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Little Wild Things City Farm
Little Wild Things City Farm produces soil-grown microgreens, shoots, and edible flowers on less than one-quarter acre in the heart of Washington, D.C.
Little Wild Things City Farm produces soil-grown microgreens, shoots, and edible flowers on less than one-quarter acre in the heart of Washington, D.C.
We believe that environmentally sustainable, commercially viable farming is possible in urban landscapes—and we're proving it.
As a first generation farm, we combine the best of time-honored sustainable growing techniques with new innovations and a disciplined business focus to achieve high yields from our very small growing spaces.
We aim to demonstrate that farming is a desirable career for the best and brightest of the next generation, and seek to develop relationships with customers who share our values to create a transformative impact on our local food system.
WHAT ARE MICROGREENS?
Our microgreens are tiny edible greens that provide exceptional flavor, nutritional value, texture, and color to salads, sandwiches, wraps, tacos, pizza, smoothies, soup and more. Smaller than “baby greens,” and harvested later than “sprouts,” microgreens provide a variety of leaf flavors, such as sweet and spicy, and come in many vibrant colors. Fine dining chefs use microgreens to enhance the beauty, taste and freshness of their dishes with their delicate textures and distinctive flavors.
Researchers at the USDA Agricultural Research Service and the University of Maryland began studying the nutritional content of microgreens in 2012. They looked at four groups of vitamins and other phytochemicals – including vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta carotene — in 25 varieties of microgreens. The researchers found that leaves from nearly all of the microgreens had four to six times more nutrients than the mature leaves of the same plant, with variation among the varieties – red cabbage was highest in vitamin C, while the green daikon radish microgreens had the most vitamin E [i]
[i] Xiao, Z.; Lester, G. E.; Luo, Y.; Wang, Q. (2012). "Assessment of Vitamin and Carotenoid Concentrations of Emerging Food Products: Edible Microgreens". Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 60 (31): 7644-7651
Indoor Vertical Farming - Edible Flowers
Sananbio U.S.
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Edible flowers are having quite the moment in the culinary scene. A crucial part of being a successful vertical farm is being able to meet the demand of the growing markets and consumer needs.
With the dynamic ability of the Radix, we are giving our grow partners the ability to do just that. Our knowledge of working with hundreds of cultivars gets passed on to our partners.
If we want this industry to grow, we must support its growth.
Let's grow together.
Getting The Growing Bug
Adam Green
Photo courtesy of Adam Green
Adam Green took a "winding road" through college, but found his niche growing microgreens and other crops at AGreen Farms.
May 8, 2019
Before he founded his own vertical farm in his apartment building,, Adam Green’s journey through college was, as he calls it, “a winding road.” He started out at Drexel University in his native Philadelphia before he transferred to Syracuse University in Upstate New York, where he changed his major “three or four times.” Green then transferred again — this time to Temple University, back home in Philadelphia — and graduated with a degree in vocational development.
“When I was at Drexel, I was a film major,” he says. “Then I guess it went from being a screenwriter and not falling in love with the film industry so much, so I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write fiction novels, so I became an English major. Then that didn't work out.” At Syracuse, he got the "science bug" – and switched to geology – before majoring in phycology when he transferred to Temple.
It was at Temple that horticulture got onto Green’s radar. Along with his girlfriend, who majored in horticulture, Green started shopping at farmers markets in Philadelphia and volunteering at Backyard Eats, an urban garden company in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood, in 2017. Today, Green has launched his own business — AGreen Farms — a hydroponic indoor farm in Philadelphia growing microgreens, herbs, edible flowers and more.
“I think that college is kind of now become, for a lot of Millennials, a place where you find what you don't want to do — and that's kind of what it was for me for sure,” Green says. “By finding out what I didn't want to do, I found out what I was most passionate about, and that was food.”
Gaining experience
After he transferred to Temple, Green wanted to switch to horticulture as a major. But due to his previous majors, he was unable to take the requisite sciences classes. When Green graduated last May he sought out any growing experience he could. He says he applied to pretty much “any indoor farm that was a moderate success in the country.” Only one got back to him: Farm.One, a New York City specialty crop producer whose primary customers are restaurants in the Big Apple.
“When I went there I had a really great sales manager in Wilson [Gibbons] and he showed me the ropes of what it's like to walk into a restaurant unannounced with a bunch of rare and exciting products, and I was just totally bitten by the sales bug,” he says. “It was funny that I wanted to be a paid farmhand at Farm.One and they didn't have a position open, so I took what I could."
Green returned to Philadelphia in August and started applying for jobs at different farms in the area, but without a horticulture degree or science background, no opportunities presented themselves. But after a conversation with his dad Bill, a career entrepreneur, AGreen Farms was born. Initial funding came from Bill.
“We had been talking about me starting my own farm for a few years, but we wanted to get, obviously, as much experience before I took such a daring venture on, for sure,” he says. “Things just fell into place; the timing was just kind of right.”
Mapping out a business plan
Philadelphia — like New York — has a burgeoning restaurant scene where chefs crave locally-grown produce for their restaurants, Green says. It helped that the elder Green had helped finance restaurateur Michael Schulson. Schulson had just opened Giuseppe & Sons, an Italian restaurant, and needed microgreens and AGreen Farms had its first customer.
“With my time at Farm.One, the specialty herbs started to excite me, and the edible flowers started to excite me, so it's really the unique flavors and the strong flavors that really interested me the most, and they became items that I was pretty good at selling because they're so hard to access for chefs while also being local and of really high quality,” he says.
Green estimates that were he able to add other notable area chefs and restaurants to this client list — a process that’s already begun — the farm would be set-up for long-term success. As the business begins, professional chefs and some hospitality establishments are the clientele Green is after.
To get the farm itself built, and Brandon Merrill was hired as farm manager. Merrill previously worked for Oasis Biotech, a Chinese-owned corporate growing company, and urban farming company Gotham Greens.
“We're totally giving him a ton of creative freedom, and that's why we got him on board to build this farm and not wait until the farm was built and then him say, ‘You know what? I wouldn't have done it this way,’” Green says.
The 5,000-square-foot growing space — outfitted with “bare bones” technology to keep costs down — is in Green’s apartment building. The company that owns his building, Post Brothers, was willing to lease him the space (and allow the farm to be built) in part because of an existing business relationship with Schulson. Green adds that, as opposed to other potential farm sites that wanted him to sign a five-year lease, Post Brothers allowed him to sign a more flexible lease. The plan is to prove the concept, take on investment and move into a bigger growing space to continue growing the company.
“It's going be a grind for sure, and it's not going to be easy. It's going to be about getting the right people in place, having a really great team, and just hauling ass,” Green says. “We're going to be developing relationships with chefs that we haven't met and have connections with, by walking into their restaurants three days a week and knowing what products they're already purchasing from distributors from across the country, and just bringing it to them more locally, more fresh and with better quality."