Today I'm talking with Joe and John at Farmstand: Fresh & Local.
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You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. This episode is sponsored by Greenbush Twins & Company, where creativity and community grow hand in hand. Just like a thriving garden or a well-loved homestead, the best things are built with care, purpose, and heart. Through thoughtful design, storytelling, and handcrafted goods, they're helping people celebrate a simpler or meaningful way of living. Learn more at Greenbush Twins & Company.
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Today I'm talking with Joe and John at FarmStand, fresh and local in Oregon. Good morning guys, how are you? Well, how are you? I'm good. So, number one, how's the weather there? I always ask how's the weather?
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John, you want to take that? Yeah. It's been pretty decent. Yesterday was hot. It was in the low 90s. Today is supposed to be more of the same, not quite as hot, but we're getting a little smoke blown in from some of the local fires, unfortunately. But overall, pleasant. Nice. And we are at the end of September, so things are going to get better. Well,
01:15
They're going to get better and then they're going to get worse, but it's going to be very fallish here soon. How's the weather in Minnesota? It is lovely. I was just pulling out my weather bug app to tell you what the temperature is. is 71 right now. The high today they're saying is supposed to be 87, but I don't think it's going to make it because it's overcast. I don't think we're going to get to 87. And it's just nice out right now. There's no rain.
01:42
And it's not hot and it's not muggy. It's just lovely considering a month and a half ago we had three weeks of tropical dew points for a three week straight. It was horrible. I was like keep saying Minnesota doesn't get a three week stretch of tropical dew points ever. So it was very weird. I feel like Minnesota do you guys get you get really hard winters. So
02:12
The summertime is like kind of in the Northwest. Everybody just lives for these few months of the year. We're always looking forward to it. Is it the same there? Yes, but the last two winters here have not been nearly as hard as they have been up till now. So usually the area that I live in an hour Southwest of Minneapolis, you'd be getting at least five, six feet total for the winter.
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of snow. The last two winters we've been lucky in our specific little area to get even a foot of snow for the entire winter has been the weirdest thing. So I can't give you an answer on what the winters are like anymore because they're changing just like they're changing everywhere. But yes, true dyed in the wool Minnesotans, which I am not,
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live for summer. I am a transplant to Minnesota and even after living here for 30 years, I'm like, it's weather. Wait five minutes, it'll change because that's what I grew up with in Maine. So I don't think I have the same culture about it that people who grew up here have. Sure. And that's fine. I don't have to. I just have to agree. I have to smile and nod.
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a lot here because sometimes I'm like, yeah, that's not what I grew up with. But okay, yes, you're right. Anyway, can you guys tell me a little bit about yourselves and what you do? go for it, Joe. Okay. Yeah, we, my family of six, my wife and I, four kids live in Clackamas County here in Oregon.
04:08
We have a small five acre hobby farm where we raise pigs and chickens and bunnies and we have dogs and cats and all of the things. We homeschool our kids, have a little community co-op in Malala that the kids will go to. yeah, full time, I'm a fireman for Clackamas Fire District, currently working in Damascus.
04:38
Oregon with John, which is kind of how this whole business kind of got going. Being that John and I work together all the time, we got to brainstorm and talk and to come up with this idea. Okay. And John? Yeah. So I grew up in Southern Oregon, came from a big family. I'm the fifth out of nine kids.
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And, uh, yeah, I grew up on acreage, uh, met my wife down there and ended up getting hired, uh, in the fire service up in, uh, the Portland area and, uh, moved my family up here. And we currently live in, uh, in like a suburb of the Portland Metro area. Um, uh, a little town called Westland and, uh,
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We have a little garden and my wife and I have four kids as well. And yeah, I met Joe a handful of years back and we fortunate enough to get placed together on the squad, working together out in Damascus. And yeah, this year we jumped into the 4-H game with our kids. My oldest daughter really wanted to
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raised some rabbits. we just last week finished up fair, which was our first 4-H year participating. Growing up, we always went to the fair and had friends doing that. And my wife's family was big into that as well. So yeah, so just a fireman, a dad, a husband. And yeah.
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enjoying this farm stand journey that we're on. When Joe came up with the idea and shared it with me, was like, yeah, that is a fantastic idea. Because my wife also, she makes tallow and we had a garden. We always have a garden, but last year our garden was going crazy with kooks and zooks, we called it. And so I was like, man, we got more than we know we can do with.
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You know, we just put a box out for free, you know, and, and, still it was like, there's so many, it's just people, you know, would come and take as many as they wanted, but it's like hard to get rid of them all, you know? And so, yeah, when Joe came up with this idea last year, it was like, yep, that's, that's genius. We should make that work. So. So I want to talk about the farm stand idea, but I also want to say thank you.
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for being firefighters because with all the wildfires that we've been going through in this country for the last, I don't know, four or five years, it seems like there's getting more and more and worse and worse. So thank you for doing what you do. Our pleasure, yeah. It's an honor to be able to do it. And at the end of the episode, I actually want to ask, I want to pick you guys' brains about the things that we...
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homesteaders, farmers and ranchers need to be aware of regarding fires on our property, because I figure you're probably going to have some answers for me. But we can talk about that at the end. So tell me about this farm stand idea. How did you, I mean, you just said because you had so much, but tell me more. Yeah. So, so last year around this time, we were
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or I was driving home from work. And as I was pulling into, I live in in a little gated community out here in the country. There's like nine lots. We all have like five acres. And last year we decided to make our own farm stand so we could share the goods from our garden or, or my daughter likes making baked goods. So she would put baked goods in it. And so we had this farm stand.
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which was off the beaten path and behind the gate. And I thought as I was driving through the gate, I thought, if this ever was available to the public, how would they find it? Yeah. There are resources online that people currently use to market their farm stands and their farms. But you potentially are lost in the mix. It's really difficult to find what's close to you. And so
09:27
I had the idea of developing an app, which is what Farms and Fresh and Local came from. But I've had a lot of ideas for a lot of different little businesses in the past. And I usually bounce them off my wife first and she shoots most of them down immediately. because she knows all the time and effort it takes to start a business. But this one was unique because she was in love with the idea from
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the start, and so was everybody else. And so that's when I thought, well, maybe, maybe I'm onto something. Nothing like this specifically for farm stands existed. There was some other apps that would market farms or farmers markets, but not specifically farm stands. And when the idea came about it and realized that, that there was a farm stand movement that was kind of going to start.
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And so since then, yeah, I had to, I had to figure out how to develop this app. I am not a tech savvy individual, but I have a friend who is in, in that world. And so I started picking his brain and I always envisioned somebody else developing the app. But that wasn't going to be feasible because I didn't have the funds to pay somebody to do so. I had, I had to research.
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how to do it myself, using all the available resources to me. And yeah, so over the last about eight months, I've spent hundreds, probably over a thousand hours developing the app, constantly tweaking it. And I've got it to the point today where it works really well. It seems to be adding value to people's farm stands. And yeah.
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We were seeing pretty decent growth at the early stages for app. Very nice. Do you happen to know the average number of how many people use the app? Do you have any idea? Well, daily average users. So we have about 515 farm stands nationwide. And originally we were thinking about
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We're trying to target locally first to build up density within our, our County or the state of Oregon. But once you get it on the app store and Google play, everybody has the opportunity to download it and to add farm stands. And so we're seeing, we have 500 and about 15 farm stands nationwide. Uh, and we have about, uh, we're, nearing 3000.
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downloads and of those about a hundred people a day are using the app. And so we envision more people using the app once the inventory in the form of farm stands and small farms. Once that grows, the consumers will then find value in the app and use it more regularly. makes all the sense in the world. Can I?
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Can I make a suggestion that you may have not thought about for the app if you want to keep playing with it? Absolutely. We have a notepad right here. Yeah. In the Northern Tier States, when we get into winter, we're not growing things outside like we were. But what we are doing is lots and lots of fall festivals and fall craft shows and things like that because people are getting ready to buy gifts for Christmas.
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Is there any way you could maybe add that kind of stuff in? Absolutely. Yeah, farm stands, this thing is constantly evolving. Initially it was fully focused on farm stands and we want to do one thing well and not expand into a bunch of things too quickly. But we want to connect people with local goods, homegrown food and fall festivals are right in that same line of
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of thinking. We actually, John was talking about our county fair and 4-H. We just met a couple who live on a pumpkin patch and they have a fall festival every year. So we're going to meet up with them probably this week, talk to them, see what they have, take some videos and help promote their farm and also put them on the app so people can find their farm when they're going out and looking for these.
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pumpkin patches and fall festivals. So yeah, we're headed that direction. I don't know how many times in the past my wife and I have been looking for Christmas trees and you want to find the best place and the best prices. Well, it's really difficult to do. So hopefully this app will fill that gap as well. Awesome. I didn't know if it was on the radar yet, so I thought I would throw it out there for you. Yeah, thank you very much.
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We haven't had a Christmas tree for two years because Christmas trees are so freaking expensive now. Live trees. Oh my God. Yeah. What do they cost over there? Oh, a really, really nice Christmas tree. Like a balsam fir last year, a six foot tree was at least $60 and that was the low end. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's, that's, uh, that's pretty much the prices over here. They can well, and they can, we
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The Christmas tree to have over here is probably a noble. And then there's duck furs, but they'll cost you anywhere from 50 to well over a hundred dollars, depending on your location. isn't Oregon one of the biggest Christmas tree growing States in the United States? Oh yeah. Yeah. We actually grew them on our property over the last 10 years. And last year was the first year that we had them. But we leased our land to a big Christmas tree.
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grower and five plus years ago they were selling over 600,000 trees a year I think just in the Willamette Valley. Yep it's a beautiful beautiful state you guys live in one of the most beautiful locations on earth. Well thank you. Not as beautiful as where I grew up because you know I got to be loyal to the East Coast. Sure absolutely. But Oregon from what I've heard is stunningly gorgeous.
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Okay. Fantastic. So, um, the app, people can use it for free. Yes. Yeah. It's, totally free to anybody who wants to use it. Uh, and, and initially we thought, how are we going to monetize this to make it worth our time? Cause it's, it takes a lot of time away from our families. Um, and we initially thought, well, there'll be free features and there'll be premium features. Well, we quickly realized that.
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we want people to use the app to its fullest. And if we are saying, hey, pay us, even though the app isn't, isn't built out with a bunch of inventory and people using it, people wouldn't want to use it. And so we made it completely free and John and I and our wives said, you know what, if this thing succeeds and we get the users that we envision, then monetizing something later,
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not on the backs of the consumers and the farmers, it'll happen. right now, it's completely free. And yeah, we want people to use it. Yeah, and if I can jump in there too, think there's this struggle with any app or any tool that is brought to a farmer or even to a consumer.
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It needs to be useful. Farmers are very busy people and growing up on acreage and realizing the amount of work and time dedicated or required just to like farm is a lot. And so nobody wants to download something that's not useful to them. So we believe we've created something that is useful, but we right now we're in the initial startup phases and the building phase.
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of telling people that it's useful and informing them like the tools and features of it. And it's kind of this teeter totter of building users, building the platform with farm stands and because nobody wants to be on the app if there's no farm stands on it and no farm stands want to be on the app if there's not users. So we're trying to build both those simultaneously, which is
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challenge, but I think we've seen constant steady growth and we've gotten a lot of really good feedback. People like the idea and yeah, so I think with that monetization side of it, it's always going to be free for the users. It has to be in order for it to be a useful tool. absolutely.
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Um, one of the things that we did started three years ago with our farm stand is I printed out our Venmo QR code and we put it on the board that we have in our farm stand so people could pay using Venmo. And it's been great because people do want some way to pay that is digital. And, um, I didn't even realize that Venmo had become the thing.
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that people use to pay for things digitally that seems to be the most popular. And so that's one of the things that I tell people when they ask me questions about the farm. How are you doing that? And I was like, you go to Venmo and they have a QR code and you print it and you put it somewhere where people can scan it with their phone. it's interesting too, because in the Pacific Northwest, I'd say Venmo is the primary
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you know, digital platform to allow people to pay like that. And regionally, like I have a brother who lives down in California and down there, it's like everybody has cash app. Which I'm like, okay, same thing, but there's all these tools now that make it a lot easier to have those transactions, you know, seamlessly.
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Yes, and one of the other things about farm stands that I've discovered over the last few years is you don't just have to have produce in there. You can have homemade lip balms or soaps or candles or goodies like, you know, cupcakes or cookies. humans are impulsive. There's a reason that they put candy in the checkout aisles. They're called impulse buys.
20:55
If you have things in your farm stand that aren't necessarily produce or I don't know eggs, people are very likely to buy a lip balm for $5. Oh yeah, absolutely. We have some friends who have a farm stand locally and one of the main things they sell is sourdough loaves. know, people come home from work, they want to buy a sourdough loaf for dinner. Well, she also has cookies there and she sells the cookies out just as fast as sourdough because people grab cookies and eat them on the way home.
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Yeah, and then they ruin their dinner, geez. Do I sound like a 56 year old mom of four or what? Just to finish up on the Venmo conversation, in the future, hopefully sooner or later, we're going to add a feature of pre-orders. so people will be able to purchase
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products through people's pages via the app. And the idea came about, was reading someone's Facebook post and they were from Alaska and they were wondering how they could keep their products from freezing in the winter time. And so I reached out and talked to the person and then I thought, well, if you could pre-order in Alaska,
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that would prevent your things from freezing because you could make them have a time you could come pick them up and they would be there all paid for and off you go. And this would apply for, for everywhere in the country. So that, that is to come. Nice. Awesome. I'm so impressed. I just talked to another person. Um, today's Tuesday. think it was Friday and
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His business is very much like yours. It's called Vine Stops, V-I-N-E-S-T-O-P-S. And I interviewed him. So I'm running two different farm stand things back to back this week. And I try not to do that, try not to do things that are so close one after the other. But you guys are doing it differently than he is. He's doing it differently than you are.
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There has to be competition in the market. There just has to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that just proves there's a need to market farm stands and farms. the, yeah, the small town America farm sometimes gets missed, you know, and we're all just trying to help promote them. Exactly. And that's why I have this podcast because I want to promote.
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farms and ranches and homesteads and bakers and crafters and people who are adjacent to those things. And you guys are actually, I don't know, farmerish and adjacent. So it works out great. I had a question as I was trying to explain that I lost it. I know what it was. Does Oregon have cottage food laws like Minnesota does?
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Yes. Yes, I do. And is it in Minnesota right now, it's free to take the class and then take the test and then have your registration? Is that what it's like in Oregon? I'm not 100 % sure on that portion of it because I know there's business licensing and certain things that go along with that. OK. And I don't know if that's where they
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I know there's a cost associated with that. But as far as like getting your cottage license and all that, I'm not 100 % on that. Okay. I'm just glad they have it because I think I could be wrong, but I think all 50 states have cottage food licensing or registration now. I think. Don't quote me. I mean, I'm being quoted because I'm being recorded, but whatever. I know that a grand majority of states have cottage food producers and it's a
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wonderful thing. Okay, so we have like six minutes left and I wanted to ask you guys about what people who live on acreage, even if it's only one acre and they're doing homesteading or farming or ranching, what can we do to make sure that our places are safe if a wildfire comes?
25:45
You want me to take lead on that Joe? Take lead, Joe. All right. Perfect. Um, yeah. So I think the biggest thing is having one, a plan for if there is a wildfire, right? Anticipating, um, you know, uh, do I have a defensible space around my structures, right? Is my firewood stacked right up against my house, right? And as when I grew up, that's how it was, you know, um, do I have
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overgrown bushes or trees or, you know, down in southern Oregon, I always joke that it would be taken over with by blackberries and poison oak if all humans left for 10 years, you know. It's just there's so much foliage that is, you know, if you just let it go, it can become a fire hazard. So making sure that you have a plan on, you know, what would you grab if you had to leave in a hurry.
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to making sure that your your home has a defensible space and and by that we mean keeping the the the trees trimmed back the the brush and all that Keeping debris off your roof because most fires When there's a big wildfire event that comes through most of the fires Aren't initial most of the homes lost aren't lost on the initial flame front
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burning through. mean, on rare occasions, like, unfortunately, we just saw in Spokane, or down in California last year, you get those crazy wind driven fires and yeah, burns a whole neighborhood. But in general, in wildfires, it's the slow creeping fire that burns through the grass, and then comes right up against the house and then catches the sighting on fire. So just keep in keeping your house.
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you know, clean around it. um, yeah, I'd say that's probably one of the biggest, both Joe and I have been out on wildland deployments before where, uh, one of the things we do as first responders is we, we try to get ahead of where the fire is going to be and triage homes, right? And, and we have different categories for those homes. Like, Hey, this house is salvageable based on it doesn't have a bunch of stuff piled up against it, you know, um,
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If there's things that we can do to like prep a home for a fire front coming through, we'll do that. But if there's too much stuff, have to say, okay, this one's a write off, we're gonna have to go to the next one. And we try not to do that if at all possible. But there are unfortunately some of those homes that fall into that category just because it is unsafe.
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For us to try to stay in there. Maybe it's an access issue to where there's a one way in and one way out and the you know, there's no turnaround or something like that So yeah, so those are just a few things that that people can do to try to Better their their or make their homes more resilient in the event of a wildfire
29:07
I did want to circle back one other thing back on the farm stand app, if I may. One of the cool things that FarmStand Fresh and Local does is we really want to empower people to support their neighbors, even if they don't have a farm themself, but they know of their favorite farm stand or their favorite flower stand just down the street. Users can add that farm stand on the map.
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And I think with empowering the users to be able to support their neighbors in that way and their farmers in that way, that's just kind of one of the cool features of this app is it not too many other of the other apps that are out there have that feature. And so I think that that's kind of one of the unique things with ours that we're trying to we're trying to give.
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empower people to help support their local farms so that we can all eat healthier and help the local farms. That's amazing. I love that. And as I keep saying, a rising tide raises all ships and that's what you're doing. So fabulous. And I'm always saying on this podcast, we need to we need to shop local and we need to support our local producers because
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We can't always rely on a local or federal government to come in and bail us out. If we are connected with our communities and we know who makes what and who grows what, we're better off shopping in our own little bubble. Yeah, by 100%. Yeah. And it makes us all healthier, right? yeah, because you know where your food's coming from. It's just better.
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Yes. And you were saying that you had Zooks and Cukes last year. We have tomatoes this year. Oh, So many tomatoes. And my husband has been selling 10 pound flats for 25 bucks and they're just gone. They're gone. People are like, do you have tomatoes? Yep. Sure do. awesome. That's great. Yeah. And I don't know, we're selling San Marzano.
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tomatoes, they have aroma, and beef steaks. And I don't know if either one of those are determinate or indeterminate. So I don't know if we're going to be swimming in tomatoes until the first frost, which is supposed to be in like three weeks, because we heard... I don't know, do you guys know this old story about how when you hear the first locust sing, six weeks from then is the first frost? I have not heard that. That sounds like a Midwest thing, but...
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I would buy that. I heard him singing last night. we're getting close. Yep. heard the first one two or three weeks ago on a Sunday night and I went, well, I know when the tomatoes will be dead. Six weeks from now. That's awesome. but anyway, I don't know what I was saying. Oh, just we have so many tomatoes. We're probably going to be giving some away here in a couple of weeks. Yeah. That's great.
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Because you can't let them go. You can't throw them away. You got to give them away. No, no. Yeah. That's a fact. Yeah. Have you ever canned any of them? We do. We make tomato sauce for spaghetti sauce in the wintertime. And it is so good. When we have to buy tomato sauce from the store, I'm like, God, I don't want it. don't want it. Well, let's build out the farm stand app and then you don't have to buy it at the store.
33:02
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, guys, this has been wonderful. Where can people find you? We are. Oh, go ahead, Joe. No, you first, Okay. We are on both the app store, the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Just search for FarmStandFresh and local. We're also on social media with Facebook and Instagram under the
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The tag farm stand, fresh and local, just all spelled out. Yeah. All righty. Awesome. You can find me at atinyhomestead.com and I'm on Facebook at Atiny Homestead podcast. Thank you so much for your time, you guys. And thank you for the hints about trying to make the outcome better if you're faced with a wildfire barreling down at you. I appreciate it. And I appreciate the work that you do.
34:02
100%. Thank you, Mary. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Mary. was nice meeting you too. All right. Thanks.
