Why Soil Is the Infrastructure of a Local Food System

What We Need to Grow, Episode 010: Building a Farm From the Soil Up. A Founder Talk conversation with Josh Blank. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

WHAT WE NEED TO GROW | EP. 010: Building a Farm From the Soil Up A Walk & Talk with Josh Blank of Carrot Top Organics

Caleb Pedosiuk: I’m transplanting some starter plants from my friend Josh’s farm. He sent me home with this amazing tote of soil and a tray of starters, so I’m getting them into compost in our backyard garden. While I was out there we did a full walkthrough of his property. They’ve only had it about six years and have been working it for roughly five, and it was really cool to see what they’ve built and to hear firsthand from Josh — a founder of something deeply tactile and important. Food. Soil at the foundation of all of us. Nutrients at the most basic level. If you’re into that kind of thing, give the long conversation a listen.

So I’m here with my friend Josh, the founder of this farm. Most of the founders I get to talk to and work with are behind a computer for a lot of what they do, so this is an incredible opportunity — we get to hear about what Josh is building here at Carrot Top Commons.

Josh Blank: Carrot Top Organics is the farm and the vegetables, and the Commons is what we’re working toward with the property as a whole — event space, a disc golf course, that kind of thing.

Caleb: This greenhouse — I remember when it went up. How long ago was that?

Josh: 2022, I think. So this is our fourth season growing in here.

Caleb: A couple of things have always stood out to me about Josh. A few years back, when Sarah and I were helping out a little with the local market, he blew our minds when it came to understanding local food systems — the importance of soil, how nutrients from the soil up are what end up in the food we eat. And seeing all the stages of what they built carried over into how I understand the work that goes into building anything. Farms are full of metaphors for life, and they’re also at the foundation of so many important things.

Josh: We focus a lot on the soil here — I always call it our secret to success. People ask, how are your vegetables so good? Well, I buy good compost and I work a lot on my soil. It’s a piece of infrastructure, like the greenhouse — biological infrastructure we have to work on in order to grow good crops. Right now we’re in the transition stage: overwintered spinach going up to seed, overwintered carrots we’re still harvesting, and new radishes, beet greens, turnips, cilantro, lettuce. With this greenhouse we grow year-round — all winter we’re producing spinach, cilantro, salad mix.

Caleb: And for context, if someone isn’t familiar with this area — our winters are brutally cold. We’re talking minus forty Celsius. One night with the windchill we hit the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet.

Josh: No heat in here, just the sun. The trick is choosing varieties that are super cold-hardy and can actually freeze — a lot of these can freeze at night, no problem, as long as their root systems aren’t frozen. The ground never freezes in here, and each sunny day, even at minus twenty outside, it can be plus twenty inside through the plastic. As long as the plants get that sun and grow a little each day, they survive and keep producing. Production slows in January, but November, December, March, April — we’re producing a lot of greens out of here.

Caleb: One thing I was ignorant about years ago — and I don’t mean that in a strange way, I’d just never really thought about it — was how important a strong local food system is. Someone might ask, why go through all that hassle to keep things alive in winter when you can just buy a bag of spinach at the store? But if supply chains break down, or there’s geopolitical unrest, or a season where supplies get hard to come by, it’s good to have at least part of your food system be self-sufficient.

Josh: And the food just tastes better. Our winter greens — customers constantly ask why they taste so good. It’s because they’re growing in the cold, which flavors them, and because we have really good soil. That’s a missing selling point in the local food system I’m always arguing: local food just tastes better, and organic food tastes better — it has more nutrients, more sugars, which we can actually measure on a Brix scale. Sugar level also affects storage. You want your carrots in the fall to hit a certain sugar level, and that means they store longer. I still have storage carrots I harvested at the end of October that I’m eating now at the end of May.

Caleb: You dropped off parsnips a month and a half ago — and I don’t even like parsnips. I found them this past week making soup, snapped off a piece, and it was crisp and absolutely phenomenal. I realized maybe I do like parsnips.

Josh: That’s seven months of storage. I’ve heard of farmers with the right root-cellar temperatures storing carrots into July. And the storage ones taste better — over the winter the flavors concentrate, like a fine wine, and they stay crispy. Another reason this matters: our food generally stays price-stable in a crisis or when the world economy gets rough, because organic isn’t as dependent on fertilizer, shipping, and trucking. The important thing is to keep supporting your local farmer even when grocery food gets cheap again — so we stay resilient and strong.

Caleb: Really good point. And you’ve started all of these from seed?

Josh: Yeah — that’s celeriac, and I’ve got parsley, tomatoes, celery, basil. We do a lot of brassicas — broccoli, cauliflower — a lot of fennel, lettuces. This is our wash-and-pack area; everything we harvest comes in here, gets washed and dried. I just bought a salad spinner, which has revolutionized my system and saved me a lot of hours.

Caleb: I’m going to brag on Josh, since he wouldn’t. When they got this farm — only six years ago — this was just a really old barn. Most of the conversations I’m in, people are building digital things: infrastructure, teams. It’s been amazing to see the real-world version — building piece by piece, from the electricity to the concrete to working with old stone foundations, watching it all come together. I think it’s such a beautiful thing when you see the old world being restored and used with new tools and techniques.

Josh: Let’s go up to the top barn — we had a party up there, events and all that.

Caleb: You’re building a disc golf course as well?

Josh: Yeah. We fixed all the floors in here, and we’ve been having events and parties — live bands set up under here, dance parties. We had a lights guy come to the last one and set up fog and lasers. It’s also a bit of storage — in the fall I bring in all my squash and onions and dry them on wire trays.

Caleb: I recognize this banner.

Josh: We’re not at market anymore, so I thought I’d put it up somewhere. Better than it sitting in storage.

Caleb: It’s so neat to see those themes of restoration — where things from before aren’t just bulldozed, but you find ways to integrate the past and reinvigorate it in the present.

Josh: For me it was also cost-effective. This barn had good bones, a great roof, a good foundation — it was way cheaper to fix it up than to build a structure this size. A new build would have cost ten or twenty times as much. Instead I fixed it up, and it’s got its beautiful aesthetic and it’s fully functional — for the vegetable operation, for events, for all my storage and equipment. Even better than a new build: it’s airy, it’s got lots of flow.

Caleb: So your vision for Carrot Top Organics — the farm, which you actually started about twenty years ago as a student, a little summer business in the city — has come to life here over the last few years. And now you have a vision for Carrot Top Commons. Can you share a bit about that?

Josh: It’s a realization that farms are kind of community projects. It’s not just one farmer managing the land or one business. One of the ways I’ve made this property work is by inviting other businesses and people to share in the benefit and the work — one woman does flowers and rents some space, we’re putting in the disc golf course that’ll be open to local clubs, we’re looking at events, maybe weddings one day. We have our first event booked this fall. The Commons is about highlighting the property as a whole — the vegetables are just one part of it.

Caleb: Tell me more about the disc golf course.

Josh: Initially I got some grants to do conservation work here — we did a bunch of tree planting and built this pond, and that area is prepped for native wildflowers. With the disc golf, the question was, how can we get people to enjoy the conservation and the forest? It’s a sport that’s very non-invasive to the land — you make some fairways, put in some baskets, and people get to play while enjoying the beauty of the landscape. It also helps us clean up the property and make it more accessible with more paths and trails, without really disturbing the wildlife — you’re working with it. A lot of it has been removing invasive species like prickly ash and dog-strangling vine, and then highlighting the beautiful old oaks, the silver maples, the yellow birch. There’s just something about a basket with a vista.

Caleb: Was this pond this size when you first got the property?

Josh: No, we built it from scratch. It was just a flat field — the back was kind of wet. We excavated, made these mounds, shaped it, and put in all the trees you see. I worked with Ducks Unlimited Canada; they came out and inspected it. They fund ponds on marginal land that were probably old wetlands that got cleared. That back corner would get a couple feet of water every spring, so I knew it was a good spot, and once we got through the sand we hit a clay bottom that keeps the water in. It fills up every spring — there were ducks in it, lots of frogs. One year there were millions of tadpoles, and the water’s surprisingly clean.

Caleb: How important is a pond like this in an ecosystem — for birds migrating, that sort of thing?

Josh: I don’t know that I’d put it in terms of importance — it just fits with the ecology. I didn’t plant the bulrushes and the native sedges and grasses; they came in naturally. When we excavated, we unearthed old wetland plant species that suddenly had a niche to grow into. I haven’t seen a turtle yet, but I’m hoping — we’ve got some logs floating to create a turtle habitat.

Caleb: Have you ever had the right conditions to skate on it?

Josh: One year, yep — clearing the snow is the hard part. And all these trees came in on their own. When we excavated it was just a pit, and naturally all these species came back. We planted some, obviously — this birch we planted a couple of years ago — but the willows came on their own. We’re really lucky here: very few invasive species, not a lot of dog-strangling vine or poison ivy. I think it’s because it’s been a wild property that hasn’t been developed much over the years, so nature’s really done its thing.

Josh: This would have been the original fence line — all these trees have come since they first cleared the field. Here’s an example where we have a disc golf hole coming through: we just cleared some of the dead trees and the little stuff and low-branched it, so it creates this beautiful canopy while the native species keep coming up on the ground and the bigger trees get more room. There’s a beautiful yellow birch right there, some beautiful hemlocks. You can do some trimming and cutting in the forest to make trails and actually benefit it in the long term — it’s not clear-cutting, it’s managing it, working with it. As you come up the course you’ll get this vista of the house, the greenhouses, and the whole farm.

Caleb: Have you partnered with anyone in the disc golf space for this?

Josh: Yeah. I’m part of a club in town that’s a big supporter of this course coming in, and one of the guys is a course designer who’s designed a bunch in the area — he designed and built this one.

Caleb: How do people get involved? You mentioned the Commons and volunteer days.

Josh: We’ve done about four volunteer days, where people come up and help drag the stuff we’ve cut, and we chip it or pile it. The cool thing with the disc golf community is that it’s very supportive — they want to see more courses, so they’ll pay memberships and also come out and help build and clear the course. It’s a lot of work clearing brush, so many hands make it really manageable.

Caleb: Sometimes people working in a certain space have visibility others don’t. Are there things you wish people knew — about getting involved in the local food system, or being more connected to the outdoors and natural ecosystems?

Josh: There are lots of ways. Number one, and it’s a bit of a plug: buy my vegetables, and support other local farms. If we can have successful businesses on the land, it lets us do all these other cool things on the land. And I really love getting people onto the farm — whether it’s disc golf, or tours (we do tours with local high schools and universities), or events. I’d like to do more of that, just to bring people onto the land and give them exposure to the different businesses using it. Whenever we have people out here, it just feels so good — the air is fresh, and you’re out in it.

Caleb: So you’re not at market currently, but if people want to buy from you it’s carrottopcommons.com — or .ca?

Josh: Both, I think I have both of them. And from there we do CSA — community-shared agriculture — and custom orders right from the website. Generally every week of the year, with a little break in June as things are transitioning. The best way to stay in touch is signing up for our newsletter, and we’re on Instagram at Carrot Top Organics.

Caleb: Awesome. Well, Josh, thank you so much. I feel like a fanboy of farming and agriculture after what we saw back in 2018 at the markets — it’s so important. And I see so many parallels with the grit and the spirit of the founders I work with and really appreciate. I just feel like these two worlds don’t have to be mutually exclusive — they can be complementary. The more the plugged-in tech world realizes how important the unplugged organic world is, the better off we’ll all be.

Josh: Totally. I think we should use those tools to level the playing field. There’s a real opportunity for small businesses in general, and small farms especially, to take advantage of newer technology to benefit our farms — and you can do that without sacrificing the ethos and philosophy of organic, sustainable, ecological practice. There’s a way to bring those things together.

Caleb: Awesome. Thank you, Josh.

Josh: Thank you, Caleb.