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Good morning. Path of Warren podcast. This is Matt Warren, and you’re on Path of Warren Podcast, episode seven. It is a beautiful morning, and I just wanted to start off talking about this children’s garden that I was a part of when I worked at the large scale vegetable producing farm. It was a grower/processor/shipper operation. So we grew the crops, processed them, put them into bags or clamshells, dice them, or chopped them up. And then there was a fleet of 85 freight liner trucks and 120 refrigerated trailers that we would one of the most valuable parts of the operation was to be able to be there when we we’re said going to be there. And the whole transportation Department really allowed that operation to not only be there on time, but there were some times when the customer would have a problem with a box of produce or a pallet of produce. And if our driver was the one that was there, he could tell that grocery store buyer or quality assurance person, he could look at it and either not necessarily push back, but if it was only one box that was damaged and the guy wanted to reject the whole pallet, he could sit there and say, hey, man, there’s nothing wrong with the rest of these. It’s just this box. Also, there were some times where the company would want to reject the produce, and we would have to turn around from that store. And by it being our old truck, we didn’t have to go dump it in the dumpster somewhere. We were able to redirect it to some other customer that was happy to accept our produce. That’s a little bit more about where I worked. Again, I was over the growing operations, and my title was the Agricultural Operations Manager. We did a lot for the community as far as having school kids, school groups, classes come, and we would give them tours of the farm. There was one group that came annually, and this young girl, she started this little organization that was a nonprofit in order to get communities to teach kids how to grow crops and then provide the produce that come from the small little farm in the middle of the city, provide that produce to food banks. And this one girl started off her operation growing a little small head of cabbage that turned into a large cabbage. She was able to feed dozens of people from that one cabbage. And she just got really inspired to start this organization. So we were hosting that group every year. But after the second year of hosting it, I was there. They had started this before I got there, but I’ve also really wanted to do it right. And so what we did was they provided this nonprofit, provided scholarships for young students to fly in and spend four days with us. We put them up at a hotel there in Lexington, and we hosted this nonprofit group and we had like a little camp for them. And we taught them all kinds of things, from planting to irrigation to pest control to how to plant their seeds properly to how to make a little greenhouse that’s powered by the sun to start their seeds. It was really a fun time, but I was over that project. If you’ll check out my website, I’ve got a blog that has some really good photos from this camp, but I would spend several months checking on it daily watering and making sure that the irrigation was coming on. It was quite a process in order to have this for this one week, but we were able to use it on the back end after it all was finished. We were able to use video from the camp for promotional and marketing materials, but it was really a good cause. I really got a lot of joy out of it. My Job, like I shared in episode six, my job started out as the field food safety specialist. I didn’t have a clue what food safety specialist was, but it grew into where I was giving tours. Like I was the guy that whether it’s a customer or an educational group that wanted to come and learn about our farm or how we process things. I was the one that normally mend them in the lobby, gave them a little brief history about the company, gave him the tour of the office. He took them up to our cafe. We had a cafe where we would prepare meals and test out recipes for the website and have dinners up there. I really got a lot out of and I became really good at giving tours of the whole farm. It first thought about it just, hey, we want you to give a tour of the fields, and then once you come to the facility, hand it off to somebody at the facility and they’ll give it to her at the facility because that wasn’t my Department. But there were one or two times where that operations manager wasn’t able to do it. So, of course was forced to do it. And then they got to where they liked it when I did it. So it worked out better just to give the whole tour from the farm all the way to the processing facility, show them how we load the trucks, and then the whole time talking about food safety and operations in the plant and the facility. This children’s garden allowed a place to get them out of the processing plant, though. We really wanted a place where they could go. Kids don’t really care about stainless steel. They don’t really understand the value of bagging the kale or dicing the onions. They don’t really care about that. What the kids want to do is actually pull radishes, you know, and look at them. I never forget the story. We had a camp going on, and there was a young girl that we were showing them these bulb onions, and it was a yellow onion. It was a big old onion about the size of a softball. And I pulled it up, and I was telling everybody, this is an onion. These are the roots. This is the top of the onion. But this gets cut off. And so when you go to the store, you’ll see this dried onion right here. And she was like, Whoa. She said, I never knew. I never knew that onions grew in the ground. Kids don’t know until they pull a carrot and take a bite out of it. In the field, kids don’t understand all that goes into growing fruits and vegetables, but what a great way to get kids excited about. And here I was just had a baby girl. She was one and two years old. So there were a couple of times where I took our daughter out there to walk around. We did a lot of planting of wildflowers around the children’s garden. We really wanted it to be an organic children’s garden, which is kind of ironic because the whole farm, except for the organic farm, the whole farm was conventional, which means we sprayed a lot of pesticides. But this little children’s garden all around it were perennial wildflowers that I helped to plant and order the seeds to be able to sit there and walk in the middle of the wildflower plot and talk about the beneficial insects and how you really want to promote the beneficial insects, because the good bugs kill the bad bugs. And these kids don’t understand. They think all bugs are bad. So to be able to talk about, hey, if you have wildflowers and habitat for the good bugs, then you don’t have to spray as much pesticides. You don’t have to spray as many poisons out on the crops. It was like their eyes opened up and they’re like, wow, that’s cool. We also did a nice little strip over on the side of what we call row crops. And so there we planted one pass with a planter. I planted one pass of field corn, cotton, soybeans, and peanuts. And we were able to explain to everybody that even adults don’t really understand this vegetable farming doesn’t use harvesting machines like combines. When you’re normally thinking of farming and you think of tens of thousands of acres, all those cotton fields and soybean fields and peanut fields and field corn, not sweet corn, but field corn. All of that is harvested by a machine. So you can manage several thousand acres with just a handful of people on a row crop operation like cotton or soybean. But you cannot manage even 100 acres of vegetable production like what we did. You could not manage 100 acres without extensive labor. So this children’s garden was so neat. To be able to show the difference in the farming, we did a camp, and I was able to show them how to irrigate with drip irrigation from a water hose. So a lot of these kids went back home and at their home all they had was a water hose at their farm or at their little garden. So I was able to walk them through step by step on how to take the hose bib from the garden hose that they could pull over to their little garden spot. Connect all the little steps that go into irrigating with the drip irrigation system on a timer. So I hope you enjoyed this brief podcast as I shared a little bit about the children’s garden and how much I enjoyed it working on the big farm. That was really a high point in my career and learned a ton but was also able to give back and share my experience to the younger generation. Stay tuned for episode eight, thank you and have a wonderful day and make your contribution. Thanks.