Do you grow your own tomatoes? What about your own basil? Carrots? Corn? The rewarding experience of morphing a seed into food also grows an appreciation for the people who do it professionally: farmers. Farms in Wisconsin range in size from thousands of acres to less than five, and those small farms are becoming more common. Though it’s incredibly difficult to make a living running a small farm, thanks to Scott Williams, farmer and owner of Garden To Be, more farmers are able to exclusively do what they love and what they know.

Garden To Be has come a long way since it started as a five-acre vegetable farm in 2000. In fact, 2024 marks the first year Scott didn’t do any farming and was able to focus solely on wholesale distribution for all the farmers who joined. “I think it’s come together where enough farms are interested in finding a wholesale distributor who recognizes their need to make a living,” says Scott.

Scott recalls working with some of the farms at the Farley Center, a farm incubation program providing infrastructure and land for new farmers. “Los Abuelos is one of the farms I worked out there. There were a lot of farms that struggled with marketing and sales either due to language or, in the case of Crossroads Community Farm, just time and labor. They’re already busy enough and then trying to send trucks around to make deliveries to restaurants is too much. So I started buying crops of theirs and adding to our list. Then I could take away from growing those things [onions, potatoes, carrots, etc.] on my farm and focus more on little gem lettuce and varieties that they weren’t necessarily growing that we could do on a small scale and meet the demand.”

Growing specialty crops plays a large role in the farm-to-table movement. Chef Odessa Piper, founder and former owner of L’Etoile, rightly receives a lot of recognition for starting the trend in Madison of connecting diners to local food producers. “I just think it’s super cool,” says Scott. “Now we’ve got this localized regional cuisine mentality.”

After working with some local organic vegetable farms in the mid ’90s, Scott started Garden To Be as a small diverse vegetable farm focused on herbs and microgreens. “We ran a Community Support Agriculture (CSA) program for the first four years, worked with restaurants, tried to get into co-op grocery stores. I really narrowed in on restaurants. I enjoyed working with chefs, liked growing some of the interesting heirloom specialty varieties that it doesn’t make sense to grow and ship all over the country.”

Before his farm was 10 years old, Scott was struggling to keep up with the demand. With the increasing popularity of the farm-to-table movement, it just wasn’t feasible for a farm of his size to meet the numbers. The result was more farms growing intentionally for chefs all around Dane County. Before supply could outweigh demand, Scott saw the coming opportunity to distribute high-quality foods beyond just restaurants.

“We do this year-round, and our customer base has grown significantly,” says Scott. “We do some stores—the Outpost stores in the Milwaukee area as well as caterers. We work with companies that have food programs for employees, like Epic, Promega, Exact Sciences. We do some school districts. We work with Second Harvest Food Bank of Southern Wisconsin. We work with a lot of agencies directly, like The River Food Pantry in Madison and Badger Prairie Needs Network in Verona. It’s been really very exciting and cool to make those connections.”

Which leads to the new facility. Garden To Be is now located in Fitchburg, a few blocks up from Sub-Zero, the old Tipi Produce location where Scott used to work with Steve Pincus. Up until early 2023, everything for Garden To Be was done on the farm itself, where there was no concrete to easily move things around on and a pallet jack couldn’t fit through the door.

Being in a more fitting space simply helps Scott and his staff better manage the amount of food coming in. “We’re shipping more than a million pounds of combined produce annually,” says Scott. “We’ll definitely be close to two million pounds this year. We have the infrastructure and the farms that can provide enough produce to hit really large purchasers. We have four refrigerated trucks, and some days all four trucks are on the road at the same time. We can ship tens of thousands of pounds daily to customers.”

The success of Garden To Be is in part thanks to Dane County’s food-invested culture. People understand the value of local produce logistically, and they appreciate the flavor it brings to the table. But that doesn’t mean everyone is starting from the same point, which is why the education component is so important. “I remember going around with this group of elementary kids with a fork I’d use to loosen the soil and pull up a carrot. I pulled up what garlic looks like from under the ground and other produce. We get over to where the watermelon patch was, and it was all just green because it hadn’t fruited yet. I say, ‘This is where we’re growing our watermelon,’ and this kid goes, ‘Pull me up a watermelon! I love those.’”

Garden To Be isn’t just the name of the business, it’s the mission. Garden to be healthy, garden to be independent, garden to be knowledgeable, garden to be sustainable. Building relationships with communities, promoting businesses with shared values, these are the ideas Scott wants to prop up and celebrate. “We need to make sure that there’s a new generation that has the means to farm sustainably with an infrastructure that helps them succeed.”

Scott is hoping to soon implement an online system that updates product availability and tells people what products are available where—what restaurants are using locally grown vegetables, eggs, herbs, and flowers. In addition, the website would work as a portal for new farms to get involved with Garden To Be.

Kyle Jacobson is a writer who gets excited about the big things, lives for the small things, and worries about everything.

Photographs by Eric Tadsen.

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