How a Philly Bouncer Became an Organic Farmer: Kegan Hilaire’s Journey to Sustainable Agriculture?

FOOD. Everybody needs it, not everybody gets it in the same ways at the same levels of freshness and nutrition. And with human population projected to reach over 9 billion by 2050, how are we gonna grow all that food??

To kick off this season of the HOPE Is My Middle Name podcast we’re looking at food, how we get it, how we grow it, and how our biggest challenges might require smaller solutions. And since I’ve been spending a lot of time with farmers across America, I figured there was one out there who could show us a thing or two about the BIG the impact of small farmers.

Enter Kegan Hilaire, a nightclub bouncer who found himself in the middle of a field with a handful of seeds and a dream to bring healthy, organic food to everyone, especially those who can least afford it. Today, Kegan is the owner of Blackbird Farms, an organic vegetable farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and as Small Farms and Diversified Vegetable Consultant for Rodale Institute, he’s helping other folks start their own sustainable agriculture ventures.

It all started with an egg. One fateful day, Kegan cracked open a pasture-raised organic egg with an impossibly orange yolk and he wondered, “Why is this egg so much better than the ones in the grocery store?” Well, it turns out, we are what we eat, eats. Eggs from a happy pasture-raised chicken eating organic feed, they’re gonna look happy and taste even happier.?

Kegan was sold. He would leave his career in sales, go back to bouncing at night and work mornings on a farm to figure out how he could grow healthy organic food for the future.?

Here are some takeaways from the incredible journey he shares with us on Hope Is My Middle Name.

SMALL CHANGE BIG GROWTH

As a complete beginner, Kegan turned his parents backyard into a market-garden CSA supporting 110 people on ? of an acre. He went on to start Blackbird Farms which operates entirely on the CSA model, with a sliding scale and at least 10% of shares set aside for those who can’t afford them.?

What’s a CSA? It’s a subscription-style service offered by farmers to the public often in the form of weekly “shares.” A “share” is usually a box of fresh vegetables and fruit, with other tasty farm products sometimes included.?

Why did Kegan build his business on the CSA model?

“80% of people who join a CSA will join another one, even if they leave. You've forever changed how a lot of those people get fruits and vegetables. It doesn't come from a store anymore, it comes from a farm. [...] It really changes how people look at and access food for the rest of their lives.”?

HEALTHY FOOD?

And why does this matter? Local, organic food is better for your health. According to Rodale Institute:

“The food we eat today contains less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than food produced just a half-century ago.”

What changed half-century ago? We moved away from small local farming and into mass-produced industrial agriculture that favored high yields over nutrition, flavor, and soil health.

With that mass-production, we started importing massive amounts of food. According to Jose Garcia, operations manager of Houston’s Moonflower Farms, 66% of the food that we import across the Mexican border goes to waste. And considering most produce loses 30% of its nutrients within 3 days of harvest, buying local is just better math.?

HEALTHY ECONOMY

Speaking of math, supporting local agriculture keeps dollars in our communities, which is good for everyone.

“The Young Farmers Coalition quoted that 96% of what small farms purchase are purchased within a 50 mile radius. So the shirts that we have for the farm were union-made in the US and screen printed down the street from my parents' house.”?

I’d rather buy a t-shirt from my neighbor than from H&M. With local farms, we get to meet the folks who labored to grow and produce our food. That is powerful. They need us, and we need them.?

And they need good soil. CSAs like Kegan’s offer composting, which solves for that unfortunate reason some of us subscribe and then cancel. We don’t always have time to cook all that delicious produce. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If you don’t eat your zucchini, it goes right back to where it came from, enriching the soil for another harvest.?

HEALTHY SOIL?

Soil is everything. Remember the Dust Bowl? Industrial agriculture, deforestation, and widespread development have severely depleted our topsoil. Scientists project we have only 60 years of topsoil left. With composting and regenerative agriculture, we can restore the soil which means we can keep growing food.

But as Jonathan Foley writes in National Geographic, “55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent).”

The good news, Kegan tells us, is that:

“Most of the edible crops for humanity, like 90% of them, come from smallholder farms around the world. They're on less than five acres, they're growing independently, they're not involved in large corporations, they're just doing it themselves, for themselves and their community. So organic is already feeding the world and conventional never did.”

HEALTHY PLANET?

Buying from those small local farms and composting what you don’t eat also reduces your carbon footprint. It takes less fossil fuels to bring the food to market and you’re cutting down on food waste, which according to the EPA, is the single most common material found in US landfills. In fact, every year Americans throw away 119 billion pounds of food– that’s 40 percent of all our food– food that off gasses methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more impactful than CO2 in the near term.?

Not to mention that when you send your zucchini back to the soil instead of the landfill, it’s helping your local farmer grow more food which pulls carbon out of the atmosphere where it’s harmful, back into the soil, where it’s actually needed. Did you know there is more carbon in the first three feet of soil, than all the atmospheric carbon combined? Nature is wise beyond her years.?

HEALTHY YOU

If after all of this, YOU want to try your hand at growing your own food, hooray! That may be what ends up feeding the planet. If we were all able to grow just enough food to feed ourselves and a few neighbors, well then, problem solved.?

Leaving a traditional career like Kegan did to head for the fields might sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. As Kegan says:

“Anyone who devotes an intentional portion of their life to the production of food I would consider a farmer. If you're a backyard gardener growing for yourself, you're doing some amount of farming.”?

If I can do it, you can do it. What started as an attempt to fill in a strip of weedy ground beside a concrete drive turned into more food than I can handle and tons of beauty too. I LOVE participating in nature’s miraculous cycle. Watching a bee turn a flower into a fruit is a spectacle to behold.

Whether you’re growing herbs in jars on your windowsill or planting a community garden, there are tons of resources available and as Kegan said, spreadsheets to help keep you on task :)? In fact, Kegan is now available nationwide as a consultant for small farmers, so if you are ready to take the next step, reach out at https://rodaleinstitute.org/consulting/

FIND YOUR FARMER

There are almost 2 million farms in the US and around 80% are small farms! Find your nearest CSA or connect with your local farmer at https://www.localharvest.org/.

Follow HOPE Is My Middle Name wherever you listen to podcasts for more inspiring stories of everyday Americans doing BIG daring things to make the world a little better. #HopeIsMyMiddleName