 Yeah, so we're going to talk about pizza farming. We don't have a ton of time to talk about it, and so I'm going to try to zip through it and then hopefully we have some time for questions. So, just a history of the farm. So our farm is called New City Farm. It's a non-profit. It's a part of a non-profit that does youth development work. We started in 2012 with the particular farm project, and then we grow on three acres. It's a social enterprise, so youth employment is the social side of the equation. And then it's run as a small business, that's the enterprise side of the equation. And just to give a sense of what the enterprise side is, like we gross about $80,000 a year in vegetable sales, and last year we did about $20,000 in value-added sales, so the pizza farm is kind of part of that. That's about 80% of our program costs, and then the other 20% is recoup through grants or donations, helping support the social side. We started doing value-added soups before pizzas actually in 2015, so our farm is actually located on the property of a church, and they had the three acres of land. They also had a kitchen that could get licensed as a commercial kitchen, so early on we realized what an asset that was to literally have 100 feet away from our field, a licensed commercial kitchen. So we started doing value-added soups so that when our CSA sharecroft customers come, they can buy a quart of prepared soup as part of their CSA, so $7 a quart. We put them in a little refrigerator at that CSA pickup. So that's our farm. I'm standing on the church's steeple right now. It's a flat steeple. I'm not like on a point or standing on top of a cross or anything like that. And so you can see now from the field, looking back to the church, and then you can see these are the exhaust fans to our kitchen. So really close to a commercial kitchen. So how can we utilize both this neighborhood asset of field space, but then also that kitchen? So these are some of our youths doing everything from the other nice thing about this. We're doing a youth employment program. We were doing four years of growing food with kids. That's kind of fun, but not that fun. Eating soup is a little bit more fun. Eating pizza is sweet, right? So I don't have to push a high school student to eat a pizza, but I got to push them a little bit to hand weed carrots for like three hours, right? And the other thing is you will weed carrots better after you've eaten them, not the other way around. And so a lot of our youths were working in our program and not necessarily getting to eat the fruits of the labor, so to speak. So then once we started making pizzas and soups, we do a staff meal every Wednesday, and whatever soups the team has made that week, that's what the whole group eats. And so two students are working in the kitchen, 10 or maybe out in the field, but they can say like, oh, Aiden, good job on the carrot, ginger, soup, or whatever. So again, we got started in value, not only because of the kitchen, but also because of Joel, who's not here with us, but he's my coworker. And he really had a lot more cooking experience than farming experience, but he had both, which is also important. And so he had about 10 to 15 years in a professional kitchen environment. And so he knew a lot about food prep. Food production is just like farming. It's got a big learning curve to it. You can have a garden, but farming is making money while you're gardening. So you've got to have the right systems, and cooking is the same way, just because you can make really good soup at home, it might have taken you two hours. So you've got to make really good soup, and you've got to do it at a pace. So just kind of keep that in mind. Joel brought all those skills with us. He also had a lot of food safety knowledge through that, and that becomes extremely important. And you're thinking about doing value-added production. There's no better way to put your farm completely out of business than to give somebody a coli. So when you get to the value-added level, there's no intermediary. So you've got to be really on point with that. So I always tell Joel, don't kill anybody. Because if he kills anybody, not only is that bad, but the farm is out of business, too. The whole user point, it's just all of it goes. And I know of a farm that they were doing dairy, and then they were making cheese on site, and they did have any coli issue with their cheese. Both businesses go bankrupt at the same time. So be on guard. So as I said, we started with soup, and then we did some condiments as well. We got started with pizzas because of Heather. I should know her last name. She just did a farmer-to-farmer podcast about two months ago. So definitely check that out. Curtis Milsamp, who also was quoted in the thing, he's doing pizza farming. So there's a couple farmer-to-farmer podcasts. But there was an NPR article. I was driving to the co-op to get cover crop seed. And they're talking to this woman, Heather, in Madison, Wisconsin, not in Madison, Wisconsin, about an hour out of Madison. And she's just talking about making pizza. And all these people showing up eating pizza. And I got back, and I told Joel, we're making a pizza. And he's like, of course we are. And so that's where the idea came from. So I'm not original in that. And Wisconsin is really pretty far ahead with this whole pizza farming concept. And they make it like you do a wine-tasting route. Check out, and you can go online. And it's like this new agritourism thing that's bringing people out to their farms. And her farm is beautiful. It's in this beautiful valley. She's got playground equipment around. Wisconsin liquor laws are awesome. So she's got a bar. And she's got a band playing. And people wait about an hour and a half for a pizza. She's doing like 300 pizzas a night. And I got three small kids. So I'm seeing myself watching my kids while I'm drinking my beer. And they're not asking me anything. I'm just drinking my beer and eating pizza. And that's like, there's something there, right? So we got a farmer rancher grant. This is kind of how we used it to go out to Wisconsin for a lot of time. Some of our staff time. We did some pizza demos for the farmers in our area. And then we also did a workshop when we built our own pizza oven. And this is what we were trying to do. Compare profitability value added soups and pizzas. We want to know which one had a better margin. We also were trying to think about which one uses seconds better. That's a huge draw, right? So one of the things that Joel really likes to do is make sweet potato sauce for our pizzas. A, because most people have never experienced that. And B, because it's amazing. And then C, it's because every year 10% of our sweet potatoes have a mouse bite on the top of them. And so he just chops that part off. He gives it a good healthy inch away. But then all that becomes sweet potato sauce. So tomatoes are also notorious for giving you seconds quality. We use, you can't use slicers to make pizza sauce. I mean, you got to use sauce tomatoes. But you can, all those peppers, to get the little black spot at the end of it, chop that off, that's, you're gonna put peppers on top of the pizza. Soups will gobble up seconds a lot more. But that's kind of what we were trying to think about. We were also trying to think about how it might increase our CSA share. So, and Michigan, we are definitely post peak CSA shares. And it seems like that's a pretty common theme as I go around. So how do you differentiate yourself in the market? And we do our pizza sales at the same time as our CSA pickup. And there's some pros and cons of that. The cons are you got a lot of stuff going on at the same time. The positive is when your customer is coming to pick up, you've just changed like a weekly chore into like the weekly highlight. And so the three kids that are in the car after school are now eating pizza and they're really happy. And it's not like, oh, we had to do that right between. It's a fun thing now. And it's not this another annoying thing that I have to do between all the other things that I have to do. This is Heather's farm. She had a pizza oven outside initially. And then as she wanted to extend her pizza nights, she actually built, this is her initial kitchen on the right, and then this room was off of that. And that oven was originally outdoors. And then as her business has really grown, she then added, she expanded the kitchen because she needed more space. And then she actually moved the oven indoors because she's doing pizza nights in October now and it's Wisconsin. So who knows what kind of weather you're gonna get. You don't want to be slinging pizza in like sleet and all this kind of thing. She's also got a nice barn and sleeting area. So that's her bar. I like beer if you don't notice. This is her menu. So she's doing 16 inch pizzas. We do 12, but just to give a sense, she's just $20 plus for a pizza. And that's the right price because these are all local ingredients. Good flowers, good meats. She raises meat on her farm. We also visited a smaller community farm in Wisconsin. They built this pizza oven. So they're also just trying to scope out different pizza oven ideas. Whereas we were talking in that, what we had just seen Heather's farm and what was so interesting about hers is like, what we learned the most that we needed to be thinking about was crowd management. Because you're gonna have a lot of people coming to your farm. And I'll talk about that a little bit later, but it was like, how are you gonna manage this and just flow. And then this oven, it was cool, but we're like, where's your commercial kitchen? And it was like five blocks away. And so we were kind of like scratching our head. We're just saw Heather have to like, add another kitchen space, you know, and think really carefully about that. And we were kind of like, that's cool. Like that would be cool to do community garden things, but to do pizza oven night events like that, you just have to be thinking about that. And we were kind of like, yeah, we don't know. So anyway, and that's kind of their space. They're thinking about eating in. So that Milstaff farm, this is, I made a lot of this presentation last year, but episode one of one of the farm of Pompecas has some great stuff about how they do pizza. They also do it in a way that they've kind of bypassed their food inspector. They've did it while talking to them, which is important. Don't just like, think you're gonna bypass the food inspector. That's not a good idea. But they kind of did like a club thing, kind of like a CSA thing. And it sounded to me a lot of the ways like when a dairy farmer sells raw milk. It's kind of like they were doing the same thing with pizza. So you don't necessarily maybe have to have a commercial kitchen, but you got to talk to your food inspector or whoever before you make that decision. I'm not gonna talk about how we build our pizza oven because I don't have enough time to. I'll just flip through a lot of pictures to let you know that it's a pretty intensive project. I have a construction background. I actually used to work in Stucco before farming and then did home renovations for a while. So this was like my dream, like this was just fun for me, but it took a frickin' lot of time. But there's a YouTube video that we did do. It's on YouTube and there's a couple other videos on it. It's on our Facebook page. I'll have my contact information or if you go to newcityfarm.org, my contact's on there. You can email me if you have trouble finding it. This is just to say, there are some different options in building that. So you can build these ovens. So you're cooking pizza at 800 degrees. The oven is gonna be up at 1,000 degrees. So you're not gonna play around with this. Like things like blow up at that temperature. Molecules really like to expand at 1,000 degrees. So things will crack and you gotta know what you're doing. So you can build it. You can get a kit from FornoBravo.com. Like that's like if you wanna build a pizza oven, you wanna go to FornoBravo.com and that's gonna give you all the resources that you need. You can get a kit with just, you're not gonna go to Home Depot and buy bricks from Home Depot. You gotta have fire rated bricks for that. You gotta have insulation around it that's all fire rated up to 2,000 degrees. We got like a pallet with all those ingredients in it for $2,000 for our oven which is I think a 36 inch diameter in the center. And then we built it brick by brick. Heather built hers with a module which is that middle picture. And I think that's around about $8,000 and they ship you like six really large plates and it's a lot easier to put it together. But your price obviously just went up quite a bit. Or we have a wood fire place that just opened up in us and like one of those downtown market things and you can get the whole thing shipped to your location too. And that's like about 12 grand depending on the shipping but they're gonna just drop the whole thing right there and you don't have anything to worry about they know what they're doing. So yeah, I'm gonna flip through. We're up in Michigan so we got a good frost line. You don't want this thing to start leaning over after a little bit. It's also heavy, it's probably like 4 or 5,000 pounds literally. So here we keep going and you take a selfie if you're a high school student. And then we needed a space. So Heather has this great advantage of being like in a rural area and this beautiful valley. And so her draw is like we're having pizza in this beautiful valley. We're an urban farm so we don't have that same dynamic so we wanted to create like a nice outdoor eating space. And so this last spring, the spring before we built the pizza oven and it kind of went into August and that's why it took forever because it's like build it for six hours and then go weed and then back and forth. And then this spring we built an outdoor patio. That's our commercial kitchen. We had to do a pass-through window after talking to our food inspector and come up with a plan for how that's gonna be doing. The other thing I was gonna say, talk to your food inspector or maybe talk to your extension agent first and who should I talk to? Because sometimes you can get certified through like we call it MDAR, the Michigan Department of Agriculture but I guess you're, how do you guys pronounce it in Indiana? Who is your, what's the, how do you say it? Okay. That's harder to say. But you wanna talk to them because sometimes those that food safety stuff can come through them. But we actually, and there's different ways to do it but we already had a food inspector because we were licensed commercial so we started talking to them and what do you need, what do you want? And generally they're pretty helpful. The other thing you wanna talk to particularly if you're in an urban space is your zoning department because that also matters. And so for example, we really lucked out we could not cook within 200 feet of a residential property and where we initially wanted to put our oven was like 190 feet away from residential property. And then we were able to just move it 10 feet and put it, and that thing is a tank. If I would have built that thing, like I was saying when Korea does their thing, I'm gonna crawl into the oven. And so I was like, we couldn't move it. So you just wanna talk to zoning and figure out like what do they want because if somebody complains they can shut you down or they can be like, oh, you have to move that 10 feet. And if you know that at the front end, not a problem but you know that on the back end, big problem, you know? So think about that. This is what the spinach base look like. And then this is people eating pizza. And these are students loving to make pizza and loving to sell people pizza. And these are some of our pizzas. And so then I always like to have some kind of numbers behind things because you go to presentations and you hear these amazing things that people are doing and then how are they paying for it is what I always wanna know. But these are some of the things that we do in terms of soups and in terms of different kinds of pizzas we make. But then here's some of the numbers and these are just based on 2016. That was when our project was funded. So we grew quite a bit from that year to this year. But really what we were trying to tease out of these numbers is what is our margin? Like revenue doesn't really matter. I don't know why farms like love to talk around revenue so much. I'm more interested in what your hourly average wage is. That's the number we're always trying to measure. And by the way, I've done that with seven farmers and the average of the seven farmers was $6.66 an hour, which is a demonic number for one, which is a problem. But also it's just a problem. So like what Chris was saying, if the numbers don't work you're gonna be stressed out all the time. And that's part of what's leading us to think through this as well. So when we're doing soups, we're making $32 an hour. So I was making 6.66 and now I'm making 32. When I'm doing pizzas I'm doing $22 an hour. And then when I'm doing pickles and condiments I'm only doing 16. Now that's not a true comparable because these are just, these are variable costs. They don't have our fixed costs in it. So fixed costs would be all of our infrastructural costs that are just gonna hang over. This is just us like, what are the ingredients you put in the pizza and how many hours did it take you to prep that pizza, make that pizza, sell that pizza or do that with the soup. And so when I did the 6.66 number that was everything. That was fixed and variable. So it's not a true comparable in that regard. But it would be hard for us to tease all that out. We have a free kitchen. So that's a big thing to think about. If you were gonna, so we thought, we have some incubator kitchens by us. So we were particularly thinking about soup doing incubator kitchens. Incubator kitchens by us are about $20 an hour. And so if you went in there with just yourself and you were making soups in an incubator kitchen you would still be making $12 an hour. So that's like fixed and variable at that point. I mean, I guess you have, if your health benefits and stuff if you want to throw all that in and you should. But then if you put two workers in there or three workers and you increase, you're maximizing that hourly thing, your hourly wage will go up. If you're doing condiments, we found you're actually losing money by the time you do it you would lose about $3 an hour. So you might feel good about like not throwing away all those cucumbers and not pickling like, okay, I all pickled them and everything but people don't really want to pay that much unless it's like McClure's pickles or whatever. But even that, I'm sure they have like some pretty significant processing facilities that allow them to do that at scale and at a pace that's efficient. If you're just doing it kind of in an incubator kitchen I think you're gonna be hard pressed to find that you're gonna make a good hourly wage. Is this a good use for seconds? So this was another question that we were trying to ask. So soups down here, percentage of vegetables that we're using that are second. So soups just kill it. I mean, soups are like pretty much all vegetables and there's a lot of seconds that you can easily use in soups whereas pizzas, A, you're buying in dough and oil which we don't do, we also don't do animals. So we're buying in, we do do meats on our pizza and we have a good local butcher that we work with. So we're paying for quite a bit of the ingredients off and then we're making our own sauce and we're doing all the vegetable toppings. So we don't use as much seconds with that and you can use quite a bit of seconds like a lot of times you get a broccoli head that will go wonky or something like that. Joel loves broccoli seasoning he's making broccoli cheddar soup all the time. I love Joel for that because then all of the broccoli that I should have harvested yesterday aren't just going and getting composted, we're using that stuff and then he's actually making more money when we do that than if I sell it. So I shouldn't even draw the regular broccoli I guess. I don't know, he's kind of mad at me but. So here's some things that we thought that you might want to think about. Is this the right thing to do? So kind of getting back to the capital investments we had some assets in place. So if you didn't have those assets in place and you had to put in a commercial kitchen you need to run the numbers to make sense of if that's a good decision for you. One idea I have had, because most of that's the biggest pushback I get when I talk about this is I think if you are a farm like and you're in that moment where you're gonna like up the pack and wash station I think there's some interesting space to overlay the two together. A lot of the things you need for a commercial kitchen like a washable wall, a triple sink, a hand washing station. These are all things that a good pack and wash station need. So maybe you design your, I just saw, who did the talk yesterday on the wash and pack station? What's that? Yes, he was great. His wash and pack station, one of the things he designed was like hey this was an urban farm all their sinks and stuff could move in and out of that wash and pack. So I'd be really curious to build a wash and pack with having that in mind. Maybe we're using this as a kitchen to make pizzas two days out of the week and we're using it at our wash pack when we're going to farmers markets. I don't know, it's just an idea or I thought I don't have to figure it out because I have one, but it's an idea. But you do want to know what your fixed costs are like and then depreciate that over time and be like okay, that patio was a $45,000 investment for us. So that's going to take a while to pay that back. So think about that. The bigger thing to me is do you have the skills for commercial kitchen cooking? And so don't think it's not a skill set. Like I think times people don't think farmers really have a skill set, but then when you do it you're like this is really hard to figure out how to weed effectively and efficiently and to make money doing it. I think cooking when I watch Joel is completely the same. So if you don't have, I think in the same way you would expect somebody to run a farm that they've worked out a farm for a couple of years. I think you need to work in a commercial kitchen for a couple of years if you're going to get into it. You can do it the hard way too. I never actually worked on a farm before I started farming and it took me a lot longer to make something decent of a living. And then you got to make sure you insured food safety. I think I scared you about that enough earlier. But then some value that you also can think about. So you have an increased exposure to potential customers. So we had a lot of late CSA signups this year because they were eating pizza. So the pizza cafe is open to the general public. They're coming for pizza on a Thursday. They get to see the CSA pick up at the same time. So we drew in a lot more CSA customers. Probably another five or 10 CSA customers in June when the cafe opened. We only run the cafe from June to August when all of the students are out of school. The CSA we run from May to the third week of December. But in that moment when the cafe was open we saw a lot more people interested in it. And then we haven't measured because it was between this year and next like what our CSA retention numbers are if they change because now people are having a more satisfactory experience with their CSA. I think the other thing we've always struggled with with CSA is we've never done community events well. You know like some CSAs are like really great at like loving their customers and bringing them on farm. I just have, we've just never have really done that well and this became like a win-win for that because now they're hanging out on the farm and we're making money at the same time. So we're being fairly compensated for all that effort because it's a lot of effort to put on an event like that. And it doesn't feel weird for somebody to be paying for a pizza at it. You know, nobody was complaining about that. And then it was fun for us. Like it was fun for me to hang out in the cafe and then I could eat pizza with a customer that's been with us for three or four years. And when they're just going through a CSA line you just don't have the same experience. So I really enjoyed that part of it. And then for us it was a great educational thing to bring that our employees all send go from the full circle right all the way from seed to pizza. And then existential questions. Do you wanna have a farm or do you wanna have a pizza farm? Because like Heather's business it's a pizza farm more than it's a farm from when I went and experienced it and kind of as I heard her talk about it at the podcast more of her revenue I think is coming from pizza than it is from her two acres of vegetable growing. And I think when she was talking to Chris Blanchard she was, I think they even stopped CSA. So they've kind of almost gone through the entire circle and just realized we're gonna just grow on these two acres for our pizza nights. Which also kind of gets at the other panel's thing when it's like how do we do the farm to table thing well and truthfully? Like let's just do it all ourselves because then you don't need to deal with an annoying chef who's like greenwashing you. You're doing it all yourself. And then the other thing I kind of touched on a little bit will you enjoy weekly crowds at your farm? If you're gonna have 200 people show up what are they gonna do for the two hours? Heather was talking about people falling into her fire that she had and kids trampling on her vegetables because there's a whole bunch of kids running around. Where are they all gonna park? Where are they all gonna go to the bathroom? You gotta think about all those things. So crowd management, where are, how are you gonna move all those people? Think about lunch and the really long line that we had at lunch today and how that's stressful. And you saw the caterers being really stressed and the people in line really stressed. You can only make like four pizzas at a time. They cook in three minutes, but you can't make 200 pizzas all at the same time. So Heather has lines like we're getting them out pretty quick. Like in an hour, we didn't have anybody wait more than 15 minutes. We also didn't advertise to anybody. So to put in perspective this year, we did like of this last year, we did 10 nights and we averaged about $2,000 in sales every time we did it. It was on a Thursday from 1230 to six. So it wasn't even on any kind of prime time hours. And we advertised to no one. I was like, don't tell anybody about this because Heather freaked me out and I didn't want all those people coming. And actually that was the right crowd for us. Like that was like perfect. We got a good rush at lunchtime when our first CSA customers are coming and we had a bigger rush at dinnertime. But we could get them a pizza in 15 minutes but we didn't have the band playing for an hour. And that's why Heather had to kind of figure out what are you gonna, if they're gonna wait for an hour, what are they gonna do? Or maybe you have to have two ovens or three ovens. So kind of thinking about all that. So I think that's all I got. Those are my contacts, my email and those are our website and our Facebook page. And yeah, shoot with question. So there are mobile wood-fired pizza ovens too. And something to think about too is maybe your farm doesn't even wanna get into this but maybe you do wanna have four pizza nights at your farm. And I think a good option is talking to the mobile wood-fired pizza oven guy and say, hey, will you use my toppings? We'll collaborate in advertising this thing. I get 20% because it's on my farm and I'm gonna give you the customers to my CSA and I'm gonna advertise it but you take the other 80. And now you don't need to know how to do pizza. You don't need to have any infrastructure in place and you have 10 really cool events at your farm. You get some of those other tendential benefits of like CSA customers are more excited and more interested. So that would be where I might think about starting. Yeah. Oh, so did all the ingredients for the soups come from the farm? So no, like that percentage is like 90, like over 90% did but we don't make cheese. So if he's doing a broccoli. So you just labeled that like for the transparency stuff. How do you communicate that? Yeah, so what we do is it's a quart jar and it has a little card on it with a label on it. Like a glass ball jar? Glass ball jar with a little string with a little label on it with our logo on it and a broccoli cheddar soup. It has our expiration date on it. So when he makes the soups, what he does is he hot packs them and they seal and they'll keep very long because they seal we only let people keep them for two weeks but we actually used to have an expiration date of a month and we bumped that back to two weeks now but they have to be refrigerated the whole time. If you know anything about canning, like it doesn't do anything for botulism but it will preserve it quite well but it has to be, it has to stay below that temp the entire time and you can't, you don't get botulism. Yeah, so it's just like keep refrigerated used by two weeks past when he made it and then it will have all of our ingredients and there'll be an asterisk and every one of them that are off of the farm and then we only use organic ingredients when they're sourced from off. And do you have to include nutritional information like you see in the store? We originally did that and the food sector actually said we don't need to do that. So we did originally do that and when we talked to him about it because of the limit, like I think if we were going into a retail establishment with it, then he was gonna want that but when we described the context by which we were selling it, he didn't require that. When did your customers bring those drugs back? Yeah, they love bringing them back. Yeah, I mean they love it because they don't want to waste plastic all the time either and so then they'll be like, oh my grandma has like a hundred jars in my basement or whatever. We're still buying jars for sure but like, I bet you about 10% of the jars we use we're actually purchasing and then the rest come in and then really what we're doing is kind of buying some and then there's just ways where they kind of forget and if we send out an email to the shareholders or put up a sign at the CSA pickup, hey, we like, love to have your jars back then people will tend to remember and they'll bring like 15 back but a lot of times I think it's just, it's something people forget to do. So we're in an urban neighborhood so it's very easy to get employees because there's a lot of kids that want to work and they don't want to work at McDonald's which is their next best alternative and so yeah, so we've actually never advertised a high school job position. It's generally word of mouth just through our former high school employees and stuff and as we've built relationships with some of the school we let them know of the opportunity and sometimes a counselor will kind of identify some student and send them our way but mainly it's from the students talking to their friends. Yep, so first year students come as an intern and so they get $1,000 stipend for the summer then second year students get $9 an hour and third year students get $10 an hour.