[upbeat music]
- Inga: Next, I travel to a small farm outside of Mondovi
to meet with Tony.
Tony is growing fields of flowers and herbs
that he then cuts,
dries,
and packages into his signature line of herbal teas.
So, Tony, tell me a little bit about your farm.
What's your purpose here?
- So, my passion is farming for health.
For my health, the health of the planet,
and the health of the people that consume my product.
There are few things more healthy for people than herbs,
and then because they're not these over-domesticated plants
that don't need so much fertility,
you can grow them in a more ecologically sustainable way.
- I don't think when people think
when they're brewing their cup of tea in the morning,
I don't think they could ever think
that it was coming from a place like this.
That it's this beautiful, almost wild place
with a huge array of all these herbs.
- Tony: Thank you.
I believe to be successful at everything,
you always have to be learning,
and the steeper the learning curve, the more you learn,
the better you're doing.
So many times, people do stuff for so many years
and they kinda, they reach their peak,
but I just wanna keep that learning curve really steep.
One of my main projects this year
to learn about is this cornflower.
It's always out of stock, it almost comes
entirely from Bulgaria, and it's like $36 a pound.
- Pretty. - Always out of stock.
So, I'm trying to learn how to grow this
on, like, a 20, 30, 50-acre scale.
- Inga: And you'll use this for tea, the flower?
- Tony: Correct, yeah. - Oh, okay.
- And they're beautiful. - They're gorgeous.
- And they smell nice.
- You know what I've done with those?
Sometimes, I learned from a friend of mine,
she takes them off and uses them as confetti
on cupcakes and things, and they're just beautiful.
- Tony: Absolutely.
- Inga: There's a lot of different things
happening in this field; what's going on here?
- So, I'm trying to grow the most potent herbs possible.
- Okay.
- I realized long ago, I can't compete
with the mass-produced herbs where they're coming in
with huge tractors and mowing everything like hay.
- Right.
- What I can do is produce the absolute highest quality
on a small scale. - Ooh, that's delicious.
- I believe that growing the plants mixed together
makes for a much more potent herbal medicine.
And what I do is I plant my plants in these rows,
but every time there's a miss, I'll fill it in.
That's a nasturtium.
This is a wildflower.
California poppy.
Garden sage.
Hyssop.
And this was all just planted this year.
- Really? Wow!
- Right, isn't it off to a great start?
- Yeah, what did you have to do to the soil
to get it to be this brilliant?
- So, for me, number one enemy is quack grass.
- Same; you and everyone else.
- You cut the herbs and they grow back,
but you cut the grass and it grows back really a lot faster.
And if I have a relatively weed-free field,
I can harvest very quickly.
I can harvest as efficiently as $100,000 harvesting equipment.
- When is the right time to be picking herbs for tea?
- Ooh, depends who you ask.
What I go off of, especially being on a small scale,
is I smell the plants.
All the time, I'll go, "Okay, this plant,
"it looks like it's in the right stage of growth.
Let's go out and we'll smell it."
And I'll say, "Oh, yes, that's a hundred percent."
Or I'll smell it, and I'll go,
"Ooh, that's not quite a hundred percent."
And by being on a small scale like this,
I can actually go, "This section of the field's ready to go,
that section of the field's not."
And if you've got a bunch of people working for you
or big equipment, you can't do it.
It's only when the person cutting really knows
what they're looking for, you can do that.
- I love this scale of agriculture.
This is, I just love that connection
that folks like, I'm kinda the same scale
that we have with having that control over your product.
- Absolutely.
You know, to be a successful entrepreneur,
it doesn't matter if you're a farmer
or you have your own electrical business
or you have a restaurant;
you need to be able to do a lot of different things.
And why I chose this is because I love working with the plants.
It's endlessly interesting.
I've learned so much in my ten years of doing this,
but give me another 20, 30 years,
and then I'll probably feel like I start to know.
- Isn't that fun, having your own farm,
you get to experiment?
- It's a never-ending learning process.
[gentle folksy music]
- It's so neat to see everything that's being put
into the tea growing like this instead of just
looking at it, even though it's so beautiful
in the canister, but seeing it living and alive
out here, it's really neat.
- Tony: I really love this.
There's nothing in the whole world I like more
than walking around and looking at my fields.
So, I thought, "Well, heck, why not make a job out of this?"
- Inga: After a colorful tour of these fragrant fields,
Tony showed me how he hand-harvests
one of his prize crops.
A potent herb called tulsi, also known as holy basil.
- This is a perfect example, this tulsi is prime right now.
The petals are starting to fall and the bees
are covering the plant, and if you smell this right now,
that's the really the thing you're looking for.
- Oh, wow. - You can see the petals.
You can see this and that,
but that's intense, right? - It's really intense.
It almost has like a cinnamon to it or something.
- It reminds me of bubble gum. - I can see that too, yeah.
And you're putting in this part into the teas.
- Yeah, so you know, when you think of normal basil,
you think, "Oh, it's flowering; it's starting to go bad."
And that threw me off with this plant
the first couple years; I didn't really understand
that this, the flowers, that is the best part.
That is the medicine, that is the form of this plant.
- This has been such an amazing experience, Tony.
Thank you so much for showing me around.
I hope I get to come back again and see your progress.
- Any time.
- Well, I'm gonna grab some tea from Tony,
and I'll see you guys on down the road.
[upbeat folk music]