Gene Dickison, your host and personal financial adviser.

And for the next half an hour, I am at your service.

As always, if you are a loyal viewer of More Than Money, what we're trying to do this evening, bring you more information, more information that may advance you down your financial path may start you thinking down perhaps even a different financial path, but most importantly, helping you in any way that we are able.

If you have questions, concerns, issues, whether they're investments or business questions, retirement or tax questions, 401(k)s or powers of attorney questions, you send those directly to us.

We answer every single question.

Not all questions, unfortunately, can appear on our shows.

We simply don't have enough time, but we answer every question directly back to you.

So whatever your concerns are, those are our concerns.

Send me your emails, gene@askMTM.com And our entire team again is at your service.

We have a very special guest for tonight's show, but before we do that, there is a question that's hanging out there, from perhaps the vast majority of you.

Certainly a fair number of the folks that we've bumped into since the first of the year.

So I'm going to turn to our financial correspondent and say, Megan, what's on everybody's mind?

- Well, I think we definitely need to address the stock market, it is pretty crazy right now, and I wanted to know what advice you have for investors, what they should be doing or think about doing to feel confident that their money is safe right now.

- Yeah, that's an outstanding question.

And it's one on the minds of many people, even folks who are relatively calm about all of this stuff.

And Megan, you're a good example.

You've got years and years and years for your financial picture to continue to grow and compound.

Then I'm on the opposite side of that spectrum.

I have maybe a few less years for mine to compound.

So making sure that your goal matches up to the way you're investing, making sure that my goal matches up to the way I'm investing means very different things, obviously.

But bottom line is, you've got to have a good plan.

Number two, you've got to acknowledge that the stock market goes up and down and quite frequently up and down.

It's called volatility.

It's a polite term for a roller coaster ride.

But bottom line is, if you've got a good plan, if your plan is appropriate for you at your stage, me at my stage, then stick to your plan.

And if you're not sure it's appropriate, or if you're not sure if maybe your goals have changed, get a second opinion.

Talk to a financial adviser that you trust to give you an analysis of where you are, what you're currently doing, and whether some adjustments might be in your best interest.

What you shouldn't do, shouldn't do is try to...

They call it timing the market.

..guess when the market's going to go up.

Guess when the market's going to go down.

Timing the market is a function of, some would say, psychic ability.

The reality is, after all these years, 1,000 plus of watching ups and downs and people trying to beat the market, we really know it's not psychic, it's a psychotic issue.

It can't be done.

If it could be done, there'd be one person with everybody's money.

It doesn't work that way.

Get a good plan.

Stay on track.

If you need a second opinion, make sure you seek it from a trusted financial adviser.

Megan, I hope that helped a bit.

- Definitely.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

Now my turn to introduce a very, very interesting young lady doing a very...running a very interesting business indeed, with a very interesting background.

So as I introduce Ashley Walsh of Pocono Organics, I think the word interesting is all over this.

Ashley, welcome to More Than Money.

- Thank you very much for having me.

- For folks who have not yet had the opportunity to discover Pokeno Organics, give us a sense of, what are you doing up there in Long Pond?

- Absolutely.

So Pocono Organics is the largest regenerative organic certified farm in North America, and we also grow the world's first and only regenerative organic certified hemp in the world here in the Pocono Mountains, so we're very proud of that.

But we've become a global center for research, education and discovery.

We have an amazing state-of-the-art facility here in Long Pond.

We sit on 380 acres and our facility is about 70,000 square feet and we're open to the public for tours.

We have greenhouses that are open year round for people to see all the different crops that we're growing.

But we also have a lot of community events, cooking classes, kids' programming, veterans' programming, and we have an organic market here on site and a wonderful café that's run by a top champion chef.

So really bringing nutrient-dense food to our community up here, which most people don't think of food deserts as being in rural areas.

They think of inner cities being food deserts.

But we're surrounded by fast food and pizza places.

So giving people a healthier option and using food as medicine to promote better health and be preventative.

- Ashley, fantastic.

Oh, my gosh, so much to unpack there.

I want to start at the very beginning.

I'm a pretty bright guy.

I like sound nutrition.

Food as a medicine is something you and I will talk about in a moment.

But the word regenerative, not in my vocabulary connected to organic farming.

What is regenerative organic farming?

- It's not in your vocabulary yet, but in the next year or two, you're going to really hear a lot about this.

So everybody's familiar with the USDA certified organic logo.

That's on lots of different food and products.

And the regenerative organic certification, I'll call it ROC for short, is a new label that was just developed a couple of years ago from Rodale Institute, which is the largest independent organic research station in the world, which happens to be based out of Kutztown, Patagonia and Dr Bronner's, the soap company, all came together to make this new label that goes above and beyond the USDA certification process.

So there's three main pillars to it.

The first one being soil health.

So of course, we don't use any GMOs, any synthetic pesticides or chemicals.

And one thing that's allowed in USDA certified organic but is not allowed in ROC certification is hydroponic and aquaponics.

Everything is based on soil health.

We've lost about 50% of our nutrient density in our food in the last 50 years since conventional farming really started relying heavily on chemical and synthetic inputs into the soil.

And that's causing soil to degrade.

It's affecting water quality ,streams, rivers, and air quality.

So it's affecting planetary health and it's affecting human health because we're not getting as many nutrients as we used to.

So all the practices that we use here is to regenerate the soil and make our, which makes our crops as nutrient-dense as we can get them.

The second pillar is animal welfare, so making sure there's no factory farms, the animals are treated humanely, they have shelter and safety.

They pretty much only have one bad day, those animals, and you can taste the difference because they're eating properly for their species.

And it just tastes like... My grandma used to say, chicken doesn't taste like chicken anymore because, you know, things had changed so much in the way that we were producing our food.

And then the third pillar is social fairness.

So making sure our farm workers make a good living wage, have great living and working conditions, which we know out West, that's a big problem with migrant workers that might be getting paid cents on the dollar and working and living in some pretty terrible conditions.

So it's taking these three pillars and matching them together.

So it's a little bit of the climate crisis and fair trade and all these things and making it a new label that can really help, like I said, planetary health as well as human health.

- In fact, the Pocono Organics motto, its brand is inspiring people and healing the Earth.

So you're bringing together two critically important concepts and marrying them into one regenerative organic farming adventure experience, if you will.

Obviously, you're passionate about this.

"Food is a medicine" is not, again, a common phrase in many people's vocabularies, but for you, it was an important start to this entire adventure.

- Absolutely.

This whole concept came from a very personal part of my life.

We came up with this concept in 2015.

We didn't start growing until 2018, but I suffer from a stomach condition called gastroparesis, which means I have a paralyzed stomach and I can't digest most fruits, vegetables and meat.

So I got to the end of the road with Western medicine, and they wanted to cut out my stomach and give me feeding tubes, put me on an array of medications that really did not help.

I was about to be 30, wanting to start a family.

Obviously, I did not want to go down any of those paths, and I started working with new doctors and I adopted organic lifestyle using non-toxic products, using plant based supplements and plant medicines such as CBD, to help to help my quality of life.

And by incorporating all of these things, my quality of life went from being sick five days a week to five days a month.

Much more manageable now, I'm not being threatened with feeding tubes.

I had a 9.3 lbs baby that I wasn't even sure if that was going to be possible for me.

So it just changed my life.

I was uneducated about how broken our food system is.

I assumed when I walk into a grocery store that everything had been tested and the chemicals and preservatives and dyes, that we knew that they would be safe for human consumption.

But, you know, we don't know that, and we're so, we're so much more of a sickly community than our grandparents were.

We should be getting healthier as we've had all these advancements in science, and we're not, but going back to the basics of the way our grandparents grew food and how they ate, where they didn't call it organic food, it was just food.

And just going back to those basics and cutting some of those chemical additives out of our lives so that our bodies can function more efficiently.

- Excellent.

Ashley, let me ask you a question, because you snuck in a little factoid in that explanation, something about a 9.3 lbs baby.

- Yes.

- When did this young one arrive, and what name do we have?

Give us some good information.

- Frankie Junior, and he's four and a half years old, and the happiest little man ever, typical wild boy.

So we have lots of fun and he loves being here at the farm.

- Oh, that's fantastic.

What better place for a young man to grow up than on a farm?

That's crazy talk!

Fantastic.

Now, you're in Long Pond, and your neighbor is Pocono Raceway.

Kind of an interesting juxtaposition between NASCAR etc and regenerative organic farming.

How do these strange bedfellows come together?

- It's an amazing opportunity, and most people think, you know, it's a little strange, but actually it's an amazing opportunity that we have.

So my family owns Pocono Organics, so I'm the third generation of our family business and we have quite a bit of land here around the track.

And when I developed this concept, there was a 50-acre parcel that had just been a field for 40 years, and prior to that it was actually a spinach farm.

So we've gone back to our roots full circle here, and what started as a small community farm of what I wanted to do here quickly changed into this global center for research, education and discovery.

So we lease this land from the racetrack.

Our food goes over to the racetrack and it's an amazing opportunity with the people that visit the racetrack, 250,000 people every year that come through our doors, to give them an experience where they might have the most wonderful salad they ever had or Mexican street corn and, you know, and taste the difference for themselves.

I like to provide emotional experiences for people, emotional souvenirs.

You can't just preach at people to get your point across.

So we bring people into the conversation in a relatable way.

So by giving them these experiences, whether it's them eating at our cafe or taking a cooking class, or any of the other community events that we have that are educational, trying to teach people how fresh our food is, because it's not sitting on a truck coming across country and it's not sitting in a distribution center.

So the shelf life of it is wonderful.

You're preserving the nutrient density - every day from when you harvest, you lose nutrients every day.

So the chef will go into the greenhouses and pick what she's going to use that day in the kitchen, and you can't get any fresher, and you can taste that difference.

So for us to be able to use the audience that we have at the racetrack and amplify our message to a greater amount of people and just educate them that, you know, eating organic is not weird, it just means there's no chemicals in it, and it's just more pure, and giving them an amazing experience to maybe inspire them to live a healthier life and help the planet at the same time.

- And not in any way to discount the value of food as a medicine or the organic life or regenerative, but it's also really good business to provide an outstanding product and present it in a way that's memorable to your clients and allows them the excitement of embracing something that's not only good for them, but fabulous-tasting.

This is a business model that has real legs.

Now, you grew up, Dr Joe and Rose Mattioli, legends, absolute legends, not just in business, but in philanthropy and in making positive impacts in their community and far beyond.

What was that like for you being part of that family, and is that maybe where you got this motivation to combine doing well and doing good?

- Absolutely.

I look at this as impact investing.

So starting a business that's not just about the financial bottom line, it's about helping people, helping the community and helping the planet.

And we can still be a business at the same time, but we're not focused just purely on financial profit.

We want to help people.

And I learned that from everything that my grandparents have done for our community, they've always given back in their community, and I always say, you know, I never went to grad school or anything, but I had so much time working one-on-one with my grandparents and learning from them and then implementing this into the new businesses that we start.

- Um, this may be an unpopular opinion for me to express among many in our communities, but grad school in many ways could be highly overrated.

If you've got your, forgive the analogy, if you've got your hands deep in the soil, if you've got mud on your boots, you've learned more about farming than they're going to teach you in grad school.

No way, it's not even close.

As you recall, growing up in a family of business owners, are there one or two lessons or one or two pieces of advice that you were given growing up that you went, "Wow, that has stuck with me all the way through"?

- I think there was many, many.

But, you know, my grandparents came from very poor families, and that was why it was so important for them to give back, and everything...

They've always done it, and most of the time anonymously, just to help people in the community, whether my grandfather read an article in the newspaper of somebody's house that burnt down or whatever it might be, and he would just reach out and help people without them even knowing.

And it's just so important.

I think a lot of people forget that, to give back to their communities, and there's so much that we can do.

And with them being doctors, you know, how they help the community in health and wellness and education, we want to continue that legacy on.

- Having mentors like that, literally at the dinner table, is a rare opportunity.

Most folks don't have that chance as they grow up.

Are there folks, though, outside your immediate family, people that you admire or people who have been mentors for you, that you would reference to us and say that they had a really positive impact on your development as well?

- Absolutely.

And I think the folks over at Rodale Institute, the Rodale family has just been amazing.

They are a fourth-generation Pennsylvania family.

JI Rodale pretty much coined the term organic back in the 1940s.

When I had the concept for this farm, like I said, it started just as 50 acres, and I cold-called the Rodale Institute and I told them my idea.

And they were confused of why a racetrack was calling it organic research station.

But they took the meeting with me and that's when we became this global center for research, education and discovery.

We partnered with them.

They supported me through this entire process.

We're becoming a regional resource center for them this year and expanding our research.

We've been doing research for the last three years with them as their largest satellite research facility.

So, following them for so many years when I was on my journey to better health and realizing how broken the food system was, and they've really inspired me along the way and have been just an amazing support system for us to start this farm, which is the farm of the future.

People have to think of unconventional places, maybe, to start farms with all the climate challenges that we're having throughout the world.

And as we all saw with Covid, the supply chain disruptions and people have really connected again with their local farms through CSA programs and not having to worry about the shelves being empty.

In the beginning of the pandemic, there was a few weeks where there was no produce, you know, and so for people to connect with the farmers, it's great for the farmers, it's great for the people and it's a win-win for everybody.

- Gosh, I would be hard pressed to think of a scenario that is a bigger win-win for everyone.

There are so many corollaries to what you're doing that provide tremendous advantages.

The food as a medicine is a hint along the lines of how incredibly superior the food really is coming out of a regenerative organic farm.

And also it wasn't trucked 3,000 miles, so there were not hundreds of gallons of diesel burned.

There weren't all those issues on the highways.

It was there.

Talk about if you want to buy American, that's about as American as you can get, if it was grown right up the street from you.

So a fabulous opportunity with Rodale, and it came across because you picked up the phone.

- Yeah, old school.

My grandfather always would go to people that were the top of their industry and ask their opinion and their help.

And so luckily, he instilled that in me.

And I just picked up the phone, no email, just old school and called them up and had the conversation.

- Fabulous, just fabulous.

And it teaches a huge lesson, particularly to folks who are just starting in business.

You think that people are unapproachable.

You think that someone who's made, what, four generations of the Rodale family have been pioneering, have been trumpeting the advantages of organic food and food as a medicine.

And yet you, as basically a startup coming off of a racetrack, got the opportunity to connect, and that has expanded dramatically.

I want to shift gears for you just a little bit.

Being in a family business can be challenging.

There are always different dynamics that we have to address.

If there's somebody out there watching and saying, I'd love to be in a business and I'd love to be in a business with my family, what one or two things would you advise them to do to minimize the opportunity for friction down the road?

- It's difficult.

It's definitely difficult at times, but it's an amazing opportunity as well because you can trust those people, and everybody's going to have different opinions, which is not a bad thing, necessarily, as long as it's expressed in a respectful way.

I think that's number one, to have that respect there and not be, you know, typical brother-sister fighting or wrestling or whatever it might be when you're kids, you know, but collaborating from different points of view can be really amazing, and amazing things can come out of it.

You know, it's hard to separate family and business.

We all work very hard at that.

And when we go on family vacations or dinners, we try not to talk about business and have that separation, which I think is very important as well.

- Those are good tips.

Very, very good tips.

Odd question.

My apologies.

But I'm the father of three daughters and each of them changed my thinking significantly.

You're the mother of a very active young man.

Has being a mom changed your thinking about how you're approaching your business in any way?

- Absolutely, absolutely.

And we have a lot of women that work here, and quality of life is something that's very important to make sure that we all have family time.

That's why we chose not to be open for dinner.

We do breakfast and lunch at our cafe and we do gourmet grab-and-go dinners that you can bring home, because we wanted our staff to be able to spend that time with their families at home.

And that's part of our social fairness policy as well, like ample time off to spend with their families and whatever it might be.

So I think having that flexibility is definitely very important.

- Do you think when the time comes you would want your son to follow in your footsteps?

- If he wants to.

You know, that's what my grandpa always said.

"Hey, if you want to, it's here.

"If you want to go out on your own, then go for it."

So whatever he chooses, I will support him.

But I did this for the future generations.

The UN scientists are saying that we only have 50 years of planting cycles, of harvests left in our soil before it's going to be degraded.

So it's very important that we take steps now to preserve that for future generations, and in the way that we're farming, our soil is going to get better and better every year, every decade, 70 years from now, it's going to be the best soil that there is.

So it's only going to improve and help future generations, and that's what we want to do.

- And in a very real sense, there's another, I noted on your website what might have been a small point to others, but as my research has indicated, the issue of bee colony collapse is a huge issue.

And if I read it correctly on your website, you have 330,000 bees!

- And we should have more this year.

So Rodale, they bring the bees up here.

We have a solar farm with barbed wire.

That's actually where we keep the bees because the cartoons are true, the bears will go after the beehives.

So we put those bees to work and they pollinate all of our fields.

We plant pollinator paths for them to eat their food, and we have amazing honey that comes from that.

But we're also helping the bee colonies, because through the use of things like Roundup and other chemical pesticides, we're losing incredible amounts of bees, and without bees, three years it takes for our food system to pretty much collapse.

- Ashley, one last question.

There are lots of young folks watching this evening, young folks, teenagers, preteens, college students.

The idea that you might choose as a career to go into farming, for the most part, for generations, hasn't even been on the radar screen.

What would you say to a young person who might consider joining your effort?

- I think it's a very noble position.

People don't realize how much work the farmers do, but how important they are, because we all, three times a day, we all need what comes off the farmer's field, and I think that's just so important, and it's hard work, but it's very rewarding work at the same time.

- Fantastic.

Ashley, I can't thank you enough.

I think our audience has learned a tremendous amount, I know I have, and that's kind of my gauge, so I thank you so very much.

I'm going to say goodnight to our audience here in a moment.

Folks, I want you to thank Ashley Walsh as well.

What an interesting, fascinating and impactful, impactful venture she has in Pocono Organics, and what an interesting and impactful connection she has with Pocono Raceway.

Fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating.

I know I'm going to head north, check that out myself.

I would encourage you to do the same thing, and I would encourage all of you listening, if you heard that and went "This is a throwback, "this is Americana, this is the way America was, "I'd like to get involved," if you're a young person, reach out to Ashley Walsh.

If you're a young person, reach out to the Rodale Institute.

If you're a young person looking, reach out to Penn State.

You want to talk about the heart of agriculture, agribusiness, agritourism, you've got a tremendous resource right there.

And of course, if you have additional questions, make sure you reach out to us as well.

It may be about organic farming.

It may be about your financial picture.

But send us your emails - gene@askMTM.com Every single email gets responded to directly back to you, and hopefully, perhaps you'll see your email answered live on a future show.

Folks, thanks for spending part of your evening with us.

We hope you enjoyed it.

We'll see you next time right here on More Than Money.