Two Happy Children Farm

Picking after the rain is pretty evil🥵🥵🥵

“Some thoughts on vegetable farming in Central Texas after almost 20 years. To the finger wagers complaining there are no vegetable farmers or boycotting because they just don’t grow it like the documentary they saw.

Interesting many people still believe vegetable farming is as simple as dropping a seed in the ground, waiting, then selling it’s fruit at 1000x the seed cost to eager customers. Behind that final product there are land loans where in Williamson County average acreage is $30,000 for undeveloped farm land (you have to provide water and electric). If you want to produce enough to live on you’ll need tractors and equipment to work the land as well as implements specialized for vegetable farming. Both are acquired from non local vendors as no one but you grows vegetables on the Blackland Prairie hard clay soil. You will also need big trucks and cooling on the farm because vegetables are heavy and treated with care after harvest. The economic WALL just to be able to grow enough to pay for the interest on the loans is mind boggling.

Next the local vegetable farmer encounters the problem of marketing their crops. They could choose the wholesale market which is a soul sucking sure to kill your farm process. The wholesale forces you to grow complete homogenous crops, little taste differentiation for long shelf life, at pennys on the pound, ALL while proclaiming “GO TEXAN”. Did you know for example if you grow sweet corn and 1 worm is found in 10,000 ear sample, the wholesaler rejects your entire crop? If you’re sleeping on a dirt floor with a leaky roof and no A/C, that is fine with the wholesale crowd, so long as they can build the next multi acre super store, who cares about your family.

Finally getting to the retail market, you’ll need to survive the local farmer market managers who’ve decided that farming is not a way to make a living, but should instead be a social justice issue. If they close is support of some local peaceful protest, parade, or a food festival while you are harvesting your most valuable crops, then no big deal, Just as long as you show up on their list so they can apply for more USDA grants and beg for donations, that’s ok with them. They are really just grant/donation cutouts. Many of them.

The final step is to actually grow something worth more than it cost to grow. Like all farms we aim to grow in ideal conditions. However at least 5 times each year our crops have to survive (or often not) an event that is not planned for. Might be a simple plugged filter at the well, poor electrical service reliability, or it might be another winter where in the last 5 years we’re averaging 3 nights below 18F. Recent flooding. The remaining crops are cultivated, fertilized, watered, and managed for weeds and pest from the day they are planted until harvest. On our farm it is TWO of us, Yen and myself doing all of this. This is so abnormal that when a USDA or TDA white pickup truck arrives unannounced at the farm, they drive past us as they assume we are the unskilled “farm workers”. No way the owner would actually do the labor in the governments eye.

Let’s say you are unwavered by the WALL of economics, decide to sell retail, found or founded the right market that appreciates farmers, and also survive the locally mismanaged farmers markets, and TWO of you grow enough at a cost that you make a living. No vacations.

That’s SOME of what it takes to be a vegetable farmer in Central Texas.”