Coming up on Keystone Stories, farming.

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Welcome to Keystone Stories.

Most of the food we consume today comes from one source, farms, and it's been that way since long before our State was founded.

Back in 1787, Benjamin Franklin proclaimed the great business of our Commonwealth is agriculture.

And nearly 240 years later, the same rings true.

Pennsylvanians flock to Rock Springs each August to celebrate the past, present, and future of farming at Penn State's Ag Progress Days.

[music playing] I think especially today, we have a disattachment from where our food is coming from and the people that are growing it.

And I think if you can come out here and you might have a better sense of why food costs, what it does, the time that's put in, and then maybe get a little bit better connected with that web.

Our lab, we work with purple maize and it's kind of not something that people really are familiar with.

So I think the big thing of State PA's part is the willingness of farmers to try different things.

This event draws an estimated 44,000 people each year, including Pennsylvania Ag Secretary Russell Redding, who shared his view on the State of PA farming.

Let's give him round of applause for saying, yes.

[applause] Pennsylvania agricultural is amazing.

It's amazingly diverse and we see that diversity in the crops and the systems of first generation and 10th generation.

It's strong, it's growing, it's challenged in many ways.

Listen, this is a business without walls, but every bit of business.

So what happens around the globe, what happens in our communities, what happens with prices and markets and stock consumer preference.

But when I look at Pennsylvania agriculture, it's amazingly strong.

And it continues to grow and we have confirmation of that.

In the most recent census from the US Department of Agriculture, farms and people and more women and diversity.

The 2022 farm census showed some interesting trends.

The average age of PA farmers grew while the overall number of farms and ranches shrank by 8% since 2017.

Even so average farm net income and total value of all products produced saw sizable gains.

Now the numbers are important, but more important are the farmers and families that give their heart and soul to feed Pennsylvania and beyond.

[music playing] I do take a lot of pride in having a family history in the business continuing what my grandfather and my father started.

They started out as a seed business that was processing seed to be sold to other farmers.

[music playing] They would grow it, harvest it, clean it, bag it and sell it to people from this area, primarily, that were looking for clean seed.

We're farming about 1,100 acres all together.

Today, Todd Ervin, concentrates primarily on growing grain and vegetables that are sold mainly for livestock feed.

[music playing] Yeah.

Let it fly.

We're fortunate that our grain usually stays within 100 miles of where it's produced, so it's we don't have the transportation costs involved that a lot of the big farms out in the Midwest do.

[music playing] We're still hanging on to the very first tractor that my grandfather bought in the late '30s.

We still use that tractor just about every day.

We've evolved into using a lot larger pieces of equipment.

We're using this newer 230 horse tractor to plant.

I can get more done in less time and be more efficient.

[music playing] I always felt like I continued about 95% of the things that we'd been doing since my grandfather and my father run the operation.

But sometimes the 5% is a hard transition.

I feel like the changes that we've made have been pretty effective.

I had that fear that I was going to fail, and not be able to carry on what had been passed down to me.

So looking back now, 26 years later or whatever, I feel good about the fact that my wife and I have been able to carry it on in a successful way.

From a preserved farm that's been in operation for more than 70 years, we now move East to Penns Valley and meet a hobby farmer in Center Hall.

[music playing] The name of our farm is fly over farm.

My wife, my two boys, and I we have a grass airstrip just up the road from us here, and there's constantly hobby planes flying over.

So it's just kind of fit.

I grew up outside Unionville, Pennsylvania, on a horse farm.

But we had just shy of 300 acres, a lot of mountain ground, but had horses when I was young.

That was my introduction to farming.

We moved out of town, bought a farm at-- I just had a friend that was getting rid of some chickens, decided it would possibly be a good way for our boys to learn some responsibility.

They had pigs, one of who was due with piglets at any time.

And we have a family history of butchering and whatnot, so decided to put an order in for some piglets while we were there.

We ended up with three piglets to raise, so we crashed right into it.

The Idaho Pasture Pigs.

They were developed to be the ideal homesteading pig.

They're not a lard pig.

They're very personable, they're very docile, very easy to raise.

You grain them twice a day on all the hair grass they want.

They just are really rambunctious.

And when they get at it, it's hard to get them back in.

One thing I like about farming is we get to wake up early, feed the pigs.

We have all this stuff to do.

It's been a little over four years.

At first, there were a lot of growing pains.

I had some good mentors that really helped me through getting into this.

Farming is not easy in any way, but there are things that are enjoyable about it.

One of the neatest things is farrowing day, when a sow has new piglets.

That's always a day for big excitement any time of the year.

It's such a neat thing to see these just tiny little piglets as soon as they're born, and how quickly they develop and grow.

This one's about 3-weeks-old.

I have to work for a living.

I have a construction company, but I do this for fun for the most part.

I'm a township supervisor.

I started that here in January.

I see it more now as a supervisor, there's a balance between development and using up all the good farmland.

You don't want to see it eaten up for houses, but on the other hand, you don't want to see development be stagnant either.

It's definitely a balance.

At this point, I'm looking more at meat sales versus selling breeders or feeders.

I'm mostly after keeping myself friends, family in good pasture-raised pork and anything above that's a bonus.

In Clinton County, technology has been a key in continuing the farming traditions of the daughters.

I'm Lori Butler.

This is my family farm, Daughter Dairy.

My Papa Graham started the farm in 1951.

They had six kids.

They started with about 15 cows.

And we're farming around 150 acres.

So if you fast forward to today, we are farming around 3,000 acres and milking around 1,200 cows.

We're able to keep up with this many cows because of technology.

They have collars on that will tell us how many steps they take a day.

We can pretty much tell if a cows getting sick before she gets sick.

We milk every cow here 3 times a day.

When a cow enters the milking parlor, she is identified when she walks in and the computer up top will tell you who she is, where she's from, how much milk she's given like the last time, how much milk she's going to be giving this time.

And then when she's done giving milk, she can go back to the barn and chill out and eat what she wants, drink what she wants, and move around, and be with her friends.

We have three milk trucks and we take at least one load a day to a Land O'Lakes plant.

And if you drink wise milk, that would be some of our milk as well.

I think that people think that farmers just put a seed in the ground and it grows.

Yes, that worked a long time ago.

But we're not farming like my grandfather used to farm.

We do have a lot of technology.

A nice feature we have on the farm for fast technology, we have an app.

Like last night, I can tell you not all our fields that we farm got over half an inch.

So there's no guessing.

It is very nice tool to have one farm without it.

So in mid to late August, we have a sunflower maze.

This will be our third year for it.

So many people have come.

We get to open up our barn doors, and then we'll offer tours around the farm.

It's really great to connect to the people that come for the maze to the farm.

We have a store.

My cousins Amanda and Candice run the Farmer's Daughter.

So we started a store back in April of 2023 and we started with deli, subs, freezer beef.

Everything that's in our store is locally produced within Pennsylvania.

Some is just right up the street in State College, some is in Williamsport, local honey from Jersey Shore.

All local stuff.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just feel so blessed because my grandparents are still alive.

They're 97 and 95.

And just being able to work with them and work with my dad and my brother and my cousins, it's everything.

Lori and Doug's second cousin lives just a few miles down the road.

Daniel Dotterer grew up raising sheep in the 4-H program.

After college, he left the farm and moved to LA and worked in the entertainment business.

He returned with new passions for using augmented reality to help the industry he's known all his life.

When I came back with this new technology, I was afraid people would make fun of me.

Holograms, your laptops in your glasses.

We've never really seen this kind of stuff, except for maybe a couple of movies.

We have a huge veterinary shortage, so why not have that technology where the vet can visit, basically do a holographic visit and see the animals and diagnosis that he can do here on the farm and do that remotely from his office?

So if you're able to see multiple patients sitting in your office, not only can you reduce your rates, the cost for the farmers, you can actually increase your income, see more patients, help more animals, help more farmers.

I think it shows a lot about the leadership we have in the State from secretary reading on down that I was awarded a grant for phase one for my remote vet application.

I mean, it's huge.

It's how we're going to get this up and going.

And we finish in the northern tier in Tioga County, home to the Painterland Sisters, one of the nation's fastest growing yogurt companies.

My sister Stephanie and I grew up on our fourth generation organic dairy farm in the rolling Hills of Northern, PA, started a yogurt company called Painterland Sisters.

It's an organic skyr yogurt that we sell, and we use the milk from our farm and other farms in our area.

And we now sell this yogurt in every single State.

The Painterland Sisters have been crossing the nation to share their product with newcomers.

I'm a 10th generation Icelandic yogurt maker who makes the yogurt right here in Pennsylvania.

How do you say skyr?

Skyr like you're skiing.

You're a skyr.

It's extremely high in protein.

It's naturally low in sugar.

It's lactose free.

When you keep real nutrients in, real products they taste good.

We grew up with a lot of cows, a lot of cousins, and just pure beauty of working with nature and animals.

As we were thinking about what do we want to do to sustain our farm, creating a milk market was so evident.

We also realized that people were really disconnected from the source of their food, the farmer.

And so we thought about, what product do we want to make, what dairy product, ice, cream, cheese?

And the answer was organic skyr yogurt.

And so that's what we came up with so that we could use all our family's milk, and the other milk in our area and continue to grow.

We sold our first cup of yogurt March of 2022.

Our first major retailer was giant and so allowed us to reach a lot of Pennsylvanians.

But we had more yogurt than Pennsylvanians could eat at first.

And so we had to become national quick.

We became a national company six months after launching.

I thought our community was just our local town.

And then I realized, OK, wait, it's all of agriculture in Pennsylvania.

And then it turned into all of Pennsylvania because everyone was eating it, and connecting with it, and they had their own reasons why they loved it.

And now our community is the entire country.

And it's just so cool because I'm proud that they're on this journey with us.

We say that the yogurt is a conduit to our greater mission, which is to connect consumers to farmers.

And that's why we like to show up at events like progress days.

Awesome.

Thank you, guys.

I appreciate it.

Let's make sure farmers are in business, and that they stay there because each family farm is really supporting our entire country.

[music playing] Anybody who's ever planted a garden, I think knows the satisfaction of putting a seed in the ground and watching it grow.

Farmers are the first, usually in just about every field, and whether that's environmentalist to electricians.

Farming is extremely important.

Without farming, we don't have food to start.

Everything we do, we try to leave it better for the next generation.

Because this land is, we're trying to pass it down to the next.

And if you ruin it now, there's going to be nothing for the next generation.

I feel blessed that I was given the opportunity to do my job.

I feel like I'm part of a situation that's feeding the world.

If agriculture is our number one industry in the State, and the State's the Keystone State, I think agriculture must be the Keystone for our country.

[music playing] Why do farmers farm?

Well, the 1999 documentary, Farming From the Heart, seeks to answer that question.

The faces may have changed, but the hard work and dedication to the craft of farming have not.

I never dreamed of doing anything but growing mushrooms and, fortunately, I was able to do that.

Pennsylvania leads the nation in mushroom production with 355 million pounds.

Chester County where C.P.

Yeatman & Sons was established in 1921, is referred to as the mushroom capital of the world.

Jim Yeatman is a third generation mushroom farmer.

Everyone wants to know why is this the mushroom capital of the world?

And my answer is simply is this is where it started.

There's really no geographical or environmental reason.

The Yeatman family grows organic, fresh market, white button mushrooms and on a much smaller scale, oyster and shiitake mushrooms.

When we started years and years ago, it was mostly just an art that you had to develop because there wasn't that much science known.

Today, it has become very scientific, but it still involves some of the senses.

C.P.

Yeatman & Sons is a medium-sized operation with 60 employees.

The farm is 200 acres.

However, you don't measure a mushroom farm by acres, but by doubles, which are growing rooms in a temperature controlled building.

In all, there are 22 doubles in five windowless buildings.

If you put it on a graph, mushroom production goes like this.

Seven days we go from nothing up here to two or three days of very heavy picking and back down to virtually nothing again.

Mushrooms are harvested throughout the year.

Average crop yield is 5 and 1/2 to 6 pounds per square foot.

The mushroom harvester has a decision to make which ones are mature and need to be picked today and which ones can wait 24 hours until tomorrow when we come back.

Then the second break starts and we go back up again, and we'll get 70% to 80% of the crop in the first flushes.

And then the third brake will be lower yet.

Mushrooms are grown in darkness and take about 11 weeks from start to harvest.

There are about 4 and 1/2 crops each year.

Growing is staggered to maintain mushroom production year round.

With the cost of the real estate and the taxes and all the overhead costs, this room has to be utilized at its maximum.

The only way you can afford to do it.

Here we're providing as optimum of climate for this mushroom as we can possibly do.

And better nutritive source we provide here, the better yields we're.

Some people, they say a guy has a green thumb.

Mushroom grower maybe have white thumbs.

[laughs] It's a sense that you develop.

And the highest producers are those who can just walk in and they just feel that they got to do this or I got to do like I'm going to make a little change here.

Jim and his brother Bob recently retired from the business, which is now run by Jim's son and Bob's son-in-law.

But for the Yeatman's mushroom farming has always been about much more than the bottom line.

We're a Quaker family and we just feel there's good in everyone, there's God in everyone.

And we search for the best in everyone.

We're not looking for the worst.

And we try to do business in a way that's we would like people to do business with us.

Several communities in Pennsylvania celebrate farming by holding County fairs.

These events highlight the love of farming and showcase livestock, crops, and agricultural innovations.

The fair lasts about eight days.

And it comes up in third week of August.

It's a County fair.

We're glad to have it located here and close to our town.

But there's a lot of people all over the County that comes.

And we also have a lot of tenants coming from our neighboring states like Maryland, even some from West Virginia.

Saturday night we have a semi-truck pull big event.

Sunday during the day, it's horse pull, it's Queens contest, and then it's the-- they call it the farmer and merchants parade.

And then on Monday night, it's a Figure 8 Derby.

On Tuesday night, it's a mud bog.

And Wednesday night's a big night at the fair.

Wednesday is the Rodeo, Dave Martin's Rodeo.

He's from down East.

He puts a real tremendous Rodeo on.

And then on Thursday night, we have what they call the tractor pull for the farmers and some hot stocks.

And then on Friday night is the pickup truck pull, souped up or just your straight bring your truck off the road.

The big feature of the fair is the demolition derby on Saturday night.

We try to keep it as an agriculture fair and also as a family event.

The Exhibit Hall has your crafts, there's one department for clothing, one department for quilts, and then there's youth group.

The youth group is a very important group to keep the youth involved.

Showing the animals why we have goats, sheep, the whole work beef, and pigs, they have to come to a certain weight in order to be sold, and they have a sale.

We like to see the young people because the young peoples got to take over.

The milkshakes at the dairy bar, they really roll out the milk.

And then I live on a dairy farm, and we ship the milk to Gallagher's Dairy, Johnstown.

And they use the milk there from the Gallagher's Dairy.

And I guess that's what makes it a little special for me Hello my name is Gaye Rogers.

And I'm here to tell you today about Hameau Farm.

I'm a third generation Ayrshire breeder.

My great uncle, Reed Hayes, my dad, John Rogers, and now me.

And the Plum Bottom herd that my father started is now at Hameau.

And so it's a small herd of Ayrshire cows.

They are great grazers, and so the whole farm is grass.

I have some cows in the herd that are over 10 years old, and I have at least six who have milked over 100,000 pounds of milk in their lifetime.

In addition to the herd, there are other animals at the farm.

And the other animals are at the farm because there's another enterprise that happens during the summer.

The barn doors just open a little bit wider and we welcome girls ages 8 to 14 to the farm.

30 of them come for a 2-week session, and I have three, 2-week sessions throughout the summer.

While the girls are there, we do chores.

Every morning, the girls do a rotation of chores, feeding the calves their morning bottles.

They also feed the sheep, the goats, the pigs, and gather the eggs, take care of the chickens, clean the barn.

And then there's another group that actually does a little bit of dish washing every morning.

This is farm camp.

And so the girls come from major metropolitan areas.

It is an empowerment thing, and that's part of our mission statement to empower young girls.

In addition to the chores in the morning, activities in the afternoon are a little more traditional camp.

We sometimes go hiking, biking.

There's feed bag fashion.

I have a stack of old feed bags that gather throughout the year, and so then the girls make dresses and hats and come to dinner dressed up.

The ultimate goal for these girls is that the last day of the session we have a farm show.

And so there's a judge that comes in that they have never seen.

And throughout the two weeks that they're at the farm, they work with an animal of their choosing, a calf, or a heifer, a goat, a sheep, or a pig.

And then the last day there's a farm show.

A lot of Kodak moments.

And the girls go home on a high note.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time on Keystone Stories.

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