February 2025 Amber Grant Awarded to Hand-Grown Greens

We’re excited to announce the February $10,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Laura Patterson, owner of Hand-Grown Greens.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Laura for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi, my name is Jama with the WomensNet Advisory Committee, and I am excited to introduce our February 2025 winners. We have with us Laura, with Hand-Grown Greens, and she is our Amber Grant winner. Thank you for being with us. To begin with our interview today, Laura, can you please tell us a little bit about your business.

Laura: I also am thrilled to be here, so thank you. This is, this is so exciting. I started my business really as a side hustle. I was working as a registered nurse in the hospital and had been doing that for about a decade and was starting to feel misaligned with Western medicine in general. And with my job in particular! I had two young kids, so there was just a lot going on. And I was racking my brain thinking, what else? If, I wasn’t a nurse, what would I want to do? I always had this kind of secret dream to be a farmer, but thought that’s really not practical, especially now that I have kids. I’ve gotta keep the steady job. And I started growing microgreens because I wanted to kind of scratch the itch, right? I wanted to be able to grow food, but I was having a hard time even maintaining a garden with a baby and a toddler. And so I watched a YouTube video and I found out about microgreens and thought this is something I could start doing with my kids. So it started kind of just for me to get back into growing, to do something fun with my kids. I was also struggling personally with a lot of gut health issues. And so I was really motivated to find ways to look at more of a whole foods diet to get myself better because I felt like all these medicines and traditional treatments weren’t helping me. So I started growing these greens and it really hooked me. And I started thinking maybe I could turn this into a, a business. And I started selling to a restaurant and started getting a little money coming in, started building my infrastructure slowly, and over time have grown it into a full-time business now where I grow for a local distributor. So all my greens stay nice and local. And I also started teaching other people how to do this. So I kind of have two branches to my business now. One is that of growing, so actually growing these nutrient dense little grains that grow very quickly. I’m harvesting every single week for my customers. And I have an online portion of my business that really came out of 2020 where people were reaching out to me, other moms saying, how are you doing this? How are you making money from home? How are you making money growing food? And I started to teach people, and I basically packaged up my process online and was able to share that with other people wanting to grow home-based microgreens businesses. This is something that’s really approachable, as the agriculture world can be intimidating. You need a lot of startup to build a profitable farm. Microgreens is a really niche type of growing. So that’s kind of my business in a nutshell. It’s these two branches, one of growing, one of teaching other people how to start home-based businesses of their own communities.

Jama: Nice. Really love the two components of your, of your business!

Laura: Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. The balance of the two has been a lot of fun.

Jama: Let’s talk a little bit about what makes your business approach unique compared to other people that are offering a similar service? And I know that you mentioned a little bit about it, but maybe can you expand a little bit on, on the two parts of your business?

Laura: Yes, I would love to expand. I love this question. Because I started kind of by copying what I saw in the industry-which is very male dominated and thought, this is kind of what I need to do. And the goal is always to scale larger. The goal is to get into a warehouse and get X number of racks and be growing this number of trays and get everything automated. And that is sort of the messaging when I started. Now that I feel more empowered and more confident in the space, I realize that there is so much room to bring creativity into vertical farming. So a couple ways that I feel like I really am different. One is how I think about microgreens, which is not how I started, which is like a pretty decoration, like a little garnish to be on a fancy plate at a fancy restaurant. Nothing wrong with growers who that is their target customer. I think that that can be wonderful. And I think chefs really do know how to highlight micro grains and show how beautiful they are. And they have amazing flavor profiles. But the other thing about microgreens is they’re incredibly nutrient dense, and we are able to grow them year-round in all different types of places. I’m connected now with farmers all over the world, growing microgreens in different ways, and the nutrient density of them really gets me excited. So I started with high-end restaurants, and I have shifted to growing bulk orders. I have partnered with a lot of hunger relief organizations in my area, and now I’m growing these for a whole different type of customer, which is regular people that are looking for nutrient dense local greens. And it’s gets me really excited to think about just where the industry could go and that I am just one small farm carving out a space. I have other growers that I work with who are getting their greens into schools, into hospitals really any institutions with food service that could benefit from nutrient dense greens that are grown locally for that customer base. So I’m really looking at microgreens as food rather than decorative garnish.

The other part of my business that I feel like is different is this education and mentorship branch of my business where I am encouraging people to do this if they want to do it, and to create a business that supports their life. So rather than that model of success equals more volume, success equals larger scale success equals hiring a team. Maybe it does, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe success to you is turning your spare room into a vertical farm and growing for 12 members in your neighborhood. And it brings in a little money for you to take some financial pressure off of your family. It connects these people to food being grown for them. It’s crazy to me how disconnected people have become from where their food has grown. And this is one small way it’s been really meaningful growing people. I’m so passionate about both the nutrient density that microgreens offer and empowering other people. I do work with a lot of women. I’m not opposed to working with men, but I tend to attract other women, other moms who have a heart for this. Either they’ve had a health struggle themselves, or they just love growing. A lot of passionate gardeners that think, yeah, I would love to find a way that I could bring in some money. And really helping each one of them to figure out what, what is your goal here? So we’re not jumping straight to that let’s scale a big business. Unless that’s your goal. Maybe your goal is to keep something small where you are still doing the growing. I still do the growing in my own operation because I love it. It is incredibly grounding for me. I’ve had a lot of shifts in my life over the years, as everybody does. And becoming a parent and being a caregiver for my father with dementia, growing has been so grounding for me that I love that I’ve kept my business at a scale that can provide income for a family, but also allows me to still be the primary grower. So in all of those ways, I feel like I’m pretty unique from other operations, and I love that it-it’s just a reminder that we can create a business that that serves our life and that supports our life and can do great things with it. So yeah, thanks for the question.

Jama: I really appreciate that-there is something special about connecting with the person that is growing your food or taking care of your food. I know that for me shopping local and with direct growers always has a different feeling and trust level than just going to my grocery store. So thank you. I’m sure that there’s been a lot of things that you’ve learned along the way as you were building your business. And so can you share with us maybe a lessons learned story, something you wish you had known or somebody had told you, but you learned it a different way?

Laura: I like this too because I’ve worked now with so many women who are who have started their own businesses or on the cusp of starting their own businesses. And that’s kind of the time period I want to speak to- because that is something that I sat in for honestly, for years. This indecision, this lack of belief in myself and stuck in kind of this identity that I wasn’t happy in. A huge part of my identity was being a nurse. It was the answer to every question, what do you do? I’m a nurse there. Enough said, don’t have to really dig any deeper than that. And so the idea of moving away from that security and that identity was coupled with my lack of belief that I could make something work really kept me stuck in limbo for a long time, where I was unhappy with what I was doing.

I had an idea of something I wanted to do and was even playing around with it a little bit, starting to grow some microgreens, doing a lot of research. And I kept myself stuck there. A lot of just learning and telling myself, well, I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready yet. And I feel like that is one of the biggest lessons for me was the importance of mindset and shifting that mindset to one of self-belief, one of believing that you can figure it out. That is really what made the difference. It wasn’t figuring out the marketing strategy, how to find new customers, or how to become an excellent grower, how to grow these more tricky varieties. I spun out on that stuff for the first two years in my business when it was more of just a side business. And I will tell you, I had so much doubt because all my focus was on taking the action, the business strategy, the growing buying- trying to figure out what was going be the magic formula to have success. It was not until I started shifting the way I was thinking about my business, that everything changed for me. I hired a business coach as kind of a last-ditch effort of like, can I make this work? Or should I just go back to full-time nursing? At that point, I was still keeping that alive. I was like, I can pick up shifts, I can bring in some extra money this way. And it really kept me in limbo. I work now with a lot of growers who find a great balance between working and having a little farm business as well. And that’s lovely for me. I really had to cut ties and take that leap. With that action came a lot of clarity around what kind of business I want. Really digging into why I am doing this so that it doesn’t just become another job that I’m also get burnt out on. Asking myself, why do I want to do this? What is important to me? What does freedom mean to me? What does flexibility mean to me? How can I actually live out my priorities? How can I build a business that supports me in being able to be present for my kids, be there for my aging parents, all of these things. So for me, it was the mindset piece that was the absolute most important component in me finding success with my business and becoming profitable and at peace.
So not just profitable from hustling really hard but being profitable and relaxing into this life that I’ve created. And that really came from me learning to shift my thoughts and recognizing that my thoughts are creating my feelings. And that’s really what’s driving me to take actions and see the end results in my life. And really that taking hold in me shifted everything. And I love helping other women who are on that same journey, that are ready to start shifting their mindset from one that’s very limited and sort of rooted in how you were raised and what you were brought up to think to one where you truly believe that you can figure out anything and that everything is open to you. It’s just a very freeing feeling. So it’s another part of my business that I love as I get to mentor other women in this business.

For me, it happens to be microgreens, but I feel like this could translate to anything. And that’s really exciting to me too, for people who are ready and willing to say, I want to do the work. I want the mindset and start shifting what I believe I’m capable of. That for me is really when people ask me, how are you successful? How are you profitable on this small scale farm? And I think they’re always expecting some kind of strategy, right? A marketing strategy, here’s how I use Instagram, or here’s how I, here’s my email marketing, or here’s my operation, here’s my automated racks, whatever. And it’s really not- it’s about how I think about my business that made the big shifts for me. So that’s kind of my answer.

Jama: Wow, that’s amazing. Especially I love how you defined what success means for you and defined what you want it to look like. And so it’s successful because it works successfully for your life. And so that takes a lot of courage to redefine that, especially when we’re not using our society’s standards of what success is. Thank you so much for taking some time to meet with us and to let us know what you’ve been doing, what you are doing, and how you’re making this world and all of us a healthier, more beautiful place filled with awesome experiences. And so thank you. And congratulations again on your award, we look forward to connecting with you later on in the year.