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Episode Summary
I
n this episode of Carrot Cashflow, host Diego starts off with Seeding Thoughts: with the new year approaching, let’s take a look at how life is going—if you were to score each aspect of your life from 1-10, where do things stand? Which aspects are doing great and which ones need to change to be better?
Afterwards, Liz Calvelage shares her farming journey from how she started her farm during her first pregnancy, up until how she now runs the farm while being a mom to three daughters. She also shares how her small farm pivoted from selling vegetables to filling a cut flowers niche in her local market.
Lastly, Diego closes off the episode with Listener Q&A, giving productivity advice on how to efficiently manage time, and finally, a Drunk Idea that surprisingly isn’t something made yet.
Today’s Guest: Liz Calvelage
Liz Calvelage began her farming journey working part time in 2013 until she and her husband moved to their permanent home in 2014, where she laid the foundations of her own farm. As a new mother, Liz began with growing vegetables until shifting nearly half her market garden to growing cut flowers to fill a niche at her market.
Relevant Links
Caselli’s Market Garden – Facebook
In this episode of Carrot Cashflow
- Sell Everything You Grow: How to Choose a Business Model to Maximize Sales for a Farm or Homestead (2023) by Diego Footer (00:20)
- Seeding Thoughts: Scoring Life and Moving Life Closer to 10 (00:35)
- Diego introduces the episode’s guest, Liz Calvelage (14:50)
- What it’s like being a mom and a farmer at the same time (15:53)
- Running a farm while caregiving for young children (17:56)
- The initial vision of a farm & fitting it into the lifestyle (19:54)
- Working on the farm as a break from caregiving (21:35)
- Switching into and out of work mode (25:16)
- How helpful is having set blocks of time for work? (27:23)
- Crops that stay vs. crops that need to go (30:28)
- Cut flowers vs. vegetables: which is more flexible & forgiving? (32:10)
- Managing expectations with setting up and growing the farm while raising children (34:07)
- What farm success means for Liz Calvelage (38:12)
- Where the farm fits into the economic picture (41:02)
- Making the decision to get or not to get childcare (42:47)
- What Liz Calvelage would have done differently had she needed the farm to make money early on (45:58)
- What hiring out help has allowed Liz Calvelage to do (48:08)
- What key infrastructure would have made a difference on day one (49:52)
- Is farming a viable business that can scale? (51:36)
- Where Liz Calvelage’s farm is in terms of potential (54:22)
- Changes to be made if the farm needed to turn a higher profit (58:30)
- The minimum number of flower types to grow to make consistent bouquets (01:01:26)
- The profitability of individual flower types (01:02:37)
- Bouquets sold per week and bouquet pricing (01:05:44)
- The viability of a cut flowers niche for the struggling vegetable farmer (01:08:32)
- Where to find and keep up with Liz Calvelage’s farming journey (01:10:42)
- LISTENER Q&A: Best productivity hack (01:11:20)
- DRUNK IDEAS: Siri for Cars (01:15:50)
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