WELL DONE

Happy Hollow Farm has adapted to farming in uncertain water years.

- BY LISA MUNNIKSMA

In her 16 years of owning and managing Happy Hollow Farm, in Jamestown, Missouri, Liz Graznak has managed alot: building from 5½ owned acres to adding another 16 rented acres and growing her team up to eight full-time and five part-time people.

With sales at two farmers markets, a 60-member CSA, a grocery store, a few restaurants, two food hubs and the farm’s online store, Graznak and crew run a larger operation than you might as a Hobby Farms reader. However, there’s one thing you likely have in common: increasing uncertainty about water.

This, Graznak has managed when her primary water source dried up not once but twice in the middle of hot, dry growing seasons. With trial and error, intentional learning and careful farm-business planning, she pulled through.

STARTUP FARMING

Graznak became interested in farming after she joined a CSA while in grad school. She was studying plant breeding, and while this is connected to farming, she realized she wanted to have a more tangible effect on people’s food choices as well as more instant gratification.

‘‘There’s something really immediately and very gigantically satisfying when you have a bed of — I don’t know — let’s say you have a bed of carrots,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s a weedy mess, and you spend three hours and you weed it. And then all of a sudden, it’s beautiful, and you know that you’re going to have a great crop of carrots because you’ve spent the amount of time that you needed to weed it, and you can see it right then. You can see the results of your work.’’

When she founded Happy Hollow Farm in 2010, Graznak had a small well that fed her house and the greenhouse. With a capacity of 15 gallons per minute, the pump couldn’t fill the farm’s increasing water needs.