From Dirt to Development: Crystal Hilsley’s Agri-Impact Mission

[00:00:05] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Hi, welcome to The Personal Side of Business where every business has a story. My name is Jet Bunditwong. Today, my guest is Crystal Hilsley, founder of CCNG Developments, where they are creating meaningful connections and memorable experiences through agricultural initiatives. Welcome.

[00:00:22] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Thanks for having me, Jet.

[00:00:24] - [Jet Bunditwong]
You're welcome. So tell us, how did we get here?

[00:00:27] - [Crystal Hilsley]
How did we get here? That's actually quite a zigzag long story. So, if you're ready for it, I will start from the beginning. Absolutely. Alright.

[00:00:36] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I went to school for psychology just because I was really curious and I had no intention of going. There's two routes. Right? You go the clinical route and you become a clinician, or you go the educational route and you go and you teach it. And I had no interest in either.

[00:00:47] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So it's a bit like, what do I do now that I have this degree? I was just extremely interested in it and very, you know, curious, I guess you could say. And I grew up in a very small town. Have you heard of Paso Robles? Yes.

[00:00:59] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah, that's my hometown. So there's wineries there and there's lots of ranches and farms.

[00:01:05] - [Jet Bunditwong]
That wouldn't make sense for your inspiration to be connected to the earth.

[00:01:09] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah. Yeah. Very much. My mom had a backyard garden when we were kids, and we had a little orchard, and we had carrots literally plucked right out of the ground. And that was a huge part of my childhood experience.

[00:01:20] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And that shaped sort of my subconscious programming. And so that's the understanding from psychology is birth to seven is you're being subconsciously programmed. Then sort of seven to 14, we go in seven year cycles. We start to implement that and understand it. And then 14 to 21, we go out in the world and we start expressing it.

[00:01:35] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And then really like deepening more into our knowledge. We can always go back and change our subconscious programming. And I'm sharing this for a purpose because it leads into how I got here. It was, like I said, it was a zigzagged road. It was not a clear path.

[00:01:48] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I'd always been very aware of health and wellness, very conscious of it. My mom's a nurse. She fed us very clean, very healthy. And so I got into business actually, and my ex husband and I had a software company. This was years ago, this is in a past life.

[00:02:03] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And we took that company over to The UK. We had a big client over there. And so I was director of operations. We got acquired by our biggest client. And so that opened my eyes and I got really firsthand experience of what kind of capital markets and a merger and acquisition looked like.

[00:02:19] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And it was just interesting to me. I love learning new things. It was just interesting. And so we came back to The US and I had my daughter and I was offered a position with a investment bank to do kind of like client liaison, bring in new clients. And that was really like the middle market growth emerging sector.

[00:02:36] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So institutional capital, big family offices, big checks between 10 and $15,000,000. And so I really enjoyed that too. So here I've, you know, tried a couple of different things, and I really enjoyed it. But it gave me flexibility because I was I was brought back to America, and my daughter was four years old, and I was instantly a single parent, like only parent. So it was a bit like, how can you, in this day and age, go and work full time and if you don't have family support around?

[00:03:03] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Right? We're meant to raise our children in villages to be there to support each other, and I didn't have a lot of family around. And I didn't wanna just go shove her in, daycare or aftercare programs. I found that just like an impossibility. So I was consulting so I could have really good flexible hours.

[00:03:22] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So a what I did was going out looking for new accounts all the time. So I had a friend in the surf industry. San Diego is the surf industry, right? Everything was born here. Surf skate, you know, there's a lot of that culture here.

[00:03:33] - [Crystal Hilsley]
The athletes are here. They're still raising their kids here now that they're older. And so there's a surf pool out in Texas. I don't know if you've heard of of mechanical wave pools yet.

[00:03:43] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:43] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Like the Kelly Slater. Yeah. So it's similar to that. There's just a couple different technologies. And so the Waco surf pool was looking to sell, the owner of it.

[00:03:51] - [Crystal Hilsley]
He'd always owned it. It was his family's ranch, and he converted into a surf pool. And so they approached me and said, Crystal, can you help us package this and put it up for sale? And I went, well, yes. Absolutely.

[00:04:00] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So I was still with the investment bank, still kind of hustling, doing some stuff on the side, working with some smaller businesses. I help some startups kind of shape their package to get in front of investors. And so, you know, I'm hustling. And in the meanwhile, my passion, as I started the conversation, was around healthy eating. So how can I allow myself to do things that also makes me feel alive, right?

[00:04:21] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Because we have all of these different roles in life. Like I'm a mom. That's a very important role. Absolutely. My daughter depends on me.

[00:04:26] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And then I'm this employee or I'm a consultant for this company and I kind of have to play this role to do that. But who am I and what's fulfilling, you know, my soul and my passion? And so it had always been around clean eating. So I would do talks at like Boys and Girls Club to kids and parents around like, here's, you know, what you should be eating and here's what we should be staying away from. I'd gotten certified as a health coach.

[00:04:49] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It wasn't like a big nutritionist certificate, but I knew enough about it. Felt like one of those things where it's like you know a little bit more than somebody else and you can be able to teach and impart that wisdom upon them. Also that's how I was raising my daughter is to eat really clean, and we knew what good ingredients were and what bad things were. And, so I was doing a couple of different things.

[00:05:07] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Was quite in your spare time.

[00:05:09] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Were just in the in the free time that I had because, you know, I was really you know, for any single parents listening, I think they can understand it's, you feel quite lonely. And so to fill up that free time and dating was just not in the that was not in my bingo card. How am I gonna fit somebody else into this mix? And also, you know, my daughter needs to see me happy. And where where am I sourcing happiness from?

[00:05:30] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's not gonna be at work necessarily at this time. It wasn't. So anyway, so I digress. So so I went back to school, and I got certified in sustainable agriculture because I was just fascinated with health and wellness. And the more that I dug into that with my background in psychology, and I learned about how children get their hands in the dirt and allow them to plant a tomato, they're going to eat that tomato.

[00:05:53] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They're not going to be as afraid of it. And we've got to expose kids six, seven, eight times to something before they decide that they like it. And with all of the big problems in the world that make all of us so sad, right, of childhood obesity, of the diabetic challenges that are happening with the learning disabilities, with the neurodivergence, And so much of that comes back to our health. So much of it comes down to our gut microbiome being unbalanced, of the packaged foods that are so much easier to reach. And so I look at these bigger problems, if that doesn't bother you about the health and the future of our children, I don't know what will.

[00:06:29] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Because we're not giving them an opportunity. And people aren't, I don't think, talking about it enough. Maybe in San Diego they are, right? It's more health conscious and aware. So the more that I dug into it, like I really enjoyed having the conversations.

[00:06:45] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I would go to my daughter's school, again, Boys and Girls Club, YMCAs. I created a ton of online material. I had my own podcast. I did quite a few different things. I actually had a TV series that I did with a bigger group that I was like the plug on children's health.

[00:07:00] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And the more that I dug into it, the more I was like, there's something here about building farms. I just kept going back to my roots. And so that's why I got certified in sustainable agriculture. And I was doing those two things alongside each other. Still corporate development to pay the bills, and then looking at how you can intertwine agriculture in some of these projects that make sense.

[00:07:19] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Because agriculture brings people together. When you come together and you're eating together, you're farming together, you look at a farm, you look at a garden, they look gorgeous. So this big surf pool in Texas, as I said, they were looking to take down the project. It was quite a big amount. It was over 500 acres.

[00:07:38] - [Crystal Hilsley]
The asset of the surf pool itself cost something like $1,520,000,000 dollars to put in. But again, see surfing in the Olympics now, and so there's a path for it. And so how can we bring in partnerships, etcetera? And so part of the project, because they were zoned agriculture, they were zoned ag. We were looking at the site plan and I said, well, if because phase one is going to be homes, right?

[00:08:01] - [Crystal Hilsley]
That's what a lot of mixed use developments do. They'll say, okay, let's build some homes. And whether that's selling it off to a bigger developer or whoever that might be, that just makes the most sense because you can get the most bang for your buck from a development perspective. I said, if we make this an agrihood? So I designed an agrihood concept, and the USDA looked at it.

[00:08:18] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They went, okay, we'll give you $18,000,000 in debt in order to help fund that next phase. So we took the money and I was like, All right, somebody higher than these talking to me here. There's something to this. So I went back to school again and got certified in environmental management sustainability strategy, and that's when I formed CCNG Developments, was through this passion behind bringing agricultural experiences to communities, to bring communities together, and having an understanding from the corporate development side that I'm not just building a farm. And I work more in micro farms, and that's a common term in my industry, if you haven't heard before.

[00:08:54] - [Crystal Hilsley]
But it's a common term. It's anything that's three acres or less. And it's something that communities can come together. You can work. You can play.

[00:09:02] - [Crystal Hilsley]
That entire agritourism sector has done nothing but continue to grow year upon year. It's much bigger in places like Europe than it is in America because the governments really step in and promote that a lot. There's a lot of farm to table, you know, experiences and things of that nature. But it's, you know, caught on here in America, you know, big time. And people are wanting to spend local, to eat local, to play local, to be a part of a farm, to go to petting zoos, to do all the things.

[00:09:30] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And so that's what was the inspiration behind the firm is it's something I'm really passionate about. And then I look at it from the corporate development perspective of how do I develop this asset that is also going to make money? Because at the end of the day, we live in a capitalist society. So I say, you know, my kind of joke is that I've got one foot barefoot on the ground and the other one in a high heel in the boardroom because actually probably 80% of my time is spent in boardrooms talking with executives and with owners about how the commercialization strategy makes sense for the overarching mission of what they're trying to accomplish with that mixed use development.

[00:10:07] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah, and when you're talking to them, what are some of the pushbacks you get from someone in that position?

[00:10:14] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's interesting because they sort of look at it like it's a nice to have, not a necessity. And I'm the inverse. This is a necessity. And so the sustainability aspect, and sustainability is a big word. And I think to an extent, perhaps again, outside of California, there's a lot of stigma around it of the greenwashing, things of that nature, that corporations really aren't doing what they say they're going to do.

[00:10:41] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So on the sustainability side, on-site food production takes those food miles down to zero. And so I've created whole theses around how on-site food production I actually have a white paper published, and it's on UCSD's website about sustainability on-site food production, how we, you know, can solve a lot of the world's problems if everybody built a garden.

[00:11:01] - [Jet Bunditwong]
And what are because you're not just going there helping them start, you're giving them a path of management, a tool that they can use forever, What are some of the programs that you give them that can help them sustain this farm now that you've created with them?

[00:11:20] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah. So my role is sort of two prongs. So one, I come in as the creative, right? I'm the architect of, here's the piece of land that we have, Crystal. What can we do with it?

[00:11:29] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And so I think programming first. What is it being used for? Because at the end of the day, the economics come down to we only earn about $5 a square foot when we're producing food. We earn 100 times that, for example, if you're bringing people in and giving them an experience with the food. And so that's how I look at the design first.

[00:11:48] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yes, I want to grow some amazing food. I use regenerative agriculture principles, so I'm all about healing the land. This is how nature works. It's no synthetic inputs. It's growing topsoil.

[00:11:59] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's preserving water. It's, you know, conserving native species for pollinators to come on board. A couple of different things. I don't often get to use animals, which is one of the kind of five that define a regenerative agriculture, farm. But nonetheless, you know, sometimes I get to throw in some chickens, maybe some goats to clear out the land before I get started.

[00:12:19] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Is it part of the evolution of the business is to one day get to

[00:12:23] - [Crystal Hilsley]
If they've got the space if they've got the space, let's do it. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I'd love to see that. And and so so I I impart upon them as my role as a consultant is to be the architect of this is the experience that we're creating, and then the full business plan around it.

[00:12:40] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I will do the oversight and supervision of the installation. I'm not a contractor. I don't have my contractor's license. I don't run a team of people that do the installs, but I oversee the installs. I write the standard operating procedures, the pro form a, the capital expenses, the operating expenses, the standard operating procedures, all of the juice behind it.

[00:12:59] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Like I said, 90% of my time is unfortunately sitting behind a desk. I would love to have my hands in the dirt much more than they are.

[00:13:05] - [Jet Bunditwong]
But you're packaging this all for them pretty much like this is it. You want to say yes or no?

[00:13:13] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Soup to nuts.

[00:13:14] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah. Yeah. And you had brought up one time the last time we'd spoken that there was, managing it is not just for anyone, right? You have to have some experience in this. Could you speak a little bit to that part?

[00:13:26] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Like, we're now, let's say someone has said, yes, we've built this out. Who's that manager that's going to come in and start to manage everything?

[00:13:35] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's typically somebody that I source. So there's a network of regenerative agriculture experts that know how to run market gardens. It's a typical solution that I would create. It depends on the client. So if it's in the hospitality industry, I absolutely bring somebody in that they can hire because they can manage that person.

[00:13:53] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They get trained under me. They get their standard operating procedures. I ensure that they're familiar with what it is that we're creating and developing. If it's a school that I'm consulting for, for example, the school is definitely going to hire somebody. If it's a bigger project, again, it all leads back to they typically bring somebody in and they're trained, like I've found them through the network of regenerative agriculture experts, because this isn't conventional.

[00:14:20] - [Crystal Hilsley]
This is not even typical landscape or typical farmers. A lot of the methods that I use, they're not familiar with. And I got a lot of push back in beginning. So my requirement is that they've had some experience with Joel Salatin, Richard Perkins, somebody like that. They've been to some type of training in the past, or they've worked on a farm that uses regenerative agriculture principles before they step their foot.

[00:14:43] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's something that I've developed.

[00:14:45] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Okay, great. And are there some land issues that will come about? Like, is the soil not perfect for this type of setting? Do you deal with that when you're you're talking to certain areas? Like, I don't know, maybe in the South, it could be a little bit rougher for you to grow certain things, certain type of foods.

[00:15:05] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah.

[00:15:05] - [Jet Bunditwong]
So

[00:15:06] - [Crystal Hilsley]
in San Diego, we're in Zone 10B, we can grow. It just means we have a very extended season. Right? We're not really affected by a lot of frost, for example. So there's plants that won't do well here.

[00:15:19] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Like, you know, I'm not big on doing stone fruit here because they need a frost, but I'm not opposed to to, you know, designing and developing an orchard, for example. As long as it's zoned agriculture, we should be okay. In fact, it depends on the size of it. So there's a commercial property not too far from here that I just want to see today. And they asked the same question.

[00:15:38] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They said, Well, it's about 1,000 square feet we're putting in a garden. There's not going to be an issue. It can fall under their existing conditional use permit. We're not selling the food. We're actually giving the food to the community.

[00:15:50] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's a community interest project. So as it pertains to the dirt and to the soil itself, as long as it's leveled, I don't care because I'm not building in that soil. I'm not touching that ground at all. It's actually a very simple, interesting process. I've built into slopes.

[00:16:08] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I can show you some pictures. I've cut into hillsides. I've leveled terraces out that way. That's a very ancient traditional way of producing food that the indigenous peoples used, right? They looked and they have you heard of key line design?

[00:16:22] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They look at, right, the key line, how it falls and sort of cut into the grounds that way in order to allow the water to flow to it naturally. You can apply that on a very small scale as well, which is fascinating. But the dirt itself, I do test it because I want to make sure that it's not poisoned or it's not going to harm the food that we are going to grow. Right? I do want to make sure that it's not been impacted by some, I don't know, nuclear issue or something that's gone around.

[00:16:51] - [Crystal Hilsley]
You never know if it's been contaminated in some way. So that's the only reason that I test. I don't really have any interest in what the pH is or if it's sand, silt, clay. Because most of the time I'm looking at dirt, I'm not looking at soil. There's a pretty big difference between the two.

[00:17:07] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Great. And let's talk about some of the benefits for what's Let's start with a school, right? Let's go to school into a corporate building. Like what are the differences? What benefits are they going to get from?

[00:17:21] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So schools, I have consulted with a few schools. It's tricky. There's a lot of red tape. They rely heavily on grants and funding, which as you know, in light of the current administration cuts has been absolutely heartbreaking. I'm a partner with the National Farm to School Network, and I'm just crossing my fingers and literally praying that that turns around pretty quickly.

[00:17:44] - [Crystal Hilsley]
But from the school perspective, I light up there because that is the funnest part ever. The kids from elementary school through high school can learn every single subject in the garden, every single subject. They learn so much about life, biology, science, math, entrepreneurship, Not to mention, you know, it's impacting their interest in nutrition and how they're feeding themselves. Because as I said earlier, right, if a kid plucks a carrot out of the ground, they're going to eat it before you put it on their dinner plate from the grocery store and this is the first time that they've seen it, right? Because they've developed a very trusting relationship with where their food has come from and they're familiar with it.

[00:18:18] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So schools is very much around it being an outdoor classroom. There's an amazing case study that's run by a friend of mine in Encinitas, Union School District, the farm lab. Her name Julie. And she's been on podcasts across The US, in fact, internationally, potentially. It's a regenerative and organic certified farm.

[00:18:40] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And they grow enough food on an acre and a half. The entire site is four acres, and I think it's about an acre and a half that they've done some market garden rows. It's the rows of food, and they build right on top of that. And it supplies food for all of the elementary schools in that district. And it's run by two female farmers.

[00:18:59] - [Jet Bunditwong]
And I'm assuming in California that would change things dramatically, right? Because California schools, I think are, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're so, they're subsidized in order to get food into the system, especially for the kids that rely on that to come into school, right?

[00:19:17] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah. And they rely on a lot of outside programs. The Medi Cal has a ton of different programs, like summer snap cards and things of that nature that they hope that reach the families. So they have an entire outdoor learning classroom at this school farm. The kids come different, you know, when they're younger, they just kind of want to have something that keeps them busy and that they can, you know, kind of poke around the garden with and sort of middle school age, give them a job, give them something they're in charge of.

[00:19:43] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And then high school, they can quite literally create their own tomato business and set it up and market it and sell it on social media and create a CSA box, a community supported agricultural farm box, sell it to the community, etc. And then that sets them up for a future of understanding nutrition, science, math. Again, you know, entrepreneurship, everything. Probably key

[00:20:07] - [Jet Bunditwong]
to you because you're going out there.

[00:20:10] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah. So, on the school side, you know, there are a number of schools in California and a variety of different districts right here in San Diego that are doing a phenomenal job. I would just love to I I believe that every school should have a farm.

[00:20:23] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Every school should have a garden that the kids can explore and learn and play in. And, know, it comes down to the initial planning and design. So who's going to actually take care of it? Sometimes it can be one parent volunteer. Sometimes it can be more.

[00:20:36] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And there are a lot of nonprofits that are stepping in, even for profit corporations that are contributing funds to make things like that happen. So it's a very big movement. So I look at it from what's the, you know, outdoor learning classroom type opportunity. On the corporate project side, it's interesting because it depends on what they have existing. As I said, I work with surf pools and with mixed use developments.

[00:20:58] - [Crystal Hilsley]
That's currently a lot of the projects that I get my hands on. I've worked also with some homeowners here that have agricultural zone land and supported them in commercializing their property. That can look like a couple of different things depending on what that individual is passionate about. They have to be passionate about if they're going to run it. If not, I can help them understand what the setup looks like to bring in an outside operator and do some type of revenue share.

[00:21:23] - [Crystal Hilsley]
That's where my corporate development hat comes in. So on the corporate development side with developing for a mixed use facility, it's intertwined into the storytelling, into the branding, into the entire overarching mission of what that mixed use development is creating. So, they would have perhaps an ethos of like five different things, you know, sun, surf, skate, play, eat, you know, be well, sustainability, something like that. And so I would slot in, which is an overarching part of that, because nutrition is a huge part of the system for athletes. That pathway for, you know, again, we're seeing surf and skate in the Olympics take over, literally take over their viewership.

[00:22:05] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It outweighs all of the other sports combined. The statistics that came out on the viewership is just unbelievable. And those athletes really care. And it's been underserved community for a really long time. But as we head into 2028, this is not a plug for the Olympics, I promise you.

[00:22:21] - [Crystal Hilsley]
But as we head into 2028, we've got, you know, surf right here in San Diego, right? San Clemente, Trestles, that's actually San Diego. So if you know that. And those athletes, you know, they are they're eating clean. They're not out there, you know, being bought by some of the bigger brands that have a lot of unhealthy ingredients in their foods.

[00:22:41] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Right? We're seeing a huge movement and push towards that. So that's really exciting. So yes, the lens I always look through is what's the overarching goal that we're looking to create? And then how can I develop experiences that work alongside that and complement that in a way that is meaningful for the community?

[00:22:58] - [Jet Bunditwong]
You know, you made me think of something like how come more athletic programs and even professional sports don't get into creating sustainable foods for themselves, right? I would think like NFL teams, baseball teams would MLB would just have that so that guys can eat healthy and not have to go buy, you know, junk food, you know?

[00:23:26] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Well, the big professional programs have typically nutritionists that are doing a phenomenal job. I mean, I don't know if you heard the case study. Don't remember which basketball team. But they came in and they took out all seed oils. All seed oils from the entire place.

[00:23:40] - [Crystal Hilsley]
They don't let the athletes touch them. They took them out of the stadium, etc. And all of the athletes performed better than they had every single year before that, just by removing that one thing that's just such a terrible ingredient. So, I are just you know, I can't say that I'm the expert, Jed, on nutrition in in with athletes and development but II think there are some smaller groups out there that are doing things. Most of the major league teams have a nutritionist that's supporting them with that.

[00:24:11] - [Jet Bunditwong]
You know I meant more like to actually grow their own, you know, produce.

[00:24:18] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I mean, and that's, you know, I think that's part of my mission here and what I'm so passionate about agriculture for is because when people hear the word farm, right, just like they hear the word sustainability, they're a bit like, you know, what is she talking about? Well, we can take the stigma out of that pretty quickly. And farming, I'm talking an acre, I'm talking a half an acre, right? I can grow like 60,000 pounds of food in like a quarter of an acre that will feed, you know, a 100 people in three months. It's just, it's a lot of food.

[00:24:46] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah. Yeah. And, I do these farms tend to grow in actual like acreage size over time? Like do people go, Oh, this is great. I'm actually going to expand this to grow more food.

[00:25:02] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Does that ever happen?

[00:25:03] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Not necessarily. No, because, you know, we're intensively planting. So we're companion planting. We're growing a lot of things together. We're following a seasonal plan.

[00:25:12] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And it depends on how big the facility is. Like if I go and I've consulted and worked with some big hotels like three hundred Keys, and I'm looking at them and I'm going, I'm not going to make a dent in what you need to bring in, but I can create We can do something, for example, like grow all of your herbs, all of the herbs that you need, and we can grow some beautiful edible flowers. And perhaps we could set up a little greenhouse and do some microgreens. And at least you can say, herbs from your cocktail or these herbs alongside your dish or our pesto was made from some produce that are right there.

[00:25:46] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Just a little bit of a start.

[00:25:47] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's a little bit of something that gives that flare that that's a unique experience and people really enjoy that and it tastes better. We're supposed to eat within 50 miles of where we live. 50 miles. And we're not supposed to be eating food that's been trucked in and shipped in from so far away.

[00:26:06] - [Jet Bunditwong]
How do you know, I remember hearing that growing up and I was thinking so I'm from the East Coast, New York originally, and like there's probably not a lot being grown within that 50 miles of Manhattan, New

[00:26:17] - [Crystal Hilsley]
York Yeah. City,

[00:26:19] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Right? So so I'm like, what where's that food coming from? And then, I remember telling this to someone. When I was growing up, I did not like avocados because I don't know. It was by the time it got to New York, it was they just didn't have a taste to them.

[00:26:34] - [Jet Bunditwong]
And when I moved to California, I was like, these are delicious. Why are they for for literally twenty something years of my life, I was against avocados. And I came to California. I was like, they're amazing. Right?

[00:26:46] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And now

[00:26:46] - [Jet Bunditwong]
I'm starting I I feel like I'm starting to understand a little bit of what you're talking about. Maybe it's just there's just something going on with, I don't know, the the surroundings, the taste profiles I'm not enjoying. It's unnatural. You know? I don't know if that makes sense.

[00:27:00] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Well, avocados and citrus, that's what California is known for. Right? Like, we're we're one of the largest agricultural producers in The US, and we're known for our avocados. So I grew up with them as a baby. So, yeah, I know a bad avocado.

[00:27:12] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I know what you mean. They're rubbery. They're hard. You know, they taste like water. They kind of have a weird film on them.

[00:27:16] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I mean, it's a couple of things. Right? It's they're being picked before they're ripe. They're probably not being grown in the best soil. And they've been flash frozen and put on a ship and shipped over from somewhere that didn't have the best practices themselves.

[00:27:34] - [Crystal Hilsley]
We're seeing a lot of farms get uncovered like the tilapia farms. I don't know if you've seen some of the things, the practices that they're doing with those fish. They're just they're sick fish and then they're being frozen and packaged and sold at bulk. And and, you know, I get you know, then the question in my mind always goes back to like people think, well, how can you how can I afford to eat, you know, this clean crystal? And the reality is is that you can grow in a small as the size of this table, this is about what three feet by six feet three feet by five feet you could grow yourself a kitchen garden and have enough produce for yourself on this size.

[00:28:09] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And it's fairly easy to do. You could you could put things in your window sill, right? You can there's a lot of different creative ways to grow some of your own food. I'm not going say that you're going to get everything that you need but there are definite ways to get creative and at least have a little bit of something that's

[00:28:25] - [Jet Bunditwong]
I'm very guessing the essentials that you're going through tomatoes, cucumbers, or whatever it is that you put

[00:28:30] - [Crystal Hilsley]
in your And salad all the

[00:28:32] - [Jet Bunditwong]
do you think what stops people from the average person from doing that is just time or effort? They just like, I don't have time for this. I got three kids.

[00:28:43] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's easier for me to go to the grocery store. A 100% it is. Yeah.

[00:28:46] - [Jet Bunditwong]
But you know where the food is coming from though. And then I'm going to just take a guess out here in the next couple of years with everything that's going on on our farms, I can bet you the value of having your own sustainable farm is probably going to be more important, right?

[00:29:02] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It is. And I don't like to get into the doom and gloom because I don't think in terms of that. But again, in light of the recent things that have happened in the media and the news, and there are some people that are going out there placing fear tactics. You need to have your own X amount of supply and you should have your own garden by now. It's real though.

[00:29:20] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It is very real, you know, and whether you are doing it out of fear or not, it's actually really enjoyable. And once you get into it, you'll find how much you enjoy it. Right? Like I potter around on a weekend just with my house plants and a couple of small beds that I have outside. I've got them set up on a drip system, so they're pretty much self sufficient.

[00:29:37] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And I just really enjoy it. You get your hands in the dirt and it's actually good for your brain.

[00:29:42] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah. And I'm just curious about the animal aspect of it. How does that how do animals help all that grow and prosper?

[00:29:54] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So they're the workers, actually. Yeah, the animals are the workers. So on a productive regenerative agriculture farm, can see anything from sheeps and goats to the chickens and cows and you name it. And they each have a job. So the cows go in and they are the ones that do the heavy lifting with actually putting carbon back in the ground and growing roots down deep.

[00:30:17] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And so there's an amazing case study and I can send it to you to look at. I I saw it when I was at a conference Mexico a couple years ago. There was an old mine and they took some cows out there and they put them in one acre little squares with an electric fence and this was the most degraded, you know, mined land that you'd ever seen. It was just it was it was beyond not just being dirt. It was just derelict.

[00:30:40] - [Crystal Hilsley]
The ground was dying for some type of nutrition. And they took the cows in there acre by acre, and they would have them in the same spot for two days, I think, max. Maybe three. Because the first day it's your living room, second day it's your bedroom, third day it becomes their bathroom. And they have the cows go around and they would feed them the hay or whatever it is that they would feed them, and they would put in some alfalfa, some extra things.

[00:31:01] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And then the cows are eating, they're doing their natural business, and then they're stomping that in the ground, and they've, you know, they're watering it, and then they move them to the next, and they showed the progression of this, was it lit up green in patches the whole way around within a matter of months. So, yeah, responsibly grazed cattle, they're doing their job. Know, and goats will pull out your most stubborn weeds. They're used to clear hillsides to avoid, you know, fire hazards and potentials. Chickens, we call them chicken tractors.

[00:31:32] - [Crystal Hilsley]
We give them a little spot in the garden and they go and they enjoy eating whatever bugs are trying to get onto your plants and whatever worms and things like that. So they each and every single one of them has a job.

[00:31:43] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Have you seen the data of growth of Southern Californians having their own farms and having their own animals? Is there any data have you seen that it's has grown over the past few years?

[00:31:58] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I mean, would love to see that it's grown over the past few years. So I live in North County, and I worked with South Morrow Hills, which is in San Diego County, the largest area of continuous farmland that San Diego has. And those farmers have been struggling for years. So I worked with the city. I worked with the tourism department.

[00:32:16] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I actually did a keynote speech to them about how to take their farm and turn it into a type of agritourism to help them, you know, some type of agritourism element to help them offset some of the losses. They can't afford to farm anymore. Small scale farms is a different story, right? People that are doing backyard farms, that's that homesteading movement, I think since 2020, has really exploded, at least in my corner of what I see.

[00:32:39] - [Jet Bunditwong]
It feels like to me too.

[00:32:39] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Yeah, my corner. Never thought of that.

[00:32:42] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Chickens, a lot of chickens. And there's things growing in the backyard that I'm seeing in the front yard

[00:32:47] - [Crystal Hilsley]
people doing it. It started to become a bit trendy, but I don't know if that's the self reported or if they were to do any type of survey on that. Would be interesting to find out. But large scale farms have dwindled, unfortunately.

[00:32:58] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Can you just explain that real quick why they are large scale farms are hurting in that sense?

[00:33:05] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So most of them, and this is not fact, a lot of it is my opinion. So I preface it with that because I don't ever want to speak out of turn. The conventional farms that are mono cropping, they're not healing the soil. They're not capturing any water. So we're losing topsoil at a rate that's never been seen before.

[00:33:30] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And it's actually quite sad to me to know that. They're estimating about 60 harvests left, like 60 actual harvests left, because they're they're just quite literally pillaging the dirt itself. Like, that's why the dust bowl happened all those years ago in the twenties or whatever it was. They continued to till the ground to turn it over and over and over again and kill all of the organic matter in it, which having deep roots into the ground is what holds water and having like your your your your dirt profile, your soil profile, it should be like 60% of your sand silt clay and then air and then water and then organic matter. So organic matter is typically about 5%.

[00:34:12] - [Crystal Hilsley]
In regenerative agriculture, it's about 10%. So that organic matter is, you know, all the fungi and a teaspoon of that type of soil is, you know, something like 3,000,000,000 microbes are in that that are just so amazing for our gut and we're supposed to, you know, eat that way again. So the traditional farming practices are quite literally ruining the earth. They're ruining the soil. They are not giving back.

[00:34:37] - [Crystal Hilsley]
And so the land doesn't hold water. And California water is quite precious, right? We go years with having a drought and then we have some hurricane or something come, whatever it is, and we get a torrential downpour. But we have no way to store that. Like, we don't have the infrastructure.

[00:34:52] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So you see it rain and then what happens? And then it's flooding everywhere and it's running off into the ocean because the soil can't absorb that. It doesn't have a deep enough root profile to hold the water that it should be able to hold. So that's the difference between regenerative agriculture and doing mono cropping, single cropping of traditional agriculture. The land is dead, it's dead dirt.

[00:35:18] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Whereas this is a living, breathing being, right? Mother Earth is a living, breathing being that she should be able to hold that water in the ground rather than let it run off so much. So that's a big part of it. They can't afford to water. And we can get things so much cheaper from other countries.

[00:35:39] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It's cheaper from the supply chain perspective to ship things in than it is to grow them locally. We are seeing a shift in that. I think there's micro movements. I'm not as familiar with down here. Again, I keep speaking to North County, but Oceanside has a huge strip now.

[00:35:56] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Oceanside was up and coming for a long time, and now it's here. And there's a ton of Michelin star restaurants up there, and the chefs are outsourcing for for local ingredients. And they're, you know, running their own farms or having their own gardens. It's a really beautiful thing to see. So I think on a micro scale, that can be effective depending on the climate itself, depending on the grow zone again.

[00:36:18] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Here in San Diego, we're spoiled. We have a very long grow season. There's not a lot, you know, that we can't grow here.

[00:36:23] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Yeah. And just for listeners that are restaurant owners, how what does one acre, how can that handle a rest a busy restaurant? Can an acre

[00:36:36] - [Crystal Hilsley]
100%. 100%. It could. That could more than handle a busy restaurant that could grow. You know, again, if you've got like your staples, you're not going to get absolutely everything that you need.

[00:36:46] - [Crystal Hilsley]
But there are co ops of farms out there that are growing and providing to some of these restaurants. But yeah, if you wanted to set up a farm to table type experience, you could absolutely grow in rows and interplant and companion plant. It's a very intensive planting schedule. That's the more popular way because a lot of people would, you know, grow and then kind of tarp over it or mulch over it. And now we can there's ways that you can kind of interplant and it doesn't crowd.

[00:37:13] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So people are getting a lot more bang for their buck per square footage.

[00:37:16] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Well, something to think about. I think especially now as all the costs for restaurants go up. Yeah. This might be something for them. A few restaurants to get together and start to get maybe this is worth it for us to put money in for this.

[00:37:31] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Absolutely.

[00:37:32] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Great. Well, thank you for sharing so much. If someone were to get into sustainable agriculture, what advice would you give them?

[00:37:43] - [Crystal Hilsley]
My path was a path of passion. Farming is really hard work. So I would say, you know, there's routes of, as I did, getting certified in sustainable agriculture. I would say, and I run my firm as a syndicate, so meaning I work with other professionals that complement what I do and we bounce ideas off of each other. For example, I'm not a designer.

[00:38:08] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Like I'm a designer, but I'm not in doing CAD. I don't have time to learn that entire program. And it's pretty straightforward. So I would say go and work on a farm for six months and see what parts of it you like and what parts light you up and what parts you're good at. Because that sometimes is two different things.

[00:38:27] - [Crystal Hilsley]
There's a lot of things, as I said, I'm really interested in, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to be good at them. What part of the farm operation would you find joy in? Could you add value to that farm? Because running your own farm, it is profitable. There are farms out there that are doing case studies that you could off of a half an acre, using regenerative agriculture principles, so no synthetic inputs, make $120,000 a year.

[00:38:53] - [Crystal Hilsley]
It is a profitable business. It 100% is. And it's very sustainable in a lifestyle type way. You do need help if you're going to want to go on vacation. But it's the most satisfying job that there is.

[00:39:08] - [Crystal Hilsley]
You're tired, but you're satisfied. So on my side, on the corporate side, there are a handful of people that do what I do. It is very niche. What I do, it's very specialized. A lot of my business comes from word-of-mouth, from knowing people.

[00:39:21] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So I've, you know, networked in with chambers and community groups a lot. I believe that if you want to make a change, start with your own community. So find out where there's a community need and see where you can help.

[00:39:36] - [Jet Bunditwong]
Thank you so much. And where can people find you if they want to contact you?

[00:39:40] - [Crystal Hilsley]
So my website is super easy, ccng.devdev. I have an Instagram. I I'm I'll be honest. I think I'm a little old school. I'm not that active on it.

[00:39:51] - [Crystal Hilsley]
I am not that I'm I do okay. I have a team that does a little bit of work for me. When I've got an exciting project, I will post some stuff on there. But yeah, the probably the easiest way to find me is on my website, and it does have some links to my LinkedIn and things like that.

[00:40:05] - [Jet Bunditwong]
All right. Well, thank you so much, Crystal, for being on the show. And this is The Personal Side of Business. Thank you.

[00:40:11] - [Crystal Hilsley]
Thanks, Jet. That was fun.