Chasing Our Dream — to a Hydroponic Farm in Iowa

So, a couple of thirty somethings leave their companies, careers, and home and bet everything on a pipe dream. Then what?

My partner, Nick, and I emptied a bag of corporate burnout and Covid and refilled it with a new outlook, a fresh start, and love. I can't say the change happened in a blink of an eye, but it began just over 6 months ago, when we purchased a well-loved, third-or-fourth-hand, forty-foot storage building outfitted for an indoor hydroponic farm. Located not far from the farm owned by this column’s regular writer, Joe Villines, our facility contains 256 towers that allow us to grow about 3,000 plants at any given time. And now, here we are, growing and selling amazing produce year-round. It’s about the most delicious produce that Nick and I, along with many others, have ever tasted, and it’s given us a beautiful life that neither of us saw coming. Girl meets boy, life happens and they drift apart, then girl ends up meeting boy again, and now they grow vegetables together. 

Nick and I, together, have more than thirty years’ experience in restaurant management — a highly stressful field that wasn’t good for our mental or physical health. I’d suffered from anxiety and depression, and, after having a kidney transplant, my new kidney seemed to be failing, and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. I suspected it was the stress. So, after trying out (and loving) a hydroponic tower that Nick got me for Christmas, we came up with a plan to switch from serving people food to growing food — and growing it the way we wanted to grow it. We dropped every dime we had into this dream, and now, less than a year later, we are the owners and operators of Leafy Dreams LLC. 

That first tower, which lived in my office and accommodated up to twenty-seven plants at a time, became the vehicle for our mutual love language: feeding people in the purest way we know how. Now, our facility is forty feet of magic, allowing us not only to grow produce sustainably year-round, but also to start seedlings indoors in early spring to get a jump-start on our outdoor gardens. 

As of early February, we have been up and running and able to share a sustainable source of produce that we can harvest daily any day of the year. We needed a way to get the word out that we existed — it was far too early for farmers markets, none of the restaurants were going to bring on our produce knowing nothing about us — so we used social media to offer samples of our produce to anyone in the area that wanted to try it, free of charge. That helped get our “Dreamy Blend” salad mixes into a couple of local markets, officially putting us on our way to turning this pipe dream into a full-blown reality. Our little operation now has a detailed five-year plan to expand into several other forms of sustainable farming; we are working towards that goal every day. 

We work long days, each one a learning experience. We fail, we prevail. The wins keep us going on even the most grueling days. Case in point: Our “coolbot” allows us to control temperature and humidity to provide our plants the perfect environment, whether it’s 100+°F or -12 outside. At least, that’s the idea. Just when we thought we knew what we were doing, with our farm full for the very first time, we checked one evening in late summer and found almost everything either dead or close to it. We had misconfigured a single setting and, when we arrived, it was roughly 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity. It was a devastating loss. We recovered quickly, however, because our seedlings miraculously survived. 

Nick and I are currently renting a place close to Des Moines while our farm sits on a piece of property owned by my family that they are graciously allowing us to use until we purchase a home of our own.The property is about an hour south of us in Lacona, Iowa, a town of 333 people. I commute daily on days that Nick is working his second job that he picked up to help with expenses. When we visit the farm together, we spend three or four days at a time, sleep in a camper, and take care of all of the maintenance and heavy lifting for the week. We often joke that he is the muscle of the operation while I handle everything else, something that is far from the truth. The hours are long, the to-do lists often seem never ending, and sometimes we have to just tough it out to accomplish anything at all. Still at the end of every day, good or bad, every second on the road, every fight, all the blood, sweat, and tears have been worth it. We are helping our community and using a sustainable farm to do our part to protect the planet. And we each get to spend our days working with our best friend. What more could anyone really ask for?