Blue Glass Farm

Every now and then I pick up a magazine about something I know nothing about, just for a glimpse into that world. In 2021 it was a gardening magazine, and inside was an article about the Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in New York City. What makes them strange is that they aren't hydroponic. They grow in soil, on a roof. How does one get soil on top of a building? They drag it there, up an elevator and out of a wheelbarrow, a process I can only imagine is slow and expensive. They engineered special membranes so the roof could carry it all. And then they ran a profitable farm on about an acre of rooftop in the middle of New York City.

That broke my brain a little. I grew up in an agricultural community in eastern Washington, where farms with hundreds or thousands of acres grossed hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, and the families running them talked about barely affording the double-wide they lived in. Here was a tiny farm doing it the most expensive way I could imagine, and making a real go of it. Pulling that thread led me to what some folks call market gardening. Biointensive growing on small acreage, sold direct to customers, high-value crops packed into the tightest space you can manage, without heavy equipment or big fixed infrastructure. Nobody is buying a quarter-million-dollar combine or putting up grain silos. Instead of $700 an acre for alfalfa against $600 in costs, you're aiming at $100,000 an acre.

I was consulting at the time and wanted something to do on the side, and farming struck me as a neat side gig. Finding land near Seattle was a struggle, but we eventually found Viva Farms, an organization that runs incubator plots, small pieces of ground with shared resources for people getting started. In 2022 we started Blue Glass Farm. "We" is me and my farm partner Alex, who had previously run a small flower farm. The plan was to market garden largely in the style of JM Fortier, the famous market gardener from outside Montreal.

The day we committed, the valley kicked us in the face. The soils of the Sammamish Valley, just outside Woodinville, Washington, are incredibly wet, which meant we couldn't work them the way the playbook assumed, with small walk-behind tractors. Plenty of people told us some version of the same thing. You can't do this here. It won't work. People don't grow here for a reason. But it was the ground we had, so we found a method that fit it. Deep mulching. Lay a thick layer of compost mulch on top of the soil, never bring in heavy equipment, and grow in the mulch itself.

Year one was about growing anything at all, and it was terrible. Deep mulching turned out to be more technical than we realized, we were doing pieces of it wrong, and things took months to kick into gear. We had also opened with an online store, which I can now say is the single most impossible business I could have dreamed up, bootstrapping an e-commerce operation on top of a farm. A venture-scale problem, attacked by two people on borrowed time. Year two was about finding anyone who might buy what we grew. We started selling through a local food hub, and I learned what e-commerce in a two-sided market feels like when you're not Amazon. Things sold and I had no idea why. That blindness eventually drove me to build a data pipeline over the marketplace so we could finally see what demand looked like, a project that gets its own page.

Year three was about getting good at sales, and it nearly broke me. At the end of that season I cried. I have never been so emotionally exhausted by an effort in my life. We were working incredibly hard, we were working at the wrong things, and the farm wasn't working. I went through something like grief, the feeling that the dream of having a farm was dying. What I eventually understood is that it wasn't the farm that was dying. It was the way we were farming that had to die, to make room for what the farm could actually be. We had been attached to the how instead of the what. When we started the farmers market in 2024 we were bad at it, a few hundred dollars in sales a month. A good week now does ten times that. We got good at picking the right crops, selling them, understanding our customers and relating to them, getting attention, merchandising, and pricing accurately.

People ask what farming taught me, and the honest answer is that it was like getting an MBA. I stand by farming being one of the hardest businesses in the world. You sell a perishable product direct to customers through multiple channels, and the downside is brutally asymmetric. Weather, pests, seed availability, fuel prices, an injury, labor falling through, an irrigation failure. Any of them can take a huge bite out of a year's revenue, and a few of them can take the whole operation. So we had to get smart. We built a sophisticated web presence, ran social campaigns, learned digital marketing, learned to sell in person, learned merchandising and sourcing. We learned to run a factory of vegetables out of a big soft fuzzy factory full of bugs, and to do it without spraying a single herbicide, pesticide, or fungicide, because we and our community eat this food.

Farming also rewired how I work. It taught me to solve problems at the scale they need to be solved, to juggle a million disparate systems and pick tasks up and put them down cleanly, to build resiliency into a complicated system, and not to reinvent wheels when great examples exist. Most of all it taught me about test cycles. A good farmer might grow fifty corn crops in an entire lifetime. A good digital marketer can try fifty ads in an afternoon. When experiments are that expensive, you learn to be deliberate about which ones you run and ruthless about what you take from each.

And the food is the reason I can't quite let it go. As far as I'm concerned we grow the best vegetables in the city, and the moments that produces are addicting in their own right. Introducing a kid to a vegetable they actually dig, knowing their life just got a little better for finding it. Helping someone with a new diagnosis find vegetables that fit the way they now have to eat. Watching a recipe suggestion light somebody up. People come to our stand because we are passionate about food, my curiosity about the world carried to its extreme, and they can feel that glow.

So where does it land? Farming is easily the least financially successful venture I've ever run, and it is also the one I've poured the most of myself into, learned the most from, and gotten genuinely professional at. Along the way we built marketing campaigns that worked, wrote our own crop-planning software, and ended up with a business we could step into full-time if we wanted it. But farming was never my passion. Solving problems is, and after five seasons the farm has started to feel like a solved problem. It will probably settle into something we do on the side, because we like feeding our community and the farm is a hell of a playground. If you've ever driven a piece of heavy equipment, you know. It's addicting.