 My name is Jeremy Calvert, my wife and I are married in 99 and I've been in vegetable production now for better than 20 years. We've been growing strawberries for about 14 or 15 years. We started out in wholesale red potatoes and we were already doing that and we'd do a limited amount of tomatoes and not a whole lot, but she and I would do that just for kind of for extra money and then we were in commercial broilers as well. We're going to head over and look at the strawberries. We can't get there with a truck right now. I take that back. We can get there right now, but it's just so muddy. I don't put any vehicles in the field if at all possible. We just have five and a half inches total the last three days, something to that effect. We're up to two acres of strawberries now and probably going to have to increase a little bit more from that. The first year my wife and I planted and it was just me and her. We planted 6,000 plants and I picked them all by myself and she sold them. She'd helped me pick when she had time, but that's how we started out. This field was in no-till production four years prior to this. Two years of that was in no-till soybeans. A year of it was in no-till pumpkins and then last year it had a cover crop of over winter to cover crop of rye clover and vetch and then we drilled in sun hemp on top of that, terminated it the last week of July and we laid this plastic. Some was around the 10th of September if I remember correctly. I never irrigate fruit that we're about to pick. We pick, then I irrigate. By that time the fruit's already on a dry cycle and so sugar content's going to be at its highest when you pick, you know. That's my goal and that's the reason to have computerized irrigation. You don't forget and leave the water on. When berries have long stems like this and big calyx, you see how wide this berry here is. It's not a perfect example of what I would consider, but if it has the right conditions on it and I'll do my job and it's left till it's prime to pick, that berry would be as big as upon my hand. I've got pictures of them from years past when they do that. Not everyone's going to do that, but I can tell you that one will. I can tell by looking at it. When you see one that's small, say like this right here, you might get a big berry out of that, but it doesn't have the potential that this other one has. They're just two very different systems there. And of course you can also see what's coming on. There's a lot coming on here. I hadn't counted the crowns on any of the plants yet. If they hadn't changed, they say the perfect strawberry plants between 7 and 11 crowns per plant. That's the perfect plant. And those things are always, a lot of the time, out of our control. That's just something we can't always control that. All of our strawberry buckets come from Southern Container in Wilson, North Carolina. And some of our peach baskets come from them and then we've started using a new peach basket supplier out of Clanton this time for our peach baskets. Our boxes come from one of two places. They come from the Birmingham Farmers Market. The market in Birmingham actually keeps wax boxes for their growers for squash, cucumbers, pepper, stuff like that. And they also keep tomato boxes. I'll either get tomato boxes from them or Blunt County Co-op. They handle all that kind of stuff. We do wholesale some berries, but that's not the goal. The goal is retail. If I was a young beginning grower, that's what I would be focused on as that retail dollar. Without that, it's tough. There's just not enough money there. The product goes through too many hands taken out of the pie and at the end of the day you don't get paid enough. You think I can sell 100 buckets a day at any given day selling strawberries? Well, strawberries don't pick that way. One day you may pick 50 buckets and the next day you may pick 150. So in order to compensate for those days that you pick 50, you've got to have a little bit more production than what you need, which means inevitably sooner or later you're going to have to wholesale some. And we've got a few outlets where we sell some to some schools and just some other different wholesale outlets I've picked up over the years. If I had to say one thing that was kind of challenging for us over the years is, we didn't grow up in the vegetable industry, so we really didn't know anybody. And it took 20 years to get some of the contacts that I've got now, not because people didn't want to buy from us, but because they didn't know us or they already had a supplier or maybe they thought their supplier did a little better job or maybe later on they think I'd do a little better job. Who knows, but it just took time to build all those contacts. The effects of the COVID pandemic had on my particular operation was honestly in the field it didn't really change very much. At retail markets it changed things a lot for us. The way we built our store enabled us to basically turn it into a drive-thru. And we did that with everything except pumpkins and it's just hard to have a pumpkin drive-thru. It just won't work. We had some consumers that didn't like it. They wanted to be able to get out and touch it and examine their product. For the vast majority of people they really liked it. One of the biggest benefits I think came out of it was in retail vegetable business, we've always had a problem with consumers wanting to touch the product. Well, we eliminated that and it gave us a good reason to. We started web sales and initially it was pretty good but as the pandemic wore on and people got a little less afraid, it kind of got to where it wasn't as good as what it once was. I wouldn't say we're not doing it anymore but it's just not what it once was. And another thing for us, we're kind of established. We've been here for several years now and so we don't really worry too much about advertising. She'll advertise on Facebook because it's cheap. I would encourage any grower to do that. It's just cheap free advertising and if you want to boost a post it's relatively cheap to do that. We do our best to sell the strawberry the day it's picked or the next. Very rarely will it ever go the next day. It's hard to put a product in a consumer's hand that's been picked for three days. It's good, that's what I'm trying to say. We generally, especially in peak season, we may be picking strawberries most all the day, but we do our best to be done picking by lunchtime because heat's a factor. We try to do that with everything. Doesn't always work that way. But the bad thing about vegetables is you're not selling rocks. Rocks will last from now until eternity. They're not going to go bad. Vegetables should have been sold yesterday. That's just the attitude you got to learn to take. And so what we were talking about post harvest management is it can be a big deal. It's the difference in determining whether your consumer gets a good product or a bad product. You can grow the finest product in the world, but if you don't manage it post harvest and get it to your consumer in a timely manner, it's not going to matter what you do. The issue we have here with spring timing where we live, inevitably we always get a three or four inch rain that can cause some issues. Water cannot stand on plastic. It's just a nightmare. Nothing does well. You cause so many issues. I try to lay fields out where it'll drain, but it don't always work that way. Sometimes there'll be a low spot or a high spot in the field that you'll never notice until you lay plastic on it. But the first thing if you're a beginning farmer, you're going to have to plant ahead enough to have this soil loose. If you've got a cover crop on it or a grass crop of any type, you need to have it plowed under at least a month before you're ready to lay plastic. Once you get the soil loosened up, you can get it weed free and get it in good condition. Then you come back in with a plastic layer and lay off your rows however you want to lay them off. Everybody's got their own different system. As a general rule, I use four foot plastic on most everything except strawberries and we use five foot on it because we double row it. Four foot is much easier to work with. It's easier to lay, easier to get up. It's a third less cost than five foot plastic. You can also go with three foot plastic. I've got a three foot plastic layer, but one of the issues I don't like is the little three foot plastic layer lays on not a tall bed. I like a tall bed for several reasons. Number one, it gets you up out of the water if you've got any standing water anywhere, but the second one is it's much easier to apply herbicides in your middles and not potentially have crop damage. The shallower of that bed, the easier it is to be able to get herbicide up on the plastic where you don't want it and eventually you're going to get it on your cash crop. That's one of the reasons I like tall beds so well. The drawback to tall beds is it takes more water. You've got a bed that's up out of the soil more and it's going to dry a little faster so it's going to take more water. You probably want to consider that with what water source you might have. One of the reasons this plastic is laid so early, I'd love to wait a month to be able to lay plastic, but in our business everything, the earlier the better. It's all about early production if at all possible. I don't pick a low field or something that's not going to dry out fast and you want to pick your highest dry spot to be able to get in there. Well, this fits that category. We'll plant squash and cucumbers here probably in the next 10 days. We'll set out tomatoes no later than the 15th of April and I don't think we've ever had a crop completely taken out by frost. I don't remember one if there has been and we'll probably plant some sweet corn in the next 10 days or so. You'll hear debates back and forth about sweet corn on plastic. I have seen it if you'll treat it properly and take care of it. I've seen it make four years to the stalk. Then what we'll do once we finish that early plant sweet corn we'll go in and mow sweet corn off and come back in with some type of cucurbit crop and get two crops out of it and by doing that it's justifiable in my opinion. It's economically justifiable. Here if I'm not careful I lay such a high bed or run out of plastic. You can see how I've just barely got the edges covered. These first six rows here is where I started and I was still getting everything adjusted and we had to go back and shovel a little bit on some of these. A determinate tomato is one that's going to get about four or four and a half feet and quit growing. An interdeterminate tomato will grow as long as the plant can survive. It'll grow over frost. The problem with interdeterminate tomatoes is, you know, well it's the problem with any vegetable. The farther you get away from that root it's harder to have bigger, pretty fruit. If that makes sense. The closer you are to the root, the easier it is to have big fruit. The reason is you're supporting more plant. Now if you've got a plant that's six foot long and you've got a tomato on the end of it it takes more juice or more plant nutrients whatever you want to call it to make that tomato bigger than it did the plant that was one foot from the root. And so the advantage to determinate tomatoes is they're a little easier to manage. They get so high and they're only going to produce so long the disadvantage is you're going to have to have successive plantings to keep them, to keep steady production. That's the disadvantage to them. We're always experimenting throwing new stuff in just try it and see what happens. Because you know even if you take someone else's word for it that something new works for them that doesn't mean it's going to work on your farm. You've got to experience it for yourself and you never want to just wholeheartedly go into something new without knowing anything about it. You've got to try a little of it to be able to know. And sometimes something that works for someone else might work for you but you're going to have to do it just a little bit differently than they did to get the same results. This field's been in conventional cultivation for two years. It was in no-till prior to that for two or three years and after these two years of conventional cultivation it would go back into no-till probably for four to six years somewhere in that neighborhood with cover crop rotation and also cash crop rotation. Let's say this was in squash and we were picking squash right now and we had a four inch rain. Now we've got two choices to get that squash out of the field. We can either haul it out or we can tote it out. If you put a vehicle out here right now I guess what's going to happen. You're going to get stuck. With no-till you eliminate a lot of that. You can travel on the ground when it's a little bit wetter and there's a lot of things to make it much much better for your soil. We always going to have to do some conventional tillage to get early production. That's just the way it's always going to have to be on black plastic but it doesn't have to be the same spot every year. We move that around and you can only abuse the soil so long you know sooner or later it catches up with you. You've got to take care of it. Anywhere there's a dirt road that's traveled very much and when it's dry if dust comes off that dirt road and floats across any field or any high tunnel that's where you'll have spider mites first. They live in that dust. I don't have a huge problem with mites. We try to stay away from pyrethroid insecticides that has a lot to do with it. If you use a lot of pyrethroids you're going to have more mites. It flares them up. If you get in a streak here where we haven't had rain for four to six weeks you're going to see some spider mites. That's just the kind of weather they love. They love that kind of stuff. They can't take cool wet temperatures. Hot dry weather is what they like. A vegetable grower especially I'd say your number one hurdle is going to be labor. That's a huge issue. We use H2A labor. Without that we would have to make drastic changes without it. It's expensive. It costs you more money. There's a lot of government red tape but at the end of the day you've got legal dependable labor and there's a lot of advantages to it too. This is a blackberry planting that's in its third year. We'll be going into our third year on this blackberry planting. We started out with less than a hundred plants and now I really don't know how many I've got. It's several hundred. How I got started in blackberries was we had contemplating growing some for a few years and Arnold Kaler kind of helped me get started in them and he's been kind of a driving force behind that and has kind of helped us get to where we are now and it's been good for our operation. All of our blackberries came from agri-starts in Florida. They were tissue culture plants. Anybody that wanted to get started in blackberries I'd recommend you go with tissue culture plants. You're just getting a virus-free plant. We went in and pruned them. We're doing our tying system a little different than this now. This is basically just like you would tie a determinate tomato. We've just put string on both sides of it but we're going to convert most of our blackberries over to a tea trellis and I like it better. There's some drawbacks to doing things like this. One of the drawbacks is about the time you're picking a crop of blackberries it's putting up new canes and you don't really have a way to control them so they kind of fall out of the way and inevitably sooner or later you get some wind damage on them and with a tea trellis that's permanent and constant there you don't have all that problem. You've got something to hold that cane while you're picking a crop. We met agri-starts. We met a representative of theirs at vegetable growers conferences. The one in Alabama as well as the one in Savannah, Georgia. We try to go to the one in Savannah, Georgia every year. In the trade show is how we've met a lot of where I've purchased a lot of this stuff but I would encourage any vegetable grower that's serious about it to go to and it never fails. A grower's vegetable conference comes up at the wrong time you need to be doing something on your operation and you think I don't have time to go but it pays off in the long term to go to these classes to go to vegetable conferences and meet other people because everyone that I've ever been to after a while you hear a lot of the same things you see a lot of the same people but I always come away with something. Cover crop is a crop that's planted and not specifically be sold for cash it's planted specifically to build the soil and maintain nutrients and in our case also you can kind of get an idea of the lay of the land to control erosion. Some of our ground it's just it's best not to plow it up if at all possible it doesn't work real well when you get large rains so we totally eliminate all that with cover crops. What we have here is rye, clover and vetch rye seeded in at 50 pounds of acre vetch at around 15 pounds of acre and clover, crimson clover at around 10 if I'm not mistaken. This was planted the first part of last October and basically stays dormant until about now this is March the 19th of 2021 and the last two weeks it's like you can almost stand back and watch it grow but what we'll do is we'll let the cover crop get up to shoulder height on me or so somewhere in that neighborhood and then we'll roll a crimp it down and then we'll do no-till vegetables into this this field will probably be all being no-till pumpkins we had no-till tomatoes here last year some no-till sweet corn and some other crops as well some squash and cucumbers that were no-till but mainly no-till tomatoes here last year we've been using cover crops for probably at least 12 years all of our vegetable crops they're cover cropped this ground will probably stay in a cover crop rotation for 6 years cover crop in the winter and a cash crop in the summer back to cover crop in the winter cash crop it'll probably stay in that rotation for about 6 years or so before we make a change and the whole time we're constantly building organic matter which you can never get enough of and add nutrients to our soil and stop an erosion most of what I know about cover crops came from Arnold Kaler who was superintendent of the experiment station in Cullman in North Alabama and he did a heavily researched cover crops and adapted cover crops into a lot of vegetable production and I had used them prior to knowing him but I didn't use them to the extent that we do now until he started doing his research something everybody needs to incorporate into their operation if at all possible now one of the drawbacks is sometimes you need a little more land than what you would need otherwise to incorporate cover crops but there's no question in my mind it pays off in the long run it's a long term goal this particular orchard is 12 years old the oldest one is 15 years old I don't know if I'd be involved in it I don't know if I'd attribute it to laziness or just what I'd attribute it to but really what caught my eye was you know what I'd like to pick a crop well I don't have to bend over all the time and so we decided we might want to get into the peach business and I'll give Mike Reeve's credit Mike was a big factor in helping me get started in the peach business he's a little bit north of here at Hartsle his family has been growing peaches since about 1959 I think and one of the first things you come across is when you want to grow peaches is well you can't do it this far north or you'll get killed by cold and Chilton County is the best place to grow peaches and so nobody ever really grown commercial peaches here so nobody knew and when you don't know there is but one way to find out and that's set out trees and Lord's been very good to us we've had consistent peach crops knock on wood it just kind of grew like the strawberries 380 trees I believe and now we're up to somewhere around 1300 I've lost track most of mine came from Cumberland Valley I've got some from Vaughan and some from Freedom there's three nurseries that I've dealt with but they come a bare root plant we usually try to set ours out in the first half of February when we set out new trees try to subsoil where the tree is going to go it doesn't seem like much you wouldn't think it would make that much of difference but in years say we set out an orchard and then we're always going to lose a few trees well the next year you go back and replant the ones you've lost that tree never catches up to the others and it's not because it's a year behind it's something else and it's just my opinion that when you subsoil where that tree is going to go it just allows those roots to go wherever they need to go and get grow quicker so I thought as I went on one of the hardest things to figure out was how to prune how to thin and some things you just only learn by doing it pruning is when we go in here with loppin' shears and hand shears and we're going to thin out wood a peach tree makes fruit on second year's wood this red wood like you see right here this is three year old wood and this is not ideal what we ideally want and this is not a good example of it this is an example of when a young grower starts out and didn't know what he was doing and he finally figured it out but it's too late to fix it ideally we would want fruit wood up and down this limb we would want red wood about so long up and down the whole limb so that we would fruit the entire area well that's not what we have here this is one of those things but ideally this is perfect fruit wood right here about the size of a pencil lots of blooms nice and healthy and at the end of the day this limb needs one peach on it not one bad peach one good peach thinning is just what I said like this limb right here it's got 25, 30 flowers on it when it actually sets fruit we're going to come back in and that limb needs one peach on it so somebody has to by hand all those have to come off they can't act like a wild man you can't go crazy with it it's slow, it's time consuming and it takes labor to do it if this tree was pruned correctly and I wanted to thin it by myself I could spend at least an hour here and probably still not be done so that gives you an idea about how many hands it takes to do this a mature tree can only support so much fruit and pretty there's a certain amount of growth there you can disperse that growth amongst a thousand peaches and it'll be this big or you can disperse that growth amongst 320 peaches and it'll be this big so I don't want no more than 500 peaches on this tree preferably less than that this limb here has probably got just guessing I'm going to say at least 40 blooms on it ideally it needs one or two peaches two at the most and once you get past the point you think you're okay from the cold weather you think I've got a crop and we're not going to get froze out then you've got a limited window when all that fruit has to come off when I can take let's say this bloom it turns into a peach and this peach is so big when I can take my pocket knife and cut through that green peach and the seed gets hard enough to close my knife down I should have been finished thinning you've hurt size you'll do good thinning from that point on but you've hurt size up to that point you've cost yourself some growth so what I'm getting at is thinning is the hardest job that has to be done the quickest of any job in the orchard you've got a set window to do it there of about two and a half weeks and it's not that you can't thin after that or can't thin before that all the peaches are going to be on this tree and what always got to come off and it's all done by hand you can pick peaches the third year expect to pick a fair amount of peaches the third year the second year you basically need to a standard practice is to pull all the peaches off the second year if it makes any because you're still building a tree you need to build a tree before you can pick quality fruit so the third year you expect the seventh year is when the tree's in its prime so you're looking at at least a four year investment before you could see some decent return that might not be true you could probably pay for the tree the third year but to be fair the tree itself is not the main cost the cost of productions in labor and maintenance and of course chemicals that's another cost as well the fatter fertilizer is real close to me I use them and I also use Blunt County co-op they deliver to me so it works out real well for me I don't have to send a driver I don't have to go get it myself I don't buy just pesticides from them I buy fertilizer, plastic grip tape irrigation supplies they handle a lot of stuff from both of those suppliers as far as our particular operation goes I could say gains that could be made in agritourism it's not something I'm particularly however that being said it's very possible one or both of my daughters could come on and they could very well like that aspect of things and if they do that's going to be their baby I would like at some point to be fair with you I would like at some point to be where I am right now my wife and I started out to where we did everything and I never really thought we'd get past that point I really thought we would probably just be small enough to be a large part of our life but it's grown now to the point to where I've got more employees I don't do as much as the physical work is what I once did I still do a lot of it but I don't do as much as I did it's more of a management role and I'm not sure I didn't like it better when I did the physical part of things but anyway it's a little easier on me now the drawback to that is you've got to play a role and you've got to make play a role in those lines but as far as our future is concerned what we would plan for is just to continue to be able to steadily grow and survive I'm not sure that I ever want to be super huge I don't know that I want to deal with the headaches of it but I do want to be able to survive and support my family and live in prosperity that's what I'd like