Part farmer, entrepreneur, marketer, networker, delivery man, community volunteer and advocate, Todd Geisert has continued a 135-year family agriculture tradition, expanded the family’s brand to include more than 60 products, and he’s done it all in eight short years.
Committed to raising his heritage breed pigs naturally – the way his family has done for more than a century – Geisert is equally committed to helping other farmers and producers get their products to market and into chefs’ kitchens. In his latest venture, Farm to You Market, Geisert and his wife, Katie Geisert, curate produce, packaged foods, meats, cheeses, milk and ice cream made and produced within 200 miles of the family’s Washington farm. Here, the life of this renaissance farmer in his own words.
The smell “What you’ll find when you come to the farm is that you’ll hardly ever smell the pigs. You’ll smell the sewage treatment plant down the road here – and you can put that in your quotes. People think it’s the pigs (they’re) smelling and I tell them, ‘You’re smelling your own poo.'”
Being an entrepreneur “My junior year of high school, I started a welding and fabricating business, building trailers and truck bodies because that’s what I like doing. It turned into a pretty good-sized business, where we had 20-some-odd people working for us, making several hundred trailers and truck bodies a year. Then the economy changed and … we learned a lot of lessons (about expanding) too fast. After 10 years, we closed up, in the fall of ’96. Looking back, we probably could have kept it going, learning what we learned, but I was in the shop at 6 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night, and (we) had a little one. I was worn out.”
Farm life “In the morning, the priority is (to) take care of the livestock, and … then you can start doing your other things. If you’re farrowing (birthing), it takes an extra couple hours. Then you work on repairs and maintenance for the next season or deliveries. There’s never a lack of things to do on a farm. If you can’t find something to do, you’re just not looking hard enough.”
Working relationships “The people I like working with are the ones (who) care about what they’re doing. Our big focus here is being able to tell people where their food’s coming from and how it’s raised. Most of the (producers) I’m working with, I know their operations and can tell you what they do. It’s why I’ve tapped them for (Farm to You Market), because I trust what they’re doing.”
What we live for “We’ve made a living doing things a little different than everybody else. Everything we’ve tried hasn’t always worked. Whether it’s farming or deliveries or dealing with customers, there’s hardly ever a day that’s the same. It’s what you get up for every morning.”
Find out what else is available in Washington’s newest market in this month’s Hit List.
This article appears in May 2016.