Award-winning Garden Fresh reaps $300,000 for expansion

• _{Article by: NEAL ST. ANTHONY , Star Tribune}
• _{Updated: December 7, 2013 - 2:00 PM}

Co-owner Dave Roeser at three-year-old Garden Fresh Farms has harvested accolades this year and grown expansion capital.

The company won entrepreneur awards from the Minnesota Cup and Midwest Region Clean Tech Open. Add the national Clean Tech Open Sustainability Award in California in November.

Roeser, 57, a building owner who started the company with his wife partly because he had a vacant warehouse to fill, has raised $300,000 from individual investors and is starting the first of several “farms” inside an abandoned building the company is acquiring near St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood. It’s twice the size of the Maplewood flagship.

Garden Fresh, which supplies thousands of heads of lettuce and other vegetables to Whole Foods and other stores, is demonstrating, through year-round vegetable harvests, the commercial practice of aquaponics, a modernized version of an ancient system of raising fish, piping water that’s rich with nutrients from fish waste to fertilize the plants. The process cleans the water before it is returned to the fish tanks.

Click here to read this complete article!  This is a great new company RADC met at the CleanTech Open in October 2013!

Click here to see their interview with Cyndy Brucato with Greater MSP on their Facebook page!