SharkFarmerXM's podcast
Jordan Knight from Colville, WA 9-23-24
[Music] And welcome again to Shark Farmer Radio. Hey, I'm your host Rob Sharkey. We're in the studio today Shh, outside of Bradford, Illinois. Studio powered by Beck's Hybrid, which we are picking today. It's not fantastic. I do love watching you pick corn. It's just that time of year. I just, I love the smell. I love the rustling of the corn leaves. And actually, it has been in the 90s, which is ridiculous. And today it is 65, working its way to like 72. So now it feels like fall. Yeah, it's about time too. I mean, we've been on beans and man, it seems like I've found every single rock that has ever been on that farm. And even a little piece of metal, which is annoying, so you had to replace a few of the knives. Sickles. Sickles. Yeah, a little, it's, I don't know, maybe part of an old fence post at one point. It was, the sickle almost went through it, so it was really rusted. But yeah, it took out five of them. Oh, well, I'm glad it didn't work its way through any farther. Yeah, no kidding. And I'm happy for those rock traps too. I think maybe we're going to have to find a roller and roll a few fields because it's getting worse, I feel like. Yeah, I think that I think it's a global rock warming or something. I blame Al Gore for all of this. They're emerging more and more every year. Absolutely. I blame him too. Damn you, Al Gore. All right, let's go out to Colville, Colville, Washington, Colville, whatever. Let's talk with Jordan Knight. How you doing, Jordan? I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you? Good. How do you say it? Colville, like Colville. Okay. Colville. There we go. Not Colville, Colville. And where is that in the great state of Washington? Oh, so we are considered the northeastern Washington. We're like up in the tippy right corner, right? Well, Canada. Okay, that's the dry side. The dry side, not the wet side. Got you. Is that where you're from originally? I'm from Central Washington, so Yakima, Washington. You and your husband are first generation farmers. Any ag background between the both of you? No, we both grew up in the city. My husband's Tyler, his family, they're all old hay farmers and cattle ranchers, but he didn't grow up around it and I didn't grow up around it. And then his family is from here originally. And he was moved away when he was the kid and we're now we're back. Now we're raising our kids here. Gotcha. Where'd you two meet? Yeah. We met through just some mutual friends. In a bar. No, actually. You gotta love it when friends set you up. Yeah, yeah, basically. Yup. And we've hit it off and talked ever since. So city kids, I mean, how do you end up farming? Um, I just have always liked animals. And we just started looking at we started with goats. And I was looking at goats on Craigslist and called Tyler and was like, we should get some goats. And he was kind of like, uh, but he went for it because he knew I wanted to do it. So here we are. So you learned, though, when you thought you were going to be a goat farm, you encourage your first hurdle, I would say, right? And you found out what you couldn't sell the meat. Yeah. So we, oh, shoot, we had probably 30 to 40 goats. We had a lot of goats, a lot of goats. And we started butchering the meat and we were offering people selling it and we had the meat butchers and we were offering and people are just kind of turning their noses up and like, you're eating goats. So we realized we weren't going to be able to sell it as much. And we just, we love pigs so much because their litters are so big and they grow so fast and pork is amazing. So do you think you're just in the wrong area for goats? Maybe. Yeah. This is definitely more cattle, cattle ranches around here. I think there's some size here pig farms around here, but it's mostly cattle. Do you like goat? Do I? Yeah. I do. It's good red meat. I don't know. We've, I know we've had it before. We had it on like vacation and that but yeah, but that's like goat jerk. So I don't know that that's the same sort of thing. The way they fix it in Jamaica is kind of a different thing than they probably fix it in Washington. I think it's the, the goats that they hit while you're going to the resort with a bus. I think so too. I think that's what you're, that's probably what we're eating. Yep. Okay. Yeah, people were not very excited when we're offering it to them. So we're like, well, this isn't going to work. That and pigs are more my type of animal. Just their personalities are so cool. They're like big dogs. And they're a stupid animal. I mean, let's be honest. They're so smart, actually. All right. So what did you do with the goats? Did you just, I don't know, kind of wholesale them? Oh, we ate them. They had a freezer full of goats. You ate goat and you ate goat and then you ate some more goat. And we had a lot of goat and now we're out of goat and I'm okay with it. I like pork a lot better. Well, I mean, how did you learn to, to raise the pigs? We just started watching a lot of YouTube videos. We read stuff online. I have made some friends through Instagram, some different farmers around couple in California that I've talked to. And they don't mind if I message them and ask them questions. They're established farms. So they're super helpful. And one that people aren't very comfortable because we cast straight all our male pigs. And we learned that off YouTube. That was crazy. But we're good now. Oh, yeah. I've done, I've done a whole, whole lot of that. All right, we've got to go to break today. We're talking with Jordan Knight from Callville, Washington. Go follow her on Instagram, holler Creek Farms as H-A-L-L-E-R. We'll be back. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way, go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. It's two, it's Monday. It's Monday. It is Monday. Are you in need of caffeine? I think you might need a little caffeine. It was a long weekend. And it was not a fun one. It was a working weekend. Well, I mean, sort of. I mean, we actually did have the Salerno's, our friends from Las Vegas come. They wanted to experience an Illinois harvest, which was fantastic. I loved having them here, and we grilled out and we did a lot of harvest, but it was 90 degrees. Yeah. And the second they leave, it's 65. So I guess they brought the heat with them from Vegas. Yeah, they've, they've dropped our rain chances for tonight. We only got a quarter inch and I would, I would love to get some more. Did we really? I thought we only got like two tenths. That's fantastic. Two tenths or three cents. Two and a half tenths. Okay. We're not doing math today. You're saying I'm the one that needs caffeine. We're in Colville, Washington. We're talking with Jordan Knight. Now her and her husband Tyler started out raising goats, said no to that. And then they went to pigs. So you didn't do the old deal where you went to like, I don't know, one of these big pig farms and say, Hey, we're going to put up a confinement building. You're you're raising them hippie style. Is that right? We sure are. Naturals. We can go other than other than we do worm or pigs. We are not that natural. Some people don't do that. And that freaks me out. We do worm or pigs. Oh, yeah, we're not pigs. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're on top of that. But others in that no antibiotics, vaccine, hormones, we're as natural as we can get them. So is that because of what you believe, what you want to eat? Or is that because of what your customers want? This, well, we started out raising them for our family. And we just, that's what we want to feed ourselves. So we want to feed everybody else's families good, good quality meat. Fair enough. So how did you settle on the Berkshire breed? Did you do a little research and decide, okay, this is going to be a good pasture raised pig? We did. So the Berkshire breed is for to pour it in the pork world. It would be like what wagyu beef is in the beef world. Okay, good stuff. Good marbling. I will say that is it is tasty. You can tell a difference. Okay. So you're raising hogs, you're castrating them. Was there something odd about that? Were you not supposed to castrate the pigs? Well, we castrate them because the male will put off testosterone. And so once you're raising your butcher hogs, you don't want that, they call it "bortaint" in your meat. So we do it when they're very little. It's a quick process. And then you put them down and they run off and act like nothing even happened to them. The guy that taught me to do it, he would pull it out with his teeth. It's something the kid never forgets. What? No. He'd do the two cuts and then he'd pull them out with a teeth. No. Oh, that's a no. Yeah, we use our hands. Pretty sure he's in prison right now. Okay, so you raise the pigs and how did you get along with that? We absolutely love it. So Berkshire are not your big pink commercial pigs. They're a little bit smaller than that, but they're still a medium to large breed. And they're so docile and they're nice. Our kids, my youngest daughter is five. She can go out with our entire herd of pigs. We have 45 in our field. And yeah, our kids can run around and hang out with the pigs. They ride the pigs. It's a big one. It's fun. It's a lot of fun. I love your videos, by the way, on your Instagram of the kids riding them. That's so funny. They each have their own pig that they've picked out and they just, yeah, they've just been hanging out with them. Our breeders, we have our breeders for years and years. So yeah, we just, we build super strong bonds with them. It's really cool. They're really cool animals. So you say you're feeding them non-GMO or you feed them corn? Nope, we don't have corn in our feed. It's non-GMO and then no corn and no soy. And we get that from a farm, a local farmer out of Spokane that does it for us. So what's in the feed then? Oh, there's barley. There's some lentils. I think there's peas in there and then they throw the mineral mix in. And then there's, yeah, it's pretty basic. Pretty basic. Okay, so you're enjoying raising Berkshires, but you had your second hurdle when you tried to go to a farmer's market because wasn't that the plan? You thought, okay, we'll raise them and sell them at the market. What happened when you went? Well, so we applied and simply put, I think it was like politics and maybe there was some bigger farms in there that didn't want the smaller farm. I'm assuming this was going on. We got denied. So we were just like, yeah, you know, this is not going to be for us. And we want our goal is to work for ourselves. And so we just, we went back to the drawing board and they're like, well, what can we do now? And we always loved barbecuing. Barbecue first, our family all the time and it just, yeah, it just felt right. And so we just switched that we raise our pigs and then now we barbecue our pigs and then feed them to people. Yeah, you got to bribe people at the farmer's markets to get in. Yeah, yeah, we found that out. We realized it just wasn't for us. It was not for us. And so we're thankful it happened that way because we were barbecuing and food vending was not even on our radar at the time. So it worked out and we are really enjoying what we're doing now. It is a lot of fun. A hundred years ago, I was president of our accounting farm bureau and they said one of the things you got to do is you got to be the chairman of the farmers market thing. And I went to one meeting and they started fighting because they've got their sections there and one person was staking their tent and their tent stake was over the line of that. And I literally, I got up and left that meeting. I never returned. So I know the politics, it's insane. Yeah, we're in there like, well, we already have a pork producer. So we're like, you can't have two. Isn't that kind of a monopoly when you only have one of something? It's like, I thought this is what we're trying to avoid as small farmers and beat the big commercial farmers, but I guess not. Okay, so I mean, it wasn't for us. You've taken a couple hits here with the goats. You didn't have the the customers that you were wanting and now this. I got to give you props. I mean, you just you just keep trying to find new ways to do it. We do. And Tyler is an amazing, amazing barbecue smoker, barbecue. And yeah, you just it just felt right. And I didn't we just like be like bringing the food to the people. It's a lot. It's a lot of fun. We've made some really cool connections. Okay, we got to talk barbecue after the break. It's going to be barbecue chat. Absolutely hashtag BBQ after the break. Today we're talking with Jordan Knight from callville, Washington's go follow her holler Creek Farms, AJ LLER. We'll be back right after the break. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io that's commonground.io. It's time for callville and coldville Washington's favorite radio segments. Where in the world as well? Well, what do you have for us today? Salmon Callville, Washington, which is a city in Stevens County. It's the county seat of Stevens County. Okay. John Work, an agent for the Hudson's Bay Company, established Fort Callville near the Kettle Falls fur trading site in 1825. It replaced the Spokane House and the Flathead Post as the main trading center on the upper Columbia River. The Walmarts of the day. Yep. The area was named for Andrew Callville, a Hudson's Bay Company governor. The fort continued to be used for some time as a center of mining and transportation associated with gold rushes in the 1850s, particularly the Frasier Canyon gold rush. After it was abandoned in 1870, some buildings stood until as late as 1910. The site was then flooded by Lake Roosevelt after construction of the Grand Cooley Dam on the Columbia River. In the first half of the 19th century, the Oregon Boundary Dispute, or Oregon Question, arose as a result of competing British and American claims to the Pacific Northwest. It was settled by the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which set the new boundary between Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel, about 40 miles to the north of Colville. Yeah, Canada dodged a bullet. They were about ready to push us too far on that one. All right. In the 1950s, the Colville Air Force Station was developed and operated 14.7 miles north and east of Colville as part of the Air Defense Command's network and radar stations. Few buildings remain at the site today. It is used largely by paintballers. The area's economy is based chiefly on agriculture and the timber and mining industry manufacturing. Lesser industries are cattle, horse, and hay farming. Tourism has increased to the nearby National Forest land for hunting and fishing and to local farms, orchards, and corn mazes. A blossoming music, arts, and crafts community has sprung up around the city's rejuvenated downtown. Sounds lovely. Yep, the notable person from Colville is Charles Day, an American rower who won Olympic gold at the 1936 Summer Olympics. Let's go back a while. Yeah, the son of a dentist Day was born in Colville, Washington into an Irish-American family and he rode in the University of Washington senior varsity eights, which won US national intercollegiate rowing association titles in 1936 and 37. In '36, he won the Olympic gold medal, rowing in the two seat of the American boat in the 8th competition. His role in the University of Washington 8 and their Olympic victory is explored in the 2013 non-fiction book The Boys in the Boat. Are y'all familiar with that? No, never heard of it. Well, us washingtonians are very familiar with that. Oh, come on. Yo, yeah, we are. Every English teacher has you read boys and a boat, along with of mice and men, apparently. Yes, that's unironically true. A medical graduate, though, Day served as a naval doctor in the South Pacific Theater of World War II, post-war he practiced as a gynecologist. Oh, that's quite a switch. All right. Thank you, Will. Jordan, did you learn anything from that? Um, I did. I learned a lot, actually. Have you read two boys in a boat? I have not. Maybe I need to. Jordan Knight from a Colville, Washington, Holler Creek Farms on Instagram and barbecue. And that's what we're going to talk about. So, now you're doing barbecue. How do you go from being a farmer to a barbecue-ist? Well, we have a lot of meat and we needed a way to sell it. We love to barbecue. So, what do you do just pull out the trigger and just to put it on in your backyard and start from there? Well, that's how we started, and then we got the most amazing upgrade. So, Tyler found this guy, another man named Tyler, actually. He builds custom smoker barbecues. He's an LV smoker, and he's an Idaho, and we just Tyler got connected with him, and he built us our dream smokers. So, it's, we're mobile, and it's on wheels, and we take it everywhere with us, and smoke on site. So, is this the different types of barbecue, right? You've got the the wet and the dry. Which one do you do? Oh, I like wet. Okay. So, you got like the barbecue sauce and just lapping it right on there. Yep. So, we just, we season our meat with our rubs, and then smoke it, and then for like our pulled pork sandwiches, and then Tyler breaks it down and we add a little bit of sauce. We keep it pretty basic. We just like to showcase our meat more than like the size and get too crazy with it. Like, our meat is just, it's so good by itself. It's, it is delicious. I've never quite understood how they judge those competitions, because, I mean, what I think is good. I know Emily, you know, it's so different in taste. Is there like some standard? How do they even do that? You know, I don't actually, we haven't gone to those things just because we, we're just in our own category, I think. It's just, we don't, yeah, we don't do that. We just keep it pretty basic. We just like to showcase our meat. So, are you inviting people out to your farm for barbecue, or are you traveling around or a little bit of both? Little bit of both. We've, we've done a farm barbecue. That was actually our first one. We get our toes, get our toes dipped in the water now, just to see how it was going to go. We had people driving all the way out to our farm to come meet our food. It was pretty, it was pretty cool to see. Now, is there any like red tape that you have to do for, I don't know, one-year selling meat like that? Yep. So, we get our meat, we take it to the butcher, and then they do the USDA cuts, which makes it okay for us to prepare it. And then we got to go see the house department. So, yeah, we're jumping through all the loops. So, how are you finding customers? Just social media and work house. Really? Yeah, it's been pretty crazy, the amount of people. And, and now we're, and, and we just finished up at Market in the Mountain, and Springdale with Moose Valley Ranch. And we had people coming up to us saying like, oh, I've seen you on Instagram, or we saw you on Facebook, and it's pretty flattering. It's so cool. That's all we've been doing, word of mouth. It is just getting out there. It's pretty cool. It's crazy. Well, the pictures on your Instagram of somebody eating a big old barbecue sandwich makes me hungry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was their pulled pork sandwiches. We sold out that of our pulled pork the first day. We brought so much pork with us. I am like, shocked, flattered, shocked and watered. Well, if people want to find you on social media, where did they go? Just Tyler Creek Farm. It's H-A-L-L-E-R Creek Farms and barbecue. Yep. Yep. I think our handle is just Tyler Creek Farm. I tried to add it later, and then it was technical difficulty. Well, congrats on, you know, not just making a business, but making a whole, I don't know, customer base and everything. It's really impressive that whenever you guys had a problem that you just found a way around, it says a lot about you guys. So, Jordan, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Really, really appreciate that. But don't go anywhere. Sean Haney comes next. He says dry barbecue is the only barbecue. You decide.