Growing for Flavor — and Health

John Kempf and Ohio vegetable farmer Bob Jones discuss on-farm research, the link between flavor and nutrients, and managing light and other variables for nutrient density

John Kempf. Bob, tell us a little bit about your story — the background, the operation that you’re working with today, and how that all came to be.

Bob Jones. Our family has been farming for over six generations. We have been growing vegetables on our farm here for about 60 years in this location. My brother Lee and I operate the farm together with an amazing team of folks. We are on a transition, or a continuum, if you will, of learning, and we certainly don’t have this all figured out by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re learning enough to excite us to try and learn more faster.

We came out of a wholesale operation that my father ran back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. At his peak he had about 1,200 acres of fresh market vegetables. He was selling wholesale to grocery chains anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. We got a very good lesson in both economics and agronomics. We talk a lot in our operation about how modern agriculture in the U.S. today is broken both economically and agronomically.

He was a large wholesale grower in that economic model of borrowing operating capital. In the ‘80s — with the farm crisis — had loans up to 23 percent interest. His largest account was Kroger, and they were a 120-day pay. So we borrowed money at 23 percent and, in essence, loaned it to a wholesaler for five months, and we wondered why that model didn’t work. In 1983, our lending institution encouraged us to find a different advocation.

So we started over. We didn’t know anything other than vegetables. We went from 1,200 acres in 1983 to six acres in 1984. We went from large volume, very small margins, waiting for our money, to much, much smaller volumes with better margin because we were selling at a roadside stand and farmers markets, and it was cash. It was simply an economics 101.

At that same time that the economics weren’t working, the agronomics were broken as well. It was requiring greater and greater amounts of inputs to produce the same or less output, and that contributed to the economic downside. While we were at farmers markets in the mid- to late-’80s, we happened to meet some chefs in the Cleveland area. They started buying at the farmers market because they couldn’t get good quality product from their purveyors. We have been extremely fortunate in that chefs have taught a bunch of dirt farmers like us the food business. Many farmers today don’t understand they’re in the food business because they don’t have a direct connection to the end consumer. They’re in a commodity world.

Kempf. Yes, unfortunately. 

Jones. That immediate feedback from your consumers is always helpful. It’s just not always fun. Because when you screw it up, they’re going to tell you, and you have to make it right, right away. We were very fortunate. 

We’re now shipping fresh produce to restaurants in 50 states and 17 countries. It worked really well until COVID, when those restaurants all closed. That was not a fun time for any of us. But it caused us to diversify the operation. So now, instead of just being 100 percent restaurant, we also ship direct to homes in all 50 states.

This time of the year [December] we’re doing corporate gifting for doctor’s offices and attorney’s offices and hospitals and insurance companies. We also have a retail roadside stand, which we had not done in over 40 years; we brought that back. So we now have four different channels that we’re selling the same fresh produce through, and that has given us a strategy of diversification.

At the same time, we have been growing for flavor. Chefs have been extremely consistent in their demands of us over the past 40 years. They asked for flavor, for aesthetics, for shelf life, and for even more flavor. If a chef doesn’t have flavorful ingredients, they don’t have anything.