This is the Farm Walks podcast brought to you by Tilth alliance and the Washington State University Food Systems Program. I'm your host, Keith Bacon. You might know me from podcasts like Field to Fork and Always West Seattle. Or you might not. In any case, I've been tasked with producing an all new season of Farm Walks and I'm super excited about it. Thanks to farmer Nicole and everyone on the team who first brought the Farm Walks podcast to life. Speaking of origin stories, Farm Walks, the podcast came about when in person farm walks were put on hold during the pandemic. Those on site visits for farmer to farmer education are back in action and you can learn more about them at our website, farmwalks.org for this new season of the podcast, we're also going back.

To those boots on the ground roots.

And recording every interview in the field. How about them apples? In this episode, we're heading out to the northeast corner of the great state of Washington for a story of two independently owned food businesses that worked together like meat and potatoes, and one hardworking couple behind them both.

I am Brent Olson and this is.

My wife, Kira Olson.

We're the owners of Olson Farms and Smokey Ridge Meats.

Welcome to the Farm Walks podcast. I'm Keith Bacon and I'm sitting here with Brent and Kira Olson at Sarah Smokey Ridge Meets in Chewela, Washington. Thank you both for joining me today. We've got a lot to talk about and I'd like to start by talking about the farm story, which, Brent, is your heritage story. Well, let's just start by setting the scene. How many acres are you currently farming? What do you grow and raise and where is that farm located?

The Home Place Farm is about an hour north of where we're at here in Chula. It's north of Colville. We're in a beautiful mountain valley there. I started off with about 200 acres. In the early days, I was interested in growing mixed vegetables. So I had about a 2 acre vegetable garden that was supplying restaurants and stores in the Spokane area. From there I was interested in growing hay and started to do that. At the time. My grandfather, who lived to be almost 101 at the farm, he was like, you gotta get some cattle, Brent. And so I, I got about two calves and he was like, well, that's not a herd. So he helped me out and grew it from there. So I had cattle going, vegetables, hay, and about that time, Smokey Ridge Meats, where we're at now, was ready to start trying to do USDA processing because I Was selling some cattle like halves, holes and quarters.

Right.

But I was direct marketing. Meanwhile, I was in Seattle, finally selling, selling potatoes, primarily about 15 to 20 varieties. And I thought, I want to add meat to this. I wasn't eating much meat and I was like, gosh, I want to know where my meat comes from. And I sensed that. So did other people want that? So I worked towards purchasing Smoky ridge meats. I started leasing it to buy it In, I think 2007 ish. At that point we had the smokers and all that. And I thought, we gotta add some pigs to this operation. People like bacon and ham. So I morphed the. My direct market farm into meat and potatoes. So we currently grow about 20 acres of potatoes. I run cattle on several hundred acres and grow probably 3 to 400 acres of hay. We put up all our own hay for the cattle.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it keeps us plenty busy.

And you're in several different locations.

Yeah. So we're going down the Aladdin valley, north of Colville is where we're primarily at.

Cool. We're going to talk a little bit more about Smokey Ridge meats in a minute. Getting back to the farms, I'm curious about the potatoes. You grow over 15 varieties of organic potatoes. How did you zero in on that?

My sister was working on her doctorate down at wsu and she's a world famous potato scientist right now.

Oh, wow.

Shout out Dr. Norals. Very proud of her. But I couldn't grow lettuce and things like that to support me year round. I really wanted to be a full time farmer. That was a big deal to me. So I thought potatoes something that I can try to market all through the year.

Right.