We're doing a farm to table today with everything a hundred percent local as much as we can.

A huge amount of the stuff we actually grew on our farm and then everything down to the flour, the spices.

♪♪ Whenever I do like an event like this, I want the first bite to kind of set the pace for the rest of the night.

The acidity from the tomatoes, the sweet savory bacon and then this Thai basil, just think of it as way more flavorful than an Italian basil.

♪♪ All right, we're bringing out the next two courses here.

So, we're sharing this family style.

This is a farm to table dinner.

This is kind of like a communal event, so similar to Thanksgiving we're passing the bowl to each other.

So, pass it along and enjoy.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] Restaurants are an amazing place to be.

There is an amazing tight knit group of people to work with.

But there's a lot of downside.

Not a lot of time spent with family and friends.

When I graduated culinary school, I went into the restaurant scene in Cedar Rapids and was introduced to a ton of local farmers and then decided that I would rather have my time be that.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] So, growing up on a farm we were pretty self-sufficient with produce.

We did a lot of canning.

We raised our own chickens for meat, for eggs.

We raised our own cattle.

And not until I moved out and went to school did I realize the quality of food that we were eating.

That was really when I started to try to put my full focus on making food.

So, it has been built into me from a young age, pulling produce right out of the garden and taking it to the hose and rinsing it off and eating it.

♪♪ ♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] Hoffman Farm and Forage, we are a chef-focused farm.

Being a chef before I started doing this full-time, we grow products that we're going to want to cook with, that I would want to see come through my restaurant door if I was working there.

The other aspect is foraging.

We do a ton of foraging.

That kind of started as a hobby of mine.

It's a huge income boost for us when we are able to forage mushrooms.

Mushrooms are essentially like a protein.

It's as if we were to bring beef to the market, but it's mushrooms.

[Andrew Hoffman] We like to sauté them in a little butter.

I like to say, however you like mushrooms is kind of how I'd suggest you cook them that way.

So, you'll probably be most successful that way.

[Andrew Hoffman] It's fun to be able to talk to people and see how excited they are about that.

Or I've never seen this mushroom, can you explain it to me?

How do you cook it?

Or oh, I don't like mushrooms and then you kind of try to broaden their horizon.

There's just so many other better mushrooms out there.

I get bored easy, so if I just farmed, I would hate it.

So, first it was photography and then I've started to ID the mushrooms and then cook with them and eat them.

So, my day is literally split in thirds cooking, foraging and farming.

(nature sounds) [Andrew Hoffman] So, a lot of times when I'm randomly walking around looking for mushrooms, I'm looking at tree canopies and trees for what kind of trees they are.

I'll be looking for downed dead logs depending on what I'm looking for.

Most likely if it's in season you'll find some.

We started with just my wife and I loving nature.

Our weekends were spent hiking.

We would go out in the woods.

We would hike, we would find nature and you want to learn about it.

So, you start to educate yourself, you start to learn more and then you start to comprehend the different aspects of edible food that is out in nature.

[Andrew Hoffman] Tucked back under this log are two little ghost pipes or corpse plant.

So, you can see it's completely white.

This one is a little older so it's turning a little black.

They don't get their nutrients from the sun at all.

They latch onto the mycorrhizal undergrowth, which is basically the root network of mushrooms.

And the root network of mushrooms lives off of the decomposing material of trees.

Mushrooms to plant trees through that, it's super cool.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] There's like some interesting aspects to foraging that people have a little bit of I would say maybe apprehension.

It's such a foreign thing for the States especially.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] This is a coral tooth, coral tooth mushroom.

It's in the same family as lion's mane and it has amazing medicinal benefits.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] So, Iowa State Extension has a licensing class where you can go and you can get certified to be a licensed forager.

I remember my first class back in like 2015 or something it was, it was a small classroom, there was maybe ten people in it.

And then the class that I had this past spring it was a lecture classroom, it was full, there was a few hundred people in there.

And that's just one class of a dozen that they do a year.

And it's exciting.

It's fun to come across something like that.

♪♪ [Andrew Hoffman] So, these still have a little bit of time on them.

They call them watermelon radish.

That bright color right in the middle.

This piece of land is pretty dear to my heart.

It was my great-grandfather purchased this property in the 1940s.

Late fall 2020 we purchased a house in Roland.

And the fall of 2020 we tilled ground to put our first garlic crop in.

At that point, we just full-headed transitioned and moved the farm here.

We had to build all new clientele, we had to find new markets.

And really, I just want to work with the product that we grow.

I genuinely enjoy being able to present a meal and be like hey, this is one hundred percent locally sourced from Iowa, even down to like a 20, 30-mile radius within Iowa.

But to be able to take this family farm, create a community built around it, I mean, it's wonderful and hopefully able to show that experience to the next generation.

It's been outstanding.

I'm excited to continue to grow and continue to move forward with everything we're doing.

♪♪