VRDNT farm

BASTROP, TEXAS

It’s early Tuesday morning and I’ve checked the weather before leaving my house. It says 67 degrees Fahrenheit, with 75% humidity in the air. As soon as I stepped outside I immediately felt the water in the air embrace me.

I get in my car and put in the address for VRDT farm, located in Bastrop, Texas, to chat with the owner Becky Hume.

• For those who may not know, I worked with Becky for our Dinner Series No.7 - Assuage, to utilize her fresh harvest for the event. I was grateful for the chance to sit down to have a one on one with her about her work and life on the farm.

When I arrived at the 11- acre farm, this immediate sense of peace came over me when I stepped out of my car. I couldn’t tell if it was the sound of the crickets in the field or maybe just the comfort of being away from the city. All I knew is I wanted to bottle up this moment and take it home with me.

K: What do you think needs to happen in order to actually support local farmers like you?  

I don't have anything against these wholesalers. You know, they're doing it. I just think that there are so many people that, want to support local agriculture without all of it. I feel like we just need more farmers. There’s so many people in this space, we want to buy from local farms, but at the same time there aren’t enough local farms because it’s hard to do this. And also it's next to impossible to start because young farmers can't get into the market. I started this farm with credit cards and coffee and it was insanely scary, you know?

I took a huge risk and sometimes I do get frustrated. Because I bet every single penny I had on myself.

K: There are so many variables that are out of your control. How did the freeze affect you and the farm? 

B: It was totally devastating. I had over half the farm already planted and a few things pulled through like onions and carrots that had some energy underground, but most of them just...died. I had tons of vegetables in storage that froze because it got so cold that even my coolers froze. There were just so many things that felt beyond my control. It's just like this constant feeling that I have with farming where I feel sometimes nature can be so bountiful and you can feel that. And then sometimes it’s just brutal and you feel like she’s pinning you to the ground or got you in a headlock. It's this place that I just keep having to come back to you where it feels like I’m just jumping into the unknown. I know that all of these notions of security are kind of false anyways. Like, you could get let go from your job. But I feel like society is just so conditioned to want these sorts of structures. Whereas out here with farming, there just is so much variability and factors that I know I’m never going to be able to control. And sometimes it feels so scary. And then other times I just have to have trust because I never know what's coming around the corner. Maybe it will all fall apart. Maybe there will be a time in the future where I'm completely crushed and have to close it down. But, it’ll be a good ride until then, right?

Right now I'm feeding people and that's what matters. It matters what I'm doing right now. Like not necessarily where I'm going. And like just taking that same attitude of even if this farm falls apart, even if a meteor crashes on me, at least I'm still going to take those skills and experiences and put them into the next thing. What are all these structures we built in the world anyways? Like they're going to come toppling down eventually

B: What are the seasons like in Texas? How do they impact how you farm? 

B: There’s kind of two seasons in Texas: summer and spring. We have a really early spring season, which got really messed up by the frost because a lot of stuff that would have been completing its life cycle just died. Then there's the later summer stuff, which was tomatoes, peppers, the stuff that loves the heat. So right now we're right  in between. All of my carrots and onions - the cooler stuff - is really coming out of the ground and getting finished.

And then the hotter stuff is really just starting now. So it's really about turning over beds. Like I just flipped a lot of these areas so that the weeds wouldn't keep growing and set seeds. Then it's just doubling down on caring for, fertilizing, and weeding all the summer crops. Then there's sort of another succession of heat loving stuff that comes on a little bit later that we're about to start planting, like the melons and the long beans and things like that. So we’re in between all the seasons right now.

K: What makes you enjoy the Texas environment more than others?

B: I don't know that it's about the environment. It's like, I feel like I moved to Texas because it’s the culture that I like. It’s a very business friendly state and the biggest thing with agriculture is like your access to markets. The fact that I’m close to Austin, which is a blooming market, really just bodes well. I’m not stuck in the commodity game. I can go to the direct market or there's just so many options for me to sell my produce. So that makes me feel safer that I'm just not locked into bottoming out. 

CREDITS: Interview and Photography- Krystal Frame // Copy: Jessica Joseph

KRYSTAL: For some reason, I find washing and cleaning my produce to be very meditative. Is that something you feel once the harvest has been brought in? Or would you say that there's more to farming than meet the eye?

BECKY: Yes and No. It can definitely be meditative, but at the same time, I think that there are a lot of ideas of what farming really is. I often get this with hiring all the time. Certain people think, "oh, I want to come work on a farm and get connected with nature. It seems so calming..." and I just have to say upfront that is not my experience with farming. I'm over here hustling my butt off! If people are too relaxed and don't get it done during the workday, then I'm the one out here till 9:00 PM washing and packing vegetables. I'm under a lot of hard deadlines. We're budgeting for labor and time every day, so if there is one hitch in the system, if it's buggy, it takes longer. If it rains, it takes longer. I'm constantly managing this complex system that has very real-time and money limits.

I think folks who are coming at this from the perspective of a community-supported garden or some form of nonprofit scenario where maybe they don't have the same economic pressures, then maybe that's a really different story where they're engaging with it. But, unfortunately, in my context, I have the ecological context and then the economic context, the place where they can overlap is incredibly narrow.

So ultimately that's my biggest challenge, as the leader of this organization, as the owner, as the operator, as the boss to try to really manage the system so that I don't have to be leaning on my employees and saying, "Hey, I need you to stay late and work overtime to get these orders done." So I ask myself "did I do everything that I could do to manage the day efficiently?"

I think that's funny when you think about it from a normative standpoint. Some people just have this idea of you yielding and making a farm and they're internally thinking, "oh, that's it! You just pull it out and then take it to a store?" They don't think there are many ideas or concepts to farming. For people that haven't looked into this, the technical things that go day by day, the little things you do, packaging an order can take hours.

BECKY: There are so many systems on this farm and this is what I'm most passionate about. And I feel like I have a really hard time actually expressing this to the world. Of course, I like to say that I'm like a technology-forward farm and people are always like, "oh, technology, you know, Bitcoin. And you must be so technologically advanced!" My response is, "No, appropriate technology."

Appropriate on the farm is actually seeds. What exactly is the seed's genetics? It means we are choosing to be the healthiest and do the best in our climate so that we can get the highest yields for the lowest amount of work. We are focused on what kind of efficiency systems we have on the farm.

That's making sure that we can crank this out affordably so that we don't have to be starving martyrs, you know? And, what machinery are we using on the farm? Is it appropriate for our scale and our labor?

So, for example, on a lot of small farms, greens are just harvested by hand with knives, which is great! But this little machine right here (photo below), basically it's a drill powered harvester where this thing, the blade, goes back and forth and these (ropes) spin and it goes along the ground and it just cuts the greens and then scoops them right up into the basket.

KRYSTAL: Now, When you're looking for this sort of technology, are you sourcing it yourself or are you just finding people with patents that are in the works? How does that process begin?"

BECKY: There are so many agricultural inventors and technologies out there. And I always say, there's no right or wrong way to farm, but there are always better ways than others. So, you know, there are huge mechanical versions of this for huge industrial farms. Then there's this company, Farmer's Friend LLC, which builds models that are appropriate for my scale of farming.

There are a lot of other companies out there as well. I have a lot of tractor machinery that I probably won't even get to show you today. But I've chosen my pieces of machinery very carefully to fit my scale.

Then you have a whole system of how they fit together. What is the sequence exactly? How do I fertilize shape my bed's chink in my drip tape weed? It’s sort of like getting your system of all these things that stack together so that you can come to the whole kind of life cycle with, as few trips.

KRYSTAL: I've never smelled full composting, but it smells like good and bad at the same time

K: I feel like a lot of people give up on caring for the environment because they assume the future is bleak anyway. Are you worried about the future of life on this planet? 

K: The word sustainable is such a loose term. What would you tell people who want to be conscious of what they’re putting in their bodies, but hesitant on how to navigate that lifestyle without looking for organic labels at the grocery store? 

B: What better way to be more conscious than to be connected to a local food system? Because even if you're just going and buying this organic stuff from whole foods, those tomatoes might be six weeks old coming from California. Whereas when you're part of a CSA (community-supported agriculture) and eating food from a place every week, you're really getting to know that landscape. You're really tasting how a summer kale is more earthy or the winter kale is more sweet or you get giddy for zucchini because you haven’t had it in a while. That’s what it’s about for me. It's about connecting with people. It's about giving them really high quality, really clean produce. 

K: From your perspective, besides the seasonal factor, what are other takeaways and benefits of a CSA?

B: There are so many reasons. On the first level of self-interest, you are getting the healthiest, most nutrient-dense, freshest, least contaminated produce pretty much possible. Even if you’re going to the grocery store and buying organic, it has a long supply chain where it can be exposed to all sorts of gross stuff...and it’s old. So just on the first level, you’re putting something better in your body. 

On the second level when you’re actually buying local, you’re keeping your dollars in your community and they’re doing such amazing things. First and foremost, they’re creating jobs for your neighbors that they want. You’re creating the opportunity for ethical agriculture that you actually want to live next to. Not this huge, industrialized polluting thing that's really far away, you know? So you're actually creating that opportunity in your community. The last piece is that relationship with the land. That you’re living consciously and engaged in understanding what's in season and what's fresh. Just being engaged with your environment. 

K: I’m just thinking of all the people coming into Austin now and how that’s impeded a lot of local businesses that were here already. Have the politics of property taxes and regulations impacted you a lot?

B: My property taxes this year... I can't get my act exemption yet because they make you wait five years. I literally am not sure if I can afford my property taxes this year because they went up a third. 

For one of my friends, she or her family owns thousands of acres that they bought from Mexico. That's how long land has been in their family. They have a few cows on it. They pay the same amount of taxes that I do, but they're not even farming. They have an agricultural exemption. Because they have like a few cows that they're just waiting for.

But like actually growing food, this is actually my only income. And they're like, no, sorry, you can't get an exemption. We're jacking up your taxes and there's nothing I can do about it. That's crazy.

Let's talk about food, safety regulations, FISMA that came down the line. I'm not even supposed to use my own compost now unless I've taken temperature records of it weekly and all of this stuff. And it's just like, I can't do that anymore. I have to buy my nutrients from somewhere else where they've had the time to do all those systems because the food safety legislation is just becoming oppressive. And I get it. They want people to be safe, but I feel like there's not a good balance right now. Bigger farms have the ability to do all of these things, put in all this infrastructure.

But for me as a small farmer, it's just like, well I guess just having to go into business. And big ag knows that and they push this legislature in the name of food safety, which is great. Don't get me wrong. It's an appropriate law for food safety. But the laws that are getting pushed through are just devastating.

K: How do you find it easiest to stand your ground with the things you believe in and what you want to stay true without listening to all the noise of other people in your ear? 

K: Marketing can be such an important aspect of any business. How have you navigated the social media space while keeping true to yourself? 

B: I'm still figuring it out. To be a farmer you have to be a jack of many trades. I felt like what I really knew how to do was farming and I just really trusted that.That’s actually how I started the farm, I started wholesale. I just grew two or three things and I just sold it wholesale to farmhouse delivery. My margins were a lot lower, but it allowed me to just focus. When I started the farm I knew I didn’t have energy for anything other than farming, so I made sure to keep my sales channels really simple and minimize my need to email, sell, whatever it is. 

A lot of that changed at the onset of the pandemic because restaurants and everything got wonky. I started doing a lot more like direct sales and sort of the CSA. But now it’s just so much work to do the marketing, and I’m kind of drowning in it and not too comfortable with it yet. I'm also just trying to hone my voice. There’s this side of what I want to come out into the world with and what I feel passionate about. And then there’s also what people actually want to hear and then finding that middle ground. Because maybe people don't care about some of the nuances that I get really excited about. So I’m trying to find that little nugget in there of what’s important to me and finding the right way to tell that story.

K: Let’s bring it back to the beginning: what has the journey of VRDNT farm been like? 

B: So it was actually previously a farm for 10 years. Nathan Heath and his family were previously here before me and it was called Phoenix farms. They just needed to retire, but they really wanted another young person to come farm here. And I was kind of looking for an opportunity like this because I had been managing Johnson's Backyard Garden for several years. I just felt really stuck where I was managing probably the largest farm in the area. Like, where do I go after that?  Like, there's no other farm I can go work for. I felt ready. I'd been farming for 10 years at that point. And I was like, “I’m ready. I don’t need to work for anyone else. I know what I’m doing.” So I saw this opportunity to basically get started. That's the hardest thing in farming is to get started. Because you don't have access to capital yet. And it's so capital intensive to get the land. If you don't have a family member or some ramp to get you there, it's really hard. The banks wouldn't give me any Ag loans because although I'd worked on farms, I hadn't run my own farm business. 

K: I heard some crazy things about the loan process for farmers and the red tape you have to go through. What has that been like from your perspective? 

K: What are your more recent next steps? Are there any new technologies or anything you’re hoping to integrate into this system to try something different? 

B: The last few years I've just been constantly testing. Like, I knew how to grow vegetables, but how do I grow them on this land? There’s large-scale knowledge, but then there's this very site-specific knowledge. Like, a certain corner has bad weeds in the summer. I feel like there's been a lot of troubleshooting with that withreally like settling in. 

There’s so many farm tools. That’s a whole different talk because I'm very progressive with farm tools. For example, I use something called a paper pot transplanter, which really saves time with transplanting. They're these special paper chains. I can show you in the greenhouse, but that's been a huge moneymaker. A huge, huge labor saver for me because instead of having to plant every plant individually, it's basically just a long line of a biodegradable plant chain that you just shank into the ground by walking backwards.

I do a lot of greens up here. Greens are hard in the summer just because of the weeds. But there are all these lettuce heads. Instead of planting each one individually, you can see they're in a paper chain and get automatically planted.

I talk about the same thing with cultivars. It's really hard if you're just planting all these baby lettuce heads or lettuce leaves and then cutting them because there might be grass in there. That's where you run out of labor to be picking out all the grass. But these lettuce heads are actually a really cool variety called salanova lettuce heads, which I have this special core that you core them. And then they fall apart into perfect baby leaves. So this is again where you will, you really, you can't just rush into it. You really think about your system. I'm like, okay, my labor, I'm shrinking this in. And then we're making a lettuce mix instead of having to cut every single one individually and pull up the weeds. We're just cutting this lettuce head and coring it. Boom. We have lettuce mix. 

It's not so much like the one silver bullet of technology. It's really thinking about a lot of small technologies and how they nest in each other and how you create a really efficient supply chain.