In this edition of Entrepreneurs Heart Hartford, we interviewed the Fresh Farm Aquaponics team to learn how Aquaponics can revolutionize the future of Food!

Tell Us About Your Company:

FRESH Farm Aquaponics is a small farm and benefit corporation located just outside of Hartford city limits, in South Glastonbury, CT. We specialize in growing fish and plants together in a sustainable ecosystem. That means we can grow fresh fish and delicious produce all year round, totally organically, without chemical fertilizers, pesticides or antibiotics. The Farm is on a mission to feed the world, starting at home in central Connecticut.

How is Your Business Affiliated with Hartford?

We are connected intimately with the city of Hartford primarily through reSET, Social Enterprise Trust, an amazing coworking space and business incubator for Connecticut’s brightest entrepreneurs. Currently, we are developing our business as a part of their LeanLaunch Pad program where we are getting extensive coaching, mentorship and coworking benefits.

We have been lucky enough to be supported by the Hartford community through awards too. We took home the CT Next Entrepreneur Innovation Award last Summer, including the Crowd Favorite award! This brought in a substantial prize that we are using to upgrade our system, so we can increase our winter production even more. We were also selected as a finalist for the fourth annual Social Enterprise Awards put on by the aforementioned reSET. We are humbly grateful for all the support the city of Hartford has brought us so far.

In the future we plan to bring our sustainable gardens into the city itself, to turn vacant lots and rooftops into abundant gardens! We look forward to contributing to Hartford’s development and supporting our community in this way.

How Will Your Business Impact the Community?

By providing the highest quality, totally organic food directly to our local community. We are reestablishing our communities connection with their food while stimulating the local economy by promoting local business. In a time of uncertainty, we are delivering local food security with our commercial garden and constructing custom desktop and backyard gardens for others.

We are about to kick off our second annual Winter CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. Our community supports us by buying a whole season’s worth of produce up front and we deliver it to them, one weekly harvest at a time. Our community gets high quality produce in abundance while supporting their local farmer. The farm gets a nice cash infusion at the start of every season while securing a destination for their produce before the seeds have even sprouted! There is nothing worse than picking something that never finds its home. With a CSA, we ensure all of our produce is purchased long before we grow it.

What Words of Wisdom Would you Share with an Aspiring Entrepreneur Who May be Hesitant to Take the Plunge?

Fail Forward and Fail Fast. Plunge forward into whatever makes you uncomfortable or fearful. That feeling of fear and discomfort is the entrepreneurial equivalent of what your arms feel like in the middle of a set of deadlifts with a 200lb barbell. Muscles must be built up via repetitive incremental stress. Every muscle fiber you break down comes back stronger than ever. Try to approach failure with the same mindset.

What is it that you LOVE about being an Entrepreneur?

I am a definite lifelong student, bordering on obsessive even. I did not even come close to slowing down after my own formal education ended. As an entrepreneur, I love that I can draw from my diverse array of interests to apply unique solutions to whatever challenges and opportunities present themselves. If I wasn’t able to adapt and pivot at the pace of my own learning, I would feel stifled and oppressed. I am grateful every day that being an entrepreneur means embracing my desire to learn.

What are Some of the Challenges that You Face?

One of the primary problems facing our business is the upfront cost of our specific type of gardens. Although the long term upkeep costs are quite low, it takes a good chunk of change to get started, which has held back our progress to a certain extent. That being said, I like to think that this has created a manageable growth curve in our start-up phase. Too many similar facilities have gone out of business by taking on too much, too fast. Instead, we have grown through every stage of the business, from a desktop grower in my Boston apartment, to my backyard system here in CT, to our new large-scale operation. This has granted us deep insight into our industry that we would not have otherwise.

We also found ourselves lacking a strong social network in our early days. We like to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who want to better themselves and their community through thoughtful action. Luckily in the past few months we have found a great source of social networking and overall FUN at the reSET coworking space in Hartford.

Lack of Awareness of our specific niche has also been a unique challenge for us. Our particular form of farming is known as aquaponics. Although it has existed for thousands of years, it has only recently started to come back into the limelight. We hope to play a major role in the aquaponics renaissance that is currently taking place.

 What is your Vision for your Business Over the Next Five Years?

We have an ambitious and thoughtful vision for the future of FRESH Farm Aquaponics. Really, aquaponics is a major component of the Future of Food because it can grow up to 10x the produce as conventional agriculture with 90% less water use and absolutely no chemical fertilizers, pesticides or antibiotics. It works in the snow and in the desert. It can grow food in your city apartment desktop, in a 12,000 ft.sq. commercial facility or in your own backyard. We are grateful for a chance to bring this amazing technology to our community, both locally and online!

The bullet points for our next 5 Years

•            Expand greenhouses locally, establishing unique growing conditions for Connecticut area
•            Grow more Aquapioneers with our Online Educational Ecosystem and Social Community
•            Deliver a scalable, modular system kit to the market. Ranging from desktop to basement to backyard to        commercial size.
•            Provide a system monitoring / data sensor solution for all levels of growers, for collecting raw data and providing   meaningful insights to the user’s system growth
•            Expand greenhouses across the nation to continue our mission of food equality.
•            Found a non-profit sister organization dedicated to bringing aquaponics to populations that would be uniquely benefited by aquaponics

With a vision like this, all I can say is that I am excited to grow to my fullest potential. We welcome the future, because we know we are a part of it!



Curious about Aquaponics? Join the Fresh Farm MeetUP Group!

This blog series, posted in partnership between HYPE and reSET, offers a platform to showcase the commitment that Hartford Entrepreneurs have for their work and this City. It will examine how young entrepreneurs have chosen their work, and give examples of the ways in which they are having an impact in Hartford.