1994-03-28: High Stakes: Gardening for Love and Money (part 1)

Vol. II, No. XIII

Transcription:

WITH GOOD REASON
Hankins, VSU
MUSIC
GREETING
"High Stakes:
Vol. II, Ho. XIV
Relf, Virginia Tech
Gardening for Love or Money"
This is "With Good Reason." I'm Laura Womack. Today we're talking
about gardening for love and money.
BACKGROUND
Gardening is one of America's favorite hobbies. Many people come
home from work and spend a few hours tending their tomatoes or
nurturing prize roses.
What these people already know is that gardening is an excellent
way to cope with daily tensions. It's also a tool many therapists
use to work with disabled and distressed patients. We'll learn more
about that in the second half of today's program.
Right now, Andy Hankins of Virginia State University's Extension
Cooperative will tell us about some of the more material benefits
of gardening. You could pick up a few hundred or even a few
thousand dollars a year just by turning your hobby into a part-time
business.
Although Andy works with farmers, herb growers and other
traditional planters, he's gotten the reputation for being the
"weird ag expert" because he's helped people grow Japanese Shitake
mushrooms and started Virginia's Elephant garlic boom.
Andy, why are you so interested in these alternative agricultural
products?
INTERVIEW
Hankins:
I'm not at all worried at all about being thought of as an
oddball or weird person. But because there are a lot of very weird
things out here and what I see is that there's so many people in
Virginia today are kind of bored with the foods that they eat and
are looking for new interesting foods. They just don't want to
continue to have mashed potatoes and fried chicken. They want
exotic Mexican dishes and Chinese food and um, products from other
nations and things prepared in different new ways. So that's where
the strangeness comes in. The strangeness is not too strange to uh,
uh, typical consumers, the strangeness comes around when you talk
to farmers who are so steeped in tradition -- someone whose just
grown tobacco fore ever and ever and you talk to them about growing
some very unusual Japanese mushroom or. In March of this year, I'm

having a conference up in Northern Virginia and its not concerned
with anything else except for Emu.
Emu is a seven-foot tall, Ostrich-like bird from Australia.
Well, that just hits someone steeped in this Virginia agriculture
as being very bizarre.
Womack
You mentioned the emu. One of the things that I was interested
in was that you have a whole discussion in your, um, writings on
ostriches. I mean, there are several different products you can
sell from the ostriches: you can sell the meat, the leather, um,
the feathers.
Hankins
The big concern with so many of these products is they very
often are unproven. Like the ostriches, right now, a pair of adult
birds is worth about 40 or 50 thousand dollars -- for two birds.
And they have great value right now as breeding stock. So, any
ostriches that are ever born are not killed and processed for meat
to be made available at supermarkets. There's a lot to come with
the ostrich and emu and rhea industry -- the ratite industry -- to
see whether there will be real strong consumer acceptance of the
ostrich, rhea and emu meat. What I hear is that for all three of
those species, the meat is delicious -- it's red in color, low in
cholesterol. They're very efficient animals that make fast growth
and fast gains on a small amount of feed. And get like the ostrich,
the female, lays 60 eggs a year. But it's in a fast period of
growth. I would consider that a high risk, high return crop. I work
with a lot of high risk, high return crops.
But, yeah, I really do enjoy working with the new, unusual
enterprises.
Womack
One of the main products that you have been promoting is uh,
herbs and spices. Is that right?
Hankins
Yes. I work closely with the organization called the Virginia
Herb Growers and Marketers Association and the this association has
a very strong commercial focus. They are primarily women who are
attempting to earn income by growing and selling herbs that very
often sell products such as live herb plants, is a big one, some do
sell fresh cut herbs. Many dry their herbs and make products like
seasoning blends and herbal teas and this kind of thing. They're -some
of them have a low-scale of income -- like two to four
thousand dollars a year but you'd be surprised at -- some of them
have quite a nice income. And have really developed good
businesses, maybe like based on catalogue sales that kind of thing.
Womack
So and they can do that with a quarter to even an eighth of an
acre depending on the crop. Right? That would be more something
like a spice crop, I would imagine.

Hankins
Yes, many highly intensive enterprises are available. Most
traditional things that people have heard of like even strawberries
and blackberries and blueberries, those don't require very much
acreage at all. And also, the crazy crops I work with like ginseng
and goldenseal, German status and Baby's breath production -- that
kind of thing, as well, can be done on small areas.
Womack
Let's talk a little bit about what people are actually growing
in these small scales. What are some of the more successful
products?
Hankins
I would certainly think that the majority of our small farmers
who sell anything in Virginia, they start off with fruit and
vegetables, particularly vegetables. Its just gardeners who become
serious gardeners and then decide they're going to sell some excess
things from the garden and they may plow up and plant another acre
beyond that so they have plenty to sell from the gardens. And these
people support the local farmer's markets and often try to pedal
their produce at area supermarkets, and this kind of things. They
have a hard time ever entering the large super market chain stores.
They don't have the volume and their products are not very uniform.
A lot of the small farmers who are doing this today are organic
vegetable producers and that's a big group, I'd say there are at
least 400 in Virginia today.
But it's amazing, you find organic farms in every single
region of the state. And you find consumers who want to buy
organically grown products in every region of the state.
Womack
And they're willing to pay a little bit more for those
organically grown vegetables products.
Hankins
Sometimes they are, just depends on where you go once again.
Many of our organic producers who work so hard to get enough
compost made to keep their soils fertile and balanced and very
productive do not get very much more for their vegetables then the
farmer down the road, who just comes out and puts out five or six
bags of ten ten ten fertilizer and gets his nutrients in the ground
that way.
Womack
You um, of fer some options for places where small-scale
agriculturalists can sell their products. And let's talk a little
bit about the different ways that the marketers sell to these
different outlets. Um, they can sell their products at tourist
fairs. Right?
Hankins
Yes, indeed. They're over 200 fairs and festivals held each
year in Virginia. And they're great places to sell because most of

the time, the producers get pretty high retail prices at those
events.
Womack
What about the farmers markets? It's really sort of a similar
situation there too, isn't it?
Hankins
Yes. It can be but ah, one of the nicest things about the
farmers market is they are all expecting you to be there with a
pick-up truck and your boxes in the back of a pick-up truck. Now,
those are popular. They're doing well in many locations. They do
well in what I call the rural towns and cities of Virginia.
Womack
You can also sell to ah, retail business maybe the little
tourist shops, the craft shops in town too, in the tourist area.
Hankins
One of the greatest wholesale opportunities that I'd like to
see is small-scale growers selling to small-scale business owners.
They do each other a favor by buying from each other. Let's talk
about maybe everlasting flowers in this regard. Every little tiny
town in Virginia -- I live in a little community called Providence
Forge it's got one stop light and a post office and a little
supermarket and it's got a little place called Peggy's Florist.
Well, it's that way in nearly every town, there's a little local
florist shop. Those people would be glad to buy from local flower
growers who can bring them probably better quality flowers than
they'd buy through one of the large marketing groups -- I won't
mention some of these names -- who could ship them as well. And
just that personal attention and care of each other with small
businesses selling back and forth between each other is a really
nice development in Virginia today and I see a lot of it.
Womack
You have a great description when you're talking about the
different places where you can sell your products of a tourist farm
say off of Skyline Drive. Will you describe that for us. That the
whole set-up.
Hankins
What we have is every fall, tens of thousands of people ride
on the Blue Ridge Parkway, looking at the glorious foliage when it
changes from green to orange to red through the October. And these
people come from many states around and they fill an area up with
a big population that's normally quite a little rural area. And
this just a particular example there of an opportunity to attract
tourists to a farm. But the farm has to be set up very specifically
to attract those tourists. When I was describing the farm as having
an attractive entrance and a stone wall with a sign, "Imaginary
Herb Farm visitors welcome." When you ride in possibly you see some
sheep and maybe some nice looking horses or something is part of
the farm grazing in the pasture. And certainly something for them

to eat and drink while they're there, something for the kids to do.
Maybe a little petting zoo or something. At least a pond with some
fish swimming around.
And, yes, there's many examples of we can call them pick-yourown
farms or just farm-based businesses in Virginia selling a wide
variety of products. Certainly not just herbs, that people go to
it, they could get these products less expensive at their local
discount department stores but that's not the point. The point is
enjoying the visit and the purchases that they make.
Womack
We just have a couple of minutes left. But is there, um, it
seems like the small farmer, the small-scale farmer, is not going
to be the person whose going to open that market up for, um, the
high risk crops. I would think it would be more the large scale
farmer who has more capital.
Hankins
Very often in Virginia today, we have a lot of people,
everybody in the world is moving out to the country. They' re
leaving the metropolitan areas and going out into these rural
counties and buying 20-acre farms. And quite a few of these people
have a lot of capital. And a lot of them have a great deal of
marketing experience from their career they had before they left
Washington to move out into rural Virginia somewhere. So, .it just
depends on what the enterprises are, but often what you find is its
these innovative people from the urban areas are have probably
already been in risky ventures in business world. And they bring
that same attitude right out into the agricultural world. So it's
all over the place. It's a mix.
Womack
If you want to start on this type of venture, and if you have
a 40-hour a week job, you can still maybe be an herb farmer with
15, 20 hours a week input.
Hankins
Oh, yes. If you will certainly every week, give an enterprise
15 hours, which would mean a couple of hours at night when you come
home from work, and then probably the bulk of the day on Saturday.
Sure with a 40-hour work week, I know a lot of farmers managing
even traditional crops like cattle and hay. Who put together a
nice, additional net income from their farm business that they -very
often you can tell when you talk to them -- that they enjoy
part-time farming a lot more than they do that full-time job that
40-hour job that they've got. So it increases the value of their
life and I just think that everybody ought to support that kind of
work as much as possible.
Womack
Andy, thank you so much for joining us on With Good Reason.
Hankins
Thanks.

MUSIC
The Gardening Song:
Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow,
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground.
And inch by inch and row by row,
Someone bless these seeds I sow,
Someone warm them from below
Till the rains come tumbling down.