Alpine View Farm

Today I'm talking with Kim at Alpine View Farm. A Tiny Homestead Podcast is sponsored by Homegrowncollective.org. Muck Boots Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters, and topics adjacent. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Homegrown Collective, a free-to-use farm-to-table platform emphasizing local connections with ability to sell online, buy, sell, trade in local garden groups, and help us grow a new food system. You can find them at homegrowncollective.org. 00:28 Today I'm talking with Kim at Alpine View Farm in California. Good morning, Kim. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm fine. How are you? I'm good. How's California this morning? How's the weather? Pretty good. Can't complain. It's a little warm, but it could be a lot worse. Yeah, the weather this year has been much better than last spring and summer, but it's still been kind of weird. I'm in Minnesota. It's a beautiful, sunny, relatively cool day. 00:57 I'm kind of tickled with that. Yeah, for sure. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at Alpine View Farm. Well, we moved to the country about eight years ago and I quickly fell in love with the homesteading lifestyle. I've always called myself a country girl at heart, but this is the first time I've ever lived in a country. So I, uh, 01:26 I guess I was foreshadowing my future without even realizing it. But we just love it here and we, you know, started a garden and then we started with five chickens and now we're up to 36. So, you know, that chicken math kicked in pretty fast. And then I learned how to can and I learned how to make sourdough bread. And so that 01:55 has evolved into a little business where I have a micro bakery. And so I'm just really enjoying this new part of my life. Nice. What else do you make for your micro bakery? I focus mainly on sourdough sandwich bread, and I also make these really fun pull apart wreaths. And that's our focus in terms of the bakery at this time. 02:24 Awesome. So where do you sell your baked goods? Well, we started off just selling from the farm and then this year we've expanded. We sell at this really cute general store in a little town near us. And then last month we just started selling at a local farmers market. Nice. Awesome. 02:51 So I don't want to be nosy, but I'm going to ask the question, how much do you sell your sourdough loaves Oh, for the bread. So we sell our loaves for $7 and we sell the pull apart rolls for $10. And I've been told by customers, it's too cheap. But we wanted to try to keep things, you know, manageable for people. 03:21 You know, times have been really tight for so many people and, um, you know, we just want to make a little bit of money for ourselves, but also make our products really sellable to everybody. Awesome. The reason that I asked so pointedly, sorry, is that a loaf of name brand bread at the store, like Pepperidge farm or whatever. 03:49 is going for seven to eight dollars a loaf right now. So you are absolutely reasonable and your product is better. So I think you're doing a good thing. I know we have our bread contain six ingredients and we use all organic ingredients. And you know, a lot of people don't realize this, but a lot of the bread that's sold in the store that's labeled as sourdough 04:17 not actually sourdough. They're using yeast and something to make it flavored like sourdough, but they're not even using a sourdough starter. So it's not the fermented food that's such a health benefit for us. Isn't it amazing what major companies get away with but we small home bakers have to label everything specifically? Oh, I know it's so 04:47 difficult to get everything on a cottage food label. And not to mention the fees involved to be able to sell the products and even we have to get in California, an egg license to sell our eggs. You know, I just kind of laugh and shake my head because I'm thinking, do you know how many eggs I need to sell to cover this or? 05:13 Do you know how many loaves of bread I need to sell to cover this cost? Yeah, it just, doesn't seem fair. And I'm not implying that life is fair, but it just doesn't seem right, you know? Yeah, it actually feels like they're trying to push out the small farmer or the small producer. 05:37 um, not help them succeed. But I'm hopeful that there's going to be some positive changes in the future along those lines. Yes. And as long as we small producers continue to fight and to work and to produce good things, we'll probably win the battle at some point. Yes. I hope. In fact, a funny story, I have some tomatoes coming in, so I ...