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Ben Coerper along with his wife, Rachel Slattery, are the owners of Wild Harmony Farm, a regenerative farm in Exeter, Rhode Island. Wild Harmony Farm offers certified organic and pasture-raised Heritage breed Berkshire pork, certified organic pasture-raised chicken, and 100% grass-fed beef.
Ben and his farm were featured in my film, Sacred Cow, so I wanted to check back in with the family and see what they’ve been up to. Since his appearance in the film, Ben has been busy on the farm streamlining his operation by focusing on the business side of farming. Like most local farms, during the pandemic, Wild Harmony saw a huge boost in demand combined with a severe labor shortage. Despite these challenges (or maybe because of them), Ben and his wife, Rachel have optimized several aspects of the farm, which he talks about in detail on the podcast.
Oh yeah – And Ben became a dad! Congrats Ben and Rachel!
Not only has becoming parents transformed their personal lives but it has also helped to usher in much-needed efficiencies to the farm business. Any parent can relate to Ben’s realization of what’s truly important and the need to spend time with your kids.
Here are some highlights from our conversation:
- Making it easier for parents and others with time constraints to shop at the farm
- Learning to streamline the business with the help of Ranching for Profit
- Wild Harmony’s Three Tenants: healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people
- Using the innate nature of the pig to the farm’s benefit
- The importance of taking time out of working IN the business to work ON the business
- Buying from local farmers!
Stayed tuned for upcoming collaborations with Wild Harmony Farm. To stay up to date be sure to sign up for my newsletter.
Resources:
Wilding by Isabella Tree
Connect with Wild Harmony Farm:
Website: Wild Harmony Farm
Instagram: @wildharmonyfarm
Facebook: Wild Harmony Farm RI
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.
Quotes:
“It’s a good thing to lay in the grass with my son and watch the clouds blow over. That’s not a waste of time. It’s good for my soul, it’s good for my body.” – Ben Coerper
“We’ve realized as a result of being parents now is how difficult it can be to shop at local farms, particularly when your time is so constrained and unpredictable.” – Ben Coerper
“It requires some humility that I certainly didn’t start with, like recognizing I don’t need to be great at everything. Get really good at the things that are really important, and then learn to delegate.” – Ben Coerper
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD 00:01
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance an initiative, advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now on to our show.
Diana Rodgers, RD 0:40
Welcome back to the podcast everyone. Today I have with me Ben Coerper. Is that how I say your last name?
Ben Coerper 0:44
Ben Coerper.
Diana Rodgers, RD 0:48
Coerper. So Ben was in the film Sacred Cow. He is the one that had the trip to the slaughterhouse and had amazing feedback about you and how real and likable you are. And I agree and thank you again for putting me up and cooking for me when I was doing the filming for the show. And so I wanted to just have you back on the show. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. You guys have a baby, you have new things going on at the farm. So what’s new Ben?
Ben Coerper 1:25
Yeah, baby is a big one. We have a two-year-old son now and, you know, everyone tells you before you have kids, that your whole perspective on life is gonna change after you have kids, and it doesn’t really sink in until you have a kid. And then I was like, “Oh, my whole perspective is changing.” That’s, that’s what everyone said. Go figure
Diana Rodgers, RD 1:45
How – so before you move on to other stuff, I want to talk about that a little bit.
Ben Coerper 1:50
It’s, I guess, I’ve just realized that there are more important things than farming. And, you know, I feel like my last 15 years of my life are pretty focused on farming. And now it’s like very clear that there’s well, and my wife, but having a kid, starting to build a family, I feel like it has made me realize that, I don’t need to work 60 hours a week, it’s actually not good for me or my family. And so it’s just kind of given new perspective to that. It’s a good thing to lay in the grass with my son and watch the clouds blow over. That’s not a waste of time. It’s good for my soul, it’s good for my body. And I like kind of, I kind of feel lucky about it. But I happen to love being a dad. I’ve had a few friends that really struggled with the early years of parenthood, and I was nervous about that. But I have just totally loved it the whole time. So that’s been great. And, it’s helped me realize that the ‘what’ for the farm to be sustainable for me and for our family, it needs to be different, like the way I interact with the farm needs to be different.
Diana Rodgers, RD 3:12
That’s really great. Well, I mean, you take care of animals all day long. So tending to a toddler, it makes sense to me.
Ben Coerper 3:21
There are a lot of similarities, certainly. And so I think to some degree, it was maybe a little bit easier transition for me because I was already kind of stuck in one place. And then he was born five weeks before the pandemic shut down. And so like the being stuck in a house with a baby, which a lot of people I think, maybe have like FOMO during that time, just being stuck in a house missing out on what their friends are doing. But we were stuck in the house with a toddler, and then everyone in the world was stuck in their house, like almost at the same time, and in a lot of ways good timing that he was born right then. And it just enabled us to really focus on that and not worry about the things that we were missing out on.
Diana Rodgers, RD 4:09
Yeah, well, congratulations. I get texts every once in a while, I think from Rachel or Instagram DMs or whatever. And I appreciate them. And I am just so happy for you guys.
Ben Coerper 4:20
Thank you so much. Yeah.
Diana Rodgers, RD 4:22
All right. So let’s talk about what’s new at the farm.
Ben Coerper 4:27
So part of what we’ve realized kind of like what I said is like, it just needs to… life needs to be easier for us to be able to add in this other piece of it that sucks up so much time and energy and so we have – part of that is making our farming systems and methods easier for us: simplifying things, doing fewer things, and making each of those systems more efficient and effective. And the other like kind of parallel thing that we’ve realized as a result of being parents now is how difficult it can be to shop at local farms when particularly when your time is so constrained and unpredictable. And, you know, we think we’re going to leave the house at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning to go to a farmers market or whatever to shop. And, you know, it takes an extra hour because our toddler is running around the house naked and won’t let us put clothes on him. And then we finally get clothes on, I’m walking out the door an hour late and before we even get to the car, he’s pooped, and so we have to go back in and change his diaper. And it’s like, okay, it kind of makes sense that people were having a hard time getting to our farm store for the two… we had two 4-hour windows a week that people could come shop. And before that seems reasonable. And now that’s like seems completely unreasonable. Like we hardly shop at any farm stands that aren’t 24/7. So we have totally revamped our selling so that people like us, with kids and time constraints, can have a lot easier time shopping from us. And that’s a whole bunch of different pieces. We’ve kind of revamped the CSA so there’s more options. And we have a… we call it the pickup shed. We built a new building right outside our store where people who, either CSA members or people that order online through our website can just come pick up anytime they want, anytime that week, any time of the day, you order online or you place your CSA order or whatever it is. And in the next day or two, it’s packed, and you get an email that it’s ready. And then you just can come grab it whenever you want. And we’re also doing shipping, regional shipping. So anyone from northern New Jersey to northern Vermont, and Southern Maine, that’s kind of like our radius that we’re shipping to people’s houses. So even if you can’t come to the farm, you can get it that way. And we sell through an app in Rhode Island called What’s Good. And so that’s also door-to-door delivery, but it’s not shipping. It just comes in a reusable shopping bag. And that’s also I think that’s also a next day delivery. So it’s just way easier to get our stuff. It’s faster than it was before and flexible, which are all the things that we have realized we need in order to shop from other farms.
Diana Rodgers, RD 7:51
Yeah, I remember when I used to run the farm stand at Green Meadows Farm when we ran that up in Hamilton, MA a very long time ago, it seems like now and I remember holding people’s babies while they shopped in the farmstand a lot. Nervous mothers being really uncomfortable apologetically asking me if it’s okay that their kid is sleeping in the backseat of the car, I would let them know that was totally okay with me. I wasn’t gonna, you know, call CPS or whatever. Yeah, making it convenient. I think the early days of CSA were everyone was still trying to figure it out. And it was much more sort of centered on what was easiest for the farmer. And I’m noticing now everybody is, you know, there’s more CSAs there’s more competition. But there’s also just this realization that even for vegetable farmers, like maybe not everyone wants kohlrabi, you know, every single week or so just allowing for more options, more flexible time for pickup and all that kind of stuff that you’re mentioning, I’m seeing as a major trend.
Ben Coerper 9:00
Yeah, totally. And the availability of having things just show up on your doorstep too and since the pandemic, you can. It was you know, starting before that Amazon was already doing it, but getting groceries delivered to your house was not very easy before. And now it’s like everyone’s doing it. So like we kind of have to jump on that bandwagon.
Diana Rodgers, RD 9:23
And if you’re like all the other meat producers in New England that I know, as soon as the pandemic hit there, animals were sold out, like even the ones that weren’t born yet were sold out and the slaughter dates were already booked for, again, animals that weren’t even born yet practically. You know, slaughter dates were already in place because we just have very limited options for slaughter as we explored in the film. Is that what you saw as well?
Ben Coerper 9:51
Yeah, same thing. You know, our sales jumped like 600% from February to April of 2020.
Diana Rodgers, RD 9:59
Wow.
Ben Coerper 9:59
And It has kind of trickled off ever since then. But yeah, it jumped way up, we sold out of everything. And we started booking two years out for all of our processing dates. But yeah, which is, like we haven’t even bred the mom of the pig that’s going to be bred that’s gonna produce the pig that’s going to produce the pork when we schedule the booking for like, so it’s just we’re, you know, we’re guessing way far out how much demand there’s going to be for me how many pigs we can produce all of that, and, you know, do the best we can but there’s very limited availability. And it’s true. We’re like, I mean, there’s only a handful of slaughterhouses in New England, and most of them are fully booked for even now for like the next year. So it’s difficult to switch slaughterhouses. It’s difficult to get in late if anything changes in production, we’re doing the best we can to stay on top of that.
Diana Rodgers, RD 11:00
And then you have to assume that 16 is going to have 16 babies, right?
Ben Coerper 11:05
Right. There’s a lot of like looking at averages over the years, which it’s helpful that we have a ton of records, we have a pretty good idea, you know, if we have 12. Right now we have 12 sows giving birth. And I know on average, they typically end up with somewhere around eight piglets each that are actually weaned and go on to be processed. But the range out of that 12 is everywhere from four to 14. So, unfortunately, we have enough that we can kind of work with averages and have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to end up with.
Diana Rodgers, RD 11:47
So in assessing, making your systems more simple, can you give some folks some examples of what you’ve done? And also, how did you figure that out? Did you do… I believe you did a workshop that helped you? Is that right? I believe Rachel mentioned that to me.
Ben Coerper 12:06
Yeah, I went to the Ranching for Profit School in December.
Diana Rodgers, RD 12:11
That’s it. Yeah. Okay. We feature them in the film as well.
Ben Coerper 12:15
Oh, you did?
Diana Rodgers, RD 12:16
Well, we feature David Pratt, who is now retired, but I’m a huge fan of Ranching for Profit.
Ben Coerper 12:21
Oh, cool. Yeah, it’s awesome. So that was an… it’s basically a business school for livestock producers, which is a, you know, a tiny little niche of the world, but they do a really good job of helping farmers, like understand the economic side of running a farm business, not just like running a farm, but running it as a business. And they also make it clear that just because you have a farm doesn’t mean you have a business. Like you might, you might be raising animals and selling some animals and spending a ton of money doing it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a business. You might just have, like some jobs, some really poorly paying jobs that are way too much work and not that rewarding. So that school and we’re working with a business consultant now through SCORE, which is an organization of retired executives that volunteer help for small businesses. We have a wonderful SCORE advisor that’s been helping us also kind of understand the business side of running a farm. So we did a lot of analysis of, you know, which animals were sucking up the most time and bringing in the least money. So that like once we saw that making decisions about “Okay, are there ways to change the system, so it’s either less time or more profit? Or should we just get rid of a group of animals altogether?” So we did decide to stop raising eggs, at least for the time being for those reasons. It was one of the most time-consuming things we do and the least amount of profit. So this is our first year not doing eggs, which at the moment is wonderful for me, just one less thing to think about. But we certainly miss having the eggs. We have a lot of customers that are missing the eggs. We understand that and are open to maybe doing it again someday, but really need to figure out a different a better system for doing it than what we were doing. And then for cattle, the way we graze cattle but moving and once a day, there’s really very little added work to add a few more cattle. Like we’re still just setting up one fence and moving one water trough. It’s just a bigger area that we get them every day. And so it made a lot of sense, both from a time perspective and when we looked at the finances to expand the cattle herd. And so we’ve added in the last two years, we’ve added two additional farms that we’ve leased that are adjacent to ours so that we could over the course first of three years, we’ve gone from processing five cattle a year to this year we’ll do close to 30. So we’ve been able to grow that a lot, processing 30 a year with almost the same amount of work as processing five a year. And for pigs, which is kind of like the biggest part of our business, we’ve made a bunch of major changes. And part of it is just kind of the financial side. And part of it is that our markets changed. And part of it is recognizing the effect that they were having on our land the way that we were raising them before. And so that the whole bunch of tweaks that we’ve made in the last couple of years are because of like all of these different factors. Two years ago, we had a butcher shop that was taking 2/3 of the pigs that we produced, but they wanted fresh pigs every two weeks, year-round, same size pigs. And so we had kind of created our entire our entire pig production system around the fact that we needed to have the same sized pig ready to go to slaughter every two weeks, the entire year, which meant giving birth every two weeks, the entire year and go into the slaughterhouse every two weeks, the entire year. It was great that we had that relationship, and they helped us grow a lot. And at the same time, it was just kind of exhausting. I think at times, it just felt like there was never a break in a cycle. Like even in the middle of the winter, when things you would think things would be slower. It was like we were just moving at the same speed the whole year. And we did that for, I don’t know, five years or something. So that was getting pretty tiresome. And it was around the same time, we were recognizing that having pigs outside on the soil in the winter was just destructive. And there was like, we couldn’t figure it out any way around that. They dig up everything basically and chew on everything. And in the summer, that’s okay, because the plants and things can recover fairly quickly. But in the winter, you know, we have basically a six-month growing season. So we have a six-month dormant season. And if they dig up the roots of the grasses or whatever, that they’re in, in October, like nothing else is going to grow. We aren’t going to have roots in the ground until May. And so we were watching, as the winters get warmer, and the ground is not freezing nearly as often, we were just watching massive amounts of erosion all through the winter, like every time it rained, and also losing the nutrients of the manure from the pigs. So this wonderful nutrient source that we had and the topsoil that we started with was all disappearing because we had pigs on the soil in the winter. And so we’ve finally kind of because of those two things, we realized like we don’t need to have pigs year-round anymore. And we really don’t want them on the soil in the winter. And so we’ve switched, this is the first year that we’re fully into the new system of just breading all the pigs want to give birth at the same time. And that’s right now are – of the 12 sounds that we’ve bred 10 of them have given birth, and we have two more that will probably go this week. And so there is a switch to even those few pigs that we have our deep-end system in a like a hoop barn, which is it kind of looks like a big tunnel, but the two ends are open. So it’s basically just a roof like they’re more or less outside, but they’re protected from the rain and snow. And then we start the winter with a foot of woodchips, a foot deep of woodchips in the whole area. And then every day we add hay through the entire winter. So the beddings just building up deeper and deeper as they poop and pee on it. And so we’re giving them a clean area to live but it’s also helping absorb the nutrients from the poop and the urine. So it’s a clean area. It starts to compost while they’re in there. So it’s actually like radiant floor heating for the whole winter that they get to lay on. And then in the spring, like we don’t lose any of it. All the nutrients are captured right there where we used to be losing tons and tons of nutrients all winter. So now we’re capturing all the nutrients and when we moved the pigs back out in April, May. We just piled all of the bedding – we pile it all up into a huge compost pile, which is like a massive pile of stuff. And that breaks down into just like super, super-rich compost that we spread back on the land. So we’ve gone from a system where we were losing money, not only the nutrients from the pigs, but we’re losing topsoil to a system where we’re actually growing massive amounts of topsoil that we can put back out in the land. So then we’ve got, you know, we’re gonna have about 100 piglets. Once these last few give birth, we’re at like 84 right now. And they’ll, once we, once the grasses are growing we’ll move them all out on the pasture. And we started a few years ago trialing different pasture systems for the pigs. We used to raise them all in the woods, thinking like… everywhere that I had farmed before, people were saying that pigs evolved in the woods, wild pigs like that’s their native habitat. So that’s where we should be producing them. And we tried for years and years and years to produce pigs in the woods. And no matter what the system, they were eating the bark off of trees, digging up the roots of the trees, and eventually killing the trees. The recovery rate of everything in the woods was slow because there wasn’t enough sunlight. So they would eat all of the shrubs and whatever forages there were available, and nothing would come back that because there wasn’t enough sunlight for things to regrow. And we finally, just a couple years ago, had the, like the lightbulb moment of like, maybe we shouldn’t be raising pigs in the woods. So we’ve transitioned them to the pasture, where, like, they’re still going to do damage. They’re still gonna dig up the grasses, but the grass can recover in 60 days, whereas, you know, 80-year-old tree isn’t like we’re not going to have a new 80-year-old tree for 80 more years. And so it was just like this major moment, like, “Aha” moment of like, “oh, like we’re not, this isn’t actually working very well for the land.” It was still good for the pigs. But it was just not a, you know, we’re talking about sustainable and regenerative systems like it wasn’t, it wasn’t even sustainable, let alone regenerative. And so now, with them out on pasture, we do weekly rotations with the pigs and we plant new forages the day before we move them out. So the like we throw all the seeds out and the pigs actually like stomp it into the ground and bury it as they’re rooting through the ground. And within maybe a week we’ve got a whole new like a new pasture, all new forages that have come up. So there’s very little bare ground and it’s for a very short period of time. And we grow… what we’re doing is growing annual cover crops that we can grow more like more biomass, more plant material, essentially, if we’re selectively choosing plant varieties that are better adapted to the time of year. So in April, what we plant in April is going to be really different than what we’re planting in July. But the things that we plan in April are gonna go grow really fast than the things that we’re planting in July are going to grow really fast then. And so what kind of what we’re trying to accomplish there, on top of just growing extra forage for the pigs like stuff for them to eat, is the more plant matter we can produce, the more carbon we’re sequestering, which is the like, which means the more soil that we’re building, the faster a plant is growing, the more carbon dioxide it’s breathing in. And if the pig is eating that plant and pooping it back out like it’s going into the ground. At that point, the earthworms and dung beetles come up and eat that and pull it down into the ground. And so we’re just like trying to create the biggest carbon sequestration machine that we can while using pigs to like do all the work for us. So we’ve gotten the pigs all out of the woods. But we have now we have of the 60 acres that we graze, probably 35 of it is silvopasture. This partially wooded area that we have, we realized several years ago that we needed to thin out the trees to get more sunlight in there. So we did that several years ago and still thought we’re gonna raise pigs in there and then had this realization that we needed to get the pigs out of the woods altogether. So we now have, you know, a little bit more than half of our grazable land in silvopasture where we don’t want the pigs but we’ve realized that it’s just like phenomenal forage production areas for the cattle. And so now our cattle primarily are grazing in the woods, and the pigs are grazing in the fields, which is just a complete flip flop from where we were five years ago. And with our standard…
Diana Rodgers, RD 24:43
What an amazing learning experience. This is really fascinating to me.
Ben Coerper 24:47
It’s been really cool for us to see too. I credit our dedication to like we say our three tenants are healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people. Our hope is that everything we do meets all three of those criteria. And through the course of the 10 years we’ve been in operation, there are times when one of them is not thriving for whatever reason it might be. And sometimes it takes several years to even see that, but we’re, like really dedicated to as soon as we realize that that’s happening like we need to change the system or stop doing whatever that is. So we’re constantly coming back to that idea. Like, are we meeting those three criteria? And we just finally saw like, nope, the trees are dying so it’s not meeting that criteria. If we’re losing soil is again, not meeting that criteria. So how can we alter the system, use the innate habits of pigs, which is to root and to turn stuff over and, like dig huge holes to cool off their body temperature because they can’t sweat? And like, we know, they’re going to do these things, if we… unless we lock them in a concrete cage, or, you know, the way that most of the pigs are raised. We don’t want to do that. So given the fact that, like, we want them outside in nature, how do we use their innate tendencies to our benefit? And the answer in my mind is like, if they’re going to be disruptive, let’s get them to destroy things we want to destroy. And that’s like I was thinking about the way that vegetable farmers talk about terminating a cover crop like that’s part of the process is vegetable farmers will plant a cover crop in between cash crops to bring nutrients up from really deep and to grow extra biomass, or that they’re building their soil. And then before they plant their cash crop, they terminate it, or they somehow kill it, whether that’s plowing it, or rolling over it with something really heavy, or covering it with a piece of plastic. So we’re essentially doing that. We’re just like letting the pigs do it for us. So we’re getting the benefit of having grown the cover crop for the soil. And we’re also getting the benefit of like having that extra forage for the pigs to be able to have like a more diverse diet. And we always, because we’re certified organic, there are a lot of health treatments that we can’t use. And so we’re really focused on prevention rather than treatment. And the way that we do that is we train observation of animal health really thoroughly with all of our employees. And as soon as you notice anything that isn’t like optimum, we call it a smorgasbord, like, we just want to give them as many options of things to eat as they can. And that’s diatomaceous, earth, garlic powder, seaweed, apple cider vinegar, and a whole bunch of things. Like we’re just gonna like, give them all these options, and nine times out of 10, they can self-medicate. If they have the whatever it is that they’re deficient in that’s causing the whatever the symptom, as the pharmaceutical industry would say, “Oh, well, you can treat that symptom by giving them this drug.” But we can’t, not only we can’t use the drug, we don’t want to use the drug. So like what’s causing the symptom? And it’s almost always a deficiency or excess of something. And so if we can just correct the… get everything balanced, then nine times out of 10, they just heal on their own.
Diana Rodgers, RD 28:23
Wow. You know, when I was talking with David Pratt, he was mentioning to me how many young farmers think that you know, maybe like because Polyface and other large farms, like Polyface do so many different enterprises on their farm operation, many other farmers think well, that’s the way to do it. You got to diversify, you know that just makes the most sense. But not everybody has the volume that Polyface does and the land and all and the growing condition everything right. So I love that. I know that for the farmers at Holy Cow Farm in Indiana, they worked with Ranching for Profit and learned that their chicken business was not profitable. They really truly wanted to make a system that their kids could not run away from and come back and want to be part of, and I’ve just met so many farmers who are exhausted and burnt out. And I definitely felt like you were a little burnt out when we met. And you seem maybe just because you’re sitting down in the middle of the day right now and talking to me, but you seem way more at peace. And I’m really, really happy that… so most of these lessons were when you’re in the middle of the spiderweb of a farm and just trying to get things done day to day. It can be really difficult to sit back and take a like eagle-eye view of everything and so, Ranching for Profit partly does that but then there’s also peer… you get set up in a little working group with other farmers as well. And so you’re accountable to them. Your books are open to them, and you give them advice. They give you advice. So what part of this was the most helpful piece to you? Or was it all?
Ben Coerper 30:21
So the peer group is like an alumni group that is optional to sign up for. We haven’t done that. I’m really interested in potentially.
Diana Rodgers, RD 30:30
I’ve heard amazing things about it.
Ben Coerper 30:32
So have I. It sounds awesome. I think we’ll probably do that in a few years.
Diana Rodgers, RD 30:37
Yeah.
Ben Coerper 30:37
But they do really drive home the point that if all you’re doing is working in your business, like doing the little jobs that you aren’t, you’re never going to run out of work to do. There’s always going to be way more little tasks to do than you will ever have time for in your life. And so one of the things they really stress is you need to prioritize what they call working on the business time, rather than just working in the business. And that, you know, I think they suggest eight hours a week, out of your 40-hour workweek. So a fifth of your time is just spent zoomed out, looking over the whole thing, and figuring out like, so what are the little tasks that feels so overwhelming? Of your, you know, 150-item to-do list, there’s probably 50 things on there that you don’t actually need to do. If you are to zoom out and see like, well, it’s not actually that important. If I don’t know, transplant these trees from here to there, like that’s not going to benefit the business at all. Like, I keep thinking that I want to for whatever reason, and there’s a million – we will make up reasons that we need to do all sorts of things, whether it’s that we heard that someone else did it, and so like, we should do it too, or whatever. Like, there’s just so many different reasons that we decide that we need to put something on the to-do list. And at some point, we have to do that. But the to-do list, my experience with to-do lists is they only ever get longer. Even if even as I’m checking things off, I’m always putting more things on them than are getting checked off.
Diana Rodgers, RD 32:19
And my experience with farmers is that they’re always moving constantly. And sitting down is like a sign of weakness.
Ben Coerper 32:27
Right there. Yeah, there is totally that paradigm. And so to be able to zoom out and figure out, like, what are the things on the to-do list that just don’t need to happen, that aren’t, aren’t going to help in any way for the big picture? And some of that is like individual tasks. And some of that is, is there a whole part of the business that really just needs to disappear? And that was one of the things that I had heard, before I even went to the class I was kind of doing some homework in preparation for that class. And they… I don’t remember the exact statistic. But they said it’s some very large percentage of the farms that go through that class and end up succeeding as a result of that class. The one thing that’s in common with them is that they dropped something. So an entire enterprise, if they were, you know, the average farm is doing five different things and they dropped at least one of those things, whether it’s making hay or producing eggs, or whatever it is, like, that’s the easiest way to become more successful. It’s just drop the one that’s wasting the most time. Or I shouldn’t even say wasting, but taking up the most time and bringing in the least revenue. And that’s what that eight hours a week of working on the business is for is identifying that. So that you’re not just trying to figure it out, like, you know, if it… what I used to think was, if we can just make each task a little bit more efficient, eventually, like it will get efficient enough that it’s not so crazy and so hectic. But that, like I don’t… I began to realize that it will never get efficient enough. If we’re still doing all the things that are ineffective for the business as a whole, we need to get rid of all the ineffective things, and then just focus all of our energy. And that the extra time that we have from having gotten rid of that thing, whatever it was, we can focus on the things that were already doing better and we can get like step up even a few more notches.
Diana Rodgers, RD 34:31
Gosh, it’s so hard because you have to be a good grower, you have to figure out how to get yourself some land, which is so hard and so expensive and tricky. And then you have to be really great at all the operations of everything, managing people, and then you also have to be a good business person. These are really unique skills that not everybody has.
Ben Coerper 34:57
No. Honestly like I’m… I think one of the things that’s helpful in the last year or two of like analyzing the business is realizing I don’t have a lot of those skills either. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a successful business, it just means I need to recognize which of those skills do I not have?
Diana Rodgers, RD 35:14
Now, that’s hard to say.
Ben Coerper 35:16
Which is really hard. That’s been, I think that’s probably been the hardest part. When we started, you know, people talk of farmers as being the jack of all trades, or the Jill of all trades. And I’m just, like, beginning to realize, like, that’s, it’s kind of a cool idea, I guess. But it’s not particularly practical to build a scalable business where one person is responsible for all of those different things and expected to master all of them in order for the business to thrive and to enjoy all of them. And so like, part of it is realizing the things that I’m not good at, part of it is realizing the things that I don’t enjoy. And part of it’s realizing like, what are the things that even if I’m not that good at it, and don’t enjoy it that much, that I just can’t find someone else to do. There are a few of those. Like there’s – we could only find one large animal vet that would work with us as an organic livestock farm. And they’re two hours away. So like there aren’t… it’s not really practical for him to come every time we have a healthcare issue. And so it is fairly necessary for us to learn how to do most of the veterinary stuff. Like that’s something that it’s not practical for us to not do. That to find someone else to just do all of that stuff. But for the first several years of the farm, I was like, the next thing I need to do is go to mechanic school so that I can learn how to fix all of the different machines and engines and everything that we have. And finally, I was like, there’s so many mechanics out there, right around the corner, people that will even come here and fix our stuff. I don’t need to be the master of that. It’s helpful to know a few things that I can fix out in the field. But you know, the brakes go on the truck, just take it somewhere, have someone else do that. Understand that I’m saving time to focus on like honing the business by not repairing, like learning how to and then repairing the brakes on the truck. And just like have someone else do that.
Diana Rodgers, RD 37:18
Hmm, gosh, I’ve done the same thing, actually, with my business. I was spending so much time doing one on one nutrition consults, which were really helping people. But I’m doing so much more global work now that I instead have developed a course for folks to take. I’m still taking a waitlist for when I am back in practice, but I’ve just been getting so many paid speaking opportunities to really get this message out to so many people that I’ve just focused on that. And when I’m not doing that, I’m like focusing on my health and just trying to feel good. So you know, definitely. And there’s so many, you know, even when I was a nutrition practitioner when I first was starting, I would take anybody and try to fix all these really rare issues that people had, right. And then I realized that I can fix 80% of the people with the skills I already had. And I didn’t need to go to a weekend workshop every single weekend to learn about these odd conditions. Because naturally, a healthcare practitioner wants to learn everything and wants to fix everything. But there are functional medicine doctors for that, that I know and I am happy to refer to. And I only started taking people that I knew I could fix with the skills I already had. And then my people were happier, I was happier. And it just worked out so much better. But it’s a hard thing. You have to learn to do that.
Ben Coerper 38:54
Yeah, it requires some humility that I certainly didn’t start with, like recognizing yeah, like I don’t need to be great at everything. Get really good at the things that are really important, and then learn to delegate. And that’s one of the things that my wife, Rachel, I feel like is the master of that and has taught me so much about like how valuable that is to recognize when it doesn’t make sense for me to do something.
Diana Rodgers, RD 39:20
So I’m reading this book called Wilding, by Isabella Tree, and some of the things you mentioned about the pigs destroying the woods and then the silvopasture. She mentions in this book because you know, there’s such this obsession that everything wants to be forest woods, and they have these gigantic old oak trees in England that really can’t thrive in a closed canopy system. And as we’ve lost the grazing animals we’ve also lost these like incubator nurseries for the oak trees that really need so much sunlight. So there’s these like thorny bits of land that are perfect little nurseries for these trees that need light because they can’t grow in a closed canopy system. Anyway, it relates to what you were talking about only in the fact that I think we tend to think of either woods or pasture as kind of like woods are like natural wild. And then pasture is either like grasslands or something that we made for animals to graze. And there’s actually much more biodiversity in a wide mix of silvopasture, woods, some open pasture, like just so many different types of ecosystems within a smaller area.
Ben Coerper 40:47
Yeah, totally. That’s kind of the foundation of the name of our farm, Wild Harmony Farm, like the idea there was that we wanted the wild world and the farm to be harmonious with each other. Not that we were like converting the wild area into a farm, but we were trying to farm, like, in collaboration with the wild world around us and in a way that is mutually beneficial between the two. And so that’s part of why we’ve wanted to do this silvopasture system and like, try it out. And we, you know, we have… the area that we had was kind of a trial that started three years ago that has… so I mean, it’s gone really better than I even expected. And, you know, I think it’s wonderful that we still have the trees out there for a number of reasons. We’re getting shade. Trees are the best carbon sequesters of all plants. And so, you know, just a forest would really, I think, I’m pretty sure I’m not a scientist, but what I understand is that forest is the best carbon sink. It breathes in the most carbon dioxide and of farming systems, the best carbon sequestration is regeneratively grazed grasslands, like perennial pasture that’s never tilled. Tillage is the worst thing that can happen. And so if we can keep it in perennial forage production, and pulse graze it like rotational grazing so that we’re like maximizing the growth of the forage and the dieback of the roots, and the building of the soil, essentially, the building of carbon in the soil, we’ve kind of combined the best of both systems into one area where we’re still getting the carbon sequestration benefit of having the trees there. We’re also getting the benefit of having some shade, which is helpful in like the really dry hot summers here, or the forage production in our silvopasture is better. It’s actually better than in the open pastures because there’s a little bit of shade. And we also see, like there’s… we’ve left some brush piles and trees still fall. And so there’s… it’s almost like a new habitat that we’ve created for wildlife. And we’re seeing… like, we didn’t really have rabbits here before. And we have rabbits now. And there’s ground-nesting birds that go into these brush piles and groundhogs and all like, I feel like we’ve just seen an explosion of bird species in the last several years. Maybe it’s coincidental, but I’d like to at least believe that it has to do with how we’re managing the system. I remember hearing that I think it’s called the edge effect, where the border between open space and forest is actually the most diverse. It’s more diverse than either the forest or for the field. This is like the edge right in between the two and a silvopasture is essentially creating a huge edge. Like it’s not just a single line anymore. It’s like this, this massive space where a huge variety of different plants and animals are happy growing and thriving because they have both the benefits of some cover but also some sunlight.
Diana Rodgers, RD 40:48
Yeah, well, um, sometimes farmers enjoy listening to books on tape, I highly recommend Wilding. Her voice is really great.
Ben Coerper 44:28
I’ll write it down.
Diana Rodgers, RD 44:29
It’s the evolution of them doing that. I mean, she saw what you’re describing. Anything else you want to update folks on before we go? I feel like we only talked about a couple of things and you probably had a bigger list.
Ben Coerper 44:41
Well, we have we’ve covered quite a bit of it. I think it’s maybe helpful to mention, even with the increase in demand from the pandemic, and I think there’s at least some greater awareness of the importance of local farms and regenerative farming systems and even with all this work that we’re doing on improving the business and improving our lifestyles, we’re still facing some major struggles. And you know, inflation is contributing to that significantly. Labor shortages are a problem.
Diana Rodgers, RD 45:19
Oh, I did want to ask you about that the labor situation. Tell me a little bit about that. Because I know it’s, do you rely on college kids or local folks? What do you do for labor on your farm?
Ben Coerper 45:32
We’ve run an apprenticeship program for the last 10 years. And that has been, almost all of our employees have just been apprentices that primarily come in totally green. So we’re training them right from scratch. And they generally are – they’re almost all past college, but typically in their 20s. They come live here for six months to a year, a few stay for two years. And that has been, it’s been a great way to grow the business and to be able to teach what we’re doing to a ton of people. There’s not as much demand for it, or not as much interest in it now. Like we’re having… we used to have applicant pools of 20-30, every year. And you know, this year, I think we had six or eight so far apply.
Diana Rodgers, RD 46:23
That’s fascinating because I know that a lot of people, I’m hearing from my kids who are high schoolers, that a lot of colleges are not accepting because they’re getting twice as many applicants because people weren’t applying last year. And so I would think there’d be well, but those would be high school kids so maybe you’re looking at – anyway, I just find it interesting that you’re having a labor issue.
Ben Coerper 46:50
Yeah. And we’ve heard that from all the other farmers we’ve talked to around here that it’s not only are there not as many people interested, but the people that are interested want a lot of money. You know, I don’t know how much of that is just because of inflation. And how much of it is that generation of people that are just expecting to be compensated better, which is reasonable, what they’re asking for. It’s just not, at the moment, it’s not practical for us to be able to pay $20 an hour. We’re really proud that we’ve finally gotten everyone to minimum wage, even people that we’re giving housing to, for a while, like the housing and food and the education was we consider that part of their wage. And so we can get by paying a stipend before because it with all of those benefits and ended up being more than minimum wage, but we’re actually paying minimum wage on top of all that now, and it’s still – we’re still getting people that apply, they’re like, “well, like, I’m really interested, but I don’t want to work for that little money. Can you pay me more?” I’m like, “I don’t make more than that. So, no, unfortunately.” It can’t… like we really want to… like we want to get to that point. But we still need our business still need to grow. We still need to continue honing efficiency and effectiveness. And like what are the few things that are the most helpful for our bottom line? So I guess that was to kind of get back to the point is, I think I tell it… I tend to tell a nice story. And it sounds like everything’s like happy-go-lucky. And we’re changing the world, the way we’re producing pigs and beef and chicken. And sometimes I just feel like screaming from the top of a mountain, “if you all don’t support this, it’s going to it’s not going to be here.” We need everyone to be focused on shopping from farms that are doing this, or it’s going to disappear. I know it’s way easier to just shop at the grocery store like I know that it’s cheaper, it’s cheaper, easier, and you can turn a blind eye to it because you don’t see how horrendous those animals are being produced and the damage that it’s doing to the ecosystem and the damage that is going to do to your health like a decade away. But it’s actually not a sustainable system like it’s destroying our topsoil is destroying our public health. It’s like sucking our tax money away to like just substitute subsidize these systems that don’t pay for themselves. Like you know, the farmers growing 1000s of acres of corn in the Midwest or they make it because they’re getting paid through our tax dollars, the difference of the value of what they’re producing and the actual cost of it like it just doesn’t line up and so like all those systems are subsidized to make it appear as though they’re sustainable when they aren’t really but gives the facade that food is cheap and food is affordable. And that food is healthy that you can get from the grocery store and you know there’s a few items in the grocery store that are but the vast majority of it is being produced in a system that is, in my mind, just completely broken, and like falling apart in front of our eyes. But it’s just the marketers, and the, you know, I think the government is just really good at pulling a veil over our eyes so we don’t see that. So we don’t see that it’s crumbling. So I guess it’s, I just want to share that we really need support. And for this to keep going. And for this to expand, like our vision is not that Wild Harmony Farm gonna grow all the food for New Englanders to eat. Our vision is that we’re going to create a system that is healthy enough. And but for us, as the producers and for the consumers, and attractive enough to other potential farmers, that they want to do it too. And so we want to just create a model of a system that is working well enough that, you know, my son like wants to be a farmer when he grows up. Like I’ve had seen so many farm families where the kids want nothing to do with the farm. They resent the farm because they never see their parents. The parents aren’t that happy so why would the kids want to take over the farm. We need to be creating systems that are attractive so that the next generation wants to do it -so that it becomes a valuable and admirable profession. So we need people to buy the product and support the prices that we need to charge in order for it to be sustainable for us. If you’re not shopping from us find someone else like us. That’s the way that we’re going to be able to keep doing this and the way that more farms are going to want to do this is if most people are buying this food and supporting it at the price that the farmer needs to just to have a somewhat comfortable life and hopefully retire someday and not have to work till the day we die. Like that’s kind of like our goal. We don’t need to make millions. We just would love to be able to go on vacation once a year and not have a drain our entire bank account and be putting money away for Milo to go to college if he wants to do that. And putting money so that I can stop working at like 65 instead of 85. We bought hay from a guy three weeks ago that’s 84 I think, like still producing hay. And you know, I don’t want to say like I have to stop working, then if I want to keep working great. Like that guy wants to still be farming.
Diana Rodgers, RD 47:33
I think I know that hay guy.
Ben Coerper 50:47
To have to still be farming because you don’t have anything saved up like that’s very different.
Diana Rodgers, RD 52:09
Yeah. And for anyone who’s listening, you know, you may have tried grass-fed beef, but I if you have not tried pasture-raised pork, I cannot eat any other pork than pasture-raised pork, I mean that the taste is so different and so much better.
Ben Coerper 53:05
That’s a really interesting thing about this is like we didn’t, we didn’t set out to produce the best tasting meat. That wasn’t the initial goal. We had this whole environmentally-focused vision of like, this is the most humane and the most environmentally beneficial way that we can produce meat. And the feedback that we’re getting, you know, we sell it a lot of home consumers, but we also sell it to chefs like a lot of really fine chefs in southeast New England. And we’ve like it’s numerous times that we’ve gotten feedback that these chefs have never tasted pork like this, and they don’t want to buy from anywhere else. Again. I think it’s just like this awesome benefit of raising animals that are happy and comfortable and healthy. And eating the huge diversity of foods that are out there that we’re growing. They get to do all that and then it like happens to also be unbelievably delicious. So yeah, it’s not just you don’t just have to buy from us because you like feel bad that the world’s about to end but like, it just tastes good. You’re not gonna be like it… I don’t think you’re gonna be able to get better pork than ours.
Diana Rodgers, RD 54:23
I have not tried your pork but next time I come down to your area, I am definitely going to stop by and meet your little guy and buy some pork. So that sounds great. Yeah, hopefully, the maybe when the waves in Narragansett are good. Well, I’ll come down with my son.
Ben Coerper 54:40
Perfect.
Diana Rodgers, RD 54:41
Yeah. So Ben, how can people order from you? Visit your farm store? Find you?
Ben Coerper 54:49
Well, we love having people come visit the farm. We’re in Exeter, Rhode Island. I feel like there’s no more convincing way for me to import all of the things that we’ve been talking about, than for you to come here and actually see it. And you know, we can, depending on the day, we might be able to walk around with you a little bit and show you parts of it. But people are always welcome to come here and walk around and see the animals and see these systems. You can check our website, wildharmonyfarm.com has all of the information, contact information, where we are all the different ways that you can buy. That’s all on there. You can order directly through the website. And then there’s a lot of different options of how you’re going to actually get the product. If you can’t come to the store, we can still get product to you, whether it’s shipping or home delivery, or whatever. If you want to go to one of the restaurants we sell to, there’s a lot of different options for how you can support us. You know, that’s another thing I like to tell people, restaurants have an enormous impact on the local food system because they go through so much food, it’s like, it doesn’t entirely make sense to me, because we almost never go to restaurants. But I think a lot of people go more often than they’re eating at home. And so like restaurants, like a single restaurant could be going through five pigs in a week, you know, it would take our household a year to eat one pig. And so if we can, if we as consumers, can make it clear to the restaurants that we care where they’re sourcing from, that’s going to have a massive impact on the demand of this type of food, which is going to impact the price of it, which is going to impact how many farms can be supported, growing this type of food. And so like we even if we go into a restaurant where we know they’re buying from Sysco, we asked the waiter where what farm does the pork chop come from? Like, we know, they’re gonna say, I have no idea. And they’ll go to and we’ll say, can you go ask the chef, and they’ll come back 20 minutes later and say, Oh, we usually they just say like, we get it from Sysco, or some places will say, when it’s available, we’ll get it from a local farm. But right now it’s from US Foods. And so I just feel like the more we can initiate that conversation and let them know in restaurants that we do care where they’re sourcing their food, particularly their meat that has potential. Like it doesn’t… you don’t have to spend any money to do that. You just have to start a conversation. Even if you’re gonna buy the T bone anyways, even though it’s straight out of a feedlot in Kansas, like whatever, at least you’re starting the conversation and letting them know, you know. If 50 people come in and say, I would love a grass-fed T bone, rather than grain-fed one, I’ll still buy your grain-fed one. But like, can you just let them know that we want this. That happens 50 times odds are that are going to start trying to find grass-fed beef to at least have as an option.
Diana Rodgers, RD 57:44
Yeah, definitely. So well, I’d love to come down and maybe do an event or something like that. I’d love to, you know, maybe we could do some kind of like, pork sample day? And I can talk about nutrition of pork or something. I don’t know. I’ll work with Rachel on that.
Ben Coerper 58:02
Yeah, we’d love that. Yeah, we’re planning to do a few formal tours this summer for the public where Rachel and I will actually like go out and we’ll see all the animals and talk about all the different things we’re doing and we would love to incorporate that.
Diana Rodgers, RD 58:17
Alright, well send me those dates and we’ll put them in the show notes. So anyone in the New England area Exeter is a beautiful place, it’s not that far from the beach. And so if you’re going to be making a day of it, and anywhere near Exeter, I highly recommend you meet Ben and Rachel in person and buy their meat and support them. So thank you so much for the update. That was really great. Thank you for your time.
Ben Coerper 58:45
Thank you so much, Diana. I appreciate what you’re doing and giving me some time to stand on a soapbox and vent a little bit about the system and share what we’re doing.
Diana Rodgers, RD 58:57
No, I appreciate it. It’s hard work. I think you know, I’m really impressed with how much you’ve learned. But I also appreciate what a struggle it is to be a farmer, especially in this area during this time. So, thank you.
Diana Rodgers, RD 59:12
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on iTunes and check out my website at sustainable dish.com where you can sign up for my newsletter, catch up on the latest blog post, and check out my courses and favorite products. See you next time and thanks again for listening
