Full Earth Farm Profile

I'm pretty excited about Full Earth Farm in Quincy. I grew up with Katie Harris, who runs the farm with her boyfriend Aaron Suko. Katie and I went to preschool together, and my mom taught her in first grade. I saw her for the first time in years on a visit home a few years ago at her table at the farmer's market, and I couldn't help but think Oh MAN she has her own farm and she's my age. Pretty rad.

Anyway, this is written from an interview in February, when plans for LATFG were hatching.

Full Earth Farm looks very different during the day. I had been out to the farm for Aaron's surprise birthday party, thrown by his girlfriend Katie, but that was at night and I couldn't get the full scope of the place. As I heard it, Aaron was getting disappointed when every friend he asked to come to the party bailed, until he showed up at the farm and 30 people were there. Zing!

Katie and Aaron met me up by the greenhouse. It was a slow day and they had been checking on their greenhouse starts- peppers, eggplant, and TOMATOES. “I hate tomatoes,” Aaron said. They are a lot of work, planting the seeds indoors at the end of winter, protecting the small plants outside once they’re transplanted, pruning, staking, and harvesting every day. But it’s worth it: Katie said they can make more money in six weeks with tomatoes than they can for the rest of the year. Worth it in the end.

It’s impressive that Full Earth is making any money at all, much less succeeding with a 25 person CSA in their second year of production. “[The farm] way exceeded our expectations,” Katie said. Though the farmers aren’t trying to over-expand, they are trying to increase their CSA to 50 shareholders for this fall, based on the overflow they experienced from last summer.

Katie and Aaron are both new to farming. Both were educated in the liberal arts and sciences, and we all know how much money you can make with those degrees. Katie started out going to Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and transferred to art school in Boston to learn to be a photographer. “During my time in Boston, I met a lot of farmers,” Katie said. “I became interested in urban agriculture, then started thinking about all this land I had access to in Florida.” The land belongs to Katie’s parents, Fred and Lucy Harris, who used to live in town in Tallahassee, but relocated to Quincy after both Katie and her brother Riley left home. The idea of farming was always in the back of her mind. “It was a pipe dream, it was a secret pipe dream,” she said. She moved back to Tallahassee from Boston. "About that time my folks said, ‘We want to start an organic farm!’” Katie said. “And that’s that, my pipe dream was realized by chance.”

Right now, the half acre garden in its entirety is under cover crops, and when that’s all added up the entire cultivation area covers a couple of acres. Families of related vegetables are integrated into their crop plan along with cover crops, and are switched to different parts of the garden each season to help with pest control and to improve the soil. “The more we use [the soil], the higher the organic matter,” Aaron said. “We feel like we’re on the right track for building the soil.”

Cover crops are a big part Full Earth’s farm plan. With sustainable agriculture, the soil is the backbone of the farm, not fertilizers. “I want to spend less time with compost and let the plants do all the work,” Aaron said. Managing cover crops takes a lot of planning, and take up space that could be used for cash crops. But the sacrifice of space is worth it. “You’ve grown your mulch in place, and as [the cover crop] decomposes, you’re making your compost in place,” Aaron said.

Composting on a farm scale is much more intensive than home garden composting. At any time there are five or six huge piles decomposing at the back end of the farm. Some piles are still being added to, with raw materials like wood chips, farm plant waste, and manure. “We’re getting better at not using as much compost,” Aaron said. “We use it once when we plant, and use unsifted compost as mulch.” As important as compost is, turning, sifting and laying compost uses a lot of tractor fuel and takes a lot of work. “We want to get as much work done as possible,” Katie said. “Sifting compost takes so much time with just the two of us.”

Just the two of them is how they want to keep it, too. Full Earth didn’t start out as a couple’s venture. “I said, ‘No Aaron, you can’t work here, we’ll break up for sure,’” Katie said. Aaron had been finishing his thesis in order to receive his masters in Portuguese translation, and working part time at a bike shop in Tallahassee. He was having a hard time finding translation work, so he started coming out a couple of days a week to the farm. And, that’s that. “After coming out here a couple of times I realized I really liked it. We work well together, and you really needed help with just your mom helping out occasionally,” he said to Katie. “It’s lonely working by yourself,” Katie said.

Katie and Aaron aren’t the only ones involved, with the farm, either. The business end is run by Lucy and Fred, Katie’s parents. “Aaron and I do everything on the farm, and they have the finance for startup,” Katie said. “Without them we couldn’t do this for a lot of reasons. I had a year of learning, then we just dove in. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without financial help.” Fred and Lucy already had the land, the tractor and the implements, they just needed the farmers. “We’re paid a wage,” said Aaron. “It helps make our time valuable, thinking of it in terms of economics helps us prioritize.”

With the expansion of the CSA and the soil becoming more productive as the seasons progress, Full Earth is on its way to becoming a self-sustaining enterprise. “My goal is to take over the business without depending on someone else,” Katie said. “What is sustainable? Financial sustainability should be taken into account, too.”

The idea of jumping into farm life can seem intimidating, especially when you look up tractor prices online. And being so young, the Full Earth farmers find themselves in the same situation as many new farmers. “The main difficulty is land access. Startup costs and access,” Katie said. But when most of the nation’s farmers are pushing 60, it’s especially important that young farmers like Katie and Aaron succeed. “I don’t know if young people in their first years have that kind of commitment [to owning land],” Aaron said. “But there are a lot of people who have money who want people to farm their land. ‘Such and such farm has such a good reputation and it’s on my land.’ I think there’s a lot of potential between landowners and young kids.”

Fortunately, for up and coming small farmers, the sustainable produce market in this area is still unsaturated. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many farmers to learn from. Katie spent a year working for Herman Holley and Louise Divine at Turkey Hill farm, where she gained her experience, but no one in the area is doing any kind of formal training. “I think apprenticing is most valuable, especially in the South,” Katie said. “There are so many regional differences.” It would be easy to go to California and work on an organic farm, but California won’t prepare anyone for growing in Florida.

Prioritizing can also make the leap into farming more palatable for young people. “I think people have a false notion that farming has to be homesteading. You can focus on what makes sense,” Aaron said. You don’t have to do it all- livestock, fruit trees, lumber, etc. There are even options for equipment that aren’t as costly, like walk-behind tractors (“It’s basically a mechanical donkey,” according to Aaron).

And, there’s always the added perk that as a farmer, you’re your own boss. “We always take August off,” Katie said. “You said you wouldn’t do this unless you got a month off,” she said to Aaron.

“I don’t romanticize hard labor year round at all,” Aaron replied. During that month last year, Aaron went to Germany, Katie traveled and rested, and neither of them talked about the farm much at all. Because of good planning and working hard in September, they had their starts ready and brought as much produce as everyone else when the fall markets started.

Right now it’s high in the spring season, lending much potential for success, for the farm, the business, and for the farmers. It’s pretty much established that Katie will never be a photographer and Aaron might not be putting his translation degree to use for a while. “It’s hard to do another job once you’ve done something you really enjoy,” Katie said. “ What else would we do? It’s hard to measure up.”