This transcript accompanies our episode talking with farmer & beekeeper Kamal Bell about bees and beehives
32:00
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
bees, farm, colony, people, honey bees, plants, students, mites, started, year, sankofa, winter, compost, honey, food, vegetables, pollinators, hives, queen, typically
SPEAKERS
Kamal Bell, Grounded by the Farm
Grounded by the Farm 00:03
Food is more than just what’s on our plate. It’s the places where it’s grown. It’s the people who grow it and so much more. Join me, Janice Person, your host on grounded by the farm every other week as we talk about the foods we love. I am back in North Carolina and all of you know that’s one of my favorite places. I have lots of family here and I love a good excuse to visit this time as I was visiting, I decided to come over to the Raleigh Durham area and I had to see my friend come on about I’ve tried to see him before and he’s always busy busy. So I drove out to the farm. I thought he was in Durham, but it’s really a town that’s about a third of the way towards Greensboro, I guess from and it’s called Cedar Grove. So this is a pretty small town. Come on. Yes. The middle
Kamal Bell 00:51
of nowhere is the no nowhere is like off the map almost.
Grounded by the Farm 00:56
And as I started driving up, I’m like, Well, I know I’m in the right place because I saw all the hoop houses which are popular on your Instagram and stuff. So I know I’m in the right place. Yeah, you are you are. So right now, what I’ll do you have going on on the farm. And I asked that because when I looked at what you’re doing all kinds of vegetables, and I know you always work in them base.
Kamal Bell 01:18
Yeah, yep. So at the farm, like you said, we have seven Caterpillar tunnels. They’re 14 feet by 100 feet long. And then we also have a 30 by 72 foot high tunnel which were which is where we’re recording now. And then we have two climate control greenhouses that are b 14 BY 45 feet that I’ll be going up this winter. As far as when we grow and grow a wide range of stuff. I just tell people to keep it simple. We’ll do everything black, garlic, and onions. So we do tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, cayenne peppers, bell peppers, celery, lettuce, lettuce mixes, kale, chard, HackerEarth, turnips, collard greens. Honey bees, of course, a Karass, such as everything,
Grounded by the Farm 02:04
lots of different vegetables. And you’ve got about an acre undercover. Yeah, right.
Kamal Bell 02:08
Yeah, we have about an acre on the cover. The whole property is 12 acres. But we have five open. That’s clear. That’s actually farmable. And the rest will be clean as we develop the farm model.
Grounded by the Farm 02:18
Yeah. So you are an odd individual. I hope you don’t mind me calling you that. But I’m gonna just say where I begin my whole life, you know, so I don’t think there are a lot of young black men who just went Oh, I’m gonna start a farm. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems a little bit like, like, did you have any family that farmed?
Kamal Bell 02:41
So indirectly, I did, of course, but um, my grandfather on my mother’s side, he farmed, and my way his mother, she had chickens growing up, my mom remembers those. On my father’s side. My grandmother’s father, they farm they grew up on a farm, they sold their land, and have like, a small, small tracts now. But as far as like, farming for profit intensively? No, my grandfather, my mother’s side had a had a grocery store. And he slaughtered his own pigs. But as far as like everybody, farmer, like for living? Nah. So I’m the, I guess, like, by definition, I’m a first generation farmer. But like, not really, by definition.
Grounded by the Farm 03:28
I think in a South, a lot of us know, our grandparents did certain things, or greats or, you know, like, there’s all those connections, but a lot of us didn’t have a chance to really learn it, either. And that’s why I think when you say a first generation farmer, it’s a little different. Because how do you learn all the stuff you need to learn if your grandpa wasn’t farming for a living and making money at it at a level where you could afford to do this? Pretty much full time? Yeah.
Kamal Bell 03:56
That’s the story of a lot of people. Just in the south in general. Yeah. That like grandparents did it. And it really wasn’t for profit. But
Grounded by the Farm 04:08
it’s actually in the black community. Yeah.
Kamal Bell 04:11
It’s a whole different story. But like, it’s a whole different story in context, the black community. So we’ll, we’re when I guess one of the I want to see the data on how many black people start a farm from scratch. Like through the FSA, and the USDA? I think I probably be.
Grounded by the Farm 04:30
I think the numbers are going up. But I think, I think in the Gen X and the boomer category, we see in that I was moving out of it.
Kamal Bell 04:40
Yeah. So I think I’ll be an anomaly. So I will be essentially odd in that sense, where I’m, like, just say, hey, I want to start a farm. Yes, pretty much like a random story that you hear.
Grounded by the Farm 04:53
So so let’s talk about Bayes specifically because you do a great job of explaining how you website pretty often on Instagram and stuff. How many hives do you have right now?
Kamal Bell 05:04
Whoa 30 song. I never really know at the peak this year, I think we have 40. But right now we’re consolidating down going into the winter. Yeah, I think right now we have, I think, I think 32 and we’re heading into winter, so we’ll be beekeeping season will be over in about a month. So we’re slowly combining hives together to give them a good chance to make it through the winter. But we actually got our start with bees, through one of our students showing interest in our agricultural Academy, and then went up to scale. It was Dick Rogers. He’s the head beekeeper for North America at Bear. And he gave us this thing called the healthy economy checklist. And that helps us like understand what the bees are doing. So it helps me to use it as it helps me with my teaching of
Grounded by the Farm 05:52
Yeah. So you got it started? Because one of your students, we haven’t explained what you’re doing with Sankofa. Yeah. So maybe we should maybe we should say, besides farming, one of the things is is you really are trying to help people get those leadership skills and how do you explain it.
Kamal Bell 06:12
So with the youth component, I looked at the I’m a former teacher, and I wanted to create a program that worked on the whole student. So I think in the school system, you’re teaching from a curriculum, and you’re not really able to, to connect with the opportunities and, or anything outside of
Grounded by the Farm 06:34
why it in way that maybe makes more sense for this child versus in there.
Kamal Bell 06:38
You can’t really there’s no really no diversity, diversity in the education system, and really catering the curriculum to specific students. So what we did was we started to bring black males out here and work with them from a leadership standpoint, but also from a mentor and standpoint, we want to give them exposure to opportunities outside of farming in general, but also kind of sparked the entrepreneurial bug in them if they had it in them. Yeah. So we wanted to get an experience in our get exposure to stem ideal. So we wanted to do a lot just to work on the whole student. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. There’s
Grounded by the Farm 07:14
so much going on in our our school system. Now. Right now, everybody seems to have thoughts about it. But few people are taking the action that’s helping make a difference.
Kamal Bell 07:26
Yeah. And it’s difficult, like it’s hard work with the student. Like you really see. It’s like having a baby at home. And we had a baby at home on my last one. And you see like, what accommodations the hospital offers you? When the baby’s born there? Yeah. Then when you have the child at home, you see all the things that the hospital doesn’t provide. So you get a different perspective. The same thing is with teaching, like the school system provides an umbrella. But in that there are also things that are missing. Yeah. So when you bring the student out here, you’re able to address certain things. But the resource aspect is really big, too. So there has its pros and its cons but I think having the students here long term, and us developing a curriculum for him, I think will will take this to the next level.
Grounded by the Farm 08:13
Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, let’s go back to the base because I wanted to make sure I gave you a chance to explain that because it is something that’s very specific to what you’re doing and not everybody does it. So I love it. So okay, so one of these students was really intrigued by bees, which I think is probably a pretty common Yep, it is thing today. And you decided we’re going to start hives. Yeah, you got some help from guy at Bear and you got some help from different people. So how long have you had them now?
Kamal Bell 08:47
I was looking at a video today. So this should be our fifth year beekeeping is that for fear became going into our fifth niche. And the student mentioned that it will help keep him more engaged if we got bees. So at the time, I didn’t like him. I only thing I could think about is Candyman and then how many times I got stung. And really I got stung by yellow jackets. But you all you think all these things. I
Grounded by the Farm 09:09
had a man who was an expert in honeybees have to like work on me overtime to get me yeah, not to be afraid. So there’s a few things you and I both have learned as people who don’t like to be stung. Yep, that part of it. One of them is to like get in the shade. If these are bothering you. I like that makes a big difference. I was surprised. Honey bees don’t like the shade. Love it. They love the sun. They love this. They love the sun. And then if you have new plants around you it’s kinda like a dog has to check out new people come in. If there’s new plants around it’s gonna make honey bees go whoa, wait a minute. We got to come see what’s going on.
Kamal Bell 09:47
It throws them off like from there. They’re like an intense pattern is moot like if you distance of they’re really specific to distance and location of their house. So you Anything new in the environment they have to adjust to. It’s just been a joy having them and being able to create an Airbnb around the trap. Have the students involved with them form relationships with organizations, it’s just been really good seeing that they spark so much interest with their people saw and
Grounded by the Farm 10:18
it’s great for the pollination it’s probably a lot easier to grow vegetables when you know you’re gonna have a lot of pollinators.
Kamal Bell 10:25
The honey bees make their way into all the tunnels at some point. So they’re definitely have a pollination I definitely see them anything that’s flowering. They definitely open that avenue. So I’m
Grounded by the Farm 10:35
checking it all time. You said you were consolidating halves now, what is what is going on?
Kamal Bell 10:43
So I’d like to start with the winner. The bees are clustered in a ball and the queen is only laying eggs on on days was 55 degrees or warmer. So the colony is small, the numbers are low. But once the spring hit hits, their development is based on foraging resource, the resource they can forge. Yeah, so there’s a lot of there’s an abundance of pollen and nectar in the spring. Yep, they use that to build their colonies out. So they’re their population speed peak, they peak during that time. So after that was once we start heading to the summer here, this the number is slowly start to drop off because the food sources so slowly start to drop off. Once that happens, you start to get to the
Grounded by the Farm 11:19
winter, so many plants are only going to flower during the peak production period. Like it’s false. That starts big. Tao
Kamal Bell 11:28
Yeah, so we call it the honey flow. So there’s another honey fall in this area around this time you’re starting to see plants blooming now. Yeah, so the second Khalifa was coming
Grounded by the Farm 11:36
range things like ragweed, yeah, all that stuff. Yep. And
Kamal Bell 11:39
that’s Ragley. All we have filled that fills, it fills ragweed, which is a good source for the bees they love it’s
Grounded by the Farm 11:44
a bad source for Mallory. Obviously, it isn’t for you,
Kamal Bell 11:47
it is so the beat. So you’ll actually we look inside the columns, you’ll see them, the numbers kind of jump up right now. Okay, but what happens is they never make it back to what they were in the spring. So colonies that don’t have the resources to we use our guidelines, we do the Langstroth system. And we do 10 frames per box that you see out here. So anybody that’s smaller than 10 frames will typically like pay a lot of attention to them. So between six and 10 is what we like to take in the winter. If no one is if our colony isn’t that size, we’ll take a sheet of newspaper, put it on top of one of the colonies, take another colony put it on top of that newspaper, they’ll take about two or three days to chew through the newspaper exchange pheromones and they’ll consolidate into one colony themselves, the bees were doing themselves on the need to do split newspapers, separate them, put the other box on top, make sure I didn’t leave too many bees behind. And make sure I do this either early in the morning or late in the evening. So I don’t leave out too many foragers. And then we’ll consolidate into a whole colony and they’ll choose a queen whoever has the best pheromone they’ll choose
Grounded by the Farm 12:54
between the the queens that are there, there’s not like a showdown on the fight.
Kamal Bell 12:59
If they merge, if they do do that, if they merge too quickly, and they don’t decide they can be one but typically they’ll have that. Okay, they’ll have that decided by the time they merge. And then after that, you’re good to go if you can build the population but the startling thing that can be around this time for publishing is slowly over all mites. So we do treat our bees here and I make sure I do that I anybody who says don’t treat bees must work magic. But with the Italian bees, which is typically the genetic lab with what we have here we treat
Grounded by the Farm 13:30
so So for folks who don’t know what a row mite is, as I understand it, it’s kinda like if I had a tick Yeah, the size of my fist. Yep, on my body trying to suck the life force out of me. Exactly. I mean, we don’t like a little bit a tiny tick.
Kamal Bell 13:46
Yeah, so this Imagine having one of the seven that big
Grounded by the Farm 13:50
and that’s what they’re doing to be so most of us don’t see them on eBay. But in size comparison it’s really an important
Kamal Bell 13:59
it is it is if you actually see her all mites that means that the mite pressure was very high in your colony, you need to treat it immediately. So these are going to get them but their genetic line and other genetics thought dictates how they’re affected. So we have we I think over time we’ve been building genetic diversity here Yeah, but because literally the strong ones survive and the weaker ones don’t suffer all mites have become more manageable at the farm but starting out depression was very, very high. Like I caught a swarm from somebody earlier in the year and it was like 40 feet up. I should have treated the hive when I got it but I got the practice like spring but the mic pressure I saw a mic on then and I’m just like we know what they’ll take care of it swamp I thought I had a brew break the pressure was gonna go down. But those mics pull those visa and I tried to treat it but it did knock the number down. Then I tried to treat again, they have scanned it so that pressure was high but everybody else is doing very well right now.
Grounded by the Farm 14:57
So how many times do you collect honey?
Kamal Bell 15:00
That’s a great question. So this year, I actually didn’t click honey. And the reason was because I felt like something was going on in the environment. So I felt we had a weird winter where it got really warm in January, where we had told again, we got cold and that cut off a lot of bees. And then here, we had a really, really strong honey flow. But then, me being from North Carolina, I’m like, You know what, we’re gonna have a tough hurricane season because we haven’t had hurricanes the last three years. Yeah. And I didn’t pull honey, because I want it just in case of an emergency. The bees have access to food. But I typically pull honey in June. I will do it next year, if the environment isn’t go on, but I thought the bees were gonna need it. So I left them for him this year. So I think that’s helped us with our numbers this time of the year because they have food during birth. So yeah, I think we made a good decision.
Grounded by the Farm 15:50
Okay. Well, I don’t know. So, so helped me understand. The Queens, the workers and the drones. That’s what we got, right? Yeah.
Kamal Bell 16:01
Yep. So I thought the drones, they have an important job, but it’s not for the overall function of the colony directly. So their job is to impregnate virgin queens. So when a queen is born, she goes on her maiden flight, drones create a cyclone, she’ll fly through and try to mate around 11 times, and then she’ll store it. Well, the drone mates with her and then they explode and die. So if that doesn’t happen, they, they’ll last around 3538 days and transfer the money out the drawers or the mail. So they have one job and plenty of resumes and they die. If they don’t do that. If during the winter, the workers will actually kick them out and not allow them to come to the hot they’ll die off and the queen will lay new ones. Your queen is she’s I guess the core of the colony in a sense where she lays all the eggs. And she admits a pheromone that regulates the colony and keeps it keeps it a normal flow. Okay, so her smell technically, make sure make sure that the colony regulates. Normally, if anything goes wrong, the workers will actually get rid of her. So her job is to lay 1000s of eggs a day into middle pheromone that regulates the colony so it’s normal. The workers do everything else so they’re gonna forge they’re gonna make honey they’re gonna make wax are gonna make propolis they’re gonna take care of baby bees.
Grounded by the Farm 17:19
They’re going to workers are really the only ones people see. Yeah, so if you’re just living,
Kamal Bell 17:25
it makes cyclones. Yeah, they die. So if you ever see a beat out, is I’m 99.9% sure that it’s a worker bee because the female Yeah, which is a female or Yup, the Queen’s a female, and the workers are too. So they they defend the colony. They make decisions. They take care of baby bees, they make royal jelly, they clean the sails, they claim to have. They they do every single thing that needs to be done to maintain the functioning of the colony.
Grounded by the Farm 17:57
And it’s really incredibly organized. So I know, we build these hives in boxes, to kind of keep it controlled where we want them to be instead of letting them just hang out on trees or in our houses or whatever. Right? Yeah, but there’s like entry points. There’s, it’s, they know where they go and
Kamal Bell 18:18
they’re super organism. So they’ll decide if this area, like they’ll go communicate, they’ll find the area to forge, they’ll come back, do a dance, communicate. They’ll be specific to a location. They orient themselves specifically to that location. They troubleshoot issues, like it’s very, like they’re extremely I think the one thing that amazes me is how clean bees are they won’t use the bathroom inside the hive in a normal healthy colony. Right. So like, you’ll see bees use the bathroom sometime, but typically, like if they have a disease, but typically they want like they’re extremely clean and very highly organized is very like amazing to see.
Grounded by the Farm 18:59
Yeah, the whole idea of bees and pollinators is just so foreign to most of us, right. So most of us typically think of bees as like a hassle. It’s gonna sting. Yeah, right. But really, they they create this amazing piece of our food chain that without them we lose two thirds of our foods almost I mean like vegetables, the vast majority of vegetables need pollinators of some kind and bees are the largest number there are. Some flies yeah, there’s butterfly dragonflies and all those kinds of things, but spends honey bees are the most effective and most of it right and their colonies are
Kamal Bell 19:39
so large you have 10s of 1000s of potential pollinators where you might have a bumblebee called me which are more efficient, but there’s only around 70 of them in a colony. So if you have acres upon acres of something, your honeybees are going to take care of that very easily.
Grounded by the Farm 19:58
Yeah, it’s it’s just unbelievable. And it’s not like you can train a bunch of monarchs to go to the plants you need to you can’t they? I mean, they’re not. They’re not as focused on pollination because the process of pollination actually feeds their hive and does all the things they need. Right? Yep. Whereas a lot of pollinators are doing it because it feeds them. Yeah. Yeah. As an individual, not the collective.
Kamal Bell 20:23
Yeah, right. Yeah. Like, like something like a yellow jacket. They’ll like they’re, they can eat other insects typically. So they can, they can do both. But they’re pollination most likely is indirect from them hunting something or looking for something else. Bees are specifically going into flowers and nectar producing plants to feed their colony and to also also grow it. So they’re very intelligent in that in that manner.
Grounded by the Farm 20:54
Yeah. So you have Italian bees, there’s a lot of African bees, there aren’t American bees. Then some native like carpenter bees,
Kamal Bell 21:02
there’s a native there were some their native bees here.
Grounded by the Farm 21:07
But they’re not honey bees.
Kamal Bell 21:08
They’re not honey bees. Um, there’s a Native Hawaiian, my finger is really tiny. And these days, but there may be some days or other be there’s another be here. This is where I will ask an anthropologist. How I know be varieties outside of honeybees is how good I am with some of my plants where some of my what varieties that oh, that’s me go look at go look at living go look. But there we have a, we’ve had a Russian visa out here as well. Okay. And I really like those a lot. And we’re probably going to do more of those. But once they after the first generation and they start mating with drones here, whatever you have here. Yes, you have. So I like the mason bees. I see them all the time in the tunnel. Yeah, but they they stand a little bit. It kind of hurts a little bit. But I think
Grounded by the Farm 21:59
mason bees are ones you can make you can actually make bee houses for them by using like straw straw things together. Yeah. I mean, I’m gonna put the link to that in the podcast because we did it once with kids and it’s a lot of fun. You can kind of learn from it without having to have like full beehives. Yeah, definitely. Yeah,
Kamal Bell 22:17
you don’t have you don’t have to. It’s not as much management. Yeah. My goal for next year is to work with my oldest son because he really likes insects, and so chronicle all the types of bees that are out here at the farm. There’s so many there’s like a black bee, like, two thirds of his body is black, and it has an orange, abdomen. And they come out around now and I see them all over pollinating every year. I want to learn like go There’s a bee like right there. Like I’ve seen well,
Grounded by the Farm 22:47
and sometimes there are flies that look like bees. Just unbelievable. Yeah.
Kamal Bell 22:52
Like I want to I want to be able to document all of those. Yeah, and and look at what time of the year like I’ve seen European Hornets out here. Yeah, they look like the Asian giant Hornet. They’re humongous about the size of mountain. Like they don’t want to have anything to do with. I run when I see him. If I see him, I take off like I’m not gonna steal I didn’t like it. Like. So I want to learn, like and document all the different types of policies, all the different types of policies, especially B’s out.
Grounded by the Farm 23:18
Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those things that I think kids are so interested in. So are adults. I mean, more and more people are kind of going well, maybe we could do that. You know, maybe maybe we could have babies. But it’s hard work. It really You said it takes more management. So tell me what kind of work it takes for you.
Kamal Bell 23:37
So those hives are basically that’s the whole on the farm in itself. If I weren’t, and I to have all the vegetables, double consume a large amount of my time, it probably takes me now I’ve been doing it for years, around five to 10 minutes to inspect each colony. But you haven’t been troubleshoot everything you’re doing. So that might require me bringing in adding a friend to everybody, you get into so much. It takes so much time we try to go in once a week. But that’s very once we have our full pharma team, we can do that. Right now. We try to I probably get me on once every two weeks. Yeah, I can give you an idea of what’s going on every colony but it’s a lot of work. It’s a whole lot of work. It’s a ton of work,
Grounded by the Farm 24:21
and you’re trying to grow the vegetables and all those things too, right? Even
Kamal Bell 24:24
things need to be planted, harvested like almost every day and you have to prune things and trellis things and it’s a lot of work there’s
Grounded by the Farm 24:32
a lot of men you have to mow the grass around it
Kamal Bell 24:34
yet the mother grass when your Bush Hog isn’t broken, you just get it back two weeks ago. Like it’s a lot like it’s it’s the management of a farm is a lot so the weeds can be a hold of the farm. So wheat management is the heart of the farm in itself. So it was like three farms and one weeds, the vegetables and the bees. There’s a lot of work.
Grounded by the Farm 24:56
So you bought this land so you’re it’s your farm? You started it from kind of scratch.
Kamal Bell 25:03
Yeah. From it was all trees when we got it. So all the trees you see over here. That’s that’s what this area looked like.
Grounded by the Farm 25:08
Okay, so you’ve kind of cleared it make it this much well, what kind of souls do you have?
Kamal Bell 25:14
We have the classification is gab I think is GA Brownville or is red clay? Yeah, that’s the soil we have. So we’ve been integrating compost over the last two years to improve our soil. So the red clay is high in iron, and it gets really horrible, doesn’t have water and then really muddy when it does have water. The compost is its own mix where it’s very It has its high nutrients and nutrients. It’s nutrient dense as its compost. Yeah, but it doesn’t hold water very well. So once we integrate that in, you get this beautiful bed that can grow a variety of products. Okay,
Grounded by the Farm 25:54
it’s getting there, getting there,
Kamal Bell 25:57
that native soil mixed in with the compost makes a big difference in does very well with yields.
Grounded by the Farm 26:04
Yeah, so help me understand who are the customers that tend to Sankofa? Well,
Kamal Bell 26:10
we have our own CSA we sell to a food cooperative here. We sell to CSAs. And we’re here to start a farmers market. We do a distribution in the area that has a mission to get people affected by food deserts distributes the food for us. Who else we work with at the farmers if they are selling items that may need food that we sell to them. Restaurants we have done in the past. Well, we started that we’re doing microgreens now Okay, so we’ll restart that.
Grounded by the Farm 26:40
Yeah, once you get the greenhouses in you can do a few different things do right either change
Kamal Bell 26:45
the whole game for you. So we sell, we always sell as a business about anybody and everybody at this point.
Grounded by the Farm 26:52
Can I ask you mentioned that there was somebody that helps get the food into food desert? It’s not by chance ripe revival? Is it? Oh, no,
Kamal Bell 27:00
it’s um, table for NC there station on the copper.
Grounded by the Farm 27:02
Okay, so they closer by then Rocky Mount it is
Kamal Bell 27:06
they send us numbers every week, and then we give as much food as them to them as we can. Okay, without disrupting our we have to keep up like our record keeping. And yields. I’m weird, like in this way where I can kind of look at like what we have. Yeah, I kind of know what we can meet. Yeah, it’s about looking at this because we’ve been doing it for so long.
Grounded by the Farm 27:29
Once you’ve had enough years of looking at bell peppers or, or beach or whatever it is. Yeah. So it’s, it’s September, you’re getting ready to plant for the fall. What are the plant in the fall?
Kamal Bell 27:41
So with us we have the tunnel has helped us out a lot. So we can keep our tomatoes and peppers in all the way until first frost night. And even with that we can still double cover them to get them over the hump is gonna push them out maybe a couple of weeks. We’ll be doing that right now. Getting carrots in. I’m going to a kale calibration mix in. We’re getting celery in beets, chard, kale. turnips. And that’s about it.
Grounded by the Farm 28:11
Yeah, that’s a lot. I mean, with the turnips, you get the turnip greens. Yeah,
Kamal Bell 28:15
you do that those HackerEarth turnips have a beautiful green on in a nice nice bulb. So we were getting all those things and we’ll get some callers in about two weeks. There’ll be from transplant so they’ll be ready by Thanksgiving.
Grounded by the Farm 28:29
Nice. Yeah, we’d be good to go. Good to go already. Look into that Thanksgiving meal.
Kamal Bell 28:34
Oh, yeah, we’ll have we’ll have plenty of greens for Thanksgiving. Yeah.
Grounded by the Farm 28:38
Well, I love it. Did I forget to ask you something that you were just dying to tell me about?
Kamal Bell 28:41
Um I thought we got everything we know each other. So Thomas stuff so? No, I think we covered everything. Well, I
Grounded by the Farm 28:51
want to make sure everybody knows to look for you. I follow you the most on Instagram. Yeah, but are you do you have the other channels? Are you using tick tock?
Kamal Bell 29:00
I don’t like tick tock. Okay. Probably just as a business person. Until we find the late like I don’t find the right fit. Yeah, I’m I joke around in like real life all the time. I ask people for what you hear, like during the podcast. But like, as,
Grounded by the Farm 29:17
like, how does it help you business? Yeah. Yeah, like,
Kamal Bell 29:21
I don’t think people want to see me joke in our house on tick.
Grounded by the Farm 29:26
Gram. You do? Like kinda here’s what here’s what’s happening. And here’s how to do some Yeah, I
Kamal Bell 29:31
do like how tos on Instagram. I think that helped a lot of people. Because I want our I feel like food is so important. And the food system is changing a lot. Yeah. I feel like if somebody really needs information, they’ll be pretty upset. They’re going through my videos and I’m up there playing around, and they really need to get this office. I wanted to make it like a resource hub. Message me the wrong way. It’s just not it’s just not me at all, which is
Grounded by the Farm 29:57
the great thing about social media as you go where it fits you and Do
Kamal Bell 30:00
it then if it doesn’t your people, you find that you find a demographic and I’m learning. I wouldn’t want to make a difference. I want to I want to make a director. Yeah. And it kind of goes away from the whole entertainment angle from us anyway, because I feel like
Grounded by the Farm 30:14
leadership development, building responsibility,
Kamal Bell 30:18
it goes directly into that. So actually LinkedIn the best I see. I like LinkedIn the best so LinkedIn. I don’t tweet a lot because I just don’t nearly I don’t have the time between when I’m out here. Looking at bees and looking at vegetables I have time to be like, Oh, you look pretty today like for that? So but we do have a pretty good following on Twitter. My son just recently went viral on Twitter for beekeeping my five year old so he got like he got so much even Morgan Freeman end up seeing a tweet which is pretty funny. Like wonderfully meta, all people started tweet. So it’s pretty interesting. Instagram, Sankofa farms, that’s the one I’m most likely to engage with people. LinkedIn, I like LinkedIn, a lot. Twitter, cincopa Farms. So all of our social media handles are sacred for fun.
Grounded by the Farm 31:03
Yeah, I love it. All right. Well, when you get the farmers markets all locked down, let us know where people in North Carolina. I’ll find you.
Kamal Bell 31:11
I’ll let you know. I’ll let you know.
Grounded by the Farm 31:13
Thanks, everyone. Everybody this is Kamal. Val, you gotta check him out. I’m telling you, you’re gonna learn something. And you are gonna smile, even though he’s not doing it just to educate you. and stuff. You go have some fun. If you really enjoy this episode, please share it with somebody else, you know, help people think about what’s happening in the food system, thinking about some of the young folks that are trying to get it set back in the direction where we need it like tomorrow, which I really appreciate. Because when people really put the boots to the ground and get the work done, is when we can really make change happen. So thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Thanks for having
31:52
me.
