One reason customers buy produce from farmers markets is the low number of food miles – the distance from where it is grown to where it is sold – it travels. In this, Vijay Bastawade thinks he has everyone else at the Durango Farmers Market beat.
His business, Micro Panda Greens, grows microgreens (vegetable greens harvested just after their leaves develop) on Durango’s Animas View Drive.
“It probably has the shortest food miles out here: 2.5,” he said.
Bastawade has been growing microgreens for about six months and plans to do so all year round, instead of seasonally like many growers.
“It's controlled environment agriculture, so it’s all indoors,” he said. “It’s a perfectly clean environment, and can grow 365 (days a year), so it doesn’t matter what the weather is outside.”
He cites the freshness and replicability as strengths of growing microgreens, and plans to market to restaurants and small grocery stores.
“Everything I do will be the same quality, the same quantity,” Bastawade said. “Everything is produced exactly every single week the same way, so people and restaurants can depend upon it. They don’t have to say, ‘in summer we buy from this vendor, in winter we buy from this vendor.’”
He said that Sage Fresh Eats already buys his microgreens on a weekly basis.
At the farmers market, he typically has four or five varieties of microgreens for sale, harvested around 4 a.m. the same day. Since he started growing them, he has tried about 30 different varieties, monitoring statistics such as their yields and growth rates, he said.
“There’s a lot of experimentation because, say, sunflower microgreens love soil, pea microgreens don't care, radish microgreens would grow in either one,” Bastawade said. “So you have to learn every single plant, how it grows, what it likes, and so there’s a lot of experimentation going on – but I enjoy doing that. I’m an engineer, so I enjoy doing that kind of stuff.”
The goal of Micro Panda Greens, he said, is to show people that everything can be grown locally instead of trucking it in from Mexico, California or Arizona.
“ One of the things everybody thinks is that lettuce can only be grown in those places, and it’s completely untrue,” he said. “We can grow everything locally and it will be fresh. It will literally be harvested today; you can have it today.”
ngonzales@durangoherald.com
