Half of the edible flowers Kevin grows are not even eaten, but used for plate decoration at fifteen of Vero Beach’s most exclusive restaurants, ten of which are located in private country and residential clubs. One account is John’s Island Club, which in 2016 was rated the sixth-best country club in the United States.1 These fifteen accounts purchase about 80 percent of Kevin’s produce; he sells another 15 percent at the Vero Beach Farmers’ Market and the remaining 5 percent from the farm stand.
The high-end chefs who buy Kevin’s produce are paid to create art as much as they are to concoct Michelin-rated cuisine, and edible flowers are only the beginning. Chefs have asked Kevin to bring in bags of orange blossoms to garnish citrus-infused dishes. Some ask that the lettuce be snipped to fit specific salad plates. Many want the spring mix cut, washed, and delivered that morning in time for lunch service. Others have asked that he grow certain vegetable varieties, a request Kevin is happy to accommodate. His operation is small and flexible enough to respond to demand quickly, unlike huge farms such as Ryan Roth’s. At two restaurants, Kevin even checks the coolers daily and replenishes stock as needed.
In Kevin’s world, there are no salespeople, packinghouses, or distributors. Just four employees work part time alongside him. Because of this, Kevin is one man wearing many hats. He transcribes each chef’s order from voicemail, email, fax, or text (he says he’d accept them via Facebook if chefs wanted).2 Then he helps harvest and box the produce and loads it in his Honda Element, which is more like an office on wheels. He does every delivery in person. Depending on traffic and how long the chefs chat him up on the route, he’s done in a couple of hours. “Then I go home and make myself a huge smoothie,” he tells me with a grin, and it’s back to the farm for cleanup and prep for the next day. When he’s not harvesting and delivering, he’s busy with the countless other tasks that make the farm function. He works sixty to seventy hours a week during the growing season, but he seems way too driven, or maybe too fussy, to transfer significant tasks to anyone else. He has tried hiring farm managers, but they don’t quite understand regenerative farming like he does. They are also not as serious about making sure things are perfect—and this is something Kevin is very serious about. At one point during the morning, he spots a tray of unplanted veggie seedlings sitting out in the sun, left there for a few moments by an employee. Kevin shakes his head and says he would never leave a tray out, that he’ll have to talk to the person about that.
I ask Kevin to be honest about something: does the farm overtake his life? Does he feel like he never had enough time with his son, who is in graduate school now, or his wife? I ask because my father has always struggled to balance time and money spent on the family and the ranch. The ranch wins in most cases. Before multiple sclerosis stole my mother’s ability to walk, she talked of visiting the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains, and even Europe. My father did take her camping at Yellowstone in ’80s, and back in the ’90s it rained so much that she convinced him to take a trip to Iowa to visit her sister (and I suspect my father only agreed because of all the corn and soybeans he could observe on the drive). Those were his only extended stays away from the ranch until 2015, when he came to Florida for my graduate school graduation. At sixty, he still works seven days a week. Aside from the occasional long weekend, it’s mostly work and little play.
This is what conventional agriculture does to families. Motivated by the constant fear of being driven out of farming by bigger operators, my father runs on John Ikerd’s treadmill of industrialization like a hamster on a wheel. The sad thing is that the running is only exhausting him. The sophisticated equipment, livestock antibiotics, synthetic hormones, agrochemicals, and GM seeds are generating more cash, but also much higher expenses. Because every other conventional farmer has adopted these practices and therefore produced more, prices remain low—again demonstrating Eric Schlosser’s fallacy of composition: the misguided belief that one individual’s advantageous practices will still be beneficial if everyone else decides to do the same thing. Because herbicides have created chemical-resistant life forms, he must spend more time in the sprayer every year. And because he expanded his wheat and corn acreage, he had to make huge investments in seeding, spraying, and fertilizing equipment—and he still doesn’t have all of the machinery necessary for row crops at this scale, so he’s forced to hire expensive agribusiness contractors.
I asked him once about the fact that he can’t harvest the wheat, his favorite crop. Harvest is the culmination of a season’s work, a moment of triumph in a year of endless labor. First my father said it’s nice to have someone else do it, that it’s quicker and safer with their massive harvesting machines. The wheat is in the grain bins before a hailstorm or grasshoppers can get it. But then again, there’s a joy in “driving down the field and seeing what’s growing and seeing what you need to do,” he said. “Someone else gets the joy.”
“I miss doing the things that I used to do,” he continued. “You become more of a manager than an actual worker. I guess it’s what you wanted, but once you get there it’s like . . .” His voice trails off and he falls silent. More of a manager than an actual worker. His admission reminds me of Ryan Roth. I can see where our farm is headed if nothing is done to stop the relentless expansion. My father and I don’t speak for several moments, both of us holding our respective phones to our ears thousands of miles apart, and I wonder if he is remembering how the wheat kernels used to feel as they poured through his fingers on harvest day, back when the farm was smaller, the warm breadlike smell left behind on his hands.
Before me stands Kevin, who has farmed the same ten acres for twenty years. Clearly he did not drink Butz’s “get big or get out” Kool-Aid. He considers my question for a moment, then says, “You have to have a balance in life. Stephanie, when you have kids, hold your kids tight, hold them as long as you can, because they grow up real quick. I thank God there was a balance out here where I got all my work done, but I was also able to be with my kid and my family a lot.” He tells me how the farm allowed him to watch his son’s football practices and attend games. He would take a few hours off, then finish his work in the evening. Kevin encourages his employees to follow his lead and prioritize family over work, even if that’s not a favorable business policy. Kevin can’t afford to offer employees paid leave (a benefit industrial-sized farms rarely offer either), but he can offer flexibility, understanding, and the promise that their job will be there when they return. “I told them no matter what, if there are family problems, go,” he says. “I’ve probably lost money because of that, but my value, as far as I’m concerned, is that we do everything for our family, or we should be.”
A lot of farmers, whether on large-scale farms or smaller ones, conventional or regenerative, work for the sake of their families like this. Ryan Roth does. My father does. Maybe both men see their large farms as security for their children. Maybe they see their long hours as sacrifices. Yet the way Kevin farms allows him to have the best of both worlds, a successful business that meets his family’s needs and allows time for a life outside of work. I can’t help but see Kevin’s approach as working smarter, not harder. He seems . . . happy. Happy in a way farmers and ranchers aren’t in places like South Dakota today. Conversations in the Bison feed store, where I accompany my dad sometimes when I visit home, are more like laments about all the work that isn’t done. The tractor is broke down in the field, they grumble. The calves aren’t branded because they’re behind on planting wheat. Can’t spray because of the wind. There’s a general feeling that wheels are spinning but no one is making much progress.
Crop prices are another common complaint. With no way to differentiate their crops or livestock—everything is standardized in conventional agriculture—producers have no grounds for demanding higher prices. I think of Ryan Roth: Cabbage is market price. You have no control over that whatsoever. Not in Kevin’s model, though. Marketing products directly to consumers and chefs not only allows him to set the price and thus cover his expenses, but also to provide a fresher, tastier product, which keeps buyers coming back. “We don’t do wholesale,” he says. “That would kill me. We sell our lettuce for ten dollars a pound retail, but wholesale it’s eight dollars a pound. I have people come up to me and say, ‘We’ll buy it all day long for five dollars a pound.’ I say, ‘No, you won’t. Not here.’ They say, ‘We can get it from California.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but that stuff is six or seven days old.’ There’s a big difference in quality. There really, really is.” I couldn’t agree more: when I participated in a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) program a few years ago, receiving a share of vegetables every two weeks, I saw firsthand the difference between fresh produce cut that morning and produce shipped from places like California, Argentina, and Mexico. Both were organic, but the local greens and vegetables stayed crisp two weeks or longer and tasted way more delicious.
Another benefit of selling directly to customers: Kevin knows exactly where the fruits of his labor go, and I imagine this is satisfying knowledge. I think about my dad, who sells his crop of calves at an auction barn every year. The highest bidder takes them away to a CAFO. My father will never know the man, woman, or child who eats the meat, whether they like it, whether they appreciate it. He works year in and year out for a faceless, nameless consumer, never feeling the satisfaction of positive feedback. Kevin, by contrast, hears thank-yous from chefs and customers. He sees the smiles on their faces, listens as they describe the delicious greens, hears the gratitude in their voices, takes note of their suggestions for improvement. The story is complete. Kevin experiences fulfillment, while conventional producers experience what seems to me like an emotionless transaction.
The connection between consumer and producer is about much more than fulfillment, though. It’s about understanding. When people left the farm, they severed their connection to food production. They became consumers, not producers. In the city, food comes from the grocery store, not the garden, corral, or chicken coop of the local farmer, which eliminates the need for dialogue between the two. This divorce between farmer and consumer remains today. When consumer and farmer become estranged, Wendell Berry writes, “The consumer withdraws from the problems of food production, hence becomes ignorant of them and often scornful of them; the producer no longer sees himself as intermediary between people and land—the people’s representative on the land—and becomes interested only in production. The consumer eats worse, and the producer farms worse.”3 When farmer and consumer separate, both suffer, and so does the land and the quality of our food. Restoring that connection is an important element of regenerative agriculture, and for the emotional and psychological well-being of our nation’s farmers and ranchers.