Farm Happy Keeps Customers Happy During Pandemic

Whether it’s the middle of winter, a pandemic or both, market garden Farm Happy is green and growing. Inside greenhouses, rows of spinach cover the ground, and microgreens under UV light pop out of the soil. Outside, ducks and chickens roam the property, and thousands of tulips and dahlias emerge from the ground. As spring approaches, farmers John McConville and Jennifer Gordon are busy both planting and harvesting in Jackson,Wisconsin. 

Before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, customers could find Farm Happy at the Milwaukee Winter Farmers Market, hosted at the Mitchell Park Domes on Saturdays. Many businesses relied on that market for non-restaurant sales. Since the closure of large gatherings and declining restaurant demand, Farm Happy has found ways to continue providing fresh produce to customers. In fact, more people than ever are using the online market box option, to the extent that some items sell out by the end of the week. 

“It is the only thing keeping us in business right now,” said Gordon. “Now I’m getting dings all day long on my phone. I’m trying to keep up with who’s getting what.”

Gordon and McConville typically put together a harvest sheet each week for online restaurant orders. Now, they add the growing number of individual customer orders in which one creates a “market box” of items. It’s similar to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) concept, but completely customizable based on what’s in season. Customers can choose between pick-up and delivery options. 

Farm Happy produce includes spinach, tomatoes, carrots, and other vegetables, as well as duck and chicken eggs. But one largely popular item is a considerably small crop: microgreens. 

Grown indoors under UV light, microgreens can be harvested year-round. McConville and Gordon grow theirs in hoop houses constantly kept above 50 degrees, and use a system that waters the plants from below. Microgreens are sensitive plants that can be difficult to perfect growing, but only need one or two weeks after planting before harvest. They densely pack both the nutrients and flavor of their larger leafy-green equivalent.  

“Arugula [microgreens] tastes just like arugula, if not better,” said McConville. “Same with the basil, it’s very floral.” 

Commonly confused with sprouts, microgreens are harvested later in the growing cycle, when a plant’s first set of leaves, the cotyledon, appears. Typically, the entire sprout is eaten (seed, stem and root) while microgreens are harvested without the root. 

Farm Happy began about five years ago. McConville had been traveling the world for years as a semi-professional kayaker, but returned home to Wisconsin due to a family illness. His father started a garden during that time, which inspired McConville to start growing food. He began frequenting a hydroponics store, where he met Gordon working as a manager. McConville would ask her for gardening advice, and they soon began building their own raised garden beds as a couple. 

Their first year, they sold produce at the Pewaukee Farmers Market, where a chef requested they try growing microgreens. McConville and Gordon were up for the challenge, and by their second growing season began turning their hobby into a full-time business. The horse pasture owned by McConville’s parents in Jackson became Farm Happy. 

Farm Happy typically provides for anywhere from 15 to 20 restaurants at a given time. Small plates restaurant Odd Duck in Bayview has been buying microgreens, duck eggs, spinach, root vegetables, nasturtiums and more from Farm Happy year-round for over two years. 

“A strong relationship between a restaurant and their farm partners can be super beneficial both ways,” said owner Melissa Buchholz. “We provide them with consistent, reliable income and they provide us with consistent, reliable product.”

Odd Duck uses microgreens extensively for garnish and small tasting-menu bites. The photo gallery on their website shows the greens used in every way imaginable: mixed into salads, sprinkled atop cuts of meat and paired with intricate sauces. 

“I firmly believe that food is just another art form like visual art, or music – it just has the added sensory experience of taste,” said Buchholz. “Micros look beautiful, and have a very delicate flavor that can add a lot.”

Produce isn’t the only thing harvested at Farm Happy. An abundance of maple trees on the farm property gave McConville the opportunity to start collecting sap for making maple syrup, a process especially involved during early spring. He explained how the freeze and thaw from daily temperature fluctuations kickstarts sap production in maple trees. A day at 10 degrees above freezing that drops to 10 degrees below freezing at night pulls starches out of the roots and into the leaves for photosynthesis to begin. 

“This is the beginning of the year; this is the life of our season starting,” said McConville. “We’re tapping into that, and taking just a small portion of that sugar rich sap from the trees and reducing it down.” 

Once he harvests the maple sap, McConville pours it into large runoff pans that evaporate it through many chambers, boiling the sap down to syrup. Making just one gallon of maple syrup takes 50 gallons of sap. The wood-fired process may take several hours, but McConville and Gordon have a lot to collect from this season: 240 tapped trees. 

“The ‘midnight-mapler’ is what I call myself,” said McConville. “I try to leave the woods by midnight, but it doesn’t seem to happen that way.”

Maple syrup isn’t the only natural sweetener on the farm. Gordon and McConville also harvest honey from their four bee hives. Initially they had no experience with bees, until Gordon started working as a honeybee research scientist. She found the job offer from Milwaukee-based Strong Microbials on her UW-Milwaukee email roughly one year after graduating with degrees in biology and conservation and environmental science. 

“I thought, how is this even real?” said Gordon. “They were reaching out asking ‘do you like honeybees and agriculture?’ I couldn’t have found a better fit for myself.”

Gordon worked on research making probiotics for honeybees, with the goal of bolstering their immune system and giving them more resilience to pests, pathogens and pesticides. She managed research hives and collected data on the developing probiotic products. 

Once Farm Happy started growing beyond a small market garden, McConville needed more help on the farm. Although transitioning to full-time farming meant Gordon couldn’t keep her research job forever, she applies much of what she learned about beekeeping to Farm Happy. She even hopes to conduct her own honey bee research on the farm.

While the bees are still waking up to spring and making their honey, maple syrup is available now. Because of these natural sweetener options, McConville and Gordon rarely buy cane sugar. Indeed, much of what they eat and cook with comes from their farm. They share some of their creative ideas on Facebook: tomato soup with basil microgreens, amaranth smoothies and turmeric-infused fennel sourdough bread. 

Farm Happy not only uses sustainable growing practices, but regenerative agriculture, a focus on soil health through composting and eliminating pesticides. 

“Unless your soil is healthy, you’re not going to produce a quality tasting plant or a nutrient dense plant,” explained Gordon. 

Sustainability involves buying locally sourced produce from markets or directly from farmers, which means following a diet according to the seasons of an area’s climate. While most fruits and vegetables are available year-round in a conventional grocery store, Wisconsin can’t support growing asparagus or watermelon in the middle of winter. Sustainability requires consuming mostly crops that are in season. Even wintertime has a variety, including spinach, squash and other “storage crops” that can keep for a long time. 

“I think it’s very valuable for people to get a little bit more in touch with their farmer and get to know your vegetables, get to know the seasons that things are available,” said McConville. “Your body actually wants those things during those times of year.”

The logo for Farm Happy, a dog holding a carrot in its mouth, is inspired by Gordon and McConville’s dog, Beau. As for the name, it’s both accurate and ironic. 

“It started off kind of as a joke,” said McConville. “We’re just so happy all the time around here, we’re just the hap, hap, happy farmers!” 

“I like to tell people that Farm Happy is the goal but it’s not the reality,” added Gordon. 

Being self-employed farmers has its challenges. A week’s worth of microgreens could be lost after a single day without watering, or an entire harvest of another crop can go bad. But at the end of the day, Gordon and McConville manage their farm out of a passion for growing food for local and surrounding communities. 

As the heart of spring approaches, customers can expect a variety of additions to the market box menu: radishes, beets, baby kale, bok choy and other crops are coming soon. One can even find Farm Happy “swag,” a colorful tie-dyed t-shirt with the logo of Beau.

When it comes to food security, product availability in grocery stores seems uncertain during the pandemic. But local farms like Farm Happy continue to provide steady supplies of sustainably grown and made products. 

“It is utterly important to support small farmers now with the closure of so many restaurants they normally supply,” said Jackson resident Ann Godsell. “Farmers can’t just stop growing. We need highly nutritious foods to keep ourselves healthy during this time.”

Godsell has been a Farm Happy customer since their beginning days of farming. Today, she even organizes a biweekly order for her neighborhood. 

“Jen and John are a new generation of farmers who care deeply about growing healthy foods in ways that are most beneficial to the environment and our human bodies!” said Godsell. “As a bonus, they are wonderfully kind people.”

While the world feels disconnected and uncertain on a global level, it may be important now more than ever to “know your farmer.”