Yeah, so my name is Josh Cohen and myself, along with my wife Melissa Matheson, own and operate Barking Moon Farm. We are located here in the heart of the Applegate Valley. We own 10 acres where we live, about halfway up Thompson Creek. And we also lease an additional, hmm, I think it's another 10 acres along the main stem of the Applegate River where we do most of our production. We chose this location because I think it chose us actually. We were, after we had completed a farming internship, we were getting really discouraged by the property for sale 10 years ago in the valley and that was in our price range. There was plenty of beautiful property, but not anything that we could afford. And we found out about this property before it actually went on the market. So we kind of had an ins on it and I had a bigger vision I think than my wife at the time, but when I set foot on it, I knew this is where I wanted to be. What drew me to this property was we were very, well not even into our farming career yet and our ideas about what the type of property we wanted and what we wanted to do on it was very different from what it is now. And so the size seemed sufficient. It wasn't a flat square, which really appealed to us.  And so having kids or pets that felt nice to be just to have a little different distance from traffic and all the hubbub. We loved sort of the gentle sloping of the terrain, the vegetation. We loved that it had to house in a barn that was built in 1950 rather than buying a piece of raw land and putting more development into this area, kind of taking and using what's already here was really important to us. We loved the surrounding open space. So beyond the property, once we learned about some of the neat open space features around here that we had access to and then got to meet all the neighbors that just really cinched the deal. So it's kind of two generations in my family on my mom's side. Great, great relatives were farmers in Greece and then not. My dad, he worked in marketing for the toy and gift industry his whole life and I always kind of looked sideways at that occupation, kind of wondering, like, what are you doing with your life, dad? But he, and he always told me he wanted to be a marine biologist. Love fishing, love being out on the ocean. And so I was wondering, like, why are you, why are you just surrendering to that? And little did I know how important it would be to understand marketing and excel at that, having my own business and creating my own product to sell. And not that I was ever, like, active or interested in it. I think I just received it through Osmosis and I feel like I may not be the best producer in the area, but I definitely have a knack for marketing and it's really helped our business excel. So growing up I really didn't have an exposure to farming. We planted a couple of pepper plants or tomato plants in our side yard as a kid and it was my uncle Butch who I would visit in the summer times in the Midwest who his neighbors called him the neighborhood farmer and he actually grew up on a dairy and kept a pretty nice garden. And one of the joys that I remember was when I'd visit we would just garden together and I have pictures of me maybe at four or five holding two zucchinis by me side by side that are as tall as I am and just really enjoyed picking raspberries in the garden. And so I kind of attribute a lot of my interest back to that young time. And then in school I studied environmental sciences with an emphasis in habitat restoration and so I did that for ten years in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties and so it became kind of a plant person I guess more than an animal person although I love animals as well. And then when my wife and I started living together we started gardening together and each house that we'd rent we'd put in a little garden and then leave it behind as we moved to another place and the next garden would maybe be a little bigger maybe be a little more successful based on our experiences and finally we ended up living in a great little place in the Santa Cruz mountains for about five years and just had a wonderful garden there and at that time started to get the bug to become homeowners, landowners, non-rentors I guess to start investing in ourselves and we also really liked the idea of not that we were ever booted out of our places or anything like that but not having to leave our garden behind if we didn't want to and I also, but I think we both also really started to get curious about what gardening on a commercial scale would look like and we never had in mind quite what we're doing now but maybe the end of weekend warriors maintaining day jobs and bringing some head lettuce to the farmers market on the weekend. So it was a big jump but it happened it was that process was sort of halted or paused by my wife wanting to go back to school and continue her education and that brought her to Montana and I decided to tidy up my stuff in Santa Cruz for a year and then join her the next year there and realized being from the west coast even in a mild Montana winter I wanted to be back out west and so we had to have our sights set on Southern Oregon years prior just driving through as my wife was looking at schools Eugene area and Corvallis and we drove driven through the Illinois Valley really like the Illinois Valley and kept working our way out to the freeway through the Applegate Valley and just couldn't really get over the Applegate Valley once we had driven through it. Toward the end of her studies we set up with an internship in an area local area farm and rogue farm corp wasn't a thing then so no and there was an organization that hadn't quite started even then yet that rogue farm corp came out of called with within earthly bounds or web that hadn't started either so we were one of the last to do like a real farm internship where they can work it to the bone and I'm so grateful for it because besides what we're do aside from what we're doing now it's probably one of the most valuable experiences I've ever had and that season I came down with the farming disease and it's just knew that this is what I wanted to do so are you done with the parsley you can take a lunch what's happening my daughter calls them muscles if they're not yeah if you want to grab the rest of the parsley carry on and then how much space you think you'll have after that halfway so you definitely have space after that okay carry on with fennel fennel is gonna be three lanes and there's eight flats with three lanes every six inches and there's two successions of fennel up there the one do you know which one's the newer one that I took off the tables can you recognize it okay yeah just plant them all but there's two groupings I guess separate those if you can you don't have to perfectly block it up but kind of keep them separate rather than intermingled in the planting yeah so start with one and finish with the other cool thanks guys well our place on Thompson Creek is limited mostly by well the the area of good soil that we have to cultivate but more so by the available water that we have throughout the growing season and so our production area is irrigated through a groundwater right it's a spring-fed pond that coincides a little bit with the creek level it's down by the creek and so as the creek tends to to sort of dissipate and eventually goes underground mid-summer the recharge rate on the pond it lengthens it it takes a lot longer when we draw water down in our our pond here for it to recharge so the first couple years we started farming here we planted a lot more space than we had water for and that was a big wake up and we have since stopped producing so much during the main season up here and have started leasing property down along the main stem of the Applegate River where there is a lot of water the soil is better about thousand feet lower in elevation we have a more open aspect on Thompson Creek we're in a very tight canyon and things just grow a little better down there and there's a lot more water so manages a lot of risk so the things that we grow up here we do a lot of early season stuff when we have more water we have all of our our greenhouses and high tunnels here so we do all of our propagation here all our plant starts we have a half a dozen high tunnels that we grow things a bit out of season so springtime that'll be early greens and then getting into like early cucumbers and zucchini and romano beans and we'll even do oh gosh what else basil and trying to scan the greenhouses right now tomatoes and egg plants and peppers and then and sugar snap pieces a big one in the spring time and then we'll move into in the fall we'll do a round of kind of the most tender greens things like arugula and salad mix and spinach and things that we some things that we can't grow outside during the winter and then some things that we can but they just do stew they do so much better under cover and and then we kind of repeat that in the spring so we're cropping three times in the year the outdoor stuff that will grow is usually springtime stuff like kales and salad mixes bunched greens and loose greens and lots of radishes and we'll do around to carrots and beets here usually kind of the whole repertoire of spring stuff as much as we can pack in here and then once we run out of space we'll start moving down to our other fields we don't do a lot of perennials but we'll usually keep some strawberries and haven't planted in a few years we're gonna replant this year but strawberries is a crop we grow here throughout the season we're looking into getting into more perennials in our place because we think the space lends itself well to perennial culture and it's taken us a little while to learn that so we haven't quite gotten to the point of committing to permanence and where planting a plant and just knowing it's gonna be there for 20 30 years so or maybe longer so kind of wrapping our head around that and kind of designing our our plantings something that happened I guess a little backstory for this year we lease three properties we we produce on a very small acreage we we grow between five and seven acres a year producing on and so if we lose a little bit of space or don't have access to space that's a big deal for our our business and so we found out kind of late this spring that one of the properties we were leasing the one we've leased for the longest amount of time was going on the market and then it had a sale pending on it and there wasn't very clear communication we couldn't quite get out of the owners whether they wanted to keep us or not or whether the new buyers would want to to maintain our our lease and so we kind of had to go into the season with the idea that even producing on such a small acreage we would have to reduce our production area by about 33 percent this year so that was a big shift and so what that did was we had to be very creative and roll the dice a little bit and so we started to bump up our production here on Thompson Creek at our home space and we planted maybe or we'll be planting probably double of what we would normally plant here so having to be more creative with our irrigation using more water wise irrigation like drip irrigation and things like that cropping things either more densely or more loosely depending on how we can maximize the amount of water we're putting on the ground and so this year we're actually doing our our main crop of potatoes and our main crop of onions and shallots and it's going to be interesting hoping to plant potatoes today we'll see how that goes it's June we don't normally plant them in June but better late than never when we think about our our sales we can break them down it's roughly 50 percent farmers market sales and this has changed pretty radically about five years ago when we started when we started I guess we started small at about a half acre and then bump to about an acre and then it just doubled from there and we finally got to the point where we were gonna the next double seemed like a little bit bigger for our infrastructure and land base and so we tried 13 acres and started to experiment with distributors and and more wholesaling and I just had what I call like the worst year ever we just weren't really ready for that and 13 acres isn't really enough acreage to go that route in my mind and make money you can fulfill markets but not necessarily make a living doing it and so we what we decided it was really a challenging year because we did a lot of beautiful stuff in the field that year but couldn't see what was what wasn't working and so it took getting through the season and that chunk of retrospective analysis and nailed down five different things that that we needed to change and so one of them was going back to our rather than increasing our all of our infrastructure we decided to work scale back into our existing infrastructure and the sweet spot that we were doing well at the scale we're doing well at years prior so that radically one of the big radical shifts that we made was we stopped wholesaling and we stopped working with distributors and we focused on selling direct to retail and we decided to raise our prices higher than anybody else's because we wanted to pay our employees more and we decided to just scale back and it was one of the greatest things we ever did we invested in some mechanical efficiencies and we had a piece of property we were releasing at the time that just wasn't really well suited for what we were doing and so even though it was a beautiful spot we decided to to do away with that and replace it with another property that was more productive so increasing the productivity of our ground getting into better land we were a little more choosy about our employee base and got more seasoned capable workers and all of those things were like the big the big shifts we made things that some of those things like scaling back and sailing back was the big one I think because that really helped us because we were always not mentored but just sort of pushed to get bigger and fulfill markets that can swallow up a lot of produce and don't necessarily pay as much per unit but it's a way to increase your scale and move product and that really wasn't our our goals for our business either so getting bigger made me feel like I was not able to to participate in my craft of farming but rather than just bang things out as quick as I could and move on to the next thing and it just became widgets and that's not really why I got into all of this so now where we're at is again that five to seven acre scale it's going to be quite a bit less this year although we did find out that we're going to be able to use this property this year so that's gonna this property that's that just sold so that's going to help us out a little bit this year it just as far as having breathing room and space to crop but we right now our sales are roughly 50% through farmers markets about 12% to restaurants 12 and a half percent to restaurants and 12 and a half percent csa and then the one crop we do wholesale although we get our price that we want for it is and it's direct to retail I guess it's not really wholesale so we still sell the area grocers five pound bags and bulk bags of our winter carrots December through mid March I guess our business model may vary a little bit in that we tend to do probably 60% of our sales during the winter quarter and that's probably backwards from a lot of the the other growers in this region and that just came out of I still feel like we're sort of the new kids on the block even though I know we're not after 10 years but it came out of being a new farm and both having to deal with local seniority and also not kind of not really wanting to step on toes like some there's a lot of overlap within the market but we really didn't want to have to to compete with our farmer friends even though we had to to some extent so we tried to look and see where where the niches were where the holes were in production and and what we came up with was winter time there wasn't a lot of produce to be had locally here in the winter well when we first started our farm and wanted to start farming we wanted to solely move all of our produce through the csa model we love that model having folks just show up at our place have a big bounty of food for them to grab or box up for them or let them do it and we quickly realized where we live here a lot of folks have a garden and there's not a big market in our immediate area not enough to sustain us financially and so we also we also knew that to be successful the first year we really needed to diversify our our our sales models so we kind of did a shotgun approach trying every model that there is available short of farm stand because we're off the beaten path here so one of the things we did is we did and we always have started really small with any enterprise that we've gotten into so we started with a pretty small csa and tried to grow it and quick for our farm exclusively and quickly realized that it was really hard to grow a csa program in this valley because there's such a wealth of produce during the main season a lot of folks not everybody but we're seeing the most folks really like to have the option of going to the farmers market and have a little control of what they want to buy some folks just really want to support csa and they like that model but we found it wasn't worth our time to pack just 40 boxes or so and all the trouble that takes and all of the kind of commitment follow through so we forewent that and had heard about another model that's similar it gives us the similar benefits to csa but has perks for our members as well and that's what we call a market share where our members buy into our farm at the beginning of the season and it's namely our farmers market shoppers and we give them a little financial incentive to do so a little price break and so for example $450 will buy them $500 worth of market farm credit and so by investing we get some startup funds in the beginning of the season and then they get a kind of glorified punch card that they can use throughout the season at any of our farmers market booth and they get to choose whatever they want whenever they want so if they go on vacation they don't lose their box or they don't have to weather a cold Robbie three weeks in a row if that's what we give them we also grow actually the first our first market when when we bought our place we had to remodel it all so I did that we were both what working full-time and we had our son that year but we decided to start farming about a half acre or so of our fields here and we are one market that year was growing for the Cisco Sustainable Cooperative CSA program and that's a CSA cooperative of now six growers here in the Applegate Valley all certified organic operations that service I think this year upwards of 250 or maybe 300 members throughout the the Rogue Valley and what was great about that is it's kind of a unique model we sign up for crops in the winter time and then provided we come through with the crop throughout the season it's already sold so we don't get the upfront funds through that CSA program like we would through a traditional CSA but we can take advances to some degree if and we usually do that every year and it's really great for us it acts more like a buying club for the growers so I think we get paid quarterly and we have administrative costs of about 25% but that first year we sold about five thousand bucks with the produce through the cooperative CSA and I think that program works really well for our members because the quality is super high and they get a lot of diversity because we have six different producers growing our admin folks are just amazing at interacting with our our members and we have little perks like an online store so people can buy flats of tomatoes and things like that in the season we also let folks take vacations and check in with us and we'll not pack them a box but give them a credit and they can either double up their boxes or have the those extra credits to be used on our online store I don't remember who came up at the online store idea yeah it's it almost everybody uses it beyond just the basic veg box which is the standard cost there's also add-ons that you can pick all a cart and really design yourself a full diet CSA box which is kind of cool what else we also have we just got a grant to do come up with an app for the program so I think it's almost done and that was my idea I tend to have lots of good ideas and then and then I wonder how good they are but it's actually going to turn out to be pretty cool a lot of things like recipes and you'll be able to log in and see when the box pickup is or different locations or pause your box or a lot lots of functions that revolve around CSA activity so yeah we we have taken up taking advantage of some sub governmental subsidies one that I think is still in effect it kind of comes and goes but there's a organic cost share for our certification fees and that's pretty significant I mean every little bit helps and so I think it covers up to a certain dollar amount and we usually realize the maximum of that each year and it's very easy to apply for that I love that about it we participated in I think it was NRCS that does the high-tunnel grants we got a small high-tunnel through that program and we just sort of said okay to a bunch of riparian network that's happening on our property the Applegate Watershed Council has gotten funding to restore a large portion of Thompson Creek and so they've been removing blackberries and placing large woody debris in the creeks and doing lots of native plantings I think that's been about three years now and I just this year they pulled a lot of the plastic mulch off the plants and they're about knee-high to waist high so that's kind of exciting to see that and I'd never even seen the creek before on our property it just knew it was there but it was just choked in with blackberries so that's been kind of me it's almost like made our property seem larger and more usable and there's when I was when we first bought the place we were talking to our one of our neighbors who was born and raised here 70 years ago and he said up until about 30 years ago the steelhead or salmon would be so thick during during spawning season that you could literally walk across the creek on fish and I have yet to see one but our neighbor who is spearheading and managing these restoration efforts has been seeing really small and mature salmonids with his GoPro camera in the creek so when we started our business family and friends told us it was going to be a really hard thing to do and I kind of thought that it would be like when we think of hard work I don't know I have my own interpretation of it like long days or you know backbreaking stuff or just lots of it but that didn't seem to be the hard part the hard parts of farming for me haven't been constant each year they haven't been predictable I haven't been able to really choose what's hard it just kind of chooses for me and I think it's maybe similar with any business maybe the only trickier part with farming are there maybe unlike carpentry or factory work there's more unpredictable variables like weather and pests and disease and markets and I don't know if I already said weather that's a big one but living in southern Oregon we have a lot of all that stuff and so I kind of learned to farm by those standards sort of having to be very dynamic and as far as when we started out little woes seemed very big getting a hail storm in June and wiping out 80% of our leafy greens seemed like alright we're done we're gonna wrap it up wrap it up during the towel kind of thing we had an employee roll a vehicle and destroy it and that really frightened us just things like that legal matters and having to to be like a legitimate business I thought we were just gonna be dirt farmers and get our hands dirty but we're actually we have to conform to a lot of the laws and stuff who knew so something seemed really huge in the beginning and and when we tell folks about some of the things that happened they'd be like wow that would be kind of enough to maybe make you stop and so weathering that stuff each year and now the big things seem pretty small and we haven't really had anything that feels too big like another example is having our entire crew quit right before we're getting to get into our busy winter season and so just being freaked out for a day and then trying not to to seize up but take a look at look at it more as like what's the solution rather than what's the problem here to dwell on the problems and I think for advice if I were to give folks starting out some advice on on farming I would say start small don't don't buy things unless you really have to have a secondary income when you start to try to manage financial risk and try to manage general risk just by diversifying what you do have lots of different markets have a diversified employee base have a diversified land base have a diversified market base have a couple vehicles like we used to have one truck and it when it would break it was like such a big deal so now it's kind of weird to have you know things extra things sitting around but it's really helps us out and keeps us moving if something breaks to have a replacement also a friend told me just to things that are important within reason just buy a couple of them when you go to the store because you'll it's probably something you'll use again and it'll save you a trip out there and I would say don't be afraid to give up on something if it's not working or if you don't like it we we've had interns on our farm for and we were interns we've had interns on our farm for about 10 years and pretty good track record of of our interns going off and either starting their own enterprise or kind of climbing the ranks in responsibility at other operations we've had a number of folks who have lasted a few weeks or have had have decided that they wanted to make it through the season but that farming wasn't for them and I think that's just a big as a big of a win as as the folks who will go on to farm because we just saved them you know 10 years and a half a million bucks and I think if you don't really enjoy this work it's probably not worth doing for anybody for yourself or for your community or for the land I enjoy it for now I don't like saying I'm gonna do anything forever that's scary I probably will farm forever although I have a 15-year plan of sailing around the world so I might take at least a break but it might not be in the same capacity as this but I do love it and I think one of the things about it that I love I feel like it's good important work and that gives me a lot of self-worth and I think it's why a lot of us get into this and do this and they think local organic farms have a romantic notion of just being the answer to all our problems in the food system and maybe I get cynical just by doing it day in and day out but there's woes to it it's not perfect either you know we use plastics and fuels and we do things that are not good for our planet and and but I think it's also maybe a click or two better than some other systems that our country is utilizing to produce food so I think I think sustainability is not so much like a destination for us but more of a journey that we're on and we try to each year have to be realistic in the choices we make with our business to be able to succeed and farm the next year but we have some of those ideals that hang out ahead of us that that we reach for each year maybe a new one each year so I don't know I feel like a lot of the systems that are in place in our world either make it easy to stray away from those ideals or or harder to reach them yeah I don't know sometimes wonder if we should just sell all our just stop using all of our all of our internal combustion equipment and we should get away from plastic and I don't know all the things that I've been told are really good to they're really bad for our planet and I don't know I'm just yeah I don't know where I'm going with that actually yeah so that's another one because I know like we have a farm or like we call this a farm and when I write my occupation down I'm I write myself down as a farmer but it doesn't feel like a farm to me per se it doesn't I don't when I think of like farm heritage I feel like this this large homestead that's been in the family for a hundred years and there's big barns and animals everywhere and like somebody on the farm wearing overalls and you know I hadn't chewing on like a piece of straw and and I feel more like what's going on here is maybe the modern version of that I guess I think it's why I tend to stray away from that from wanting to really resonate with that heritage word but maybe we're maybe I could say we're building heritage here in a new way this is a modern business that's having to cater to more modern rules and legislation and and more modern markets and yeah maybe maybe my great great great great grandkids will look back and be like wow that was such an old-timey place where they ran their whole farm from a smartphone and now we don't even use that stuff anymore it's all chips in our head or who knows or maybe they'll go totally retro but um yeah I kind of doesn't feel like a farm we were decentralized with many different fields and it just and it doesn't really feel like a factory but it just feels like like an more like I don't know just like a food producing operation yeah it doesn't have that like romantic notion of farm like if you were to pan the camera around right now there's like piles of stuff everywhere and just like vehicles and it's not like this gorgeous picturesque place or maybe it is I don't know I've just kind of lost sight I see the the stuff and the and though utility in it and so yeah it feels just like a big office space


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