 Good evening everybody, welcome to Private Property Farming podcast. My name is Mbali Nwokor, your host every Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8pm. I hope you've been enjoying the gardening series and all the lovely competitions that we're running on that particular series. So keep looking out on our social media pages for fantastic prizes and keep supporting the gardening series as well as the farming podcast. Today we're talking about microgreens, growing microgreens and the benefits they're of. So if you have green fingers and particularly like microgreens to be specific, I think the show is for you. And we're joined by two amazing entrepreneurs from Happy Greens. They don't grow cannabis just by the way, they grow microgreens. I know the name might sound a bit funny. But yeah, I hope that in their production, you know, they definitely are happy farmers growing happy greens as their name says it. So today we're joined by Ruan Urstasen and Tina Skraus, who are both co-founders of Happy Greens. And if you have any questions for both the gentlemen tonight, please feel free to ask and we can answer them directly live right here onto the show. Otherwise, keep commenting, liking and sharing this farming podcast. And we love engagement. So anything that you have to say, we definitely take it quite seriously. And if there's any other topics that you would like us to talk about here on the farming podcast, please do throw your suggestions and follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube as well, and subscribe to our channel. Well, let's get straight into the show. Gentlemen, Ruan, Tina, thank you so much for coming onto the show. How are you doing? Hi, buddy. Thanks for having us. Hi, I'm Bali. We're doing fine. Doing great. Thank you. Great. It's good to know. Well, you've got a very, very interesting background, right? It seems like you're in a container. I can definitely see some greens there. I can see some lead lighting. So tell us about Happy Greens. When did you start and how were you producing the Happy Greens? Well, the concepts, we got the idea from, I was like, we both were sick with COVID and obviously in bed with the phones. And I came across a video from a guy in the US that said, my side hustle for 2020, growing microgreens as a business. And immediately I thought, this is so me. And obviously I've got green thumbs and I just started running with it. And this is what we got today. And there's a vision and we're going forward with it. Right. And how did Ruan come on board? Because you're saying you saw that video, Tina. So how did Ruan come on board? Do you have green fingers as well? Or did you just find the concept of growing microgreens quite interesting? Well, yeah, the concept of growing it is absolutely amazing. The health benefits, everything that is constituted to microgreens is just amazing. So when he came up with the idea of it, I was on board immediately. I don't have green fingers myself, but I helped with all the other things like the admin and the finances and keeping track of our social media accounts. Yeah, all of that stuff. Things I'm good at. I'll leave the plant to him forever. Right. So it sounds like Tina's is the farmer and you're pretty much the marketer, which is quite a good combination because you definitely need the two. So Tina's, from a production level, the backdrop that we're seeing, are you growing microgreens in that specific structure using led lighting? Are you using soil or some form of growing medium? Maybe just take us through your actual production processes. Yeah. So your microgreens is grown in a tray. So this is your pea microgreens. So that's the tray. So you'll weigh your seeds off. So each variance got a certain weight of seeds that you need to weigh off. And your gray medium is cocoa peat. And so you'll sow your seeds and then first you'll soak your seeds, sorry, soak your seeds for either two hours or eight hours, 24 hours depending on the variant. Then you'll sow it on top of your cocoa peat and it will go under the dock and then it will start sprouting for three to four days. And then you'll put it under lots. So your growing period is between 14 and 21 days depending on your variant. Okay. And you know, we have some people thinking that because it's grown on cocoa peat, it's under led lighting, it is organic, right? So are you using any form of pesticides? It looks like a very enclosed structure where minimal pests come in. So does microgreens need to flower? Does it need bees? Or do you need an ecosystem of some pests to really make sure that the plant grows well? So the environment it grows in is supposed to be isolated. Best is out green. So your temperature control as well and humidity control. So grow at a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius and between 30% and 60% humidity. So if your humidity is too high, you look at getting mold and stuff. And so it's a very controlled area that you need to grow it in. Yeah. It sounds quite technical. Like who assisted you with all this technical information, you know, in terms of alighting the degrees, the temperatures and so forth? Well, Google, Google search. There's so much information on the internet. It's actually scary. We were watching YouTube videos for days on just soaking up all the information. And then we got funds together. We got our first trays, our first batches of seeds. Did our, built the first part of the enclosure. And when we did our first trial batch, it was just like, you know, this... It was amazing. It was amazing. We definitely need to continue with this. And we've been... In the joy you get out of it, spawning those seeds and seeing it grow and sprouts. It's just amazing and amazing here. So if you can share gentlemen, like how big is this enclosed structure that you've built firstly? And number two, how dependent is it on light really? You know, we have load sharing nowadays. So does one have to get like a backup generator, some solar system in place? And maybe how many, how many plants can one grow? I don't know if that's the right question because microgreens are quite small. So maybe there's like hundreds of thousands in that small enclosure that you have there. So yeah, how big is the structure? And how heavily reliant is it on electricity? And so, and also maybe how many seeds or plants are you growing? What can one look at harvesting from a kilogram perspective in that structure? I know it's quite a number of questions, but I think you can answer it within one sentence or two. So the structure we got up here, it's a two bar, six meter structure. I've got three shelves. Each shelf carries 30 trays. So out of these 30 trays or 60 trays, I can get about 8 kgs of microgreens. So I would plant like in sequence to harvest every Friday or delivery on every Friday. Oh wow, that's amazing. Fresh delivery every Friday. Fresh delivery every Friday. So it's quite an intensive workout there just so that you've got happy greens growing and harvesting and delivering to your clients. Is that the case? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. How much time do you spend in your little farm making sure that you're getting the right crop or the right microgreens at the end of the day once you harvest for your clients? Well, it's quite intense because you need to look at your temperature constantly. Especially with weather changes. With weather changes, with all the rain we're having lately, your humidity is quite high. So you use the humidifier to take all the moisture out of the air. So electricity plays a big part of it. Luckily for me, on the one side of the big window facing the sun side of the house so I get exposure to the sun as well. So maybe for Ruan, what type of varieties are you growing? So I see green, green plants there at the back and I see some plants that are almost like purple in colour. Is there a difference between herbs and microgreens? Because sometimes people think microgreens are herbs. So maybe just educate us a little bit on the difference between the two. And what type of varieties of microgreens are you growing there? Now, we've gotten a lot of references before where people confuse herbs with microgreens. Now with microgreens, it's an actual vegetable. So our variants that we're growing here, we have sunflowers, broccoli, bok choy, which is a Chinese salad. Our purple one that you were referencing is the radish. It's got a nice, spiky, spicy taste. It's very, as well with our mustard, it's got a very intense taste to it, very delicious. And then, other than that, we've got the pea shoots and rocket, which is the arugula variant of the lettuce. And this week we're going to grow or taste onions. So every time we get a new variant that we want to try out, if it's a success, then we add it to the production line. And then it gets added because we produce two weights. It's a 150 gram and a 75 gram tub. That's available at Greengrocers. It's apple tree and our local spars here. And in the tub is a mix of all the variants. So tell me, Tina, when you started growing, right? So I suppose, like you said, you saw this man's video, it was a side hustle that he started, and you decided, let me start as well. So once you started and you saw the stuff growing, at what stage did you decide then to say, let me just take this to market? Or are we just consuming the microgreens for your own personal consumption? Well, the first time we grew it and we actually tasted it. We were wowed by the taste of it. And the boost that you get, it's like drinking an energy drink without the negative health after effects that you get from an energy drink. It just gives you that feeling. Yeah, that perk that you that's one. And it's good for the stomach as well. Yeah, yeah. So apologies for my question here. But how do people consume eat microgreens? Right? Because my interaction with microgreens is literally seeing them on a plate, you know, as the chef has sprinkled something just as a form of decoration. But you mentioned that you're selling it to like Apple Tree and the local retailer as well. How are you selling it? Like I think you mentioned in tubs, right? So do people buy microgreens literally in tubs? And then how does one eat it? Because my perception of microgreens is that they're purely used as a form of decoration on a plate. Well, it's microgreens are so convenient because you can take out a little bit of it and just put it on a sandwich or you can make smoothies out of it. Add them to your salads. So let's chop them up. You can add them basically to any meal. Breakfast meals, eggs, the possibilities of ingress. We take all our excess microgreens and we slice them up and add some juice them up with juice fruit and some ice and then we make a whole batch of microgreen smoothies that we just batch up and freeze and then every time with the meal we'll have a microgreen smoothie which is like this energy drink. Oh, wow. This is fantastic. So with your clients, I mean, are you selling it under the brand of Happy Greens? And also take us through those conversations that you started having with clients. Was it quite easy to get to market? Or were they saying, geez, we've been waiting for a microgreen's customer. So just take us through that journey of the branding process and obviously speaking to your clients for them to buy your microgreens. Well, at first, not everybody's familiar with microgreens. So I need to, to people, you get your sprouts and then you get your baby leaves. So microgreens are the one in between sprouts and baby greens. And those microgreens are 40 percent, 40 times as 40 times more nutrients than its adult counterpoint. That's the whole benefits of microgreens. So just imagine one cup of broccoli microgreens. You have to eat 40 cups of the adult broccoli heads compared to the one cup of microgreens. Same amount of nutrients are. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when the clients just started saying, okay, like, did you, did you have to make a few harvests and show them the samples of your microgreens? And how was that reception like? Well, our packaging are quite unique. When you, when you open, open the tub, it's like a little garden of microgreens, all the, all the different variants. And, and we actually grew popcorn for the first time. And that's quite interesting. So it's all yellow. People can go onto our Facebook page or Instagram to, to see what it looks like. Quite unique. So we, we basically started with private customers, you know, people we knew, people we knew who were health conscious and, you know, approaching them with the idea, giving them samples. From there on, we approached local retailers to, you know, telling them about the health benefits and giving them some of our private clients references. And we're now on four green grosses that we supply to every week. So it's so convenient. You can just pop in, grab a tub and all the nutrients that you need right there. And our main aim is not really to, you know, create this empire. It's really to sell the idea of being healthy and selling this to a market where people need extraordinary nutrition, where, you know, people suffering with ailments and illnesses and stuff like that, you know, people who probably on strong medications, you know, stuff like that messes with your digestive system. And there are so many health benefits, so many, they contain so many minerals and, you know, acids and all of that stuff. And we've got less, all the variants on our social media pages. We've got all the variants listed and all the health benefits. So you guys need to check it out there. Yeah, I'd like you to just bring on those health benefits. But before you do so, I just want to find out what are some of the challenges that you guys have experienced in growing microgreens. So for example, I know you mentioned that it's quite intensive. You have to check the temperatures quite often. Is cold chain also another challenge? Is, you know, getting the crop rotation cycles another challenge? So maybe just take us through some of the challenges or obstacles that you've had to undergo and obviously surpass once you started or when you started happy green, specifically where production is concerned. Well, I think the biggest challenge thus far was getting, trying to get the humidity down to what it's supposed to be between 30 and 60%. Otherwise, no other major hassles or, you know, that's it. It's really easy to grow. Hygiene is obviously a big, big, big factor. So everything must be hygiene and you need to sanitize your trays because you reuse your trays every time. Needs to be washed and sanitized and then all of that. Yeah, yeah. So Ruan, what are those health benefits? You know, are they best for people who are diabetic, have cancer? Just take us through the health benefits of having microgreens in our diet. Well, since you pointed out the radish, which is our most, our prettiest microgreen here with the purple, I'm going to bring one closer. Yeah, I've got a whole list here. The radish microgreen in particular, it's an anti-cancer food, high glucose and a late concentration of microgreens, especially radish microgreens, makes it more suitable anti-cancer foods as compared to broccoli. It's got weight loss effects, benefits for the skin. Radish microgreens also contains an antioxidant rich component, like a high concentration of polyphenols causes causing health to reduce Alzheimer's disease risks. And then also microgreens helps in diabetes. The antioxidant present in microgreens in radish microgreens helps to reduce the stress that can prevent sugar from properly entering the cells. Research studies show that radish microgreens increases the glucose up to 25% that's helping reducing diabetes. So we've got all of this listed on our social media pages for every single variant. But mostly this would be concentrated on a market for people who have, I won't say severe illnesses, but mainly health concerns to severe illnesses. And we are living in a time where people want to be more health conscious. They want to be more conscious of what's put into their bodies, especially now with COVID and people taking vaccines. People are being conscious of what's going into their bodies. And I think starting with food and starting to educate people on this particular food because it's been around in Asia for thousands of years. We've only now only picked it up on the Western side, but it's actually not really a brand new thing. But I think it's never been commercialized as big as your fully grown vegetables because it is such a labor intensive process to get it to this stage, to actually harvest, pack, and supply it to a supplier and to a green grocer. To get to that point, back in those days, setting up a factory to do that was just not, it was out of the question. But with advanced technologies today, what we've done in here, we can just multiply by 10 or 100 in a warehouse situation and boom, we can supply the entire country if we want to. Yeah, yeah. That sounds so amazing. And I mean, when I think about the landscape of South Africa is that we're such a cash crop society, where the most important or the most in demand crops are your cabbages, your tomatoes, your potatoes, your onions, and carrots because that's what a lot of people consume. And you are quite right, Ruan, to say, yeah, it's microgreens aren't so popular. It's typically seen as an affluent or niche crop where you literally just find them in restaurants and not usually your green grocers. Share some experiences with us or the feedback that you've had with the private clients that you've sold to. What have they said about happy greens? And have they come to you and say, please train us so that I could grow these at the comfort of my own garden or in my own home? Yes. We had customers coming to us. We want to grow this because they're far away from us and we only deliver to Johannesburg and Victoria at this time. Yeah. So our cut friends in St. Lucia and my parents in Nelspray to my dad's also growing. He ordered stuff from Joe Burke, which we shipped down for him. So he's also now experimenting with it because we shipped some of the actual microgreens to them on a basic because my mom loves it. But now he wants to grow it for her. So we've got people addicted to microgreens now. Fantastic. Getting everybody to eat microgreens. Tell us about the future plans for happy greens. I mean, I'm sure there are those customers that could say, happy greens, please build this structure for myself in my own home and teach me how to farm it. So are there any prospects of maybe franchising this concept that you've started and making it quite popular or just where do you see yourself in the next year maybe? Well, I've got a vision next year this time. We want to do a thousand trays and our five year vision is to have awareness with supply and supply nationwide. That's our vision. And obviously empowering people in the country and getting them to grow as well. Every household should actually be growing microgreens before they diet. Just like people grow herbs as something that people have a tiny little herb garden. Teach people to have a tiny little microgreens garden as well because there's nothing as better than a fresh cut batch of greens that you just add to whatever dish you just put together. It just adds that extra flavor and texture and you feel great off to it. It's really hard to explain the feelings you get from when you eat. The taste is very, very, very unique. It's very spicy. But the feeling you get off to it, you know, it's like you've just eaten something really healthy but it wasn't, how can I say it, disgusting. Sometimes health food isn't really nice but it makes you feel good where this tastes really delicious and it makes you feel good as well. Right, so it's quite easy on the taste buds there and, you know, people could just use it in their daily diet. So gentlemen, thank you so much for such an informative conversation around microgreens. I definitely see you guys growing up because it seems like it's such a nice and neat structure. You've, you've grasped the concept of growing microgreens and already selling to retail. So they trust you enough. So tell me, any shout outs that you want to make? Maybe, you know, thanking those customers that bought from you in the early stages and where could people find happy greens? Yes, yeah, I just want to give a shout out to Broughton from BAC Logistics who supported us in our journey so far and Maurice from... Absolutely, water. We sponsored our, it's Maurice and Kaelin, we sponsored our... Water purification system. Yeah, we use all the watering of the microgreens because we know there's a lot of heavy metals and stuff, although the water here in Aquaroline is at a high standard. You know, we're on the safe side with the reverse osmosis water system. So yeah, you can find happy greens in apple trees, Eatonwell and Elbiton. It's also available at SuperSpar, Coroglin and Meyers Dull. And you can order privately from us and just send us an email at happy.greens at aqua.com or you can find us on Instagram or Facebook, Happy Greens Urban Farm. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dines and Ruan for joining on, for coming on to the show. Yeah, happy farming. Thank you. Thank you very much. Awesome. That was Ruan and Dines from both co-founders of Happy Greens, where we spoke about microgreens and the benefits thereof. Towards the end of the conversation, you could definitely catch their products in those specific retail stores and you could order directly, directly to Happy Greens online. So reach out to them via email and follow them on their social media pages, which I will definitely do so, because I think the concept in which they're using to grow the microgreens is quite interesting. And so yeah, I hope you've enjoyed the show tonight, short and sweet and quite precise. And yeah, I hope you got enough information maybe to start your own microgreens, contact the Gens and maybe you could be trained by them as well, but keep supporting their business as well. And yeah, if you have any questions, comments, this particular video will be on our YouTube channel under the farming podcast playlist in the private property YouTube channel. So be sure to catch this episode, reach out to either Ruan and Dines, if you have any other questions that we didn't cover onto the show regarding microgreens. And yeah, happy farming and have a fantastic Thursday evening, as well as a lovely weekend ahead. That's it from Private Property, The Farming Podcast. See you next week, Tuesday. Take care.