By Meakalia Previch-Liu
Eat more tomatoes! is the message under Joe Vanderbosch’s email signature and on his business card. It’s also part of the message that he practices every day as the owner of TLC Farms in Suttons Bay.
Vanderbosch, and his wife, Anne Cunningham, are now in their fifth season of operating the hydroponics farm located on Setterbo Road, which is a type of farming focused on growing plants using mineral nutrient solutions in water and without soil. The mission of the farm is simple: to bring locally-grown, hydroponic-quality produce from the farm to the table.
“It’s fair to say we’re loving what we do”, Vanderbosch said. “It’s still a learning experience figuring out how to do it all. This year is the best year for us healthwise for the plants. Our farm table at farmers markets is loaded with different stuff and it looks really good.”
TLC Farms has three greenhouses on site with about 2,500 tomato plants total, which is their primary crop. They have an impressive 28 varieties of tomatoes such as different heirlooms, cherry tomatoes, and red beef steaks. The farm in addition grows a dozen different types of lettuce, and has added other small scale herbs and leafy greens to the garden since starting their business in 2017. In their third greenhouse near the back, you will also find hidden gems like colorful cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant.
“We added things like lettuce mixes, mustard greens, a lot of arugula, basil, parsley, watercress, and bok choy”, said Cunningham. “It makes your stands look beautiful and it helps your consumer have a variety of choices every single week.”
“It’s estimated that about 140,000 pounds of tomatoes are harvested every summer,” Vanderbosch said, while roughly 100,000 heads of lettuce or more are harvested per season. Around 100 bags of greens are produced every week in a season, too.
The farm has expanded over the years to one part wholesale business and one part retail. The retail part is the direct consumer and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) reach, where people can get straight from the farm vegetables by purchasing a share in a local farm. The wholesale part includes working with 30-40 restaurants and grocery stores/ food distributors in both Leelanau and Grand Traverse County.
“Since that time (of first starting the business), we’ve sort of expanded our market a little bit and were doing more direct to consumers through farmers markets and CSAs,” Vanderbosch said. “We put together a box for a consumer and it’s offering them a share of your crop.”
Having a presence at local farmers markets is good business for TLC Farms and has been since Cunningham started incorporating more of a variety into the mix. People can find the company’s fresh produce at five markets a week including in Glen Arbor on Tuesdays, Traverse City on Wednesdays, Northport on Fridays, and Suttons Bay and Traverse City on Saturdays.
As the fifth owner of the TLC operation, Vanderbosch said a lot of the knowledge he’s gained tending to crops in the greenhouses are due to his predecessors who were also farmers.
The idea of controlled environment agriculture gave Vanderbosch hope that he could successfully run a hydroponics farm and provide local produce that people could rely on and trust.
“They have been so helpful and have mentored me on how to do this, and it’s just a great resource to have because all of these people have been very helpful,” he said. “The irrigation of hydroponics is intuitive to me. I know there’s a water supply tank, and a pump that pumps all the water out into all these buckets, and I felt like I could wrap my arms around this and get it.
Every year brand recognition for TLC Farms increases, Cunningham added, and they see the same loyal customers come back time and time again. When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit the economy at the beginning of 2020, supply chains were disrupted across the country and around the world. With all of the shortages that used to be so plentiful, people turned more to local produce.
The interesting thing is once they started looking locally, they saw the difference in taste and quality.
“A tomato that had just been harvested and brought to market is an entirely different tomato than something shipped thousands of miles,” Cunningham explained. “We don’t let produce sit around here, and we cut it one day and bring it to market the next day — For a customer to come and actually talk to their farmer just gives them a lot more confidence in the integrity of the produce itself. There’s also a pretty healthy demand for organic local produce, and although we are not certified organic, we do grow organically.”
Additional greenhouses and more produce is a possibility in the future, Vanderbosch said, as well as growing more crops in soil versus the hydroponics method. Some of the garden beds on the property already have planted garlic and asparagus, but with the couple acres of land that is just meadow right now, he said they could till the land to enrich the soil and plant things. In the meantime, the duo are thoroughly enjoying managing the business that brought both of their careers together.
“We don’t plan to expand exponentially, but one thing we always work on is the profitability as a business,” Vanderbosch said. “We always had separate careers and there wasn’t a whole lot of crossover — just running this business with Anne is incredible. It’s really enjoyable to work with a partner like that. We already know how we work together and it’s been really great.”