Consulting & Speaking

Lexy is the primary educator for Build It Up, leading workshops on all aspects of year round organic gardening.  She is also the Program Director for the Field School, and organizes over a dozen farmer training workshops a year on a variety of business planning and production topics:

Taylor calls himself an amateur in the old French sense of the word, “one who loves.” He enjoys planting, managing, discovering, observing, and foraging from fruit and nut trees across the country. Through this he has honed in on some perennial species that can be grown well in Northeast Tennessee including mulberry, black walnut, native grapes, apple, persimmon, black raspberry, fig, hardy kiwi, and a few others. He is particularly interested in integrating multiple species in an orchard setting along with pigs and chickens as buffers against weather patterns and pest populations. He has been encouraged by the possibilities of this approach by studying a host of diverse, perennial-based agricultural systems around the world and observing them with an eye for regional adaptation, productivity, and profitability, with low or no spray management needs. He has been on the board of the North American Fruit Explorers since 2014, and is a member of multiple national and international fruit and nut growing organizations, so if he doesn’t know the answer to a fruit or nut question, he almost certainly knows someone who does. Though not yet technically a farmer – in the sense of making a living selling products grown from the earth – Taylor hopes to one day buy a farm large enough to plant a commercial orchard, and develop a cooperative business around multiple agricultural product lines. For now, he’s happy to share his knowledge with others in the area who have questions or are interested in learning more about the following topics: