Meet Micah Hartman, Michael Meier, and Jackie Vitale of Ground Floor Farm in Stuart

Today we’d like to introduce you to Micah Hartman, Michael Meier, and Jackie Vitale.

Micah, Michael, and Jackie, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Ground Floor Farm is an urban farm, cafe, and community space in Stuart, Florida. Our aim is to help grow a more dynamic and resilient town through food, art, and fun.

Our cafe serves the kind of food we like to eat: big flavors, fresh ingredients, and simple yet creative preparation. Everything you eat in the cafe is made from scratch, including the salad dressings and condiments. We even cure the bacon ourselves.

On the farm we grow vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers for sale directly to our community and for use in our restaurant. We prioritize heirloom, native, and ecologically appropriate varieties of crops. We grow both intensively in the soil and in hydroponic systems to maximize production on our small farm. We use only materials approved for organic agriculture to fight pests and diseases. We never use synthetic chemical pesticides.

We love hosting a range of public events to serve the diverse needs of our local community, from family festivals to night markets and art events. We also create a variety of educational programming for both adults and children, building confidence and getting folks active in the kitchen and garden.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We founded the business with a big vision of what we could be, and not necessarily a direct path on how to get there. We have always wanted the farm to be a reflection of our community around us, but also be an avenue for us to do the things we love. As a result we’ve tried a lot of different things from big festivals, to dance nights, and pop-up markets. At each step we’ve evaluated our process to see what’s working, and what’s not.

We’ve had a lot of success, and a lot of failure. The important thing is that we as partners check in with each other, with our crew, and with our community to assess how we’re doing, where we need to improve, and what we need to change. We’re always looking for ways to further our mission and provide interesting and unique experiences. The three of us personally love play and creativity, and the intersection of food, art, and community is where we all take inspiration and joy.

For example, we added the cafe a year ago because of feedback from our community; people were interested in what we were doing and wanted more access to the farm, more of the cool flavors we were slinging at our pop-up market, and a better way to enjoy the space we have. When we set out to start the business we were pretty adamant that we didn’t want to have a restaurant for a host of reasons, but when we got into the thick of our business it became clearer and clearer that we could fill a need in our community. So we adapted and are really proud of what we’re able to provide.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Ground Floor Farm story. Tell us more about the business.
We’re known for a lot of things- depending on who you ask! We like to say that we do food, art, and fun.

Broadly speaking we’re a food business that emphasizes sustainable and traditional methods of food production and processing. This means that we grow beautiful and nutritious vegetables, and play around a lot with fermentation. We make cheeses and breads, sauerkrauts, and pickles, naturally fizzy sodas, and condiments. All of these things are created based on what we’re growing or what we can source locally.

Some people would say our bread is what keeps them coming back, others might offer that it’s the freshest arugula in the area by far. We’ve done six-course tasting menu dinners, and summer camps for kids to get their hands dirty. We make an effort to be inclusive of all members of our community, and as a result we have a broad offering of activities and experiences. Our hope is that in each aspect of our business our customers experience the care, thought, and love that went into what they’re experiencing.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
The three of us openly acknowledge that we are extremely privileged to have been able to start our beloved business. It’s a happy and lucky accident that we all knew each other growing up, that we were all in a financial position to be able to dedicate resources and years of our lives to a start-up, that we each personally had living situations that were stable, that we were able to find a building that would serve our purposes, the list is extremely long and continues. That’s not to say that we haven’t worked extremely hard to achieve what we’ve had; for all of us a 50 hour work week feels luxuriously light and we’re stoked when we’re able to achieve that!

We’ve also had our fair share of bad luck and misfortune. Since we’ve started the farm we haven’t had a single season free of a major weather event (this includes a freak hailstorm and two major hurricanes). We hesitate to categorize that as “luck” as there are scientific reasons that we’re experiencing increasingly extreme weather, but if luck is the effect of circumstances outside of your control, then we’ve had a good amount of bad luck.

Contact Info:

• Address: 100 SE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd
  Stuart, Fl 34994
• Website: www.groundfloorfarm.com
• Phone: 7726004230
• Email: crew@groundfloorfarm.com
• Instagram: groundfloorfarm
• Facebook: facebook.com/groundfloorfarm

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