Transcription
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Welcome to the Microgreens Mastery Podcast! I'm your host, Jonah Krocmale. Together, we'll explore the art of turning tiny seeds into a thriving microgreens empire, sharing insights, coveted secrets, and strategic wisdom from building one of Canada's largest microgreens farms. Stay tuned for thought-provoking conversations with leading figures in the world of microgreens.
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On today's episode of the podcast, we're going to be answering your questions from social media—everything from the best capital investments to make as a microgreens farm, growing options, the best drying method for your microgreens, ideal growing conditions for microbasil, and so much more! Stay tuned; we have a great episode for you today, so let's get right into it and answer your questions from social media.
The first question comes from Jeff: Can microgreens be grown hydroponically? Is it easier?
So, while yes, you can grow microgreens hydroponically—there are lots of farms that do that—I highly don't recommend doing that. There are three main reasons:
1. You're going to have lower yields.
2. You're going to have more issues actually growing the crop.
3. The shelf life is much worse.
So, you're going to find that growing in soil, there’s a symbiosis with the plants and the soil that really hasn't been able to be replicated in hydroponics as of yet. I think it will get there over time, but right now, in today's environment, we just don't understand enough about the soil microbiome and the symbiosis with plants to replicate it properly.
Given all that, I've grown hydroponics with lettuce, basil, and also microgreens, and I found that the quality, the yield, and the shelf life were much worse on those products. So, if you can grow with soil and you can grow microgreens that are higher quality, higher nutrition, higher yields, and better shelf life, it's a pretty easy decision, in my opinion, to go the soil route. Even better would be going in with an organic fertilizer, because then you're going to get the highest possible nutrition in your microgreens.
John asks: Any tricks to stop seeds from sticking on the bottom of trays during stacking in germination?
Yes! So, in the early days of Living Earth, we definitely had this issue, as a lot of farms do, and the best solution that we found was to use something called vermiculite, which is a fine volcanic rock expanded, and it comes from the earth. By using that on the top layer of the seeds, you'll actually find that the seeds won't stick to the bottom of the trays. You'll get a little bit of vermiculite sticking to the bottom of the trays, but the seeds will stay with the soil, and the roots will start developing down.
Now, there are also a lot of other uses for vermiculite. We add it to our soil, which is a great soil amendment to add moisture-holding capacity and air porosity, and then it's also great to prevent mold on a lot of crops. So, that top layer of vermiculite added to your seeds after planting will actually significantly reduce the amount of mold you'll experience on your crops. Anyone that hasn't done this yet or hasn't tried it, I highly, highly recommend trying this—it will make a huge difference in your mold issues you have with your microgreens.
Next up, we have a question from Samuel: What do you think about reusable Tupperware as containers for microgreens for your subscribers?
This is a great question! I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out a way to use reusable containers instead of plastic because, obviously, plastic is—while it's not renewable—it's also not really not renewable. So, a great way to mitigate that would be to use actual reusable containers, not single-use plastic.
The difficulty with using Tupperware or reusable containers is the process and the logistics of getting them back, cleaning them, and reusing them. When you're really small—let's say you're growing 50 to 100, 200 clam shells a week for customers—it’s not that big of a deal to collect them back and wash them. But is it scalable? That’s the question you should be asking yourself during the process of determining if you want to use Tupperware containers instead of single-use plastic.
From my experience and the research I did, it's really hard at scale to get the Tupperware containers back, properly disinfect them, ensure that there's no food safety risk, and then redistribute them to keep that cycle going. It's a lot of extra work. You can incorporate that into your price, but then it just makes it harder to compete with all the other growers out there.
So, I hope there will be a solution for this in the near future. The best solution we came up with for the issue with plastics and single-use plastics is to use assembly-use plastic that is made from pre-recycled materials—so clamshells that were made of recycled water bottles. That ensures that at least there was one step in the recycling process before it ends up in a landfill. Using the plastic in these clamshells, which is PET plastic, is much more recyclable than other types of plastics like Styrofoam and colored plastics.
William asks: I don't have the space to grow indoors, so the only alternative is to grow outside or in a garage. Is it possible to do either of these and grow successfully?
It depends on your climate. For most people, growing indoors will be much more advantageous than growing outdoors for microgreens specifically. If you're growing tomatoes or lettuce, there are lots of advantages to growing outdoors because sunlight is free, whereas lights require you to pay the electricity costs and the capital costs to buy them.
However, most people across the world don’t have a consistent climate year-round—whether you’re in a tropical climate with a rainy season and a sunny season, in a northern climate with a hot summer and a cold winter, or in a desert climate where it's moderate in the winter but very hot in the summer. All these climates aren’t really conducive to having consistent year-round growth.
The produce that's grown outside comes from California in the winter months, from Arizona, and as the spring warms up in the United States, it comes more and more north through the states, and then produces locally wherever you are.
But with microgreens, if you grow them indoors, you can have them year-round. So, growing in a greenhouse or outdoors, you're going to find there's a lot of seasonal variability. From one week to the next, and one month to the next month, and one season to the next, you're going to find a vast difference in how the microgreens grow, how they look, how they taste, and how long it takes to go from seed to harvest.
All that production issue gets a lot easier when you grow indoors versus growing in a greenhouse or outdoors. It makes life a lot easier, and you can focus on the things that will actually grow your business rather than just production, like sales, marketing, hiring staff, automating—all these things you can do with the free time that you don't have to spend worrying about production because growing indoor just keeps it a lot simpler.
Now, in a garage, you can definitely grow because it is pretty climate-controlled, but you would probably have to adapt the garage to have more climate control and protection from the outside environment. A garage is kind of like the in-between, where it is climate-controlled but not to the same degree that your house is. You need to put a heater there in the winter, which should solve the problem. Depending on humidity, you may also need to have a humidifier or dehumidifier, depending on the time of year and your climate.
Ben asks: What is the best method to dry microgreens before packaging?
This was a huge conundrum for the farm in the early years because it was really hard to package wet product and see it go bad really fast. This is especially true for crops like basil, which took me many months to figure out how to properly dry them in a cost-effective and time-efficient way.
The way that we found to be the most effective to dry your crops is to have a fan—ideally, an oscillating fan that goes left to right—and have that fan run for about one day before your crop is ready to harvest. That will allow the canopy of the crop to dry out completely. So, by the time you actually harvest the crop, it's already dry.
The other method that people use to dry their crops is to cut the product; the canopy is wet because microgreens are very dense. Then, you cut the product and put it under a fan or something with airflow to dry it out. This takes a lot of extra time during your harvest day, and harvest days are the bottleneck for microgreens farms.
If you can reduce the bottleneck, something as simple as drying the crop before harvest allows you to reduce that one step, making you that much more efficient during the one or two days a week when it is the most stressful, overwhelming, and time-consuming. Reducing the amount of time you're spending on harvest days is a win, in my opinion.
Also, it's a much more cost-effective way to do it because you don't have any time or labor involved in drying the greens—you're just turning on a fan, which takes literally a second or two.
Sarah asks: When did you know it was the right time to scale your business beyond yourself and actually employ and pay staff to expand your business?
This is a great question! There are a lot of factors at play in a decision like this. How I did it—which is not necessarily the best way to do it—was when I literally ran out of time. I have X amount of hours in a day to work on the farm. When I literally ran out of time, that was when I decided to start hiring people.
I had no choice. The better way to do it would be to plan in advance—plan your trajectory, see how many trays more you can grow in a day, how many more you can harvest in a day, and from there plan in advance to hire someone.
When the time comes that you are at full capacity, you already have a staff member trained to take some of the load off your work. One thing I wish I had done was hire staff earlier because that would allow me to spend more time on sales, building the business faster, rather than spending time working in the business.
I would be spending time on the business, which I highly recommend for anyone at that mid-level where they're starting to get really busy with the business but don't need to hire someone. I would start planning that process now rather than waiting to the last minute because it'll save you a lot of headaches.
When you're training someone, you're doing all the work plus training them, so it adds even more to your daily schedule than just training someone when you have free time to do so. So that’s the first thing.
The second is to consider what your time is worth. If you're making, let's say, ten thousand dollars a year selling microgreens, and your time is valued at two dollars an hour because you're working crazy hours to do it, it may not make sense to pay someone because that's eating so much into your profitability.
But when you're making a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars a year selling microgreens, your hourly rate starts getting much higher. So, the time you're working at the farm, you're getting paid much more per hour worked. Once that hourly rate you're working is somewhat higher than the market rate for the work that's being done, that's really when you should start hiring staff, pay them what the market rate in your area is for farm labor, and start actually building the business from a bird's eye view rather than working inside of it.
So, those are the tips I would recommend, Sarah. I hope that helps!
Chris says: What is the process of growing proper micro basil? What humidity level are you growing in?
Micro basil is a really tricky crop to grow when first starting out, but once you have a recipe to grow it, it's actually quite an easy crop to grow. Micro basil is unique in that it really likes warm temperatures.
If you're growing micro basil and it's 65 Fahrenheit or 15 degrees in your growth space, you're going to have really slow growth with your micro basil; it may take three weeks to a month for it to mature. Now, basil's ideal growing temperature—which sounds kind of crazy—is 87 Fahrenheit. That is the optimal temperature for growing basil microgreens, which is significantly higher than most microgreens like cilantro, pea shoots, or any sort of mustards. They generally like, you know, 70 to 80 max, so somewhere in that Fahrenheit range.
But basil really likes the warmth, and if you want to optimize your system for basil, you’ve got to increase the temperature. This is one of the reasons I recommend people grow at a bit warmer temperature—not just at 70 or 72, which is general room temperature— but growing 76 to 78. I find is a really good temperature that increases the speed of growth quite significantly from the 70-degree mark.
So, temperature is the first thing—you definitely want to be on the warmer side. It doesn't need to be 87; I don’t expect anyone to have their house or growth facility at 87— that’s way too hot and also not very comfortable to work in. But if you can increase your temperature a little bit, you'll find that the speed of growth and yield will increase.
Now, the second thing to consider with growing micro basil is the drying of the crop, which I mentioned earlier. It’s a big problem. If you take basil and it's wet, and you put it in a fridge or even just leave it out, it will rot literally in two or three days. The shelf life is very poor on basil that is wet.
This is one of the reasons that micro basil is such a great crop because it ships so poorly; the product coming from Southern Florida or from Colombia or the other places where basil is commonly grown for commercial use, the quality of the basil by the time it gets to your region is generally pretty low quality.
That's where I decided to grow micro basil—there's a unique opportunity in my climate. The growing season for basil is so short—about two or maybe three months—that you can harvest basil in Southern Ontario, so for nine months of the year people can't get good quality basil that is local. By growing it indoors, I was able to do that and find a niche in the microgreens space for this micro basil.
The best way to dry the basil and ensure that you have a product that has good quality or good shelf life is to ensure it's properly dried before packaging. The best way, as I mentioned, would be to have a fan oscillating and drying the crop before harvest. But if that's not an option, you definitely have to dry by hand after harvesting it because the shelf life won't be very good, and your customers won't be happy with a two-day shelf life.
So, drying the crop is crucial for basil.
Now, for humidity levels, basil is not super picky in my opinion. The lower the humidity, the less moisture is going to be developing in the canopy of the crop, but it’s not necessary to have a specific humidity for basil. Anywhere between 35 and 60 or even 65 should be totally okay. Generally, on the lower end is better for most crops, but you can kind of work with that range—it gives you a lot of wiggle room there.
So, yeah, hope that helps, Chris!
Rob asks a really great question: What are your top three capital investments you've made for improving your operational efficiency?
The number one tool, which I talked about in the last podcast, that made a substantial difference to our success was the Quick Cut Greens Harvester. That tool allowed Living Earth Farm to transform into a much larger-scale farm. It was one of the first pieces of automation that we purchased, and it was also one of the cheapest. I think it is the cheapest piece of automation you can purchase—it's somewhere roughly about a thousand dollars to get the harvester and the bracket that holds it onto a table so you can kind of just push trays through.
I also purchased a conveyor belt for the farm, which allowed the speed of harvest to be even faster. So, that was definitely the number one tool I recommend. Whether you're growing 50 trays, 25 trays, 100 trays, or a thousand trays a week, having the Quick Cut Greens Harvester is a lifesaver, and I am not making any money from saying that; it's just my opinion. I think it's an amazing tool developed by farmers who really wanted to help what started as outdoor crops, like lettuce, be cost-effective to harvest. It ended up working really well for microgreens and microgreens farms.
Next is a microgreens seeding machine. This is one that is hard to get in the marketplace right now, but one exciting piece of news is that I am working on creating a cost-effective microgreens seeder with James from Vertigro. We're currently in the design stage of building this seeding machine, and I think it’s going to transform a lot of farms from an automation perspective and efficiency perspective.
We bought a much larger commercial-grade machine for the farm to seed, and that made a huge, huge difference because each tray has a uniform amount of seed on it. You can dial in specifically how many grams of seed you want per tray, and it makes a huge difference in disease management, crop quality, and crop yields.
The last capital investment that has improved operational efficiency is having guides and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your business. For those of you that are still doing your business on your own and you're the only person involved, it doesn't seem like it's a big deal at this point. But once you start hiring staff or you have friends or family helping you with your business, it makes a massive difference to have everything laid out, easily understandable, and have actual guidelines for your staff on how to do things.
This can come in many different ways. There's software to do this, like Vertigro’s Farmware, where you can put different directions on how to process the crop—when to water, when to harvest, how to do these things. You can have actual operating manuals, training guides, and manuals on how to do the different tasks of the farm. This makes a big difference in having things be consistent and reducing the amount of time that you, as the owner, are spending training new staff when the time comes that you hire new staff or when one staff member leaves, and you have to hire a new one. It makes a world of difference to have those SOPs.
William asks: Do you know if there are any grants in Canada that a small farm can apply for?
I'm going to touch on not just Canada but also the U.S. Now, I'm not super familiar with U.S. grants, but I have some information that will help a lot of the small farmers out there.
In Canada, there's a main federal-provincial program called the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, also known as CAP. If you have a farm business and you have more than seven thousand dollars in revenue, you can apply for grants for all sorts of things. Some of them only relate to outdoor farms, like environmental stewardship and soil management, but there are also a lot of grants that apply for microgreens farms—whether it's marketing, such as in-store demos or packaging design. You can get grants for automation equipment, labor efficiency, even grants for helping someone create food safety guides or SOPs for your business.
Now, the caveat is that it's not always available, so these grants are available in specific time periods. I'd recommend signing up for the newsletter from each province, as it has its own distributor for the grants. In Ontario, it's the Ontario Soil and Crop Association, so you can sign up for the newsletter, and they’ll email you when grants are available.
Other provinces would be the same thing. There are also many other types of grants besides just farming grants; there are lots of innovation grants. For example, in the city of Toronto, they have a startup grant for starting a business in Toronto. You can apply for a five thousand dollar grant, and then you have to take a few courses to learn about running a business and the basics on those types of things.
That’s what I know is available in Canada.
Now, in the U.S., there are even way more, way, way more grants available for farmers, which is amazing! I know in Canada, provinces like Quebec focus on having a lot of money available to farms. If you wanted to even just start a farm in Quebec, they sometimes just give out money to you.
This information may be out of date, so don’t hold me accountable for it, but if starting a farm in Quebec is one of the best places I know of in Canada to start a farm, in the U.S. there's the federal USDA grants that you can apply for, and then there are also statewide agricultural departments that would be a great place to contact to find out what grants are available.
I do know that in the U.S., there are tons of farm grants available, which is great when you're in the expanding phase or when you need to buy equipment. There are lots and lots of resources available for farmers, which is amazing! If you're in other countries, I can almost guarantee you there will be some sort of program for farmers.
I don't know the capacity of it, but definitely reach out to your local agricultural department—whether it's your state, province, country, or county. Feel free to reach out, and they should have more information on what is available. But definitely utilize those resources.
Now, another caveat is: don't rely on these resources. Don’t rely on grants to be operationally profitable, but use them as a stepping stone to get you faster to where you want to be with your business. Relying on grants is what a lot of nonprofits do, and they’re doing great work. The challenge is that if that funding goes away, you don't want your farm to be at risk of going out of business because of it.
So, you definitely want to find a model that is profitable and sustainable from a financial perspective. But you can also rely on grants in the early phases to increase the speed of your farm's growth.
Tony asks: What are some of your most popular blends of microgreens that you sell at supermarkets?
There are two categories of crops or markets for microgreens—so you have the retail or grocery store sector, and then you have the food service or restaurant sector. Both of them are going to have different demand for different crops, so different interest in and popularity in these crops.
On the retail side, you have crops like broccoli, which is really popular, pea shoots, sunflower shoots, and mixes that are really popular. For example, a crunchy mix or some sort of colorful blend we call a rainbow mix would be the most popular crops on the retail side.
Now, on the food service side, you're going to have a different set of crops that will be your top sellers. You’re going to have basils, cilantros, and something we call a micro mix, which is a mix of mustards and amaranth. Think of the kind of small, more dainty, strong-flavored herbs and microgreens as being more popular in the food service side.
The ideal scenario for a farm would be to have some sort of mix of retail and restaurant as you scale. Now, most people start off just selling through a subscription model, and if you're going that route, then you're going to focus on these retail crops. Over time, if you decide to move into the food service restaurant space, you can start adding in a few of these crops at a time. The goal would be to have a blend of crops from both the retail side and the food service side, as I explained in the intro podcast with the history of Living Earth Farm and how it really saved our butt during COVID to have our feet in both doors—in the retail and food service side.
While I hope that something like COVID doesn't happen again, it's important to be prepared to know that you have diversity in markets so that you can sell products no matter what happens in the external environment.
Andy asks: Is there any way to recondition soil for reuse?
Yes! There definitely is a way to reuse the soil, depending on where you're located. This will really determine if this makes sense or not.
If you're in a city where land and outdoor space is at a premium or very limited, it probably doesn't make sense for you to compost and reuse the soil because the process will generally take three to six months, and in the winter months, it'll be way longer than that if you're in a cold climate.
So, while you can compost the soil and reuse it, there are a couple of challenges besides space. Space is number one. The second is all the seeds that haven't germinated in the trays. There's something called hard seed, which is an interesting side fact that actually helps plants survive during difficult situations.
For instance, if a plant drops a lot of seeds and 100% of those seeds germinate the next spring, if there is any sort of catastrophe or major climate event that happens and all those plants die, there are no seeds left for the plant to reproduce in the future, which could potentially wipe it out from the genetic pool.
So, plants drop seeds, and a certain percentage of them are called hard seeds, meaning that no matter what condition they're in, they won't germinate right away; they might germinate six months later, a year later, two years later, or even five years later. This is a defense mechanism for the plant to ensure it can survive any and all conditions that are thrown at it.
So, there's a percentage of hard seed that's going to be in your trays that you seeded, and they may come up and be considered weeds at that point. For example, if you're growing a tray of pea shoots and you have radish sprouts coming up, that's something you generally don't want. So, you'd have to properly heat compost it to kill all the seeds.
The third main issue with using reused soil is disease management. If you have pythium in your soil when you’re growing microgreens and then you put that tray in the compost pile, those disease spores will stay there and survive. Now, generally composting with a strong heat source will kill most of it, but it generally won't kill all of it.
There is a risk that you will be spreading the disease further if you have any soil or plant pathogens that reproduce in the soil. Basically, the way I would think of it is: if you have a large piece of land—let’s say you’re in the country and you’re growing your microgreens in a garage or in your home and you have a ton of land—I would make a pile of microgreen trays and reuse them in garden beds.
If you really want to reuse them as microgreen soil, you can definitely do that, but there will be those risks that I mentioned before. The compost made from microgreen soil is often of really good quality; it adds a lot of organic matter to outdoor soil. So, it’s really great if you already have a garden bed to amend that.
The last question we're going to take today is from George: Recently, I went to several stores to see what microgreens are being sold. I noticed their packages have some sort of organic certification—USDA, etc. Should we obtain at least one certification? If so, what does that process take, and is it worth it?
As a farm starting out, it is not necessary to get organic certification. The only reason that you would want to get organic certification is if you're selling a large quantity of your product through a third party—meaning a retail store—where the consumer doesn't know you directly, or if your customers require it. Some of our customers only sell organic produce and said that if you want to sell to us, it has to be certified organic, so that was a push for me to get certified organic.
But it's not necessary, especially when you're starting out. If you're selling direct to consumer—meaning you're doing subscription sales or online sales to direct consumers—you really don’t need to get organic certification. If you want to promote that you’re organic and you're using organic seed and organic soil, then promote that but just don't call it certified.
You can say it’s grown organically; we don’t use pesticides; we don’t use any synthetic fertilizers. But you can't say it's certified organic. When you're selling to retail stores or when you scale up your business, there may be value in getting organic certification because it's kind of like a stamp of approval. When a customer sees it, they know that it’s not sprayed with anything synthetic, and you’re not using synthetic fertilizers to grow the product. Generally, it’s going to be a more nutritious and better quality product.
Generally speaking, there are a lot of caveats to this. If you’re in a current situation where you’re growing everything organically and you’re already using organic seed, organic soil, and you want to get the certification, the process looks pretty simple. It’s a bunch of forms you need to fill out, proving that you’re using organic seed, your processes—probably some detailed information on what mixes you’re making, what they include, and proof that you’re not using any non-organic inputs.
For example, if you're using Pro-Mix HP as your soil medium, that won't be allowed because it has a wetting agent and a very small amount of synthetic fertilizer. If you’re using Pro-Mix MP or another approved input with organic seed, then you will be able to get approved for organic production.
Each jurisdiction is a bit different; it usually goes based on the country. In Canada, we have the Canadian regulations that dictate what is and isn't allowed, and then there are regulating bodies that will actually do the certifications for you and get you certified. In the U.S., there's the USDA, and they would also have certifying bodies that would come inspect your farm, making sure you're doing everything as per the regulations for organic production.
It is time-consuming; it's definitely a process to get it done. The good thing is if you are a microgreens farm, it's really easy to get certified. You can apply right away because you don't have any soil in the ground that could be contaminated.
If you are an outdoor farm, and you're growing tomatoes, lettuce, peppers in greenhouses or indoors and you're growing in the ground, you have to wait at least three years, proving that you haven't sprayed any chemicals or used synthetic fertilizers on that land.
For microgreens, because you're growing in trays and using new soil, you don’t have to prove that, which makes the process a lot easier and speeds it up. So, from start to finish, you can probably expect, you know, a three to six month process to actually get certified organic. Each year after that, it’s super simple; you just fill out some forms, have a quick inspection, and then it's smooth sailing from there.
So, that's it for this Q&A session! If you guys want to have any of your questions answered in future sessions, feel free to send an email through my greens consulting, send some messages or comments on posts on social media—whether it’s TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram—and we'll get those questions answered for you in the next Q&A.
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Thank you!
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