Meet Modern Farmer's Guest Instagrammer: Local Roots Farm

Modern Farmer: Could you tell us a little about how you and your wife started farming?

Jason Salvo: This is our eighth year farming. We started on a leased piece of ground. It was a creative partnership with a guy who had tractors, land and was looking for people to help him actualize his dream of having a vegetable farm. We were with him for four years and then eventually broke up, at which point we bought our 80-acre farm about 10 miles north of where we had been. We have a really great farming community out here in the Snoqualmie Valley so we wanted to stay here. Out of the 80 acres, we are currently farming 15 of mixed vegetables, which we sell through a CSA, farmers markets and restaurants in Seattle.

MF: Why did you decide to join Instagram as a farm?

JS: We have this love/hate relationship with social media. We use Facebook for marketing purposes, more or less. But Facebook started limiting how many people actually see your post. We have 1,100 followers who liked our Facebook, but they tell you how many people they show your page to and it’s like 200. They have an algorithm for it. The more people like your posts or say something the more other people get to see it. I was feeling frustrated about that. Then one of my employees asked, “Can I start a Local Roots Instagram account?” She was doing that for a little while. Then I joined out of curiosity and I started finding all these other farmers using Instagram.

MF: You have gotten pretty into Instagram through your farm. What made it click?

This is an amazing way to see what other farms are doing and have some amount of direct communication with them. It all starts with somebody posting a picture.

JS: There is this amazing network of small farms out there using Instagram, but it doesn’t seem like advertising. It is more farm-to-farm direct communication about techniques and pretty pictures of what they are doing. We met this amazing group of people – not actually met in person, but we now are aware of a lot of other people doing a similar thing. There are people from Australia and Japan who are all over Instagram posting pictures of what they are doing. It is worldwide. You don’t even need to understand what the caption is. If it’s written in Japanese, you can still say, “Look at those awesome watermelons they got planted there.” This is an amazing way to see what other farms are doing and have some amount of direct communication with them. It all starts with somebody posting a picture.

MF: So you’re forging relationships beyond the app.

JS: One of the things that we are really into is growing Italian chicory. We found some farms [on Instagram] who are also into forcing chicory in the winter. We started emailing with them, one of them emailed us straight directions of how they do it. It was bonding over this obscure Italian vegetable we all loved. I think that took it from being something that was casually interesting and a diversion to something a bit more real.

MF: What are you looking forward to sharing the most this week with our followers?

JS: I guess this may be selfish, but I am interested in getting to meet other people who are doing what we’re doing. I think what makes me excited about this is expanding the audience to more people with whom we can all communicate. So we can all start doing a better job in being more efficient and running profitable farms. It is hard to do. A lot of people try and fail. The difference between failure and not failing might be a technique or some efficiency that you haven’t thought of, but someone else has. There aren’t many manuals out there. It is just a great way to get information.

(This interview has been edited and condensed)

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