Farmers Against Hunger with Newell Thompson

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NJ or New Jersey farmers against hunger, correct?

No, it's a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.  It's the New Jersey Agricultural Society.  And the program is Farmers Against Hunger.

Okay, gotcha gotcha. that's not that complicated.  And with that... I actually still need somebody to give me sort of the elevator pitch. So that's the perfect starting off point for us. Good

Are we are we on go mode now? Yeah, we're on go mode.

So the elevator pitch is that the New Jersey Agricultural Society is one of the oldest associations, if not the oldest association in United States. We were founded in 1781.

And we were the governing body for all things agriculture in, you know, in between the two major ports of the United States during early colonialism. Right. So we basically New Jersey as the garden state fed Philadelphia market, fed New York market, brought fresh fruits and produces into those facilities to help the kind of the burgeoning population. So fast forward to

Today, there have been lots of pieces to that conversation that have been broken away. Education, went to the land grant university with Rutgers. The government picked up a lot of the responsibilities that we had been a part of, et cetera. And now, for the past 30 years, we have three specific programs that we have built for the New Jersey Agricultural Society. Those are Farmers Against Hunger,

which we'll talk about today. Ag education, where we're educating the non-farm public on the values and benefits of agriculture in New Jersey. And then leadership training. We put a two-year course together for those aspiring agricultural folks who have been in the business who are looking to take a more leadership position. So we teach them non-farm skills, including public speaking.

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business planning, marketing, succession planning, strategy, so that they can perform at a high level when going after positions. for instance, five of the eight Board of Ag members are alumni of our leadership development program. The Secretary of Agriculture is an alumni of our leadership development program. The President of the New Jersey Farm Bureau is an alumni of our program. So it's been really successful helping to train up

Folks in the agriculture industry to be leaders in the state getting back to farmers against hunger that was founded I believe in 1996 So we're coming up on our 30th anniversary here and not in a couple years We we are a network of farmers Those farmers if you know anything about food about 30 to 35 percent of all food never leaves the farm It's turned back into the soil. It's taken to a compost heap never gets to market

And that's for a variety of different reasons. So it was, I think during a legislative tour about 30 years ago, people saw that there was a ton of food that was ready to go, that wasn't going to get to market. And they came up with the ideas. Well, it's not going to go to market if you're upside down on this product from a cost standpoint. What if we collected it and took it into places in need? And thus Farmers Against Hunger began.

So fast forward today, we are collecting about one and a half million pounds of food every year. We distribute it to 75 different agencies across the state. An agency is defined as a church, a community center, senior living facility, a veterans group, anybody who is kind of essential hub for us to drop pallets of food off at the enterprise level.

So, each week we're delivering about 25 to 30,000 pounds of food across the state, fresh fruits and vegetables primarily. And, our four main hub and spokes are Trenton, Camden, Browns Mills, and Mount Holly. We also are pushing into a variety of other places across the state so that we do ad hoc drop-offs to places like

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Salem city, we go up to New Brunswick, we work across Middlesex, Monmouth, we're working into Ocean County. So our, our trucks are on the road collecting food and then distributing food to places in need. We're serving up. That's yeah, we're serving about depending on the numbers, 11 to 12,000 folks in need every week. Yeah.

We're funded by the state with a gleaning grant. And then we have other kind of individual corporations supporting us, like the Holman Foundation, the Wawa Foundation, and other family foundations who are helping support us. They all see a need. And that's a big opportunity for us is to continue to build those corporate relationships to help us build and grow. Flip side of that is.

We do corporate gleaning. So we'll take companies out onto the farmer's fields and have them collect food. And so they get to participate in the gleaning process and then know that all the community service work that they're doing, it's going to a great place. And they get to be outside and really enjoy being out on the field. What we always hear is, well, know, New Jerseyans, right? Well, they're on the highways.

But people never take the time to actually get off the highway and look at what's right around the corner. So we'll hear, didn't even know this farm was here. my gosh, this is amazing. And, you know, people take the time to get out into agriculture and really understand the beauty of what the garden state has that people are definitely surprised. There's a ton of very rural spots. can find yourself in where if you had a certain upbringing in New Jersey, it might as well be, you know, like being dropped on Pluto.

Like there's certainly people who've resided in New Jersey their whole life who have no idea that you can go find a big stretch of country road in the middle of some rolling farmland. I'm kind of the poster child for that. I grew up kind of in the Mercer County area and in Hopewell. And there's, there's agriculture there. Don't get me wrong, but there's also a lot of wealth.

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And so, you know, the farm, the real farms have been kind of pushed out and now it's more gentlemen farmers. And there are a handful of larger farmers, but not many. And when you go into places like the Pinelands and look at the cranberry bogs and look at the open space and the scraggly pines, it really does feel like you're almost up in like Northern New England. It's got a very kind of rustic.

authentic feel to it that you just don't get in any other places. And then down south, I did a study of, spent three or four days doing a video production on the blueberry harvest and you know, the Hamilton, Vineland area, just spectacularly beautiful with, agriculture. And we don't see that up in the more kind of densely populated area. So if you get up to, you know, Morristown or

Princeton or Montclair. People think that agriculture is, know, the small, you know, 30 acre gentlemen farms, so to speak, but we've got farmers who are farming a couple thousand acres. the, the association, the sort of, see what I'm learning is this goes back hundreds of years.

Is that a sort of an all encompassing group of agriculture professionals in New Jersey? Is that a niche to the association membership? What does the membership look like in terms of participation and are there like vendor participants or like that type of thing? What does the group look like itself? Great question. No, really good question. So it really represents a network of farmers.

and related businesses in the agriculture community. So traditionally, I'll talk about our board makeup, which is a good reflection of our membership overall. 50 % of our board are producers, so farmers. And our board's fairly large. We have about 30 board members. There are six board appointments, so ex officio appointments. So Secretary of Agriculture,

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the president of the Farm Bureau, someone that's involved in legislation and policy, the president of the SEB school, which is the former Cook College at Rutgers, the president of the Board of Ag and the past president of the Board of Ag, and then elected members thereafter. We also have someone from the FF, the president of the FFA, which is the Future Farmers of America. So trying to connect back into the next generation of farmers as well.

So overall, that's probably reflective of our broader membership base as well. So I would say 50 % farmers and then seed manufacturers, fertilizer companies, tractor retailers, and anybody who's interested in supporting the agriculture community as a business or individually. the sort of educational aspect.

Does that go way back in time to the roots and the founding or are these things that have come up as, as required, so to speak, by the community and by the market? would, would answer that more as the, as the, as the latter description. So, you know, back in the 1800s, everybody was connected to agriculture. You didn't really need to educate people about agriculture as much. Good point. Today, there is a disassociation with agriculture and food.

So that, you've got people shopping at supermarkets who don't even really understand where their food comes from or which animal it comes from or what it actually reflects from a nutritional value standpoint. So education really for us is all about educating the non-farm public on the value of agriculture with particular interest in the state of New Jersey. But you know, the, you know, whether it's preserving open space.

Whether it's adding a value additive to the culture of New Jersey, whether it's building economic sustainability in agriculture. And I think most importantly for this generation, it's mitigating the amount of time and miles it takes to transport a vegetable to someone's kitchen counter. So, you know, right now.

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I don't know what the percentage is, but a very large percentage of our food comes from California, the West coast, Mexico, and then it gets to the supermarket and people buy it. And there you have it. There's no real sense that, wow, this tomato just traveled 2000 miles to get to my kitchen counter. Is that, is that a good thing? And I think the, I think the answer is no. I think the aquifers in the West coast are drying up.

think the notion of, you you can have whatever vegetable or fruit you want 12 months a year. So thinking about eating seasonally, what we're really doing with food is we've commoditized it and turned it into a product that is just, it's a utility rather than someone going to a farm market and really understanding that all the hard work that was put into this, the nutritional value, the soil, what it takes to produce this.

There's a big kind of disconnect between the public and the agricultural process. So we're trying to educate the non-farm public on the value of local agriculture and why it matters.

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And seems like you'll take on any sort of conversation that contributes to that, like anything from the educational side, like you're saying, to just general PR, having a general understanding amongst the population is the only way that you could expect them to stand up for themselves and be on the side of local food production if and when it matters.

Yeah, just to be fair, can see how all of that sort of makes sense. do not get involved with policy. We're a 501 C3. What our job is to teach the non-farm public the value of agriculture and to get them to, know, my background's marketing and media. So I know consumer behavior, you know, General Mills and a lot of the big package goods companies spend tens and hundreds and billions of dollars.

building behavior. It's that muscle memory. If you can get someone to go buy a box of Cheerios, you know, and you get them to do that every week for the course of their life, what is the customer lifetime value of someone going and buying a box of Cheerios every couple of weeks? The numbers are staggering, right? And we, built huge companies around the notion of consumer behavior. If I can change consumer behavior just a little bit,

and get that consumer not to go buy a tomato from California and to go visit a local farm market or ask their supermarket manager, where's the local New Jersey food? I want to eat local food. then I've done my job. That that's really what it's about. It's about creating an awareness around local food systems and getting people to think about changing their behavior enough. And I know people are really busy, so.

It's really hard to get a soccer mom to not, you know, to take an extra 20 minutes to go to a farm market or to ask that question to the store manager. It's not easy. And I get, I get that, but we're just trying to change behavior a little bit to get people to start thinking about local food systems for all the reasons that I just described. mean, most people don't even take the time to read the labels of what

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they're putting in their cart and will eventually put in their mouth. And I honestly think people's purchasing habits would change dramatically if they read the labels. One trip to the store, if they read the labels on everything they put in their cart and spent five minutes on Google for the words that seem to be from outer space, I think it would change their behavior. And I think that type of thing can be very sort of self-fulfilling or rewarding on its own.

I don't know, I shop like that and I feel better shopping like that and I feel better feeling better. So I continue to do it. Like I think a little education around people's food ultimately does go in the right direction because I sort of fall into the camp that thinks local food that doesn't have to be preserved for shipment, that doesn't have to be sprayed with stuff just so it can make it to the market looking presentable.

I mean, the more proximity, I think there's a ton of benefits right there. You know, flavor being one of them. So I don't think it's a hard pitch in any way, shape or form. Once people have been exposed to what it is that you guys are selling, which is like, you can't have every vegetable all the time in a, in a place like that's not how mother nature really works. if you.

acquaint yourself with seasonal eating. Well, geez, there's nothing better, you know, find some old timer and get them to talk to you about Jersey tomatoes or, you know, asparagus or something like that. They will. And they'll give you a list as long as they're on why it's better. yeah, yeah, no, the so when you pick up when you pick a fruit or a vegetable, right, there's a that that vegetables ready for you, right, you're picking it when it's ripe, it's full of nutrients and good things.

Now, if you pick it in California, it's to the box truck, the box truck takes it to a warehouse, the warehouse, you're waiting for the, you know, the truck to pick it up, drives across country, goes to the warehouse, sits for a couple of days, gets to the shelf at a supermarket or in the back of the room of the soup. You're talking about fruit from the West coast is going to be six or seven days old after it's Now.

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Nutrient value dissipates over time as a vegetable gets sick. It's off the vine, it's off the tree, and then those nutrients dissipate. They naturally release. So when you eat something that's six or seven days old versus one to two days old, there's a deficit in nutritional value on that particular piece of fruit or vegetable. So it further supports local food systems.

So you want to eat something the day or the day after it's picked. And most farm markets in New Jersey, that's how they manage their food. And farm markets in New Jersey are almost ubiquitous. If you see a flea market sign in New Jersey, that's not just a flea market. I guarantee you there's a farm market going on in that flea market of fruits and vegetables that are seasonal. And certainly,

throughout South Jersey and I would imagine even in the neighborhoods where you're gonna find, you know, a gentleman's farm in Mercer County, you're probably finding farm stands. yeah, yeah. And there's a farm, there are community farm markets and the one that keeps coming up over and over again is the one up in Summit. So farmers travel up to Summit, you know, hour and a half, two hours sometimes to sell their foods up in Summit.

You know, when a good community farm market gets established and they build, again, this is consumer behavior and they build a kind of a meaningful mass population that people keep coming back over and over again. And a West Windsor farmer's market right here in my area has done that as well. The vendors, the farmers know that when they do drive that long and they're pulling farmers off of their fields, which is not perfect, but they need to make money. They know that.

they're going to sell product. So building those consistent engagements with customers starting to happen. I think we're getting beginning of consumer behavior change. Now, largely in affluent communities, people can spend more for those things. What we really wanted to do is to start to drift down into the larger

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populations in New Jersey as well. Getting back to farmers against hunger, a lot of the food that we're pulling off of the fields, we're getting it into places, into food deserts and people who are food insecure. Oftentimes the food that we're giving them is healthier than what they can get from the store. And that feels really good. As we're getting them, I'll pick five or 10,000 pounds of corn off of a field and it'll be at the food pantry.

that afternoon. That's awesome. Fresh, food from the farmers in New Jersey getting to places in need. It helps break the cycle of poverty. Brain fog is prevalent with over processed foods. People who don't have, you know, the economic viability to buy regenerative or organic foods or things that are going to make their bodies more sustainable and healthier.

They can't afford that, but they're getting it oftentimes with farmers against hunger. And that feels really good. are there, do you have any sort of fundraising events or any sort of fundraising online or anything that we can mention while we're on the subject? You know, obviously such a good cause, the Bridgerton Beacon in that vein, consider the Beacon soapbox and megaphone. If you want to talk to the

the folks at the greater Bridgeton area at any point in time, you can always reach back out to me and say, Hey, we've got something going on. We'd like to share. You will happily give you a soapbox in Megadon. How can people support in general or the farmers against hunger initiatives in specific? you can go to our website. It's pretty easy. It's www.njaag.com.

dot org and you can go to our drop down menu and donate right on our website. You can, you can get involved. can volunteer, you can donate, you can sign up for the newsletter and support the friends of the NJ agricultural society as well. So it is pretty easy. I just jumped on that quick. You don't have to be a rocket science to find where to

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where to support a good cause on your website. Now, and we do an annual gala every year. So we do a celebration, we hand out awards and we do a fundraiser gala on the 29th of March this year up in the Princeton area, right at the Crowne Plaza. Anybody is welcome to attend that. They're interested. And that

will be promoted in the next, that will be on our website as well, probably in the next two weeks. Okay. So we'll look out for the gala in March. Anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to share? Is there, should we be promoting membership in general? Should we promote promoting anything to the general public about what they can learn or see about New Jersey agriculture to take sort of their first step in the path of, know, well, if they're watching this.

They're interested enough if they've gotten through 27 minutes of you and I extolling the virtues. If they're still watching this, they're troopers. You've got them on the hook is what I'm saying, Newell. If they're still here, you've got them on the hook. So if you're still here, them what to do next. You certainly can make a donation and we're appreciative of any amount of donation. But even more importantly, become a member of the society. For the general public,

you can become a member of the society for $75. We'll add you to the newsletter. I'm sending out at this point in time a bi-weekly newsletter to give everybody updates on what we're doing. But in general, you're supporting ag education, you're supporting leadership training so that we keep agriculture strong in New Jersey, and you're also supporting farmers against hunger. So we can keep our trucks on the road, our drivers driving.

and that we're collecting food and getting it to the places in need. And for $75, that's a pretty meaningful and valuable contribution. And I would say that's as important as just making a straight donation because membership models are lasting over time and means you value what we're doing. So that is also an important way. Other way you can participate is you can volunteer.

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Come collect food. You or your company, we do a lot of corporate cleanings. Come glean food off of the fields of our New Jersey farmers. And you can sign up on our website to volunteer as well. There's a sign up portal there. Yeah, that's great for all the Beacon friends in the Greater Bridgestone Area Chamber of Commerce who are looking for a philanthropic slash team building activity in the sun. need that. Maybe we can. down at

So not too far from Bridgeton, I believe is AT Busby. We're down there every Friday, the summer during corn picking season. And we need volunteers down South. really, we really want to expand what we're doing in the Southern region of New Jersey. And, well, I could have picked 50 to a hundred thousand pounds of corn one day and we only had four volunteers. we got, we got four or 5,000 pounds, but, AT Busby would have given me that whole field.

It was there for the picking and we just couldn't get it off the field. And that's what you see again. Wow. It's not that we don't produce enough food. It's that we can't get the food the right time to get it to the people with the immediacy that's needed. So the bigger our volunteer network, the more we can activate that process. Wow. That math is wild. That's such a missed opportunity. It's a timing issue and farmers, know, farmers are busy. They're working 16 hours a day. They're not, they're not thinking.

I should call up farmers against hunger. They're thinking this corn is going to sit in the field because the market doesn't demand it. And I'm upside down on my labor costs and I'm going to turn it into silage and move, move that field into my next crop cycle. So we have a very small window. have a very small window because the farmer is a businessman. He, know, their, margins are razor thin already. We can get in the middle of that conversation and affect change. Again, we don't have a food.

production problem. have a timing and a logistics issue. So we have the trucks, we have the drivers. need to continue to develop our relationships with farmers and make sure that they think about us when they're doing their business. So if we can get a SWAT team down onto their fields and get those zucchinis that are perfectly timed that they're not going to get to, then we can be very successful supporting those.

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Now, what would that operation have looked like fully manned? So four is on the low end. What does a full compliment look like in terms of volunteer ship for a project like that? you know, that's an unusual opportunity. So I would almost call it like a SWAT team of volunteers. I would say 30 people, picking, you know, I don't know, 150, 200 rows of corn and probably two trucks, 12 pallets each.

Palate of corn is 800 pounds. So, you know, 10 to 15 pallets in each truck, you know, it adds up. that's 30 people is not an outlandish number of volunteers. It's what I sort of what I'm getting at is that's not a number that, you know, you didn't need 150 people to get the job done that day. It's, you know,

30 seems to me like the kind of thing with more work and more work and more work that it seems like almost like a, your dream would be to be able to push a button when that sort of opportunity arises and have so many people out there on a mailing list or a text list who were open to the idea that, once in a while we get these crazy opportunities to really collect and deliver a great deal of food.

Which to me, like I would sign up for something like that locally. I happen to be in Florida at the moment, but when I'm in South Jersey, like, yeah, I think that's the kind of thing me and the guys who hang out at Glass Town Brewery and you know, their wives and all their buddies like, yeah, they'd be like, yeah, you know, cause heck they probably know the

road they might know the farmer to begin with. you know you make a really good point so those kinds of community building opportunities are really meaningful because you you guys meet at the brewery like that brewery could host a couple days of leanings right and get and get folks like you out there and then what happens with corporations is they'll they'll help pay for the gas or they'll pay for a lunch or you know becomes this communal event that's really

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You know, there's something about getting your hands in the soil that's very communal and kind of spiritual in a way. And I see that over and over again. Those cleanings are really extraordinarily valuable just for the human condition. We're getting people, you know, from accounting firms. We've got Amazon folks. We've got consulting firms. And I see the people that come out there. A lot of them are really moved by.

It's amazing. People spend a lot of time just sitting in staring at their phones and living in their cubicles. And the day the volunteerism that these organizations are asking them to do, they love coming out and cleaning because it really is a change of pace in a very good way. There's something about, you know, actually filling an actual truck with actual stuff versus, know, I spent a lot of time at a computer doing editing and

audio engineering, but handing someone something or putting a crate in the back of a truck. That's about as tangible as it gets. So I can see where there's even just once in a while, if you don't get your hands dirty often, there's a real appreciation for like seeing a whole pile of your work at the end of the day. It's a good feeling that most people don't have the opportunity to live that way.

No, it is. great. And they know where it's going too. I mean, they know that that food is going to really important places. Yeah, almost makes me want to see what kind of interest I can raise from my buddies when I'm back up in New Jersey. Absolutely.

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I can't decide if that was an emergency or if it was your dog was gonna come running down the hallway if your kids were coming in with a sandwich. No, that was my son's dog ran up the stairs and I, you know, I was being mindful of the noise. That was great. The good news is we in the last couple years, the AI for this, this you walked right into my pitch for podcasting for associations, but the AI.

around audio engineering, cleaning up background noise, all that type. It's been game changing even in really the last 12 months, the ability to take out stuff. it's sometimes I'll even tell people in advance, like, don't worry if your dog barks or don't worry if, because it's, the quality of the product in the end is generally so good. But it's that would be, have, so you guys have an email newsletter, man.

Again, if you don't start your own podcast, anytime you want to use us as a platform, it don't hesitate. This is such a fantastic, you know, what what about a live podcast? Set up a table, get the headphones and we do one out in the field and you could, you could do a podcast with two or three volunteers. So you wouldn't probably live broadcast it, but you could record in the field pretty easily. Yeah. And so.

And the funny thing is, even with an iPhone or an Android, you can get those lapel mics now. So you get like a set of two lapel mics and you can do a perfectly good interview in a not perfect setting because they're so close to the speakers that it's okay that there's a tractor going on. Whereas maybe if you did it just with your iPhone, it's a much more difficult treatment at the end.

But I think whatever's easy is probably the best plan. Like if it's the kind of thing that sort of fits into your routine in your life, I think that's probably the best way for you to adopt media. If you find that anytime somebody's like, we're gonna launch a podcast, we can't wait to tell you all about what it's gonna be. I'm like, well, this is never gonna happen. And if it does happen, it's not gonna last more than six months because they've done all this planning.

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to create a thing. I'm like, it's easier to just document the stuff you have going on anyway. Like you're already doing a podcast, you're just not recording it. It's called your telephone. You talk to people all week long about this stuff. And some of those would be really interesting for sort of educational or public consumption or even internal comms kind of thing. But I think whatever's easy. if you've got the interest in doing things like that,

Don't hesitate to call me back and say, here's my idea. Cause I will be happy to say, okay, well definitely don't do this and don't do this. Right. Because I've probably screwed them up before. but, but I do think to get out there and interact with participating farmers, volunteers, people, and the conversations would change seasonally. It's, I don't know. It's the kind of thing I.

I think I'd be interested in because it's so niche. Like most of the podcasts I consume are from these niches that I don't necessarily live in. Like I don't live in agriculture, but that's only more reason why I want to time listening to people who do. It's like a whole, I listen to hunters all the time and I don't hunt. And that might be who I listen to more than anybody. that sort of their point of view on conservation is highly educated.

highly educated, very fascinating their perspective, but who would want to take care of the land or the resources on it more than them? Because they, you know, they're harvesting those resources. So for me, agriculture is very much in the same vein and has a greater depth of subject matter than Joe Schmoe would think at a glance. There's chemistry. There's, I mean, there's, there's the business end of it. There's the human resources end of it.

You know, there's the, you know, the agriculture end of it, the plant, the pickin, but again, there's, you know, you, you've covered business and chemistry and people and like, there's so many facets to make it all work. Engineering and mechanics and the whole mechanical side of it is.

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a whole different part of your brain or really a whole entire different skill set altogether. So there's so much depth to the conversation. Well, and the biggest, the one that you didn't talk about a farm that I think is really big is the culture that surrounds an agriculture community. you know, that makes a lot of sense. can listen to country music. They talk about Tulane country. They talk about, you know, meeting their girlfriend out in the cornfield in high school and you

All of the country music songs kind of talk about the country life and why it's so meaningful and you know, the crickets and the streams and you we know all those words, but the truth is in New Jersey, we need to preserve our agriculture community because who wants to just live in a strip mall and housing development? If you don't have a balance of open space and culture of agriculture,

you're missing a really big part of our connection to light. True. It's a whole, it's a, it's, it's a recognized, but not nearly appropriately revered enough segment or cult segment of our culture. Yeah. Is what I would get. Like it's, like it's there, but it's, it's almost, it's been there before all of us. So we didn't, we didn't notice it. Like it didn't pop up kind of thing. There's, it's not a shiny new toy for the

the culture overall to play with, but it's underappreciated. think under, or there's a great lack of understanding or education. Like we were saying before, people just reading the labels or spending a day in the field and how much satisfaction they get from that can be a real eye opener for this whole thing that goes on every day in the world, which is people growing your food and getting it to market. And probably they're

people like that closer to you than you think, no matter what state you doubt about it. No doubt about it. You talked about the workforce too. The migrant labor workforces that come up through New Jersey to pick the blueberries, to harvest the food. There's some amazing stories about the relationships that farmers and their workers, and really valuable ones. And those stories oftentimes are unreported because you only hear about the negative stories, but largely,

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These are great stories of, you know, success and collaboration and cooperation. I really saw that when I was down doing the blueberry harvest. This is a seasonal, you know, lot of the seasonal workers are coming up through the state and are revered and well-respected by all of our farmers. Cause if we don't have them, they're not going to get the quality of the blueberry because the electric machines don't do as good of a job getting the

the berries to market. you're right. There must be just an endless trove of incredible stories. Yeah. Going back, going back decades or centuries in the state of that, because when it's local and it's not shipped in refrigerated, it's that seasonal thing. So everything is timing and everything is getting the right amount of, you know, hands in the field at the right time.

So that migrant workforce, boy, that's such an interesting, interesting sort of economic market there too, because from season to season, a farm to farm, but really still could, you could maintain if it's inequitable and like you could have extremely long-term relationships, even with all that transient nature of it, you get a really long-term relationship. they do. They sell the...

The workforce now is largely in the blueberry industry. I've been told largely now Guatemalan population. they used to be from Mexico, but it's shifted to Guatemala. They come up, and they start down in Florida and they work their way up to Maine, then over to Michigan and they do the blueberry harvest. These are families and it is, it's, they come back year if you're not, and if you don't treat them with respect and properly, they're not going to

They're not going to show up. So the relationship is I was talking to one gentleman, they do an, they, they do an annual kind of pig roast at the end of the harvest. They have a nighttime soccer game where the employees and the farmers, you know, go out on a pitch and play soccer together. And that, you know, it used to be just the men, the men would come up and pick now the whole family's come up. So they've, they've had to kind of transform their living conditions. So they have a family room. They've got,

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place for the kids, they've got little playgrounds that are set up. So they're really having to adopt to kind of the changing dynamics of the migrant worker in a really positive way. Because if they don't, they're not going to get them to come. It's actually, you you hear all the negative stories in the press, but it's actually a very positive relationship. You hear about the bad apples, but in general, these are these are long standing relationships.

And a farmer's reputation has to be how do you treat your workers? And it's with respect. there was a big issue this summer with the heat stress bill, right? I don't know if you read about that, but largely it was architected to support workers who were in really tough conditions where they were working in a restaurant or out on the boardwalk serving food and it was 120 degrees, getting dehydrated. They weren't getting enough shade and legislators set these kind of parameters about this heat stress bill.

And it really didn't take into account the labor force out in the fields. So that, you know, it was prohibitive because every day the heat is over 80 degrees and the workers always have water breaks. always, you know, can stop working, get in the shade if they need it. Now the government wants to start regulating kind of how

businesses, including farmers, treat their workers, they've got to have a heat break station, they've got to have this, that and the other thing. And it really was affecting very concerning for the, for the agricultural population, because it would limit them on their ability to kind of do what they've been doing for so many generations without a lot of college kid, a college kid busting their hump on the boardwalk.

God bless them. Respect to the hard work, but they don't know squat about keeping cool compared to somebody who's spent last summer and the summer before in the field also. Like, nobody really has any business telling those people how to keep cool. No, and the farmers get that. They already get that. They're treating their workers for predictivity and you can't have workers dehydrated and exhausted out in the fields or they're just not going to be affected.

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So it was already happening. And I think the legislation was, think, done with all the right purposes, which is, you know, restaurants and places that are confined can get really hot. And, you need, you need to make sure that people are taking the proper breaks, but it's just not as relevant when you're out in an open field. we've covered the, agricultural society. We've covered, boy. It's such a, again, don't hesitate to come back anytime. Like.

Just on its face, everything you guys are involved with is so sort of wonderful. I mean, it's just one of those feel good conversations. Like, you're taking food that was going to get wasted and you're getting it out to people who need food post-haste. Like there's just nothing that can beat that. So again, we're thrilled to have had you on the Bridgerton Beacon, Newell. We welcome you back anytime. We'll put this out and promote it as much as possible. Yeah, I'm going to, even I'm going to keep my eye.

on things differently because gleaning is a new conversation to me. When I grew up in an agricultural area, but you just added a wrinkle and I'm not a young man, but you did just add a wrinkle to the conversation that I thought I had a pretty good handle on and how this is it. It's its totally own separate opportunity. It's its own totally separate course of action and outcomes. And it needs its own sort of support and ideally.

a SWAT team in every county where when these opportunities sort of arise, you guys can really, really, you know, put the bushel to it and do the collecting you'd like to do. Absolutely. And to your point about that kind of your conversation about meeting at a brewery, know, churches and any community groups that are organized down in the Bridgeton area or just in South Jersey.

We would love to connect with them to help build this network so that we can get that SWAT team enabled and get to the food and time to recover. Yeah, well, I don't think too many people would be upset if they got a text that said, remember that group you joined? We've got an opportunity to collect 8,000 pounds of food and get it to the hungry. We need you Saturday. We need you Friday.

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Whatever the case might be. That's kind of a cool text to get. it is. And it's, believe me, I do many every year and I, never, it never disappoints. Never disappoints…  because it's a way to clear your head. Awesome. Well, it's, it's just a great experience for everybody. Yeah. Well, mean, sunshine's good for your mood and your immunity and everything else. Yeah. I can imagine. It sounds like a good time. We'll do what we can to promote it. Thank you for coming on.

That's Newell Thompson. It's the New Jersey Agricultural Society and the Farmers Against Hunger program, which is a really cool thing. So we'll get clips out and I'll probably shoot you an email in a couple of days, Newell.

If there's any highlights from this that you guys can use to promote on your Twitter, your Instagram or anything like that. I'll send you a media kit of you sounding brilliant and compelling those clips and you can use them to your heart's content.

Sounds great. Tom, thank you so much. I really appreciate you bringing me on. Thank you very much, sir.