$17,000 per Month Selling Microgreens

hey real quick before we start today's video i just want to invite you guys to a free web class that i'm doing talking about micro greens and how you can make 1500 bucks a week profit without selling to any of the conventional market streams such as farmers markets restaurants distributors or grocery stores out of all the over thousand videos that i've published on my youtube channel and my website over the last six years this is by far the most valuable and relevant to the time content that i've ever produced if that sounds interesting to you click the link in the top right of the screen or go directly to microgreenswebclass.com or follow the link beneath this video today we're talking all about microgreens and my guest is a fellow named donnie greens he's a youtuber and he's an expert microgreens grower in fact donnie has contributed some amazing content to my recently re-released micro greens course and in this video today we're going to be going deep into some of his production and marketing systems that he uses on his farm this is going to be a longer form interview but we're going to cut it short at about the 50 minute mark and then the rest will be available up at from the field dot tv so hope you guys enjoy this one there's a ton of value in this video hey donnie thanks for joining me today man what's going on how are you great great so you know i love i love what you're doing and um i've just been fascinated with your journey selling micro greens and it's so cool that uh as a guy who's relatively young and even relatively new to this you're totally crushing it with with microgreens especially with with the new kind of marketplace scenarios that we're dealing with right now do you want to can we start with maybe um you just kind of introducing yourself and telling us a bit about what's happening with your microgreens and and and where you sell and it's kind of the basics of what you're doing yes so um i'll start from the beginning i always knew i wanted to do something in agriculture and i wanted to work for myself so i was scanning the internet what am i going to grow what am i going to grow i saw your stuff with the um like the front yard gardens and all that super cool and then i must have found something about the micro greens because i remember seeing those videos and being like okay that's what i'm gonna do that's exactly where i'm supposed to start so i jumped in it's about four years ago now i started in my parents basement super small space maybe like three racks and i remember my total investment was around three or four thousand dollars which obviously includes a ton of mistakes in there so i was net positive in nine months after starting and then before i hit my two year mark i was doing six figures and i had a six figure business so super exciting super random like at the time like looking back it was slightly risky like i just dropped all my money into this random micro greens thing but i just knew in my heart that this was right for me um so yeah nine months net positive then at that point i was making money so i knew i needed to get a bigger space so i left my space in my parents basement and i actually found an old rundown deli around the corner from my house that i literally grew up skateboarding in the parking lot so funny yeah and uh the whole town knows this place because it was a deli in a residential neighborhood which is unheard of it was grandfathered in and then like as the rules changed and this guy just loved animal husbandry he had all these crazy animals in the back like even deer like you're not allowed to have deer living in your backyard um but anyways it was super cool really funny scenario and i fixed up this old rundown deli and turn it into an urban farm i operated out of there for about another year and i went from three racks to like 10 racks in a year super fast growth i was doing a lot of farmers three racks when you say three racks you're talking about like what 12 to 16 flats on a rack each of my racks holds 20 trays okay yeah so you're doing 60 flats then went from there yeah so i was doing yep right around 60 flats in my parents house then moved into the new farm and within one year i was doing you know i mean it's not exactly 200 flats per week because some of them are on the rack sitting for longer than a week but very quickly i was up over 100 100 trays per week and operating with 10 racks and then this past not this past february but the february before that february 2019 is when i moved into this facility that you see me in right now and this has been great to me um super nice super nice space and i'm actually located in a building that's surrounded by an organic farm so they've been doing the farmers markets on sundays and i've been having people walk in and see my products so wow long journey a lot of fun and uh yeah so now i'm here where i'm at uh when i first saw these youtube videos they were telling me that i should be selling to restaurants and i realized very quickly i didn't really want to work with restaurants at the same time i finally found what i was going to do in farming and entrepreneurship i was also learning about the health benefits of sprouts and microgreens through a friend of mine jesse and he's really the one who introduced me to sprouts they were growing on his windowsill i'm like what's this it was like wow you can grow your food in five days in a mason jar on your kitchen counter and it's some of the healthiest foods on the planet like that's tremendous yeah so that was happening in a parallel to me starting my business so not only did i not really like working with the restaurants simply because they were almost like leading me on this one guy i remember was like hey man if you if you grow cilantro um the whole town will buy cilantro from you you know yeah i know uh right so here i am trying to learn how to grow cilantro as a brand new grower i finally get some cilantro growing i bring it back in and he's just like totally uninterested doesn't want it um so that was kind of an annoying experience yeah um and then i mean there are some other difficulties too like having to work with not only the chef who's going to be using the product but also the manager or the owner of the restaurant who cares more really about like the cost and the financials behind it so i was like you know what i know the real value of these plants are in the health benefits and i'm passionate about health and i want to improve the health and sustainability of my local community so that's when i came up with this delivery service i wanted it to make it i wanted to make it as easy as possible for my local community to get access to these healthy foods um they're new right like we're not people aren't typically eating microgreens in their diets so it's going to be a challenge and a hurdle to do the education and teach people how to use it i might as well uh kind of pander to that and include some other additional aspects of my service that just makes it easier to use to like uh close a deal and get people eating these products right right so so what when did you start that customer direct program the customer february 2019 customer direct program i was doing like literally two weeks into the business okay so you've been doing that all along all along yeah from the start but you were you were looking at diversifying you'd try some restaurants and maybe some other market streams but you'd been doing this thing the whole time and and how and how serendipitous was that for you uh when all this coveted stuff started happening because your business was already set up to weather the storm of all the lockdowns and all that stuff right yeah i mean super thankful just because of that business model that i've put in place going direct to the consumers homes um you know doing online billing automatic billing and all that that seamless hands-free hands-off interactions um it was great covet hit unfortunately you know it's it's not a good thing by any means but fortunately my business has been able to thrive in it i remember uh in may i did like 17 000 in may uh which was my which was my biggest month and that was like at the very peak of kovid so hope it hit and then the sales started booming everybody was looking for fresh food they wanted to help their immune systems and then one of my distributors also um there was like a change in the consumer behavior where they all wanted microgreens all of a sudden and i was doing a ton more business through them like two hundred dollars maybe on average per week hundred fifty two hundred spiked up to a thousand dollars in the matter of like a week or two two hundred dollars per week to a thousand you mean in terms of total sales to this one distribution company that oh to one distribution company okay right yeah that was a definitely a major driver in some of those higher numbers wow so i mean tell me how that looks you know you said in may 2020 you did 17 000 in sales of in that month what does that look like as far as allocation to customers is that at this point mostly divided between the hundreds of customers you'll deliver to plus a distributor or are there some other type of revenue streams in there with different types of customers um so my customer base consists of about a hundred weekly subscriptions most of them are home deliveries right to you know consumers and families then i'm in about five or six different health food stores here on long island and then uh basically one distributor okay okay so you're doing like over a hundred drop-off deliveries per week because you got the 100 customers plus the distributors uh the distributor and the grocery store so i'm curious kind of how that lays out logistically because i know you know i i ran a delivery business for many years we did csa we did restaurants a lot of restaurants and there was a lot of logistical challenges there i'm curious how how that kind of plays out for you like you use a software that helps you organize that how do you do that and and they're probably not all on one day right you're not doing all that delivery on one day you're probably spreading it throughout the week right yep it's spread out so basically like i'll tell you my business model right now i actually want to make like a little like mini guide to give to people just so they can understand how it is that i created this business um so obviously in the beginning i'm focusing on home deliveries i'm hitting up you know a few local small like pop and shop health food stores and i'm building a delivery route so i what i'm doing is i'm trying to max out one day the more deliveries you have in that one route the more efficient it's going to be and i also try to stay as local as possible oh and i forgot to mention the farmer's markets i'm not doing farmers markets anymore but they played a critical role in my growth as well because you get to one test out different packaging test out different prices get feedback from customers and then the people who are coming to farmers markets are not only local but they're also pre-qualified because they're at a farmer's market market yeah um so that definitely helped to build my subscription service in the beginning for sure um so i would build up this route and i would deliver on tuesdays and i would harvest on mondays um and i would get up basically i realized that there was some limiting factors right so the main limiting factor there's two of them one is how much you can get done in a day and then two is how much product can you fit in the fridge in like my fridge that i'm using and i'm still using the same fridge to this day you can see it right there it's just a full-size box fridge no freezer or anything just one big door all fridge and i can fit pretty much exactly a thousand dollars worth of product in that fridge so what i did is i built up my route to a thousand dollars um it was essentially half was in the the north shore and then we would shoot down to the south shore and go along the south shore and once it got to a thousand dollars i split the route so now i would harvest on monday and then do tuesday deliveries on the north shore right and now by splitting that route it's more efficient because now i have my north shore people on my south shore route then wednesday i would do another harvest round and then thursday i was i would deliver south shore and that became my two main routes at this point i'm up to four routes the monday one is is relatively small um and then the other routes are are pretty pretty much the same but yeah that's that's essentially how i did this and how i built it and um i'm including the health food stores in with the same deliveries that my customers are in all right right basically wherever you're you're going to be geographically you just stack in there and then i guess you just you coordinate that with your customers so the one one of the things that i've i've been really impressed by with your setup is how you kind of have this laid out online and and and people kind of it's it seems like you've got a really good setup for people to come in and sign up for being your service now one thing i i haven't noticed and it's just probably just because i haven't delved deep into it but where do you differentiate on your on the customer experience between a commercial customer and a residential customer how does that kind of play out in there in terms of prices or in terms of like logistics and signing up kind of all of that so so if does somebody who wants to be a commercial customer for you do they just go to your website and sign up or do you kind of expect that they're going to call you and have a conversation for a commercial uh business it's more of like a conversation it's either like an email a phone call and a lot of those places i'm not getting i'm not closing those deals via my website those are more for like the home delivery people the the health food stores and business to business i'm going like more like cold direct marketing yeah yeah and i'll just contact them bring in some samples good good so um tell us a little bit about um you know on the customer and what they expect because i know you know one of the challenges that some people who have tried to do this kind of model with micro greens one of the challenges they have is that it doesn't make sense to deliver five dollars of product to somebody now you kind of have a package deal that that you sell to your customers can you talk a little bit about that yeah so technically the orders are a la carte they can order whatever they want i have five dollar options 10 15 20. you can buy in bulk um whatever they can choose it whatever they want but there is one item that has been crucial for my growth and that was originally the sampler box when i was putting like sprouted chickpeas and sprouted lentils in there um but now i've gotten rid of those products and it's called the sunny sampler box so it's a bunch of sunflower in the bottom uh there's pea there's radish there's broccoli and then a little bit of micro mix so it's all of my products all in one box and it's just easily become the best seller right so we talked about how people aren't typically eating these products there's a lot of education and teaching people how to eat it um so with that being said most of these people don't really know what they want either so i've guided them into essentially like the applebee's like appetizer sampler right right right that's really created for micro yeah and it's cool because you've got it all packed in one thing you just kind of separate them they all touch each other but it's all there so i mean i love that because it streamlines things for you on your production end opposed to somebody doing an a la carte order and wants this and this and this and then you have to do two different packages for each now you did say that they can order a la carte so does that mean you do have some customers that just literally order five dollars of sunflower sprouts and you're gonna deliver that or is there a benchmark for delivery there is a benchmark so if somebody wants just five dollars or ten dollars of product that's fine they can do it but i'm tacking on a five dollar delivery charge okay and then for any orders that are 20 and up it's free delivery because everybody's sharing the delivery cost because of that root system right yeah so i'm sure you're kind of on your end you're just incentivizing that so much that are most of your customers going that way now every single one there's nobody really under 20 dollars brilliant brilliant so the so so you've kind of set it up that you've built enough of a buffer for yourself there where if the odd person does happen to order a la carte and i'm sure it happens from time to time it's not really costing you much because if 99 of your customers are taking the dollar bundle and then the odd one takes a five dollar thing plus a five dollar delivery fee it it's not that big of a deal yeah and i mean even with a la carte there's plenty of a la carte people um they're people who like maybe they don't like the radish in the sunny sampler so they're getting like a box of pea a broccoli and a sunflower and that's fine the one of the other upsides to the sunny sampler and having everything in one box is if you really dive into your numbers and micro greens the majority of your cost is typically coming from like your packaging your sticker your overhead your delivery the cost of the microgreens themselves are are very cheap so if i'm taking eight ounces of product and spreading that over four containers with lids with stickers it's a lot more expensive than those eight ounces which actually comes with more on the sunny sampler but in one box with one sticker yes so there there's higher profit margins there as well and from a production standpoint um and streamlining you're right um technically like it does streamline things a little bit but the way i pack orders and and like my systems for how the farm operates it it doesn't it's really not um not a big deal for people to do like multiple packages or a cart sure sure sure and again i guess you've you've still you've built such a buffer for yourself with that sunny sampler if that's the majority of your product that you're moving your margins on that are so good that it covers everything else so so again i'm curious to just delve into that sunny sampler package a bit more because it is it's so smart tell me again what are all them well first of all does the do the products in the sunny sampler change from time to time it it's always the same always the same okay so so tell me again what all those products are in there so you're getting five ounces of sunflower in the bottom yep hence why it's called the sunny sampler it's mostly it's you get the most of sunflower then you have two ounces of radish on one side then we put two ounces of broccoli on the other side stems facing in and then we put three ounces of pea on top and then we do a little bit of micro mix which like almost hides the stems of the pea and adds like this little flare there fun wow so i mean yeah it's from a production standpoint i love how you've got i did a similar thing with my my rainbow mix micro greens product that i did for years where i put them it was a mix of it changed a bit but it was mostly p so it was like 50 to 80 percent p and then i had a red cabbage a radish and a broccoli in there but because the majority of it was pee i have such a huge margin on that seed that the fact that i had less of a margin on the other ones it made up for it now i i'm assuming it's the same for you and that if how what's the total weight of of everything altogether uh five six seven eight nine eleven twelve like twelve and a half 12 and a half so like three quarters of a pound of product in there a little under half of it is sunflower which you have a good margin on right sunflower is a is a good one probably your most expensive seed in there is either the the broccoli or the radish right yep yeah that's great so it all kind of it all kind of comes together absolutely so um the other thing i'm kind of curious about um is kind of how you've got your operation laid out and maybe what we could do in this is because you you are a youtuber and i would encourage everybody who's watching this to subscribe to donnie's channel i'll make sure i have a link in the in the video and the the show notes but maybe we could actually get a video and kind of splice it over a bit um but but maybe talk about some of the logistics of how you have your shop set up i remember the first time we had a conversation because you've you've made some amazing content for my micro greens course here and uh i remember the first time we talked you walked around with your phone and you showed me some of the stuff you have and and you've really got your operation laid out really smart maybe let's talk a little bit about how you've got your this whole thing uh set up so over time in moving my farm you know two or three times and setting up different spaces um i've kind of like learned what works what doesn't work and and how the whole operation flows so i think in general what i've realized is that your front door should be closest to your fridge as well as and then your harvesting station should go after that because your products are going to be moving out the door from the fridge so you want it close to the door then you want your harvesting tables right next to the fridge so you can harvest and then go right into the fridge i have these sticker dispensers right at the edge of the table that's closest to the fridge so they get stickered and then go right in and then i've also realized that your germination room typically you want in the furthest back of your space because that's where the process starts so i try to store like soil back there if you have space i have my soil back there i have a sink for washing buckets i have a big cabinet for storing some seeds and then i have a stainless steel table back there as well for making trays and then a few racks where they sit on there and germinate so from that back room you start the process they're germinating three days later they get brought out and put out under lights in the main grow room space and then kind of adjacent to that space you're doing the harvesting and then packing it into the fridge as you can see yeah yeah there we go so so when you okay so i wanna i wanna just explore your process a little bit more i like what you said there because you've really identified the timing and placement of each task so that basically you're in it might not literally be in a circular form but you've basically said okay product starts here and it ends here like how you said soil at the back or germinating at the back that's the first part of the process and then fridge by the door which i can see right behind you um i'm curious a little bit more about your harvesting process so there's i've seen as a couple different schools of the way microgreen growers do it some harvest product and then pack it right away some people harvest product put it in the cooler then pack it all right which one are you are you doing something else um i'm the first one and both of these methods are like super intriguing because like batching things obviously helps and improves efficiency so for instance when i make youtube videos i'm batching four at a time doing all the filming at once and all that stuff and same thing for micro greens right like we can harvest all the broccoli put it into a bin and then go from there and put it into the individual things um but my opinion as far as the harvesting process goes is i'm trying to reduce the amount of steps in a process so we're harvesting right from the tray and from that cut in our hand we're going right into the package so not only in my opinion does that is that like the most efficient because you're you're reducing the amount of steps but these products are delicate so by going right into the pro uh right into the package you're not risking them like tumbling and and and getting damaged yeah okay so a detailed follow-up on that how does that work when you're doing a sunny sampler versus packaging so you just said you're harvesting broccoli and then that's going to go in there what do you do when you've got to build those sunny samplers how does that play out yeah so when we're doing the sunny samplers um what we do is we have all the trays out on the table so for this to the left is p then we do radish and then broccoli is the closest and then we have our scale with the package and then on the right side of that is the micromix now i didn't mention sunflower because we pre-load all the packages wow this is funny yeah this is actually a little bit different and detailed right i i like i knew there was some more nuance to this yeah i didn't really think of this because you're doing it so often and for so long you don't really think about the details but so for harvesting sunflower that's a completely different process in in general rather whether we're making sunny samplers or not um because of those damn shells so we're harvesting a whole tray usually two trays at a time onto the table and then we are moving the dirty pile into a clean pile and as we move from left to right we're taking all of those seed hulls and any of those like half grown sunflowers with seed health still on them and just throwing them off to the side into a pile until we have one big clean pile then from there you know if we're just packing in bulk sunflower we're packing that right into bags but if we're making sunny samplers we're going to take that sunflower and just do the bottom half of those sunny samplers of just the sunflower and then we'll have essentially a stack of 10 15 20 of these boxes that are filled with halfway filled with sunflower and then those are what we're using to do the second half of the process which is where we're lining up those trays ready to go putting those prepackaged boxes on the scale and then we're doing broccoli radish pea on top and then micromix clothes sticker fridge okay brilliant so what about the micromix how does that play out what's in the micro mix and then uh because it makes sense to me what you just described so just to just to explain it really quickly in layman so that i understand and maybe everybody else understands just to reiterate it is you basically lay out all of the packages kind of organized broccoli packages over here sunny sampler packages over here so on and so forth you harvest and then those just get allocated to those and so they're all sitting on the table for a while as you build those out correct only for sunny samplers we're going to have multiple trays on the table um right of course so yeah you you'll you'll look at your your harvest list and say okay we've got so 50 packages of broccoli to do today let's get the broccoli flats harvest those pack those out do all of those individual ones first maybe yep then okay let's do the sunny sampler harvest lay everything out and then do it all that way exactly yep right because yeah you only have so much table space so so the the thing that i'm curious about is how does that logistically work out when you do your micro mix so what's in the micro mix and then how does that how do those steps play out when you do it that way so the micromix is super simple it's not like it's not like when you grow varieties of microgreens different varieties and then mix it all together this is literally just the spicy salad mix from true leaf market okay it's just it's it's a mix that you plant together exactly wow okay okay and and is that where you get most of your seeds and true leaf i would say most of my seeds come from true leaf um i get like my sunflowers and my radish come in from like a supplier from italy um and then if i'm getting other stuff like arugula typically and uh like cilantro i'm ordering from kitazawa where's that yeah that's like uh kind of like a random one that i was told about um definitely some people know about them but yeah they're kind of weird to order from but hey i like their seeds so wow so let's talk about um your your production as far as crop allocation i'm kind of curious kind of what crops you grow uh we've already talked a little bit about them but let's lay it out and then i'm curious how those allocate because my guess is that sunflower is probably at least half of your production based on what you said about the sunny sniper or or maybe a little bit less or what do you think a little bit less there is a lot of broccoli because i'm in the health niche and broccoli has just got so much hype about the sulforaphane and the nutrient concentration um so i grow the most trays quantity wise per week is definitely broccoli and also the yields play a role there too right because i'm pulling eight ounces off a broccoli tray i'm pulling more off of the sunflower tray so i'm doing sweet pea which is actually like speckled speckled pea um i used to use dunpee i switched to speckled pea they're pretty similar then i do the china rose radish for the pink stems and then that's a spicy flavor then i do the broccoli which i just talked about and then the sunflower the sunflowers are always going on the bottom shelf of my racks and that's because they're hulls when i'm swiping those off i want them to go right onto the floor rather than into another tray sure yeah yeah so smart yeah and then the other way you could do that though is if you have like a full rack that's a little bit like off to the side dedicated to them um and when i move my farm again that's probably what i'll do so then all the seeds are concentrated in one place rather than sweeping the whole farm peas always go on top i find they're just like the least picky they're so easy to grow and then everything else kind of goes in the middle so aside from that i'm also doing wheat grass okay because i'm in the health that's the health thing and does that does that go to uh delivery like uh home customers or is that mostly a grocery store type product mostly home delivery customers and then um i have like one or two like health food store juice bars that that takes it uh to be honest i hate growing wheat grass i don't like growing it it's just like so easily prone to mold and unless you keep those temperatures like lower you're gonna get the mold um but i need to keep the temperature up a little bit specifically like for the sunflowers so that's a little tricky um and then i do one tray of barley grass per week because i convinced one of my customers that that was healthier than wheatgrass and so he's been drinking that and then i do the micromix and that's everything okay okay oh and arugula i've been selling one tray of arugula and then i have like some cilantro growing right now for fun and stuff like that so that it's a good amount of crop allocation there you've been in business for what two years now four years for okay four years what has been you've obviously arrived at that crop allocation based on you know certain criteria probably like what what are customers asking for what's easy to grow what uh what seeds you have access to for a reasonable price in your in the last four years what's been the most difficult micro greens for you to grow that maybe you either stop growing or you found some kind of new ways to grow them that that make it easier um so sunflower has been a tremendous pain in the ass throughout the whole process i can't stop growing sunflower because it's a huge variety for me and also i'll mention these varieties were super easy to pick because in the health niche there's other organizations that have been utilizing microgreens to help people to heal for instance the biggest one is the hippocrates health institute down in florida now they're big advocates of pea and sunflower so that was easy starting there pea and sunflower the broccoli for the super health benefits and then the radish for that for that stem for the visual appeal and then also that covers me for a spicy variety so that was the thinking there yeah um and then the wheatgrass is obvious uh so sunflowers have been in pain in the butt the whole time since i can't stop selling them i've just i've just had to keep growing them and i've just learned things little nuances here and there things about the seeds all sorts of different things i know about sunflower unfortunately in my opinion um so yeah they've been the worst when i first started growing and i just like didn't really know what i was doing yet i couldn't grow broccoli because i was over watering it um but now you know i know how to grow these things now so yeah um cilantro is trickier because of those little hulls that stick on but i found that just covering them with a light cover of soil really helps a lot there yeah so just soil or vermiculite layer just just the same stuff that i've been using one of my one of one things sorry one of the things that i find really important is keeping everything simple um and that also includes keeping the material list simple so if i don't have to go out and buy something else i'm not going to do it and it works with the pro mix that i'm using so it works it works yeah yeah and so how's arugula for you as far as difficulty arugula has been fine um like over the years like i'm just so and obviously you know this too like as you practice and do this every day you get so good and your knowledge just becomes so intuitive so when i started growing arugula i was testing out seed densities and i realized very quickly that if i didn't want any like molding or rot to happen in the arugula i just needed to lower the seed density because the top canopy will block out the bottom canopy they won't get light they'll stay yellow and then they'll just start dying and degrading and then it'll ruin the whole crop yep so i'm running my arugula trays at like 0.5 ounces of seeds which is like really low yes and what kind of yield do you get off that like i'm getting four ounces okay so you get a quarter pound that's like 100 grams okay okay like i'd prefer six or eight but yeah yeah well and the neat things too is i mean i found this because i've grown you know dozens of different microgreen varieties as you have is that as long as you look at how things are allocated some crops have a massive profit margin like say p shoots and then others have a fairly small profit margin like something like like a arugula or an amaranth or something like that but as long as the vast majority of your allocation is profitable it kind of covers everything else right yep which is super cool because you're making those higher profit margins on the other products that you're selling you're able to still fulfill the desires of of customers in other ways that you don't necessarily want to do a lot of or that is a little bit cost prohibitive exactly so are some of those i'm curious or maybe you answered it with arugula but is are any of those sort of loss leaders in in that respect like you mentioned when we talked about how things are allocated for you in your production you said you do one tray of this and two trays of that a week are some of those loss leaders where you don't really make money at them but it's worth it for you to sell it to get the customers because then they'll buy other things too um no i mean i'm making profits on everything there's no like there's no like unprofitable microgreens for me something like the arugula say i'm getting such a low yield i'm just charging a higher price sure so it's all it's all profitable i probably the thing like wheat grass is annoying to me like that's the one that i want to cut out but my customers want it so like i'm gonna keep them healthy um right but that's not really like a profit standpoint that's more of just like me not liking to grow it yeah exactly and so in regards to some of those problem crops like wheatgrass and sunflower you're i'm assuming you're sanitizing that seed no i don't sanitize any seeds really they just go you just go right in go right in and typically it's good like occasionally i'll just get like especially for weak actually wheatgrass and sunflower the seeds are the most important part i'll have a bag of seeds where there's no mold at all and then i'll have a bag of seeds that definitely gets mold on every tray and it's just a matter of if those mold spores are on those seeds typically um i don't sanitize my seeds because i've been able to get away with not doing that i'd rather not do that and there may be some beneficial organisms on those seeds that i don't necessarily want to like kill either from like a really weird like deep health perspective um and it's just it would add another step to my process which would annoy me also the way i'm soaking my seeds uh i have an automatic seed soaking system so if i had to pre-sanitize my seeds it actually wouldn't allow me to use this system because you're not going to soak them in the sanitized water you're going to let them sit in there for maybe 5-10 minutes right well you just have to do it before i've seen that that's one of the things that you showed me uh when we first met it's really it's a really cool setup because then you don't have to worry about coming to drain them or whatever just does it automatically right so i mean i guess in terms of sanitizing you just do it before because it's only five to ten minutes and then you would load them into there to to do that whole step the problem though there for me is that at that point so i have to come in and manually unload the benefit is that it's it's putting the water on automatically if i get the seeds wet and then put them into these buckets now they're sitting wet which is a problem you want to get water on them right away um so that's yeah that's like why it wouldn't work with my system but right so i mean my question a big question there because i mean for me when i was operating um at your scale or actually at the height of my operation we were doing about 200 flats actually there was even a time where we were doing up to 400 flats a week and so if in two cycles i couldn't fit 400 everywhere we'd do it we'd do two big crop outs a week but the challenge i always had is that and i identified the exact same thing thing you just said about sunflowers it really does come down to the seed the problem i had is that you know i'd get these same seeds they're like they all come from italy like the black oil sunflower the best ones do come from an italian some italian growers i got them through mum spreading seeds my challenge was i would sometimes get a batch of seed that i'd even pre-test and i go okay i like this send me you know a pallet full of that seed i would get that seed and if i was identifying those problems i'm kind of screwed so have you not been in a situation where you are basically sitting on a lot of seed and if you didn't sanitize that you're basically compromising half your yield for an entire you know 200 pounds of seed that you're sitting on so i don't run into any mold problems with uh any other variety really than than wheat grass the sunflower seeds like they'll be wonky and like some won't germinate and i do see like sometimes mold forming on some of the seeds and maybe right when you take them out of germination there's like a big spider web on top in my sunflower video i literally tell people to just water top water right over that and it it breaks up the mold colony and destroys it and now that the tray has airflow once it's in the main room the mold actually doesn't come back that's a it's amazing how see i've never i've never been able to do that but but the thing is that's important to recognize with microgreens just like any other type of growing is every climate you're in whether you're inside or out there's variability where you are because you're in long island new york where you are the air you have around you is different than what i have here uh and there's so many variables too this the soil you're getting uh the humidity the temperature what what temperature do you operate your main your main growing room what what temperature do you keep that at i try to keep it between like 71 and 73. okay um if it gets up to 77 i'm gonna start seeing some problems and then uh if it gets below 70 i'm going to start seeing some like the greens just like feel cold like i don't know how to explain it but like especially the sunflowers they just feel cold but yeah i want my germination room to be 69.70 though yep yeah yeah because if it's too warm you can run into problems with uh that's that's where i've always run into fungus problems and things like that what's cool about micro greens it's so it's so interesting normally you would want a warm damp environment for for starting seeds like for vegetables but because these so these processes of seed sprouting they generate waste heat and when you have a tray that's filled with all these seeds like thousands of seeds the trees are getting warm in between the in between like i'll grab my wheatgrass to come out out of germination into into the grow room and the trays are literally warm under my hands so you that's why i think you want to keep the temperature lower in your germination room because they're getting so much hotter than you realize that's a really good point and so that leads me to my next question is what's your germinating process are you stacking uh the trays on top doing it that way yeah okay and so that that's where you really see that heat because you know one thing i've i've found over the years some can do it better than others but sunflower trays i was never able to stack more than six on top because it generates so much heat that the one at the bottom you would get this like crazy heat spot that would just would basically rot everything in the center wow um i've never experienced that i've also never stacked my trays more than six so i'm always doing six max for everything that seems to be the magic number i've never been able to go over that yeah i go over it a little bit but then you might run into some slight problems so six seems to be the magic number so that's the way you do it and then um what do describe what your germination area is look like is that do you do you put them on a rack and bring that to your planting station or how do you what does that step look like um so my videos actually that are launching right now on youtube uh the one that posted this tuesday and then the next three are on micro greens racks and in the last video i talk about other uses for the micro greens rack and i call it there's this thing that i built that i call the super rack and this is essentially a rack on wheels with like two or three times as many shelves as your grow racks so in the germination room i'll make the trays six at a time stack them put them on um and then this is the second thing in that video a germination rack so a little bit of a different setup than the grow room they go on their stacked they get a weight on top like a 14 pound paving stone yep and then they're ready in about three days for most varieties so i'll wipe off the bottom of the tray to get most of the dirt off and then i'll put i'll load them onto the super rack so on this super rack i can put i don't even know how many at least like probably like 40 trays 50 trays 60 trays on one rack and it's improved my efficiency drastically because you can move a ton of trays around the farm all at once so load them onto this rack move it out to the main grow room and then i'm putting the these new trays onto the racks as i'm pulling the trays that are ready for harvest onto the super rack and then i'm using that to harvest as well they i don't know if you can see them but they're kind of right over oh yeah there they sit behind the harvesting station and then um brie can easily just pull the trays off and and they're all right there ready for her right on so you mentioned uh bree there how many people are working with you in your operation i have i guess three three and then plus me and it's all part time um i like to i like to have at least a few people because it builds resilience for your company if somebody leaves then the other person kind of fill in spots if somebody calls in sick or something exactly and also cross training is another great thing to do which i haven't been doing enough of lately but having your employees know how to do the harvesting the driving in each aspect um so yeah i have what was awesome is i had this girl dana and she was doing all the delivery driving and then also helping me with social media i think because of kovid her mental health was declining a little bit and she didn't want to work anymore so she ended up quitting and i lost my delivery driver and the person who was finally allowing me to start ramping up social media again lost her all in one and then i had to start doing the deliveries and that was like the worst thing that happened to me during kovid um i mean it's not the worst thing in the world like my business is still fine and i'm growing and figuring out other things but so yeah so i had her and then i lost her i have one girl doing one day a week on thursdays that's the big delivery drive so she's doing that then i have brie she's a superstar she does all the harvesting and then she also does a small drive on monday and then i got my dad retired so he's been doing the driving on tuesday and wednesday for me which is great because now i have time again um yeah and that's about it i do i do all the watering i essentially do all the growing so i'm doing the watering in the morning then i'm doing all the tray making and then i'm pretty much done for the day until orders are ready to be packed up so that's one of the great things about microgreens farming is this happens once you get employees and this also will happen in the beginning where there's not a lot of work that needs to be done like the plants know how to grow they're going to be there growing for you so once you set them up you have a lot of free time i'm working maybe like an hour to two hours a day on actually like farm labor and then the rest i'm focusing on you know youtube and social media and other aspects building software and all that amazing so so donnie what i'd like to do now is uh we're this this video is going to come out on youtube and from the field dot tv what i'd like to do now is do a special segment because we're already 50 minutes into this this is a long video for youtube what i'd like to do is end it here for youtube and then then i want i've got a bunch of other detailed questions i want to get in for our members but so right now we're going to end this one for youtube tell everybody where they can go to learn more about you and check out your videos you know you reference a lot of things uh just give people the basics on where they can go and check you out yeah so uh definitely go subscribe to my channel on youtube it's at donnie greens and that's my handle for everything um but my main channel is really my youtube where i post the educational videos on micro greens and micro greens business i'm having a lot of fun doing it and it seems that the feedback from other farmers and and other entrepreneurs they're loving the videos and finding them super useful so you can find me on there and then instagram i was starting to get rolling and then but like i said i lost dana so um but there's still a lot of great posts on instagram i've been making these carousel posts where it's like a topic in the front you're learning about it and then a bunch of information is at the end um so instagram is a great place to learn from my content too and from there you can find everything else my twitter isn't that important my website's not that important so that's awesome donnie thanks for doing that thanks for thanks for joining me here today no problem thanks for having me i hope you guys enjoyed that video i'd love to take this opportunity to invite you to a web class that i'm doing talking about micro greens and how you can make 1500 bucks a week profit without selling at any of the conventional market streams such as restaurants farmers markets grocery stores or distributors out of all the over a thousand videos that i've published on my youtube channel and my website over the last six years this is by far the most valuable and relevant to the time content that i've ever produced if that sounds interesting to you click the link in the top right of the screen or go directly to microgreenswebclass.com or follow the link beneath this video you

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 282,337

Rating: 4.9315438 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening

Id: nVJIZbXOxZo

Length: 52min 34sec (3154 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020