MISSOULA — Jamie and Carly Rogers of Missoula were looking for a way to turn their gardening hobby into a tax write-off, make a little extra money and cut back on their day jobs.
They stumbled across a niche product that upscale chefs are clamoring for across the country: microgreens, the young edible seedlings of vegetables and herbs.
The couple built a greenhouse in their Westside backyard, and now sell more than 100 pounds of microgreens every month to high-end kitchens and grocery stores all over the Missoula area.
If you’ve had a kimchi burger from The Top Hat or a microgreen salad from Café Dolce, for example, the pea shoots come from the Rogers family’s Killing Frost Farm.
They grow 16 different varieties of microgreens: red vein sorell, cilantro, radish, beets, mustard, kale, lemon basil, fennel and amaranth, to name a few. They are already working on plans for a large expansion.
The beauty of microgreens is that they are the stage of a plant between sprout and mature, and are packed with nutrients and flavor.
“The thing that’s cool about microgreens is the flavor is just super intensified and they’re also incredibly nutrient-rich,” Rogers explained. “They’re a superfood.”
A seed has all the nutrients and energy that a plant needs to get started, because it has to shoot out a sprout without any sunlight. The seeds first produce the cotyledon leaves, and the true leaves — the ones that eventually become big and floppy — come out later.
Studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have shown that cotyledon leaves have significantly higher nutritional densities — including vitamins C, A, E and K — than their mature counterparts.
“Right when the true leaves come out is when we harvest,” Rogers explained. “We add nutrients because some of these things, like the basil for instance, is going to be in the trays for three weeks, so it’s going to run out of the stored nutrients it came into the world with. Like the radish that is only six days old, it’s still loaded with the stuff that nature gave it. It’s only as it grows older and uses all that energy and nutrients to grow itself that it’s depleted. But if you get them young enough, it’s kind of nature’s perfect food.”
Rogers is quick to point out that he’s not some crazy health freak, either.
“I think they’re cool and good for you and I eat a lot of them, but I’m not going to pretend that eating them has changed my life,” he said, grinning.
Across the U.S., large microgreen distributors are popping up everywhere, but Killing Frost Farm can offer restaurants in the Missoula area something nobody else can.
“We never let our harvested greens sit more than 24 hours before they’re delivered,” Jamie said. “There are big distributors of microgreens now, in San Diego and Ohio and other places, who if you’re a chef and you call them and say, ‘I need three pounds of red shiso overnighted,’ they’ll do it. The thing is, that may have been harvested two days ago and now it’s going to get on a plane or truck. And they charge a premium for it. Like, it’s no joke.
“The thing that we have going for us is we can basically be farm to kitchen within 24 hours and if stuff doesn’t look good we won’t bring it. We really, really try to make everything as fresh as possible when it gets to the kitchen. It’s super important to us.”
A pound of pea shoots sells for $24 on the low end, and a pound of red vein sorrel would go for $96.
A big portion of the couple’s business is fresh-cut flowers for weddings, as well as edible flowers.
“Ultimately, the plan would be just to do specialty cut flowers for brides,” Jamie said. “The wholesale market for flowers is tough. There’s just no way for us to compete with the flower growers in Colombia. I mean, like not even close. But we do a ton of edible flowers, like 11 percent of our income in the last two months has been from edible flowers, which has just been crazy.”
The decision to bet on microgreens was a fairly recent one for the couple.
Jamie was working as a fishing guide and freelance writer, and Carly had a successful career owning and managing a hair salon, but they were both feeling burned out and the idea of starting a farm was very appealing.
Carly did some research on the burgeoning market for microgreens, and they slowly built up the business by networking with local chefs and restaurant owners.
“We learned by doing it over and over, and screwing it up over and over until we finally found a system that works for us,” Jamie said. “In the beginning, it was all walking into kitchens and saying ‘Hi.’ I gave a lot of stuff away. But it’s paid off, man. It’s big-time a relationship business, anyway you look at it. Whether it’s the customers or vendors, we exist and I like to think we’re successful because of the relationships.”
