Amanda Scott:
On July the 1st 2018 Hardcourt Organic Farming Co-op was launched. The cooperative now has five enterprises on site including a dairy, orchard, market garden, fruit tree nursery and Grow Great Fruit online teaching business. In time Katie and Hugh want to share their model with other farmers, but first they want to figure out if it works. So welcome Katie and Hugh, I’m really excited to have you here today. One of the first questions that I’m really interested in asking, I’ll start with you Katie, is how did you come to being on an organic orchard?
Katie:
This is my family farm, I had no intention of being a farmer, and our parents were actually very keen for us all, I’m one of four girls, they were very keen for us to leave the farm and go and get an education, a tertiary education, which we all duly did. But as time passed–I had my own small business actually in the city, but when it was time for our kids to go to school there was just this real urge to come back to the country, and then that ended up coinciding with my dad deciding he was going to sell the farm. And suddenly I discovered my inner farmer, I was like no you can’t start a farm what are you talking about, and in my late 30s discovered that I actually wanted to be a farmer, and so Hugh and I moved back to the farm then.
Amanda Scott:
So how long have you been on the farm now?
Katie:
Well that totally gives away my age doesn’t it [Chuckles], because it’s 20 years, just on 20 years.
Amanda Scott:
And you say you’ve got organic orchards, what do you produce?
Katie:
Mixed orchards, so stone fruit and pome fruit. We’ve got seven different types of fruit so peaches, nectarines, plums, apples, pears, what did I miss Hugh?
Hugh:
Peaches.
Katie:
Cherries, peaches, so all the stone fruit and apples and pears.
Amanda Scott:
I mean this is quite a radical idea, I haven’t seen too many people out there doing what you guys are doing in terms of leasing your land to other farmers. Where did you get this idea?
Hugh:
So I guess having been farmers for 20 years as we said, and reaching an age where the horizon was starting to look like we don’t want to get to 70 and still be doing all the physical hard work of the farm. At the same time we’d invested so much of ourselves into it that we didn’t want to see the hard work disappear and us move away really. So we wanted to stay on the farm, we wanted a succession plan really of how we were going to be able to gracefully exit, without still having to get to a point as so many farmers do I think, get to a point where suddenly they’ve reached an age where they don’t or physically can’t work any longer as a farmer, and what do they do, they’re left with no options but to sell.
So we were sort of thinking how could we stay living here, which is one of the other main things we did want to do because it’s such an amazing place where we live, we’re really attached to it. So we were thinking how could we both stay here but also keep the land productive and increase the productivity of the land, because while we had 5,000 trees or whatever it was on 12 acres, there was a lot of acreage on the farm that wasn’t actually being used to its full potential. So there seemed to be some opportunities coming together there for meeting all those needs I suppose, and so it was actually in a conversation with our accountant when we were talking about now will we sell, what are our options sort of thing, they said ‘well why don’t you lease it?’ and it was like oh okay [Chuckles].
So we then started seriously investigating that and how it might work, and from that we came up with a multi enterprise model which we’ve then put into practice.
Katie:
The other thing that had already happened when we started seriously thinking about our succession was that we had been approached previously by two young women who wanted to start a market garden. And we very naively as it turned out had said ‘sure why not that sounds like a great idea’, and it was a great idea, I don’t mean naïve in that it wasn’t working or wasn’t going to work, we just had no idea at that stage what it was going to lead to. So they had already set up their market garden a couple of years before we started seriously thinking about what our succession plan would be, and so we already had them in place. And that I think was the germ of the idea for being able to expand on that concept of leasing out some of our land to different enterprises.
Amanda Scott:
Do you want to take us through those and just tell us a little bit about who you’ve actually got on the farm and their stories and how you found them?
Katie:
So the Gung Hoe Market Gardeners, Gung Hoe Growers, and as I said they found us. So we already knew them, they’re both local women, and we’d known them through different contexts, and they had just already decided to set up a market garden and they were looking for somewhere to do it, so they approached us with that idea. Then once we had the idea of expanding the concept, I was actually talking about it and it was still just a germ of an idea. I think it was at an open day at our local TAFE, Tess Sellar was in the audience and she had the same story really, she had already decided she was going to start a micro dairy and she was looking for the right place to do that.
And again we already knew each other loosely, but that was really important actually having the beginnings of that relationship because it established trust immediately, so we could have that conversation straight away. So she approached us, told us what she was thinking about, and then she headed off on a 12 month study tour, and during that 12 months she was writing her own business plan. So when she came back to us a year later we were much more ready and so was she, so it was obvious then that that would fit in beautifully with the model that we were thinking about.
And then with the orchard as Hugh said before, it was our accountant that gave us the idea to actually just go and look for somebody to lease it to. So that was a very different situation, we ran a campaign for several months on social media and through all of our networks; we actually put together a mini prospectus about what that business opportunity was. We ended up with quite a few people applying for that role, and so we were in the very fortunate position of being able to choose who we thought was going to be the best person, and that’s Ant Wilson.
So he leased the orchard and rebranded it, we used to be called Mt Alexander Fruit Gardens and the orchard business is now called Tellurian Fruit Gardens. And the fourth on farm enterprise is Carr’s Organic Fruit Tree Nursery, we’ve always grown all of our own fruit trees here, my dad Merv Carr, we’re a multi-generational co-op, he’s always been in charge of that but I’ve been his student for many years. And Sas who is part of one of the other enterprises, the Market Garden, was also really interested in learning how to grow fruit trees.
And so Sas and I went into partnership to turn that into a commercial business, because we’ve finished our rare planting program here on the farm for the orchard before we leased it. And it just seemed like too good an opportunity to miss when we had dad here as a mentor, you know he’s got 60 plus years’ of experience in growing fruit trees, and he was really happy to mentor us into that business, and so that was a really neat fit. So that’s the four on farm enterprises, the fifth enterprise is the business that Hugh and I run which is our online teaching business called Grow Great Fruit. So we teach organic fruit growing online, so it’s based in place, it’s based on our farm here, but in fact all the activity happens online.
Amanda Scott:
It sounds like a very busy farm.
Katie:
It’s a very busy farm [Laughs]. One of the great joys for us is being able to look out the window or go outside the house and there’s just people around all the time, just quietly calmly getting on with their business. But as each of those enterprises has grown they all have volunteers, they all have employees now, and so often there can be upwards of 10 people on the farm all just quietly going about farming. And it is just fantastic in terms of one of our goals was to make the farm more productive, and there’s all these people out there doing it.
Amanda Scott:
It sounds like it’s become a real community endeavour as well.
Katie:
Definitely.
Amanda Scott:
There’s obviously a lot of different models that you could’ve adopted in achieving what you wanted to do, why did you choose a cooperative model?
Hugh:
That’s an interesting one. Part of what we could see or envision was farmers on the same property being able to leverage the fact that they were all together on the one property, to maybe get some benefits in terms of being able to do things as a single entity rather than each individual business having to do all the things themselves. And so there would be four businesses all basically duplicating effort and costs, so the cooperative model gave us a structure that enabled us to do that.
One good example is our organic certification, so organic certification is obviously a cost to every enterprise that chooses to certify, and it just seemed insane that we would go from being a fully certified organic property to having four businesses each then being required to maintain their own organic certification over property that we’d already certified. And so we approached NASAA [National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia] and negotiated with them really, because this model didn’t fit their system. And so we negotiated with them about how we could do that, and to their credit they were very willing to look at it and negotiate with us.
So we now have an organic certification that covers the entire property as a single entity, but those four businesses can still trade with their own names under the one certification, so that was an immediate benefit for all concerned. And one of the other things that’s happened is they’ve been able to start co-marketing, and so they’ve started a new farmers market, or were responsible for starting a new farmers market in Castlmaine, it’s a weekly market, a weekly twilight market on a Wednesday, and they were the driving force behind that.
That has now taken off and it is going fantastically well, and they are now marketing with a single stall as a co-op stall, each businesses produce at that stall, and so again that’s a way of pooling resources to save everyone time and money.
Amanda Scott:
Well that NASAA certification’s really interesting. I think what you’re doing is quite pioneering, in that it’s going to open up opportunities for a lot of others who want to do something similar. I know through the Farming Together program we saw so many older farmers who were in a similar positon to you guys, in terms of they wanted to retire but they didn’t want to leave their family farm which had so much history. They had so much knowledge of their land, but their kids weren’t interested in taking over the farm. So I think the model that you guys have put together is one that hopefully we will see implemented a lot more across the country, and I think the knowledge that you have to share for that is going to be really valuable.
Hugh:
Yeah, I think it’s still early days. I mean as you said we’ve been going just coming up for two years, and so there’s been a lot of things along the way that we’ve had to work through, I think the co-op model is one that lends itself to exactly this, to retiring farmers.
Katie:
And at the same time the other cohort is young farmers wanting to get into farming without having easy access to land. So some of our farmers here–only one of our farmers grew up on a farm, but that farm wasn’t available, it wasn’t accessible. And a lot of the other young farmers in their generation that we’ve met or have talked to are the same, there’s this growing interest, it’s fantastic, in this younger generation, they really want to get their hands dirty and there’s this passion to get farming. But getting access to the land is a really big issue, and we’re not the only ones trying to solve that. There’s a lot of groups and initiatives that have sprung up with different people trying to come up with solutions to these problems, so our co-op model is just one of those.
Amanda Scott:
Yeah, but I think it’s really effective, it’s a really effective one again from having worked with a number of farmers over the last three years, this could really work.
Katie:
We hope so [Laughs].
Hugh:
One of the things we’ve noticed since launching the co-op is the interest that it has generated amongst both young potential farmers, but also older farmers who are at our end of the journey, and we’ve been approached a number of times for people to pick our brains about how it’s going. And so we’re really keen to share this knowledge or share the experience we’ve gained, and it’s the way we’ve done it, it’s certainly not a definitive model, it’s not the only way to do things.
Amanda Scott:
No but I guess the foundations are there and you sound like you’ve got the ability to be flexible and adaptable and evolve with that as well along the way. One question that just came to mind, you’re talking about we don’t know if we’re there yet, we don’t quite know if it’s working, how will you know?
Katie:
It’s such an interesting question Amanda. Part of what we are discovering along the way is the problems that we haven’t managed to solve yet, and the system we’ve put in place here is nine year leases in three year amounts. So each of our farmers, we’ve committed to each of them for a nine year period, but they actually have to sign up again each three years, so they have more security in that in a way than we do. Which was part of what we needed to do we felt as a group to try and redress the–there’s an inherent imbalance in our system because we’re the landowners, we own the land and this system we’ve set up here, the cooperative system is just based on leases.
And so our farmers are putting everything into their businesses and into their land with no real security beyond the lease, so we wanted to give them a long period of security, the nine years, but at the same time they needed the opportunity to be able to bail if it’s not working for them. So part of the answer to your question is that they’ll keep renewing their leases, and that also we as a community will solve the longer term problem, or the longer term scenario. What’s it going to look like at the end of our initial lease period, are we going to extend the lease period or are we going to collectively come up with an alternative model that might involve for example some transfer of land ownership.
So we haven’t addressed that basic issue within the model that we’ve set up, it may turn out that we’re an incubator and the farmers that we’ve got at the moment sell or lease their businesses’ to other farmers, we just don’t know that yet so it’s quite a short term model. We don’t know yet what success is going to look like in the long term.
Hugh:
I guess the shorter term measure of success is that the farmers that are here running their businesses are running profitable businesses, so that they’re in a position from our point of view to pay their leases every year. I mean that’s being fairly hardnosed about it, but that’s what it comes down to is that they’re running profitable businesses. And if they’re successful in what they’re doing it’s a win for them but it’s a win for us as well.
Amanda Scott:
True, true, yeah. Now going from one end of success back to the beginning, when you were starting this all, in your mind what was really essential in terms of being able to get this going?
Katie:
We worked with a business consultant right from the beginning through the Farming Together funding; well we worked with a bunch of consultants through that funding actually. And that gave us a really good opportunity to do a few things, one was explore a bunch of different models, so we didn’t just come up with this model, we actually came up with a number of different models, and then measured them against each other to decide which one we would do. That also gave us the opportunity to start working together as a community, to work through a whole lot of issues right at the beginning, so once we had all our people in place everyone was part of that process of planning what this would look like. I think one of the main things actually was the people, it was feeling like we had the right people in place.
And this is also part of the measure of success, one of the shorter term measures of success is that we all like each other and we need to keep liking each other. The community has to work on just a visceral day-to-day getting on with each other way, like a family does really or any small community does. And so that’s one of the ways that we kind of all check in with each other all the time, does everything still feel okay. And that was definitely one of the measures of success, one of the things I think we had to get in place right at the beginning. It was definitely key in us deciding who was going to get the orchard lease, was that that had to be somebody that we thought would fit in well with us and with the rest of the community.
Hugh:
And I think that’s been informing us as we go as well, we’ve been approached by I don’t know how many people to become members of the co-op, who’ve come to us with an idea. And we are actively looking still for new members, the ideas have often fit but the people don’t. And so we’re really very mindful of bringing new people in as we want to, but it is really important, it’s critical to the success of the co-op that the people who are in here share values and share common ideas about what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Amanda Scott:
I think that’s the biggest thing we’ve seen as well through the Farming Together program, in terms of the importance of working with people that have the same values as you, you’re taking the time to build those relationships, taking the time to build the trust and then the rest follows. So I totally agree from our experiences, and the people are the foundation of it all. If I remember a while back I think I’d heard you guys talking about the legal contracts and that being a bit of a challenge. I know that with some of the collaborative business models that we’ve seen that actually structuring those contracts can be a really challenging part of the whole process, so you’ve got to have the relationships and the right people, but obviously in these kinds of arrangements you also need those formal contracts. What was the experience like for you?
Hugh:
It worked really well for us, in that with the Farming Together funding we were able to access a consultant who was an expert in co-ops and another one who was an expert in leases. So between the two of them we came up with–we were suddenly made aware of all the pitfalls of both leasing land and co-ops. And so we did come up with a document that was our lease template, which we’d got a generic template for that and had adapted it to our situation, which we then took to our solicitor and got him to look at from a purely legal standpoint. And he had some ideas that we didn’t necessarily agree with, because he was looking at them from a strictly legal point of view and we weren’t necessarily coming at it from that, we wanted to have the human aspect in there as well.
And so we came up with a document that we were happy with, and then what we’d initially thought would be a nice brief and easy contract ended up being a 17 page document, which we then handed to our prospective lessees and told them to go away and get it checked. Which we thought would be a simple process, and that started three months of negotiations basically to come up with. Because obviously we’d written it from our perspective, and we made sure that we were covering off the points that were important to us, but our lessees were then looking at it from their perspective, and came up with things that we hadn’t really considered or hadn’t given the importance that they thought they needed. And so it was quite a negotiation process to get those leases over the line to the point where everyone was happy to sign.
Amanda Scott:
I think it’s an important point that you suggested, which is that this contractual arrangement was not about how much can I get out of this and how can I make sure that I’m covered, but it’s how much can we collectively with our shared values, what do we both, what do we all want out of this partnership and how can we make that work into the contract.
Katie:
So the leases are just between us and each individual lessee, so that was the level at which everybody had to feel confident that their interests were protected. That’s why it turned into such a lengthy negotiation, because it did have to keep going back. It went to the lawyers on a number of occasions, because we were all getting advice about how to make sure we were protecting our own interests. And for us as landowners this is our home, this is our farm, it felt really important, but it felt equally important to each of lessees because as I said before, they were contemplating putting their hat in the ring to set up a business, their whole livelihood on someone else’s land, so it also felt really really important to them.
So the leases are the very pointy end of making sure that every individual feels confident that their rights are protected. It was scary, it was a scary process, and there was a lot of fear involved, partly because it was so legal and just because everyone felt they had so much on the line. As soon as it got to the point of going alright that’s kind of it, we feel like we’ve negotiated everything we can, this is what we’re offering, are you in, are you signing, and everybody went alright we’ll sign [Chuckles], that very day all the fear and tension disappeared, it dissolved. So as soon as we got over it then we cracked a bottle of champagne, and it’d been a tense couple of months, always friendly and always polite but tense.
That day everything just changed, as soon as we signed them then we put it away in the drawer, we’ve got a process for referring back to it each year to keep it up to date and checking on condition reports and things like that, but it was a really interesting process. So I’m glad we went through it and we did it that way because everybody has got that security there now, and it was very community building in the end because everyone has stuck it out [Chuckles].
Amanda Scott:
And they all signed [Chuckles].
Katie:
They all signed, we had a big party.
Amanda Scott:
You were all friends at the end, that’s pretty impressive [Chuckles].
Katie:
We were all friends at the end, that’s right.
Amanda Scott:
Obviously when you’re working in a collaborative business model like a cooperative there’s a lot of different personalities, so even when you’ve got the same values, you’re all working towards a shared goal there’s different personalities, and with that can sometimes bring conflict. How did you make it work with all those different personalities?
Katie:
Egos and personalities in any community or family are one of the hardest things you have to deal with for sure, negotiating stuff like that. There’s a whole bunch of ways that we didn’t anticipate that our lessees would see things differently to us, which is partly inter-generational, and partly just the fact that we’ve got a bunch of really strong minded individuals here. So in the early days particularly we would present an issue or talk about something and just assume that what we were saying was common sense and everybody would agree with us, and there would be really markedly different opinions. And so yes we have had to come up with ways of talking through issues where there are really strong opinions on both sides and negotiating.
Shared resources [have] been one of those, the actual logistics of how we share water on the farm. So we’ve got plenty of water and we’ve got access to plenty of water, but how it’s delivered to everybody in a timely way that works for all the different individuals turned into this big issue, that needed a lot of negotiation in heatwaves when people needed their water now and weren’t getting it. So we’ve been put under some pretty stressful situations where we’ve had to negotiate those sorts of issues, it’s an evolving situation, but like I say one of the things that we keep doing as a community is checking on how everyone’s feeling about each other.
And it’s named and acknowledged if people are feeling a bit grumpy with each other, and sometimes the solution to that is to just back off and give each other a bit more space, sometimes the solution is to just sit down and have a meal together. So it’s a live aspect of the community, nobody pretends that it’s not an issue, we all know it is, and on the whole I think we’ve handled it pretty well. Maybe one of the things we would’ve done differently is do a bit more work on actually having a really robust decision making process earlier on.
We did a lot of work on our shared values so we were pretty confident that we had shared values, but then in the actual negotiation of things we didn’t have a really robust process for how we would work out things when there was conflict, we just agreed that we would but we didn’t really know how. And we’ve started working on a holistic management decision making process, we’ve got a mentor in to help us work on that and that’s a work in progress.
Amanda Scott:
And did you want to add anything there Hugh, or do you think Katie pretty much covered it?
Hugh:
Oh I think she’s covered it. But I think I would say part of the reason for the success so far is because we have got the right personalities and egos involved, which comes back to the selection process in the first place, that if we had thought that there was someone who was really not going to fit in then we wouldn’t have gone with them in the first place. So it has been difficult as Katie has said, but the main thing is everyone is still fully committed and fully prepared to work things through. If something’s not working no one spits the dummy and walks off, everyone in their own way is prepared to negotiate and work through it until we get to a resolution.
Amanda Scott:
Yeah, really important stuff.
Katie:
Really important. And they have been fantastic at doing that, they’ve had some really stressful situations and they keep coming back to the table until we get through them, and then the tension sort of dissolves again.
Amanda Scott:
So I’ve asked you some of the challenges, the challenging things, the contracts and the personalities. What are some of the things that you think you’ve done really well in setting this up?
Hugh:
I think we’ve made a good job of being thorough, how we set it up and making sure that–we didn’t just go into it with handshake agreements and gentleman and women’s agreements on what would happen on the farm [Chuckles]. We really had to make sure that everything was watertight in as much as it could be, and I think we did a good job of that. And in being consultative with our young farmers, all the entities at every step along the way of what we were working towards, you know I think as Katie mentioned before we didn’t say right we’re starting a co-op and this is what we’re going to do, we said we want to work together, how are we going to do that. And I think that whole consultation process working with the consultant that we had really helped bond everyone together really, and I think that’s now paying us back in that everyone is really committed and really wants to make sure that this works.
Katie:
I think one of the maybe slightly unexpected benefits or things that have happened is the huge amount of community goodwill and love that we experience all the time from the community around us. And I think that is probably mostly to do with our young farmers and the way they connect with their customers and the way they connect with the world at large. It’s just this tremendous amount of support and goodwill from their customers, from their volunteers, they have a lot of volunteers, they’re all employing people now, and their employees actively look for ways to support them. So some really lovely relationships have built up with the markets that they do, with the people they supply, the chefs that they’re supplying, with other businesses in the area. There’s a real sort of collaborative and collegiate feeling around the co-op, and more so than I think we ever got ourselves, I mean we’ve always had tremendous support as well in our business, but there’s just a lot of love around the co-op.
Amanda Scott:
So you said that surprised you?
Katie:
More than we expected. I guess we’ve always been a little bit more just business, you know it’s just a business that we run, and we’ve put a lot of our heart and soul and love into our own business. But they do it in a way–they’ll write a blog, we have a weekly co-op blog that we take it in turns to write, and the way they all write their blog posts it’s totally from the heart, that’s how they run their businesses. So sometimes that means they can’t ever make decisions in a way that we would make, or they make actual decisions that we wouldn’t make, because their passion just shines through at every level and I think people really connect with that. And not just young people, it’s not just other people of their own age that connect with it, but the whole community seems to really connect with who they are and what they’re trying to do. There’s just this tremendous little good heartedness about why they’re doing this that everybody has just responded to amazingly.
Amanda Scott:
And it sounds like everyone coming together collectively has built that excitement, that energy, that authenticity–
Katie:
Yes, authenticity I think Amada is a really great word, you can’t fake this, what we’re doing here.
Amanda Scott:
What do you wish you had known before you started?
Hugh:
I think we wish we’d known how hard it was going to be, we thought this was going to be easy, it’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done by a long way. I mean we farmed for 20 years through drought and bird plague and whatever else, but that was just us against the elements. Whereas setting up this co-op and the collaborative farming and sharing the land has been a very difficult thing, and it’s challenged us too in ways. Like I hadn’t thought I was attached to doing certain things certain ways as much as I clearly have been, because when I see it being done another way I go hmm oh that’s an interesting way of doing things, but we’ve just got to let it go. It’s not about how I do things, we have committed to letting these guys run their own businesses and we’ve got to stay out of their way, and that’s been hard to watch at times I guess.
Amanda Scott:
I guess especially when it’s on your land as well.
Hugh:
Yes [Chuckles].
Amanda Scott:
And you’ve cared for this land for so long, and now you’re seeing other people use it in a way that may not be the same way that you would choose.
Hugh:
That’s true. But while it might not be the same way it doesn’t mean it’s not better even in some ways. So again part of the shared values thing is about a commitment to environment, a commitment to sustainability, to regenerative agriculture, to organics. So when everyone’s got that mindset where you can be confident that things are going to happen that are overall for the greater good, but they just might be differently to the way that we would’ve gone about it.
Katie:
Part of the joy of this model is seeing our land being used and developed in ways that we only ever dreamed of. So we destocked, we used to run a few cows back in the day, we destocked during the drought and never restocked, because it was not our primary business. And so we’ve had all these paddocks sitting there getting weedier and not being utilised, and to see them now being farmed regeneratively with a micro dairy is just bliss, it’s fantastic. And the same with all the businesses actually, they’re all innovating, they’re doing new things, they’re bringing new ideas onto the farm which is just wonderful to watch.
Amanda Scott:
So that was going to be one of my other questions, which was you’ve said this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but has this brought up new opportunities and new rewards in ways that you never possibly imagined?
Katie:
Being able to watch our farm be farmed by the next generation when it became fairly obvious that wasn’t going to be our kids, we’ve got five kids and none of them are interested, they may be in the future, but none of them were when we were ready for the next generation to take over. So to be able to watch our farm be farmed and become more productive by a growing community of passionate young farmers is just amazing, it is such a gift. And particularly because my dad is still here, he’s getting huge amounts of joy out of watching that happen as well, because that’s the gift he gave us. He mentored us when we took over the farm and stepped right into the background, but stayed there giving us that guiding hand and he taught us how to be orchardists. And it must have been agonising for him because to watch us do things differently to the way he had always done them and make loads of mistakes along the way. So it’s really fantastic for him to still be here and see it pass onto the next generation as well, so we’re not quite the elders yet, we’re the young elders [Chuckles].
Amanda Scott:
You’ve got to start somewhere right.
Katie:
That’s right [Chuckles].
Amanda Scott:
You haven’t been handed the baton yet.
Katie:
No.
Hugh:
Not yet.
Amanda Scott:
Your dad’s still holding on and watching.
Katie:
[Chuckles] he’s watching yes. But he handed over responsibility really early which was fantastic, and that I think gave us the model of being able to do the same thing, was to stay here, guide when we’re asked, and basically stay out of their way. And it’s given our farm a whole new life.
[End of Audio Recording]
