(upbeat rock music) (upbeat rock music continues) - Welcome to a "Shot of Ag."

My name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm a farmer from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

When I got into agriculture, when I was going through college, they always said, "Ag is the perfect example of competition," right?

You had, everybody's growing the same products and the only thing is getting in and out of the business.

That was almost impossible.

Well, I've got a guest today that will argue that.

Today we're talking with Rachael Smedberg from Beecher, Illinois.

How you doing?

- I'm doing great.

- Yeah.

- It's good to be here.

- Yeah, I said your name right?

Smedberg?

- Smedberg.

Yes, correct.

- How many people butcher that?

- A lot, people usually say Smeedberg, but it is Smedberg.

It's Swedish.

- Okay.

I like it.

- Yeah.

No, I think it's interesting.

I mean, my maiden name was Oscam, so, you know.

- Well, you like 'em weird, don't you?

- Yeah, right?

Oscam, Smedberg, you know.

- You are from Beecher, Illinois.

- Correct.

- Now, where is that?

- So it's in Will County and it is about 45 minutes south of the city of Chicago.

- Okay.

Is that where you're from originally?

- No, so I am originally from northwest Indiana.

I grew up in a town called St. John and it's about 15 minutes away from our farm.

- Okay.

You did not grow up on a farm?

- I did not, I am a first generation farm, farmer, and I actually grew up dreading going out to my mother's garden and watering the plants.

And when I told my mom I was buying a farm, she thought I was crazy.

I'm sure a great grandfather was a farmer at some point, but my husband and I are first generation farmers.

- Okay.

What was the driver?

I mean, why farming?

- Yeah, so when we had kids 2015, I was looking for organic options in the grocery store, and I could not find them anywhere.

I was this, I guess, quote unquote, "crunchy organic mom" and wanted to- - Hippies.

- I was, yeah, you know what?

I am kind of a hippie.

- Okay.

- I like that title.

Right?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, so I was like this crunchy organic mom, and I was saying to myself, "I am gonna feed my kids all organic food, and I'm gonna make it all."

And I go to the grocery store and it's like, well, there's organic bananas on the shelf, and that's all I had options to buy.

And so I began growing my own food.

And so we lived on a three quarter of an acre plot in Crete, Illinois and we really built up permaculture and all of these gardens and we started growing this nutrient dense food and started selling it at a local farmer's market.

And it kind of empowered us to say, "Hey, we could do this."

Like, we love this lifestyle that we can give to our children, and we can really connect where our food was coming from.

- Now, was it, okay.

You loved it.

- I loved it.

- I mean, was your husband, was he on board?

- He was just as much into it.

We were kind of crazy.

He was actually on, at the time, he was working on the road five to six days a week.

He was gone, he was missing life, and we just wanted a different way of being.

We wanted a different lifestyle for our children.

We wanna be home every single night for dinner.

So, no, he loved it just as much, and he was just as crazy about the soil as I was.

- Okay, so three quarters of an acre.

Which when you're doing by hand- - Yeah.

- It's a lot of ground.

- It is.

It is.

And it was enjoyable work.

I'm not scared of hard work.

I'm not one to sit there and watch TV at the end of the night.

I wanna be working.

I have a hard time sitting still, so.

- Do you?

- I got that going for me at least, right?

(Rob laughs) - So how does that evolve to where you're at now?

- Yeah, so like I said, my husband was on the road five to six days a week for work.

He was was missing life and we, New Year's of 2018, he came to me and said, "I don't want to be on the road anymore.

I don't wanna do this anymore."

And so he had just finished up a job and he had this money, and we said, "We can invest in your current business, or we can take this money and buy a farm."

And we sought out and we looked for a farm and we put an offer on a 30 acre plot.

We had no intentions to move.

We didn't have the experience to do this big farm.

And we're saying, "Hey, well, this is kind of an investment piece.

We'll see where it goes."

Two days before we were gonna sign a contract to buy that 30 acre plot, the old man that owned it died and it went into a trust.

- [Rob] Pretty selfish of him.

- I know, right?

Well, it actually worked out for our benefit.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

So he died.

It went into a trust.

And yeah, that's kind of sad to say.

(Rob and Rachael laugh) - How dare you.

- Yeah.

So that piece didn't work out, and so we're like, "All right, it's February.

If we wanna get on a farm and get a greenhouse up and get things going, we need to go, we need to go now."

- It's February.

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- Y'all don't mess around.

- Well, you know what?

Yeah.

I think maybe, it's a weighing of making these big, bold decisions or do we sit back and kind of wait, but we kind of risked it all, and so- - That had to be terrifying.

- It was, I feel like we were definitely naive to what we were actually doing.

- Yeah.

- But I think that was important that we were naive because if we knew, I don't think we would've did it.

- If we knew what we were getting into.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Like if someone were to ask me today, like, "Do you think you would've did that again if you knew what you were about to go through?"

And I probably would say no.

- [Rob] Okay.

- Because it is, insane amount of work, insane amount of risk.

We had to sacrifice a lot for our family, but the pros of becoming a farmer and having this lifestyle of a farmer, those far outweighed the risk that we did take.

My husband's home every night for dinner now.

- Yeah.

- He's not on the road.

- Can't put a price on that.

- No, you can't.

And so it was definitely the best decision we could have made.

- Okay.

So the dude dies on you?

- Oh yeah.

So the dude dies on us, so we're like, "Okay, let's get on a farm.

We gotta do this."

- It's February.

- It's February, we need to get a greenhouse up, right?

If we wanna start vegetables, we need to get a greenhouse up.

And so we went on Zillow and we're just scrolling through and this property on 80 acres, we always passed up.

It was way out of budget.

Way too big.

- 80.

Yeah, that's huge.

- 80 acres that had, you know, barns on it.

A lot of the barns were falling apart.

There was a house on there.

Probably if we didn't buy it, the house probably would've been knocked down, like a lot of other family farms around us.

So we walked on this property and Zillow did not represent the farm at all.

There was a beautiful creek running through the middle.

It was just, "Hey, this is where we need to be."

So we approached the daughter of the owner and said, "Hey, we have a creative deal.

Can we write you a business plan and can we tell you everything we're gonna do with this farm?"

And, you know, maybe we could see if this offer sticks.

And so we sent that over to her and she says, "I want you guys to farm this land."

- Wow.

- "I feel like this is where this farm needs to go."

So we sat at the kitchen table, that kitchen table in the farmhouse.

It's the same table that's actually still in our farmhouse and no lawyers present.

We negotiated the deal to buy the farm.

- Are you a good salesman?

- I guess so.

(Rachael and Rob laugh) And so, yeah, we shook hands and they gave us the keys and they said, "Send the check when your house sells."

- You're kidding me?

- Yes.

It was wild.

But that house, that farm at the time, was on the market for four and a half years.

- Still.

- Yeah, and now these properties, they don't exist, right?

- Yeah.

- We got it.

It was timing.

Right?

Some timing, some luck, some grit.

- How much tillable?

- About 60 acres tillable.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

So a lot.

- So from zero, - Yeah, right?

- To three quarters.

- Right.

- To 60.

- Right?

Yeah.

We're like, "Yeah, we could do this.

We could totally do it."

And we're like, we didn't even have a tractor.

We didn't have a till.

We didn't have any of that.

We didn't have grandpa's old toolbox that we could take any tool out of.

We kind of had to build fresh.

My husband is super mechanically minded, and so that kind of went hand in hand.

Something's always broken on the farm, and so he was able to fix it.

And then I'm more on the marketing side, so, you know, something's broken.

I'm calling Jesse to come fix it.

- [Rob] Well, it sounds like that works.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- So what are you growing now on those 60 acres?

- Yeah, so now today, we have diverse, we're really like the modern family farm.

So we grow a lot of different crops.

So we have 50 acres of hay.

And today, now we have 120 acres.

So last year, we were able to purchase 40 acres that's directly across the street from us, and it's the original homestead.

- Oh my gosh, the way you guys pick up acres.

- Yeah.

So 120 acres.

So yeah.

50 acres of hay.

We did 27 acres of industrial hemp fiber for textile products.

- Okay.

- We did about four acres of produce and floral.

We grow hemp for extracted and smokeable flour.

And then we have a small livestock herd.

- Okay.

We have interviewed a ton of hemp farmers.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I'm gonna say we've interviewed 100.

- Okay.

- I can think of one that's successful.

- Yeah, no, it's, a lot of my friends or people in the industry are no longer in the industry.

There's a lot of regulation, there's a lot of unknowns in the hemp space.

But what we did with hemp is we launched branded products.

So we are vertically integrated.

So we grow the industrial hemp, we process it on farm.

- I think that's the key.

- It is, it's vertically, because that was the biggest thing.

And when hemp came out, everyone's like, "Oh, we're gonna get rich from this crop," right?

And they grew this crop, they took away land from their, you know, original crops, and then they grew it, and then there was no one there to extract it.

There was no processing.

- Yeah.

- Right?

So we kind of approached the market differently and we became vertically integrated.

And what we did was, when we bought the farm, we focused on the brand.

We focused on creating these branded products so then we can get some cash flow in before we were able to harvest.

So that was, you know, a really big key to success.

- That's you.

- But hemp is such a small, it's a big part of our company, but it's slowly becoming smaller and smaller as we kind of lean more into food.

But it is an important part of the wheel of what we do in our diversified profit streams.

- Okay, I don't know what this is.

The LFPA.

- LFPA, Local Food Purchasing Act.

- Okay.

- Another name is Illinois Eats.

- Oh, okay.

- Yeah, yeah, - I got you.

Yeah.

- So essentially what is going on in the state of Illinois and other states around the country is the USDA is purchasing $28 million of local food in the state of Illinois from farmers that fit into a certain parameter.

So farming for less than 10 years, a veteran owned farm, women owned farm, BIPOC farmers, LGB- - Bi?

- BIPOC, Black and Indigenous.

- Okay.

- So what they're doing is they're purchasing proteins, produce, honey, grain products.

And so we're a really big part of that grant.

We're not a lead agency.

So there's 15 lead agencies throughout the state of Illinois that are essentially aggregating and distributing food for that.

And that food is ending up in food banks and food pantries.

So we're not a lead agency, but we are an aggregator for a lead agency, Midwest Foods, which is a food aggregator out of Chicago.

And so we're kind of building off of the relationships that we've built over the past six years and using our network of farmers and aggregating their food for this grant specifically.

It's been incredibly exciting because it has now given the confidence to farmers, especially in the specialty crop, to invest in infrastructure, right?

And to get, they're getting full retail price for their products.

So what they would get at the farmer's market, they're gonna be getting through this program for the next two years.

- How do you set that?

- What do you mean, the price?

- Yeah, because you go to a farmer's market, don't you just set your own price?

- So the state, the University of Illinois extension, is a big, the lead charge on it.

They actually talked with farmers prior to this grant kicking off and they determined the best set price.

So yeah.

Full retail price on local food.

So it's amazing because local food in the state of Illinois is shifting right now, right?

You talk to farmers around this state and then in the country, what are they doing?

They're going to farmer's markets, right?

They're launching CSAs and there's not many avenues for them to get into institutions, right?

They can't, they don't have opportunities- - Pretty much none.

- To buy this, right?

They don't.

- Unless you bribe people.

- Exactly because we don't have the GAP certifications and all of these certifications in order to get into these institutions.

So LFBA, this grant, is allowing us to build up that infrastructure so we can get these certifications.

And then when this grant is over in 2025, hopefully we're ready to sell to these institutional buyers and we can have food be more accessible for people, right?

It's really hard to find local food.

- Good food too, because- - Good food.

- If you are parent, right, and you can't afford stuff and you gotta use food banks, used to be they'd give you a seven pound block of government cheese.

- It's like Kraft Mac and Cheese.

- Yeah.

- You know?

Yeah, it's so and- - Which there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong.

- No, there isn't.

- But still.

- But it's not nutrient dense, right?

And people ask me all the time, "Well, I can't afford local food.

It's expensive."

- It is.

- It is expensive.

But we must recognize that food that is grown, you know, with maybe organic practices or you're consuming that food 48 hours to 72 hours after it's been harvested, is more nutrient dense.

So you're paying maybe 30% more for that local food, but you're paying for the nutrient density, right?

Nutrient density in our country and our food and industrial food system is plummeting right now.

And so you're getting more value by buying more nutrient dense food.

And this LFPA program, I see, I hope, that it will affect generations, right?

You get people that are gonna be getting this food in a box every single week.

Maybe something that they wouldn't buy in the grocery store and, right, they're teaching their kid to cook it.

They're eating it, they're experiencing this new, nutrient dense food.

And hopefully we can see generational change within our health in this country, because I really do believe the food that we're eating, that is medicine for our bodies.

So it's so important to know where your food comes from and to know your farmer and have that connection to your food source again, like it used to be.

- I didn't think about that too.

It's, you know, you're getting an ingredient.

So this might be introducing cooking into a house that maybe has never done that before.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

- Yeah.

Can you get into the schools too?

- So there is, there's a lot of programs right now that are helping farmers navigate that and to get into schools.

I think that's going, you're gonna see a lot more of that after we have, farmers have these certain certifications to meet the school's standards.

- Okay.

I interviewed you on the XM show and it was at the very end, you brought up about the grocery stores.

We really didn't even get into it.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So tell me about those.

- Yeah, so we own a grocery store.

So we're farmers and grocery store owners.

- [Rob] What is wrong with you two?

- I know, I feel like I even, I talked to my husband, I'm like, "Okay, we have all these opportunities coming our way.

When do we say no?

Like, when do we say no to these opportunities?"

- Never!

- I know!

That's the problem because they're all really great opportunities.

So we were approached last year in January, I think, of last year by a lady that was a financial investor, essentially.

And she owned Village Farm Stand, which is a micro styled grocery store in Evanston, which is on the north side of Chicago.

- You mean like micro farms?

- Yeah, so it's small, like it's 1,300 square feet.

- Oh yeah.

- And essentially, it was created when the pandemic hit, because all of these farmers had all this food.

The restaurants went out of business, and they're like, "How are we gonna sell our food?"

So it was created right around COVID and it's an online system.

So you order online and then you come into the store and pick up.

Yes, you can come into the store and you can browse some of the selection, but most of it is in the back of the house.

And so it's a really great concept because, right, a lot of people are on their phones, shopping online, - Is it?

- You're able to order.

- Because, I mean, produce especially.

- Yeah.

- That's why I always wondered about, like, if you bought stuff at Walmart, right.

You're letting somebody else pick out your produce.

- That's true.

That's true.

I think people wanna shop with their senses, right?

You want to feel- - Yeah.

- And you wanna see it.

- Squeeze, yeah.

- We have really strict quality control standards, so you should never get a bad piece of vegetable- - Gotcha.

- When you come through ours.

And everything is super fresh.

We're getting deliveries throughout the week that those products were just harvested.

They're not coming up from Mexico, ripening on the truck, and then getting into the store.

So we really stand behind our quality control at the store in order to bring the best product.

- Okay.

Sorry.

- Yeah.

(laughs) But yeah, so we have this grocery store.

We work with about 85 different farmers throughout the Midwest.

We really, we pride ourselves that, hey, this is our purpose, right?

Like, yes, we bought this grocery store, it's beneficial to us.

We can grow our farm confidently.

We can grow more produce, we can raise more livestock to know we have this really great outlet to sell it.

But really what it was about was making sure that these other farmers had another area outside of farmers' markets or CSA programs to sell their products to the community.

And so we really build up farmers in our network.

And it's incredibly humbling to be a part of.

- Do you do the farmer's markets?

- I don't.

So- - Good.

- When we first started, I did.

- That sounds like hell to me.

- It does.

- Actually talking to people, ugh.

- It's awful.

Because it's like, it does, like you start at 7:00 AM, right?

The farmer's market, so, okay, I'm getting up at five, I'm loading everything up in my truck.

- Which is a myth.

Farmers don't get up that early.

- I don't get up that early.

- No.

- If I'm a dairy farmer, I'm getting up that early.

- Yeah.

- But I like to sleep in.

I'm a night owl, I work at night and I sleep in.

My husband's up early, but we're not, I'm not up at five.

- Yeah.

So you don't wanna get up early?

- No, I don't wanna get up early.

I don't wanna load up my car and unload my table and put up my tent and then put out the produce and then pay my vendor fees, right?

- Yeah.

- In order to even like, get into a farmer's market, even in the city, I'm paying $500 to $1,000 upfront in the springtime, when farmers have such a hard time paying anything at that time.

- Yeah.

- Just to get into the farmer's market and then, you know, God forbid it rains and it's like, there's my whole day when I could have been in the field.

So our store allows them to kind of get away from farmer's market, and then obviously this LFPA grant really is changing the landscape of local food in the state of Illinois.

- How do you learn all this stuff?

I mean, I think about you, I thought about this after the first interview.

It's like, how do you even learn how to grow stuff?

I mean, is it YouTube?

Is it?

- Yeah, yeah.

Definitely.

- Okay.

- Definitely YouTube.

If you wanna talk about nitrogen and this and that, like, that's not my lane.

You gotta talk to my husband about that.

He's incredibly smart and he does a ton of research.

But no, it was a lot of trial and error.

We made a lot of mistakes.

We still continue to make mistakes, but we surrounded ourselves with people that knew.

We got there and we asked the conventional farmers questions.

They all thought we were crazy, but we'd asked them questions and then after like two or three, more conventional farmers would start coming around, like, "Oh, what are you guys doing over there?"

And I'm like, "Oh, now you wanna see what we're doing?"

- That's funny.

- Right?

- Because where you live, are you surrounded by the corn and soybean guys?

- Yep.

We're surrounded by corn and soy.

We bought a corn and soy farm.

So when you take land out of corn, row crop, corn and soy, you know, you kind of, you upset people.

Right?

- Not me.

You could take it all out.

- Yeah.

- I agree.

- I don't like competition.

- Yeah.

(Rob laughs) So yeah, that was, mentors along the way.

We got livestock, you know, we had a relationship with another guy that mentored us in livestock and just a lot of networking with people is really where we learned it.

- Mm-hmm.

So you guys got a refrigerated truck now?

- Yeah, so we applied for the LFIG grant.

There's all these different acronyms to remember.

The LFIG grant, which Local Food .

.

.

- Something, something.

- Infrastructure Grant.

That's what is is.

- You could have lied to me.

(Rob and Rachael laugh) - So, and that was administered through the Illinois Stewardship Alliance and the Illinois Stewardship Alliance is a phenomenal organization in the state of Illinois.

And essentially, they go to Springfield for us, they go to Washington DC for us, and they go to bat for the farmer, right, on the legislative level.

So they administered this grant and we were awarded $60,000 to purchase a refrigerated truck.

And that refrigerated truck is going to be able to obviously, you know, drop off for our farm goods, but we're also offering that service to other farmers in the area, whether picking their meat up from the processor and getting it here or working with Midwest Foods for the LFPA grant and getting food to the food banks and food pantry.

So we actually just got it yesterday on the farm, so.

- Nice.

Okay.

Tell me what we got here.

- So Acre for President.

Acre is our livestock guardian dog.

- [Rob] Okay.

- And she's famous on the farm, so.

- She is?

- She is.

Everyone comes to see Acre.

I mean, she's a big, white, fluffy dog.

I mean, she's, you know- - Guardian dogs are cool.

- So welcoming.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

And so she's pretty famous around Beecher.

So, you know, so we- - Is this supposed to be Vote for Pedro?

- That was kind of - It's a throw off.

- The spin on it.

- Yeah.

- That was the spin on it, so obviously, it's an election year.

- Vote for Pedro.

(Rachael laughs) - It's an election year and you know, we're try, we stay neutral on things, and Acre for President is what we're trying to push for our community.

And we got a big billboard too off of the main road by us that has Acre for President.

It's super eye catching.

- Oh yeah.

- Cool conversation piece.

- Okay.

I'm thinking back on our conversation we just had, why do you think people in agriculture would assume that I would not get along with you?

A conventional corn, soybean guy, fifth generation, compared to, what'd you say, crunchy?

- Crunchy organic.

- Yeah.

- Why would I assume that they wouldn't get along with me?

- [Rob] Why do people assume?

- I don't know, you know what, we never experienced that.

Obviously we got pushback when we first bought the farm, but I never got that sense of like, "Oh, I can't be friends with them."

I'm not here to say like, my way is the only way, right?

There's so many different ways to doing things, and hey, this is what's working for us.

You do what's working for you.

I'm not here to say, "You shouldn't be spraying this, you shouldn't do that."

That was never our intention when we bought the farm and farm the way that we do.

So, no, I've never not gotten along with someone like you.

- There's a lot of people in this world.

- Yeah, I'm sure there's someone that's like- - We need to feed 'em all.

- "That girl is crazy," but that's all right.

- Well, that's what they were saying about you when you came in.

- Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure.

Yeah.

- No, I mean, there's, we gotta feed everybody in the world.

- We do.

- And there's people- - We do.

- That are struggling to get food, so.

Yeah, I think the more people preparing food, growing food, is the better.

- Exactly.

Exactly, and I always say, farmers, especially in the specialty crop world of things, like produce, we're not in competition with each other, right?

- Yeah.

- We all need each other.

- Yeah.

- We shouldn't be in competition with each other.

- Yeah, well, Rachael, I want to thank you for coming today and I want to thank you for what you and the story that you have, because it's out there, it's kind of a known, that shouldn't be known, that you cannot get into agriculture.

You just can't do it.

You can't make a living of it.

You and your husband are two great examples of how you can, just by hard work.

- It's a lot of grit.

A lot of grit.

- A little gambling.

- A lot of grit.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

All this stuff.

And here you guys are, you're living your dream.

- Yeah.

- And feeding people.

I mean, I know I look at this as a farmer, but, you know, feeding people, I don't think there's anything more noble than growing food for other people.

- It's purposeful.

- Where can people find you?

- Okay, so they can find us, our Instagram and Facebook handles are tuliptreegardens.

And our website for our farm is tuliptreegardensco.com.

And if you are in Chicagoland, it's Village Farm Stand in Evanston.

And we're adding multiple pickup locations throughout the city.

So you'll see us soon.

- Mm-hmm.

How long before Chicago comes down and engulfs your farm?

- Well, the airport, so the Peotone Airport- - Yeah.

- Is supposed to be built like right down the way from us.

So that's gonna really pick up the southland.

There's still land available.

It's expensive.

- Yeah.

- You know, it's not north side expensive, but yeah, I think about a decade, you'll see it kind of transformed towards southern Chicago.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Then think how much that farm would be worth?

- Ugh.

Hopefully - You could 1031 it, probably get 1,000 acres.

- Right?

I don't know.

We'll see about.

Yeah, right?

We'll see about that.

That would be amazing.

- Yeah.

When you sit back and think about it all, are you proud?

- I am very proud.

But there's still a lot of work to be done.

So we just keep on going.

- Typical farmer answer.

(Rachael and Rob laugh) Rachael, thank you so much for being with us.

- Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

- Really appreciate it.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

(upbeat rock music)