WEBVTT

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<v Kelly McFarland>[Kelly McFarland] Hi guys. I'm Kelly McFarland.

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I am a farmer in far North Texas.

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I'm also an applied anthropologist and a food activist.

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I got into farming through my research in applied anthropology

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and also through my husband

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and my own independent research into the food system.

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That's what brought me here.

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I'm recording a segment for the Earth Day sustainability virtual thing.

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I thought it'd be fun to focus on two different things

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that we're doing on our farm.

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Right now, I'm in my daughter's bedroom because my kids are home.

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Their schools are closed right now and so this is the best place for me to be.

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I've taken a lot of photos of what we do outside

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so I'm going to do a voiceover video.

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First I'm going to talk to you about flower farming.

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We are getting into flower farming this year.

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We are doing cut flowers for sale.

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We were going to be dealing with florists

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to try to grow the local industry,

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and florists have since closed,

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so we are revising our model and going consumer-direct.

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I'll go ahead and take you through some photos of how that works.

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[Lively Music]

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The "why" of sustainability with flower farming:

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I think first of all, when it comes to sustainability,

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anything that you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is a good thing.

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I'm a believer in any little bit helps,

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and with flower farming, most of our flowers in the United States are imported.

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The best flower farms in the United States would ship to places like New York or California

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for those really showy flowers,

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and then those places also get direct shipments from Denmark,

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from different places from --I think Brazil is a big flower grower-- South America.

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The bulk of the flowers in the United States are imported,

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and so that was just our idea of how we could help locally:

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to start growing flowers that would not be imported

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and to reduce those miles.