The Big Impact

is my vision for this project, and no matter how many customers I have, the mission stays the same. Microgreens isn't a movement or even a trend in La Plata County, but it's worthy of the effort. There is so much potential to elevate our community health and sustainability, especially for those that are food insecure, but also for fine diners and everyone in between. And we can do so while efficiently investing our local natural resources and creating year-round farm jobs.

In 2022, I relocated here to work with the Good Food Collective, to help research and plan for re-establishing our local heritage apple industry. It was a short contract but I enjoyed becoming familiar with Manna, local and regional accessible food partners including Pine River Shares that operates in my valley.  One of the obvious challenges in our local food system is how to offer fresh produce and shelf stable farm products throughout the year. Our growing season is pretty short, we have a small amount of vegetable farms and output for our population and produce diversity is tough in this climate and economy.

I’ve co-owned and operated two family restaurants and a food truck. Neither of the businesses were designed or operated as I would have preferred, but I learned a lot about commercial kitchens and every decision point regarding sourcing, preparing and serving retail food. This is what seems important to me: protecting heirloom seeds and diversity, localizing food production and rewarding small farms, scaling regenerative grazing practices and permaculture, ensuring pollinators and clean water thrives, using reusable containers and many other improvements in our food supply chain.

The global food supply conglomerates have of course exponentially increased our ability to produce foods and hold them throughout the year for a nearly uninterrupted market supply. The cost for this ‘quality of life’ and convenience is astronomical and in return for our investment we’ve decimated heritage seed stocks and corporatized our seed and food supply chains, we’ve depleted our soils and forests while adding millions of tons of toxic chemicals into every natural resource on Earth, including ourselves from birth.

Is the way of life as a small farmer quickly approaching extinction?

Who is going to take responsibility for the human-caused factors that result in terrible health outcomes for billions of people?

Our economy rewards affluent markets with the healthiest foods available, so inevitably health food stores and grocery sections carry premium priced 'health' foods with the conventional massive-variety approach and we end up with twenty kinds of alternative milks, forty kinds of yogurt, hundreds of alternative meats, and people willing to pay twice as much for crackers because they’re made from rice instead of wheat. Hungry people get low grade produce, hyper-processed calories in cans and boxes and very little of the actual healthy compounds we need.  

What makes all of this even more devastating, is that in the U.S. we throw away about 40% of the fresh foods and farm outputs that are generated each year. There’s a quickly growing industry to redistribute imperfect foods that aren’t pretty enough for retail. This is a smart band-aid for a portion of our waste, but we need a lot more if we want to be relatively waste-free and a whole lot healthier.

In La Plata County alone there are 6,000 food insecure or undernourished people. Pine River Shares feeds 3,000 of those people in the valley I live in.  So I’ll ask you like I asked myself, what do we need locally to offer essential nutrients, aka fresh produce, to our communities throughout the year?

Microgreens are relatively inexpensive to scale production, they require very little land, very little water and can be completely produced in year-round controlled environments or outdoors in the summer. 

Microgreens are significantly more nutritious by weight than the mature vegetables they become. Sprouts and microgreens are easily considered a very efficient source of plant based nutrients, polyphenols, antioxidants and a complete amino acid profile, even Omega 3 & 6. 

Wisdom and Scientific Resources

I am going to be adding my research and resource files as I am able.