Vendor Spotlight: Joe’s Organics

Joe Diffie started a commercial compost hauling business in 2012. As the compost piled up, Joe began using the fertile soil to raise crops for sale at local farmers markets. The farm quickly gained a reputation for its microgreens among Austin’s chefs, and Joe’s Microgreens was born. The farm uses a variety of ag technologies to sustainably produce hydroponic lettuce heads, microgreens, sunflower shoots, and other specialty produce. Their produce has an incredibly low carbon footprint, making it the choice for climate-conscious consumers. Their primary growing medium is compost generated from local food waste. The nutrient cycle that fuels their farm is no accident. Farmer Joe started the farm as an antidote to the broken urban model of landfilling mountains of food waste while importing truckloads of food from around the world. The food waste that cities generate should fuel local food production. Their farm creates a new nitrogen cycle that gives their produce a near-zero carbon footprint, since they are recycling food waste.

Their long-term growth goals center around building food resiliency in Central Texas, especially after seeing empty grocery shelves multiple times in recent history. They want to build more local food infrastructure for central Texas that can weather a changing climate and unpredictable supply chain. We met up with John from Joe’s Microgreens at the market to learn more about their process of growing and packing their fresh greens to be ready for the market each week – check out the video here! Stop by the Joe’s Microgreens booth at Lakeline every Saturday and Mueller every Sunday.