“The Tide That Raises all Ships”: A Conversation with Bob Jones Jr. of The Chef’s Garden

Bob Jones Jr. is CEO of The Chef’s Garden, a 300-acre vegetable farm in Ohio started by his father, Bob Jones Sr., and now owned by Bob Jr. and his brother Lee. The Chef’s Garden has worked with AEA since 2011. Bob was a guest on the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast in 2023.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

AEA: How did you first encounter John Kempf? 

Bob Jones Jr.: My father first discovered John in relation to my dad’s early work on nutrient density and flavor.

The Chef’s Garden is a family vegetable operation. We’ve been in business since 1960. We work primarily with 4- and 5-star chefs across the country. The chefs have been remarkably consistent in their demands of us. They specifically request flavor, aesthetics, shelf life, flavor, and more flavor. They’re very consistent.

If you don’t have flavor in the kitchen, you don’t have anything. The industry has essentially bred the flavor out of many vegetables, in their desire for yield and shipping characteristics.

We were also growing conventionally early on in our career. And we noticed that it was requiring more and more inputs to produce the same or fewer outputs.

Our farm also went through some pretty drastic changes. At the time we met John, we were coming out of those. We had been a wholesale farm, and we lost that farm in the mid-80s.

It was really a confluence of an economics lesson, an agronomic lesson in how to grow vegetables, and then a bit of marketing, if you will: understanding what our customers were looking for, and then how to meet and exceed their expectations.

In our quest to grow produce that tasted outstanding, we were looking for varieties and growing methods that would help us.

And we ran across John. He was very, very young, but a brilliant young mind. He was a voracious reader and a very inquisitive spirit, and grew up on a farm. He was looking for a lot of the same things we were looking for: good tasting produce that could differentiate you in the marketplace.

I think we were trying to answer the same questions. And he was coming across ways to solve that puzzle. So we were very interested in his work and started using some of his early products [in 2011]. Some of it he was struggling with at the time.

But AEA is one of those few companies that has stayed the course and has done an outstanding job of continuing to evolve, change, and learn, and to better understand how to differentiate their product in the marketplace.

AEA: What has your relationship with AEA been like?

BJJ: We’ve learned a lot from John and his team over the years. I think it’s been a good win-win relationship, which are the ones that last.

People are tired of extractional relationships, and there’s a lot of that in agriculture today: where people are only interested in the next sale. That’s never been AEA’s motto. They want to help the farmers that they’re working with be able to grow and expand and become more profitable.

I think John is one of those folks who understands that. The best way for him to grow AEA was to make his customers more profitable.

That is not something that every business owner in this industry really understands, grasps, or welcomes, but John does. And as the business has grown, he has brought in people around him that understand win-win versus extractional, and that has been very refreshing.

AEA: What made you trust this young guy? When you were veteran farmers at this point? 

BJJ: He was working hard and he was really figuring some things out. And he was willing to do the work, to learn.

But in my opinion, the real key that has allowed him to grow and understand natural processes as much as he has is his faith background.

What we’re really trying to do is understand Creation. And John gets that. He and I have had many conversations over the years about that.

I believe strongly that that has been one of the reasons why he has succeeded and why AEA has grown the way that it has. It’s a company that’s based on sound foundation. And that is really important to me as a businessperson and as a believer.

I want to work with people that I know are not in it only for themselves. John wants his customers to succeed—that’s very important to him. He knows his business doesn’t grow if his customers aren’t profitable and successful.

You do business with people for 20 years, you become friends. This is not a fly-by-night deal—our family business nor his business. If people really understand that you’re there to help each other and it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, then it truly is a win-win, and those relationships last and you become lifelong friends with people.

I remember when John got married. I remember when they started a family. I’ve kind of grown up with him. He’s 20 years younger than I am. But we kind of grew up in the business together.

AEA:  What’s changed in the past 20 years working with AEA? 

BJJ: The formulations and the products are much easier to work with today than the very early ones. John was working out of a very small area with limited resources. Some of the products just didn’t stay in solution. He was learning as he went along.

But he was always open to feedback. He listened to what the customers were telling him. And then he went about correcting it. That’s another thing that unfortunately today is not always present. You have to have a keen ear and really have a desire to listen to your customers. That’s unfortunately not as common as you would hope.

But AEA has always been willing to listen, willing to take constructive feedback, and then take that feedback and do something with it. A lot of people say they listen to their customers. They just don’t ever do anything with that information. That’s really the difference and I think that that’s what will help AEA in the future.

AEA: The industry of regenerative agriculture is fairly young. Obviously some of these things have been going on for millennia, but the industry we’re in is relatively new. What do you think it means for a company to have been around for 20 years? 

BJJ: Well, certainly in today’s economy, every year that the shingle is still hanging is a sign of moderate success. You have withstood the test of time.

Regenerative agriculture, natural agriculture, has been around for thousands of years. It’s just that we’re now paying attention.

At Chef’s Garden, we’ve been farming regeneratively for decades. We just didn’t know it because the term hadn’t been utilized. It involves understanding nature and leveraging nature to work for you instead of against you.

Conventional agriculture is based primarily on the principle of death. And regenerative agriculture is based primarily on the principle of life. How do we make the ecosystem thrive? Versus how do we kill weeds? How do we kill disease? How do we kill insects? If something is getting in our way, you just destroy it.

Unfortunately, what has borne out is the fact that our society is now one of the sickest populations on earth. 6 in 10 Americans have one metabolic disease, 4 in 10 have 2 or more. And everybody else is just pre-disease: they haven’t been diagnosed yet.

We have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the way we do agriculture in this country simply doesn’t work. We farm our soil to death, and then we take those crops and we ultra-process them. And we wonder why our people are sick.

It really is that simple.

And now, thanks to MAHA, there’s a conversation about where our food comes from and how it’s grown. This is good for all of us. As a company, AEA was at the forefront of that. There have been a few others, but there haven’t been many that were in it earlier.

John understood early on that finding ways to work with nature was going to be better for us as a society in the long run. Whether the majority of agriculture has learned that lesson yet or not . . . I’m fairly certain that it has not.

AEA: It seems like The Chef’s Garden has mastered both ends of the farming operation: growing crops very successfully, as well as the marketing and sales side. You have found a market that really works. What advice do you have for farmers on achieving success in both those areas? 

BJJ: Well, I don’t know that we have mastered anything yet. We have been very fortunate. We’ve been blessed. We have an amazing team of people working with us here on the farm.

The first tenet of regenerative agriculture that everybody mentions is “know your context.” These principles will work anywhere. But you have to understand your particular environment, what you’re trying to accomplish, and your customers.

Know who your customers are, then go ask them what they need.

What can you do as an organization to make your customers’ lives easier? We have a saying that if we don’t make our customers lives easier, someone else will.

So in order to understand what your customers desire, you simply have to ask them. Then you have to listen. And then you have to do something about it.

What is it that we can do? In our business, we talk a lot about providing a consistent supply of high-quality produce.

One of the things that we heard from chefs 40 years ago was, “Inconsistent supply of amazing product still drives us nuts.”

Farmers would come into a restaurant in the summer with amazing fresh green beans. They would convince the chef to put them on the menu, and the customers loved the fact that the restaurant was buying local, that they were buying good fresh product. They could taste the difference.

But the farmer had them for two weeks, and then they were out for two weeks, and then they’d have them again.

A chef is under a tremendous amount of pressure to perform at a very high level, night after night after night. There’s a saying in the culinary world that you’re only as good as your last plate. If we provide them outstanding quality on a roller coaster, we’ve actually made their lives harder.

We had chefs tell us, “we will take inferior quality product because we can get it consistently.” How crazy is that? That’s why they don’t buy direct from farmers. For convenience’s sake, they go through purveying channels. It just makes no sense, but they really didn’t have a choice.

The other thing we talk about a lot is how do we make ourselves irreplaceable in the customer’s mind, through product and service?

That has to be intentional. You can’t just say, “Well, I didn’t intend to have an inconsistent supply or a poor-quality product. It just kind of happened.” You know: the weather, the insects, the disease, the markets, the bank—all of those things that farmers tend to blame. The list is long.

But it doesn’t matter in the mind of the customer. They don’t care what my problems are. They only care about what their problems are. And if I don’t make their life easier by working with them, then someone else will.

As a general rule, I have found that farmers love doing farming type things. Most farmers suffer from iron deficiency. They really like to be around equipment. But try and get them to take a class on marketing, on business succession, on accounting principles. We just don’t like that stuff.

We have an amazing story to tell in agriculture, but we’re lousy storytellers. I’ve had some farmers tell me, “I really wanted to get into direct market. I want to do farmers markets. But boy, I wish I didn’t have to deal with all those customers.” Well, it kind of comes with the territory. You can sell wholesale at a much lower markup. But it’s just not the same.

That’s what we sell in our business. We sell product and service. We sell freshness, because we ship the day that product is harvested. And we also have a great story to tell.

Simon Sinek talks about how the purchase decision is actually made in the limbic portion of the brain, which is the emotional side of the brain, not the side with facts and figures. He says that you can give a customer all of the reasons why they should buy your product or service. But if they don’t believe you and like you, they’re never going to buy from you.

The sales cycle is: familiarity, likability, trust, then purchase. They have to know who you are. They have to actually like you before they can trust you. And they will never purchase unless they trust you. You have to get to know them in order to have a successful long-term win-win relationship.

It’s not extractional anymore. People don’t like that. They don’t want that. It won’t last.

AEA You said that as an organization, you have to ask what you can do to make your customers’ lives easier. What does AEA do to make your life easier? 

BJJ: Well, certainly they supply products that help us provide a continuous supply of high-quality product for our customers. They’re making our job easier in in my attempts to make our customers’ lives easier.

We have basically the same problems that our customers have. We have pain points in our business. Vendors that we work with have to understand what those pain points are, and help us relieve them so that our job becomes easier in our attempts to make our customers’ lives easier. And everything tends to snowball in the positive direction.

AEA:  On a mixed vegetable farm such as yours, what role does nutritional management play among the whole suite of tools that you’re using to grow exceptional produce? 

BJJ: Healthy soils grow healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people, and a healthy planet.

We used to get frustrated because our restaurant customers never asked about regenerative agriculture. They only asked about flavor, shelf life, and aesthetics. And consistency. Our direct-to-consumer market asked about regenerative agriculture and nutrient density.

Growing healthier plants and healthier soils helps all of our customers for different reasons, whether they understand the cause or not.

The primary concern for some customers is nutrient density and clean food. Other customers of ours are looking for flavor and shelf life and aesthetics. Regenerative agriculture is the tide that raises all ships.

What AEA has done is understand that we can accentuate natural processes. We need to better understand them.

Probably the single most important moment in our business is when we recognized how little we understood about how soil works. And about the synergistic relationship between the sun, the plant, and the organisms in the soil.

You see, leaves of the plant, whether it’s a cover crop or a cash crop, are simple solar panels. Their job is to convert light energy from the sun into chemical energy that the plant can use.

What they never taught us at university was that the plants only use half of the energy they produce from the sun. The balance of that energy is excreted out through the roots as root exudates to feed the biology that lives in the rhizosphere around the root of the plant. And then that biology converts legacy minerals in the soil to a chemical form that the plant can take up. There is a symbiotic relationship in nature.

The beauty of all of this is the value of diversity. Diversity of plant species, diversity of microbiological species, diversity of people. I have learned that I can learn a lot more from people I don’t agree with than people I do agree with. Now, I may not change my total outlook or my opinion, but there is value in diversity. And I think that it’s important to understand that you can learn a lot through diversity, whether that’s in the soil, in the plants, or in people.

AEA: When you when you look into the future, what excites you about what’s happening at The Chef’s Garden or in agriculture more broadly?

BJJ: I wish I had another twenty years in this. But I don’t. We’re very fortunate that we have seven of the next generation actively working in the business. So the business will carry on beyond my brother and I. They will do things differently than we have, but they will grow on top of it and go to the next level.

What I’m most excited about is that people are beginning to understand that real food is as important to healthcare as a good physician. Right now we’re on the very early side of that.

We’re beginning to understand two things: how detrimental to our health ultraprocessed food is, and how beneficial to our health real food is. When I say real food, I mean food that’s grown in biologically active soil, that is truly nutrient rich, that tastes great. Kids don’t eat vegetables today because vegetables don’t taste good. We have done that through our desire to increase yield and decrease time to market.

I look forward to a day when real food with regional distribution, grown locally, becomes the norm again.