Sunny Acres Farms

Today I'm talking with Brian at Sunny Acres Farms. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. 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 Brian at Sunny Acres Farms. Good morning, Brian. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing good. How are you? I'm good. You're in Arkansas. I know we already established that before I hit record, but I like people to know where I'm talking to people.

00:28
So you're in Arkansas and you said it's kind of chilly there this morning. It is. Yeah. We're experiencing some single digits. It's been, this is day five, uh, uh, that will not get above freezing, which is pretty unusual for this area, but it's becoming more usual as we have these extreme weather fluctuations, but, uh, yeah, that's pretty chilly today. Yeah. Today at noon, we're supposed to be out of our, um, frigid air.

00:58
warning. So we've been really cold for at least four days now. So I'm very much looking forward to not having it be so cold. Yeah. Yeah, we have a little bit of livestock too. And when it's this cold, it's always an added chores to keep the ice broken up on the water and keep them in a good situation when it's this cold.

01:25
Yeah, and they're not used to it. I feel so bad for the animals that aren't used to it being so cold because they don't know what to do. Right, yeah. They're like, what is this? This is not right. Okay, so tell me about what you do, Brian. All right, so my partner Becca and I started Sunny Acres Farms. We just completed our third season, so we're going into season number four.

01:54
started with backyard gardening that just kept getting larger and larger until we had a 1,500 square foot garden in our backyard, which was able to produce way more food than we could ever eat. So we just started selling some and creating pickles and canned goods and giving it away or selling some to our friends and family and things like that. When the COVID pandemic hit, we were both...

02:23
had careers in restaurants. We were in restaurant management and bar management and things like that. But that shut everything down for quite a while. And that kind of really made us reevaluate both of our careers. And we had an opportunity to – well, I went to a trade school basically. It's called CAF, the Center for Arkansas Farms and Foods, during the 2021 or 2020 year.

02:50
and it's basically 11 month long trade school for farming. It was super interesting because I grew up gardening with my grandparents on both sides, had a big garden that fed the family and everything. But farming was something that was definitely a lot different, a lot more different than I thought it was gonna be. I kind of went into it thinking like, oh, I know how to grow food. Like I'm a pretty good gardener. And you get into the actual farming techniques and what it takes to maintain a farm, or to keep a farm producing.

03:19
week after week throughout the entire year is much different than a home garden. So, yeah, so 2020 was kind of when we really decided to shift our focus from kind of hobby gardening for ourselves and pursuing other careers to really turning growing food into our passion. You know, it was already a passion of ours, but like turning our passion into something that could also make us money. And so that's kind of been the start of our journey starting there.

03:49
Completing year three so a lot of people that have a story like yours and trust me I've heard it over the last year on this podcast, but everybody's story is different. Did you ever think you'd be doing this? No, man If you would have asked me five even just five years ago like before like right before the pandemic if you would have asked me this I would have not guessed this or

04:14
I might have believed you because I was into gardening but it would have been like, really? That's where I'm going to be in five years? I would have never guessed that. That wasn't really ever the plan. I've always enjoyed growing food. When I was in college, my very first apartment, I got a lot of my neighbors to get involved and we in the courtyard just created a raised bed garden so we could all kind of grow our own little bit of a…

04:41
of our own food there. And it's always just been fun for me. So I've always enjoyed the aspect of growing food and enjoyed the quality of food you get from homegrown food. So yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have guessed it, but it was kind of the next logical step if restaurants weren't going to be my career. I love that you enlisted your neighbors in the apartment building. That's amazing.

05:08
Yeah, and so I went back to that apartment building in years past and there's still that little raised bed garden area that's being utilized by the tenants there. So that made me happy. That's fabulous. You started a trend that has continued without you. That's great. Yeah. But yeah, so we are kind of the main goal of our farm. We're focused on regenerative ag techniques.

05:34
We just last year got our certified naturally grown, our CNG, so we don't use any synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. We follow no-till practices. We do initial tillage to create our bed areas and to shape and form our beds. But then typically after year one, those beds, unless there's some issue that arises, those beds won't see tillage again.

06:02
We use hand tools and implements like the broad fork and the tilter to incorporate amendments and compost that we add on top of our soils. And then we use the broad fork to aerate the soils and kind of fluff them up. And our main focus is we grow about 45 different varieties of produce.

06:29
At this time, we don't have any fruit in production, so we are just vegetables. But we grow everything you possibly can in season, which that's what we kind of like being here in zone seven. We have a pretty long growing, decently long growing season. It's not like a Florida or a Texas, but we do experience wintertime here. But we can grow food year round here in tunnels. Obviously, we're not growing tomatoes and green beans right now.

06:56
We have all kinds of root vegetables in the ground that are growing and that we're harvesting off every week to take to market like beets, carrots, radishes, turnips, storage radishes, we have all types of greens. We have spinach, arugula, Asian greens, lettuce mix, kale, collard greens, chard. So there's still quite a bit growing on the farm right now. There's not much of us, not as big of a variety as peak season.

07:25
But yeah, that's kind of just the general basis of what we kind of are shooting for and what we do. Very nice. I'm gonna talk my husband into moving to Oklahoma so we can grow stuff in the wintertime. Yeah. This not being able to grow things in the winter is the most frustrating part of having a small hobby farm because I love veggies. Like I would eat a salad every day if we had it in the garden all year round. Yeah.

07:53
Yeah, no. And so one of the, I mean, I try to tell people this every time when they come by our booth, like, because a lot of people aren't familiar with buying produce in the vegetable, like locally grown produce in the off season, like winter, but it's really a treat to like brassicas, like, like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collards, all like in the wintertime, like when it gets below freezing, all of the starches in those things turn to sugars.

08:20
Not all of them, but they start to turn to sugar, so they're very sweet. Like, you can just bite into a leaf of our collard greens and eat it like spinach. It's so tender and it's just sweet. There's no bitterness at all. It's so tasty. It's delicious. So, wintertime vegetables, not only do you get fresh vegetables in the cold season, but it's like they're so tasty. They're delicious. Yeah. I feel like I repeat myself a lot on these episodes while I'm going to say it again.

08:49
We just put in a hard-sided greenhouse in May and my husband just went out on Sunday and planted radishes and some lettuce and some spinach, I think, in the raised beds out there because it's warm enough in the greenhouse that they will survive. So I should have radishes in a month or so. Yeah, very cool. Yes. So it's doable, but it is not doable just outside in the ground right now.

09:19
Right, yeah. Yeah, we have so right now we have two working tunnels and we're built, we're working on building another one. So we have a 60 foot by 20 foot and a 60 foot by 30 foot tunnel that we produce in during the winter time. But yeah, just the fact that the tunnel holds the heat in during the day and heats the soil up keeps the soil warm is really the main thing because

09:47
That was one of the most interesting things I learned going through that vocational farming program. We learned that in a handful of healthy soil, there are more microorganisms than there have ever been people to walk the planet Earth. I just thought that astonished me. I was like, that is wild to think about. We're just now cracking into that iceberg of understanding the dynamics that go on between those microorganisms, the roots of our plants.

10:16
There's like a whole chemical economy going on down there exchanging, you know, oxygen or CO2 for oxygen or for different elements down in the ground that these microorganisms essentially mine from deeper in the soil and bring up to the roots. Like, it's crazy. So keeping that soil alive during the wintertime under the greenhouse is like the really the key component to it, I think, is keeping those little microorganisms from freezing during the wintertime.

10:43
What you're talking about is some of the most fascinating science ever discovered. It reminds me of the Horton, here's a who, Dr. Seuss story. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No, and it's funny you kind of mentioned that too. I remember I read a study over this last year that they've now found that when plants are not healthy, like when the soil is not healthy.

11:10
plants actually put off this chemical signal that pests pick up on. Pests are just an indicator that there's something wrong with your soil. Our main focus in regenerative ag techniques and in the whole point of not tilling and using cover crops is protecting your soil and protecting that microorganism life in the soil because that's what's doing all of your work. That's what's doing the work of

11:39
creating these healthy vegetables, bringing all the nutrients from the soil that the plants need. And if your soil is not healthy, you know, you're gonna eventually have a not healthy plant. And there was a study that came out, I was reading over the summer that like, there's now like, we can detect this chem, like a trace chemical signature being put off by this plant that certain pests can pick up on. And so it's, you know, just like throughout all of nature, you know, the, you typically predators will go after the weakest of the herd.

12:07
Well, the same thing for plants. The pred- those bugs are going to go after the weakest plant. The strong, robust, healthy plant, that's not going to be the first one hit. They're going to go for the ones sending off those distress signals. That's what's going to get hit first. So, we've been really trying. I didn't know about that. Yeah. I wish I had that link available right now, but it was just something I'd-

12:35
popped up in my email over the course of the summer. I was reading about it and it was just super cool. I was like, wow, it makes sense. That's why you get pests. Pests are really kind of nature's indicator of, hey, you've got something wrong in your soil. You need to have healthier soil because this plant's not healthy. And that's kind of the whole adopted principle of regenerative ag is you're feeding the soil, not the plant. Essentially, all the amendments we add are to oyster the life

13:05
that's there, that microorganism life, it's not necessarily to directly fertilize the plants. We're trying to amp up the life that's already there that's going to bring more nutrients that the plants need anyways. I mean, not to say like – I mean, we are adding nitrogen to the soil, obviously, like feather mill, bone mill, things like that, that the plant does immediately uptake. But really, the whole overall longevity goal of regenerative ag is to protect and build that life that's in the soil.

13:38
Right. You're feeding the soil so the soil feeds the plants so the plants can feed you. Right. Exactly. Exactly. It's actually a really simple concept, but people who don't know, don't know. They don't. They've never thought to ask the question in the first place. It is wild to me. That was kind of one of my biggest inspirations in getting back into farming. Just seeing the disconnect.

14:06
that just a few generations have from where food comes from. It's like not that long ago, like three, maybe four generations in some families, people were literally mostly surviving off the land, like having their own homesteads or growing their own food to some degree. There were still grocery stores where people bought flour and salt, and I'm sure there were other things, but.

14:31
Just very quickly, it happened that people just don't even understand where food comes from. Like the amount of people that come by my booth and will make a comment about, you know, so one of our niches too is we like to grow kind of unique food. So we grow all the staples, but we grow different varieties. Like we like to grow colorful. Like we just harvested a bunch of purple cauliflower. We grow the purple, we grow the yellow cauliflower. We do grow white as well.

15:01
But just like the people don't even realize like there's more than just one carrot You know, there's thousands of carrots that some are sweeter. Some are better for storage Some are bigger some are smaller like and so, you know the amount of people coming by our booth They're like, oh my god, we didn't even know that that you know, this was a thing like, you know Yeah, there's just this huge disconnect and that's what I thought was so cool about gardening That's what kind of even when I was in college Like I like to grow unique stuff because I was like you can't find this stuff at the grocery store

15:31
I can't go to the grocery store and get an orange beet or a white beet or at least in my rural town area that I kind of grew up in. If you wanted stuff like that, you had to grow it. There wasn't these great options at the grocery store. We do have a great local co-op, but still, your options are very limited as far as—

15:52
different varieties of things because there's a reason large scale growers grow all these varieties you see in the store because they have great shelf life. Maybe they have good holding value or whatever it is, but that doesn't always mean it's the best tasting and it doesn't always mean it's the best product you could possibly have. It just means it's able to sit on that shelf for longer and look prettier.

16:18
Don't even get me started on grocery store tomatoes. But yeah, that's like a whole different thing. I am right there with you. I swear to you, I've talked about tomatoes so many times in the last year of people who grow tomatoes in gardens. And it's true, homegrown tomatoes taste better than grocery store tomatoes. But there is a place in Minnesota that grows tomatoes in their company. And I can't.

16:46
I keep meaning to write this down because I know it's going to come up at least every other episode, but I think it's Bushel Boy is the name of the company. I could be wrong. Okay. And their tomatoes in the wintertime are fabulous. And they are a company. They're not just a small farm. They are a big tomato producing place. And I am so thankful for them because by February, all I want is one of my...

17:12
tomatoes from my garden, but that's not happening until July at least. So I'm really thankful for this one company in Minnesota that grows tomatoes. And they grow them there? Yeah. Like in the heated greenhouses probably? I think so, yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. I know there's several places like that in Canada too. Really, you know, and in operations like that, it's great, like, cause you know, you can have good tomatoes and even in the off season, if you have the right operation, the problem with a lot of the stuff we get.

17:42
is that it's being picked before it's ripe and then put in a big shipping container and then gassed with ethanol to ripen it up. And so it's like it's not necessarily getting a bad product. It's just it was picked before it was fully ripe. You're forcing it to turn red, but it hasn't had time to absorb the flavor and the nutrients from the plant. Right. Yep. Exactly. I think it's interesting that you were talking about the different varieties because many moons ago.

18:10
We grew a purple kohlrabi. I assume you know what kohlrabi is. Oh yeah, we grow a lot of that. Okay, all we'd ever grown before was the green kind. And we found this purple variety and I was like, let's grow purple ones, that'll be fun. And we did and my neighbor who would literally let the cucumber vines grow through the fence so that she could pick cucumbers that she said were hers. She was like 12 at the time. She...

18:39
We grew the purple kohlrabis for her because she thought that brightly colored veggies were better. They were magic. And so we grew these purple kohlrabis and my husband gave her a couple. And my neighbor, her mom, was like, what do I do with a purple kohlrabi? I said, same thing you do with a green one. You slice it up and eat it. And she sliced it up for a little girl. And her little girl came over later and she was like, it tasted like unicorns. I was like,

19:08
Okay, good to know. Right? And she was 12, so you know. Right? Yeah, no, we've had similar kind of responses from parents bringing their kids and getting our rainbow carrot bunches. Because they're like, they just love the rainbow carrots way more than, you know, because they do say you eat with your eyes before you eat with your mouth, like even for adults.

19:36
Something that's visually appealing is, you know, we make it taste better in our brain. Absolutely. If you hand me a cupcake that has gray frosting on it, and you hand me a cupcake that has bright pink frosting on it, I'm probably going to pick the bright pink one, even though the gray frosting is exactly the same taste. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So it's absolutely true.

20:03
Okay, so what's your, we've got like 10 more minutes. I figure your answer will take at least five. What's your plan for your place? So we're just focusing on kind of fine tuning our techniques right now and establishing systems. We currently sell at the local Fayetteville farmers market and

20:30
We also have a CSA subscription box program that we are building. Right now we're sitting at about 20 subscribers. We would like to build that over the, slowly build that up. We're trying to shoot for 50 to get more people onto our subscription program. And yeah, I mean, so.

20:56
The goal right now is to just, yeah, to kind of just build out the business. My partner, Becca, during the winter months works an off-farm job. I'm currently full-time farming, but the goal is to have this be both of our careers where we can just full-time work on the farm and sell produce. Nice. Okay, so we did a CSA for two summers in a row.

21:24
And we never got anywhere near 20 subscribers. I think the most we had was like nine. And it is a lot of work to do that, to get it together and have the containers that you put the stuff in, go with the people. And we ended up buying the plastic milk crates because we got different color ones and they all get a certain color for the season and they will bring them back. And that way we weren't.

21:49
We weren't trying to buy new boxes every year because that gets really expensive. Uh-huh. How are you going to keep up with 50 subscribers? Because that's a lot of packing stuff. Yeah, so we try to go, we do very minimal packing as far as like, so basically we treat like one day a week, we treat like as our CSA day, where we spend the day harvesting, packing.

22:19
delivering to the drop-off point. We don't deliver to each person individually, but we deliver to a drop-off point where they then come and pick up their bags. So when I say subscription box, we actually just do like some paper bags with our stamped logo on it and then compostable plastic bags. And so in any given CSA, you might actually have two or three bags to pick up depending on what all was in the bag that week.

22:48
But yeah, that's how we do it. We just treat it as a whole day. One of the days out of the week is our CSA day and we typically will – we have it – we just started at the end of the season last year bringing in help. We haven't had it full time but this year we're hoping to have a full time extra set of hands on board. That can help us on days like that when there's kind of just like a lot to process. Okay. That makes sense. I get it.

23:18
But yeah, like for, you know, it's not much different than harvesting for a market day for us because, you know, on any given market day, that's about, you know, 50 portions of each item that we have is about what we would be harvesting anyways. So we just have a harvest day for CSAs and a harvest day for like our market and stuff like that. So cool. And then did I see something on your website that you're, you have partners that, that you can sell meat and stuff?

23:46
Yes, yeah, our neighbors literally our neighbors right across this. Yeah, so we've we've from the beginning wanted to do that and we've had two partners from day one that have offered our Customers things like we have a farmer brown chicken brown sow a buddy of mine About 20 miles away grows pork and so he offers all his pork products

24:16
with the tallow, I guess, or the lye. And so he makes his own soap and stuff like that that is offered. And then our neighbors right across the street, they actually have beef, lamb, and pork. So they offer those products as well. And then they also have honeybees. So basically what we do is with each CSA, you get a newsletter.

24:42
and we include a couple recipes with the items that we picked out for the week. We'll have a couple recipes that include those items to help give people ideas so you're not just like, hey, here's something you might have never heard of before. Good luck. We like to give them a couple recipe ideas. And then they'll also receive a list of the items that will be available to order the following week. And so we get that, like if they wanted to order like say,

25:10
a pound of bacon and a shoulder roast and a dozen eggs and a jar of honey, they would just text us that order. We also have a platform online where they can just go and order online, which that's actually what we're trying to push people towards because then they can pay our partners directly. Then our partners will bring the product to us when we are going to make our CSA delivery and we will just bag it up with their items and take it to the drop-off point.

25:39
But that way, we don't have to do any middleman shuffling of money. Our partners are just paid directly. But we can do it either way because there are some customers that just prefer to text us an order and then we do the legwork for them of letting our partners know and then accepting the payment and then giving it to our partners. So we do a little bit of legwork, but that's not the majority of our customers. But yeah, it is something we felt like added some value to our program.

26:07
something we just wanted to help people out with because that's one of the biggest conveniences of going to a grocery store is that you can get a lot of the groceries that you need in one place, hopefully all of them. But we kind of wanted to add more of that opportunity to kind of make it more appealing. Like, okay, well, you can get your meat and your veggies from this one spot this week. But yeah.

26:36
We weren't that fancy at all here. We were not doing the CSI anymore. My husband has a full-time job and the garden is his baby. And so we just sell at the farmer's market because he decided that that was good enough for him. And I'm not gonna say anything because it's his baby. He can sell his veggies however he wants to sell his veggies. I am all good with it. So do you guys have any critters at your place or is it just produce?

27:05
egg laying chickens and we have sheep as well. Okay and the sheep are for what? The sheep are for meat they're not wool sheep so it was the sheep we just moved on to this this property this new property we're on last year so we've been here just over a year now we had started off on a leased property that was just a quarter of an acre which was right down the road from where we're at.

27:35
But then we were able to get this property, which we've now moved onto, and are getting things set up here. But when we came onto this property, it already had, there were sheep here, and so we could have sold them all or got rid of them, but we decided to keep them and kind of see if we wanted to work them into kind of our rotation of how we do our regenerative ag things. So.

28:01
It's kind of in a trial basis right now. We are seeing if it works for us, if we have what it takes to take care of the animals while maintaining the vegetable side of the operation as well. So we'll see how it goes. It's very new to us. Livestock wasn't in our plan necessarily, especially this early. It was kind of down the road possibly, but.

28:26
So right now it's in a very much a trial basis. We're kind of seeing how it goes, see how they play into our system and things like that. But the new property we moved onto is 68 acres with I would say probably about 65, 70% of that being cleared pasture land. So it kind of made sense that the pasture's already there, the sheep were already there. We had to build some fence to kind of divide up the pasture and we're doing like a rotational grazing routine with them.

28:56
But yeah, so that's what we're working. Yeah, it's kind of a new thing that we're trying out. We'll see how it goes. Okay, will you have lambs this spring? Yeah, so they've already started lambing. We've got, I think, about 15 out there right now. Nice. Last year we had 27 babies. And do you enjoy the baby season or is it just a means to an end to get more sheep? Yeah, I mean, they're cute. They're pretty cute, yeah.

29:25
But it is, we have to keep our eye out a lot more during that time, because you never know when they're gonna come out. And a lot of times with sheep, you'll get sheep that are rejected by their mothers because in sheep, twinning is very common. And then sometimes they will just reject one of the babies. So that's kind of heartbreaking. And then so you either have to intervene, go save the sheep, bring it inside, which then you're bottle feeding it for a long time, which is another added chore.

29:54
and stuff like that. So it's an interesting dynamic and nature is very brutal at times. But it's... Yes. Yes. That's another thing I've talked with people on this podcast about a lot. It is... It's heartbreaking when babies die and it's heartbreaking when these animals that you've been raising for years die. But I keep saying that...

30:20
that the joy of this outweighs that or at least balances that sadness out? Is that kind of how you feel too? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. And you know, it's neat to see like when the animals appreciate you taking care of them, you know, like you can see it, like they'll look at you and they, you know, when we are out in the field, the sheep follow us around and you know, it's a cool little relationship you get to build with your animals and like even our down to our chickens, you know, they

30:50
their little personalities and you know we have some that will walk right up to us and you know balk at us and you know they're just super interested in what we're doing and following us around and you know so yeah it's pretty fun like and we get to see them running around chickens are funny to watch they're just crazy they'll just run around the yard all day and chase after each other and just be crazy and stuff it's so yeah there are all kinds of you know joyous kind of rewards that come with the territory you know for sure.

31:20
Yeah, we don't have any chickens right now, but we're going to get more in the spring. We have had chickens for the last four years. And you're right, it's really fun to watch them. And I call them the crazy cluckers. Yeah. Because they just, they do that craziest things. And the one thing that's really fun with the chickens is we get a watermelon at least three times the summer, like a really nice big watermelon. And we will give them the shells after we've eaten what we want out of them.

31:50
They love watermelon and they will put the shell out there and they have destroyed it within an hour. They're like, free food. I'm all, I'm all. Let's do it. It's really fun having chickens. Okay, so Brian, I try to keep these to half an hour. We're at 30, well, almost 32 minutes. So I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the talk.

32:18
For sure, thank you. Have a great day. Alright, you as well. Alright.