878: Matthew Geldin on Building Neighborhood Farms.

Greetings, Urban Farmers Gardeners and Healthy Food Visionaries. Farmer Greg here, and welcome to the 878th episode of the Urban Farm Podcast, where every day we work together to educate and inspire you to become part of your food revolution. Today in our podcast, we have a company that is changing how far our food travels. We're talking with Matthew Geldin about building local food systems. Matthew has been the farm scape's head farmer in Southern California since 2014, overseeing the weekly maintenance of hundreds of projects from backyard gardens to neighborhood farms. He is an expert in raised bed vegetable gardening and developed the company's farming service manual. Welcome to the show today, Matthew, are you ready to rock? Absolutely. Awesome. So I shared a bit about you. Can you fill in the blanks for us and share more about the path you took to get where you're at today? Yeah, sure. So first I'll just share a little bit about farmscape and then I'll share a little bit more about my personal path to get there. So farmscape is the largest urban farming company in California, and we are a food-focused landscaping company. We are landscape architects, we're licensed contractors, we're farmers, and so we do design, build and maintenance, and we do programming as well in the communities that we work in. And we work in all different scales. So we're operating in everything from a backyard garden all the way through commercial campuses up to multi-family master plan communities providing managed farm amenities. And so we've really seen the full gamut of growing experiences. We've seen every microclimate that California has to offer just about and worked with every type of client at every scale and everything from individual families to entire communities, to chefs, to developers, to HOA managers, and everything in between. Yeah, we just have a really broad range of experience and we're a really unique company because we have this vertical integration between our design and construction and maintenance and all of our departments inform each other about how we build spaces, how we think about spaces, how we maintain spaces, and so it's really just a unique operation in that way. And so I've been a part of it for nearly 11 years. I was actually FarmScape's second intern and came to it through a design background. So my personal journey was that I didn't grow up as a farmer. I didn't grow up as a gardener necessarily, and I really came to farming and design, landscape design from an interest in trying to figure out what was meaningful to me in my life. And so I knew that I wanted to work outside. I knew that I wanted to work in a small business. I knew that I wanted to develop a trade and a skill set. I knew that I wanted to have a relationship with my clients, and I knew that I wanted to do something that was meaningful in my community and meaningful in the world at large. And through just exploring that in a lot of different ways, I ended up with an interest in landscape design and landscape architecture and with a focus in food. And my family does have a food background. My dad and my grandparents were in the wholesale meat business in Los Angeles. And so I knew that conventional meat production wasn't my path in life, but food has always been around. And so all these things came together, and I ended up going to school for landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, and it just so happened that was at the same time that FarmScape was starting. So I had a studio professor who knew about my interest in food forward design and invited me to join this studio tour, and I met the folks at FarmScape very early on. This was, gosh, this was probably like late 2009, maybe early 2010. So the company had just started about within the year, and I was an intern and loved it and just really thought that the idea behind the company at the time was really inspiring. The initial concept was to be everyone's backyard farmer, and that vision I think was really beautiful and really evocative at the time because there was a return to an interest in victory gardens and an interest in community gardens. In that moment, the economy was in a major downturn and it became a part of the cultural conversation in a big way. And so FarmScape started with this really beautiful vision, and ultimately what materialized as realistic was not quite everyone's backyard gardener, but I think that we figured that out because of something that I really value about our work, which is that we're the boots on the ground, really figuring out how to professionalize an industry around urban farming. And I think that there's a lot of projects out there that are really beautiful, that are community-supported or foundation-funded or reliant on special and unique individuals that really make projects work or reliant on a lot of volunteer support and labor to make a garden function or make a farm function. And we really wanted to build an industry, build a business, and figure out how to do that. Yeah, I see that because a lot of these programs out there are one-offs and they're typically run by one person or two people and they're great programs. But it looks to me like you guys have gone way past that, you've expanded this to a community conversation. Yeah, absolutely. We're building a successful business, we're trying to visualize and build a successful industry around urban farming as a career path, as a company model, and doing it at a lot of different scales. From my design background, it was really common to see urban farms or vegetable gardens or community gardens or orchards thrown into designs in a way that didn't really have any relationship to how things are grown. Yeah, relationship to place, relationship to what's required to have a successful farm. And so we've really been doing the work of how do you do that? And I think that it's often talked about, we should be farming everywhere. And while, yes, I do agree with that conceptually, the reality of that is that there are some places that are more suited and less suited than others. And in the places that are maybe less intrinsically suitable, like a rooftop or something, where there are many successful projects and we manage some really beautiful rooftops, we've had to figure out what are the real challenges of growing on a rooftop. It's one thing to just say, we should throw a farm or a garden on every rooftop, but what does that take? And we're actually figuring that out. We're dealing with the urban critters, we're dealing with the urban microclimates, we're dealing with the designing spaces that work efficiently in an urban environment and produce food in an urban environment and grow successfully. We've really mastered that over the last decade and a half. Nice. You used the term that I want you to unpack for us. You said food forward design. What does that mean? Yeah, we are landscape architects. We are contractors and we are well versed in what it takes to design an effective growing space in an urban context. And so food forward means designing a space that is productive. It means food forward is designing a space that is more sustainable in terms of its water usage, in terms of its plant palette. And so we are focusing on designing landscapes that produce food that's appropriate for the place, whether that's row crops, whether that's raised beds, whether that's orchards, whether that's food adjacent plants, or that's what I call them food adjacent, having pollinator hedge rows and compatible native plantings that are responding to our summer dry California climate. And that's the gist of it. We want to grow food and we want it to be beautiful and we want it to be accessible and we want it to be engaging and we want it to be up front, ecologically meaningful and up front. Absolutely. And people's faces? Certainly. I mean, in their mouths. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So I was on your website earlier today and one of the things that I saw was the FarmScape does residential, which makes sense, multi-family, that makes sense too. Commercial office parks, tell me about that. So we're in a work environment now that has really shifted since the pandemic. There are companies that have really had to navigate how do we encourage employees to return to work? We make the office a meaningful, delightful place to be. And so the different types of amenities that are offered for corporate campuses for commercial office parks are really important. And so having a farm space that is beautiful, that produces food for the on-site cafes is a really valuable and unique and healthy, sustainable, important amenity that a company can offer, that a campus can offer, that makes being at the office more enjoyable, makes it healthier and makes it more seasonally engaging and makes it more delicious. We work with a number of caterers, restaurateurs and companies to provide produce for company cafes and a lot of times those dishes or those ingredients are featured on the menus as coming from being grown on the property. And these are spaces that employees can use as recreation, they're beautiful and they produce food. And we can even do programming too. So we'll offer workshops and education opportunities for employees as another perk. Oh, nice. And what kind of response are you getting from the people that work in these office complexes that have gardens, farms out in front? Yeah, it's great. People come up to us every day that we're on site and they want to ask us about what's growing, how it's being used. They want to tell us about stories that maybe they grew up on a farm or their family has a farm or they've been gardening and they had this issue, what do we do about it? And so every day that we're on site at any of these properties, we are engaging with employees or engaging with people who have relationships to food, have relationships to landscapes in their heart that are meaningful to them and it makes being in that work environment more meaningful place. Do you have an incident that happened when you were at one of these office parks that for you it was like, oh my gosh, this is the reason I'm doing what I'm doing? I think that it's not just one thing. For me, it's always a multitude of interactions, a multitude of engagements. I was just mentioning someone talking about growing up on a farm or their farm back home. And a lot of companies that we work with, they have employees from all over the world. And so sometimes it'll be someone sharing about their farm back home in another country. And I've never lived in another country. I've traveled a few different spots in the world, but to uproot yourself and put yourself in an entirely new place on the other side of the world and be in what I think we all think of as a more sterile environment. You're maybe in a steel and glass building, maybe you're under fluorescent lights. Maybe you're working on something on a computer and the richness or authenticity or like tactile nature of other experiences from your own story might feel far away and to be able to walk into a space and say, Oh, I grew this on my family farm back home or my family grows green beans. And just to be able to have that connection in a space that might not have a lot of those kinds of connections, I think it has the opportunity to be profoundly meaningful for someone. Exactly. And you guys do a lot of projects. What's the one of the coolest ones? Oh man, there's so many. I think one that we get a lot of buzz for and that really is unique and interesting is Levi Stadium. Not a lot of sports teams have working farms on their stadiums, but we have a farm at Levi Stadium and I know and it's a pollinator away station. It's a beautiful seasonal garden and it is also producing a lot of food that goes into the cafes at the stadium. I think one of the neat stories about it too is during the height of the pandemic, the Levi's team actually kept us on the farm and donated all of the food during the pandemic. And so I think that that was something that was really meaningful to us during that time because it kept us working and it got the food to the people who needed it the most. And it's been a really unique and meaningful project in a lot of ways. So I just looked up Levi Stadium Farm. There's content on the web about this thing. This isn't a small stadium, it's 68,000 seats. Yeah, it's huge. It's huge and it's got a core acre farm right on the roof there. It used to be succulents and it's served a sustainability metric for them, but they really elevated it. They took it a step further than they had to and really made it a productive and beautiful and unique amenity for the stadium and for the attendees, for the fans to come and enjoy something special. This is a baseball stadium, football stadium. All right. So they get a good traffic flow through there. This is an opportunity to educate a lot of people as well. Absolutely. Yeah. Nice. Wow. So your website also says you're growing 150,000 pounds of food every year. We talked a little bit about this already, but what happens to all that food? The unique thing about what we're doing is that we are producing food on site. It's hyper local. It's not within 100 miles. It's within 100 feet. I love that. Yeah. And the food all goes directly to our clients. So whether that is an individual homeowner where we're handing the harvest right into their hands, whether it's something like lead by stadium, like we're just talking about where the food is going into the cafes or one of the corporate campuses where the food is going into the cafes or one of the restaurants where it's going straight into the kitchens or in our master plan communities and our agri-hoods where we are working with residents in the community who are participating in farming with us. We have resident farmer programs where families of all ages are coming and participating in helping to grow food for their own community. And those, you know, work shifts are work to eat or work to learn. And so they get to take home food with them at each shift, but the food also gets shared with other folks in the community through you pick events, through farm stands or farm bag sales or through donations to give food to the local food bank. So the reach is really as broad as the whole community and beyond. And the engagement is really up to how much depth of connection the residents want to have with the farm. So just like any other amenity in the community, maybe you've got a pool and some people use the pool every day and they swim every morning and some people might go a couple of times in the summer and some people maybe never go to the pool, but they like that it's there. People can have a similar relationship to the farm where some people are there every week and that's where they get the majority of their produce. And that's where they build relationships with their neighbors. That's where they get some physical activity and some sunshine and where they're hitting all of these wellness markers in their lives. And for other people, it's a more occasional thing. Maybe they come and have a farmer for a day experience by attending a upick or just picking up some zucchini bumper crop when we have a flash sale in the middle of the summer. So it can be any range of experience. And so the food is all what I call hyper local. It goes directly to our clients. God, I love it, man. I have said for years that the with a capital T thing that we need to be doing is figuring out where our food comes from and how to grow our own and growing it in the city. That's where 70% of the population lives. So that's where we need to make that happen. You guys are doing an amazing job of integrating food systems in urban areas. Congratulations. Yeah. Thank you so much. So I'm going to shift on you and I'd like for you to talk about a time you failed how you overcame that fairy and what you might have learned from it. I mentioned earlier that we were talking about the idea that people should be growing food everywhere. And I think that is beautiful. But in reality, farming has challenges everywhere you go, no matter if you're in an open rural field or in a tight urban space. But one of the things that we learned really on when we were primarily backyard farmers was dealing with urban trees. When you have a garden space in a tight environment, when you have maybe Ficus hedges around you or maybe specimen trees that have been growing for 20, 30, 40, 100 years, those root systems are massive and they are thirsty. And when you build a vegetable garden or a small farm, you are providing the ideal environment of like perfect nutrients and lots of water, exactly lots of water. And so those roots just have a way of finding their way into the beds every time. I think we had to learn how to deal with that, which is pretty labor intensive and requires digging out raised beds, cutting back tree roots, putting the soil back and basically doing that at the beginning of every growing season. But I think that the failure that we learn through or that I see affecting a lot of people is it's really common for individual gardeners, backyard farmers to have a really strong start, have like maybe a great first season or two, and then see this decline in production. And they might think they're doing everything right. They might be fertilizing on a good schedule. They might have even good sun exposure. And they might not understand why they're seeing this decline. And I think a lot of times there are forces outside of people's control that they don't realize like tree roots. And that's like a topic that doesn't really get talked about in a lot of conventional gardening conversations or urban farming conversations, home garden conversations. And I think that there are these things that people don't realize are impacting them. If they knew a little bit more about what was happening below the soil level, they might realize that it's not their fault and that there is a pathway to success. And it is laborious, but it's doable. And so I think that sometimes the failures, I think we have a tendency to be far on ourselves and the failures aren't always, but sometimes we don't have the knowledge to go through that. And so that's that boots on the ground experience that I mentioned where we're really as a company figuring out how to do those things, how to grow in these environments and be successful at it. We had that same issue in Phoenix and Tucson with Mesquite tree roots. Oh, sure. So, yeah, I've seen that before. Those are massive root systems too. They're extensive and they are well adapted to finding limited water sources. Exactly. Exactly. What do you consider your biggest success? Our whole company, we're growing every year, we're expanding the scale of the work that we do. When we started, we were building small gardens in backyards, which we still love. And now we're planting multi-acre farms in master plan communities and consulting on projects and building projects and maintaining projects at that scale. And the shift in the culture has continued. When I mentioned earlier that back in 2008, when we were starting the company, there was this return to victory gardens and it was this very individualistic, like we all need to be having our own vegetable garden. And that's beautiful and I'm all for that. But it's a very insular, very independent, very lonely endeavor if you only think about it that way. And I think one of the beautiful things about farms and about growing food is that these are nexus points. These are linkages, these are connectors, these are hubs. And now we're seeing a trend in real estate development of having farm spaces as amenities that are prominent features of the landscape of these communities and prominent features of the identity of these communities. So we work at Rancho Mission Viejo and that's just one of our agriculture sites, one of our agricultural neighborhoods and that community is a working ranch. It has preserved open space and it has resident accessible amenity farms. And that's I think a really important and beautiful evolution of this idea that we need to have more local food systems, we need to have more local food access and we don't all have to do it as individual people with limited time, limited resources, limited education, limited skills and like an ever-changing life environment. Maybe you've got time at one point in your life but then maybe you've got kids or maybe you've got to take care of your parents or maybe you get a new job or maybe you need a move or whatever it is. And to have spaces that are professionally managed, that are community supported, that are community operated, I think is a much more sustainable and fulfilling path than just everybody doing it on your own. Yeah. Bringing it together as a community. And what drives you? Exactly that. I think that has been a really beautiful evolution of my own mission and of our company's mission. When I was in design school, I slapped a rooftop farm on the top of a project, just like in a drawing and just here you go, here's a farm but I didn't know at that point what that meant or what that took and now I have a totally different understanding of that and I want designers and builders everywhere to have that understanding of what it takes and to hire professionals whether it's us or anybody else in the space to build successful growing spaces. There's a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of passion that goes into creating these places for people to live fulfilling and meaningful lives and I want them to be good. I want them to succeed. We've learned a lot in the process and there's a reason why farms are designed in certain ways. There's efficiencies of scale, there's relationships to environment, there's relationships to land and space that all need to be taken into account to create a successful farm that isn't just going to look beautiful on opening day but is going to sustain for 20, 30, 50, 100 years as that community ages. Nice, and if you could recommend one book for our listeners, what would it be and why? Yeah, I know that a lot of your listeners are individual gardeners and one of my favorite references and resources is How to Prove Fruit trees by our Sanford Martin. It's been through, I don't know, like 20 editions or something like that and I love that it is short. It's to the point, it has illustrations, it fits in your back pocket when you're pruning and I know that this is going to come out later in the year but we're recording this going into winter and it's about to be pruning season and so this is the reference that I pull out every year to do something that is only happening at specific cycles of the year. It's not something I do every day and one thing we didn't talk about was I do have a public garden background too. I used to garden at the Los Angeles Arboretum and my boss there before we did any pruning she would pull out the book and it's just okay, we're just going to check and you always got to make sure you're making the right cuts when you first get started and then you get into the rhythm of it as you're pruning and it starts to feel really good but it's always nice to just have that check in at the beginning of the season to make sure you're prepared to make the right cuts and you just have the reference on hand in your back pocket anytime you need it. And what one final piece of advice do you have for our listeners? So I think the advice that I would give would be don't start too small, maybe don't start too big either, don't like take on more than you can chew so to speak but I think don't start too small. It can be fun to have one pot and put a tomato in it and that's cool but you're putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak and I think that it's nice to maybe get a raised bed kit and have a whole raised bed or have a couple raised beds and make it something that is meaningful and fulfilling and gives you some flexibility so that you're not relying all on one tomato but maybe you've got a variety of different crops that you're trying out and you can see what you like to grow, what you like to eat, what works for your rhythm and I think that's a good way to go. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on this show today, Matthew. Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my own story and most importantly to share the work that we're doing at FarmScape. I'm really proud of the scale of work that we're operating on and the quality of work that we're doing, the beautiful spaces, the productive spaces and I want to just keep building more urban farms. Nice. And how can our listeners find FarmScapes and get ahold of you? So we are at farmscapegardens.com and we're also on the socials, we're on Instagram at FarmScape and posting a lot of stuff there every week. Great. You guys are in Southern California and San Francisco? We have offices in LA, Orange County and Oakland. So we're working pretty much all over Southern California and we're working all over the Bay Area. Nice. All right. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. And you can find show notes from today's podcast at urbanfarm.org/farmscape. We hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Urban Farm Podcast. Remember to listen for tips, advice and resources to help you on your journey with urban farming. You can find us on the web at urbanfarm.org or send us an email to [email protected]. In the words of Vincent Van Gogh, "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. Be encouraged that with each lesson learned and skill developed, you are one step closer in the direction of your dreams."