 Sarah is so special. It's a farmer-directed grant arm from the USDA that started in 1988 with the farm bill because the USDA knew that farmers are always on the cutting edge to find applied solutions to their problems that they have. Liz Brownlee, Liz and her husband Nate raise livestock on pasture at Nightfall Farm in Southeast Indiana. They sell via farmers markets, restaurants and independent groceries, but their meat and egg CSA is the cornerstone of their farm. They typically have 50 families in their CSA and over 90% retention. They raise meat chickens, lane hens, sheep, pigs and turkeys on 50 acres. Liz works as director of farmer programs for Partners in Food and Farming, PIF, which I would love to hear more about that too, Liz. So my husband and I farm in Southeast Indiana. We're practically in Kentucky, and so we are in a very rural space. We're right where the glaciers stopped, if you can picture it, so it goes from flat, flat, flat, flat to hilly. And we're on my family's farm, so we worked on farms up in New England for about five years learning, worked on organic farms, and most of them had CSAs, and we learned a ton from seeing that behind the scenes reality. So if you're still in that aspiring phase, I highly encourage you to, or even if you already farm but you're thinking of adding a CSA, find somebody who has a CSA near you and work on their farm to help with distro. I would love for somebody to offer that to me if you're near me. Come help me with pickup days and see what it's like, what the decisions are behind the scenes, what the stress points are in organizing pickup days, things like that. We saw it work really well, both as collaborative CSAs where 14 farmers were working together in Pennsylvania and doing a unified share. We saw individual farms doing meat CSAs that really worked, and that's what got us excited. So we actually run a meat and egg CSA only, no vegetables, and we've mostly talked about veggies and meat so far, but I'll add you mentioned soup, right? We've seen soup CSAs and cheese CSAs and bread CSAs and all sorts of cool stuff. We stick to the non-perishables, and I would say that's one of the keys to our CSA is that there is no getting overwhelmed because if you don't have time to cook that week, you throw it in the freezer. And as long as you don't do that with six consecutive months of chicken, you're going to be fine. Okay, so let me zoom out a little bit now that you know roughly who I am and where I'm from. I wanted to say on the SARE grants, raise your hand if you love SARE farmer rancher grants. Who's already in love? Oh, I can convince a bunch of you then. Okay, great. So if you don't already know, SARE has a bunch of different sorts of grants, and their farmer rancher grants are specifically for farmers who are doing something innovative, trying something out that's either new to their state. They're not really neat. Let's say maybe in Michigan, they're killing it with X practice. They know how to grow, you know, I don't know, something really neat. Like they can grow mushrooms on an urban farm, and I'm an urban farm in Indiana, and nobody's doing that. I could apply for a SARE grant to take a known idea that's innovative and sustainable and try it in my place. Or if there's just an idea that I haven't heard of anybody else trying, I could apply for funds to do that thing. So the SARE grant that my farm that we applied for, we went into Cahoots with another farm, because here's another cool thing about SARE grants. You can ask for money. I think it's up to $9,000 for one farm. But if you go in with others, you can ask for more money, which is even better. So we had two farms, so we asked for like 18 grand, and if you go up to three farms, you can ask for $27,000. That's a lot of money. It's not going to change the world, but it might change your farm. So that's the other key thing, is that you can really think strategically about how a SARE grant can not only research and try out something innovative and help other farmers, because a key piece of it is that you're sharing out. Whatever you learn, you share through talks or videos or some way to get the word out, because the whole idea is this is government money, right? They don't want it just to help one individual business. They want it to help lots of farmers. But also, can you use that SARE grant as a way to take some big step forward? So for our CSA, with meat, a big bottleneck was processing. It's a problem for farmers all across the Midwest, all across the nation, in fact. And so we wanted to find out what is the very smallest processing facility that you could open and make money? How small could it get? Because our farm and our friend's farm, Palmer Bowers Farm, said they raise cattle. We do sheep and turkeys and chickens and pigs. And for all of those animals, it's really hard to get a butcher date. And maybe you know this well. You know, in March, I called on the first day the butcher was taking butcher dates for sheep, and they said, how's December 27th? And I said, sold, I'll take it, because that was the only date I could get. You're scheduling months, if not years out at this point. So we wanted to know, could we open our own farm processing facility that would be state inspected? And would it ever pencil out? Would we make any money? So our project was actually a feasibility study, because we felt like we've kind of got the CSA thing working. And their farm felt like they had the freezer beef thing working. It wasn't selling our product that was the problem. It was getting from animal to product. And so we hired some fancy people who knew how to do the math. And we paid ourselves to meet every month for two years to work through these questions. And we worked with a chef. And basically we put together a really cool set of resources that we have not utilized. So we've actually decided not to open a processing facility at this point. They might, they're like thinking about it and working on the local zoning things needed to open the facility. But in some ways that's what a feasibility study is supposed to do. Help you decide. Do I want this or not? And I would say once a month at least somebody emails us out of the blue and said, Hey, I found your thing online about your SAIR project. And we're thinking about opening a facility in fill-in-the-blank state. And it was really helpful because we hadn't yet seen a free floor plan and layout for a really small facility. We hadn't yet seen an equipment list of what you'd need. So we developed all those tools and now they live on our website. And if that's useful to you, I'm not trying to get clicks because these don't do me any good, but nightfallfarm.com. And there's like an about us and you click processing. And SAIR paid for all of that. And so we really wanted to get out to other farmers and be useful to other farmers. It's not directly helping our CSA, which is kind of a bummer. It's not directly helping our farm, although it did probably save us a lot of money. I think it helped us realize like, wow, that could pencil out. We came up with a budget for three species. So all red meat, right? Lamb, pork, beef. A facility that'd be open with one and a half employees and it can pencil out in 10 years. It'll pay for itself and it'll be viable. But we realized like, wow, we don't want to do that. It sounds miserable. We decided that that wasn't for us because that would be all the work every single week. Whereas right now my husband and I are one and a half people farming. And that helped us realize we wanted to be outside farming. So that was our SAIR project. What do we do on our farm? I wanted to tell you. Let's see. So when we moved home to Indiana, we wanted our farm to be a piece of the solution on climate change and on rebuilding our rural communities. So that's really been the focus. And you were spot on that the first, yeah, your first chunk of CSA members are people you know. So our first year we started with 12 CSA members and we knew every one of them. And now we're at 50 really consistently and we really like that number. That's what our farm can sustain. Our rural place could not have a 400 member CSA. I don't know 400 people who would buy a CSA. And that's okay. That's where we're at. It's a pretty poor community and for a lot of people value means cheap. So finding our members has been a really interesting process. You would think that our members are all well to do and they are not. We have a lot of school secretaries and nonprofit workers and military families and factory workers. We also have doctors and professors, but it's a real cross section. And I think the unifying thing is that people prioritize good food. So they might come to us for a really wide breadth of reasons. So some people when we ask, why are you joining? They say, oh, I care about the environment. And other people say it's for humane animal practices. And other people say I want to support small businesses in my local community. But when we ask why they stay, they say it's because it tastes good. And that makes me really happy. And so we get these people who wouldn't normally interact standing in line to pick up their CSA share interacting. And that feels like a real win. Let's see. What else about the CSA? In terms of connection, I want to add to your connection list. So we do things like tree plantings and potlucks, recipe books, things like that for our CSA members. We're going to make t-shirts this winter. We're going to have like a t-shirt making party. That should be fun. And then just to bring it back to the CSA or to the SEAR project, I do still hope to make jerky. If anybody out there has figured out how to do jerky in a commercial kitchen while following all the rules, let me know. I haven't figured it out yet, but the SEAR project did really help us realize, like, oh, even though we're going to have to deal with those longer wait times at the butcher and schedule way ahead, there are still some other pieces of that processing and value added puzzle that we think we could solve. And maybe that's another SEAR grant. I don't know. Because people don't all love lamb, but almost everyone loves jerky. And if that jerky happened to be made of lamb, I think they'd be okay with it. So we're trying to figure these things out. How do we offer things that make our CSA members' lives easier and sell the products that we want to raise?