[music playing] LIZ WAGNER: I'm Liz Wagner, and I'm a first generation farmer.

I own and operate Crooked Row Farm.

It's a 3 and 1/2 acre vegetable farm with a farm stand.

And then my parents have a second farm property where we farm another 10 acres of vegetables there.

Primarily, we grow all kinds of different vegetables all year round, greens in the spring, tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and zucchini in the summer.

We grow a lot of herbs to make herbal products.

In the fall, we grow a lot of roots.

And we also have high tunnels where we grow greens in the fall and winter.

I sell my vegetables two different ways.

I run a CSA program.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.

So people sign up in the winter and the fall and the very early spring.

They'll give me all the money up front for a whole season's worth of vegetables.

And then for 22 weeks, every week, starting from June till the end of October, they come in, they get a big box of vegetables that we've been growing.

And it's a surprise for everyone, depending on what's ready to harvest during any given week.

The other thing that I do is I run a farm stand.

So we sell a lot of produce that way.

And I'm able to aggregate from other growers and producers.

So I actually sell goods from 30 to 40 other farmers and local producers at any given time.

People seem to really want that immediate connection with who's growing their food in a way that I don't think they have for the last few decades.

And that feels like it's growing.

I'm sort of an exception to the norm in that I don't come from a multigenerational farm.

Learning how to grow 1,000 tomato plants instead of 20 was a bit of an adjustment.

[music playing] [tractor starting] Biggest challenges and headaches on a farm are weather, for sure.

Being OK with losing a crop, and having a diverse set of vegetables to cover the fact that this didn't grow because it didn't rain or it got too hot.

You really have to be able to adapt.

You have to be pretty organized.

You have to be pretty good at keeping track of your money, keeping track of your seeds, keeping track of your bed space.

So there's a whole skill set involved.

And things that I am not as good at, it's helpful to have somebody around.

All those things are things you are able to outsource.

And if you figure it out, you can focus on the things you're really good at and then find really excellent people around you to help offset some of those other skills because you kind of need them all.

But you don't have to be the one doing them all.

There's a lot of different ways you can get involved in agriculture.

You can start working on farms as a teenager if you think that's something you're interested in.

But you can go to college for agriculture, for sure.

There's a ton of people, at least in this immediate area, who went to school.

Penn State, Delaware Valley, there's a lot of agriculture programs to learn how to farm.

There's a lot of opportunities for formal education.

I didn't do that.

But when I moved back to the area to start my farm, I started working on other people's farms also to see how they were doing things.

I worked at a dairy farm.

I milked cows.

I did all those things.

The opportunity to work in agriculture is pretty limitless.

You can be a farm laborer, you can be a farm manager, or you can do what I did if you have land access and hop on somewhere and start a farm.

But you don't have to do that.

You can work for people, and they will pay you well.

You have to track them down.

But we're working on making agriculture employees a very viable option for people.

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