Badseed, Solid Roots

Dan and Brooke Salvaggio met at a soil convention in Springhill, Kansas. They were married over the winter while working on a goat farm in Sardinia, Italy, with a flock of pink flamingos on the beach as their only guests. This summer they will live on their land in a small, retro trailer to better look after their land and their new baby goats. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, Brooke and Dan with Badseed Farm live, eat and breathe farming. This young couple is still in their 20s, but they have as much passion and nurturing care for their land as any seasoned farming pro.

Their land is small, but their enthusiasm is great. Brooke’s Grandpa’s backyard in south Kansas City is home to Badseed Farm. The yard measures about an acre and a half, but only about half an acre is used for their farming efforts. Grandpa takes up some of the land for his own use.

“Grandpa has a bit of an obsession with antique cars,” Dan said, as he walked by a slightly rusted yellow car on the side of the shed.

Brooke and Dan are dedicated to providing what Dan called a “more than organic” product. Badseed uses no sprays on any of its fruits and vegetables, even sprays that are deemed to be organic.

Brooke said although Badseed is a business aimed at producing and selling the food they grow, she never wants to lose sight of why they had the passion to get started with farming in the first place.

“First and foremost we’re doing this to feed ourselves,” Brooke said. “The core of it all is to be tasting and fueling our bodies with this medium that we’re creating.”

Brooke started the farm in 2007 on her own after traveling Europe for a few years, taking in the food and farming cultures of communities in countries from Italy to Cambodia. Brooke said her travels got her more seriously interested in farming.

“I grew up in middle class suburbia, my life completely consisted of fertilized lawns and food coming out of a box,” Brooke said. “I didn’t really have any connection with who I was or what I ate. When I started traveling I was sort of searching for something else.”

Brooke said when it came time to think of a name for her own food-cultivating escapade, she looked to her roots.

“I was a very bad seed as a teenager, at least in my parents’ eyes,” Brooke said. “When I abandoned all that and got into this farming, holistic living, I thought the name was kind of a funny and ironic tribute to my parents and to those days.”

This summer, while living on their land, the young couple wants to extend their family- with goats and chickens. With animals to produce their eggs, milk and meat, the Salvaggios fell they can live even more sustainably and have more of a hand in taking care of all their food needs.
A new llama will also call Badseed farm home, to serve as a guard for the goats and chickens. Dan hopes this year the goats will not meet the same tragic end at the jaw of neighborhood dogs.

More than just satisfying their own food needs, Dan said Badseed Farm is all about building community connections. Picking up produce bags from a local vendor reminded Dan of the importance of relating people to the world of food.

“We ended up staying in this guy’s store and talking to him for more than an hour,” Dan said. “There’s not really the time for us to do that, but we like to learn from him and connect with him on a very human level. We couldn’t have done that had we ordered the bags online. We wouldn’t know the face, or the name.”

Dan said he and Brooke are looking to start collecting compost from the neighbors to build an even stronger community connection.

“That will bring people here to connect with us, these animals, this land,” Dan said. “Badseed is about simplifying and getting back to more basic values, more community values; the things that have been lost in the last 50 years.”

When someone asked Dan what he wanted to be when he grew up, he always said a farmer. Now he and his wife are living the dream.

–By Amanda Thompson