still farming

Daniel Ramos

Our area agriculture is still alive and well—and thriving through smaller growers and makers

BY RICH POLLACK

hey are the “mom and pop” versions of agriculture in Palm Beach County: small farms or plant nurseries led by couples or tight-knit families, often transforming what started out as a hobby and building it into a business.

You’ll find them online presenting everything from gourmet mushrooms to one-of-a-kind bromeliads, from homemade fruit vinegars to unfamiliar herbs and 20 varieties of smoking hot peppers. You’ll also see several at the Delray GreenMarket, where regular customers search for them each year.

Though they face an abundance of obstacles—some from Mother Nature and some from man—each of these growers say they wouldn’t want to be doing anything else. Here are their stories.

Daniel Ramos

RED SPLENDOR FARMS

Daniel Ramos knows better than most chefs that the herbs, greens and edible flowers he uses to enhance his gourmet meals are fresh—because he probably harvested them just a few hours earlier on his Red Splendor Farm. Trained at Florida Culinary Institute and working as a chef at some of the area’s most prestigious country clubs and popular restaurants, Ramos is a rare breed, blending his newfound love for growing food with his well-honed skills preparing it.

“It’s just a dream come true for a chef to grow food and then use that same food in a meal,” says Ramos, who hosts farm-to-table dinners using only what’s grown on his two-and-a-half-acre farm west of Lake Worth Beach.

Ramos quickly learned that farming could be just as physically draining as working long restaurant hours. “The effort it takes to harvest every herb is harder than a 16-hour day in the kitchen,” he says. Ramos’ path from full-time chef to full-time farmer and part-time chef is one filled with serendipity and even a few curves. In 2015, the chef de cuisine at Quail Ridge County Club in Boynton Beach stumbled into a chance to start a business with a partner making whole-hog organic sausage and bone broth, which was sold at green markets.

With his background in meats, Ramos was later recruited by friends to become a partner in the Butcher & the Bar gastropub in Boynton Beach, where he served as the executive chef. By June of 2021, Ramos was ready to move on. It was about that time that his wife’s aunt, Melodye Abell, who owned Abell’s Nursery for decades, decided she wanted to create a fresh-herb farm. Ramos jumped in to help, and was hooked. “I said, ‘I could do this every day,’ and by the end of August I was starting a farm,” he says.

The focus at Red Splendor Farm is on herbs, but mango trees are also abundant, and you’ll find heirloom tomatoes growing on the property as well. Red Splendor also produces 20 different varieties of hot peppers.

The herbs Ramos grows are not ones you would typically find in a grocery store. There are 75 different varieties of herbs on the farm, 12 varieties of mint, including Kentucky Colonel Mint, which Ramos says is perfect for a mint julep. Other favorites are African blue basil and lemon thyme. The herbs can be used in cooking, but they are also good for teas and even ice cream. In addition to selling the herbs at the green market—as well as some plants—Ramos also sells herbs and greens to local restaurants. Trading in his straw hat for his chef’s hat, Ramos does farm-to-table dinners at Palm Beach Meats in West Palm Beach and also in-home farm-to-table dinners where he uses only items found on the farm. “Adding an herb is the quickest way to elevate a dish,” he says.

Darrin and Jodi Swank

Small Farm Agribusiness

There was a time, not that long ago, when smaller farms in South Florida could survive just by taking their produce to market. Each year, however, with prices rising, increased competition and additional layers of regulations, local farmers have come to understand that just depending strictly on produce sales won’t pay the bills.

Instead, local family farmers are finding that attracting people to the farm for special events or family adventures generates additional dollars that help them stay afloat.

“You cannot just grow food anymore if you’re a small farm,” says Jodi Swank, who along with her husband, Darrin, has been running Swank Specialty Produce in Loxahatchee Groves since 1996. “You have to keep the farm evolving.”

With that in mind, the Swanks have moved toward what some call agritourism, bringing people out to the property for events such as the Swank Table dinners, where up to 200 people can enjoy a multi-course al fresco dinner in their massive pole barn, with some proceeds benefiting a local charity. During the pandemic, when local green markets on public properties were closed, the Swanks created a Saturday farmer’s market, which now attracts a couple of dozen vendors. Just this year, Jodi Swank added farmhouse wine dinners in which a chef is brought in to create a gourmet dinner paired with a vintage from an upscale winery.

“Produce sales were the No. 1 source of income for years,” Swank says, adding now that the revenue received from 10 sold-out wine dinners tops what they bring in through sales of produce grown on the 20-acre farm.

Down the road from Swanks, on U.S. Highway 441 west of Boynton Beach, Bedner’s Farm draws thousands from throughout South Florida for its U-pik-ems and pumpkin patch events. The Bedner family still grows familiar crops like bell peppers, cucumbers and corn on the 80 acres. They also still cultivate another 200 acres in Palm Beach County to produce an assortment of Florida winter vegetables. Still, it is the strawberry u-pick that gets the most attention. Bedner’s has continued to evolve, opening retail outlets where it sells farm-grown produce and other items in stores in Delray Beach and recently in West Palm Beach.

Marie Bedner says that keeping the business strong requires constant adjustments.

“It’s about evolving and listening to customers,” she says.

Jon and Nikole Lallier

BRILLIANT BROMELIADS

There are bright bromeliads that will catch your eye at home improvement warehouse stores or garden centers. Then there are the bromeliads that you’ll discover Jon and Nikole Lallier growing west of Delray Beach.

“I have bromeliads that no one else has,” Jon Lallier says. “They are the only ones in the United States.”

What you’ll find growing at their fledgling business, Brilliant Bromeliads, are plants with vibrant colors and descriptive names such as Tigerama, Tears of Fire and Marble Throat. Had you had told Jon Lallier a few years ago that he would become enamored enough with bromeliads to start to grow them, first as a hobby and then as a business, he would have shaken his head in disbelief. That changed, however, after he took ownership of a plant given to him by his mother-in-law, who was running out of room for all her own bromeliads.

“It all started with just one hand-me-down,” he says.

As his mother-in-law continued giving him a plant here and there, Lallier grew increasingly intrigued. “Each plant is like a piece of art,” he says. “I love art and I like colors.”

The more he learned about bromeliads, the more he wanted more. “I was fascinated by the fact that each plant had its own name,” he says.

Eventually, Lallier visited a bromeliad collector in Deerfield Beach, Lee Magnuson, who had amassed more than 3,000 plants. Magnuson quickly took the amateur enthusiast under his wing and is now a partner in Brilliant Bromeliads. After he was given a few more plants, Lallier began buying bromeliads and going to shows, where he would see what others had been growing.

Eventually he learned how to create new colors and patterns of plants through hybridization, and the collection began growing, to the point where he has about 40 shade tables at the Delray Beach location and somewhere between 400 and 500 bromeliads.

There are also as many as 4,000 plants at a growing station in Pompano that is part of Brilliant Bromeliads’ collections.

“This is just a hobby that we’ve been growing into a business,” says Nikole Lallier, who handles much of the business side of Brilliant Bromeliads, while Jon handles the growing side. Since the business launched in April of 2021, the Lalliers have created a website and have been traveling the state to shows, where they sell mostly to high-end collectors searching for unique plants.

Unique plants, Lallier says, can sell for as much as $500, with some fetching even more. Although the business is growing, both Jon and Nikole continue to work at day jobs, with him working at his family’s car wash business and Nikole working as a probate paralegal. Eventually they hope the business will be strong enough so they can tend to it full-time. In the interim, they’re continuing to discover more about the art of cultivating new plants and sharing that knowledge.

“We want to go out and teach people about these plants,” Jon Lallier says.

For Lallier the hobby-turned-business continues to be a chance to create in living color.

“It’s not even work,” he says. “It’s just fun.”

Joseph Chammas

GRATITUDE GARDEN FARM

Joseph Chammas was enjoying the good life, capitalizing on his knowledge of three languages while working in the world of high finance for a private equity firm. Then came stage IV colon and liver cancer and toxic treatments that Chammas says almost killed him—more than once. Taking matters into his own hands, Chammas started learning about the medicinal value of certain foods, and soon began growing his own plants.

“Before you knew it, every inch of the front yard, the backyard and the side yard had raised beds,” he says.

Joseph Chammas

AARON BRISTOL

Now, a dozen years later, Chammas and his wife, Tawna, have taken what they learned as he fought off cancer and transformed it into Gratitude Garden Farm, an organic farm on five acres in Loxahatchee Groves. Here the couple grow an eclectic mix of fruits and vegetables as well as nine varieties of gourmet mushrooms—including lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms— that they provide to mostly high-end restaurants. They are also available at five local greenmarkets, including the Delray Beach GreenMarket.

You’ll also find several varieties of microgreens—the first few leaves of a plant, which are packed with nutrients—as well as medicinal mushroom extract and turmeric extract, which can be used as a supplement to address a variety of health issues including arthritis and allergies. The farm is also where the couple grows as many as 35 organic vegetables, including tomatoes, squash and peppers, as well as four varieties of turmeric. A fruit orchard on the farm nets five different varieties of bananas, 10 varieties of mangoes and three varieties of avocados. And tucked away on the property is a small, 350-squarefoot cabin that Chammas and Tawna call home. An entrepreneur with a valet business as well as a company that supplied vending machines with healthy food, Chammas never imagined farming would become a way of life.

“I did it as a form of survival,” he says.

Since they started the farm in 2015, Joseph and Tawna have seen steady growth, evolving to meet changing demands and to keep the farm financially viable—no easy task.

“It used to be simple—just me, my wife and one guy,” he recalls, adding that now there are as many as eight employees working on the farm at any given time. While Chammas will tell you that farming is now in his blood, he’s quick to point out that it’s not an easy life.

“A lot of people have a very romanticized idea of what we do,” he says. “In reality, it’s 100 hours a week just to get ahead.”

Farming also comes with risks, many brought on by Mother Nature, including weather.

“An iguana can climb a power pole, trip a transformer and we lose $20,000 worth of mushrooms,” he says.

To minimize risk, Chammas is making changes to his property. He is building a farmhouse amid the fruit orchard—so he and Tawna can move out of the cramped cabin. Down the road he hopes to create a wellness retreat, where people can come to the farm and learn about a healthy way of living. “We get to live the life everybody else wishes they could,” Chammas says. “We’re farmers, and it keeps us healthy. We live, work and eat in our own space.”

Sean Wertheim and Crystal Clark

Crystal Clark and Sean Wertheim

DOOR 2 DOOR MICROGREENS

The sign on their booth at the Delray GreenMarket capsulizes Crystal Clark’s and Sean Wertheim’s philosophy about the relationship between fresh vegetables and health in just three words: “Food is Medicine”.

For the past few years, the couple that runs Door 2 Door Microgreens has shared that concept with market guests who come to learn about the microgreens they nurture on their property west of West Palm Beach. “Our goal has always been to make the public healthy,” says Wertheim, who spent 28 years managing produce for Whole Foods Market.

Fresh microgreens, they both say, as well as the vinegar they produce from fruit trees on their land, are key to helping people improve their health.

“Microgreens are the fastest way to get vitamins,” Clark says. “It’s like vegetables on steroids.”

Essentially the first few leaves of a vegetable plant, microgreens are packed with vitamins that are easier for the human body to metabolize than parts of a mature plant. A cup of broccoli microgreens, Clark says, has the same nutritional value as two-and-a half pounds of the mature vegetable. Clark and Wertheim grow several different varieties of microgreens, including purple cabbage, cantaloupe and broccoli.

Their microgreens are used in a variety of ways, frequently in salads, but they can also be ingredients in smoothies or even teas. While microgreens are nutritious, they also require a lot of special care and attention, in part because they are a tender crop, subject to external conditions, especially with the humidity here in Florida.

Microgreens won’t stay fresh quite as long as more mature greens, and as a result Clark and Wertheim refrigerate the greens and bring them to market soon after they’ve been picked. “It’s a lot of work,” says Wertheim.

Creating homemade vinegar from their fruit trees is no easy task, either, Clark says. It can take up to two months to create vinegars made from mangos, star fruit, passion fruit and even watermelon. “The homemade vinegar is a great companion piece to a microgreen salad,” she says. Like some other small farmers, Clark and Wertheim began growing microgreens for their own health and then realized they had the makings of a business.

“We couldn’t eat all the microgreens we were growing,” recalls Clark, who battled with diabetes off and on.

While they agree that it can be difficult making ends meet growing such a perishable product, Clark and Wertheim say they are loving the lifestyle that comes with being small growers.