Langton Green Community Farm

Today I'm talking with John at Langton Green Community Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
Did you know that muck boots all started with a universal problem? Muck? And did you know that it's their 25th anniversary this year?  Neither did I. But I do know that when you buy boots that don't last, it's really frustrating to have to replace them every couple of months.  So check out muck boots. The link is in the show notes. The very first thing that got hung in my beautiful kitchen when we moved in here four and a half years ago was a calendars.com  Lang calendar.

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00:56
You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with John at Langton Green Community Farm  in Maryland. Is that right, John? Yes, ma'am. We're in Millersville, Maryland outside of Annapolis.  Okay, cool. Good morning. How are you? I'm doing well. Good. I am so excited to have you on the show because

01:22
This community farm thing you've got going on is huge. So tell me about it. Well, Lankton Green has been primarily providing residential services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities since the early eighties.  About 15 years ago, we started also doing day services, which tends to be vocational or activities based for a small number of our consumers.  But we're always

01:50
looking for more to do on an ongoing basis. So after a couple of years of doing a lot of landscaping and commercial and residential cleaning contracts,  our former executive director went to a conference and met some people who operated a small residential program on a farm in California  and said, hey, could we do something like this?  Which was exactly the kind of thing that I was already engaged in personally.

02:18
doing a lot of  suburban homesteading kind of stuff, a lot of  gardening and canning. So it definitely matched a lot of my personal interests.  A lot of my job coaches and staff also had experience working in horticulture and landscaping. So there was a natural tie in there.  So I spent the next couple of years working with our board of directors,  going through some mentorships with local agricultural organizations  and

02:48
looking at properties locally to actually develop an expansion of our existing day services program to be focused on an agricultural property. The spot that we found was perfect. It's right in the middle of a really very populated suburban area and to be able to provide 13 acres of

03:12
animals  and  sustainable produce and flowers. We've incorporated a lot of artwork on the property over the past 10 years. It has just been a really great thing. It's benefited our consumer population tremendously. And I think we're increasingly a benefit to the public as we provide a space for them to come out and have those experiences  and to kind of get a sense of where food comes from. Because I think a lot of people have lost that.

03:42
If you ask  a group of kids where does food come from, the number one answer is going to be the grocery store.  So to be able to give back  a little bit of opportunities to experience  the basis of that food  industry and where it all starts in a setting that's also focused on  providing therapeutic care for everybody,  but most primarily for our consumer population.

04:10
That's phenomenal. I'm so impressed.  Okay. So my first question is how is the public interacting with the farm?  Initially our biggest, you know, we, we wanted to draw volunteers, so we needed the additional help with some of the work processes. Um, everybody that comes out here is just floored and really enjoys being on the property. So initially we started with a lot of

04:37
group activities with local churches, local community organizations.  When we first got  our property in Millersville, it basically was a 13 acre, some of it was in agricultural production with one of our neighbors.  Part of it had been horse pastures with a collapsed very large barn  and two houses that hadn't been inhabited for probably decades, one of which was actually.

05:04
Condemned it wasn't suitable for habitation.  There were a lot of big projects to tear down the barn to actually just get the property at the point where we could utilize it. So we had a lot of volunteers coming in  to assist with those things.  And over time, we've continued to bring in and recruit volunteers.

05:26
Our kind of gold ticket volunteer is somebody that's available a couple times a week at their convenience, know, based on what works for them schedule wise to actually come out and assist on a regular basis with the agricultural processes, along  side our staff and our growers. So we've, you know, we've been really fortunate in look and finding and maintaining connections with a handful of people like that.  But we also continue to bring in groups.

05:55
We have a local church and school groups that come out on a regular basis every year a couple of times. And this last year we did our first  CSA that was open to the public. We're expanding that this year.  So we'll have distributions for CSA and something we're calling kind of click and pick. It's  kind of an electronic farmers market where you can go onto our website. And each week we load up what produce we have available for the week.

06:24
You can fill your basket, pay for it, and then come out on Saturday to pick it up. And we're also trying to incorporate things like yoga and some storytelling for children and additional activities on those Saturdays so that people can actually spend a little bit more time, get around, walk around, see the animals, pet a chicken, look at the, you we're doing  a goat yoga. One of our staff is a yoga instructor.

06:50
So we're just trying to find opportunities to bring people out more and more often.  A lot of times during the summer we also have pick your own opportunities for blackberries and strawberries. We've just invested a lot of time in our orchard,  so we're hoping to have more  fruit and blueberries available as well as some cut flowers to augment  our vegetable and produce sales.

07:15
This sounds like my idea of heaven.  You're doing a beautiful thing there.  So you said chickens and goats. Do you have other animals too? We have  some small herd of pot-bellied pigs.  Someone had a female pot-bellied pig that needed a home and we agreed to take her and of course she was pregnant.  So we got to go through all of those processes.  A couple of the babies were adopted out but we still have six.

07:43
Hot-bellied pigs, we have four goats currently.  I think our laying flock right now is about 36 birds. We're about to add about 18 more.  And Atticus, the farm cat who kind of keeps us all on our toes and  is pretty much the boss around here. Is Atticus friendly? Atticus is extremely friendly. There's almost no tour or group that shows up.

08:10
that he doesn't at some point join us and walk the property with us and have you give his input.  Yeah, he is definitely definitely our mascot. So Attic is the ambassador for the farm. Absolutely. Yes, ma'am.  Mm OK.  We have a black  neutered  male cat here that's our barn cat. He's like five or six years old now.

08:35
And he's terribly friendly with us, but he doesn't like strangers. The minute somebody comes on the property, he takes off into the barn and hides. So  he is not like Atticus in that way. There's a wisdom in that, but Atticus is also a neutered black male,  but he's a love bug.  Yeah. It's crazy how  they either are really friendly or they are really not friendly.  When we got him from the Humane Society, they thought he was about two.

09:05
When we went to pick him up, he was billed as part of their barn cat program where you pay like, I think it's like $25 or $50 for a barn cat as it were. And we went to pick him up and they said, you will never be able to pet him or hold him. is feral. He is mean. He is nasty. And we ended up naming him Satan thinking that we would never be able to touch him.

09:28
He is the friendliest cat with us. mean, my son picks him up all the time and this cat just sits there and purrs and drools on his shoulder.  It's just nuts. We have a couple of feral cats at home that are also extraordinarily affectionate than you wouldn't think. But yeah,  you never can tell.  Yeah, I posted a video of Satan on our YouTube channel.

09:52
and my son is holding him and he's growling his head off but he's not actually mad. He's just like, I don't really want you to hold me but keep holding me.  And I got so many comments about why would you name a cat Satan? That's terrible. And I'm like, cause he's the devil. He was supposed to be as built as the devil himself.  So anyway,  um.

10:14
All right. So  how long have you guys been doing the farm part? you tell me to begin with? I forget. we, um, July of last year was our 10 year anniversary. So  our 11th season now.  Okay, cool.  And tell me the reaction of, let's start with little kids who come out to visit. It's amazing. And again,

10:35
You know, I think there's just  a disconnect between these kind of processes in most people's lives, especially people that live in a primarily urban area. You know, we do have a lot of families who  commute  out to Western Maryland or Southern Maryland to go apple picking or to do farm kind of tours.  And people are  absolutely thrilled to have  this right in their backyard. I mean, we're literally,  it feels like we're a couple hundred miles away, right in the middle of  this kind of

11:05
urban Metroplex. So it's been a real blessing. And when people come out, they're just amazed.  The property itself has kind of been a strange  zigzag pattern. So as you walk through the property, every time you turn a corner, there's something new that jumps out at you.  The animals tend to be at the right at the beginning of the property where most of our houses and activity is situated.

11:33
The kids just are, it's wild to watch just the looks of amazement as they are able to not only see, but interact with the majority of the animals. You know, to pet the goats, had a young lady came out and did a storytelling last summer and read three billy goats gruff with our billy goats wandering around nibbling on people's clothing and sitting in and listening and being petted while we were doing the story.

12:03
And it was just amazing to watch the kids did not only have the relationship of the story, but while they're doing it to have these animals accessible to them.  it's  just, again, something that I think a lot of kids in this area don't necessarily get an opportunity to experience.  And if they do, it's once or twice at a field trip in school, not on an ongoing basis where  we're here every day. And we encourage people to come out and to  have those experiences.

12:32
That's awesome.  Okay, so do you guys offer classes as well or is that not on the agenda? We're not at the moment. We've transitioned a couple of times since COVID for different bar managers. We do have a virtual learning platform where we're doing some of our, we developed a lot of virtual content during COVID to remain connected with the community and with our service population. So we still have that platform. We really want to get back to it.

13:01
because we have developed some cooking classes, we need to polish some of that a little bit more, but we definitely would like to be able to do those things in an online format where we can continually, people can continually access it after the fact.  So we're really, leaning into the virtual world. We had a poetry reading here last year that was virtual with Marilyn's poet laureate, a couple of poets from Europe and  the DC area.

13:31
So that was really, it was kind of a strange sideline,  but we're kind of about strange sidelines. So that's actually still up on YouTube. And I think the video and the sound quality wasn't phenomenal, but it was really an incredible thing to be involved in. Yeah, this technology thing we've got going on in 2025 is pretty freaking amazing. yeah. It's opened a lot of doors that we wouldn't have even considered.  Yep.

13:58
Honestly, I think it's great that you have the poetry readings on YouTube or yeah, you said YouTube That's great. But  I would recommend that if people  want to to be Want to be exposed to the events you have go to them, you know If you can't make it to it, then yeah catch it if you guys upload it But  there's something really amazing about being at an event in person in real time

14:25
Yeah, we did our last farm manager did a couple of kind of instructional talks on starting a home garden and kind of those processes that were open to the public. And we also recorded to stream later. So probably a combination would be  something that we lean toward a lot. Yeah.  Do you get a lot of people like coming  and  spending time at the farm and  asking questions about how could I start a little garden in  my home?

14:56
Not a tremendous amount because the area we're in is a little bit more rural for this space,  but we do,  about a year ago, opened our community garden plots on the front of our property. So we have offered 20 by 20 plots with some raised beds in that space. And we've got, we probably are about half full at this point.

15:20
So,  me, a lot of people that are interested in gardening and that has become a whole separate community. Do we opened it up with the expectation that rather than charging people for access that we would ask for some service hours monthly and that's worked out really well and has certainly become its own little community within  our larger program.  And again, something we'd certainly like to build on and kind of have our own garden club, you know,

15:50
kind of built around that. also doing a plant sale with a lot of vegetable seedlings and flower starts for the spring. So we're working to make increasing inroads with kind of that local gardening community because  again, that's the word of mouth to kind  of increase sales and just drive awareness that we're here.

16:13
Minnesota has  a thing,  that thing is a really bad descriptor, but  we have Master Gardeners through our university. Yes. And basically they go and take the courses and become certified as Master Gardeners. Does Maryland have that too? We do and we have that locally. We've met with our local Master Gardeners program and talked about, you know, doing potential because of course they do service  projects and training as part of their curriculum and we've offered that here as well. It's never

16:42
quite come to pass,  we're certainly open to  the Master Gardeners, Boy Scout troops, church and civic organizations.  But the Master Gardeners is a phenomenal program. It's pretty active around here and they're already awfully busy. Yeah.  Yep. The ones here are too. I  was actually going to start a second podcast called Mary and the Master Gardener with a lady that I had made contact with.

17:08
We did three episodes and she got super, super busy and it hasn't gone anywhere. And I'm very sad about this. So I'm going to look, I'm on the lookout for a new master gardener person to keep going on it with me. I would tune into that. Yeah. I got to get on it. I've just been so focused on this one that I'm like, I can't, I can't allocate the time right now to go find somebody new, but I'm to work on it this week because I only have like four episodes scheduled to record. So I'm going to work on that one guys too.

17:38
Um, okay. What else can I ask you?  Um, how many acres is the farm? It's just short of 13 acres.  Um, oh, so it's not huge. No, no. And we're probably working on about two and a half or three at the moment.  Um, the,  again, the bulk of the acreage had been maintained in agricultural use by one of our neighbors,  um, who operates a vegetable stand up on the, up on the highway where we're located and

18:07
The soil was pretty played out. was very much a conventional guy who would dump a bunch of, you know, fertilizers and hope for the best. So we started utilizing what had been horse pasture on the front of the property. And they're doing really well with that in a raised bed system that we're rotating and doing cover cropping and trying to maintain really intensively.

18:32
But we're starting to lean into that rear of the property. So we've been cover cropping that over the past couple seasons. We just did a small planting of Christmas trees  and are establishing some more formal garden spaces back there. It leads to about a four acre wood lot that we're also in the process of clearing out to do  some mushroom cultivation maybe and to set up.

18:57
an outdoor classroom and kind of utilize that shady space as a break area and kind of another multipurpose space.  Lankton Green Community Farm is a fabulous resource, it sounds like.  We certainly try to be.  I think most of the folks that are here  are just tickled to death that we get to come in here and do this every day.  If you get the right kind of person who enjoys

19:24
Being outdoors, you know, no matter how miserable the conditions are,  it's really a great thing. And the professional staff that have been here,  they literally talk about where on the property they want to be buried.  it's a pretty good work environment. I still count myself incredibly fortunate  when I come in here to think that, you know, I get to do this professionally every day. Yeah, it's like playing.

19:53
Absolutely. If you enjoy, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life, that kind of a thing. this is just that in spades. Yep. So  I have been to Maryland once  and I grew up in Maine. So it was a very easy road trip with my folks to go visit friends in Maryland. Maryland is beautiful.  Yeah. What are the, what's the growing like there? mean,  you guys can't grow year round unless you have a greenhouse. Yes.

20:23
That's correct.  And we have a couple of poop houses,  30 by 60 foot poop houses. So we work on, you know, trying to do cool weather stuff year round there  and in our greenhouses and in indoor spaces.  And some, we play around with things like micro greens. You know, the idea is to always be cultivating something  even if it's on really small, you know, on a small scale.

20:48
New farm integers vary into  aquaculture and aquatic systems. So we're looking to incorporate more of that  and hydroponics, especially in the off the traditional growing season.  We've been doing fall or I'm sorry, cool weather crops for about a month now. We're getting ready. We're starting to do some small levels of harvesting of pak choy  and kale that was over winter and those kinds of things.

21:15
But we'll be harvesting summer produce into September, sometimes October, and then again typically we'll have a pretty good fall season as well into about the end of the year.

21:30
Okay,  when's your last scary frost date in the spring?  Oh, I believe it's October 15th or at least that's, I kind of have locked into my head May 15th, October 15th. Okay, yep.  That's what it's like here in Minnesota for us. We don't plant anything in the garden until May 15th because  we've done it and we don't want to lose any plants again. Yep.  Yeah, I'm sitting on at home, I'm sitting on...

21:55
two and a half foot tomato plants that I'm thinking about gambling on this weekend because the weather looks like it's going to be pretty consistently good. You better pray and keep everything crossed because the minute you think it's safe, it's not. Okay, so I try not to ask nosy intrusive questions, but you keep talking about new ideas and new things because of the new farm manager. How are you funded?

22:25
We receive funding from the state and federal government to provide services for our consumers.  So that funding pays for staffing and vehicles and keeps the lights on.  All of the farm stuff that we've gotten, I've become a development person in kind of as a sideline. So we've written grants and dealt with foundations and gone out and found a lot of the funding for.

22:52
our gators and tractors, our hoop houses.  There are lot of existing governmental programs. The USDA paid for both of our hoop houses. We're working on at least one more of those  fairly soon.  So yeah, but that's been a big sideline is to go out and find opportunities to match up with foundations and grants and governmental organizations that will provide some of that income.  And again, I...

23:20
really like to get to the point where we're doing enough  sales that we can maintain a little bit of self-sufficiency.  We're trying to  ensure that we're able to  donate about two-thirds of our produce every season, which leaves about a third of it  available for sale. And the goal would be to allow the commercial sale end of things to support the donations.

23:48
which go to local food banks, a lot of which are starting to accept perishables,  as well as the  34 homes that we operate in the county at the moment  that serve our residents. Okay. Is the farm nonprofit?  Yes, Langton Green is a nonprofit organization. Okay. That sort of kind of helps when you're looking for grants and things.

24:15
Has the crackdown on grants from the federal government that's happened since November, has that affected you guys? Not yet, but everybody is  definitely talking about it.  I suspect there will be a trickle down  as some organizations funding is affected.  A lot of what we're leaning more into,  there's a local service club that has been really, really good to us.  We actually

24:41
We won a couple of years ago, the Kubota Corporation's Hometown Proud competition, which provided a really nice amount of cash prize. So we're definitely diverse in what we are, where we go for grants and financial support. Congratulations on that. That's amazing. We had, I think we applied for $10,000 for material for our community garden.

25:11
And they contacted us and said, Hey, this is really great. Could you give us a budget for a hundred thousand dollars  tomorrow?  Well, yes, certainly can do that.  And then, I think we were the Southeast  winter. were five, think regionally and we won for the Southeast. was  kind of out of the blue, but I mean, really, really fantastic people to deal with. And we've appreciated their support.  Oh, absolutely.

25:40
You and your people should be so proud of what you have built with this community farm.  I'm listening to you talk and I'm just like, my God, this is amazing.  Yeah. I mean, again, it's, it's, it's a joy. I mean, half of the time that we feel like we're, you know, we're, we're getting the better of the deal.  Um, but, but again, to be able to share it with people is,  has been phenomenal. And during COVID.

26:05
We closed for programming and it was just the staff here, just the core group of staff here. And those were actually really good years to just have it all to ourselves. But it's been a lot of fun to open back up and to be able to get even more involved with the clinical community. Sorry, I didn't mean to cough in your ear. So who's, I mean, this is a weird question. Whose brainchild was this?

26:35
Who came up with this idea to start with?  Well, again, our executive director kind of came in with this idea based on  this organization in California that he had encountered. And it was just  a really magical fit because, again, it tied into exactly what I had been doing personally and was thinking about doing at a larger scale. You my wife and I were thinking, you know, maybe we should get some a couple acres and do something.

27:01
when he suggested this and it just seemed like such an automatic win for our consumer population and our staff.  Because again, we were bouncing or we had a retail site that we worked out of  just  near our  main office area.  And it just wasn't enough consistently to do and we were sort of bounced around from one place to another all the time.  This gave us a home and my assumption

27:29
was that there would pretty much always be something to do. And there absolutely has been. mean, everybody will ask, what do you do in the winter time? We've never slowed down in the winter time. By the time we're, you we come up for air at the end of the summer season, it's, you know, kind of operate a little bit less intensely for a couple of months, but it seems like every year it's time to start planting again. By the time we've cleared our wood lot,

27:58
to prepare some other garden spaces, gotten all of our equipment and materials  recovered and cleaned up for the next season,  inventoried and developed a planting schedule, looked back on the previous season to determine what did well, what should we do more of, what do we need to cut.  So there's definitely  many, many, many opportunities.  And again,

28:23
the agricultural processes themselves lend themselves to our consumer population because they think each task can be broken into smaller components. So somebody that might not be out working in the field four or five hours at a time can sit and seed or can assist with harvesting and packaging or produce. So the idea of it just developing a more engaged agricultural program made sense for our

28:52
specific consumer population.  Being outdoors rather than  sheltered workshops is kind of was at that point more of the typical environment. And a lot of people  would definitely prefer to be outside and active than sitting at a table.  So it just made a tremendous amount of sense  in all of those ways.  And again, our board of directors was hesitant about it.  They saw it as  something that

29:20
would potentially  cause some safety issues.  was told that I think farming was one of the most dangerous occupations  in the whatever the I'm sorry,  it was basically one of the  most consistently dangerous occupations. So I had to research that and it turns out that it is, but it's because it's lumped in with ranching and livestock and

29:49
being run over by combines, we couldn't turn a combine around on our property. So  we're doing much more hand processes.  it all made a lot of sense. And over time, we were able to develop a business plan to demonstrate that  it was also a viable programming option. So I've got to give our former executive director, Arne Dordek, a lot of credit for coming up with the core of the idea. But once he kind of lit that fuse, myself and the staff that were working at the time,

30:19
really ran with it and  everybody got excited about it really, really quickly. Fantastic.  Do you happen to know the population of the county that your  farm is in? I do not, but it's Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It's not as populous as the Baltimore, D.C. immediate suburbs, but a lot of the people, yeah, it's definitely one of the more populous regions in Maryland. Yeah, I was wondering because

30:49
you are serving a fairly large community of people because I'm assuming people come from all over Maryland. Yeah, the majority of the folks are coming from like the Annapolis area. And again, the Anne Arundel County people that live here tend to work in either D.C. or Baltimore. So it's  definitely  a  large there. There's mixed  residential development of  single family home communities and apartments and town homes.

31:17
So it's definitely a fairly dense population and growing. I freaking  love it, John. I'm so glad that you would come talk to me today.  We are at 30 minutes and 27 seconds and I try to keep these to half an hour. So I, you have no idea how much I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. Absolutely. I really appreciate you reaching out and I'm glad we made the connection.  This was so fun. I'm going to be on a high for the next six hours because I love what you're doing.

31:47
Thanks so much. Have a great day. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. All right. Bye. If you like this podcast, you would probably love Amy Fagan's Grounded in Maine podcast. You can find her on all the platforms, groundedinmaine.com.