JourneyTalks Podcast
Your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration.
JourneyTalks Podcast
Cultivating Community Through Urban Farming and Cultural Connection with Nathan Ballentine
Ever wondered how urban agriculture can transform a community and bridge cultural divides? Join us as we sit down with Nathan Ballentine, a passionate community leader and visionary founder of Overall Farms. Nathan shares his inspiring journey of turning a section of his Jacksonville backyard into a vibrant community hub, welcoming individuals from all walks of life. With a unique approach to urban living, he and his family open their home to students and visitors, fostering a rich tapestry of cultural exchanges that enrich their neighborhood and beyond.
Nathan's story is one of resilience and connection. Through his nonprofit work, he emphasizes the importance of storytelling and shared meals in uniting diverse communities, inviting us to see the beauty in our shared humanity. We explore how Nathan's initiatives are breaking down societal barriers, encouraging collective growth, and nurturing an environment where everyone can feel included and valued.
The episode also highlights the transformative power of youth-led farming, as Nathan shares heartfelt stories of young people who have embraced healthier lifestyles through their involvement in urban agriculture. By incorporating culturally relevant foods and empowering these young advocates, Nathan is sowing the seeds of change and fostering a new generation of community leaders.
The Journey Talks Podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration, hosted by Jorge González. Hello and welcome to Journey Talks Podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration. My name is Jorge González and I am your host. I am convinced that behind every gratitude, there's a powerful story waiting to be told.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I want to create a space where we can share these stories and inspire one another. As humans, we all share one thing in common, and that is the experience of being alive. We all are together in this journey we call life, and we meet people along the way. Some of them stay for a very short period of time and others linger in for a little longer. My question is the main question of this podcast is who are the people or what were the situations that opened doors for transformation in our lives and helped us become the person that we are today?
Speaker 1:Through this podcast, I'll be interviewing guests with stories of gratitude, but my hope is that our willingness to reconnect with these stories will help us celebrate our shared humanity and give us an opportunity to reconnect with the unconditional love we all have access to from within. I'm so happy to reconnect with today's guest. I met him when I was probably 20, 21 years old at a youth conference event in North Carolina, and he was this amazing, energizing, light-beaming being that could brighten any room. When he walked in, he had an aura about himself that was undeniable. In he had an aura about himself that was undeniable. His humbleness creates a safe space and an open space for dialogue, laughter, healing and growth.
Speaker 1:Our guest today is a farmer, community leader, organizer, and he works creating awareness and opportunities to connect people with earth, their neighborhoods, good and healthy local grown food. He is the founder of Overall Farms, a UPIC membership model where people buy a subscription and get access to unlimited fresh seasonal vegetables. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and, along with his wife and son, Malcolm, they are the quintessential example of hospitality, the amazing gift of being humans and a gift everywhere they go. Join me in welcoming my good friend, Nathan Ballantyne. Nathan, welcome to Journey Talks Podcast. Thank you for accepting this invitation. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me, Jorge.
Speaker 1:Well, Nathan, it's been a minute, I think, prior to today. We haven't caught up in a few years now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like a decade.
Speaker 1:Probably the last time we spent time together, we were, like I said, in my early 20s. You were becoming a young adult yourself, and now we both are adults. Life has happened and I think it'll be amazing for us to use this space to reconnect, and selfishly. I would love to hear what's going on with you and to learn more about what you get to do with your life and every day. Nathan, what's going on with you lately? Can you share with me and the audience? What do you do? What are you up to? What's booming in your life and every day, nathan, what's going on with you lately? Can you share with me and the audience? What do you do? What are you up to? What's booming in your life as of today?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I guess there's a couple of fronts. One is on a family front. My wife and I have a son he's five and we share our home with some other folks. We have a gentleman from Venezuela, another guy from Washington who's a PA student at the local hospital, and then we have rotating students that come for about a month to stay with us as they're doing rotations at the hospital in and lived with us for about four and a half five years, kind of like a co-housing situation. I had a master upstairs and master downstairs and we shared the kitchen, had common meals and things like that, and then, in 2020, they decided they wanted their own space, and so we had this empty upstairs and we actually realized one way or another that we hadn't been upstairs for a few months and we thought, well, this is silly, like we don't need this much house, but we have space, so we should find a way to share it, and so since then, we've had a couple of different iterations of folks coming through, and so, on the home front, our life is very rich and filled with stories. Right now, we have three students from India that are here on rotation, and so we're learning about Sinis of India and exchanging foods and flavors and culture and things like this. The gentleman from Venezuela is history buff and so he'll often fill out and flush out our kind of American-based education and history perspective, and so that's been really rich as well. And then we're embedded in this neighborhood. That's just really come alive the past couple of decades with neighborliness. So one measure of that is just I probably have 200 neighbors' phone numbers in my phone. I could text them because there's so much going on, and partly that's because of the farm, which I'll talk about in just a moment, but it's also because it's not uncommon for 10, 15 kids to be running back and forth on our block our son among them and it's not uncommon for a new book club to form or initiative to support the local elementary school or what have you. It's very engaged. So that's kind of on a personal level, just community within and community outside of our home.
Speaker 2:On a business front, for 15 years now I've been doing urban ag work. I started in Tallahassee where I grew up, and then, in 2015, we moved to Jacksonville and a few years into supporting other folks with their gardens here in Jacksonville, we had this larger than normal lot in our urban neighborhood in Jacksonville and there was a section of our yard at the far back that's accessible by the alley and it almost looks like it's a separate lot entirely, though it's legally part of our same lot and we said, well, we could start a farm here and people could access it from the alleyway and there's a longer story here. But what emerged as we kind of experimented with different business models was the idea of a subscription you pick, so people pay a monthly fee, like Netflix, and they can come harvest whatever they want whenever they please. And so as farmers, we're responsible for making sure that there's always like 10 to 20 options available for harvest, and then, when something's ready, we put up a sign that says, hey, this is how you harvest it, here's some recipe ideas, and people come and pick it and it's a way that as farmers, we don't have to harvest and go to market. But then also our families, our community members that are members, they don't have to wait for market day either. They can just come and get exactly what they want when they need it.
Speaker 2:And it's just been really fascinating experiment, because healthy food has a fixed cost. People can experiment and they say, huh, well, what's Romanesco? I don't know, but let me, I'll take some, I'll try it, because the cost of experimentation and trying some new flavor is effectively zero. And so we get a lot of young families and the kids and the parents will say, yeah, I want to do this because my kids don't eat vegetables. And then fast forward four or five months and they do. They like you'll see them running through the farm with a carrot that they just pulled out of the dirt and they like, loosely rinsed it off and I'm munching it down and I think like, oh yeah, that's another one that didn't eat vegetables two months ago. So we're doing that.
Speaker 2:And then we continue to support gardeners across the first coast. So we have a small team of other farmers and overalls and we walk people through the whole process of starting a garden, so from helping them pick a site, developing a design, install, planting, maintenance, education and then. So this farm in my backyard was so successful that after a couple of years we had a wait list and we started farm two in 2023, last year, last fall, it launched and our wait list only grew in the act of building another farm. So now we have another 50 neighbors here in the neighborhood who are on our wait list. Plus, now the cat kind of got out of the bag and we have about 350 people across the city who are saying, hey, like, come start a farm in our neighborhood. So my life is like trying to figure out how to respond to that. So we're developing this third farm and it's much larger. I'm fundraising and navigating certificates of use with the city and all those kinds of dynamics of developing some project. That's a stretch for our small team.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. You're quite busy, I feel like that's true. Wow, that's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing, and it sounds like you guys have something really special going on. It sounds like it has provided for the community to be integrated at a level that perhaps it would have not happened otherwise. And when you say that the kids are running around the backyard, the kids are picking up carrots and just eating it right off the bat, I mean that's amazing. You don't hear stories like that on the usual.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty magical. I was driving by a couple of weeks ago and I saw this posse of kids, that kind of roam our block and they turned as a group and started running towards the farm and all I heard was let's go pick something, you know, and I was like we're winning. We're winning at life.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, nathan, this podcast is all about sharing stories of gratitude, but it's the kind of gratitude that comes as a result of moments of transformation in our lives, and I think you do so in such a special way, an intentional way, that I'll be so honored if you could open your heart and share some of your gratitude stories with me and the audience. Are you down for it?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm up for it. All right, let's do it. So the first question what is gratitude for you and what is your relationship with gratitude, Nathan?
Speaker 2:I saw this question in your list and it's a hard question actually. Tell me more.
Speaker 2:I saw this question in your list, and it's a hard question actually, tell me more. I think that gratitude is in terms of experience. It's a way of honoring what you've been through. It's a way of acknowledging that this experience shaped me and gave me skills and fortitude to be able to take the next step, to navigate. When it really comes down to it, I find that I end up being grateful. Though I don't necessarily always use that word, I find myself being grateful for almost everything I've ever experienced, because it informs how I approach the next thing. It becomes this mass data set of experience from which to draw and also to continually relearn from that experience. So what is gratefulness to me? I mean, it's a thank you, it's a deep breath, it's an acknowledgement that something has deep-seated value. I think it's all those things.
Speaker 1:Nathan, I remember when I met you and you were still a teenager, I was mesmerized by your death. You were always what you see is what you get, kind of guy. Yet you can feel like that's just the surface. But when you scratch a little bit you keep finding more and more, and you always had this since your young age. It's fascinating to see you now as an adult age. It's fascinating to see you now as an adult.
Speaker 1:And when I ask this question of gratitude to hear that you can give me such a profound and complex answer, the fact that you started saying I don't know how to answer it. That's a difficult question. I loved it because that's telling me you're really taking this question seriously. And again, that's not the point of this podcast.
Speaker 1:The point of this podcast is to really go deeper and to explore what's behind those simple moments in life, to explore what's behind those stories. You said that it's a way of honoring what you've been through and I love that observation and that perspective because it embraces the whole package. It embraces the things that have gone well and the moments of bliss and life and joy and laughter, but it also embraces those moments of uncertainty, the moments of stress, the moments of shortcomings, the moments of growth, and I'll be curious. Honestly, I would love to explore this a little bit further with you as we continue to go in our conversation, Because you have been, for me, one of those examples that wisdom is present at a very young age and the more you cultivate it, the richer life becomes.
Speaker 2:Well, let's hope I didn't get dumber.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't think so. Listen, welcome to the club, dan, because I think I find myself many times in those moments of what was I thinking? What am I doing? Why does the lesson continue to show up? Clearly, I have not learned the lesson yet. All right, nathan, what are you most grateful for?
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, what am I most grateful for? I think, if I tried to measure the depth of gratefulness across everything, it's probably very basic things like I live in a relatively stable society and I have access to relative abundance society and I have access to relative abundance and so my family is cared for and we don't have major primary biological needs that go unmet. I think that most of what I'm able to do and create in the world is built atop that stable foundation, and so I'm very grateful for those basics. I'm grateful that I grew up in a house that valued creativity and curiosity and learning, because it means that I never look at something and think I can't learn that or I couldn't do that.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I think I don't have the time right now to do that, but it's kind of like the world is just a plethora of adventures that I can choose to take on or not take on, and that goes back to my upbringing. I'm really grateful right now to have a wonderful spouse and a delightful son. They bring me lots of joy and joy and stability. It's just, it's relatively easy. I get caught up in the details and the busy and I have stress around that, but when I take a step back and look at how is my life actually. It's great.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for sharing I keep hearing, through the guests that are coming through the podcast, an observation and an attention to the small things in life. There's so much noise around us, there's so many things, distracting things, that that can get in the way, but, um, paying attention to the small things allows us to recognize something that I feel like you tapped into it, which is those. You've been very fortunate to have some protective factors around you that allow you to prepare yourself in a very intentional way in life, to continue to create community in very intentional ways. I think that's fascinating. That's really special. So thank you for sharing. There are things in your introduction earlier that you talked about. You're sharing your space, your living space, with people, your home. I'm very interested in learning more about that here in a second, because I think you're taking it a step further you all as a family unit, opening your home to people to feel that they have a home in a stranger's land.
Speaker 1:These are folks that are pursuing careers. Maybe somehow I'm identifying myself with them because I went through that. I came to the United States in the pursuit of a greater education and all of that and, honestly, the intention to give back. You know what I mean and I am eternally grateful for the people that in the past provided opportunities like the one you're offering to these folks, because it was a reminder that you can still trust in humanity. It was a reminder that there's two beautiful human beings out there that understand the beauty of cultivating, the beauty of those simple aspects of life like sharing a meal, preparing the meal, planting the food so we can harvest it out of the ground and just have a space where you can tell stories and perhaps discover who you are or receive support in moments of challenge and struggles. I think it's fascinating, so I look forward to hearing more about that here in a second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me jump in there for just a second, jorge. I spent time on the US-Mexico border in 2007, 2008. And it was a study abroad. I came back home and people said, how was it? I said it was like visiting Alabama in the 1940s. It was very jarring the injustices that I heard about.
Speaker 2:But when I got back to the South I thought I want to connect with immigrant communities, not as a benefactor, like a social service agency, as a volunteer, and I don't want to connect with them as like my server at the restaurant. I just want to be a human across this citizenship line and it was quite difficult actually to find opportunities. Whenever there's some major power differential, it's very hard to connect with people as human, and I really value that in our home, when we sit down to dinner together and I really value that in our home when we sit down to dinner together we're human. Wherever it is that we happen to be from, or what our expertise is or what we're studying or learning, we all eat more or less the same and we all have cultural and family recipes to bring to the table, and that's a really beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for sharing I mentioned it earlier and you're just tapping into this beautiful gift of our shared humanity that, ultimately, regardless of where you come from, ornamentations, struggles, gifts and creating a space around the meal, which we've been having doing for millennia.
Speaker 2:Right, it's an old thing.
Speaker 1:It's an old thing and will continue to be a part of us because it provides sustenance, and I love the fact that something around food and the earth is providing different kinds of layers of sustenance the physical sustenance, but it's also the emotional, the spiritual, the intellectual sustenance that come as a byproduct of those moments. I was on the receiving end of that. I was on the receiving end of people's generosity. I was on the receiving end of people's creativity. I was on the receiving end of people's advocacy. I was on the receiving end of people's creativity. I was on the receiving end of people's advocacy, and so I just think it's beautiful what you and your family get to do and offer on a regular basis. Seriously, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, nathan. Can you think of someone or remember a situation that you went through and now, looking back, you realize you know yourself better because of it?
Speaker 2:Say more.
Speaker 1:Ask it a different way. So my point here is I want to get to this concept of self-awareness, and what are the experiences or the people that have helped you open the lid or give you access and provided you a safe space for you to discover who you are? What are your attributes, what are your strengths, what are areas of growth, what are perhaps opportunities for you to unlearn and learn new things? And today you can show up in the way that you show up in the world. Does that help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does. So the experiences that come to mind are some things that go way back. One of the things that continues to shape me and continues to inform how I move in the world is that my parents did not get along well when I was quite young. They still don't, and throughout my years growing up I mediated that relationship quite a bit. Throughout my years growing up I mediated that relationship quite a bit. I would because I grew up with both of them as parents. I could understand both of them, though they could not understand each other, and so I would play interpreter. So I would a fight would happen and then I would go and speak to both of my parents individually and say, like what did you mean by that? And kind of tease out what they had been trying to communicate, but unsuccessfully, and then I would relay those messages In retrospect.
Speaker 2:It's not really a spot that a kid should have to be in, but I was in that spot so when I helped start a nonprofit in Tallahassee called Tallahassee Food Network and we were effectively a dating service for people in the food movement. So we knew the farmers and gardeners, but we also knew the folks working on food access and food justice and environmental concerns around local food systems and economic development, and we would weave the network together and we very intentionally wove and fostered partnerships and relationships across white-black race lines, since it's such a large social segmenter in the South. And I realized only kind of after the fact that my ability to navigate across cultures and to understand the subtleties of culturally relevant communication was based upon my experience with my parents, because honestly, interpreting between racial communities was like a no-brainer compared to trying to get my parents to see eye to eye, and I think actually that's part of why I loved we spoke about our shared experience at places like Montreat and youth ministry, kind of creative collaborative group processes, and I think that's part of why I love that so much is because it was this way that you could take disparate people and groups of people and walk them through a process that would help them generate a shared product, and whether that was shared ideas, a shared conference, you know whatever it was. So I think that piece goes back to when I was very young and that's not a joyful memory thinking about the tension in my house, but it is something that I'm kind of like upside down grateful for, because it's when I need to turn that on on a professional level or also on a personal level, like of navigating that.
Speaker 2:I am a really big advocate within our household and marriages. Let's get to the bottom of whatever this disagreement. What happened? How do we understand it? What's the fix that we can do as a temporary patch and then what's the solution that actually will work for us long-term? And I have that similar pattern of questions. I'll lead that both it's my business team as well as in my household and there's it's incredible how, what good solutions you can come up with if you're willing to dig in and process and look for opportunities of alignment and mutually agreeable solutions, which is not the same thing as compromise right.
Speaker 1:It's much better than Can you unpack that a little bit more, because I love what you said. It's not the same as compromise. Tell us a little more.
Speaker 2:Trying to think of a specific example on a personal level with my wife and I.
Speaker 2:My wife loves to go dancing and I really love to have free evenings when I just get to improvise and do whatever, and so the compromise would be that we split an evening and we go dancing and then the other half of the evening I can kind of read a book or build something or whatever.
Speaker 2:But what actually is the better solution for us is that, yeah, we have date night so that we have time together and we do something that we both want to do in that same time, but then we have an evening that is hers and an evening that is mine, and so we have our son cared for, but she gets to go dance and just celebrate it and enjoy it and bask in it. And then on my free evening I never really have a plan, but I get to do whatever it is that I want to do. But I know that I'm kind of off the hook from familial obligations, and so that's a solution that has emerged that allows us to both fully get what it is we want, without trying to like water it down and compromise, so things of that nature.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I want to piggyback on something that you said because it's at the core, in my opinion. It's at the core of what is now a gift for you, but it's the result of a very challenging experience. As a young child, you said it and I kind of agree with you. As a young child, you said it and I kind of agree with you. I don't think it sounds like you were in a situation where you had to grow up very quickly and, whether you want it or not, you develop some skills that allow you to navigate some very challenging and difficult waters. I'm sure there's a bunch of stories around that dynamic, but now you use that skill set of what I have come to term to understand as holding the tension. These are skills that demand a lot of self-regulation. These are skills that demand a lot of With self-regulation also comes the ability to be a good listener right, and so to me I find it very interesting that you have been able to take something that indeed was a bit of a burden or something that you have to carry with you in your bringing.
Speaker 1:Now it has set you off for success in many other aspects, and that reminds me of something Nathan, there's this beautiful spiritual leader. His name is Ramdas and he uses a phrase that I recognize, that I struggle with it at times, but the more I pay attention to it, I'm like he's up to something, and it's that suffering is grace. And so understanding. First of all, you have to unpack what grace means, and then you have to entertain this concept of how your suffering can turn out to be something that, on the flip side of it, on the other side, truly becomes something powerful, an opportunity for light, an opportunity for transformation and healing. And so what are your thoughts when you hear that expression? Suffering is grace?
Speaker 2:in response to your personal experience, what are your thoughts when you hear that expression suffering is grace, in response to your personal experience? Yeah, I guess you know at the very beginning I mentioned that I am grateful for the breadth of my experience because it's something I get to carry with me and that informs how I approach and able to navigate new situations. So I guess I would see it through that light. New situations so I guess I would see it through that light. The other thing I'm thinking about as we're discussing this is that early experience navigating between my family then set me up to be able to work across race lines in the South and I have this simple little story that comes to mind as I in my parents' neighborhood growing up it was mostly an Anglo white community and the norms around how you said hello were that if you were physically going to pass somebody on the sidewalk within a few feet then you would very briefly, very furtively say oh hi, hello evening, something like that, like one word, and that was it, and then you pass on.
Speaker 2:And then when I got started doing urban ag and we were doing the Tallahassee Food Network, I helped start a youth farm in a majority black neighborhood and the young kids all save one or two of the kids were black kids and my coworker and my colleague Sundiata, who he says I'm a so-called black man. He educated me around hellos, not because of he sat me down and taught me, but just he. I would watch how he interacted with the neighborhood and he would. He would be say, turning compost, say a hundred feet from the street, and somebody would walk by and he would stop what he was doing and he would put his hand up in the air and he'd say, hey afternoon, how are you doing? You know, and they would yell back and say, oh, I'm doing, all right, how are you doing? And they would have a moment or two conversation, just because this guy was walking by. And I thought, like, how different is this? That like, if I had done something like that in my parents' neighborhood, it would have been seen as very invasive, maybe even aggressive. There would have been questions of what does this guy want? But here I was now in a black community and I was inadvertently every day being rude to everyone because I wasn't saying hello boldly or from enough distance or from enough distance, and so lots of those experiences across like white-black lines then educated me in a positive way.
Speaker 2:It was a very positive experience, but I came to realize that these differences between cultures, between families, what we can count on is that there is just lots of difference in ways that people do things on, is that there is just lots of difference in ways that people do things. And so you know, when we receive we have this group of Indian students right now when we receive these students we were discussing the other day about what are the different norms about. When you receive a guest, how does it work, how does a meal, who serves the food and all of these little subtle things. That until you have some exposure and experience, recognizing that there just are all these differences, your common sense you assume is common, but it's actually like common to you and maybe your family, and I'm very grateful for enough exposure just to realize that I'm what's the? It's now that I'm wise, I know nothing, or something like this. You know.
Speaker 1:It's like, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know right right right yeah, you know it's fascinating because your response reminds me we are constantly given an opportunity to expand our definition of love, of inclusion, of compassion, of all these different things that ultimately, we're not saying that you have to compromise who you are, but if you give yourself permission to work around the edges of that and love yourself enough to be challenged, there's something so powerful on the other side of that. What would you say about that?
Speaker 2:So there's this book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, and he says that the way that you best I can't remember his exact word but allow people to embrace their own faith traditions is to embrace your own, and you don't get to the like, this global brotherhood, by trying to water down everything that you are in order to be like everyone else. He said, no, we do have these differences and you lean into them and be you, and in so doing, you give people permission to do the same, but then exchange right what is your faith tradition, what is your understanding of this and that and everything. And let me share with you my own of this and that and everything, and let me share with you my own. And I think that there is this danger in appreciating difference, into thinking that, like you, you can't be who you are or where you came from, or celebrate the good things of your own culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. That makes me think of the hesitation that we find ourselves right now, with a world that keeps expanding, a nation that, for some people, might feel like it's being compromised. I happen to believe that we, just again we receive an invitation to continue to redefine the definition of inclusivity. Diversity, love, welcomingness, hospitality. Those are things that gives me energy and, I think, allows us to continue to highlight the beauty of who we are as human beings. We're not perfect. We definitely have our areas of growth and our shadows and the moments when we don't show up in the best way. Yet I feel like we have this opportunity to, out of self-awareness and out of growth and out of an intentionality of spiritual practices intentional practice, whatever works for you, to really solidify and create spaces to celebrate our shared humanity, our diversity and an opportunity to see new expressions of love and diversity. Nathan, why do you do what you do? Love and diversity. Nathan, why do you do what you do? Why farming? How come farming? What keeps you motivated and is gratitude connected?
Speaker 2:to it in any way. There's a couple of stories here, so one is goes back to childhood and the other to why I get started professionally. My mother helped me start a garden when I was eight years old as a homeschooling project and and I planted this lettuce and carrots both in the wrong season, so the carrots got woody and the lettuce got just buggy and bitter. But I fell in love with this magic of planting seeds and watching things grow. And then, throughout my my school experience, all the way until I graduated from high school, I had a garden every spring and I would fixate and just love and watch these little seeds germinate and sprout and, like a bean sprout, pops up with its stem up first, and then it raises up its leaves and I would watch it by the hour changing. And then when I had this produce to harvest, I got to share that with my family and we got to eat and enjoy that bounty and that goodness. And then, very quickly, I also began to share what we grew with our neighbors. So I would leave a few ears of corn on a neighbor's doorstep, I would offer tomatoes to somebody passing by and I became known as like the kid with the garden on the corner, you know. But I, I loved how the garden served as this permission giver to break those rules of hello in my parents' neighborhood where, because there was a garden, we could engage with each other for a more extended period and say, wait, are those collard greens? And I'd say, oh yeah, and they'd say, oh my gosh, my grandfather used to grow collard greens and my grandparents they had the best recipe for greens. And then we would find ourselves speaking for five or six or 10 minutes sharing recipes and family stories and where people's families were from. And there was this depth that emerged because this garden had given permission, and, as much as I loved the growing of the food, I also loved that, that magic and the connection that the food in its growing state provided to to help people connect on this very human level. So I carried that with me.
Speaker 2:And then I graduated from college in 2008 and and I actually studied community organizing I wrote my thesis on social movements. Had I gotten an organizer job, it probably would have been with a nonprofit, but in 2008, all the nonprofits were laying people off and so that was not in the cards and the economy was crumbling and we didn't know how far that crumble was going to go and I thought I don't know how to fix the economy, but I do know how to grow food, and if I can share that with my community then things don't have to get as crazy, because if people are at least well-fed, they can figure out the rest of the details. But if they're hungry people get desperate. So I thought let me work on that, let me see if I can feed my community. So Let me work on that, let me see if I can feed my community. So that's why I got started professionally was because I thought I can help feed my community, I can teach more people, and that way, if things get really crazy, there will be more of us that know how to garden. And when people need to learn a skill, they ask the people most proximate to them that they know. And so if the only people are socially and relationally very far away, they don't have access to those skills. And so I thought the more of us that there are that know some of these basic skills, the more they can be drawn on if and when they're needed. So that got me started.
Speaker 2:And then the things that keep me going are somewhat concerns about environment, but now the health situation in the US is just so dire and so many of the chronic diseases that plague our families are a direct result of the foods that we're eating. Obesity is actually overtaken. Tobacco is the primary cause of preventable disease. I oftentimes find myself frustrated and angry because my own journey of health. I have to navigate the grocery store and I have to pick and choose at restaurants, almost as if I'm navigating through a minefield of toxic food, and it's so absurd. So I think that people need an alternative. The whole food system needs an overhaul.
Speaker 1:But in the meantime, if folks have access to at least fresh-grown, healthy, non-toxic vegetables, then we're taking a step. Nathan, that's fascinating and I so appreciate this whole attention to I'm sure you heard the expression before like the world is big. There are a bunch of issues in the world, but if you can focus on what you can do in your little corner of the world to make the world a better place, you're actually making a difference. And that's exactly what you're doing and I just think it's so powerful, it's so remarkable and I hope it empowers other people to see themselves and to find to affirm in themselves the gifts that they have, because I can only imagine what it must have felt like for you coming out of college. You're ready to pursue life and the economy is going haywire and you don't know what you do. But it could be very scary.
Speaker 1:I had a hard time trying to figure out what was the next step, but that pursuit of your heart, of this is what I can do and I'm going to hone into it is something worth paying attention to, in my opinion. I think we're so used to this immediate gratification model of life, and being a farmer just forces you to pay attention to the season, to slow down, to tend to the soil right To care for it, and I just think it's fascinating that the skill set that you develop at such a young age has allowed you to live your life in such an intentional way, providing opportunities for other people. I just think it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other thing in terms of giving back and finding solutions in systems thinking, people say that the best template for a large system that works is a small system that works. Best template for a large system that works is a small system that works, and so if you want to make big change, you have to find small solutions that then can be replicated, and we've been in this business for 15 years, and for 10 years, like, every single thing that we ever did was not really scalable in any kind of way. It was a single garden, was not really scalable in any kind of way. It was a single garden, custom garden for a specific family, and we got better at doing that, and so we've helped 90 families with their gardens this spring.
Speaker 2:But also this farm model that finally emerged out of some different ideas and concepts. We're looking at it, and one of us on our team can, one day a week, provide agricultural abundance to 70 families right now, and so you start scaling that up and those numbers grow a lot faster. But it took us 10 years to find the model, and then it took us another about five years to recognize it as oh wait, we could do something bigger with this. This is something that could help feed Jacksonville not just like my immediate neighbors, and who knows. That's the direction that we're growing right now. But in the meantime, we're feeding these 70 families and next year probably about 200. And we're going to make sure that they're eating better, but a step at a time.
Speaker 1:I love how you are allowing the journey to become a teacher and to give you opportunities for expansion. You sort of like tapped on it already. But what are some other successful stories? And I don't mean successful, oh, things are going well. I'm more curious about what are some of the other stories that, when you look back at them, of the other stories?
Speaker 2:that when you look back at them, your heart is full. In Tallahassee we had a youth farm that I mentioned and that youth farm has informed our own neighborhood farm model. That youth farm was a wild success in terms of engaging young people and helping transform their diets and taste preferences. So when we got started, I was riding around in the truck with a couple of young ladies and we were gathering lumber and materials to build our first garden beds and I turned to them and I said hello, lexis and Tiara, what kind of vegetables do y'all eat? And I asked that question because I thought well, we need to be sure and grow the things that they're already eating, because that's where you start. You start with where people are at. And they conferred with each other and then they looked back at me. They said, no, we don't really eat vegetables. And I thought, no, just not necessarily. You love them. But what vegetables do you already eat? And they're like no, we don't eat vegetables. I said when's the last time you had a vegetable? And they said we had a salad from Zaxby's sometime, like last week. And I thought, okay, yeah, we've got some work to do. You know, come to find out in that conversation, greens are actually a separate category from vegetables in their book. And so they admitted that they love greens. The grandmother has the best recipe and they eat them all the time.
Speaker 2:So that next week we made a big pot of greens with the young people and we ate them, and all the kids ate near a plate full of greens. The following week we made because of the seasonal abundance we had a bunch of basil, so we made pesto, and all these young people they said, no, that's just nasty, we don't want that. And so we learned really quick the importance of culturally relevant foods, and so we came up with a new system that young people would choose what it was that they wanted to prepare. And then one of the adults at the time this was Mary Elizabeth, my wife. She would take that recipe idea. She would go to the store and buy $20, $25 worth of groceries and then the next Friday, the next workday, with the young people, they would combine those groceries with things from the farm and turn it into a meal. And we did things like pizza and sloppy joes. And what Mary Elizabeth's charge was? Taking their recipe idea and turning it into something that would be healthy for the young people. So we had sloppy joes on a really nice bun with lots of shredded carrots in the meat and then served over a like a bed of fresh greens and green onions, right. But like, at the end of the day it felt and it tasted like a sloppy joe, right, so the kids would eat it up.
Speaker 2:So we did this for months and then I remember, like about 10 months in, we all the kids left on a Monday before we got to decide on a recipe, so we didn't go grocery shopping. So they get there on Friday and they say, hey, mr Nathan, what are we going to cook today? And I said I don't think we can cook today. Like, we didn't go shopping, we don't have any groceries, there's nothing to cook. And these teenagers look at me like I'm just an idiot and they say, well, we could at least make a salad. And I just blinked and I was like, yeah, I guess you're right, yeah, we could just make a salad.
Speaker 2:So these young people, all on their own, they harvest this incredible salad of like lettuce and arugula and spinach and kale, shredded onions, shredded carrots, green onions. They make their own homemade ranch dressing with like fresh dill and garlic, and then they serve it and everybody goes through the serving line and fills a bowl full with salad and nobody says a word for five minutes because they're just gorging on their salad and the first thing that breaks the silence is this young man named Delon. He stands up and he said that's some good salad. I got to get me some more and I just sat there and I just soaked it all in because I thought, like this is the same group of young people who you know, 10 months before told me they wouldn't eat vegetables and here they are just feasting on salad. So it was. It was awesome watching their transformation of diet. It was also awesome watching this group of young people who not all of them, but a certain segment of them were not stars in school, so they were in special ed classes and pushed aside academically, but on that farm they were the experts of how to use power tools and how to compost and soil, biology and crop rotations and predator-prey relationships on the farm, and so we would have college students that came to volunteer and their teachers were these middle and high schoolers. So they were like the finance degrees, the folks from the Greek houses and such, who were like aiming towards being tomorrow's future leaders and such, and they were getting schooled by a 12- 12 year old on our team and that was awesome to behold as well, to see these young folks who really they just needed an opportunity to excel and they got it through the farm. So that's definitely a memory that I hold dear and actually the way in which we started that youth farm.
Speaker 2:There's two pieces to this. The short version is just that we had a community cookout and a workday to start the farm because we wanted to engage the neighborhood, let folks know what we're doing and also weave these young people into relationships with people in their own communities so that they had a broader community of support. And so as the youth farm developed from there, we had people who would point back and say, oh yeah, I remember when you were starting Cause, cause, they were there right, like they were all in compost and building things and getting to know the young people. But the backstory on the fact that we had a cookout was another educational experience.
Speaker 2:So I was riding around in a truck with a gentleman named Wendell and he was my senior by about 20 years, but I was his boss in terms of our work together doing gardens, and he grew up in the neighborhood where that youth farm was and I said hey, wendell, what do you think about us having a picnic and a work day to get started with this youth farm? And he said nah, you don't want to do that. And Wendell was a black gentleman. And he said, nah, you don't want to do that. And Wendell was a black gentleman. And I said well, why not? He said what's picnic sound like to you? And I said sounds like blankets and food under a tree, whatever, just like a park. It's an outdoor meal.
Speaker 2:He said nah, you ever notice how black folks have cookouts? And I said picnic, cookout, who cares? Same difference, he said. Said, nah, they're different, man. And I was like what's the deal? He said look now, nathan, a picnic is what southern white, good, good old white folks used to do back in the south, when they go and pick them up, a brother, and string them in a tree and then they have a little festivity underneath. He said you don't want to have a picnic, you want to have a little festivity underneath. He said you don't want to have a picnic, you want to have a cookout. And I was like you're right, we do want to have a cookout.
Speaker 2:And now, whether or not that true entomology of the word picnic has to do with lynching or not, it doesn't matter, right? Because if there's a community understanding, that is the entomology of the word. If I, as a white guy in overalls, go knock on somebody's door and say, hey, you want to come to a picnic, they're going to say, no, thank you. But if we come and knock on the door and we say, hey, we're going to have a cookout on Saturday, you want to come, all of a sudden it works. And again, it's just one of those like cultural differences that it's really not a, you know, one is not necessarily better than the other, but it's better in context. And so we had a community cookout and workday and then that same form of a community cookout and a workday. We morphed it and now we use that as we develop these neighborhood farms, except now we call them farm raisings. So we have food and a community workday and we draw off the Amish barn raising idea and call them farm raisings.
Speaker 1:That's powerful. Thank you so much for sharing those are beautiful stories, beautiful stories. Nathan, what do you do in order to connect with yourself, with the deepest part of who you are, in order to show up for other things in life?
Speaker 2:I guess there's two things. The thing that helps me center is to read. Reading is this way that I get to learn from the experience of others but then also reflect on my own experience and draw things out of my brain that have been gotten dusty in the back of my mind. And so reading I actually do love to write and share stories. So it feels a little bit cheap to say this because it's part of my, the way that I do marketing, but I write long form social media posts on a regular basis and share those about, say, my grandmother, and I just wrote a story about how we used my grandmother's tiller to break ground at our third farm. And I like to tell those stories and I have an idea before I write. But it's actually in the writing that the sense comes together and I start to understand why something was meaningful, why it stood out, what it means for me and our team and things like that. I like writing stories and I guess you know opportunities to just reflect back. So that's interrelated with storytelling.
Speaker 1:And does it usually happen like individually, like personally your time, individually, like personally your time, or do you? Or because I'm hearing that that there's a layer of dialogue involved in this process for you to realign yourself once again am I hitting the nail on the nail or are you because reading is a personal thing, you're by yourself, but the process of sharing the story is interactive with other people is. Is there a layer, is there a component that you benefit from? Sharing it, from hearing the feedback of other people as well, and helps you?
Speaker 2:Yes, and it gives me an excuse to tell the story, to write the story because there's someone that may read it.
Speaker 2:Then, historically, I had a journal that I would write stories in. It was my story journal and it was a practice of trying to find meaning amidst life, because when you live every day, by and large, if somebody says how was your day, what were you up to, you just go through this like list of actions or noticings, but it's not understood for yourself or presented to other people in the form of a story. Oh, this thing that was surprising happened, and then I navigated it in such a way that it became story. Or I did this thing and I did it because of this layered meaning and grateful, or whatever it is. We just report in lists, and lists are data but they're not really sculpted to mean things, and story is data infused into a narrative that means something, and so having that audience allows me to do that. And also, I'll be honest, like the Instagram word limit of 2200 characters always forces me to condense what I'm trying to say, because I'm like I don't have 5000 characters. I got to figure out how to tie it up in 2200.
Speaker 1:And that's hard to do when you want to convey something you want. You want to be succinct, the choosing of words. It's hard. Listen, I want to ask you how do you handle challenges in life? How do you handle that fear, the negative self-talk that all of us struggle with? What does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:I've been realizing that recently. Actually, you know the Avengers, right, there's Hulk, right, and Iron man tells Steve B, steve banner, he's suit up, we, the aliens, are here, whatever. And he's he says something like what's your secret? And steve banner, right before he turns into hulk, he's like it's time what iron man says, it's time to get angry. And steve banner, he says that's my secret. I'm always angry, you know, and he's like, turns into hulk um, not necessarily on positive light, but I've been acknowledging that I live with this like low-grade fear, just like constantly that that, or you could call it worry or whatever, like that I'm not going to remember something, that, like, this thing is not going to go well, that there's some variable that I'm not anticipating.
Speaker 2:I've had co-workers. They say, gosh, it's just so overwhelming, I don't know how to do this thing and you're expecting me to figure it out. I'm like, oh my gosh, I live like that moment where you are for five minutes. I live there Like that is my whole existence, is like every single day. I don't know how I'm going to do X, y, z, and partly it's a I don't know how I'm going to do it because there are so many things that have to be done that are like do today and then often probably 10 times a day.
Speaker 2:It's also like I literally have never approached this thing before, and so there's a certain amount of stress and fear that comes with approaching something that you've never encountered before and you don't know how to do, and so on one level, it'd be nice to have a little bit less of that, and in ways that I help dissipate some of that cortisol in my system is like going on walks, deep breaths, cold water Actually, I love freezing cold water because it just resets my system and it allows me to think very primarily in terms of survival rather than all of these hundreds of possible to-dos and lists and things like that.
Speaker 2:When you're in ice water, you only think about getting warm and getting out, so it just simplifies things a lot. But also I have come to be more comfortable with being ignorant and unprepared, because it's something that I encounter a lot as an entrepreneur, trying to do things that are different Every time that things stabilize, then I think, okay, well, now I have a new foundation, I can leap and do this new thing and grow, and so it's a flip-sided coin, right? It's like on one hand, it's the personality trait that allows me to innovate and grow and develop and dream, and, on the other hand, it's the reason that I am constantly low-grade, stressed, and, on the other hand, it's the reason that I am constantly low-grade stressed.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for sharing. I love and I appreciate hearing your honesty. I think any young entrepreneur out there will benefit from hearing these affirming words of listen. You're not all of us are still trying to figure it out. Some of us have a plan of action that works, but it's not because it happened overnight. It's an ongoing process of many attempts that sometimes do not work, but you continue to show up and you continue to believe in yourself and you continue to go for it and ultimately, somehow and at some point, it will deliver and it becomes an opportunity for gratitude. Let me ask you this how do you access self-love?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest way that I do this is to revisit where we've been, where I've been and I tend to be so caught up in what is coming and what is yet undone but having the opportunity to look backwards and say, right, like a year ago we were struggling to get our second farm launched right, and then by November of last year we got it launched and now we have paying customers doing that and like it's working, and another 40 families now are eating from our farm. It's those moments when I get to say, yeah, we have climbed this mountain right, we are climbing it, but we are not at the bottom. Those are certainly moments of self-love and celebration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you Well in closing, nathan, because I want to honor your time and people's pen of attention what is a special quote or figure that has inspired you over the years?
Speaker 2:So the quote and the moment that I've been channeling a lot lately is a mentor, rick Uppercase. He's the guy he started Borderlands in Arizona and Northern Mexico and the program I studied with and I visited him. He moved to Stony Point in New York and ran a retreat center there, and when I got there and he was describing all the many things that they were doing with their program, I said, rick, how are you doing all of these things? And he said poorly. And I said, no, rick, really Like you have this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing happening. And I said, like, really, how do you do it? And he said really poorly. And I loved it because from this outside perspective it was like this monolith of perfection, right, like he was constantly achieving and doing more than seemed possible, and to him it just felt like a cascading shit show, and so that's where I'm at right now is it feels like it's just poorly, but hopefully it's serving folks that are a step outside of that chaos and making the world a little better place.
Speaker 1:Well, I am thankful and grateful that you get to do your things so poorly, that you are making an impact in your community and hopefully the people that are listening to this podcast can also benefit from your light, your commitment, your humbleness and that self-love that allows you to stay committed to this vision that is providing so many people in your community and the people in Jacksonville with healthy food, hopefully, a better lifespan, a longer lifespan and a greater understanding of the importance of food and how we can actually keep ourselves healthy when we pay attention to what we eat. Nathan, this has been phenomenal. I am to say that I'm thankful is an understatement. Please sustain my love to your family, the people that are living with you, all for your time. I always ask this question at the end of the podcast and I like to ask my guests who could be a future guest on the podcast. So who would that recommendation would be from you?
Speaker 2:I was thinking about somebody that we both know and that's Reggie Weaver. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've really valued connecting with him over the years, both when I was a young person and then also like five or six years ago. I went deep down a rabbit hole about co-ops and he was part of the leadership team helping launch a co-op and I don't know where that initiative has led, but it was his own reimagined way of contributing to life after he was a little bit less involved in church and such. But he's a cool guy.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Yeah, reggie Weaver, that's a name from the past that I love to reconnect with. Thank you very much. Well, nathan, thank you again for the opportunity. You have been phenomenal. I hope this conversation has been a blessing to you and to our listeners. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm full of gratitude for you, for our time together. To our listeners, this has been another episode of Journey Talks podcast, your favorite podcast to reconnect with gratitude and inspiration. I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode. Take care and see you next time. Thank you for watching. Make sure you like and subscribe to our channel, share your feedback, hit that notification bell and let's keep the conversation going.