Transitions
Inspiration for Organic: A Q & A with Transitioning Farmers Robyn Jasko, along with her husband Paul David, operates Homesweet Homegrown, a 3+ acre pepper farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. They are in the process of organically certifying their farm and products. Homesweet Homegrown raises 45 varieties of hot peppers, five flavors of hot sauces, and four flavors of dose extracts. Robyn shares insights on Homesweet Homegrown’s transition to organic with Sam Malriat, a Rodale Institute Organic Crop Consultant. PCO thanks Robyn and Rodale for working to provide Robyn’s story, and is available to discuss the requirements of becoming certified organic for anyone interested. Call or email our office to speak with one of our friendly staff.
1. Can you tell us a bit about your operation? We are Homesweet Homegrown and we are located in Kutztown, PA. We started as a farm-to-bottle hot sauce company and now we have expanded to also include fresh peppers that we ship around the country and hot sauce micro-dose extracts that are pure pepper extracts. Everything is grown at our farm in Kutztown. We have about 3 acres that we farming right now. 2. When did you start farming? Did you come from a farm family or farm background? I actually did not. Originally I am from New Jersey and I have a background in marketing and advertising. I have always loved gardening. I started the community garden at Kutztown University in 2008 and was able to manage the garden in exchange for having a plot of land to work with. I used that as a testing ground and really learned a lot. I started a blog on sustainable living, homesteading, eating well and living local called Grow Indie and that grew into a website, and then a book deal. I published my first book, Homesweet Homegrown, in 2012. Before leaving for my book tour, I planted a lot of habaneros, lemon drop chili and ghost peppers and came back to a ton of peppers. I thought “why don’t I try making some hot sauces?” and so we did. I created recipes and labels for three hot sauces and took them on book signings as a homegrown gift to offer along with my book. People really liked the sauces so I started a kickstarter with a goal of $800 to cover all of my pepper starts. I hit my goal overnight and the kickstarter grew to 16
Organic Matters • FaLL 2020
Paul David, Ajax David and Robyn Jasko, of Homesweet Homegrown, a 3+ acre hot pepper farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania currently transitioning to organic with PCO. Photo: Homesweet Homegrown
$53,000 and the highest selling hot sauce in kickstarter history. In 2013 a friend saw we had outgrown the community garden space so he connected me with a landowner that had been farming GMO corn. He suggested connecting with the landowners and converting the land to organic. So that’s how we were able to locate our current farmland. As soon as I got access to the land I put in organic winter rye to get the two years of GMO corn out of there. Three years later, after lots of organic matter and tons of building up the soil we were able to get certified naturally grown. That’s the land that we are farming now and in process of certifying organic. It’s been quite an evolution. 3. What influences helped to establish your niche market connections? At Rodale Press I volunteered at Organic Gardening test garden and I loved that we would get a preview of all the latest varieties and get to test them out. One year when the indigo tomato came out it was first purple tomato to hit the market and we were able to test it out and see what it tasted like. I got really excited about finding obscure varieties so that definitely influenced me; knowing about new varieties hitting the market and also rediscovering heirloom varieties. Because of the internet and how things had become so globalized, we were able to track down seeds that we couldn’t years ago in part because Baker Creek [an heirloom seed provider] has been expanding so much. Another thing that influenced me was that in 2014 we started doing markets in NYC to promote our hot sauces. I had never sold to chefs before and was totally surprised
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