Blake Carson | #038

What this episode covers

Blake Carson:I like to see things grow, I like to make food. I swear my whole life revolves around food prep and all that stuff. Announcer:This is the Real Food Real People Podcast. Dillon Honcoop:My guest on the podcast this week gives me hope for the future, I guess, of growing food, particularly in Western Washington. You’ll see that he has a passion for helping people grow food. He’s an agronomist right out of college. Blake Carson is his name. He works for Skagit Farmers Supply and he’s worked alongside his grandpa for years helping to grow food. So he has that background, that history, he has the experience to know the big challenges, but he also has the vision for the future where he wants to see food grown here that we don’t necessarily grow here anymore, but he knows that we can because he knows that history from working with his grandpa. Dillon Honcoop:Fascinating conversation and really inspiring when you hear that … And Blake is a really soft spoken guy, but he’s super transparent. You can tell this is all very important to him and that he’s thinking about how to make our food system here in our region better. Again, his name is Blake Carson. We had a great chat right in his grandpa’s machine shed. And I know I, for one, really enjoy this conversation this week. My name is Dillon Honcoop. This is the Real Food Real People Podcast, documenting my journeys all over Washington state to get to know the real people behind our food. Dillon Honcoop:So when was it that you got into farming because your folks aren’t in farming, right? Blake Carson:No, my parents aren’t. So my grandpa, he of course has farmed for quite a while and I started raking hay when I was nine years old. So, little nine year old me was out there jumping the clutch and wearing a cowboy hat raking hay. And yeah, I’d pretty much started right about then. Dillon Honcoop:So what kind of farm did your grandpa have at that time? Blake Carson:He had just got out of the peas they’d left in Whatcom County and I think … Yeah, so he was doing about a couple 100 acres of hay where he’s selling it to horse people, feeding it to his replacement heifers, and he also did quite a bit of field corn. So that’s where I dipped my feet into doing a little bit of field work with four wheel drive tractors and whatnot. Dillon Honcoop:Yeah. What had he farmed over the years though? You said he had done peas in the past, what else had he done back in the day? Blake Carson:So years ago, he and his brother they dairied together and they also did peas, sweetcorn, dabble a little bit with some green beans. Then they had their separation and he continued to just do the whole field corn route with other dairies after they quit dairing and just making it work with what he had. Dillon Honcoop:So you’re nine years old, starting to work on the farm. Do you live in town at that time or what? Blake Carson:I lived right down the road from my grandparents farm, so yeah. Dillon Honcoop:Okay. Well, that made it easy then to be right there? Blake Carson:Yep, yep. He’d always come pick me up in his old beer farm truck and I was always excited. I mean, most kids at nine years old, they are pretty excited to go out to the lake or whatever, but I was always itching to get back onto the tractor. Dillon Honcoop:So you caught the farming bug early on- Blake Carson:Absolutely. Dillon Honcoop:… from your grandpa? Blake Carson:Mm-hmm (affirmative).