There is nothing easy about growing things in the ground in Texas. You have to know exactly — like exactly — what you want to farm, because there are no effortless days in the land of humid winters and hail-hammering summers.
North Texas weather is a haunted house full of crane flies, and the cost of entry to build even the micro-est of farms is steep. Margins for sales are paper thin, and there are never enough farmers at city markets because transportation can easily kill a budget.
Profound Microfarms and Foods, Lucas
“Every day there’s something,” says Jeff Bednar, owner of Profound Microfarms and Foods in Lucas. Ten years ago, he did something absolutely bananas: He ditched his real estate career and bought a farm. Who does that, right? He’d barely been able to keep a house plant alive, and then he was staring down 2.6 acres and 14,000 square feet of greenhouses.
The thing is, Profound Microfarms is doing well enough to expand. Bednar, who runs the farm with his wife, Lee, recently closed a deal on more land, bringing the total to 10 acres and nearly 45,000 square feet of greenhouses. It’s a swath of land that will soon be home to a full-scale, no-till regenerative soil farming operation, including rows of hydroponic production for fruiting crops like peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers. The expansion will also continue to house nurseries for local farmers and home growers.
Things changed for Profound during the pandemic. Actually, “changed” is too callous and small a word. Things, more appropriately, rage-screamed. In the first week of retail home delivery, a pivot that followed the shutdown in 2020, Profound saw three times the sales it had ever done at local restaurants.
Today, those numbers have plateaued. As the pandemic and climate change settle into our everyday lives, North Texas microfarmers are readying themselves for another round of adaptation. That’s the thing with farming these days: You weren’t doing it for the money, even in a normal year.
Learn more about Profound Microfarms and Profound Foods at profoundfoods.com.
Our Farmlet, Anna
Marylinda Jones, who runs Our Farmlet in Anna and partners with Profound Foods to deliver her goods across the area, is keenly aware of the constant need for adaptation. She started her career in corporate IT, a life of cost estimations at IBM that spanned two decades.
The past few weeks, however, she’s spent her time harvesting dozens of spring onions. She’s unearthed baby leeks and onion flowers. That’s her bread and butter right now, as well as edible flowers like snapdragons and violas. Jones’ harvest survived the frigid winter blasts, thanks to tunnels she and her husband carved into the land and the frost cloth they wrapped around tender vegetation.
Was all of this, this unthinkable amount of work, what she imagined she’d be doing now, at 81 years old?
“I would never have said, ‘I’m selling edible flowers to high-end restaurants,’” she says, but “I think about what I would do if I weren’t doing this … and I don’t have a good answer for that.”
You can find produce from Our Farmlet at profoundfoods.com.
Pequeño Farms, Dallas
Most of the week, you’ll find Olivia Lopez and Jonathan Percival in their commercial kitchen in the Design District, but they’d much rather be outside.
There are no windows in their warehouse-style kitchen, and equipment is strewn about with makeshift spaces for small businesses like their pop-up and catering company, Molino Olōyō, a recent James Beard semifinalist.
The couple has carved out a space to cook, experiment and nixtamalize heirloom corn into extraordinary tortillas. On this visit, Lopez presses amethyst-purple masa into a circle, a magic and instant tortilla of the highest order, and Percival spoons outrageously juicy pulled pork into a cast iron on a mobile stove. This isn’t any restaurant’s kitchen, but that’s not what’s important.
Their garden, at least to Lopez and Percival, is the whole deal. Their pop-up dinners are growing in frequency and popularity, but growing things is a moral imperative. For Lopez, cooking with native crops and pulling the freshest possible herbs and greens from the ground is non-negotiable; it’s how she connects to her food. For Percival, this, too, is a soulful thing. He worked a corporate job before he got laid off in February 2020.
“I had to find out what was missing in my life,” he says. “Nature is always right.”
Their little Eden is a garden built from a barren patch of clay and limestone and transformed into half an acre of chocolate-rich soil in Lancaster. There are thunderheads of salad greens, plenty of sweet potatoes, and colorful squash blossoms. Peppers, okra, eggplant and small but bold tomatoes grow on Pequeño Farms like they’ve never been bothered by humans.
Lopez and Percival spent the past few months readying for spring and summer, making sure the soil is heavenly, heaping in compost. Radishes and spring onions are ready now, and days ago they yanked armfuls of long, vivid green stalks with milk-white bulbs at the end.
See more of what’s growing at Pequeño Farms at instagram.com/pequeno_farms. And order tortillas and look for pop-up events at instagram.com/molino_oloyo.
Jubilant Fields Farms, Trenton
Dawson Mehalko was 11 years old when he started a farm in his parent’s backyard. Melons and corn were early first attempts, and he started by selling them to his community at the local church.
“I don’t think I had repeat customers,” he says now, at age 19 and as owner of Jubilant Fields Farms in Trenton. “I don’t think they were very good.” Salad greens, radishes and carrots were next.
He taught himself what it means to maintain a healthy biome, focusing on the connection between healthy soil and plants. He uses permanent growing beds, allowing the webs of raw organic matter to bind and communicate. No tractors, no tech disruption — just plenty of water and steamy compost to keep his crops happy.
Patina Green in McKinney was his first restaurant customer: He sent them his backyard-grown radishes, turnips and broccolini. Mehalko’s mom made the deliveries, as he wasn’t old enough to drive. Dallas chef Matt McCallister took notice, too, using Mehalko’s greens for some very farm-to-table salads at the now-shuttered Homewood restaurant.
Mehalko beams when talking about his tomatoes. The absolute, bar none, best time for Texas tomatoes is the dead of summer, June and July, and Mehalko says he’s proud that he’ll have tomatoes for far longer than those two sweltering months. Thanks to a heated greenhouse, he can keep the tomatoes at an even 90 degrees.
“That really reinvigorated me — and just, frankly, being really proud of the things that I grow,” he says. “It’s something I want to do for a long time.”
You can find Mehalko at Good Local Markets — at White Rock on Saturdays and Lakewood on Sundays. His stand there focuses solely on leafy greens so he can corner the market on local salads. One bonus: He can drive himself now.
Follow Jubilant Fields Farms at instagram.com/jubilantfarms.