s the same thing with like all of us on our farm. It’s really easy to wonder why someone would want to come visit, you know. It’s like, it’s what we do every single day. You’re used to it and so you kind of get to view what you do through a different lens when you see how interested people are and like the questions they have and just the day-to-day things that you never think about.
Carol McFarland
That’s cool. You say there’s room in this market if we want to regional, for a more regional food system there’s room in this space for more. What advice would you give to someone or to yourself, you know, if you looking back to yourself in twenty fifteen what would you tell yourself about this journey?
Seth Small
Luckily I didn’t know too much, you know, like I went, I went into it with like a pretty good level of ignorance. You know, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I still, you know, I still don’t know a lot, but I mean the big thing that I’d tell people is if you have an idea, if you have a thought like research it, see if it’s something you can do. Find a chef, find a baker, find you know, get your grandma to mess around with it, you know, whatever it is. But like at the end of the day people are really open to new and interesting things. They’re really open to and welcome, like, having ties to farms. And I know it’s not something that everyone can do, but like I said, I mean, you just got to get out there and do it. And I know WSU has some great information. Cascadia Grains Deal, I got involved in that really early on, and that’s where I met some of your past guests, you know, Derek Schaefer, Douglas Poole, Garrett Moon. Like, I’d met those people through that actually years and years ago when, you know, they were out looking at doing different things. But there’s also other things like WUSATA, you know. The Western United States Agricultural Trade Association, I think that helps farmers actually export their product directly. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there, but they’re not without a lot of work as well.
Carol McFarland
You’re close to Blue Mountain Station. They offer some infrastructure to support value-added and direct marketing. Sounds like you’ve experimented a little bit with that space too on your journey?
Seth Small
Well we just leased a warehouse space from the Port of Columbia there that was kind of co-located with that. I haven’t had a lot of involvement there but yeah. We were, early on we were trying to figure out the flour deal and everything and we kind of— well, I got hooked up with a few different distilleries and then I bought a mill. And so we were actually, alongside doing the flour, we were milling these grains and delivering them to distilleries as kind of a secondary market. And that was good for quite a while. But, we really saw that the flour was like the right opportunity and path for us. So we backed off of that. And I know a few different farmers who are direct-selling to distilleries, but you know that that movement is really blown up you know and so there’s all these kinds of opportunities. The real trial of it all is can you get it to the scale that makes it worth doing on your farm, you know. And so for any and every grower that’s going to be totally different.
Carol McFarland
So has your direct marketing changed the way you farm, like how you run your field operations?
Seth Small
No. No, not really. It’s led to a lot of conversations about how we could do things differently, which has been a really interesting customer interaction. You know, do you use this? Or do you use that? Or do you employ this technique? Or are you no-till? Or do you use tillage? Or why do you do this, you know. And so I think for us it’s been, you know, and we’ve had conversations— especially with like bigger users about like okay what would it take to change to this thing that you’re concerned about or your customers are concerned about? Like what would that look like? Right, and so then actually having them be a part of that conversation and saying like, “well if we didn’t do this we would have to do this, and this would be a more aggressive practice.” And at the end of the day, you know, it’s just a lot about, yeah, education and stuff. You know, we have gotten a few certifications. I don’t know about those. Like, you know, and that’s I think that’s where our direct relationship with the customers really comes in, because at the end of the day,it’s like if you come visit my farm, please come see what we’re doing, see how we’re doing it. I tell everybody, like, if you come and I’m driving the tractor, then you have to ride along if you want to talk to me. I don’t really love the whole paying somebody else to put a stamp on my product.
Carol McFarland
And there’s paperwork to it.
Seth Small
Oh, my gosh, it’s so much. And so I don’t really love all of that. But, it has become like an expected industry standard. But at the end of the day, I think we’re doing a lot of things better than most any of those require. And so they’re kind of like, they’re pretty easy. They’ve been easy for us to get through, from that standpoint. I feel they’ve kinda become a necessary evil. But I think they’re also a good opportunity for growers to help find accessory markets. And so maybe it’s not., maybe it’s not direct marketing your own crop but it’s it’s selling to somebody at a premium because you have this stamp or this label. So I have seen that for other growers open like good good market avenues for them, you know, so.
Carol McFarland
Nice. You’ve said so many amazing things, you’ve really shared a lot. It seems like a lot of your trials over the last decade or so have really revolved around this direct marketing of your flour and developing that aspect of your farm business. So what’s one thing you would really like to try but can’t right now because of some limitation? Whether that’s equipment or precip or what? Sky’s the limit. What would you like to try?
Seth Small
Yeah, I think more alternative crops. I think there’s some really interesting possibilities out there. One that like always like lupini beans for example. That one’s really, really interesting to me and I’ve looked into sourcing it and like how to grow and so, but I think that the limitation becomes finding a buyer. And that’s back again to where I say like some of these alternative crops, some of these things that people could do. It’s like the hardest thing in the world to do is create a market. And the hardest thing is the customer education portion of it. And that product in particular, there’s not a huge use for it here.
Carol McFarland
I don’t know. It’s the next superfood.
Seth Small
And they have said that. But I don’t really see it in products.
Carol McFarland
Yet.
Seth Small
Yes.Yet. I did order some lupini bean hummus at one point. I won’t mention where it was from. I didn’t. I took a bite or two of each one. I wasn’t a huge fan. But like, you know, it’d be an interesting thing to experiment with and learn about. And I think it’s well suited to what we’re doing. But again, it’s like we don’t have that. We don’t have that processing happening here. We don’t have an end user, but I think that’s a, I think there’s quite a few different alternative crops out there that would be really fun to experiment with.
Carol McFarland
That does sound fun. See, I think I saw some that were like a lupini bean like corn nut thing.Those look kind of good.
Seth Small
Did it have the ranch dust on it?
Carol McFarland
I don’t know. That stuff isn’t really for me. I didn’t actually buy them. I just saw that they existed and was intrigued.
Carol McFarland
Do you know if the, the, cause it’s the sweet lupini. It isn’t just any old lupini. It’s a particular type of lupini. And do you know if they’re perennial or not?
Seth Small
I don’t know if they’re perennial or not. I know that the, yeah,so there’s the sweet and the, there’s one that’s poisonous.
Carol McFarland
Yes, yes, there’s a poisonous one.
Seth Small
Unless it goes through some sort of process,in which they can process the poison out of it.That doesn’t seem like the best route to me.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, well, at one time I did know the name of that compound, but it is eluding me at this moment.
Seth Small
Yeah, I can’t keep that kind of information in my head.
Carol McFarland
Okay, so. I want to hear about your kids. Do your kids like to farm? You have four girls, did you say?
Seth Small
Yeah, I have four daughters .My oldest, Georgia, is twelve.
Carol McFarland
Is she in the combine yet?
Seth Small
Not yet. They help move equipment.They’re driving pickups. They get pretty excited about that. I have a twelve-year-old. Mamie is ten. And then I have two little babies. One is four and one is three soHaddie and Willa. So they, they love to come out and go for a ride. Haddie— my four-year-old— she will leave the house with me at eight in the morning and get back home at eight at night and never complain the whole way. She sleeps with her head all bent over in the back seat when she needs her nap, but yeah. They’re, they’re all really interested in what we’re doing and then and then being as we have the you know the flour portion of the business, you know. My oldest in particular is very interested in baking. She does a little bakery subscription program and she sells her baked goods and is always experimenting and cooking and so it’s fun too. We’ve created another farm related avenue for them to continue to be a part of it whether or not they want to drive a tractor or run a combine or be into baking.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like she gets a pass for not driving combine. Well let’s wrap up with kind of a last question here. If you could change one thing about ag right now, what would it be?
Seth Small
That’s a tough one, but yeah I just think that we’re in a tough position in agriculture that, you know, economically, and so I think that the economics of ag if I could see that, if I could see that change that would be really wonderful. And that’s everything from the cost of our inputs to the value of our products and the value— or perceived value of our assets and that being, you know, farmland. Those things aren’t adding up. And they don’t make sense. And I think it’s really accelerating the decline of family farming.I think that it’s a really valuable lifestyle. It’s one where you get to or have to work very hard, and sometimes not necessarily compensated accordingly but it’s a good, it’s a really good life and I would like to see it be tangible for future generations to continue, you know. And so I think in order for that to happen something has to change.
Carol McFarland
To support your— buy local food is that?
Seth Small
No I’m just saying, I’m just saying overall. And I think it’s I think it’s bigger than just the local food movement, and I you know I couldn’t I couldn’t tell you how to fix it.
Carol McFarland
That wasn’t the question.
Seth Small
I couldn’t tell you how to fix it, but I, but I do think that, you know,I do think that it’s the best. It’s the best lifestyle there is, you know, it’s, it’s one of the greatest ways you could raise your family and everything else. And I, I would, I want to see it continue for future generations, I think it’s really important.
Carol McFarland
Great. You’ve tried a lot of things on your farm, both in the field and in the marketing adventure. And I think maybe we didn’t talk as much as we could about how you mark your trials and keep records. And it sounds like you’ve really done a lot of great on-farm experimentation, but thank you so much for what you have shared. I just really want to thank you again for giving out to this beautiful wine estate that is part of your farm. And it’s really been a pleasure to hear your story. Thank you, Seth.
Seth Small
Yeah, awesome.Thanks for coming. Love your show.
Carol McFarland
Thank you.