$10,000 a month growing microgreens in a basement!

Hey guys, I'm in a suburban neighborhood a little north of Calgary and today I want to show you how you can have a home business

growing

microgreens

and you can scale it. These guys here, this operation is called micro acres and these guys. They're generating about ten thousand dollars a

month

in revenue from their microgreen and they're two people running a husband and wife team that work about 40 hours a week and they're doing those kinds of numbers in their

basement

, so we're I'm going to go check this

basement

and see what it's all about. My name is David, my name is Kerstin, we live in Airdrie Alberta and this is our little microgreen farm, my cookie organ, Airdrie Alberta, a little bit north of Calgary and we're sitting. 400 square feet of germination area and

growing

area are going right now, about 170 rocks or so between them germinating to your left here, so this is where it all starts, so now we have about 70 trees growing, everything goes. cat in a little snail abraca other things we do stacked peas radishes sunflowers we have popcorn growing right here we're just going to germinate nice and simple there you go maybe it's about five days after those guys we have some micro leeks germinating up there so These guys are doing a vote two days ago right now, so they're just starting to show up a little bit, they run a six day cycle before going live, yeah, they run to six four tables, this is where basically all the sowing, harvesting, everything is done, yes, we. use all corn-based biodegradable and compostable containers, okay, out of the Los Angeles company, so use three different sizes, two for retail and two for wholesale, and then yeah, this is the main one crop of his acre, so we have five fans running simultaneously 24/7 when there's a damn favorite here.

What you just showed us here is our mm-hmm microleak, which is growing pretty well right now, so these are running for about two weeks right now and these guys are running for nine days, so you're seeing a boat that is actually missing two inches. the growth inside that shell remains, which is pretty cool, which is why chefs love that they have the dehydrated look - it's that sweet, crunchy little scallion, little bit of wheatgrass that we get to come out, so We actually supply the University of Calgary actually requires quite a bit of our product. since they developed a whole new program to provide healthy nutrition to the students, they did a big renovation last year and added a bunch of food stations, so we prepared nine different vegetables for them, one of them is wheatgrass so they can make radish and broccoli juice. and they're adding that really cool culture of healthy

microgreens

to their project - eating the typical pizzas without cafeteria food, the golden brown crust, it's really nice to work with them and work with those chefs, and we've seen a lot. in the Calgary region is that chefs are starting to love, you know, microgreens as nutritional value, but also as an accessible, affordable price point, yeah, and that's your experience in absolutely Yellin aerated, so you have kind of a relationship with these guys in a way and you speak their language certainly helps understand my background.

I operated restaurants that lasted 15 years, building them overall, managing them working with chefs. I understand the cost of food. I understand where our food comes from and, ironically, how much the price actually increases over the years. -Hmm, that's something we try to mitigate here at the farm: bringing in fresh local produce, but at a very basic base price, so we're underpricing much of the competition by about half and still letting them know 80 margins. percentages a lot of respect yes we do it because we understand the culture we understand how to bring that to the table through chefs through general subscriptions through our retail customers through farmers markets we can it's double there's no competition necessarily it's for us only it's bringing a good product to the table for families, chefs and students, yeah, in a multi-different aspect, so on the production side, you were saying you're averaging around $25 per floor, give or take, yeah, so suddenly, you're doing like 250 floors. a week so yeah that's awesome and you guys are still working so what you said was 40 hours a week right now we're 40+ hours a week off of the usual late night social media and Facebook and Instagram which include our delivery. time or cutting time and that's 40 cumulative hours of us, okay, combined total between harvest, cutting deliveries again, you know all the deliveries you know today.

I did five hours of deliveries for almost 30 restaurants because they're all probably within five square miles of each other relatively speaking, so we picked a lot of restaurants on that basis so we could go one after the other to really mitigate our workload and that's a lot of the reasons why we choose what we choose so we can save the overhead, save the one that then essentially goes to the consumer, whether it's a chef, a retailer or just our neighbor, yes, yes, so a question that I know some people will ask en I know the answer, but you appear on camera and that's why you're wearing two-inch deep flats.

As opposed to one inch deep, most micrograin growers use one inch deep jacks, myself included, but what is it about two inch deep flats that makes a difference for you? So one of the reasons we chose that is twofold. The first is simply again on a lever and in such a way that being an urban farm environment it is obvious even beyond the basement, we like to keep things clean, we do not have the ability to simply open the land, we just slide the ground so we can put our soil in these trays with very little waste of soil, yes, we've dumped it in there, we can make it a lot flatter, we can tap it and go, and the secondary measure is that we find that a lot of these act as a buffer for the sides, so if something is too big, if something starts to lean to the side, it acts like a wall, which actually helps push the mic up and keeps it a little more structured, a little better airflow, we found which gives it a little better flavor. and variety of the real microgreens oh yeah yeah yeah what's the weak flow of your guys?

And I'm interested, since you guys are a couple, you have kids, yeah, take me through your week like I want to know how you balance everything, yeah, like. For example, take me until Monday. Do you have free weekends? For example, take me through your average week. How you balance your day jobs and all that. Basically, I'm taking this Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, from my full-time job, destroying what we do, but Mondays are on minimum days, so catching up on bills, communicating with new chefs, it's actually structure a week, take meetings, take meetings, so today is a meeting in the city.

I always try to minimize the work aspect, so I always go into labor, whether it's midday or after my deliveries, so I'm already in the city. Calgary is about 20 miles from where we are, so it gives me the opportunity to be able to circumnavigate other aspects so we can save time. Tuesday is early, we get up at 3 a.m. m. and we make all the cuts, so we cut from 3m until 6:00 a.m. m. yes, and we can cut 190 trays in that time and that's including packing for the net our daughters get up at 6:30, so we're basically free to write to be fair exactly and their school breakfast so we can enjoy that family, probably that balance of life and that's what I've learned. running restaurants you know you are working 18 hour days yes I don't mind running our days as there is a purpose behind it but this is in our own home our kids are here and they can try a product so all.

Those, then on Tuesday I basically go out and go to restaurants in Calgary, I head all over southern Alberta for that, probably at biblical noon if I don't have any meetings and the rest of Tuesday is just cleaning, managing the farm and singing. On Tuesday afternoons I go out to our local customers here in Airdrie to deliver our

month

ly subscriptions, so they're weekly subscriptions, they come to us and place orders or whatever they want and I'll deliver them to their door free of charge, so we have about two. hours delivery time usually, that's a big day, yeah, only about 30 of the deliveries today, only about two hours, so we did a little sale, so we had a few more deliveries as a result of that, but like I said even with about an hour or two hours it depends on what comes weekly.

Wow, Wednesdays, just the day, it's my other full time job Wednesday night, we soak everything for the Thursday morning plant, sorry if I'm basically getting the farm ready Wednesday night. On Thursday morning we back it up with a book from 3:00 to 4:00 in the morning and we do everything, so we run on Thursdays with our little one, once we plant 70 to 80 trees that day, we also remove all the cycles. the ones that are germinating in the light, so everything we do over a seven day period is designed around a 9 to 10 day rotation, so we're on the farm cutting at the same time, so to speak. doing all the planting here can be doing the germination, thanks things like the right ones, so there's never a time when there isn't one of us working on a rotational cyclical basis, so we're mitigating the work by using both labor fair I was the best we could, yes.

Thursday again is cutting them or planting them in the morning, the same as our girls get up at 6:30, so and then living, everything they have to do on Thursday afternoons and Saturday nights, really not nothing happens except taking care of the farm. watering, checking your facilities, all the usual stuff for that, then on Saturday night we re-soak for Sunday morning which is our secondary plant, again around 3:00 in the morning we plant all the Sunday and then I make all the cuts for deliveries too, so that's another great day for delivery. I deliver to Societal Virtus or out of Calgary to Kenmore and Cochrane and then that's what the hotels in East Elbert, Western Alberta provide for that and then come back and then have a free Sunday afternoon so why did you choose do it that way?

It was because having a delivery day like Sunday seems like a strange date. Yes, doing it for sure is only because you had to line it up on certain delivery days. just to make everything work with everything else, you were a part of this, it's a great game. I'm a big restaurant many mostly all chefs when deliveries are Thursday Friday yes weekends are busy that's what we love but we have a minimum shelf life of 10 days in our micros, we can run three weeks on our pea shoots, but we actually set everything up on a weekly couple so all of our chefs get everything, so it's very different, we're changing the way restaurants actually get a lot of their products correctly, so we get them fresh during the week, so Monday is a customer going to a restaurant and getting fresh product, but we also know on Friday that it has exactly the same quality consistency that was received on The Monday Sunday you did too, which was originally a day off, so it was from your date, your week, work, yes, Sunday was a day off, so it was a day to be able to throw everything away and have a good time to complete the processes and then in the restaurants, on Sundays for longer, we visited some really unique places where we do some high end bars, the lounges were sitting looking outside the box of just restaurants mm-hmm, where you know most people don't come around you know a sports bar but these guys have I had a chance to take advantage of a great product but no one threw them out of the typical produce purveyors in Canada and a lot of restaurants are closed on Mondays in Calgary, yes, so we moved it to Sunday so they serve first for Sunday and Tuesday exactly right.

Very good if people want to follow you what's the best way to do it it will also be full of the best on Instagram so at Micro Acres yeah it's our main once we do a news blog on the farm that It is also found on Facebook, which is. obviously, fresh off my cookies, those are the best ways to track a farm. Look, what we're doing, we publish, you know, the nutritional assessment, but the most important thing is that you really focus on the Microns and how they're arriving. the community has the photos and gets some Micronunique are not just the typical sunflower sprouts that you want to bring to the market things that people have heard of and see, but at the same time they are really easy and accessible to grow, yeah. and then they offer a huge new market so that you know that you can bring - you know, from chefs to restaurants to retailers, they have unique flavors, you know, something like spicy, they can choose this, it doesn't just have to be a rule, they can be mustards and radishes. and we really need different varieties so that's what we really do through our Instagram is bring some unique aspects and always show photos from the farm and post every day different aspects of different ways of growing our lights or trays again to bring this. to the average farm that's all here we are an average farm we love what we do yes we like to grow and keep it simple that's all