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Welcome to the Path To Warren Podcast, episode Eight In episode seven, we talked about the children’s garden at the largescale vegetable producer. It was quite a fun experience, and I learned a ton and really got a lot of giving tours to elementary school students all the way up to senior citizens and everywhere in between. My job was to lead all of the food safety audits and many of the customer tours. We had clients that would come and want to tour around the farm. That was my job, and I really enjoyed that. And it helped me a lot when it came time to the production facility really had a huge processing plant, and we were only growing a small portion of the product. And I found out really quick when I got over the planting schedules and really coordinating all of the farms where I realized we were buying these things from to have 25 different vegetables that were offering to a client or to multiple clients. There’s no way that our farm in South Carolina can supply everything. There’s just too much demand. So we would have to outsource and have to buy product from other farms, other locations around the whole country, and really the world. I found out where the bulk of that was coming from. I really got a lot of joy out of looking at the monthly production spreadsheets. So the Accounting Department would produce this report that showed year over year where we were as far as cases purchased. And so my boss and I would sit down many times and look at, oh, man, look at Collard Greens. Collard Greens are up from this time last year. And he would always look at the four main crops, Collard, Kale, Mustard, and Turnip. Those were the four bread and butter Greens. And then after that would come things like herbs. So we did a lot of Italian Parsley, Curly Parsley, Cilantro. But the quantities of the cases that we purchased and sold were nowhere near the amount that we sold, say of Collard Greens, which were like 100,000, 150,000 cases a month of Collard Greens. There’s no way we grew all that in our one location. And in order to have sort of a form of insurance, we had to supply or rely on outside suppliers. So in house, we had in the office guy who would call, he was the buyer. He would every day figure out what we needed to buy to fulfill the customers orders. And he had to go out on the open market and purchase this product. It could be that we’re short on yellow squash because it’s out of season right now. So he’s got to go buy yellow squash. Well, he’s just not going to stock up on it and hope he sells it. He was only buying what we had sold. What’s very interesting about the produce market is everything is cut and sold to order. And I say that loosely. There were some things that you had to harvest it when it’s needed, like, for example, squash and zucchini and Bell peppers, even sweet corn. You harvest sweet corn when sweet corn is ready. You don’t wait until you get a buyer or until sales are finalized to harvest the sweet corn because it will be too ripe. And same with squash. You wait one day on a squash plant and that thing will be a number three that you can’t sell. But other than those few crops, everything else, like cilantro, Parsley’s: curly and Italian, all the Greens, collard, kale, mustard, and turnip, all of those, and especially green onions, we harvested a lot of green onions. I believe we were the largest green onion harvesting company for Walmart on the Southeast. That might have changed now, but when I was there a few years ago, we supplied Walmart and all of the major stores with their green onion supply because nobody else on the East Coast had figured it out. So we would have like 40 to 60 acre plots of green onion plantings in a row. So every week we were planting 40 to 60 acres or so of green onions. I mean, that is a ton of green onions. And that was also the place where our harvesting crews would come at the end of the day. So it was always best to harvest in the morning when the plants are the most vibrant and have the most nutrients inside of them before the afternoon heat comes. It’s always better to harvest the Greens and the herbs and everything first thing in the morning. In the afternoon, everybody, all the harvesting crews would convene on the green onion field. And there, everybody would harvest green onions until the orders were filled. A lot of times that would be until 8, 9, 10, 11:00pm at night, until all the orders for the green onions were completed. So diving into and being an agricultural economics major, I mean, that major was absolutely perfect. I was in my wheelhouse to study, to have a passion for plants and be able to look at the paperwork with an economics mindset, supply and demand. This was really my bread and butter, right up my alley. And then to top it off with a Business Administration minor from Clemson, all of that, I really was in a sweet spot there. What I realized real quick was we’re buying certain quantities. And this wasn’t all credit to me on this, but I was able to call out and put in the spreadsheet who were buying the bulk of these things from. So there might be a dozen companies out of a list of 100 farms around the country. There might be a dozen of those that we were buying 80% of our produce from. What I did was I started putting those numbers of historical data. I put those numbers into the spreadsheet so we could see okay, in August for Cilantro, we have cases needed to supply the customer. We sold 80,000 cases and we never have any in South Carolina because August is too hot. So we’re going to need to source that during July, August, September, maybe even October, those summer months. We’re going to have to source that out of some farm and it probably needs to be up in the Northern region of the country because it’s too hot here. Cilantro, if you plant it in this Southern climate, it’s really a spring or fall crop. There’s no way it’ll last through the heat of the summer. It’ll just go up to flower and seed out and you can’t sell it. So what happened was I realized from a food safety background and it’s kind of perfect. I came in as the food safety specialist for all the fields because I was able to ask the tough questions like, hey, sales Department, you guys are buying all of this kale, for example. That’s the perfect example because it’s a high risk crop. So many people today are eating kale in salads. That all the food safety standards that are for crops that are what we call RTE, “ready to eat” all the crops that are RTE, their food safety standards are higher. There are a lot of things that have to be done with extra care because people are not going to be washing them. They’re going to be just chopping them up and putting them in their bowl for salad or smoothies. People are chopping them up and putting them in their bowls in their smoothie blender without really doing a lot of cooking. There is no cooking step with certain crops. Green onions is one of them. Roma tomatoes is another one. You don’t normally Cook a lot of those tomatoes and the kale definitely fell in that category. So I would go to the sales Department and say, hey, Where’s their food safety paperwork I need for this food safety inspection coming up? I’m going to need the paperwork for this farm, this farm, this farm and this farm, because I’ve got to show that our food safety program is in place all the way around. And if I’m not careful, this small little farmer that’s got two acres of kale in the mountains of upstate Virginia, he could ruin the 2000 acres of production for us here in South Carolina because of a food safety outbreak, E. Coli and salmonella from the mountains of North Carolina or Virginia or upstate New York. If you get a food safety outbreak in any of those, it’s going to affect our whole entire company, if not the entire market. Like what happened with spinach several years ago, that the market for spinach is barely recovering. It’s come back, but it’s not nearly what it used to be when spinach was hot, everybody’s afraid that’s what’s going to happen with the kale market too. So when I started asking the tough questions like, hey, Where’s their paperwork? They haven’t sent in their information on their seed suppliers to show that they are practicing good agricultural practices. We don’t have any kind of food safety inspection for this farm in Mississippi. We don’t have a farm in Florida that’s certified. We got to step it up. Well, guess what happened. They said, well, why don’t you go do that, Matt? So the rest is history. I quickly found myself on an airplane flying to Malone, New York, where we have a grower up there, and Malone, New York. It was about 8 miles from the Canadian border. So really high up there. He only has a two and a half to three month window to harvest his crops. Really short window. So he’s got to be planting on time. And during that off season, he’s got like 4ft of snow in upstate New York. So there’s not going to be a lot of working on the food safety program except for paperwork during those off season months. But I visited with him and helped to get him certified. We had several farmers, I would say five or six that were on the list for upstate well, about the middle of Virginia area. So my job was to go to that farmers market. There was a local farmers market right off the interstate. I showed up there, met the person who kind of ramroted this cooperative. The cooperative had several farms that were scattered throughout the mountains of Virginia. And everybody brought their goods to the farmers market where they would be put on a truck and shipped out to us. So a lot of coordination going on, a lot of different hands touching the produce, a lot of ways for things to become contaminated, really, and not a lot of good feel back in the office of what kind of paperwork that they have in place. How are we going to be able to justify to the attorney when we’re sued for putting contamination into the product? How are we going to be able to defend this? So I was in the perfect situation to fly up there and drive up there and meet with these folks, walk around the farms in my boots and kick the tires with the farmers, win their trust, win their permission to help them, basically. And I greatly attribute my lawn service and pine straw business, being able to manage and lead people and being able to get things done with workers in the field. Even going back to when I was on the commercial landscaping job trying to irrigate eight soccer fields, a lot went into talking Spanish, listening to what the guys were saying, listening to what the customer wanted, being able to strike a compromise or lay down the law, all of those skills. It’s amazing how God laid it out like that because I was able to really use those skills for this new role of agricultural operations manager. Well, I did a ton of traveling. I ended up going to the farm. They had a farm out in Texas they were working with all the way out to Texas. I had to catch two flights. If you know where McAllen, Texas is, that’s the place you see in all the videos where there’s a bunch of smuggling and immigration issues going on right at the border. This farm we were farming, believe it or not, the bridge to get into America went over the farm. You could see it from the field, the immigration bridge to cross over into America. That’s how close we were to the Mexico border in McAllen, Texas. I stayed at a hotel. I never forget it. You can look out over the south from the American side in downtown McAllen. I was at a hotel, maybe on the 8th floor I could look out, and all you saw were like two helicopters going back and forth, patrolling, looking for, I guess, smugglers and Coyotes trying to bring people and drugs across the border. Quite an experience. And I was out there by myself. But this farm in Texas was a big powerhouse. They were getting a lot of produce from Mexico, also growing it right there in Texas. What you got to understand, too, is every farm irrigated differently. Every farm fertilized differently. Every operation had different nuances. And you had to figure out why something works in South Carolina but won’t work in Virginia while the guy in New York has to spend two weeks picking up rocks out of his field. Where Lexington County, South Carolina, doesn’t have the first rock, it’s all sand. So understanding what that farmer in New York means when he’s got a field full of rocks, he’s got to spend time to get out there and pick the rocks up. Just little things that had to be worked out and figured out and learned on my end, because I had never done this before. There was a major farm that I traveled to down in Clewiston, Florida. Excuse me, is right there along the border or along the edge of Lake Okeechobee, down in the Everglades of Florida, man, talk about a different world down there. Lots and lots of sugarcane. You drive for miles and miles and miles before you see any establishments outside of Clewiston. Clewiston had one hotel, and it was the Holiday Inn Express. I got to know that hotel, but that was it. There was one little restaurant, but I’d spend the night there and get up and drive all the way out to this farm. I get to the farm. This guy’s got a big old handle of bourbon sitting on his desk. Just rough crowd, but I got a nice tour of their farm. This guy had been doing Organics for about 20 years. He knew what he was talking about. I could spend an entire podcast talking about this farmer in South Florida and his organic crop operation and some of the things he had done and some of the things that I found during a surprise food safety inspection up from South Florida Clewiston area. I would then drive up to this area called Bunnell, Florida. B-U-N-N-E-L-L. It’s between St. Augustine and Orlando area. The company I was working for had recently purchased about 600 acres down there, and it’s a ton of land before I left the company that was over 1000 acres in production. Not all of that was owned. There were several hundred that were actually leased with, like, two or three year leases and contracts with other local farms. But it was a serious operation down there. But I never forget going down there talking food safety from this young 30 year old kid. Basically, I think I was 28, 29 at the time. Here is a 28 year old, 29 year old coming down to a farm in the middle of nowhere. That’s an agricultural town where they’ve been farming their whole life. This farmer, he didn’t know what food safety was. He’s a potato farmer. Potatoes don’t have nearly the food safety standards as kale. Everybody cooks potatoes. When was the last time you had a raw potato? You know? So this guy had no idea about food safety. This guy had no idea about ready to eat crops that were going to be bagged and chopped and eaten raw. So talk about a learning curve. It was like a black cloud moved over his farm whenever I showed up, I mean, people would scurry and scatter and go hide things from me and lock the chemical room. Put these jugs away, put the dog back in the house. Don’t tell him about this. You going to tell Wayne about this. Everything was scurrying around last minute when I showed up. They didn’t know what I was going to do or what I was going to say. Huge experience there, but I’m going to stop it right here for today because there’s so much more to talk about with these food safety inspections and the things I learned and how I was able to present these things so that we could actually pass the inspection, keep our food safe, because now I have a young daughter that was actually eating these crops with me. So I really appreciate you guys being on the podcast today. Stay tuned for episode nine as I’m going to share more about the food safety and what all went on on these farms and just how to overcome these obstacles. And then there was a lot of opportunities, but yet a lot of great victories when it came to growing the company. So stay tuned for episode nine hit subscribe if you like what you’ve heard and share it with a friend, I hope you have a wonderful day and always remember to please make users contribution. Have a great day. Thank you.