Market gardener tending tomato plants in a greenhouse, hands raised among the foliage

“Farming is beautiful,
but life's richer with energy left for the people in it.”

A coaching program for market gardeners

Harvest more from fewer beds.
Earn more in fewer hours.
Let your greenhouse do the heavy lifting.

Join the waiting list →

A program by

Orisha Growing for Market

The story that inspired the program

The off-farm paycheck became optional

How Drew and Allison changed their farm to carry the load

Ghost House Farm

Hand-drawn sketch of a small half-acre farm plot with rows of beds

½ acre

Hand-drawn sketch of a single 30 by 80 ft high tunnel greenhouse

30 × 80 ft greenhouse

Hand-drawn sketch of an assortment of vegetables clustered together

30+ vegetables

2023

Drew runs Ghost House Farm full-time. Allison works off the farm to make ends meet. They are one of the better tomato producers in the area. The greenhouse contributes $10,000 that year.

"Our first spring in the hoop house was awful. It was miserable."
A farmer's hand cradling a young tomato flower in the greenhouse

2024

Drew and Allison stabilize the greenhouse climate and dehumidify to keep the diseases that ruined 2023 at bay. They focus on improving their tomato techniques: variety selection, multiple leaders, pruning, water timing. In August, Drew shares on Instagram:

"As of today, we have DOUBLED tomato production compared to last year."

They overshoot market projections and make a profit for the first time. The greenhouse contributes $25,000.

A farmer's hand cupping a cluster of green tomatoes in the greenhouse

2025

Allison joins Drew full-time on the farm. Drew starts consulting with Antoine to steer tomatoes and lift fruit set. In early July, they write Antoine:

"We've harvested more cherry tomatoes than all of 2023, before we'd even started picking that year."

Greenhouse contribution: $43,000.

A row of fruit-loaded tomato plants at Ghost House Farm, July 2025
Drew and Allison at Ghost House Farm, 2025
"My wife was able to quit her job and join me full-time on the farm."
Drew, on Allison's first full season.

The same footprint now pays for two.

Join the waiting list →
Read Drew and Allison's 2025 season, week by week →

The angle

Making our beds pay for the life we want

No money to buy back our time? The beds are already paid for. The hours are already spent. Every extra vegetable off them is what buys our time back.

Hand-drawn sketch of four garden beds, two with crops and two drawn with dashed lines as if being removed

Fewer beds, same sales

Less walking, less weeding, fewer problems to chase. The farm gets quieter.

Hand-drawn sketch of a steaming coffee mug resting on a newspaper

Money to hire out what drains you

The accounting gets done by someone who actually likes doing it. Your Sundays come back.

Hand-drawn sketch of two farmer figures working together in a garden bed

Means to pay what good people are worth

Better candidates walk in. They stay longer. Experienced hands mean more done, faster. Less hiring, less training, fewer HR headaches. More energy left in the tank.

Hand-drawn sketch of a small farmhouse with chimney smoke beside a small arched hoophouse

Farm income that carries the household

The off-farm paycheck, the partner's second job, the winter gig. Optional again. And the hours, back to your family.

All four bring you closer to the people you started this farm for.

The focus

Starting with greenhouse tomatoes

A farm has more work than hands. Focus where the work pays the most.

Hand-drawn sketch of a tomato plant with a few solid fruits and many dashed ghost fruits showing unrealized potential

Most room to grow

›

Top growers harvest 5× the small-farm average off the same beds.

“We were at just around 1 lb/ft² with slicers in 2023, and we were one of the better tomato producers in the area. We're up to almost 5 lb/ft². We're trying to hit 6 this year.”
Drew, Ghost House Farm
Hand-drawn sketch of a garden bed with dollar bills and coins sprouting from it

Most pay per bed

›

A well-run greenhouse tomato bed earns what 25 beds of beets, kale, or onions earn.

Catherine, on FQT Farm's numbers.

Catherine, Ferme Décembre
Hand-drawn sketch of three large full baskets clustered next to a row of small empty baskets

Most of the farm's income

›

Tomatoes, cukes and lettuce carry 70% of Drew's farm revenue. The other 30 vegetables carry the rest.

Hand-drawn sketch of a tomato plant overlapped by a clock face

Most labor per bed

›

Tomato beds ask more than any other bed on the farm. Double the yield, and 2 of our 4 tomato beds come off next year's plan. Almost a day a week, back to us.

More reasons tomatoes are our lever

›

Most of the work can run without you

“Automation helps us continue to run the farm when we're not there. We get better quality and better yield with the tunnel totally automated without us than if we were there managing it. The tunnel will do a better job by itself.”
Dan, Broadfork Farm

Tuning for tomatoes lifts the rest

Last season, Drew focused on improving his tomatoes. Yet his cucumbers came in 30% over 2024.

“We grew almost 3,000 pounds of cucumbers off of two 70 foot beds last year.”
Drew, Ghost House Farm

Greenhouse beds are the best ones

If we double our tomato yields, half the beds free up.

Conor's move, at Neversink Farm, is to bring field crops into his high tunnels. Since each bed inside pays like two of the same crop grown outside, he slashes the total number of beds he has to work.

On most diversified farms, tomatoes are the low-hanging fruit.

Nothing's new

The techniques are known

Andrew Mefferd walking the rows inside a large industrial tomato greenhouse
Andrew learning industrial greenhouse techniques.
“First year I applied big greenhouse techniques, my yields doubled.”
Andrew Mefferd

Andrew wrote The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook to share these techniques with small growers.

Aerial drone view of Antoine's 2-acre market garden at Jardin Inverness
Les Jardins d'Inverness, Antoine's farm.

And they work at small-farm scale.

Greenhouse consultants have adapted big greenhouse techniques to small farms. Antoine and other growers learned from them to regularly fill their 30x100 greenhouse with what would normally take four greenhouses to grow.

So why a program?

Bringing the techniques onto our farm is hard

A farmer training a young tomato plant onto a string trellis in the greenhouse

The information is out there

Andrew wrote the book. Orisha made a free online course.

It's not enough

Folks send Orisha questions all the time.

The devil's in the details

Changing how we grow brings hundreds of judgment calls, with little time to work them out.

Which move do I prioritize?

How do I adapt to that variety?

I irrigate many times a day. Why do I still see blossom-end rot?

Am I pruning enough, or pruning too much?

Am I doing it right?

No theory can answer those for you.

What it's about

Not doing it alone

Carrying everything on our own shoulders is heavy.

This program is not a proven silver bullet. No program could be. Every farm is different.

It's a structure to help transform our farm.

  • Follow concrete actions that work on many farms.
  • Pool our experience to overcome roadblocks.
  • Ride the momentum of everybody working on the same goal.
A market gardener harvests cherry tomatoes into a blue crate in a greenhouse, two young children crouched beside her helping

The rhythm

How a week actually looks

One visible goal at a time

›

So we can focus, quickly see results, be motivated.

We want to see the impact. It has to be quick. Often within a week.

Everyone working on the same goal at the same time builds momentum. Questions pile up around the same thing. Folks share what worked for them. The exchange gets specific.

  1. Monday

    2-minute check-in. The week's crop-steering moves.

    ›

    We look at our plants.

    Count leaves, and fruits on a leader. Enter numbers in the app.

    See the week's progress against our goal and yield trajectory.

    Get next moves: irrigation, pollination, pruning tweaks.

    Steering our tomatoes in 2 minutes

  2. Wednesday

    60-minute group call to overcome roadblocks.

    ›

    An hour with Andrew, Antoine, Guillaume, and the cohort. We tackle what theory cannot.

    It's optional. It's recorded if we miss it.

    Watching others' roadblocks often helps move faster. We sit in while doing admin work or answering email. Nobody will be put on the spot.

  3. Thursday

    New 5-minute videos drop. Phone-watchable between rows.

    ›

    What to look for in our plants, the specific moves to try.

    To keep information from piling up, videos stay short, focused on the current goal, and spread across the seasons.

  4. Anytime

    The forum is open. Ask, answer, share what worked.

Starting this June

Our first goal

More fruit per plant, consistently.

Join the waiting list →
A market gardener smiling, holding a giant heirloom tomato in front of one eye, framed by tomato plants

Who this is for

For growers who want their week back

  • You're a market gardener, a few years in
  • You grow greenhouse indeterminate tomatoes
  • Open to trying new things
  • You run an industrial-scale greenhouse
  • You're looking for theory, not practice

Pricing

Try it out.
Leave anytime

Standalone

$40 /month

Month to month. Leave anytime.

Join the waiting list →

Special offer

$0 /month
  • · Growing for Market subscribers
  • · Orisha users

For 2026 only. To be determined after that.

Join the waiting list →

Subscribing to Growing for Market magazine is the cheapest way to join the program. $39/yr.

Team behind this

Different paths in,
Different angles

Andrew Mefferd

Andrew Mefferd

Author. Growing for Market editor.

Andrew Mefferd ran a market garden before anything else. He went to work for Johnny's Selected Seeds and learned greenhouse techniques from the industrial growers who've built the craft over decades. He was still running his own farm at the time, tending tomatoes at 5am before heading in to Johnny's. The first year he applied what he was learning, his yields doubled.

Read more ›

He wrote The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook to carry those techniques back to the market-garden community. Later he took over Growing for Market and set commercial farming aside. He's spent the years since editing articles and running the GFM Podcast, which has kept him in close conversation with the best of the small-grower world.

On calls, he brings the combined view: his own hands, plus the hundreds of farms he's edited and interviewed. When you describe something in your greenhouse, he's usually seen it before somewhere else.

Guillaume at Ferme Décembre

Guillaume

Founder, Orisha. Co-grower, Ferme Décembre.

Guillaume started Orisha with no background in agriculture. He spent the years since in conversation with hundreds of farmers, along with greenhouse consultants and university professors. The question driving him: how can greenhouses best serve a small farm? So Orisha could be useful to small growers.

Read more ›

One challenge kept coming back. There's never enough time to get everything done. He made that Orisha's focus. From the failures and success stories he kept hearing, he built a 40hr farm playbook.

To test it out, he started Ferme Décembre with his partner last year. The target this year is $500k in revenue with 4 employees. Many things yet to figure out, but it seems to be working out so far.

On calls, he can help you spot what's holding your plants back, and where your week is leaking time.

Antoine at Jardin Inverness

Antoine

Grower, Jardin Inverness.

Antoine started a farm from scratch and sold it to take over a 2-acre farm he loved.

A few years in, between the financial and HR pressure, he told himself: "One more year like this, and I'll sell the farm."

Read more ›

Instead, he went hard on lean farming. He started the next season with half the staff. The farm finished the year with 15% more sales. Learning from Quebec greenhouse consultants, he pushed his tomato yields to 4× the small-grower average on the same square footage.

He now works with Orisha to share what he learned, while his employees run the farm.

On calls, he'll show you which lean moves held up when his farm was breaking, and which greenhouse techniques pushed his tomatoes to 4×.

The Orisha team

The Orisha team

Behind the program, alongside Growing for Market.

The rest of the team at Orisha produces the videos and handles platform logistics, so Andrew, Antoine, and Guillaume can focus on farm stuff. They build the virtual consultant that supports the program. And they learn from the program to build tools that make greenhouse production easier.

Join the cohort

Farming is beautiful.
Let's make sure it stays that way

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