7 Ways to Garden and Get Paid

➡ Justin Rohner, founder of AgriScaping Technologies, shares seven unique ways to earn money from gardening in a presentation. He emphasizes the growing trend of urbanization and the increasing demand for locally grown food. Rohner also highlights the challenges faced by home growers due to lack of localized information and professional support. His talk aims to guide people on how to make gardening profitable, sustainable, and adaptable to urban spaces.
➡ AgriScaping Technologies has developed a new approach to growing food in small spaces, using microclimate technology. This method allows people to grow food anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and in any climate. It’s a sustainable and profitable system, with the average AgriScaping network earning $7.84 per square foot per year. The company also offers software to help map out where food will grow best, and a service to sell excess produce, allowing growers to earn a minimum of 25% of the retail sale.
➡ By using your yard, you can create a sustainable food economy. This involves growing and selling excess produce, such as fruits, vegetables, and sprouts, even in small spaces. You can also make money by selling plant starts, giving tours of your productive yard, and educating others on how to grow their own food. This not only puts money back in your pocket but also contributes to the local food economy.
➡ Agriscaping is a field that combines agriculture and landscaping, offering opportunities for people to become educators, designers, and installers. The process involves educating people about agriscaping, certifying them, and providing them with the necessary tools and support. Agriscaping design certification teaches how to assess a property for its potential, design sustainable landscapes, and even get paid for it. The goal is to transform resource-draining yards into productive, elegant gardens that can put money back into the owner’s pocket.
➡ The text discusses a program that trains people to become personal gardeners, helping others grow their own food and improve their health. Participants can earn between $35 to $90 per hour, working flexible hours. The program also offers a culinary connector role, where people can create meals or sell produce at local markets. The program provides certification, training, and client referrals, making it easy for anyone interested in gardening or food to start their own business.
➡ The Skysung project is an eco-friendly initiative that grows food within five feet of where it’s eaten, in a four-restaurant complex. The project also includes a 22-story twin tower building with a gray water system and terraces. There’s a promotional offer for a Mastery Program that teaches you how to participate in such projects, with a $100 discount. The program also offers credit for prior knowledge and collaborates with local permaculture groups.
➡ The text discusses a certification program in agriscaping, which varies in cost based on your experience. The more experience you have, the less you pay. The program also offers opportunities to become an educator, teaching others about agriscaping. The aim is to help people grow their own food, improve their nutrition, and even earn money from gardening.

Hello and welcome to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS Online Homesteading Summit. This is Marjorie Wildcraft. Our next presentation is by Justin Rohner who is going to talk about seven ways to garden and get paid. Now. Yes, of course, we all know the obvious one, you grow some produce and sell it. The other six that he presents are really unique. I think you’re going to get a couple of big takeaways from this. Let me tell you a little bit about Justin. He is the founder of AgriScaping Technologies and he’s been helping people around the world grow healthy food for more than 25 years.

Here’s something really cool. Justin was named one of Arizona’s top 35 entrepreneurs under 35 by the Republic and the azcentral.com for his work in improving local food access and sustainability through his company, agriscaping.com isn’t that cool? After growing up around the family dairy farm, Justin began his career in landscaping at the age of nine. So yeah, he’s been doing this a long time. He worked summers and weekends at a small nine hole executive golf course in Mesa, Arizona and he kept doing that, but eventually he earned his BA from Arizona State University and his master’s from the University of Santa Monica.

And he’s been a key public educator for local nurseries since 2009. Justin lives in Gilbert, Arizona with his beautiful wife Brittany, 4 kids, 20 chickens, quail, rabbits, fish and a landscape full of food. Here’s this presentation, seven Ways to Garden and Get Paid with Justin Rohner. Alright, welcome to 7 Ways to Garden and Get Paid. I’m Justin Rohner. I’m going to teach you how to all seven ways as quick as I can. I’m really excited for all of you right now. Thank you for answering the call of your own curiosity and vision that you could do more with your gardening and or your gardening skills to really serve the world in a new and special way in such a way that you might get paid to keep doing it.

Perhaps you’re here today because you simply wanted to find out some ways to pay some extra bills that you’ve got to maybe create some extra cash each month for some fun or maybe just to accommodate your habit or addiction that some of us might have to go and buy fruit trees. So perhaps you want even more than that. Perhaps you want to find a quicker path to retirement in your garden and that is a definite possibility today with the seven ways that I’m about to share with you. Or perhaps you’re just simply trying to find that more economical and sustainable way to to keep your gardening hobby alive and get your spouse or significant other off your back.

Could be. I’m excited for whatever reason that you came here today. Thank you for showing up. Because this world is run by those who show up. And so I’m so excited for you to be at this stage with us in the development of agroscaping. So here’s a quick overview. I don’t have a lot of time to really share this entire segment with you, so I promise to keep introduction short and to teach you all that I can today and talk really fast and then show you a way that you can get full access to more time with me, if you’d like, on each of the points that I’m going to talk about and whichever one is of most interest to you.

Because what I want you to do is as we go through these seven points, make note on the one that you’re like, yeah, that’s me. That’s my starting point. That’s the way that I can get started now. And I’m going to hopefully teach you enough that you truly can do that. And if you want some more time, I assure you I’ll give you a way that you can connect with me more personally and more directly on how to go deeper with each one of these levels if you need it. So here we go. We’re going to talk about an overview, give you a rise of these new times.

We talk about seven ways to garden to get paid. I’m going to show you some samples of some ways that people have done exactly what I’m telling you and some really cool projects that are out there in the world. So we’ll do this all in less than 60 minutes. And if you’re ready, be ready to chase that chicken. Let’s get going. So little overview. These are definitely new times. This is the first time in human history where more of our populace live on or in cities and not on or near farms. The first time in history.

And I think this background is very important to share with you so you can understand exactly how you can fit these seven ways into producing an income for yourself almost immediately. Because has everything to do with how these times, they are changing. So people don’t live in farms anymore. We’re growing and trending much more urban. And that trend continues to grow closer and closer to our neighbors. And as this continues to happen, there’s a lot of pressures being put in our marketplace, especially around food. Average distance food is Traveling to our US cities is about 1500 miles.

Now, I don’t know about you, I don’t particularly feel fresh after 1500 miles of journeying, let alone 50, really. And I’ve gone on a nice 7000 mile journey this summer. And I can definitely assure you by the 1500 mile mark, I did not feel like a fresh bumpkin. So if trucking stopped, there’s a challenge that most of our US Cities, because of this fact that food comes from further and further away, it has decreased our sustainability of our localized food supplies. So it can be kind of freaky. What has happened also is because of that, and we see that there’s been a growing demand for what’s called locally grown.

Almost every grocery store has a new locally grown section. I know in the state of Arizona, what’s considered locally grown is 500 miles. Again, who feels fresh after 500 miles? So 500 miles, that’s considered local. And so that’s still a little too far for most of us. And we all have started to understand that more health comes from food grown closer to where we live. And this has increased a lot of people trying to grow their food at home. So there’s a huge increase, 38% increase since 2008, based on the National Gardening Association’s website and statistics that they put out every year.

So that’s 48 million new households attempting to grow food right at home. And that increase in demand causes some major challenges also in just how we do this whole thing, how we grow food, it’s causing a lot of craziness. And people go online, they’re trying to find information, and they end up growing more frustration than they do food. Because the information they get online is not localized. It is everybody’s information. Basically. I could have someone in a totally different climate zone preaching and touting that this will work for you. And yet how can they be sure with my soil conditions, my climate, all that stuff.

And it might have been recorded months ago. And I don’t really have the context for that. It’s challenging to get that to work in every one of our locations. The other thing that’s happening is that about every food packet out there or seed packet that grows food. So food related seeds, edibles have this interesting little caveat on it that typically says this full sun. And with our shrinking landscapes, because the urbanization of all of humanity, that full sun space continues to shrink. We don’t have full sun. And if you’re living in a very wooded area like the people in North Carolina are, full sun requires a lot of demolition of forested area.

And that’s really Expensive to do. So how do we do this? How do we grow in these shrinking spaces? And where do we go to get help? That’s the next part. There’s a dwindling professional support system for growing in backyards and growing farming in general. It’s starting to get to the point where people are retiring, just like my grandfather did. My grandfather retired knowing little about how to help people grow in such spaces as we have today. So though they might have been pros for decades, they really don’t know how to grow the variety of produce that we as home growers demand.

We want a huge variety of stuff, but our generation past and the current generation present, they’re very into monoculture farming. As I’ve traveled across the country, I talked to hundreds of different agricultural professionals that are growing hundreds and thousands and millions of acres of land. And for the most part, their portfolio consisted of only between two growing items like soy and corn, up to five. And so between two and five things. Whereas our local grocery stores and the demand that we have as consumers, we’re looking for, like, hundreds of things. And so that dwindling professional support is a real problem.

You can’t go to your local big box retail store for garden centers and get very professional help. And certainly if you found one, you never want to let go of that one. I know I didn’t. I didn’t want to let go of my don that was over at my local home depot. I didn’t want him to go, but he retired. Thankfully, he ended up joining our network, but he retired, and he was no longer available for everybody to get easy access to him when he was working. So what ends up happening is people start creating these edible yards that are ugly, hard to manage, void of any style or taste, and typically are prone to fines and failures.

Now, depending on the eye of the beholder, this might be beautiful, but to most municipalities, a yard that looks like this, a traditional farmed yard, is not the type of yard that they want to see and again, can be bulldozed just like this Atlanta property was. So there’s been also some great new advances that people need to be aware of. You all need to be aware of that. Because of these transitions and changes, there’s been some shift in how we’ve studied the growth of food. And here at agriscaping technologies, we’ve created some new advances in microclimate technology that have become accepted across the board in a lot of usgbc landscape architects associations, these groups and organizations that govern the body of municipal growth and Municipal design are really starting to understand that microclimates are under.

We need new understandings in microclimates and that technology is something that we at AgriScaping Technology have developed an A through F microclimate basis where we can then understand what grows best in each location. An example of this is this particular property. Some family that came to us as agriscapers and wanted us to then map out where their microclimates existed. And you can see them all color coded here. And this mapping actually then aligns with the types of food that this particular client wanted to eat. So we were able to literally map out where that food would grow best based on that time of year.

We ended up creating some software to help support that as well. So with all this, what we’ve done with agarscaping is create a simple, very scalable and and very sustainable approach to growing food in our shrinking landscapes. That’s why it’s called agroscaping. We make growing food easy so people can now grow anywhere. Indoors, outdoors, full sun, full shade, scale to any zip code, have more freedom with this new microclimate technology. And they’ll know what to plant, when to plant it, how to care for it, when to harvest it. All custom fit to your yard. And it’s set up in a very fun, very easy to manage way.

Now with that increase in freedom, you have more creativity at your hand. And all gardeners have more creativity at their hand, they can start expecting more out of their landscape. So with agriscaping.com you can have your beautiful, elegant yard and eat it too. Just like this yard. A lot of edibles integrated right into it, a lot of production as well as rainwater harvesting. Hugelkultur. There’s a lot of cool things going on that makes this landscape a lot more sustainable. So to give you a quick comparison so you can understand right before we get into this first way, because this leads right into it.

If you compare your traditional farming versus an agriscape. So growing food, this is based on some data in 2014 that a sustainable produce farming has some significant challenges when it comes to being productive with today’s current technology that’s being used versus an agriscape in today’s traditional farming. Farming by the acre is what they do and they average about $0.40 of value, $0.40 of production value per square foot per year. It’s flood irrigated, which can be very consumptive in those places that don’t have rainwater that can irrigate their property on a Continuous basis. And They’ve got a 1500 mile average on the distance their food is likely traveling.

And in order to be either manufactured into other items or sent directly to the market, It’s a system that by itself kind of eats us as humanity. Now, an agriscape is where we can actually farm by the foot. Our average in the agriscaping network is $7.84 per square foot per year. So you can already see there’s a huge difference in terms of value that can be created in a localized food economic system. And in a beautifully productive yard. We also have direct drip or better, which makes it much more sustainable for low water use areas. And our average distance food travels in our methodology is 15 miles.

So it’s a system that when things might go awry, or if they go awry, it’s a system that truly can feed us. Compared to your traditional landscape, it’s a total game changer. You guys can probably already see this for yourselves, but I wanted to show you some of these examples. Money is typically spent on traditional landscape water. Used waste goes to a landfill. Very consumptive. We know it’s consumptive and it eats us. Because when someone loses their job and they have a traditional landscape, the first thing you notice is their yard starts looking terrible. But with an agriscape, money can be earned.

Water can be harvested. Harvest can then be integrated into a market. It’s a very productive system that can feed you. And we know that it’s something that feeds you. Because when an agrescape yard, an owner of an agrascape yard, loses their job with or their normal source of income, their yards usually get better. They become more beautiful because they are providing in ways that they would not otherwise be able to do. So let’s get into the seven ways to garden and get paid with number one, because this leads into it. Number one is to grow food for you.

And beyond go beyond survival. So going beyond survival means to look at your yard differently if you’re going to invest in your yard rather than thinking from a traditional means. If I put $10,000 into a landscape, I want to make sure that that landscape is going to now produce something for me. And if you had it maintained by somebody else. So this is the maintenance cost in agriscape and we have professionals that are starting to grow and be available to help people out nationwide. You can have an agriscape maintained by somebody else and it might cost a little bit more, but the first thing that you’re going to see is you’re Going to get the offset in cost because of the harvest and you yourself are able to put back in your pocket.

So you can truly make magic at your own castle by growing food and producing for yourself. But again, you want to go beyond just producing for you. You want to go into producing for others. So this is a nice example on what someone can do, and this is what we’ve done here with agriscaping is that there’s additional revenue that can be integrated into the local food economy. We’ve built a model that you can also replicate for yourselves or be connected to. You can go to utopianharvest.com and see a great sample of what happens in a local food economy.

To grow food at home. And when you have excess production, you can take it right over to Utopian harvest. They sell it for you. They have the buyers, they bring the buyers together, they sell it for you, and you make a percentage of that sale. Now, a farmer on average only makes about 17% of the retail sale that goes to market. When you use a service like Utopian Harvest, you, as a local grower would make a minimum of 25% on any excess produce. You have 25% of the retail sale of the produce you create out of your yard.

Kind of cool, huh? And this all came about from a lot of experience of myself. See, I grew up in a binge gardening family, and in a binge gardening family, you take your spring break and you plant everything that you want to eat. You know, mom would get us all together and we just planted stuff. So you can just imagine this nice big row of, of nothing but zucchini. And a couple months after that, that couple months has now grown a whole row of zucchini plants with more zucchini than we could ever eat. So we start sharing it with our neighbors.

And eventually we start sharing so much with the neighbors that the neighbors lock their doors. And then as the neighbors lock their doors, we’re becoming a little stranded because we start to get these baseball sized, bat sized zucchini that we can’t unload. And then across town, we end up finding out there’s someone across town just even a few miles away that’s dying for some fresh zucchini, some beautifully grown, tender loving care, organically grown, better than organically grown produce that they’re looking to purchase and they’re willing to buy it. And here we couldn’t give it away. So this dichotomy happens often among those of us who love to grow and to grow with almost a reckless abandon.

We grow for way more than ourselves. So this integration into local food economy, for a system like that, like Utopian Harvest, you can get up to 80% of the retail sale price right back in your pocket for selling that excess produce. Beautiful way to really create a sustainable food economy. So growing that big, here’s a great example of it. So this is a client of ours a few years ago, came to us, we installed this yard for him and helping them produce, their budget went from about $8,000. It went up to about $37,000. That invested over the course of a few years on a 7212 square foot lot.

Now, the reason they did this, and this is what a lot of us start to see, we can make money with our yard, and if we can make money with our yard, we might put more money into it. So a huge increase. But here’s what it looked like. It’s set to produce $18,000 a year in its first year. It’s on track to do that again to continue to produce on this very small property. 1/20 of an acre is all that’s being farmed on this property. 1/20 of an acre. 1/20 of an acre is significantly less than 7212 square feet.

Which means with that added flexibility that we’ve created through microclimate technology and how we integrate the growth of edibles into the landscape, we can make this thing look amazing. We’re producing fruits, vegetables, sprouts, all indoors. So learning how to grow microgreens indoors can help you in any climate condition to be able to grow food that is massively valuable in your local food economy. People can eat that and get six to 100 times more nutrient dense food by eating sprouts and microgreens than they would otherwise get from the mature, mature plant. Now, all this information is all well and good.

It’s obviously important that you first that commitment level one or way number one is to grow for yourself, little money back in your pocket, and then grow beyond that, grow for others. Eggs, chickens, fish, plant starts, rooted cuttings. I mean, that’s another great way that you can do is that we integrate by backyard nursery production. So integrating growing starts right into your landscape. So you can see this planter that we’ve shown right here. Imagine for a moment that you have a beautiful big plant here. Let’s call it, let’s say it’s a goji berry plant, just for ease of how these things work, a goji berry plant.

Let’s say it’s an Andersoni variety, which is a Great desert adapted goji plant, sometimes called a wolfberry. And so we’re gonna grow this goji berry that sells for about $24 a pound. 24 a pound for this particular variety of goji. So $24 a pound, that’s what you would end up paying for it if you went to a Whole Foods Market. So huge value available to us. And then I want to grow some plant starts on top of this. There’s not very many andersoni wolfberries available in the marketplace to be able to grow, but people would love to buy them if they had access to them.

So we do some cuttings and we actually trim this back to make it look all nice. And those cuttings, we actually can make a little rooted cutting with them. And that little rooted cutting we then plant in a nice ornamental fashion in our landscape. As they grow, they continue to grow in our landscape and they grow up to a size. Let’s say as soon as they root out, it’s worth a dollar. About four weeks later, it’s now worth $5. Another two months later, it’s now worth $15. And so this plant continues to grow. And then we can pot them and put them in a nice little space.

And as we pot them up and there’s a bigger and bigger plant, we’ve now created a little cash flow system for ourselves, just selling the plants and not having to sell the fruit. So pretty cool thing to do, right? So that’s one of the days producing not just for yourself, but producing for others, plants included. Growing starts more and more. We’re finding that the urbanization of America and the world. Urbanization of the world is driving the business. It’s driving away a lot of our best local nurseries. The nurseries that grow all the fresh veg and the organic produce and stuff they’re growing.

The starts, their price and value of their house or their property is growing so much and so quickly that they’re more willing to sell it than to keep their business alive. Which means we have a huge lack of localized plant starts for those that are trying to grow food at home. So again, huge demand. Here’s some pictures from this particular yard. So beautiful yard. This is before the leaves all came out. So you can’t even see these houses behind this particular house because of all the fruit trees that are now growing in this backyard. You can also see on the wall how we then increase the production capacity by having these elevated gardens right up against the wall, improving what we can grow in each of our microclimates.

Productive pets Also a great thing. You can integrate and sell productive pets. So we have at our property chickens, so we have the eggs. That’s a productive pet. Guinea pigs, also productive pet. Great composters. Those little guys. Rabbits, you know, you can turn them into pelts. You can also turn them into meat. But, you know, people may not like that. Cavity is also a great food. Fish. Fish emulsion is a product that we can produce here, right in a beautiful aquaponics system. That’s something that we also teach and help people then fulfill for themselves. And so that’s kind of the basis of level one.

That first one is to grow your own and go beyond just growing your own. Get it integrated in the local food economy. Now, for some of you, I’ve probably already indicated at least five little subways within this one way on how you can garden and get paid. Kind of cool, huh? So way number two is to give tours. Now, the first thing that typically happens when you have an agriscape like we’ve talked about and what I’ve shown a couple pictures of, is that people pay to come to yards that look like this, and when they find out it’s edible, they’re even more excited to come.

And they’ll come in such droves that you will have to charge money just to limit the number of people that are coming to your house. So get paid. The way we’ve done it and how we literally started off, I just opened up and had tours in my own landscape. I opened it up, and the first one I did, we had like 60 people. I couldn’t even fit that many people through. And so I started doing multiple sessions, and then there was still too many people, and I just couldn’t handle all the parking. You know, the city was starting to get on my case.

So I said, well, how do I manage this? How do I regulate this? And so what I did is, is I basically opened it up. I said, okay, you’ve come to a tour before. We keep changing what we do in our yard. It’s always growing. Different seasons, different produce. We started charging $10 a person to come, and we still would do multiple sessions. And so you think about $10 per person, and if we got even just 20 people, that’s an extra $200 that we got just for doing that. Now we do a session, and we set it up so we have multiple sessions.

Let’s say we do times four in one day, or even just do five in one day. And now we’ve made an extra thousand dollars just doing little tours. And then once you do it one round, then schools start finding out and they want to do they want to come to your house and they ask, well, how much does it cost per person that we can come by and do a little tour of your landscape? And so the price might have to go up in order to accommodate the demand. And that’s exactly what happened for us. So a few extra thousand dollars a year you could get just by opening up your yard for tours.

Now the only way to get there is because it looks that good. If your yard can inspire people like these ones, can people pay to come check it out? So doing tours, you can do it. Great way to attract a lot of attention and to grow the other parts. So you can even then sell some of your food, sell some of your starts. So way number one can be added on way number two, and now you’ve increased your income even more. So number three, educate others. Those that love to tour often love to speak and communicate and share with others.

Educating others is a great way to advance the cause of what we do with agriscaming, teaching others how to grow. Once you’ve proven your ability to grow, you can now educate others. And schools are dying for people to come and help them and their students grow food. There are people out there wanting to know how to grow better where they live. And where you live is where you want to be educating others. So here’s how we work in the world of agriscaping. I’m going to share this with you so you can see how we want you to be a part of what we’re doing.

And this way is an opportunity that we’re giving you even more ways to become an educator with us that we can send you business because people want to know the agriscaping way, and they’re asking about it all the time. But we don’t have people where you live that can teach it. So the first step that we do in agriscaping is we educate people. The second step is we certify them, whether it be for themselves or to do it for others. And then we give them the support tools like the online software and the integrated professional support to help them do all of what we’ve been talking about, to really grow beyond their own need and to really grow, to be productive, to really truly garden and get paid.

So we provide the support network. We provide certifications for those who like it and. And we help educate them to get to that space. We have an online university certification software. It’s all available and this is part of the hint of how I could continue to help you after the fact. But as an educator, we need more educators in local areas. And the typical radius for an educator with agriscaping is about 15 miles. So you’re not going to have to travel far, but you will be empowered with the tools of mastery to be able to share at multiple levels and be able to teach the agriscaping way wherever you live.

So that leads us to number four, when people get educated and they learn about what we do with agriscaping. Agascaping is a design science. It’s integrated with technology, engineering, art, mathematics, and if you love that kind of stuff like I do, then you might be the perfect person to garden and get paid as a designer of these sustainable living masterpieces. And we, when we have an educator start and they start teaching people and that way is fulfilled for them, people will ask, well, I want a yard done, I want it to look amazing, I want it to look like yours.

Who can do this for me? Who can design it? That’s the first thing they ask. And so we send them a designer. We send them somebody that is interested and passionate about designing it. You can garden and get paid as a designer, perhaps maybe you just simply want to create more economically suitable means to just keeping your garden hobby alive. By doing that, just do the design part, help people be the designer, and then send it on to a professional that we can help supply you with. Agriscaping design certification teaches you how to do everything that I’ve been teaching you to the level of serving others at a huge level.

And here’s some samples of what they learn. So designers in the agriscaping modality, they know how to assess a property for rainwater harvesting capacities, gray water recycling potentials, productive productivity potential. So they can literally help somebody map out and know what their yard is worth. To get rid of their resource sucking money pit that they call their yard and to turn it into their own elegant edible Garden of Eden. Putting money back in their pocket and creating that amazing magic at their own castle. Edible and non edible products like we talked about, the designers learn how to design for all those things and to make it very easy to maintain.

How to correctly identify and map microclimates as well as knowing what to plant in each of those locations at a level beyond just their own landscape. How to explain the agroscaping process, how to connect them with that, how to do full design packages, phase it in. Design packages for agroscapes typically run between $750 to an Aggrescape designer and beyond. I mean, a one acre property could be $3,500 for one design on an agriscape because of all the integral parts. But we empower designers with tools that makes that whole design process simple because of the software that we provide them with, as well as the access to resources and help that will make that design process easy.

How to design watering systems, all that stuff, that’s what designers can do. So you might be that kind of person that loves to create and keep designing, and your spouse or significant other might be frustrated with the fact that you keep redesigning and, and redoing different parts of your yard. Well, you can appease that itch and get paid for it by doing it for others. And there’s a lot of people out there really eager to find out more and to get a designer for them. So here’s some examples of what we teach. Different modalities. French country elements.

Maybe you want French country. Maybe your client’s interested in that. Maybe there’s some other things that they’re looking for. Maybe they’re looking for an English cottage format for an elegant edible landscape. Curved pathways, all this type of Southwest garden elements. We also teach all of our designers the localized stuff. So if you’re in the desert southwest, these are edibles that work where you grow and they are native. So integrating native plants and edible plants and forageable plants right into a landscape, even at large scales. Here’s some more desert native edibles. These are the types of things that we love to teach and integrate into what we do.

Contemporary garden elements. I mean, this is amazing and all edible. Spanish mission. Also another great one, contemporary. So that gets us into design garden and get paid as a designer, if that’s your itch, number five is to install it. Maybe you’re the kind of person that has a knack for putting it all together and helping others create their dream landscape. And so maybe you’re the kind of person that loves to do that, help pull together those resources, pull together the people, help them transform the landscape. And maybe the kind of guy that likes or gal that loves to have that shovel in hand and just do it, install it, you can become an installer.

We love to help people make that happen. The process, how it works. When working for a client, and this is something you can know, you need to go out and assess it, help them understand what the property can do for you, make sure it gets designed well, because agaping is a design science. Gardening at this Level to be productive and get paid, needs to be designed well, then the installer jumps in, can get paid well to install that landscape for them. People put money into their yards. We know that you’re expected to do that if you buy in an hoa.

You have to install a yard. You got to get it done. It’s got to look good. Might as well get that yard to pay you back. You do a lot of work for your yard. We all have. What’s the yard doing for you? Time to get it installed, time to become that installer, perhaps. Maybe you love that. And then we supply you with that support mechanism behind the scenes to help you continue to do that day in and day out. So the certifications that we offer at every one of these levels, like we talked about before, a certified designer, certified contractor, certified maintenance people to support at every level.

Which leads us into the contractor study. So this case study, lot more business you can get doing an aggrescate. If you have a landscaping company or know of a landscaping company, have them get into this too. Maybe you can help them grow their business and increase their revenue by simply having them go more in the agriscaping way. Increase in sales growth. Very easy. When you’re an installer with this type of thing, maybe you don’t want to take on too many projects. You just want to help here and there. Pick up the projects you’d like by understanding the process that we’re teaching you.

I mean, installing is that easy when you know how to do it for yourself and you can see how these are all building on each other. When you know how to do it for yourself, you can then start applying it in service to others and get paid. Number six, become a personal gardener. Now, the personal gardener is something for the people like my grandma, like my mom, who just really loves to garden and just loves people and loves working with kids and loves helping people out, and she can come over to somebody’s house and just help them spruce up their little garden bed and make sure it grows really well for them and, and get paid to just be that personal gardener to become a professional at production.

I mean, it’s really mastering that art of elegant edible production. If you’ve gotten really good at producing food and getting your plants to produce food, start offering your service to your neighbors. Say, hey, I can help you get paid, you know, get some money back from that yard that just keeps eating you alive every month. I noticed that you’re, you know, it’s like the family that wants to get healthy help Them offset their own healthcare costs by getting healthy by what they eat. You know, help them be proactive in their approach. Be that personal gardener for people.

On our website, you can actually find out more about some of these programs. If you want to lead it, you’ll actually find a link to a lot of this on how you can get in and get certified and how you can go out and get paid. A great example of it is we have a number of people, they get paid. So they’re charging being a personal gardener. Our guys are charging right now, and this is average about $35 per hour, up to $90 per hour. And some of our guys, they don’t even spend too many hours.

They’re just doing 10 hours a week. And you can obviously see if they’re just doing 10 hours per week for an extra $90 per hour, they’re making an extra $900 per week for $10 for 10 hours of work. And this is true. This is true. To form our starting people, they’re out there doing about $35 per hour. And you can charge that. You just say, well, here’s what I do. I charge by the hour as a personal gardener for you, I will go and I can even go and buy materials for you. I just asked to be reimbursed at cost, which is kind of cool.

And it’s a great thing for them. That alleviates some of the. The licensing requirements in most states and countries, because there’s licensing requirements. If you’re buying stuff and you’re being a contractor, that’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about is that you’re like a coach for somebody. Or if you want to even make sure it’s even more protected for yourself, what you’ll do is you’ll literally go and make an agreement with a client and say, okay, I’d love to help you with your garden. What I’m going to do is I’m going to charge you 35 or I’m going to charge you $50 an hour for my time working in the yard.

If there’s any materials that I feel I need, I. I’m going to give you that list. If you could go and purchase that list of stuff, I can tell you give you some pointers on where to go purchase that stuff. Just make sure it’s here. I am working for you. I just show up, I get paid for my time. I’m going to work on it. I’m going to install the stuff, and then you’ve Taken care of all the materials. So you truly are kind of more of a 1099 type employee for them. Which means that on tax wise, all that stuff, it’s easier, it’s simple, it’s an easy way to just jump in, start helping people to grow food.

And again, you want to do this. If you have the knack for growing a massive amount of produce in a small amount of space, you can do it for yourself, start doing it for others, offer that as a service to others. We have a training program again for that. We call it our agriscaping maintenance program. Agriscaping maintenance certification. And we teach how to also build the business, how to build the whole model for yourself. Number seven, become a culinary connector. It’s what we call a certified harvester. It’s becoming a harvester, the culinary connector. The genius behind taking amazing fresh produce and turning it into amazing foods and dishes and recipes, become that culinary connector for others.

We’ve got a gal, her name’s Lan, and she is a great culinary connector. She understands food and has become by default, coming from a Vietnamese background and serving her German based husband. She has a great diverse background on what foods people like. And she experiments a lot and she loves to create and experiment. And though her husband may not like that experimentation, others love it. And so she’ll get local produce and she talks to people and basically she’ll have a client and they’ll pay her per meal, $10 per person, and they’ll pay $10 per person to connect her to kind of put together a meal for them.

That’s one way to be a culinary connector. Another way to be a culinary connector is to be a utopian harvest type person. Somebody that can go and gather all this excess produce, take it to the farmer’s market and be able to sell it then to the local food economy to become that connector that bridges the gap from field to fork in a localized food economy. And that’s what our people at Utopian Harvest do. That’s what we continue to teach you. Be able to see what they do. And it’s all based on a consignment process. So that as a connector, you’re making a percentage of all the food that gets sold at your little market stand.

You don’t need to be the grower, you can be the connector. And we teach you how to do that with Utopian Heart. We can take that to the next level and really make it easy for you to get started as a harvest type person that can then get paid by being that Culinary connector. Finding the food, Finding the awesome food that’s local and connecting it to the restaurants, connecting it to the people that want it most, connecting it to the recipes and inspiring people to grow more from even their own yards and get paid for creating such amazing things.

So maybe that’s the right fit for you. That’s a great way to get paid with something that you love if you’re a foodie. Being a harvester is awesome, that culinary connector. So I promised you that we’d take. We’d go as fast as we can. I’d teach you as much as I could. It’s the time that we had, and then I’d make sure that you could get connected to a way to continue learning more about this. But you might be like me and have been inspired now to just go out and do it for yourself. And I hope that might be true for you.

So what we’ve got is we’ve got a way to get you started even in the business of doing it, by educating you, certifying you, and sending you projects or sending you clients. Once you’re certified, we’ve built the network. We have a flow of people requesting our services on a regular basis. It’s got a great interface online, very simple to use with all the additional training for each of these methods. So the Mastery program is the way that we teach way one and two. Way number one, one and two are both in our agriscaping Mastery program, what we call our amp.

So you can amp up your garden, amp up the way you produce. By getting involved with the mastery program, we teach 36 skills of agriscaping that you can do it for yourself, to grow in a way that no one else grows, to have a yard like no one else and create your own little way to create income. We teach it all in the Mastery program. That is fundamental. And then after the mastery program, for those that want to get in and start teaching, we give them all the resources and teaching to then become an educator for themselves, become a designer, a contractor, maintenance person, the maintenance person that is the personal gardener for others, and the harvester that connector.

There’s also a tech level that we do for high school students, people that want to just get in, maybe go and do assessments for people and do those property assessments and just learn how to do microclimate mapping for others. Our average tech gets paid about $35 per hour just to go out and do microclimate maps and to serve others in that capacity, helping them understand what gray water capacities their property can Then produce their different sources and and how to connect to local pros or how to connect to the resources to do it for themselves. It’s all divided by certification type.

Also the whole mastery program, you can do it on your own pace and we connect you specifically with a local certified educator that you can work directly with and get hands on experience. So that’s another important piece to that puzzle. Hands on experience. We have all the training right there. Video, live support. It’s something that’s being talked about now, growing nationally across Forbes, USA Today. Agascaping is something being featured out there and current certifications. Current pro networks are already in a number of states and continuing to grow. We have need for people in every one of these states.

Some of the others that have joined us. North Carolina, we’ve got a big following there now. Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, we’ve got a lot still going on. Wisconsin, we’ve got Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho. But we still need a lot more people jumping into the fray. We’ve got pro networks in each of these places. We did a big nationwide tour, we did a big loop. I drove about the whole way, came all the way back down to Arizona. I’ll be up in Oregon and Washington later this year. A lot of great cities. Here are some examples of some of the projects that some of our certified people have been installing.

This is a Skysung project. Just they’re starting to work on this. This is a field to fork. It’s within literally five feet for where the food is grown to where it is eaten is only about five feet. And so this, this landscape that is very eco friendly goes right into a four restaurant complex. The food goes right in there, right into where people can eat it. Awesome commercial project. Here’s another view of that project. Awesome stuff happening. This is another one that some of our contractors have done. They’re working on right now. This is a 22 story twin tower building with a gray water fed and systems.

This actually has a whole system of support. All of these are terrace. So each of these apartments have that. It also has a restaurant that can be. The food is integrated right into the restaurant. All right there. Lakeside in Tempe by Tempe Town Lake Culinary Parks. This is a 280 acre park being done by some of our certified people where they’re getting paid a lot of money to be able to not only just design this. So designers getting involved in a project like this to integrate food in food and agricultural products into a municipal park to offset the cost to the taxpayers and create more Regional wealth for that community.

A system that truly can serve and sustain itself. So growing professional support through a lot of organizations to support you as you go through this process to garden and get paid. It’s not just us. There’s a lot of organizations wanting to help and support you. We can do it where we can, but there’s other organizations that you might already be affiliated with that can get connected with us very easily. And you, we’d love to have you join us and take another step if you felt inspired at any level. All roads to move forward. If you’d like to get more help from us.

They all lead to one space and that is a cool promo code and the Mastery Program. We’ll give you $100 off the mastery Program, which is a prerequisite to all the other certifications. $100 off. It’s normally $450, so it’d be $100 off of that. So you’d be able to get in for $350. And we’ll teach you how to do exactly ways one and two for yourself. Ways one and two we can give you. With that next step, some of you might already be ready to jump in and want to connect to a utopian harvest place yourself.

You can do that. We would highly recommend that IGROW 2016 that gets you $100 off. And all the expense that goes into whatever your mastery cost is can go towards later certifications. If you go to agriscaping.com right now and you click on Learn, I think it says lead it. If you go to lead it on agriscaping.com you can then find out more about each of those certifications. If you sign up now, again, use promo code IGROW2016 to sign up for the next round of of Agriscaping Mastery. And you’ll get that $100 off and then all of that, that 350, you’ll get $450 credit towards your other certifications if you choose to continue forward.

Now, each of those certifications requires that you actually apply on that Lead it page. You’re going to find more information on each of those particular subjects. You’ll find more information and be able to apply for free to find out more information on how you can get more involved at each of those other levels. Now a question comes up about whether we are in Canada. We actually do have people in an agriscaping network growing in Canada. It kind of started in Vancouver area and continues to start to expand across there. But it’s starting in Vancouver. The next mastery program for this, the fall season, starts Sept.

23 and will be completed. And you can go at your own pace, but it will be completed before Thanksgiving. So if you’d like to get started, we’ll actually give you access within a week. Once you sign on, we’ll give you access to all the videos and all the training stuff, and you’ll have access to live help and integration. Once a week, you’ll be able to jump on. You’ll be able to listen to videos. We’re always adding new stuff. You’ll have live connection to me personally to get answers to your question as you go through the course.

So that’s next cycle, which starts kind of week one will be September 23rd. The week of September 23rd. So that’s how you can get involved. That’s when the next mastery program starts. So if you want to get deeper into what we’re doing to get paid to garden and get paid, that’s when it starts. You’ll have access to all the training for an entire year without need for renewal. You’ll have access also to our garden planning software for yourself just at the mastery level, where you can design your own landscape, you can set it up and create your own customized calendar for all the things and inventories that you’re wanting to grow in your landscape so that you know exactly what to plant, when to plant it and and how to care for it, all custom fit to where you grow.

Now I’m going to open it up for questions. I know there’s been a couple and we’ve already started to answer those, but I’m happy to go live. If you’ve got some live questions that you’d like to ask, I’m happy to unmute you. If you’d like, just text. Got a question. And I will find you in the list and I will unmute you. And for all those that might be just coming on, we are recording this session and it will be available live a little bit later. You’ll be able to go through all seven. All seven ways to garden and get paid.

These are our most profitable ways to get it going. Yes. So there’s a great question. Are we collaborating with local permaculture groups? Absolutely. So there’s another cool piece to this puzzle. And when you sign up, we’re actually working with the local permaculture guilds. If you’ve already gone through a master gardeners program or you’ve gone through a permaculture guild, you’ve gone through permaculture training, you’ve got your permaculture design training. We’re going to allow you toward your certification. You’ll actually be able to pass out and get a discount on certifications by the different parts that you’ve already learned that we might have already covered.

So you easily be able to skip a number of the weeks of coursework and be able to move into your certification training even faster because of the things you already know. We want to credit you for what you already know and give you value in return because it is there’s a lot of the similar things with permaculture is what we do. We call this kind of the the modern permaculture. This is a modern permaculture called agriscaping, elegant edible landscaping that can be integrated into commercial and residential properties without a fit. And so great question. We want to collaborate with more permaculture groups because we want to be able to send them people because there’s people that need to go to permaculture and learn more from them because that’s the method that best fits what they do.

We also want to be able to add some business to permaculture groups as they refer business and people to get certified and help build the pro network. We give a little kick back to those organizations. We make donations to local groups that are willing to work with us to help build the professional network so that everybody can get that support system for themselves, no matter where they live. Great questions, great questions. So this class, the question comes up if we’re going to make this class available, that you can then view it when you wish. So this one will be available just through the end of this week.

We’re going to do another class again later and then that will be another one that we’re liking to record because we’re just going to keep improving this. So I appreciate the question, but we’re not going to have it up and available all the time. It’s only going to be up and available for a short period of time, a little window. We want to give you all that opportunity. I can’t guarantee that this discount deal is going to be available. And that’s another reason we really wanted to get you guys in now, help build that local infrastructure, help you become the first in your area to garden and get paid and then we’ll move from there.

So great question, great question. So you will be able to access this. So how do you sign up for the mastery course and get credit for Master Garter? So first thing you do, you will sign up for the mastery course and you’ll get that $100 off on this. You’ll get credit for the additional certification courses that happen thereafter. So in the future we’re going to have a pre test. But currently the discount is happening for anything beyond mastery. So hopefully that helps and answers that question. It’s for anything beyond mastery and the certifications on the beyond the mastery level.

So right now we’re giving you that discount so you can get Mastery certified for $350. We also have the programs, they go in range in total price. So if you’re already in the mastery, this will be deducted from it between $450. So it only be literally it’d be the same price because you guys are getting $100 off for a tech certification or as you get up into Design certification is $1,250. You’ll find out more about that and why, but it varies based on your experience with design. So again, for those of you that have more experience, your fee will be less.

And so it’s a great opportunity to get in understand it. That’s why we have the application process. So the application process for your specific certification on ways you can garden and get paid for those applications help us know more what you know and then helps us then align and discount then the costs of your other certifications based on what you already know and what you already understand. So for instance, we have some people going through design training and rather than spending $1,500, they’re only they can get design certified and we can start sending them business for under a thousand bucks, for under 850 bucks.

And for those wanting to become an educator, empowering them to teach mastery courses of their own and to fill classes and be able to get paid for teaching those, teaching local communities, teaching at schools. We have great programs for high schools, elementaries and also at a lot of different organizations that work with homeless centers and creating perpetual education programs for homeless centers to help integrate education and job training for people that are trying to get their, you know, get on their feet while they’re growing food that supplies them with great nutrition. So that’s what an educator does in this world of agriscaping.

Great questions. Love them. So if there’s no more questions, I’m not seeing any right now. We can call it complete and thank you all for showing up and being here again. The world is run by those who show up. Thank you for showing up tonight. I hope you can show up with us with agriscaping moving forward and become a professional to grow where you are and and garden and get paid with agriscaping. We’d love for you to continue with us. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully we see you again real soon. Have a good night. Well, there you go.

That was Justin Rohner. That last bit was some live Q and a he had when he recorded this. It wasn’t live here, but I did ask Justin to be available to answer any questions you might have. Just pop down to the comments section there and Justin will be back on and off throughout the day and evening to answer your questions. Of course, you can always get in touch with him by going over and clicking that button to the right and heading over to agriscaping.com to his website. Lots of great information there. This is really a fantastic program and we’ve been excited to get this presentation and make it available to you.

So this is Marjorie Wildcraft and you’re attending the Mother EARTH News Online Homesteading Summit. Hey, let’s get together for the next one.
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