After less than two years, a Tallahassee urban farm is packing up its shovels and closing this summer. Ten-Speed Greens has a growing customer base and thriving business—but its owners say urban farms’ success depends on more than profitability.
Wednesday morning, Claire Mitchell was harvesting arugula with a small knife at Ten-Speed Greens in the Levy Park neighborhood. The urban farm opened on Sixth Avenue in the Fall of 2012. Since then, things have gone really well for Mitchell and business partner Danielle Krasniqi. Restaurants in Tallahassee and Thomasville have replaced other produce with theirs.
“We have 13 clients. We sell from really high-end places to sandwich shops," Mitchell says. "We sell to Sweet Pea on Tharpe Street, and we also sell to Kool Beanz and Cypress.”
One client is Railroad Avenue’s Bread and Roses Kitchen, where operator Susie Petty regularly features Ten-Speed Greens on the vegetarian menu.
"Their product is just really fresh and amazing," Petty says. "They’re really close into town, so they can just--I mean they bike in, too, which is great."
Mitchell says the farm also feeds 30 families per week through its subscription service, and more customers shop their farm stand.
But there’s a problem.
The 20-something business partners don’t own the land they’ve planted. And the foreclosed house next door, along with half the farm property, are for sale.
"Technically, yeah, we’re squatting on this land," she says. "But this house, people were squatting in it. The landowner, the homeowner has abandoned it; he’s bankrupt. And before, when people were living in it, it was a crack house. So look what we’ve turned it into. And there are places like that all over Tallahassee.”
Mitchell says besides the lack of affordable land, other roadblocks are keeping urban farming from taking root in Tallahassee. First, she says, farmers don’t get business loans. Second, local zoning laws don’t allow urban farming in residential areas, meaning a neighbor’s phone call to the police could end it. She’s hoping zoning can change. And then, she hopes city officials take an inventory of public and private land people are willing to lease cheaply to entrepreneurs.
"You know, there’s a lot of potential for new customers, there’s a lot of potential for feeding folks fresh food that they might not have had access to before," she says.
And she says she hopes Ten-Speed Greens’ success proved that to the community. Mitchell hopes to return to her home town and try again after going to grad school.
