What's up everyone?

What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. This is our final episode

at least for now with Riley Brock of Imperfect Foods and Imperfect Foods. They're a grocery delivery service focused

on building a better food system. Now we've talked a lot actually this week about kind of

the whole gamut of food waste, grocery delivery, business models, cooking at home, wasting food, not wasting

food, and I'd like, I think, to bring it back to the earth and talk about farming. And like I mentioned in yesterday's episode I've had my friends on here who have

literally been market gardeners trying to farm in today's climate

But I'm actually really curious from you guys since you're working with so many of them,

you know, what are you seeing as the struggles that they're facing in this particular year?

Because it's quite a unique year, but also just kind of going forward.

Yeah and I really am glad you brought that up, you know, we're coming up on Labor Day as we record this and I think

the under-appreciated overlooked part of our food system really is farm labor and just how hard,

what type of hard work it is to grow food.

And so the main thing we've heard from our growers is, I mean, one, they face so many variables

every year. You know, the main one is what mother

nature is going to be doing. We've been facing you know crazy heat waves and

droughts here in California, you know, as of pretty recently there have been

wildfires burning right outside of the town

of Salinas where a majority of California's lettuce and charred and broccoli is grown so

in addition to having to wake up early in the morning and pick on hot days.

Now folks there having to pick under these crazy clouds of smoke and it's just, it's super

scary stuff.

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