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Here’s the thing about farmers: They love to talk about farming.
As a flower farmer and vegetable gardener myself, it’s something I’ve experienced a lot. We love to swap stories about growing practices, compare notes about dahlia or potato storage, and wax poetic about our favorite varieties of heirloom tomatoes. But when I can’t connect with another grower face-to-face, I find myself turning to podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube channels to scratch that itch, especially as another season starts to come into focus.
Enter: Jesse Frost of No-Till Growers.
The 43-year-old Frost is author of The Living Soil Handbook and the man behind the No-Till Growers network, which includes a popular YouTube channel with more than 400K subscribers, a corresponding Instagram account, and the Growers Daily podcast.
A no-till farm (or garden) is one where the soil is never plowed or turned over and is heavily mulched, like with wood chips or cover crops — a practice that can help with soil health and erosion control. It’s a big topic in the farming community as many growers strive to improve the quality of their soil and produce better yields, not to mention reduce the need for pesticides or other inorganic inputs.
Credit: Zooey Liao / Jesse Frost / Mashable
Based in Kentucky, Frost and his wife Hannah Crabtree run Rough Draft Farm, a small-scale vegetable farm that serves their local community. It’s also where Frost creates much of the content that appears across his channels, and where he applies the no-till farming practices he speaks of so often.
Frost says that his biggest mission is to help others learn alongside him.
“We try to create and aggregate as much information about growing food ecologically as we can, and then disseminate that for free,” Frost says. “The entire idea is we believe organic, no-till farming is important work and the technical details about how to do it should not be behind a payway.”
We recently caught up with Frost about some of the essential tools he relies on every day, why content creation is so important, and the power of authenticity online.
Talk to me about how everything got started.
I originally launched the [Market Garden] podcast back in 2018 because I just felt like that was the information I needed and wanted the most and it just was not out there. I knew there were all these growers who were doing creative, low-till things, but the information on how was just not there. So I decided to call them and record it and share it. Seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, and now it’s a huge part of my life.
I later stepped away to concentrate on farming, on video making (which is easier than podcasting because it can be done on your own and then edited in the morning, unlike podcast interviews, which are typically done during the day when I need to be farming). I also wanted to give my wife, who is a painter, a chance to do some of the stuff she wanted to do and had sacrificed so that I could make the podcast.
Within the last couple of years you launched the Growers Daily podcast – talk to me about the shift into daily content.
I started Growers Daily in September of 2024, the idea just being that I thought farmers and growers might enjoy a daily podcast to listen to. I love daily podcasts. I use them to motivate myself in the morning and then afternoons when I’m tired. Moreover, the daily was also something I could do early in the morning so it didn’t require much, if anything, from the family or anyone else. I love daily podcasts, but most of them are sports or news-oriented. My idea was simple: why not farming?
What are the products you can’t live without for content creation?
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On the podcast side, I use the Shure SM7B microphone and although I have not tried every microphone out there, the bang for the buck is huge and I like how well it fits my voice. Microphones are really high on my list of “can’t live withouts” because I remember a time before I did live without good microphones and I don’t really want to go back there.
On the video side, I’m often using either the RØDE VideoMic Pro+ shotgun mic with the Deadcat windscreen (for in-the-field shots) or the Rode Wireless Go II for talking or doing interviews. I like to have the Omnidirectional lavaliers for those as well, but not a requisite. I just think sound really elevates video.
Camera-wise, I’m a big fan of Sony. Originally, I just liked how long they would record (versus the 29:59 limit that Canons had). That comes in incredibly handy when filming farm presentations. I find that Sonys are user-friendly and relatively intuitive (this is an aspect I appreciate because I am not a big tech guy and have no time or space in my brain to learn all-new equipment). I also just like the video color and saturation better on Sony than other cameras I’ve tried. Specifically, right now I have a Sony A7IV for shooting outdoors (with a Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM Lens). For the podcast, which I film at my desk, I use an older Sony A7C (with a Sony Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA Lens).
I have a teleprompter that I can’t live without for the podcast, but not because it’s a great teleprompter, just because I use it a lot. It’s an old Glide Gear, and it’s fine but it’s a little awkward to get in and out of every day (the podcast is daily). It’s 7 years old and it does the job and if I have to take it to the field, I don’t sweat it too much.
Because I’m on a farm (and a budget), I try not to overdo it on the quality (read: price) of my equipment. I could buy better mics and cameras, but they will get dirty. For me it’s about finding that balance of quality and price so I won’t feel bad handling it with muddy fingers as I move it around the farm.
Also shouts to my editor Mike, who now handles all of the backend stuff on the videos and podcasts — he’s pretty hard to live without.
How about when it comes to farming?
I always say I could run my farm on a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a 7-inch stirrup hoe, and a rake if need be. No special brands or preferences there, but those would get me pretty dang far. The tech for shooting videos and recording podcasts is ever-evolving. In farming, there is new tech, too, obviously, but a lot of food can still be grown with very little in the way of tools, as it has been for thousands of years.
You do a great job of showcasing your humor and personality within your content — is this something you actively think about and plan for?
I wouldn’t say I think about being funny very much or work on material really at all. Oftentimes, like I would imagine it is for many people, my humor comes up when I need to fill empty space, or when I feel awkward, or when I felt like something I said was boring and I’d like to bring the listener back in.
Humor is a great tool in that way. For instance, the subjects of my podcasts can often involve intricate details on, say, the planting distances of broccoli. If I don’t make a joke or ten somewhere in there, people are gonna check out. Myself included, frankly. You ever fall asleep recording a video? It’s not a great look.
Where do you see your best engagement?
I think I see my best engagement not based on platform or content-type but on sincerity. I think people respond most to honesty and vulnerability. I don’t exploit that, I just notice it. People really love to see my mistakes. People really love to see me be human. And I love to show those things because I want people to walk away from my work still feeling good about their own work.
Content creation has a unique power to make people feel less-than or unaccomplished, but as creators, we can make the choice to show them we screw up, too. I do it all the time. I am as good at screwing up as succeeding. I think it’s helpful for people to see that.
What makes a good farming account?
I wish I knew! The somewhat embarrassing truth is that I don’t watch a lot of farming content. Basically none. The reason for that is to keep generating new ideas and not keep feeding the old ones. I don’t want what I’m sharing to be what everyone else is sharing, which is what tends to happen in the content creation. So I don’t watch YouTube videos, I don’t listen to farmer podcasts really, unless my friends are on it or some farm I’m interested in. I read research papers and talk to researchers and growers (on top of also farming full-time and gaining my own perspectives).
The goal is just to always try to bring something new to the space. And I’ve also had to grow okay with just not knowing all the time what the new thing or tool or trick people are talking about is all the time. So No FOMO here — I know I’ll find it eventually. And really, like I said, farming doesn’t change that much. I’ve been doing this for almost 17 years. I’ve seen a lot of tools come and go in that time. The next big thing is still the shovel, wheelbarrow, hoe, and rake.
Any noteworthy achievements you’d like us to mention?
We’ve made 350+ episodes of the daily. We’ve done hundreds of videos. We have 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, millions of podcast downloads, but when I think about that question, I just think about the time I helped my kid through a hard thing, and didn’t say anything stupid in the process to make it worse. Or how I had a difficult conversation with someone that actually made the situation great — better than I could have imagined. I don’t know that numbers or classic achievements (awards, etc.) will ever satisfy me quite like a relationship achievement. Those are the best.
What do you love about creating content?
It’s a fun, creative challenge every day. I’ve always said I have two parts of my brain that need a ton of attention — the physicality side (picking stuff up and moving it around) and the creative side. Farming fulfills the physical side, whereas content creation fulfills the creative. They work well together in that way. I also love how accessible it is. If you have a genuine desire to change something in the world (in my case, how the soil and earth are treated), content creation is a way you can start embarking on that mission today.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
