Inside an ambitious family farm in Delta Junction, Alaska

[Music] i love talking about farming i love talking about the science of farming [Music] see how that crunches that's what we want that's where alaska stands way ahead of everybody this is a new area we can leverage all of that cool information all that new science and apply it to this new region gosh who knows where we can go with it [Music] well dad or uh honey that's what everybody calls me here but i'm the owner of wrigley farms we also do business as alaska flower company i farm here with my family with my wife my son milo and his wife leah three-pound cinnamon one three-pound regular [Music] the lifestyle is amazing i mean going into the flower mill and working in there all day and then being able to walk outside and if you listen there's no cars [Music] there's birds singing the trees are green the sky is blue the sun is shining this is a great place to be able to just come out and decompress our season starts our farming season starts in may we have to wait for the snow to leave and then the ground to firm up and not not be too wet and so the grain just grows and it just continues to ripen until yeah the end of august the first part of september is when we start combining we try and get it out as quickly as we can because we never know when the snow is coming [Music] we have a no-till system that we use for somebody who doesn't understand what no-till is or how it differs from conventional tillage with conventional tillage you disturb the ground you turn it over you aerate it and you create a seed bed that way no till you don't turn the soil over the whole idea is to disturb the soil as little as possible the advantage that that does is that it doesn't oxygenate the soil so carbon dioxide doesn't leave the soil if you're losing that carbon source then you're losing the food that the microbes rely on we don't want to destroy that and have to rebuild it we want to manage it so it doesn't get destroyed and no tillage allows us to do that [Music] we make products out of barley that fit for every single meal for breakfast lunch dinner and dessert [Music] barley is a superfood because of the fiber there's a specific type of soluble fiber in barley called beta glucan now the beta glucans are important because it slows down the rate your your body breaks down the food in your gut and introduces glucose into your bloodstream so what that means is that somebody who's diabetic if they eat rice their blood sugar spikes if they eat barley it doesn't spike because of those beta glucans it's a great alternative for people who are allergic to wheat who have diabetes high cholesterol hypertension heart disease if there's a chance of staying healthy and if you can do it with good tasting food that's even better the whole idea though was to do something to improve alaska's food security in 2005 hurricane katrina happened was watching the news and i remember the announcer saying somebody had killed their neighbor for food and just some reason that just really resonated with me and i thought you know the earthquakes we have up here volcanoes the different situations that that occur in alaska i've long believed that somebody that relies on on another place for their food potentially loses their ability to make their own decisions we have tens of thousands of acres in alaska that can produce food that's much more than what alaska can eat alone once we feed alaska there's going to be a much larger capacity to produce for export because of alaska's strategic location you know we have the options to export our products to various countries that's how alaska's agriculture industry is going to continue to grow we're going to be a much larger industry here that's actually going to contribute a significant amount that's what the alaska flower company is this is the future of agriculture [Music] you