When we started the podcast—and then the website—our goal was to aggregate as much information as possible and put it all in one place for free for anyone interested. There was simply nothing yet out there about how to run a profitable market garden without tillage, so we wanted to change that. 

That was around this time last year… and the response has been flooring.

We grew beyond our imagination in our first year, especially considering we’d only done a handful of episodes and run out of growers. Our listenership is currently around 4K downloads per episode, almost 25k a month, over 125k in total. Not including listens and YouTube plays. Our site gets nearly 300 visitors a day and our following on social media is over 20K strong.

For a niche nerdy podcast about a very specific subject within the context of market gardening, that is amazing. And that’s not on us, that’s on y’all.

Some of what was talked about on the podcast, however, was hard to visualize. So, we wanted to add some videos for illustration. Unsure of how to pay for those videos we felt obliged to put them behind a paywall of sorts at patreon.com/farmerjesse as a perk. And indeed, our beloved patreon members have been enjoying those videos for the last few months. 

But, this has never felt right to us. It’s not in the spirit of No-Till Growers. To us, information should be freely shared like farmers talking over the fencerow, and keeping things behind a paywall doesn’t honor that. It also doesn’t honor the time donated to us by the individuals allowing us to film them, or for that matter Josh for the work he puts into coordinating and traveling and filming and editing them. So, even at the risk of losing some patreon members, we have decided to TAKE DOWN THE PAYWALL and put the videos out for free (albeit slowly, as there are a freakin’ lot of ‘em). 

We can’t afford to do literally anything we are doing without our patreon support, but fear of losing some of that money does not outweigh our missin to simply get this no-till info out there. To be sure, there is more than one way to sustainably grow veg, and there are many other important considerations for small-scale farms besides whether or not to till—be it finances, marketing, labor, etc—but we feel methods that reduce tillage while remaining profitable is what we have to contribute to the greater market garden movement.

No-Till Growers is more than just a podcast, blog, or videos. It’s a small part of the silver buck-shot that’s going to fix our food production system for years to come.

There will still be a few perks for patreon members, like discounts on gear and events, but we are officially taking the majority of the videos we have produced and any videos we make from here on out and giving them away on our YouTube page. By being a patron, we want you to know that THIS is what you are supporting—not me, not a content producing business model, but the movement itself. 

We hope you will still stick with us, and stick together, in this effort. Please let us know your thoughts and thank you.

-Jesse + NTG Team