City Roots Owners Talk About Their Decision To Downsize

By Bach Pham

Sep 26, 2018

Bach Pham

There was a sense of calm between City Roots owners Robbie and Eric McClam as they worked on the field at the farm last week, preparing for the Glass Half Full Festival. After a busy first half of the year, the quiet moment was a welcome turn for the father and son.

The change came by choice.

Founded more than a decade ago, City Roots occupies a few acres in Columbia’s Rosewood neighborhood, near the Hamilton-Owens Airport. But recently, the community-minded urban farm began growing faster, expanding production at a second site.

“This past winter and spring we were scaling the farm from three acres to about an additional 30 acres to which we were planting a dozen or so acres of vegetables,” says Eric McClam. “We basically had five farms: a microgreen farm, a mushroom farm, a flower farm, a vegetable farm, and an agrotourism farm spread across two locations, 15-20 minutes apart. That was fun and exciting, but had its own new set of challenges.”

The size and scope of the changes was immediately felt. City Roots was branching in several directions with production, and struggling to make it all connect.

“We had over 200 different things we were growing between the farms,” Eric says. “No one can do 200 things well.”

The complexity of the farm’s rapid growth brought as many technical issues as it did benefits. City Roots was doing everything: growing, processing and delivering to local restaurants in Columbia and food hubs in Atlanta, Greenville and Charleston nearly every day of the week.

“We had three deliveries going on a day at one time on some occasions,” Robbie says. “We had vans in the shop, car repairs all the time.”

The breaking point hit over the summer when Eric fell ill and was forced to take some time off.

“What precipitated the scaling back and hard look at everything was I literally got shingles from stress this summer and had to stay home for a period of time,” says Eric. “While at home, I had time to take a hard look at what was holding that stress and recognizing that it was the diversity and scale of the farm. Everybody has a grounding moment in their life and says, ‘OK, what is important to me?’ The farm and family are important.

“So after making the hard decisions, we scaled it back to fit what works well for the farm. We recognized that getting better at what we do well and letting go of things that were painful to let go, especially reducing staff — some of whom had been here for many years — was something necessary for the direction of the business.”

Eric calls the decision to lay off employees “the hardest decision.” The farm went from 23 employees to about 15.

“We hope we are still in a good place with everyone. We just didn’t have the ability to retain them. We had to be nimble and change course. My role as the head farmer is to steer the ship. We were heading for a ditch, and we needed to get back on course.”

The McClams made several major changes in the past few months. Production at their second site was halted, and the community supported agriculture (CSA) program was cut.

“When we first started, the CSA was exciting and a good business model for us,” says Eric. “We never could quite get the volume of CSA we needed to make that diversified larger scale work, though. … We realized that we’re better suited to do a variety of things and bringing those to market and doing it that way.”

While the field side of the farm struggled to find the right identity, two parts of the farm actually have grown over the years: microgreen and mushroom production.

Microgreens went from being a small portion of the farm in the beginning to quickly becoming the biggest component of City Roots, seen not just in Columbia, but everywhere in the South from menus in Charleston to shelves in every Whole Foods in the Southeast.

“A lot of people grow organic vegetables, but not a lot of people grow microgreens and mushrooms,” says Eric. “Those are what we’re most known for, that’s our niche market and what works really well for us.”

City Roots plans to shift their focus to sharpening their microgreen and mushroom production, maintaining some small-scale flower production, and simply putting more time into the urban farm itself.

“We’re going to be putting more landscaping around the farm, more shrubs and trees, making the farm a prettier place and improving it as an event venue,” Eric says. “I’m excited about putting more emphasis here at the home farm and getting back to the roots at City Roots.”

Eric still plans to maintain the educational aspect of the farm. This year they doubled the number of school tours from last year, and plan to continue finding ways to share the farm with the community. They have also been exploring pickling, dedicating a portion of the farm to growing root vegetables and plants like ginger to contribute towards different recipes to sell at the farm.

There is still hope to do some large-scale gardening, especially with one particular product that has become a much-talked about agricultural item: hemp. The farm applied for the industrial hemp pilot program run by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture and is currently in the running to be one of the 40 farms certified to grow hemp in South Carolina.

“We are excited about that potential,” says Eric. “It’s a new niche market that we see a lot of potential for growth.”