Why an NRCS Soil Specialist Started Farming Southern Vegetables in Iowa

Shaffer Ridgeway spent 28 years with the Natural Resources Conservation Service convinced that soil health principles work. But around Waterloo, Iowa, he kept hitting the same wall: local farmers trusted what they could see, and they were not seeing enough neighbors change practices. His conclusion was blunt—the problem may have been that none of the advisers around the table farmed. “Farmers learn best from other farmers,” he said.

So Ridgeway became the farmer. He and his Alabama-born family missed Southern vegetables that were hard to find in Iowa—purple hull peas, collard greens and mustard greens—and he saw a way to fund on-farm soil research by growing crops he personally wanted to eat. The business, Southern Goods, started small, but the timing proved important. At the start of COVID-19, local buyers were looking for direct sources of nutrient-dense food, and his first month selling staples such as mustard greens and black-eyed peas brought repeated calls.

The demand let him set profitable prices, but it also forced him to answer a harder question when other farms entered the market. His answer was the very practice he had been promoting. Healthy soil, he argues, can reduce risk, improve quality, protect margins and give a farm a better marketing story. His framing for other producers is to stop asking whether they can afford to care for soil and start asking what poor soil is already costing them.

What the Southern Goods Experiment Shows About Soil Health as a Business Tool

Why Ridgeway needed standing as a farmer

The article's central insight is as much about trust as agronomy. Ridgeway saw soil health gaining momentum in 2019 but said it was not reaching his county. His diagnosis—that farmers are more likely to change because of a neighbor's results than a specialist's recommendation—fits the way practice adoption often spreads in agriculture. It does not diminish NRCS technical advice; it suggests that demonstration farms and farmer-led outreach may carry weight that expert recommendations alone do not.

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What set Southern Goods apart at the farm stand

Southern Goods did not win on price. Ridgeway says he sold collard greens for 50 cents more per bundle after other farms entered the market and still kept demand. The defensible advantage, as he describes it, was the product story: a crop grown with deliberate attention to soil biology. In a direct-market setting, that story is visible to the buyer in a way commodity grain quality rarely is. If the premium is real, the economics matter because a small per-unit price advantage can drop almost entirely to the producer's margin.

The opportunity-cost argument behind soil health

Ridgeway's most transferable point is financial as much as rhetorical. He wants producers to replace the question “Can we afford it?” with “What is poor soil costing us now?” The article does not provide a full profit-and-loss statement, so the size of that cost is not independently verifiable. But the logic is clear for a specialty-crop business: visible quality, resilience and a credible story can support a higher price, while degraded soil quietly erodes all three.

What Shaffer Ridgeway's Farm Stand Teaches About Soil Health Marketing

  • Start with a crop you can stand behind. Ridgeway chose purple hull peas, collards and mustard greens because they were foods his family missed in Iowa. A grower's own familiarity can guide both production and sales, especially where local supply is thin.
  • Let a small direct-market trial reveal pricing power. Southern Goods' first month brought repeated calls for staples such as mustard greens and black-eyed peas, which let Ridgeway set prices at a profit. Use limited early sales to test demand before expanding.
  • Turn soil health into a visible difference. Ridgeway charged 50 cents more per bundle for collards because he could connect the practice to a product story. A premium works only if the buyer can see or taste the benefit, so tie the marketing claim to a specific farm practice.
  • Re-frame the farm decision around opportunity cost. Instead of asking whether soil improvement is affordable, estimate what poor soil may already be costing in quality, risk, margins and marketing. This was Ridgeway's central question to producers.