Graham Oberly - From Football Fields to Farm Fields

[00:00:00] Dominique: Hello, welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:20] Dominique: And I'm so glad to be here alongside Adam, social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and had done something pretty cool about it.

[00:00:29] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:36] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are very excited to be joined by Graham Oberly. Graham is the co-owner of a family farm called Oaks and Sprouts Limited. Does so alongside his wife, Tony, their farm utilizes regenerative practices to grow, produce, cottage goods, and pastured meat. And previously, Graham was the Ohio State University's Sustainability Coordinator, which meant that he supported athletics, business advancement, and other business and finance activities.

And today, we're really getting to know Graham as our green champion. Thanks for joining us, Graham. 

[00:01:04] Graham: Thanks for having me 

[00:01:05] Dominique: Was that bio pretty good summary of the journey? 

[00:01:08] Graham: Spot on. 

[00:01:09] Dominique: Okay. Well, start from the beginning. This episode's a lot about like your passion and how you got to this very cool place of owning a farm, but starting from the beginning, you have a bachelor's degree in Natural Resource Management.

How did you choose that? What brought you there?

[00:01:22] Graham: Well, I grew up in Chesapeake, Ohio, which is across from Huntington, West Virginia. And my mom worked for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. It's a now closed non-profit. But they focused on trying to stop mountaintop removal and fracking and other environmental hazards in Appalachia, specifically West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. 

And as a kid, I volunteered my free time via being my mom's kid. 

[00:01:48] Dominique: That'll do it. 

[00:01:50] Graham: My sister and I would help at OVEC functions and learned a lot about environmental stewardship through that organization. I was also in the Boy Scouts of America and I'm an Eagle Scout and learned a lot about leave no trace principles through the Boy Scouts. And I was in the order of The Arrow. We did a lot of land management and Boy Scouts worked with natural parks type personnel to teach us, and then we did volunteer functions for that. And so I just got a lot of value of caring for and stewarding the land from Boy Scouts, from my parents. 

And growing up in Appalachia, it's so beautiful but there's a disregard for the land there ' cause it was just a financial gain for so many people there. Coal mining and everything else. It was very extractive and it broke my heart a lot to see that.

And so I came to Ohio State to get an Environmental Science degree. I switched to Natural Resources Management. I like running programs, managing.

[00:02:47] Dominique: What is the difference for someone who maybe didn't study either one? What is like the difference between those two fields?

[00:02:52] Graham: Environmental Science would've been a little more heavy on the being a someone in a lab, going to the field, taking samples or something of the sort versus Natural Resources Management. I could have been like a land manager. A park manager working for a company that uses the land to say, " Here's a good practice or a bad practice". 

And then I ended up in sustainability. Now there's the EEDS degree at Ohio State about sustainability that didn't exist when I started. 

[00:03:21] Dominique: Yeah, we actually had an episode recently with Dr. Neil Drobny talking about how that program started. So fun full circle.

[00:03:29] Graham: That degree would've been perfect for my career at Ohio State University had it existed. Yeah. And lined up. Now I'm in farming. 

I took two farming classes when I was a student at Ohio State but I had no intention of being a farmer up until about two years before starting the farm.

[00:03:45] Dominique: Okay. What did those farming classes, what was that like? What do you do?

[00:03:49] Graham: I know I took one that was something like sustainable farming or something like that, and one that was like Intro to Vegetable Farming, I think. And I know we grafted tomatoes, we grew a few things out in the field. Just learned about general basic farming practices.

[00:04:05] Dominique: So, but you got to get outside. You were really out there doing and practicing things. 

Yeah. You said that like EEDS would've been great for your career. Why do you say that?

[00:04:12] Graham: I have a natural resources degree. It didn't quite prepare me for working at Ohio State in a full business setting. When I was a Sustainability Coordinator for Ohio State, I was looking at the full financial ROI of projects instead of just how to manage land.

[00:04:29] Dominique: So more of like the business management skills were maybe a gap. 

[00:04:32] Graham: But you did it. I

t helps a lot that I was in the Boy Scouts of America, now Scouting America, I believe. Because I learned a lot of Management Skills and Project Management. What do things cost? In scouting, I had to do a lot of research what this project will cost, tell the advisors. They'd say, " You missed this, you missed that." And it just got me thinking. 

[00:04:54] Dominique: How old are you when you're doing that? 

[00:04:55] Graham: Yeah. Middle school through high school is the boy scouting program. The Cub Scouting program would've been like elementary and middle school, and Boy Scouts is when they really enable you to take on projects and learn and fail.

I think that's something a lot of our education system needs more of. Children being able to try something on their own. Learn, fail, learn from failure, and go on from there.

[00:05:18] Dominique: Were you a boy scout, Adam?

[00:05:20] Adam: I was not, but I, I lived in the woods, so I was always outside.

[00:05:24] Dominique: Actually?

I feel like I learn a new fact about Adam every time.

[00:05:27] Adam: I grew up in Minnesota, so we were technically on a marshy lake thing that was on another lake, but we were surrounded by woods, so I grew up in the outdoors.

[00:05:36] Dominique: That's cool. Okay, so you kind of stitched together Boy Scout project management training with like understanding of resources from your classes. 

And did you just apply to this job or did Ohio State know you 'cause you were around? How did you get to the sustainability coordinator position?

[00:05:50] Graham: Great question. So when I was a student at Ohio State, Corey Hockey was one of the sustainability coordinators for Ohio State, and he started zero waste at Ohio Stadium, program that still exists, to divert waste from Ohio State football games.

And I volunteered for that during my sophomore year when that program started then Corey hired me as a student employee and I worked as the student manager of that program for the rest of my time as a student. And I got to know the stadium staff quite well. And from that, when they started that position, they called me and said, "Hey, you should apply for this cause you already know at least a portion of Ohio State Athletics."

[00:06:31] Adam: And what kind of projects were you working on in that position? 

[00:06:33] Graham: So in the student position, most of what I did was all the logistics for Game Day Zero Waste for Ohio State Football. We had about, at the time when I was a student, we had I think 70 Game Day employees, which were mostly high school students, plus parent advisors to them that we brought to the stadium.

We fed them, we geared them up with safety equipment. We positioned them through the parking lots for tailgating and through the stadium. And so there were a lot of logistics moving people around. And if you've been to a football game with 150 thousand people between the parking lots and the stadium, it's a fun little logistics puzzle. 

[00:07:11] Dominique: I was just gonna say, I think it's worth like clarifying for some audience members that are not local or have just simply not attended an Ohio State football game, or under a small rock.

[00:07:20] Dominique: But Ohio State Athletics is not just an athletics department. Like, can you maybe give us a sense of like scale for someone who's listening maybe doesn't really get how special it was for sustainability to be prioritized at such a like high profile athletics department.

[00:07:38] Graham: When this program started, it was one of a literally a handful in the nation, and every week during all of the inaugural years, we'd have one or a dozen different colleges following alongside us to learn how it started. And then while all that's happening on the game day, we all had microphone walkie talkies on. And when it's by your ear, it's so loud from the human noise of the event that you couldn't hear the radio usually if you're in the stadium. So it's, it was challenging to get 70, 80 people moved around, get 'em on their brakes, get 'em clocked in, clocked out, geared up.

[00:08:14] Dominique: One, for it to be zero waste at the athletic stadium, you're diverting 90% or more of all the waste created, correct?

[00:08:21] Graham: Officially, yes. And so for Ohio State and most collegiate programs, they measure then and now two different numbers: inside the stadium and tailgate lots that are on campus. And so that's what we manage as well. We managed inside the stadium all pieces of waste, outside the stadium if it's on Ohio State University property for tailgating. We tried to identify it, track the weights. but there are dumpsters everywhere for trash, recycling and compost. Some of those are for game day, some are not. So there is some wiggle room in the numbers,

[00:09:00] Dominique: And that's notable because it's not like there's four tents outside the stadium. This is like full blown festival happening every home game on a Saturday.

[00:09:08] Graham: I said 150,000 because there's usually a hundred thousand people in the stadium, plus 50 to a hundred thousand people that specifically watch at their tailgates. And so there's tens and tens of thousands of people everywhere you look. As far as you can see cars, trucks, buses, ambulances, all tailgating. 

[00:09:28] Dominique: Yeah, they're partying, they're drinking. Like that's not the best like situation for education or, yeah, so that's just a really tough challenge.

[00:09:37] Graham: Yeah. We had high school students and Ohio State College students trying to educate tailgaters and it was a fun customer service training to get folks to interact in a pleasant way with all of those tailgaters while they've been drinking for one to 20 hours.

[00:09:55] Adam: I can only imagine. 

But that role grew and it expanded beyond just the athletic program so you were doing stuff outside?

[00:10:02] Graham: So when they hired me as an employee, full-time employee, to fund that position, they pulled together three different departments of Ohio State. One was the Department of Athletics, another was the Department of Business Advancement which lives inside athletics. That's not spoken of very often, but it's a, a little subdepartment within athletics. And then the third one was the Office of Business and Finance, which is separate. 

and those three departments decided, let's fund our own sustainability coordinator. So in 20 15, Ohio State created sustainability goals for all of campus and all university departments were supposed to achieve those goals. And to do that, each department was hiring their own sustainability coordinator to track their own department's contributions, challenges, upcoming projects to work towards that. The Ohio State is so large, a single person in a central department can't know everything going on at once. I think there's like 30,000 employees at Ohio State if you include all the folks. 

So I liked the decentralized system at Ohio State. Some universities have a centralized system where all of the sustainability staff are in one office. I really liked being within my own departments ' cause they trusted me more. I was within their own goal systems. I wasn't just some outsider coming in saying, " We need to change everything and what we're gonna do."

[00:11:30] Dominique: Yeah. You're really a part of it. 

[00:11:32] Graham: I was in their meetings, I learned their operational ways. I would observe whether it was the hotel or the athletic programs or the business office, see what they were doing, try and suggest programs or methods or equipment to make them more in line with the goals.

[00:11:49] Dominique: Was that a huge learning experience Just thinking about I mean, right out of college doing all of that?

[00:11:55] Graham: I had to learn quite rapidly how the most financially strict departments on campus operate. I probably got scolded a few times about trying to move too rapidly, and then there were folks that were saying we need to go faster, slower, do more paperwork, less paperwork, lots of operational styles just in those three programs. So yeah, I learned a lot really quick.

[00:12:18] Adam: What were some of your big achievements while you were there? 

[00:12:20] Graham: I think the thing that was right on the cusp of getting fully established was I was trying to create a program where each department manager had a part of their annual personal evaluation to meet sustainability goals that were related to them. So housekeeping managers would've been responsible for waste management or food and beverage directors for the sustainable food purchasing goal.

And what I mean by that is everyone at Ohio State, you have goals that influence your annual bonuses and raises and how you're impacted as an employee. And the system that died right as Covid came along, there were probably about 20 people who were gonna be the inaugural batch, getting those goals and their personal goals.

' cause one of the challenges is people have their own goals for the department. And then I was coming in and saying, "Hey, we need to change this". And they'd say, " it doesn't impact my career here, so why should I add that to my already full to-do list?"

[00:13:18] Dominique: Yeah.

[00:13:19] Adam: so finding the right incentive so people would be like, "all right, yeah, this is extra work, but I'm gonna make it happen. 

[00:13:23] Dominique: Yeah. And I you're speaking to the concept that was the heart of this podcast, which is the idea that we need green champions inside each silo. And so you're almost even doing it even further of each human needs to have as part of their personal goals. But that just speaks to the same thing that we're noticing that we need to have people who are like extremely close to the situation to know what's possible. 

[00:13:45] Graham: And those 20 ish individuals that we were testing it out with were our green champions that met with me monthly or more on our campus sustainability goals. And so I was working with them, with each of them to craft those goals. It wasn't just me adding something to their personal professional development goals. But we worked with each of them to do that and it was approved from the top. Gene Smith approved it who was the athletic director. He's now retired and I loved working with him on that. And he was the one that also approved Zero Waste at Ohio Stadium when it first was created. I was very proud to work with him on that.

[00:14:21] Adam: I love that. It sounds really interesting, but very different from farming. How, How did you get from here into being an owner of a farm?

[00:14:29] Graham: Great question. So when I was working at Ohio State, I was involved in the sustainable food purchasing goal for campus, and then I had a handful of student employees working with me and then some family things. So for the sustainable food purchasing goal, I got to learn a lot about what is and is not sustainable food, what is local food and how do those play into the university food purchasing system.

[00:14:53] Adam: What is sustainable food?

[00:14:55] Graham: It's a great question and many people have tried to define it. There are a thousand definitions of it, and Ohio State had a goal of purchasing sustainable food, but did not define it, and it was being defined when I was there. I don't think they have yet finalized it.

[00:15:15] Adam: In your mind what is it? What does that mean? 

[00:15:17] Graham: I like the idea of regenerative food and farming, which is that our farming methods benefit the people involved in the system, the local economy, but also make the ecosystem better than it was before versus many farming systems which are extractive of people, land and sometimes the local economy.

[00:15:39] Adam: You were encountering the stuff in the work that you did. 

[00:15:41] Graham: When that was happening, my student employees kept saying, " Why are you eating meat if you care about sustainable food?" ' cause at the same time, and still there are pushes by many different sustainability groups to ban all meat. And there are valid base reasons behind that, based on animal agriculture methods in the world right now.

And I had heard of Will Harris at White Oak Pastures, which is in Georgia. I heard him speak at a sustainability conference I was attending for Ohio State Athletics, and he took his family farm which had been using conventional farming practices for the last 50 years, they switched to what I would call regenerative style farming, and they revived the local economy which had died. They are creating healthy food now and their land is by pictures, by data, better than any of the land in the surrounding farms.

And so I saw that and when that was happening, the land where my dad grew up has been family farming since the 1930s. My uncle had passed away already, my aunt's health was right on the edge. She's since passed away. And when that was happening, they did not have a succession line set up for the farm to stay in the family. And I said.," Why don't we do this, take over the family farm and convert it to a regenerative style farming system?"

[00:17:05] Dominique: Did that require some conversation? You are making that sound light. I'm really happy you've done it. I just, I wanna hear more about like, how that really felt to do. 

[00:17:15] Graham: That process of moving from the city to the farm as well as we purchased acreage and then my dad owns acreage beside us that we use, my wife and I had a lot of conversations ' cause once you commit, you're pretty deep into it. Had to have conversations with my dad and my mom about the land that they own, buying the estate from my now late aunt from my cousins, and then figuring out who all of our other players would be in that. So it was a long process. We started approximately in 2018. We didn't buy the farm until 2020. Moved to the farm in December of 2020. So our first growing year was 2021, so it was several years in the works. Unintentionally, it lined up with COVID and Ohio State decided to do some layoffs and, I wasn't laid off, but it was like reduced hours. 

[00:18:07] Dominique: and. we'd already purchased the farm and so then I met with my manager and said "Before that takes place, I'm already leaving. So don't worry about all that paperwork, because we purchased a farm." So the timing, which looked like we were leaving 'cause of Covid, had already been in the works for several years.

So you kinda feel like a genius in that moment.

[00:18:26] Graham: It was nice to have something in the works when the world seemed to be crashing.

[00:18:31] Dominique: Did you ever see yourself as a farmer growing up?

[00:18:34] Graham: When I was a kid, I always saw farming as just something either boring, like sitting in a tractor, growing corn or dirty. There are a lot of farms that are very messy, dirty, unorganized which is just how some people operate. and I just thought, "eugh", like that doesn't seem very inspirational or good for the environment or anything like that.

[00:18:56] Dominique: What changed your mind about it then? 

[00:18:57] Graham: I am very active, physically active. I like seeing in this case, literal fruit of my labor 

[00:19:03] Dominique: versus like, sometimes you just do so much paperwork to push a program forward and then it gets stalled or stopped completely and you've worked for months. And now one, you can literally see the benefits of what we're doing. But also, we are our own boss on the farm. My wife and I we're both co-owners and that allows us to choose exactly what we want to do within our financial means, which is one of our limiting factors.

Is it fun to work with your wife? 

[00:19:31] Graham: We work very well together. We actually met working together at a science camp for youth. So that was fun. 

[00:19:37] Dominique: That's so cool. 

You're both very lucky to have each other. That's awesome.

[00:19:41] Graham: We sure are.

[00:19:43] Adam: And I know we're gonna dive into the farm a lot more in the next episode. 

But really quickly, like how does regenerative farming benefit the environment?

[00:19:50] Graham: So one of the reasons that I wanted to get into regenerative farming was to see the land create food. And then when that series, whether it's an annual cycle or several year cycle for animals, I wanna see the land not be eroded or washed away of nutrients. The trees aren't all knocked over destroyed, the water's clean.

 For me, that's one of my biggest things I'm looking at on the farm maybe not on pen and paper, but visually, a lot of people say the best thing a farmer can do is walk the land. And so I'm always looking around trying to see how's the land doing,

[00:20:24] Dominique: And then I bring us back to the very beginning. You mentioned like learning about Leave No Trace and Boy Scouts and this idea of leaving the land, how we found it, if not better. I think about like how hard your job is. And as a farmer, but then I also think about how hard your role was at Ohio State. And I just think you've done these like very physically taxing on top of the mental load. But I think you've done like very high commitment, like really taxing roles.

And I'm just really curious to hear kinda like your why, like when you don't wanna get up in the morning, to go have a really long day, whether it was going to Ohio Stadium, to have a hard conversation about sustainability goals or to go to athletics or, you know what I mean, like all these things or the farm today, like what is your driver of why this is important?

[00:21:10] Graham: One of the biggest drivers in my life is love your neighbor. And I think that's why I've chosen my entire environmental career is to try and love other people through environmental action.

[00:21:20] Dominique: I wanna make everything you say into a t-shirt. 

[00:21:24] Adam: Well, thanks for joining us today. How do people find out about your farm?

[00:21:28] Graham: Oaks and Sprouts is on Instagram, Facebook, occasionally on TikTok, and you can message me anywhere with any questions. @oakandsprouts 

Thanks for having me.

[00:21:38] Adam: Yeah, it's been fun kind of walking through your journey today and covering everything from being a Boy Scout to going to OSU, to being part of a huge sustainability program. And then. launching and opening your own farm.

[00:21:48] Dominique: No one's made Covid look so good.

[00:21:52] Adam: And I'm really excited for our next episode to really dive into regenerative farming and what you're accomplishing there. I think that's really exciting. So if you're listening, stay tuned.

[00:22:00] Dominique: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change. 

[00:22:11] Adam: You can find our episodes episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If at thegreenchampions.com

If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website at thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik.. Thanks for listening to Green Champions, and we'll dig into another success story in our next episode. 

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