Episode 152: Family Farming and Modern Economic Realities with Mike Omeg

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. If you've not heard my introduction before, well, if you've heard my introduction before, you already know what we talk about. If you don't, here's where we talk about topics that are generally related to revitalizing soil health and plant health and human health. Because after all, the ultimate purpose of agriculture is to cultivate the well being of human beings in the landscape that we're responsible for stewarding. Today I'm here with a return guest who is a very close friend of mine, someone who I've really come to appreciate, Mike Omeg. Mike, thanks for being here.

Hey, thanks for having me on again, John.

Mike, I think you were probably one of the, one of the first couple dozen people that I interviewed and your episode has been really popular where you talked about all of the successes that you've had and the impact that you had early on with, with the changes in cherry production and producing more disease resistant trees. But a lot has changed for you since we had that conversation and your operation has changed. The scope of the work that you're doing has changed. What's been going on? Tell us a bit about what the last seven or eight years have looked like.

Hey, that's a great question and I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes for your, for your audience today. I, I'm a fifth generation farmer. When I was a young kid we, we farmed, we had cherries but most of those cherries went to processing cherries, either cannery or maraschino cherries, cocktail cherries. And we cut hay and we had, we ran cattle and we had apricots and we had apples and we did wheat as well. But as, as the world changed around us, we changed with it and specialized in grow cherries. And in 2017 I looked around me and I was a grower of about 350 acres of fresh cherries. And I was focused not on what am I going to do tomorrow or in five years, but what, what am I going to do as the steward of our family lands into the long run. And what I saw was that it was becoming more and more of a struggle just on the economic side of the business to not have any vertical integration. So we would grow our cherries and then send them to a packer and they would be packed and sold. And I saw, I would, I saw a dilemma with that in that I, I, I didn't see a future and I wasn't super excited about getting really small and marketing just to, you know, only farming a few acres and shrinking our farm size down. And so I looked at what I needed to do for. For that in the future, and that. And the key to me was vertical integration, becoming part of a company or buying a company or developing on our own our ability to pack and sell our own fruit. And what I quickly learned is that's really expensive. And at that time, there was quite a bit of ag investment dollars around just. But in the end, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be working for somebody else. So the next best path was to buddy up with somebody, to partner with somebody and affiliate with them. And so I decided that that would be the path I went and I did that. I affiliated with my longtime friends and neighbors, the Bailey family, who grew up literally next door to each other, had farmed by each other for generations, and they already had, through Orchard View Farms, which I work for now, had a vertical integration. And so we affiliated in my much smaller organ farm, became a part of a much larger organization. And so today, other families have done the same thing. Today, Orchard View, where I. Director of orchard operations. So I'm in charge of all the farming side of the business. We. We farm about 3,600 acres. A little over that, almost all of cherries. We have a little tiny bit of wine grapes, a little tiny bit of prunes and plums, but we're focused on cherry. And that has been a huge change for me, but it's a change that I. I needed to do to ensure that I could keep our farm and the family. And I didn't care what the name the shingle on the door said. I was more interested in having the farming opportunity be available for future generations, even if it's just owners of my family just being landowners. But also, if people wanted to participate, I didn't want to say to my kids, and we hear so often in agriculture, hey, this is a huge challenge to farm. So you're crazy to. You're crazy to do it or get. You know, our young people aren't interested. There's a lot of opportunity by being a part of a big organization where we're in it together, but it's still all family farm. And we're farmers at heart, and we really. I'm very fortunate in that. Orchard View is focused upon the farming and family aspects of. Of the business. So we're very large, but we aren't. We aren't what you made. That horrible title gets bounced around. And I don't mean to Insult anybody. We aren't a large corporate farm. You know, of course I think all farmers need to be welcome to the table and we need to, we need to be, embrace each other for what we have to offer. But we're very focused on the growing of fruit and packing it, selling it, but with the family aspects in mind. And I think that does make us different than most large organizations.

You know, it was here on the podcast in an interview with Canon Michael a couple of years ago, he, he took that, that label of a corporate farm because they're also a very large farm. And he said, you know, how many we, we idolize or idealize smaller scale regional production, but how many of these smaller scale operations are paying their owner operators for high quality health insurance and giving them a good quality of life? Like the, by working with the larger organization, having a larger team, you're actually providing much better quality of life for the team members that are participating in that organization. And thinking about most of the people that I know, he's not wrong. So I think as in many things in life, if we pay attention to the things like what are the ideal outcomes, what are the things that we really care about from a people perspective, from an organizational, from a landscape ecosystem perspective, from a food production perspective, good and bad is not equal to large and small.

No, I, I think it, it's one of those traps that there are, there are many in our community, say the regenerative ag community. If I, if I may be so arrogant as to, as to use that phrase and to put myself as a, as a member of that. There are many who are, are puritan and say if you're big, you're bad. And I don't think that that is fair at all. And I think that I look at it from what the opportunities are, not what may be lost when you grain in size. Because there are many, you know, the, the world is complex and when you're part of, when you're running a large organization, there is things that, there is things that you say, oh gosh, I wish we were small again, that'd be awesome. On the other hand, there's tremendous opportunities. You mentioned one of them with health insurance and being able to care for your people really well, that of course can be done at a different, at, at many different scales. But the opportunity that I have, if my goal is to grow really awesome fruit that people want to eat and consume and that brings some health, we grow food for people. I can grow 14,000 plus tons of that good food and have a big impact on, on the world. I have many more acres where, when we improve that landscape on this, you know, little blue ball that the creator gave us to steward, I have a bigger impact on that.

Right.

Hundreds of employees that, you know, grow our fruit during the growing season and thousands that harvest it. When we have a win, that win is amplified at a much larger scale. And I think that's the opportunity. And if, if, if it comes down to scaling the difference you can make, I think that's something that gives me a lot of hope, actually, as being part of a much larger production organization.

Let's, let's talk a little bit about scaling. You know, there is this critique, this criticism that regenerative agriculture doesn't scale. You can't scale it up. And one of the things that Will Harris has said in some of his popular podcast interviews as well, yes, it may not scale, but it does replicate. And you can replicate it. But I don't agree with the premise that it can't scale because many of us are working. Like when I work at aea, we were working on very large scale operations that have succeeded on scaling it. But that certainly does come with its own set of challenges. There is, there are things that have to be overcome, but it is very scalable. But I'd love to ask you, you've, you've had the perspective, I mean, you've essentially, over the last seven or eight years, you've essentially 10x the size of the operation that you're responsible for from 370 to 3,600 acres. What has that process been like? What has it been like to try to scale the approach, the region of agriculture approach that you originally had with Omega Orchards?

You know, it's interesting. I think I agree with you, John, because I'm a pragmatist and I'm definitely not a puritan. So when I think, when I think about where I started, you know, meeting you and your team at Acres USA and the excitement that I had for that, my perspective now looking back at that, is when, and I think this is common for many folks because I've talked to quite a few that get started in regenerative agriculture is we say we want to check all the boxes and we're excited about all of them. And we try to do 100% of everything that we consider to be regenerative. I think it's very difficult to scale if you don't focus upon the things that the practices that move the needle the most. And you try to do everything at all times everywhere. And I actually think for smaller scale producers, that's also a trap that diffuses the focus. And so what I mean by that is when we're talking about regenerative agriculture doesn't focus. I can see where that would be a perspective where we say the human limitation of being able to manage and focus time and concentration and thought upon everything that's encompassed in regenerative ag. There's a limit on that. My argument is that let's concentrate our effort and our thought and our resources, whether that be time, labor, dollars, on the things that bring the most benefit to the regenerative process. And that we don't say we aren't regenerative if we don't do everything that say we read in a, read in a paper or listened to in a lecture or read in a book, but rather we focus upon the things that accomplish our goal of truly changing the way that we produce our crops to be beneficial for those that are, that are consuming them, beneficial to those people that are working on our operations, and I would also say beneficial to everybody who's involved in the economic processes, the logistics and the retail sales, et cetera. Well, because regenerative practices bring great benefit to them. If you have better quality fruit, everybody wins that's involved in getting fruit grown, packed, distributed and sold. Everybody.