charlie sanford

This position will be filled before 1/4/2025

We are a 15 acre farm in Central Florida with a large customer base for our honeys.  We produce honey which is our main source of income.  We also are building a store and want to grow organic crops for the store.  We have 5 acres of organic peaches and 5 acres of organic oranges to tend to as a u-pick.

We are looking for 1 person possibly 2 in the right situation.  No kids.  To live on the farm and work for us to grow this endeavor further for $16 per hour.
Daily duties would include honey bottling and cleaning floors and taking out recycling etc. in the honey room and helping grow crops, help with establishing chickens for eggs and dairy cow, sell goods in the store.
We are located in Central Florida.
We have a nice 2 bedroom 1 bath home available that we basically just use for lunch and would provide a room.   Its a very nice home.
This person would have to be a perfect fit to gel with us so we are really wanting to start some dialogue and get to know anyone interested and feel out the possibilities.
Must be into organics and natural living.

Hey our farm is right down the street from you.  Why dont you come pick some organic U-pick peaches for free and come say hi?  The peaches are looking really nice this year!  

Can anyone chime in or physically help with this project?  

I have 5 acres of Naval Oranges, 5 acres of peaches and 3 acres of baby Macadamia trees.  I have not used any chemicals or fertilizers for over 18 months.  This year I purchased a John Deere 5067 tractor and a great no till seeder.  I want to plant some cover crops like sun hemp or sorghum Sudan or a mix and maybe an inoculant to fix nitrogen in the trees.  My naval oranges actually look really nice the old farmer said he spread 140 pounds of synthetic fertilizer on the orange trees and thats why they look so good.  They have greening.  What's weird is these synthetic fertilizers just give a short burst of nitrogen and I think with the right mix of cover crops and innoculants we could run a great test to see if the slow release of the nitrogen helps heal the trees.  I also want to plant some pine trees and oaks and various diversity in the rows where some of the dead trees are.

I bought a cool Italian flail mower that gets under the trees real good so I have not used any glyphosate or anything to kill the grass under the trees I let it grow wild for 1 year and just chopped up all that natural biomass so there's a good over over the soil now.

I included a BEFORE photo of the soil when I bought the grove 18 months ago really sandy soil with lots of glyphosate.

Anyways I am looking for anyone local that wants to chime in and maybe see it evolve and run a cool test on them with me.  I am new to this but love learning and trying things.

I noticed (maybe I overlooked something) that the UF and citrus labs never really study the natural methods effectiveness on healing citrus greening.  And I am willing to sacrifice my trees for a cool organic test.  Hopefully it works but it would be cool to have multiple inputs on what to do.  

Hope to hear from you.

Hello!  I have built this cool honey business by Disney world.  The honey is sold in tons of grocery stores now so we bought a 15 acre farm and have a 5 acre you pick peach grove and oranges.  I can fund the off grid project with the honey biz but I don’t have the right female partner to settle down with and take it to the next level so if you’re interested I would consider.  Love Charlie