I get really obsessed with things from being younger.
It went from being a pet store owner to being
a rock star. Now, this is my obsession
and it really shows the problem with agriculture is that
there's not enough young people getting into it. The
average medium of a farmer is like 60 or something
and looking at food security down the line, if
no one wants to do what I'm doing, then
we're gonna be in a place of trouble. I'm
a normal 26 year old kid, like I go
out, I have fun. But this is my
job. I come here. It's a lot of
balance and it's a lot of coffee. I grew
up in an Italian household. My grandfather, I
would spend the weekends there. It was kind of
my job being the oldest kid to take care of
his yard. Some of my earliest memories I remember
is like picking zucchini or tomatoes or cucumbers with him
in his garden and he's 86. He's still harder
working than me, honestly. Yeah, they're proud
for the most part. I'm not a doctor,
but I'm still running a decent business in Burlington and
having fun. So they're happy for me. What
we do here is called intensive chemical free market gardening
. We garden with just manure and then compost.
That's the only inputs that we put into the garden
. We don't use power tools or tractors or anything
like that. They're all hand tools. Everything's on
a hand scale. I'm a nerd about the environment
. I wanna see the way that I'm growing food
and the way that my business is running and the
way that I'm building this kind of community around this
farm is also improving the natural world. Basically,
I wanna grow in a way that is improving everything
around me. The food in the grocery stores,
that food is old when you're getting it, the
lettuce mix that you get in the grocery store and
it goes bad in five days is because it's three
weeks old and you get it. Our lettuce mix
has a three week shelf life. We've kind of
as a society gotten away from local with Ryan's Market
Gardens. I wanna get as local as possible.
You just can't be local.