Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

There is a rhythm to watching a dispatch console. The same rhythm, it turns out, that governs a seed tray in March — attention, patience, the willingness to wait for something to emerge. I spent years managing both, and the parallels still surprise me.

Before I came to gardening full-time at Freighter View Farms, I spent my career in emergency services. As Executive Director of Saginaw County 911 Central Dispatch, I led one of Michigan’s first deployments of artificial intelligence in a dispatch center — four AI agents that handled everything from policy lookups to training support. The work drew coverage from WNEM, NPR, and national publications. The Michigan State 911 Committee appointed me to two subcommittees. The county recognized our team’s work with an APCO nomination.

I tell you all this not to dwell on the past, but because the thread that connects 911 technology and heirloom tomatoes is the same thread that runs through everything worth doing: you show up, you pay attention, and you let the system teach you what it needs.

What Dispatch Taught Me About Gardening

In a dispatch center, you learn to read patterns. A spike in call volume before a storm. The way certain neighborhoods generate certain kinds of calls at certain times. You learn that the system has its own intelligence if you are quiet enough to listen.

The garden is the same. The Brandywines tell you what they need through their leaves. The soil speaks through what grows and what does not. When I deployed AI at Saginaw County — tools that could parse policy documents and surface answers in real time — I was essentially teaching a machine to read the same patterns I had learned to read by hand.

From Console to Garden Bed

Today I work as a Solutions Consultant at Prepared, helping dispatch centers nationwide implement the kinds of tools I first tested in Saginaw. But my mornings start here — in the raised beds at Freighter View Farms, on Saginaw Bay, watching the freighters slide past while the coffee cools.

The garden is the counterweight to the screen. Where dispatch demanded speed, the garden demands slowness. Where AI processes thousands of data points per second, a tomato seed takes its own sweet time. Both require the same fundamental posture: humility before a system larger than yourself.

The Writing Life

I write about both worlds. On this site, you will find the gardening — the seed saving rituals, the Zone 6a experiments, the recipes that come from what the beds produce. On my personal site, you will find the technology writing, the Michigan planting calendar, and the guides. On AI in Public Safety, I write about where artificial intelligence meets emergency services.

If you have found your way here from the 911 world — welcome. The garden has room. And if you have come for the tomatoes and are curious about the dispatch work, the links above will take you there.

Either way, I am glad you are here. Pull up a chair. The freighters are running tonight.

📰 Featured in NENA’s The Call Magazine

Chris Izworski authored the cover story for The Call, Issue No. 51 (April 2025), the official publication of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). His article, “The Unstoppable Wave of Artificial Intelligence,” examines AI’s transformative impact on 9-1-1 operations and emergency communications, reaching over 21,000 public safety professionals nationwide.