Focus on Being Your Farmer

You know the organization with the name and radio show called "Focus on the Family". Whether you agreed with everything they do or not, you at least know their focus. Farming is like that, you need to know your focus.

About 90 percent of farmers today have no idea who their customer is. Even the language they use supports this. Listen to the lingo, "Farmer Jim sells his commodity corn to the local elevator who piles it in a million bushel pile until it is loaded on trains and then barges to go to a bulk processing plant run by computers who belong to a faceless mega corporation. They turn his corn into feed stock for making plastic bags, or ethanol or one of 1000 other things." Farmer Jim is doing a great job for who? Who knows.

Our slogan is "We want to be your farmer!"

You mean you want to be everyone in the whole world's farmer? I wish that were possible, I would definitely do some things differently, but that is not what our slogan says. Let me explain...


The slogan says, "We want to be your farmer!"

• First and most importantly, that means we want to have a relationship with you as your farmer. We want to understand the food needs of your family, and then to meet those needs with a portfolio of flavorful, healthy, and sustainable produce.
• We also want to teach younger farmers in our community what we have learned and so we want to be their farmer, mentor and build supportive relationships with them as well.
• The Vegetable Freak web site has a world wide audience. I counted the number of countries in which people read our web site and it bigger that those reached by the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) one of the largest media outlets in the world. How can that be? Well the Internet now goes everywhere in the world and we have readers from almost every country on earth. So in a very real sense, we want to be their farmer as well. We want to encourage sound agricultural practices and teach good growing techniques everywhere in the world. 

By the time you read this we will have exceeded 30,000 reads of our blog. About 40 percent of these reads are outside the US. That just boggles my mind, that I can sit at my desk in the basement and reach a world wide farming audience, I would have never imagined this 30 years ago when I was learning to farm.

We cannot be all things to all people but for a select group of like minded families, local farmers, and farmers world wide...

We Want to Be Your Farmer.