Adding Extra Value As A Startup Farm
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
In this farm economy, it’s difficult to get started in farming unless you find a way to add extra value. Clayton Mooney saw an opportunity to offer superior freshness with Clayton Farms Salads—a direct-to-consumer indoor farm focused on growing for people, not the supply chain.
Mooney... ”If you walk into a grocery store, produce aisle, right now, most of the food sitting on that shelf is older than three days post-harvest. So it's missing a third or more of its nutrition. And especially, you know, the wintertime in Iowa as an example, lettuce, 95% coming from California, Arizona, right? And so three days post-harvest and packaging, a few days on a truck, gets there at day seven, eight on the shelf at nine, 10. Then you get your clamshell back home. You enjoy that first salad, and then you go to make a second one, and it's all slimy. So the full nutrition is my why and I'm a firm believer, this sounds maybe drastic, but what you eat is your death sentence. But it's really hard to get people to be excited about nutrition if they can't really see it or taste it. And so we've noticed that if we lean more into, on the flavor side, as people come through for the first time, they'll leave as a Google review, and they'll say like, whoa, I've never tasted romaine like that, or arugula like that. And, to which my response usually is, that's how it's supposed to taste. But you have so many, so many sides that are wanting to grow for the supply chain and not for people.”
Clayton Farms is based in Ames, Iowa. Learn more at claytonfarms.com.
