Welcome to Blue Lizard Farm
We created this series to help future farmers in Southern Nevada learn from our mistakes.
This is a preview of upcoming episodes releasing July 8th2025
The farmer needs to understand the different types of growing space. Outdoor growing, hoop house, growing and greenhouse growing. Hydroponics.
Water Rights
Water rights are complicated in Nevada, and we need to have a basic understanding of those water rights.
Financial Goals
It’s important to work out all of the financial and before you spend the money, and then you have to have a business plan in order to get a farm loan, whether it’s from an agricultural bay. If you get rejected from them, then you can go to the FSA. But if you don’t have a good plan, nobody’s going to want to lend you money.
Hoop House Program
In Nevada, we can get $50,000 worth of hoop houses, and that’s where we got our other ten much larger. Who passed that 30ft wide and set a ten feet wide, same 96ft long. And so that program continues to this day, and it’s a great program. Yeah. Reinventing the wheel. I’ve tried that. And, what I found is that it takes more time for me to figure out and build something than it is to find what’s already out there and available for specialty crop growers.
Weeds in the farm
Weeds are always going to be an issue, and in the hoop houses you can even get it down to. I will never say 100% on weeds, but I think you can, you know, get your weeds situation under control 95%. The seed companies and seed developers are always coming up with new crops for instance, with our spinach, we buy varieties that stand straight up so that we can cut them well.
Spinach
We also buy varieties of spinach that grow really well in the winter time, and also grow pretty well when it gets starts to get hot, right, they don’t bolt as fast. In my opinion, the reason that conventional farming gets such a bad rap is because they continue to play the same crops over and over again and do heavy tillage.
Soil
When you turn the soil, you’re turning all your microbes upside down, so you’re killing them off as you’re burying the ones that are surface of microbes and you’re bringing the low microbes to the surface.
Post Harvest Handling
The most important thing that we can do for any crop that we grow is post-harvest handling. But for us and our greens, we come out, we cut, usually about 25 to 30 pounds, and we rush it right in to go into our greens washer. That chills the, crop very quickly and removes that field heat.
Mental Health
Farming is hard. It’s stressful. It’s usually heavily debt laden. And so there’s a lot of pressure on the fighters.
These videos are brought to you by Nevada Department of Agriculture’s Specialty Crop Grant program, and the USDA.
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