Marty Travis walks through Spence Farm, which grows vegetables and grains without chemicals for Chicago chefs. The farm uses AEA products called Holomic and Holomac to improve plant health and yield, and credits this approach with noticeably better flavor and quality.
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I'm Marty Travis. I'm one of the partners here at Spence Farm. We grow all manner of vegetables, produce small grains and some alfalfa for a local dairy. Almost all of our product is sold to restaurants, chefs in Chicago and downstate Illinois. This evening's tour that we're hosting along with AEA is a unique opportunity. The information that's going to be shared here is not just about our farm. It's about understanding what really healthy crops look like, how to get to that point, and how to create the most healthy food for consumers. We're excited to be able to have John and Gary and Nathan here this evening to kind of walk us through some of this, this evening's tour. We're really trying to focus on three areas of the farm, three areas of production. One is our alfalfa area that will talk about how to grow great quality alfalfa with high production numbers, high feed value numbers for the dairy customer that we have. So folks will be able to see that piece of it, the small grains. We're growing a myriad of different kinds of wheat, rye, barley, different varieties of corn, and doing all this chemical free. So folks hopefully will be able to see how we're dealing with potential disease issues and how we're harvesting, hopefully able to dramatically increase the plant health.
So one of the things we do and that John has been so very good at developing is the concept of a balanced nutritional diet for the crops. We do some SAP analysis where we will take leaves from the plant and they'll extract SAP from the plant and then analyze that for nutritional content.
The big area that we're going to focus on this evening is this area to the north of us with our variety of vegetables, lots of different varieties of kale, potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peppers, Brussels sprouts, all these different things and using AEA product and how that has dramatically helped our plant health, not only just in quality, but also in quantity of what we're able to provide for our chefs. And we'll be able to share some of these stories of, you know, what we've been able to accomplish and how actually chefs, and we can tell the difference between a treated plant and an untreated plant. We have put together a two part product foundation, two products that we call Holomic and Holomac. We use those two as a foundational base for all the crops that we work with here at Spence Farm. Most of our product goes to chefs in the city of Chicago and downstate. We have a long, wonderful relationship with these chefs.
One of the biggest Things we found was going from using national broadliners to our commandment about five years ago, to going to all local and sustainable farms. And what we noticed was the flavor of the produce, the flavor of everything we're getting. Our grains, the variety we could get, was a lot more than what we could get from a national broadliner.
They understand more now than ever that quality produce is important. They can do great things, but only if they have really great stuff to start with. So we have a number of chefs who, when we announced this tour, signed on immediately and said they wanted to come and be a part of it. They wanted to speak about their experience using local product and product from here and a lot of other small farms.
It's the quality of food that we can prove that can be grown in our own backyards. I don't have to go to other reaches of the globe to bring in food that's right here at the end of the day. What it goes back to, the flavor and the quality of the product.
It's wonderful. It's refreshing, it's creamy, it's eggy. It's everything you want in good ice cream.
It's got something to it. It's not just filler.
It's not about Spence Farm. It's about us sharing this knowledge and how we can all do a better job of creating healthy food.
