Philly’s Bouncer Turned Organic Farmer: Kegan Hilaire

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker and this is Hope is My Middle Name, a podcast from Consensus Digital Media. Today, I am so excited to bring you Kegan Hilaire, owner of Blackbird Farms, an organic vegetable farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And he's also the Small Farms and Diversified Vegetable Consultant at the Rodale Institute, a Pennsylvania nonprofit dedicated to building a future of regenerative organic agriculture through research, farmer training, and education. Kegan has been a farmer for over four years now, and as you'll hear, he is passionate about organic farming, how it's better for our bodies, for our communities, and for the whole planet. But becoming a farmer was a radical career shift that no one, least of all Kegan himself, saw coming. And it all started with an egg.

Kegan Hilaire: Hello! Good morning. 

Kate Tucker: It's so good to see you, Kegan.

Kegan Hilaire: Yeah, thanks for having me!

Kate Tucker: Tell me... when you were a kid, was there a vegetable that you just totally hated and maybe now you've come to see as like really delicious, and if so, like, how did you experience that? 

Kegan Hilaire: Growing up, I never liked tomatoes. They were just gross. And it was when I started actually growing tomatoes and working with tomatoes and understanding that it's not just like the balls of red water that come off a shelf. It has flavor. There are nuances to different types of tomatoes. Eating that first tomato that's still warm from the sun, I think will change most people's mind when they say they don't like tomatoes. It definitely did for me.

Kate Tucker: Yeah! That's such a great example because a grocery store tomato is like a completely different fruit. Also, I'm learning that in certain parts of the country tomatoes are so easy to grow. Like in my area, I just used compost that someone else had left at the house that I bought. And within like one year, I had, I think there were 19 volunteer tomato plants just like popping up in my front yard and they're the best tomatoes. They're like weird heirloom varietals that somebody must have eaten and put in the compost and now they're back. It's so magical. 

Kegan Hilaire: That's awesome. And honestly, I think there's some truth to the fact that those tomatoes have had a harder life than most cultivated tomatoes. And I think that has to play into how they taste. In French cooking, it's terroir. It's the taste of place. And what happens in that place and how things work around that growing tomato plant absolutely have to impart something to that taste into that plant in general. So I say it with a lot of the consulting clients that I work with that in organic ag, everything is everything. You can't change one part of something without it changing at least a small part of everything else. And I think that part is a huge reason why the same variety of tomato tastes different from your yard to your neighbor's yard.

Kate Tucker:  I love that. So in everything being everything and being connected, let's talk about you and kind of where you started. Did you grow up eating vegetables, liking vegetables, thinking about where your food came from? 

Kegan Hilaire: Not really at all. Honestly, my parents had like a tomato plant that I never ate in the backyard and then like some other random vegetables every once in a while, but we were outdoor kids. I grew up in suburbia, but we didn't have cable. We didn't have the internet growing up until I was, I think, in eighth grade. Our friends used to joke that we were the Amish kids, but we just had to go outside. We had to go play outside all the time. So we weren't really farm kids. We were just like, get out of the house kids.

Kate Tucker: Yeah, it makes a difference! So okay, your parents weren't farmers. What then led to, I mean, did you dream ever of being a farmer? Did you think you might become a farmer?

Kegan Hilaire: No, and actually the first time that I told my family that I wanted to even work for a farm, my sister actually spit her food on my uncle. It was like a movie spit take, like across the table. So it was kind of a surprise to everyone, including myself. I guess the way it kind of happened, my wife and I were going to school down in Philly. I had just graduated. She was in grad school. So I would be making a lot of the dinners. And my cousin, who's a chef said, you can either get better techniques or better ingredients.

So we joined a CSA down in the city and we started getting pasture-raised eggs. And I couldn't figure out why the eggs looked different, why they tasted different, why they cooked different. I couldn't wrap my head around why those eggs were completely different than the ones in the store. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole of pastured livestock, then rotational grazing, and then robo pasturing, and then kind of eventually backended my way into vegetables. But it was really through a food lens that I started getting into ag.

Kate Tucker:  Do you remember when you heard. It's either improve your technique or improve your quality of ingredients. Did you immediately think like, I'm just going to go for the ingredients? How did you make that decision? 

Kegan Hilaire: My first thought was I am way too lazy for better technique. So we're getting better ingredients.

Kate Tucker: Yes. So you get this egg. Do you remember the first time you cracked open a pasture-raised totally organic egg? 

Kegan Hilaire: Yes, I definitely remember it. It was from Green Isle Grocer. They were like an organic local-only grocery store. That was before organic was in Walmart or before it was so widely available. If you wanted organic produce, you had to go to a specialty store. And from there ended up kind of doing my research into all of that. But then I was doing a sales job. I have an economics degree, so I have no farming background. I did business-to-business sales for about three to four years after I graduated.

And then once I started kind of doing the cooking and understanding the eggs and reading a little bit of Michael Pollan, I decided I needed to be done with sales. Previously, I had been a bouncer in the city. So I kind of part-time bounced and part-time took up a job for a dairy farm that was selling cheese and yogurts at farmer's markets.

So I would drive about an hour and a half north of Philly to go to the farm, eventually started running those farmer's markets for the farm. That was like my first real farm job, but I didn't get to do any of the farming. So from there is when I kind of really jumped headfirst into vegetable and food production.

Kate Tucker: What were you selling B2B before you fell back on bouncing and selling milk?

Kegan Hilaire: I was a sales manager for an insulation company. So we would come in and do retrofit insulation. From there, I worked for another home improvement company training marketing reps, and then worked at Comcast for about two weeks. And I was like, wow, I really hate this. And I think that was the last straw from there. It was dairy farming and bouncing for about a year, I would say. 

Kate Tucker: Sometimes it takes that one job that you're just like, Nope, I will not. And then you are flung into the abyss, but you find your way. 

Kegan Hilaire: There was about two months where I was, I would describe myself as listless. I had no idea. I knew I didn't want to go back into the business world. I didn't know what I was looking for in ag. Even for a couple of years after getting into ag, I don't think I really knew what I was looking for. So it was really just kind of confused. I thought, let's go back to bouncing and let's go to farmer's markets. It sounded like a nice way to spend my time.

Kate Tucker: But how did you sleep?

Kate Tucker: On the weekends? I didn't. I would work until about three or four in the morning and then I'd go back to my house, take like an hour-long nap, get up at like 5:30 or  6, drive to Lambertville and then pack up for a farmer's market. And then I'd sleep when I got home from the market that day, and then do it again on Sunday.

Kate Tucker: So you're there selling dairy at the market. How do you start to build the groundwork for your understanding today and the purpose and what you do today? 

Kegan Hilaire: I would honestly say a lot of it was the commute between Philly and the farm. I had about an hour and twenty minutes to myself each way every day. So I read a lot of audiobooks and that kind of helped formulate an idea in my head of what I was looking for and what I was kind of grasping at. I give a lot of credit to Audible because I was ripping through ag books as quickly as I could.

Kate Tucker: And so take me through the trajectory of that. I mean, were you looking at dairy because you were selling dairy? How did you start to come into organic farming and realizing that those practices mattered? 

Kegan Hilaire: The dairy farm was actually a conventional grain farm mostly. They did about 1200 acres of corn and soy that they sold in the commodity market, but they had traditionally been a dairy farm and did a lot of agrotourism, so they always lost money on having cows, but it fit into other systems on the farm. So my goal when I first got that job, they told me was we want to lose less money on having a dairy herd. So working with wholesalers and distributors and small specialty shops and just... really selling a lot, a lot of cheese and yogurts. But they were fully conventional. The cows weren't on pasture. I mean, they're wonderful farmers. They're great people. They had some really good cheese. I have some of their cheese in my freezer right now, actually. Still love them, but it just wasn't what I had in my head for what I thought it looked like.

And from there I ended up doing a working interview for a pastured lamb and pork operation that also grew on about 15 acres of vegetables. They did some farm dinners and some agritourism. And once I met them, that was the jump I needed. This is what I wanted to do. This is how I wanted to farm. I was at that dairy farm for about two and a half years, so it took a good amount of time for me to really wrap my head around what it was and what the system was I was looking for.

Kate Tucker: And what was that system? Can you describe it for me? 

Kegan Hilaire: When I walked out to that first pastured farm, it's called Plowshare Farms. The lambs ran up to the fence to check on me. The the pigs were, were running around in the back and chefs were walking around. We were planning farm dinners. There was community involvement, for sure. There was a small CSA. We were selling in the city to some of the top chefs in the country. But then also all those practices where it's okay if the field is weedy because it's still producing cucumbers. We're here to grow cucumbers not to kill everything in sight. So it was just kind of a mindset shift that kind of aligned more with what I had in my head, I think.

Kate Tucker: And tell me more about why we don't need to kill the weeds to grow the cucumbers. 

Kegan Hilaire: There's a saying that if nothing's eating your vegetables then your vegetables aren't a part of the local ecosystem. So there should be things that happen. There should be pests. There should be some disease. Otherwise, you're probably not as involved as you think you are, especially for a small vegetable farm.

Kate Tucker: Ooh, that makes me feel so much better about my own garden right now. Thank you.

Kegan Hilaire:  Oh, absolutely.

Kate Tucker: If nothing's eating your vegetables, they're probably not very good. 

Kegan Hilaire: Exactly. And I feel like that's always the test is if the animals aren't eating your stuff, then your stuff's probably not very good.

Kate Tucker: Yeah!

Kegan Hilaire: If the deer aren't eating some of your lettuce, then your lettuce might be too bitter because they have free range of everything and they chose to eat your stuff. And that is infuriating, but also maybe that's just how I comfort myself. When they eat the tops off of all of my baby beets, that's what I tell myself.

Kate Tucker:  I love it. So tell me how you actually started Blackbird Farms. It blows my mind to think of saying, I'm going to have a complete career change and just become a farmer. How did you get started. 

Kegan Hilaire: So I did about two and a half years at the dairy farm. I moved to Plowshare Farms for a season. And then from there, I actually went to the Rodale Institute Farmer Training Program. I started there February of 2020. So we ended up being the COVID kids. So coming out of that program after a year there, your final project is to have a fully functioning crop plan and a fully functioning marketing and business plan. So from there, I went to a local incubator farm. I'm there with eight other farmers and we share resources. The nonprofit owns most of them and then we rent them out by the hour or by the space or by the acre and they just kind of share everything there. So I took my business plan there. I applied and I started Blackbird Farms.

Kate Tucker: So what is the Rodale Institute and how do you think starting and going through the program in COVID has expanded or shifted your perspective on farming?

Kegan Hilaire: So the Rodale Institute is an organic research farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. We just had our 75th anniversary actually, where we conduct a lot of trials. It's a research-based farm that's all driven by organic ag. So we have the longest-running trial of grain crops in the country, if not the world. We have conventional organic growing side by side, and we're taking data measurements every single year to show that organic ag is not only more resilient in times of climate stress, but also, that after about a three-year system shift, the yields are comparable to conventional even in a normal year. So whether that's the grain side, whether that's the vegetable systems trial where we're actually measuring nutrient density, or if it's part of the farmer training trial or farmer training program, that's putting out new farmers with business plans, with marketing plans, with connections in the industry to help them kind of get their own plan started.

Kate Tucker: Wow. Well, farmer training could be a trial, especially if you're going through COVID. Tell me about that. 

Kegan Hilaire: That was interesting because we actually started in kind of the end of February and then all of a sudden lockdowns were coming. Agricultural employees were declared essential. And then later that day we were told that if we didn't live on site, we had to go home and we didn't know if we could come back.

So in that meantime, my parents had a little bit of a yard, so we got a whole bunch of soil delivered and we built a little market garden and basically ended up doing like a you-pick CSA out of like an eighth of an acre at their house. And then a month later, Rodale called and said we could come back in. So we went back to farmer training. At the time, I was running a little market garden, 110-person CSA. We were doing two low-income markets in Redding and Allentown. And then we were donating a lot of produce too, just because there was so much need at the time. 

Kate Tucker: And I mean, if it hadn't been COVID, you probably wouldn't have started the market farm on your parents’ land.

Kegan Hilaire: Exactly.

Kate Tucker: While you were in the program, I mean, that sounds like a lot, but also so cool to see what's possible on an eighth of an acre.

Kegan Hilaire: We ended up doing about 10 families, about 10 neighbors would come up once a week and just pick whatever they wanted. And there was always more than enough for everybody. And that actually ended up being my proof of concept really for starting my own farm that next year was like, we can grow at scale. And that certainly gave me the confidence to do it, but also the people around me really kind of understood it a little bit better. So it was huge to have that happen, honestly.

Kate Tucker: As you get through this program, what happens next? Like, how do you actually break ground at Blackbird Farms? And if you could kind of take me there, show me what it is. Like, let's go on a walk and describe to me what I'm going to see.

Kegan Hilaire: Okay. It's called the Seed Farm, which is a nonprofit incubator farm. So they own the greenhouses and the tractors. They're responsible for maintenance, keeping the coolers running. You have to apply with a fully functioning business and marketing plan. You have to have a crop plan, which gets reviewed by their review board and they'll approve you for whatever acreage you're asking. And the whole point is that it's an incubator. So no one's holding your hand, but if you have a question about an implement or if something goes wrong, there's kind of a support system there to help you get through it and help you figure it out. Most leases are about three to five years.

We have people who are doing medicinal herbs, culinary herbs. There's a woman who's a seed keeper and a couple of mixed vegetable farms and a flower farmer. So from coming out of the farmer training program, which they call RIFT, Rodale Institute Farmer Training, you have a fully functioning business and marketing plan. You have a fully functioning crop plan. So it was basically the application for applying to the seed farm. So from there, ended up getting five acres of land. And then from there, just jumped into it starting in February.

Kate Tucker: That's a lot of land to start with. Did you have help? What did you actually physically do first? 

Kegan Hilaire: Honestly, the first day that I got my lease, I walked onto my big field and just wept. I was so overwhelmed. I just cried like a baby and pulled myself together and was like, okay, well, we just have to start working. So from there, basically just started following my crop plan. It was important that I had that training from the year before because I could lean on the things that I had made decisions on with a clearer mindset when I wasn't overwhelmed by all those tasks. Just saying, that I just have to do what this spreadsheet tells me to do today and everything's going to be okay.

We did a pretty heavy tillage that first year to try to get some of the weeds under control and then just started doing field prep, transplanting and seeding as fast as we could that first year. We did about 30 CSA shares to farmers markets and then some wholesale I had originally started that as I was gonna go to six farmers markets a week. We were gonna make all this money kind of market garden style, just sell it all retail and quickly. I fell out of love with that and quickly fell in love with the CSA or FarmShare model. This year, this is our third season. We don't do any markets and only do CSA and wholesale.

Kate Tucker: Why is that?

Kegan Hilaire: I have a full time job. So I really need to know how much I need to harvest, how much I need to sell, and with markets, that makes that really difficult. If it's a hundred degrees or if it's raining, you could have a complete washout. And that just wasn't consistent enough for what I needed, while also kind of learning more about CSAs. There's some statistic that it's I think 80 percent of people who join a CSA will join another one even if they leave. So you've kind of forever changed how a lot of those people get and access fruits and vegetables. It doesn't come from a store anymore. It comes from a farm. And CSA seemed to be like the clearest way to kind of make that connection with people. It really changes how people look and access food for the rest of their lives. Plus I have the stability of knowing I need to harvest 75 CSA shares this week. I don't need to worry about what we're taking to market. I don't need to worry about what came back last week. So we could kind of standardize some processes, but also really just get a better handle on what we should and shouldn't grow and what we need to get out.

Kate Tucker: That's great. That's great. So are you a morning person then? 

Kegan Hilaire: I was a bouncer for over a decade, and I was very much not a morning person.

I would still consider myself a night owl, but I've accepted that I need to get better at being awake early in the morning. Farming was like a complete 180 of a lifestyle for me in every aspect, including not being a morning person. We drink a lot of espresso here. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, I was going to say! So you have a full-time job. Who's the we? How many helpers do you have and how do you do this?

Kegan Hilaire: So my first year, it was kind of just me and my mom who would come out and help wash vegetables. And I had a buddy, Wilson, who would come out every day and just work with me. We actually ended up helping him get his farm started at the seed farm as well the following year. So. It was originally just like two people, me and two halves. And then the second year, I started bringing on some part-time help. And then this year, I have a woman who works for me full-time. My mom and my aunt still come and help wash and process lettuce mix and stuff. But it's mostly myself, a full-time worker, and then I call them the beer and pizza crew. All the friends that'll come out if you buy them beer and pizza for an evening. That, and I also call it vegetable oil, where you just give people vegetables and it just keeps everything moving. Yeah. We give away a lot of vegetables and we buy a lot of pizza. 

Kate Tucker: Back in year one. Do you remember the first time you took something you grew to market?I mean, what was it and how did it feel?

Kegan Hilaire: It’s kind of funny looking back on it every once in a while I'll send a picture to my mom who would help me at market and I felt like we were like the biggest veggie vendors in the world like we were riding high. Looking back at those pictures, there's like six bunches of kale on the table. There's like four pints of potatoes. There was, it was skimpy, but I honestly wouldn't remember any of that if it weren't for the pictures because I just felt like we were like the richest people on earth when we showed up with all that produce year one. So this year it feels even better because we've just gotten better and better at that and we're feeding more and more people.

So that's what it's about.

Kate Tucker: What are you growing this year?

Kegan Hilaire: I think, 87 varieties of things, my last count. So, I think we have 8 different tomato varieties. We have 7 different peppers. We have 3 different summer squashes. We have 10 different winter squashes. So, it's kind of all over the map, but because we do a CSA, we range from everything from those early spring brassicas and greens all the way through all your typical summer stuff, eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes. Sweet potatoes. And then right now we have all our winter squash. Our onions are almost done. We do about half an acre of garlic. So kind of all over the map. If you eat it seasonally through the spring, summer, and fall in Pennsylvania, we're probably growing it. 

Kate Tucker: So are you always trying new things like are you growing new things every year?

Kegan Hilaire: I have some standards. Like we have heirlooms, there's a lot of peppers that are pretty similar year to year, but then there's always things that come on and off the list. Things that didn't grow well, things that I didn't like to grow, especially things that I didn't like to harvest. Yeah. I tell the farmers that I work with for my consulting job, what are the things you don't want to do, and then figure out your systems based on that. So find out what you don't want to grow and then grow everything else.

Kate Tucker: That makes sense. I think that could apply to life in general. So you are in high season right now and you talk about harvest kind of being the hardest part, which makes a lot of sense to me, even with my small little vegetable setup here. So I've read something where you were talking about the July blues. Talk to me about what farmers are really facing when it comes to that sort of pressure of bringing food to harvest, when you have all of this extreme weather and the uncertainties of how the seasons are moving and the unpredictability of how the harvest is going to be, I mean, all of that adds up to a lot of anxiety, I would imagine. How are farmers coping with this and what's the scene for mental health like? 

Kegan Hilaire: Unfortunately, farmers have been coping with it historically poorly. It's the highest suicide rate I think it's ever been right now for any size farmers, especially the larger farmers. Some of that is just, like you said, those day-to-day pressures, but a lot of that too, for people who have like a family history of farming, I couldn't imagine someone six generations from now losing control of Blackbird and having to sell it. Having to give up kind of that generational or like that family history and you being the one who lost it. I can see why they have such a hard time with it.

The the July blues is really just… now is the time especially for vegetable farmers or small farmers where you're harvesting is the heaviest it's going to be all season, but you're also cleaning up all of your spring plantings and doing all the massive amount of landscaping that has to happen now, but you're also planting all of your fall crops and tending to them and dealing with baby carrots and baby beets that are so tender. So, and it's everything has to happen all the time right now. So it's very stressful. It's when you're probably the most tired. So the July blues are a real thing and I didn't believe it until my first full season. 

Kate Tucker: Do you struggle with that? And if so, what's it like for you? Where do you turn?

Kegan Hilaire:  I'm lucky. I feel like I have a really good farm community around me, whether it's from my consulting job or from Blackbird. It's really a good mix of people who are all in the same boat together right now. It all sucks for everybody. So my cucumbers died. Uh, my truck broke down. Uh, my market got rained out. Like we can talk about that stuff. And I have a buddy who just elbows me once in a while when things are going poorly and he goes, you know, you can buy this stuff in the store, right? I mean, it's horrible, but it's also, you just, sometimes you just need to laugh at it. Just put your head back down and get back to work. So I feel like we're getting better at talking to each other and acknowledging that we're all probably struggling with something similar. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, well, connecting with your local farmer, thanking your local farmer, just being aware of who's out there working day and night is important.

Kegan Hilaire: Definitely.

Kate Tucker:  So what are kind of some basics that you like to enlighten people with when it comes to organic farming and nutritional value, organic farming and our carbon footprint? Why is it better?

Kegan Hilaire: A big thing that I first learned about was the caloric gap between the food on our table and how many calories it actually provides and I think the last time that someone did this calculation, it took 14 calories of fossil fuel to bring every calorie on the American plate to it, calories is just a measurement of energy. So if you eat 2,000 calories, you needed 28,000 calories of fossil fuel to get it to you.

Kate Tucker: Whoa! Let's break that down even more. So, why is that? Like, what are we talking about? The energy it takes to keep the lights on at the farm and all the production at the farm and then the shipping and then the, like, what all is factoring into that gap?

Kegan Hilaire: I mean, we send grain all over the country and all over the world, but also all the inputs that go into producing it are mostly fossil fuel based and then those systems already have tremendous amounts of fossil fuel that go into just producing fake nitrogen for overproduction of conventional corn. The whole system is wasteful kind of up and down the line. It was either running off and polluting the Gulf of Mexico or it was destroying someone else's field or causing pollution or even just, in smaller context, contributing to an invasive plant that was sucking up all the extra the actual plants need. So there's so much kind of locally and globally that goes wrong when we're in that kind of system. 

Kate Tucker: There's also kind of the inverse that happens, right? With carbon sequestration and what we can do with the soil. Can you talk to me a little bit about how organic farming is kind of offsetting, oddly, some of that damage that's been done by commercial farming?

Kegan Hilaire: I think the biggest part of that is just the lack of inputs, synthetic inputs, I should say, that go into conventional farming that don't happen in organic. At this point, California is basically, I would call it a hydroponic setup, where we have a growing medium, which is basically the sand in the Central Valley, and we add water to it and the nutrients that each plant needs to grow and then it grows. We're not actually cultivating anything. We're not actually growing anything. We're just putting it in a medium and giving it what it needs. It's a very different growing style than an organic where you have to have all of those things you need for it to grow in the soil already. A lot of organic farmers kind of think of themselves as soil farmers and a lot of organic livestock people think of themselves as grass farmers because those are the things that really the foundation of the farm is built on where if we lose either one of those, it doesn't matter what other systems we have in place because it just won't happen.

Kate Tucker: When you look at soil, what are you looking for and why is it different from dirt? You know, what do you hope it smells like and feels like when you pick it up? Tell me about soil. 

Kegan Hilaire: We actually have shirts at my farm that say, “Don't treat your soil like dirt!” Because it is a pretty big distinction between the two. I always tell people it's dirt when it's in your house, and it's soil everywhere else. It's really only dirt when you're referring to it as a nuisance. Because really everywhere else it's productive and necessary and has everything we need to continue existing on earth. 

Kate Tucker: So what is healthy soil? Like what does it feel like and look like and smell like?

Kegan Hilaire: It's kind of what's fun about organic ag is that the context and the system that it's in is all completely necessary to take into account. What is healthy soil because healthy soil might mean something different if you're growing cactus versus a vegetable and it's going to be different whether you're doing that in different parts of the country So it's really all context driven. There's places up right on the Canadian border where it was traditionally wetlands and their organic matter is like almost 20%. It looks like you're just picking up compost out of the ground. And it's because they had traditionally drained a lot of wetlands to build up the cities that we have around us. So, I mean, I'm happy if I have 4 percent organic matter and a conventional farmer's happy if they have 1 percent organic matter. So the fact that they naturally have almost 20 percent is kind of off the chart. So it's really situational dependent. And as long as you're taking care of the things that are naturally in your soil, then. it's going to be healthy soil. So it's fun because there is no real answer, but it's also a little frustrating because when someone calls, we can't just read them a fact sheet. We really have to get into the systems that are in place using that soil. 

Kate Tucker: When you think of the future of food and kind of what we're going to need to do to support like 9 billion people by 2050 or something, like, is there a place for hydroponics, for urban farming, for vertical farming and organic farming sort of supporting one another? Like, how does that work in your mind?

Kegan Hilaire: I think anyone growing any food anywhere is a good thing, but we haven't figured out with hydroponics how do we make up for the loss of energy from running water and grow lights and all that stuff to produce crops that essentially have little to no nutrient value. There's very little nutrients in lettuce mix, which is mostly what hydroponics is growing. So we need to grow better foods with the hydroponic systems we have, more nutritious foods, but also going back to that 9 billion people comment. I have such a problem with that thinking because that's always the one that’s “How is organic going to feed the world?”40 percent of all ag production goes to non-human food. Most of what we grow doesn't go to human consumption at all. So regular conventional ag doesn't feed the world currently and most of the edible crops for humanity, like 90 percent of them, come from smallholder farms around the world. They're on less than five acres.They're growing independently. They're not involved in large corporations. They're just doing it themselves for themselves and their community. So organic is already feeding the world and conventional never did. So I think getting people away from that is huge.

Kate Tucker: I just got chills. Yeah. That is so exciting. That is so hopeful to hear. 

Kegan Hilaire: Our next shirts for the farm are going to say, “Get small or get out.” 

Kate Tucker: I love that. So you were talking about nutritional value and hydroponics. So talk to me about nutritional value in organics. What I do know is that part of what's so powerful about having these small farms produce for the surrounding community is that we don't lose the nutritional value as the food doesn't have to travel very far. There's a lot of nutritional value that gets lost every single day a plant is cut from its root. Can you talk to me about that?

Kegan Hilaire: Yeah, I forget what the statistic is, but it's something like eight percent a day is lost from conventional produce in storage. But also now, especially at my day job at the Rodale Institute, we're doing a vegetable systems trial where we're actually measuring the nutrient density of an organically grown tomato and a conventionally grown tomato and an organically grown winter squash and a conventionally grown winter squash because I really think the next kind of differentiation strategy within organic is probably going to be that my tomato is not… We're not comparing literally apples to apples. Your apple is fundamentally different than my organic apple. And hopefully very soon we'll have the science to prove that. 

Kate Tucker: Well, I mean, it goes right back to that terroir thing too, right? Like my neighbor's tomato is different than my tomato. It makes sense because we're eating what that thing is eating, right?

Kegan Hilaire: I love that. That was probably the biggest thing I learned when I was at the dairy farm is— we are what we eat, eats. It's like hard to follow, but it makes so much sense.

Kate Tucker: And then it's really literally hard to follow because you have to follow the whole food chain. 

Kegan Hilaire: Everything in this, I feel like goes back to that “everything is everything,” because all of that chain affects all of what you're eating. And what you eat affects that chain. So yeah, you can't get away from it.

Kate Tucker: So from kind of a community perspective, like expand a little bit on why it matters to have a small farm in your community, why it matters that you know where it is and that you interact with it. Like what does a small organic farming do for the community?

Kegan Hilaire: First things first. Economic impact. I think the last study that they came out with for the Young Farmers Coalition quoted that 96 percent of what small farms purchase are purchased within a 50-mile radius. So, the shirts that we have for the farm were union-made in the US and screen printed down the street from my parents’ house.

It also, the new statistics, it's like 65 percent of first generation or young farmers in the U. S. are not straight white males. It's kind of all the statistics for new farmers and beginning farmers are almost inverse of what the USDA puts out every year. They're not old white guys on corn combines. They're actually females of color growing flowers or vegetables. Like you're connected to different communities automatically because the people running the farm are from different communities. It's the same reason having a mixed vegetable farm. You don't want to have 12 crops. You want to have 50 or a hundred because at some point you're going to need to lean on one crop harder than you expected because something didn't go the way you planned. So diversity in any system is a better thing. And the more small farmers we bring in, the more diverse farmers get. So it kind of just feeds into that positive feedback loop.

Kate Tucker: It’s so cool. So my neighborhood, my street has been talking about ripping up the devil strips and growing food all up and down the street for the community. What do you say to neighborhoods? And I've seen it happen to here where the woman who lives next to me, she's been building this beautiful garden for the past 12 years. And then the person next to her started growing, the person across the street. And then I did. And we all started sharing plants and things. How do you advise in a community set up like that, like expanding on that.

Kegan Hilaire: In that community, like it'd be fun to start saving seeds or like everyone pick your favorite heirloom or like a lot of people have family seeds that they save and then just start sharing them, start talking to people. It's really just facilitate the connections and help them with access, maybe there's a grant that we can apply for.

There's some community gardens here in Bethlehem that they just really needed someone to just say, yeah, we can help with that. And all of a sudden they're off the ground. I'm working with the city of Reading to do a household composting system. So you have trash pickup, you have recycling pickup, and you have compost pickup, and that we're trying to get citywide for one of the biggest cities in Pennsylvania. So, it really is just kind of helping to facilitate the connections between what we're trying to do and what needs to happen to get it done.

Kate Tucker: So let's get a little bit into your work with Rodale Institute. Tell me what you do there and sort of a little bit of like how you help people. What do you encourage them with first? I hear that I need a spreadsheet, but 

Kegan Hilaire: a bunch of spreadsheets probably, but we can send you templates for that.

Kate Tucker: Awesome.

Kegan Hilaire: So yeah, I'm the Small Farms and Diversified Vegetable Consultant for Rodale. So basically anyone, usually 15 acres or less. I have a medicinal herb-only farmer that I work with, actually a couple of them.

Now I have flower farmers that I work with. I have vegetable farmers. I have off-grid homestead people. Pretty much anyone who's not growing conventional grains is probably coming to me. My position is funded through Pennsylvania Department of Ag to provide technical assistance to farmers, whether that's helping them build a bed or understand a plant cycle or to write a business plan or to help them with their organic certification paperwork.

So yeah, we're free for anyone in Pennsylvania, but just recently opened it up for free for anyone across the country. That was a big push for us. So yeah, we can now provide technical assistance, mostly remote. I mean, I had a farmer just calling me to complain about markets this morning and that's what he needed today. So we talked about his farmer's markets.

Kate Tucker: Tell me, how do you define the role of a farmer? What is a farmer these days?

Kegan Hilaire: I would say anyone who devotes an intentional portion of their life to the production of food, I would consider a farmer. If you're a backyard gardener growing for yourself, you're doing some amount of farming.

The original definitions tend to leave out a lot of farm workers, a lot of farm adjacent people. I feel like anyone who's putting intentional time into that falls under the farmer umbrella for me. 

Kate Tucker: So in your four years, what are kind of like the bigger challenges that you come up against maybe for yourself or the ones that you've had to help guide people through, especially when it comes to starting out?

Kegan Hilaire: The hardest thing I thought was going to be finding land access for myself and for other people, but that actually has been one of the more pleasant surprises. Whether it's someone maybe in a community who's like, “Hey, I have an acre of yard, aybe you want to put in a little market garden?” I'm actually moving my farm to a community college next year as a partnership with the college and a for-profit beginning farmer vegetable farm to help Blackbird, but also help the community college and integrate it into everything in the farm and integrate it into everything in the college.

So I feel like the land access part's been a lot easier than I had planned on. But almost everything else has probably been more difficult, whether it's zoning laws that don't make sense or just little things here or there that can hold up an entire farm project because no one has thought through any of these things on a small scale.

They've all been looked at as if they were a thousand-acre grain farmer and it's not the same and none of this is similar to conventional ag. So kind of having to fight with those little things is draining. But when you get it done, and when you actually accomplish that, it makes it that much better.

Kate Tucker: Tell me about some of the individuals, some of the young farmers you've worked with who have been especially inspiring to you. 

Kegan Hilaire: There's one, they're Limerick Homegrown Produce. They had no farming experience, had previously owned a business and it had gotten shut down during COVID so they sold out and just said we're going to start a market garden and we're going to make it work. And they took their grass out and put in about three-quarters of an acre of permanent raised beds and are now at, I think they're at four markets this season. They're wholesaling to a bunch of people. They're certified organic. This is their second year. And they're a family of six living on that. So they've been particularly inspiring.

And then everyone that I work with at the seed farm, which is the incubator farm where my farm is located, I'm surrounded by like, Sister Seeds is Amira. She is a seed keeper. There's a lot of, especially Philly adjacent seeds that have a really long storyline in this area, dating back to like when the Lenape people were all along the Delaware. There's beans that we had thought had been lost to history and Amira has helped kind of bringing those back into being cultivatable again for other farmers to start using. There's enough seeds in the seed bank now that we can bring those varieties back. So I feel like everywhere I go with the small farms I get pretty inspired. 

Kate Tucker: How often when you go to those other farms are you having these aha moments or learning something that you're going to take back to your farm? 

Kegan Hilaire: All the time. I would say most of the things that we have at my farm I've taken from other farms or been inspired by other farms to do. We have a composting program where— CSA the number two complaint is food waste— so we have a program where any produce that you don't use, we give you a bucket at the beginning of the year and you bring it back and we compost it on site. So if you don't eat your zucchini, it doesn't matter because it's going right back to where the zucchini came from. But I stole that directly from another farm. That was not my idea at all, but I also hopefully share them as, as well with other farmers that I work with.

Kate Tucker: I have read that your mission is to bring people together, you know, around the power of food. Tell me how you do that, how you see yourself doing that at Blackbird Farms.

Kegan Hilaire: I do tell everyone I didn't get into farming for the manual labor. I definitely did it for the eating. So if we're not eating well, then what's the point? We try to do once a week, we call it either farm lunch or farm dinner, depending on the schedule where we'll just harvest a bunch of stuff, roast it on the grill, and just whoever wants to come can come and eat. If you want to come harvest things, if you want to come learn something, if you want to just come watch us do things. I have an older guy who just comes and hangs out with my mom and my aunt while they're washing lettuce, and they just talk. And he watches us work out in the field. So, it's really anyone who wants to talk about anything that's growing. It’s a safe space for everyone who's going to come because it's about food. And if you want to connect with anybody, eating is a pretty good place to start. Plus, I mean, you're eating fresh vegetables, so it tastes good too. So that helps. 

Kate Tucker: What about maybe the people who wouldn't be at that dinner necessarily, but are in your community?

Like I've read something about solidarity shares.

Kegan Hilaire: We donate 10 percent of any shares that we sell on our own. So if we're doing 100 shares, we're donating at least 10. There's no questions asked. If you need vegetables, let me know and let me know where to drop them. And we also have a sliding scale. With CSA or farm shares, it's hard because normally you need that money upfront in the beginning of the season, which is usually right after the holidays. It's not as inclusive as a model as some others. So, you can pay weekly, you can pay what you can, you can pay not at all, no questions asked. If you need food, come eat, is kind of our unofficial motto. 

Kate Tucker: Has there been a moment on this incredible journey of yours where you've just... known that you were doing what you're meant to be doing.

Kegan Hilaire: There was one my first year. We were working with a chef. His family was enslaved in South Carolina and he had gone down to the plantation and actually worked and found some artifacts from the time. And he brought it back to a farm dinner to talk about traditional black cooking in America. And so, while we were there, we're standing in the field in the middle of Bucks County, and that's when he realized that the man who had owned the plantation was actually living down the street from where the farm was. So he was essentially bringing these tools back to where they had originally come from without ever knowing it. I mean, it's a connection with the horrible side of American history, but at the same time, like... It feels like that came full circle where he moved from Bucks County and then enslaved people in South Carolina and then the descendants of the people who were enslaved are now bringing his tools back. We call them signs from the universe that you're in the right spot, doing the right thing in the right place. So I've been one person away from so many people for years now where it's like, oh, that guy. I read all his books when I first got into farming and now we work together.

Kate Tucker: What's bringing you hope these days? 

Kegan Hilaire: I would say just how many people are getting more interested or getting more excited, even if they're not excited about starting a farm or buying from a farm, they've made that connection. I feel like, especially since COVID, they've started to kind of connect those dots. We have the largest investment of federal dollars coming to organic ag in the history of organic ag. So there's a lot more grant and transition to organic funding that's available. So it's starting to catch on. We won't save the world because of small farming, but we won't save the world without it being part of that system. The fact that there are more people doing it, I think is the biggest part that gives me hope.

Kate Tucker: Ah yes, you have given me so much hope and I'm going to take it back to my neighborhood and I'm going to tell them we need spreadsheets and we need to think about all of the possibilities. So thank you. Thank you for the inspiration. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today!

Kegan Hilaire:  Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And if there's anything I can help with, we're free for everyone.

Closing Credits: Thank you so, so much to Kegan Hilaire for a fascinating conversation on the many ways organic farming enriches our lives. And how anybody, anywhere, can grow food to feed the world. To see what Blackbird Farms is growing, go to blackbirdfarms.square.site.

This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Our sound designer and engineer is Scott Somerville. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and visionary at Consensus Digital Media.

Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It would mean a lot to us if you would follow, rate, and review the show.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media produced in association with Reasonable Volume. See you next time!