alright! this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com.today we have another exciting episode for you and i’m here working in my garden todayplanting stuff out as you guys can see. things are growing slowly here in the winter, butat least there’s no snow in the ground. like, where my next guest actually farms.so, you guys saw the title of this episode is how you can make $100,000 on a half anacre. and this is what my guest today, curtis stone, does! actually, he doesn’t even havea half-acre, he has a third acre in this pasture he made $100,000 on a third acre with onlytwo people farming. a third acre worth of space. and this is what i want for all youguys, i really don’t want people to work for the man, work for the system, work fora job they don’t like for money they don’t
need, right? do something you love, but moreimportantly, when you do something you love, provide a service for others. and one of thethings i think is required in this society today is there is higher quality food becausethe crap at the grocery store sucks. you know, if you guys like farming and rowing your ownfood and you have some extra space, and you maybe want to quit your job this would bea really good thing to do is to start growing your own food for community. and to make itwork and make it successful. and to do that you need to have a model. so you know i didn’tjust learn everything that i learned from trying out things, but i learned from researchinghow people have done it. you know, i was inspired a long time ago by the durveys family, likewho how did they grow a lot of food on a small
plot. i could do it too, right? and maybei inspire a lot of you guys and that’s great. for those of you guys that want to be farmers,because i’m an urban gardener, curtis here is an urban farmer and he wrote a book, “theurban farmer†growing food for profit on leased and borrowed land. and he does thisnot in california, not any place that actually has any kind of decent climate. he does thisin canada, eh? with about 7-8 month growing season, so he has like 4 months off. it’samazing! alright, curtis, so what was the motivation for becoming an urban farmer inthe beginning? i mean why do you even want to do this, what was your previous job anyways? well the motivation actually was because ithought the world was going to hell, and i
actually started watching your videos 6 or7 years ago and i was always interested in health and community and i was trying to finda way to find a niche that way. and i found just through youtube literally, and otherfarmers and i was trying to buy land because i had this idea you know i want to be a homesetter, i want to do what you’re doing, i want to live off the land, i want to liveby my values and i didn’t want to support the big box stores and eat all the big boxcrap. so, i was kinda at this place where i wanted to be a farmer and live off the landbut buying land is so expensive. because where i’m living in colona bc canada, an acreof land can be almost a million dollars. holy shit, man!
it was not possible, so i kinda had this despair.i actually rode my bike down the west coast, i came through santa rosa, pantaloma, allthese places and saw what people are doing and i was really inspired. but still had thisdilemma, like how can i buy land? how can i do this? so i heard about a guy named wallysaswitch in saskatoon, canada who was making a 6-figure salary on land he didn’t ownon lots, urban lots. so i was really inspired by him. he had a book called spin farmingthat was kind of a starting place for me. and i started with that, i said, you knowwhat i’m gonna do this. i went, i did a season of tree planting. my past is i’mactually a working musician, i was living in montreal, canada, where it’s really coldand but i supported myself doing that by being
a tree planter, which is a very canadian job,we go in the bush and work our asses off but we make good money at it. so i had about fourteenthousand dollars of cash, and i was like you know what i’m just gonna go all in and trythis thing, and let’s see what happens. i just had no fear at this point. i road mybike from colona to tijuana so at this point i was like, you know what i can do anything.so i just went for it, made tons of mistakes. but you know what, it worked. my first yeari had just a little under half an acre and i did about $22,000 my first year and i feltgood about that and i kept doing it and it doubled every year and it got to the pointwhere i grew my business to be about two and a half acres with about eight staff and itkinda got top heavy, and those of you who
know anything about business and that youknow, if your expenses outweight your income then there’s a problem. so i kinda learnedthe hard way. but what happened that year was really neat because i was growing 90 differentvegetables, we had a csa box program with 80 members and i looked at the spreadsheetsat the end of the year and i discovered that 10 crops made 80% of the income of the farm.so at that point i kind of, i still had a lot of ideology but i had some practicalitycome in too because you gottta have a little bit of diversity and i said you know whatwhy don’t’ i focus on those main 10 crops, i grew about 20 different crops, but thoseone, focus in on that, so when i looked at that land in the previous year that all thatmoney was made on, it was about a third of
an acre. you know what, i’m going to getrid of the two acres and a bit, focus on 5 urban plots, that way i could actually moveback down to the city which is why i started urban farming to begin with, i wanted to livein the city and do that. and that year we did $75,000 on a third of an acre. and i waslike, ok this works. so it was all about, you know have you heard the term preto’sprinciple. it’s the rule of 80/20. yeah, i knew the 80/20 principle. the 80/20 thing. 20 percent of your customerswill give you 80% of your business. 20% of your products will give you 80% of your revenue.so that’s what it was it was an 80/20 thing. i boiled it down to the 80/20 with the products,as far as the crops. but what i also did was
i boiled down the customers. i really lookedat my customer demographics and said who’s spending the most money and who’s reallythe kind of people i want to work with. so i really focused in on that and catered tothat market and it’s worked ever since. so that’s what lead me to write a book aboutit. that’s awesome, so how long have you beendoing this now? i’ve been farming for 6 years commercially.i’ve been into this stuff for a long time in a permaculture for maybe 10 years. but,6 years as a commercial enterprise. and yeah, i’ve been teaching it actually for 5 years.i started teaching workshops the year after i did it because so few people actually mademoney at this that there was a lot of people
just asking me. and because i had a backgroundin music and performance people were like hey can you come to our garden club and talkto us at the garden club, then it was like can you talk to the high school, hey do youwant to come to the college, do you want to go to the conferences? and then it just kindof kept going, and i just kept talking and people liked coming to hear me talk and soyeah, i kept farming and kept talking. that’s awesome, that’s awesome! yeah,so i mean one thing is that curtis has experience behind him. and he’s a smart guy, i’vebeen sitting here talking with him before we made this video and he’s a smart guyand i appreciate many of the things that he’s actually doing and that he was able to writethis book to share with you guys how you guys
could turn your plots or turn your plot andget plots that you don’t even own because actually the land that he’s farming, mostof it he doesn’t even own. which is kind of crazy. so, let’s talk about that curtis,let’s talk about how many different plots do you have? and do you own any of them? andhow are you making money in using these plots? yeah, so when i started i didn’t own anyof it. i was living in an apartment, living with my mom actually. i moved back from montreal,i moved in with my mom just to get my feet on the ground to get started and i leasedout, basically i rent out people’s yards. so you know, we look around your area. somebodywill give me their yard and i’ll come in and i’ll grind it up. i don’t do raisedbeds because it costs too much and since i
don’t own the land i don’t want to putin that investment. so i’ll go in, i grind up the lawn, till it a bid, i actually d alot of no-till stuff and i just get it into production. so on a 2000 square foot lawn,like maybe some of the corner lots here, you could do almost $20,000 in revenue on thatmuch space. and the key is, is what i call i write about it in the book, high rotationplanting. whereas you’ve got an area or a bed and everything i do is in a standardizedbed. it’s 30 inch wide by 25 foot long. high rotation means that’s going to getrotated many time in the seasons. so i’m focusing on quick growing, high value, andhigh yield, and short days to maturity, and popular crops. in the book i write about thei cal it the cvr scale, the crop value rating.
so basically anything that doesn’t meetthat criteria i don’t grow from my farm. and that’s how i can make money on tehselittle plots. i can go into somebody’s yard, dig it up, and within a month have vegetablesin there, and a month later i’m producing a steady income off those plots. so to goback to your original question, the only place i own is my home. and i didn’t. actuallyat first i was farming in the yard of the house that i now own, and then they askedme to rent it and then they asked if i wanted to buy it and i eventually bought it and nowit’s my home base. but when i started i didn’t own a single piece of land. the onlyreason i bought my house was because i didn’t want ot move. my landlords were telling methat, you know we gotta seell this and i was
freaking out and i didn’t think i couldactually get a mortgage. i hate mortgages to be honest with you. yeah, me and you both! i hate banks too! i did get a mortgage because it made businesssense. and so now, my home is the place that i operate. i have a passive solar greenhousethere, we do all of our vegetable washing there, i have a office there. i have a renterin the suite, so it is a revenue stream so i kind of bundle it into the business. but,you know, you don’t need to own anything. in fact, the farmers that are doing the bestright now are landless farmers. they don’t
own land, because owning land is a huge undertaking huge liability, yeah. huge liability, and there’s really no advantageto it. there’s no upside especially if land isso much, unless you live in minnesota or something or kansas here’s the thing, it’s the economics ofit that’s really interesting. and yeah, you’re right. in the midwest, it’s cheap.but here’s the thing, less than 2% of the people in the world know how to grow foodtoday and the average age of a farmer is 60 years old. so not only is the information,and skills to farm land scarce, but farmers
are dying. so, owning land, you don’t reallyneed to because look at the economics. there’s tons of land available, why own it? what’sthe point? you can get into a 5, 10, 20, even 100 year lease on a piece of land withouttaking on that liability. so it’s, i think it’s actually advantageous because i startedmy business on $5000 or $7000 actually. made m22 my first year, reinvested capital as iwent. it’s all about a low- start up capital cost to get into it. and that makes it accessibleto a lot of people in the us who just don’t have jobs and they want to do something, theywant to contribute something to make the world a better place, they want to eat healthy andall this stuff, and how can you bundle that into one lifestyle, and that’s what thisbook is all about.
wow. that’s amazing. so, i’ve been thinkingthis whole time while you’re talking, it’s really cool what you’re doing. but whatare the top 10 crops that people want to grow to make an income, but more importantly forsomebody like me that wants to be able to eat out of their garden that are fast turncrops, i talk about this a lot on my show that i want you guys to focus on the cropsthat would be expensive to buy but are easy to grow. yeah, exactly. so it all goes back and i liketo tell people about my thinking behind this. instead of telling you exactly what the cropsare, though i’ll tell you those. first the thinking. you want short days to maturity,so i say focus on crops that are 60 days or
less. you want high yield per square foot.so things that cut and come again. like spinach you can cut it, it comes back. same with lettuce.radishes grow quickly too. you want a high price per pound. so, leafy greens baby rootvegetables have a high price per pound, same as cherry tomatoes and things like that. andthen you want long seasonality, you want a crop you can grow many months of the season.so for me in canada, that’s really crucial. i’m looking for things i can have at leasta 4-month season out of. that doesn’t necessarily mean i have one type of crop for 4 months,it just means that type of crop can be in the ground being planted for 4 months andthen the other thing is crops that are popular that are in demand. so for me it’s all aboutleafy green vegetables, spinach cut and come
again lettuces, arugula things like that radishesbaby root vegetables. i tell people we’re on a small farm we grow small veg, baby carrots,things like that, that restaurants like high-end restaurants like. and then cherry tomatoes,in determinate tomatoes especially because you can pick them and they keep coming back.so it’s really stuff like that. and micro greens too, i do indoor micro greens. andthat’s certainly something that people can do at home too. you can grow a flat of sunflowershoots, they’re so nutritionally dense and they’re ready in 10 days. so, it’s stufflike that. quick turnover, i can grow for a long period of time. cool, yeah. i want to encourage you guys thatare home gardeners, grow some of the things
he’s talking about. i always encourage youguys to grow sprouts and micro greens. you can do this even if you don’t have any land,or borrow a friend’s lot or anything. and the coolest thing that i think curtis is doing,is that he is literally farming on other people’s land. it’s like opl, other people’s land!opp, who’s down with opp what’s up? so, but yeah, so this is something that’s availableto everybody wherever you live in the world. you can find some land, get into a lease,maybe some people will let you use their land if you give them some food. so let’s talkabout that, have you had instances where somebody said hey use my land, i just want some ofthe food off of it. absolutely, and that’s how it works. isi don’t pay rent, i just feed the people.
so they get a basket of veggies each weekthat’s an assortment of all the corps i grow. not just what’s on their properly.so sometimes i have to specialize the plots. i have an ordering system where all my landownerscan pick between $20-$30 of vegetables depending on the season and i just, we bring it to themor they pick it up at the farmer’s market each week. that’s the exchange, so it’sreally cheap because i didn’t need to take on a mortgage or get all of these overheadcosts to start a business. but you know the coolest thing about it john, is it’s actuallywhen you really boil it down it’s about building and fostering community. becausepeople see a garden, and everybody likes a garden. and it gets a dialogue going in theneighborhood and people go and say, man that’s
so cool. and not only that but they learna ton. and the cool thing about what i’ve done is that every place where i farm, andi’ve had over 20 different plots over the years, every place that i’ve farmed there’sbeen at least 10 people that have become avid gardeners just by seeing me. they’ll seeme out there in march planting stuff. aren’t you worried about the first frost? forgetthe first frost, it’s all about the crops you grow during the times of optimal season.so you optimize your production based on what the season can offer. and so, you know it’shad a ripple effect where now there’s like hundreds of gardeners maybe even thousandsof gardeners in the city i live in that have learned from me just because i’m there.when people walk by, they see you, they talk
to you, they ask questions and so it engagespeople. the cool thing from my end, from a selfish standpoint is that they become diehardcustomers. yeah, right! they become diehard customers and then peoplewill say to me, oh but you’re training people to grow their own food. aren’t you worriedyou’re gonna lose customers? no, that’s scarcity-thinking man. it’s all about abundancethinking. that by sharing the information people actually not only appreciate the, becauseif they grow it themselves they’re not going to become full-time farmers, not all of them,they’re going to appreciate fresh so much more that now they are going to go out oftheir way to support the local farmer and
get the fresh stuff because they see the realvalue of it and then they tell their friends and then they speak highly of you. and thatjust has this abundance effect where it’s a multiplier, and you gain more customers,you gain more influence, and you just make tons of friends. and that’s what’s coolabout being multi-locational too, is it’s like i have five groups of neighbors. so onall my five plots i’m just like somebody who lives in that neighborhood because i’malways out there. i get to know the community, the neighbors. i know them by name, i givethem veggies when they walk by. it’s all abundance. i want to encourage you guys to have abundancementality thinking, this is huge right? curtis,
he’s more than just a farmer, right? he’smore than just a businessperson. he’s an educated and teacher, and these are all veryimportant roles to play. and as an entrepreneur myself, you need to wear many hats if you’rean entrepreneur and he’s really done this quite well and i want to encourage all youguys, we need to educate the general world and public at large about the food system.the food system that’s being dictated to us in the stores, grocery stores, big boxstores, whatever. it really is not the way to do it, see its centralized agriculture.what curtis is the exact opposite, decentralized agriculture. because he has many small plotsinstead of just one big plot of land and he grows many different crops. and we know they’rethe most valuable.
you know, we need to decentralize the farmersand that’s what this is all about. because one farmer can make $100,000 on a half anacre. how much land do you need to farm? it all of a sudden takes away the incentive tosay, “go big or go home.†like i need a thousand hectares or thousand acres to farm.you can farm on a half an acre, make a good living, contribute to your community, andhave a nice quality of life. and then we maybe have a hundred more of those farmers in yourcity, why not? let’s decentralize it. the more things are decentralized, the more stablethey are and that’s how we build resilience. because if one farmer has a bad year thatdoesn’t jeopardize the whole local food system. it creates a resilience, i like theterm anti-fragility actually, it’s some
of you are familiar with naseem talib andthe whole idea of anti-fragile, things that suffer shocks like in nature, it’s likewhat doesn’t kill you make you stronger. it’s that whole thing. when you suffer shocksyou have, you learn to bend and flex and you actually become stronger and more resilientand that’s what it’s all about. yeah, that’s why i encourage you guys togrow a lot of different crops instead of just one thing. i have so many different cropshere, something’s always going to be making me some food. and man, it’s just reallycool what you’re doing. spreading this knowledge, and not only is curtis doing this he is actuallyteaching you guys how to do it so you guys can put him out of business, just don’tdo it in bc. just kidding. well, you’re
probably not going to be in the same neighborhoodsas him anyway, so he doesn’t care. this is the cool thing, right, this is the newbusiness model that i see. open source model, where curtis is just sharing how he’s beenable to make a living. make $100,000 on a third of an acre. you guys could probablydo a half. and get everybody to do this, because this is how the world is going to change.this is why i make my youtube videos. so that i can change the world, and i want everybodyto get into farming because if everybody had local gardens, local farms like curtis did,people would no longer buy their shit in the store. and the world would be a much betterplace. so, curtis, let’s talk about your book here. so why did you decide to writethe book after farming and teaching and doing
all this stuff you’re doing. people kept saying to me i should write abook. i didn’t really have a way to do that. i’d never written, i’ll probably get criticizedon the grammar in the book. i had an editor, it’s a published book and it’s the ideasto me that are the most important. but it just seemed like it was the right thing todo. it felt like, you know when you have a book it becomes more accessible, it becomesnewsworthy, i had a friend who wrote a book on the same publishing house a guy named johnmartin fortier who’s a great farmer and author. he connected me with the publishinghouse, and they said they’d love for me to write a book. because i’ve been teachingand lecturing for a while so it kinda just
feel into place. i’ve been writing lectures,so i was just kind of like streaming my content into something like this, which is a challengebecause this is limited pages are limited. i have an online course that i teach, andthere’s very little limit to that because you can just have videos for an hour longor whatever, right. but a book is challenging, it was cool because it really made me thinkabout what i really think about philosophy, the 80/20 rule, the preto’s principle, howcan i boil this stuff down in the least amount of time to give people the most amount ofimpact, like what are the crucial things they can learn about so that’s what i’ve putin the book. that’s awesome! yeah, so i mean, now youguys can start your own business, make your
own money by helping others. by educatingothers. and more importantly, feeding others. because i know a lot of you guys, you knowmight have a job you don’t like. and i think everybody once again, should get into farmingif they enjoy it. because i mean, what better thing is there to do than to be out in nature,get your hands in the dirt, and to help others on this planet. and to create a differencein the world. i mean that’s why i grow a garden, that’s why i have this youtube channel.so, curtis i want to give something of value for my viewers that have stuck through towatch it to this point. what’s something, a tip or something that you could leave witheverybody today that’s really going to help them become a better farmer or a gardener?
yeah, i’ve got a good one that i think isreally important for new farmers. start small! so many people get into this and they go,i want to grow everything! i want to do what john does, i want to grow all that stuff buti want to make it on a farm. start small, if you’re gonna farm commercially don’tstart on anymore than a quarter acre especially if you’re going to use intensive techniqueslike this. start small and focus in on some of the things that you think are gonna bethe best sellers. so one way to find that out is do market research. and a really easyway to do market research as a local farmer, is shop at farmer’s markets. go to the farmer’smarket, talk to the farmers and here’s one tip i’ll give you which is really easy todo. if you want ot figure out where there’s
a niche market at the farmer’s market. goto the farmer’s market in the morning, see what’s on the tables, make notes, take pictures,and then go back at the end of the day and see what’s still there. don’t grow thestuff that’s still there. grow the stuff that was sold out at 10 o’clock. focus onthe niche. find the unique things that you can cater to, where there’s a high demandfor. that has got to be one of the best things you can do. wow, that was just one of the tips and there’sso many more in this book, that’s actually, it’s my copy. he signed it to me, let’ssee what he wrote. “john, you’ve been a huge inspiration for me over the years.i’ve followed your stuff for at least 6
years, keep on rocking curtis stone. yeah!so now i have this book, not that i’m going to go into business because that’s not mycalling. my calling is to educate you guys and let you guys know about people like curtisdoing this kind of work so now you guys can get in business yourself. so curtis, i wantto put together a good deal for my viewers here because i always like to give them agood deal for people i have on the show. we’re going to go ahead and put a link down belowto curtis’s stuff so you can buy his book or get his online course at a discount. onlyavailable for you guys absolutely, yeah so, i know curtis is in town only becausehe’s actually doing lectures in this area.
this video will probably be aired after allthose lectures. but how can somebody learn more about you, and get connected with whatyou’re doing so that they can start their own business and be independent and help everybodyout? yeah, so they can go to my website theurbanfarmer.coand i’ve got a youtube channel like you, if you just put in youtube urban farmer curtisstone, or curtis stone urban farmer anyone of those you’ll find me on there. and myfarm’s website is greencityacres.com and my online course is profitableurbanfarming.com. wow! great man, and yeah, thanks for comingout today. i appreciated it. if you guys enjoyed this episode with curtis, please give me athumbs up, i’ll do more videos with curtis
in the future when we’re in the same placeat the same time. maybe i’ll come visit his farm in canada during the season to checkit out more if you like this video. this is one of the things that i really want to encourageyou guys to do, to start your own business and to help others because when i think aboutbusiness, i don’t think about how can i make money, i think about how can i servemy fellow man i think about how can i help my fellow man? i do that these days by actuallymaking these videos, and curtis does that by actually educating people on how to makemoney by farming but also serving people by giving them food and also educating them atthe same time. i mean what better thing in the whole planet could you be doing? i don’tthink there’s much else check out his website,
i’ll put links down below. and also be sureto click that subscribe button, right down below to be notified of my new and upcomingepisodes. i have new and upcoming episodes coming out about every three to four days.and also be sure to check my past episodes. i have over 1100 episodes now, show you guysall aspects of urban gardening. and i like to have a lot of urban farms that i visit,but i’m not doing that myself yet. so, in any case once again this is john kohler withgrowingyourgreens.com. we’ll see you next time, until then remember keep on growing!