Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jamie Nadler. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jamie , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

My parents did many things right, but two values they instilled in me stand out: hard work and the courage to dream big.

Growing up, they taught me that I could do anything I set my mind to. My mom worked her way up to the executive suite and demonstrated that anything is possible with hard work and resilience. This value motivated me to give my best in everything I did in school, sports, and beyond.

When I think back, I remember when I was struggling with something in school. I was never alone in dealing with it; we would figure it out together. My mom would spend countless nights with me, re-teaching herself geometry or pre-calc so we could work on the concepts together to make sure I was most prepared. I truly learned hard work and the power of persistence from being with her side by side. My mom showed me that mistakes were not failures but rather learning opportunities. As a result of the late-night studying and editing, I was instilled with the confidence that I could do anything I set my mind to.

Along with working hard, my parents also encouraged me to dream big and embrace every opportunity. They were initially quite skeptical when I told them I wanted to be a farmer. They had a lot more questions. What does the day-to-day look like? Can you support yourself? How do you even become a farmer? I knew I had to keep working to prove it to them.

When my business partner and I envisioned starting Dancing Greens, my parents had recently moved, providing a unique opportunity to use their land with minimal initial investment. When I approached them about utilizing their space, they immediately said yes. Now, their support manifests in hands-on ways – be it volunteer weeding, assisting at events, or many other tasks. Their ongoing investment in my dreams means everything, and it reminds me every day of the values they instilled in me from the beginning.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I believe that I was born to be a farmer. As a suburban kid, I was not surrounded by farmland, but I was always drawn to nature. My favorite food group was always vegetables, and I was consistently found digging for worms or climbing trees. I just wanted to be outside. When I was a senior in high school, I took an environmental science course, and I was completely enthralled by learning about the earth’s systems. At the same time, I was overwhelmingly heartbroken learning about climate change. What fascinated me most was how our food was grown and how agriculture impacts carbon emissions, especially as climate shifts make farming more challenging.

That same year, I had an internship at a vegetable farm. Almost immediately, I knew this is where I belonged. I loved the hard physical labor, seeing a vegetable from seed to fruit, and learning how to take better care of the soil.

From that moment on, I never looked back. I studied environmental science as an undergrad and took every opportunity to gain hands-on experience about farming from volunteering on farms to running community gardens and reading extensively on the topic. In 2021, I went to Rome, Italy to earn a master’s degree in Food Systems. I wanted to understand the economics and politics behind our global food system. While there, I met Madison, who came to food from her health and went to culinary school for health-supported cooking. Together we envisioned a way to combine our skills in farming and cooking to create something meaningful – and that is how Dancing Greens was born.

Dancing Greens is a diversified vegetable farm that practices no-till regenerative farming. In addition to growing food, we put on farm-to-table dinners and workshops we call “shindigs”. We want to grow vegetables for others, welcome people into our community, and feed them a delicious veggie-centric meal. A core value of our work is safe eating for everyone. We take dietary restrictions seriously, so no matter who comes to our events, we will cater the meal to everyone.

Another core to the business is prioritizing collaboration and partnerships. We cannot grow everything we use in a meal, so we do our best to work with other farms and companies that share our values. Additionally, we try to work with partners outside of the food world, including artists, craftspeople, and teachers to create unique events like yoga, candle making, forest bathing, cooking, etc. Our artists collaboration series brings together people from diverse backgrounds, engaging them with farming in ways they may not have experienced before.

Through Dancing Greens, we want to bring people closer to vegetables grown on regenerative farms, promoting enthusiasm and joy in an industry often filled with gloom and doom. Our mission is to cultivate not just produce, but a community that is connected to food, the land and to each other.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Our shindigs are pop-ups at heart, which has brought us into some pretty crazy conditions and circumstances. At the end of our first season we had a shindig planned in Chelsea in NYC. However, the location had a beautiful space, but no real kitchen and we did not have the option ot prep on-site. The cost of rental commercial kitchens in New York is crazy high and would cause us to lose money on the dinner if we went that route. As a result, we got creative, piecing together various spaces to handle the prep and also allow us to stay on budget. However, working in multiple spaces came with challenges, especially when it came to refrigeration. On the morning of the dinner, we discovered the refrigerator that kept all our food had not kept temperature through the night. This meant that everything that was prepared was no longer food safety compliant. We were at a loss, forty people were coming that day and we had just lost everything. We had two options- we could either cancel the dinner or we could edit the menu and remake everything the day of. We chose the latter option.

Through a crazy series of events, we got to the location of the dinner, brought in our mobile oven and burners, called in some family/friends for help and remade everything the day off for the shindig. Somehow we pulled it off and the food was incredible. That dinner, that night, proved to me that, with enough resilience and resourcefulness, we could do anything.

If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?

Dancing greens was crafted with a business plan of multiple revenue streams. From my farm planning and apprenticeship programs I learned that diversification was extremely important for a farm’s sustainability and success. Additionally, to be frank, small scale regenerative farms are not high revenue ventures. It is hard to make a living as a farmer, especially one that isn’t subsidized by government programs. This reality allowed Dancing Greens to make a plan that has our shindigs, workshops, and private events as one revenue stream, farmers’ market and wholesale vegetable sales as another source of income.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dancing-greens.com
• Instagram: dancinggreensfarm
• Facebook: dancinggreensfarm
• Linkedin: dancinggreensfarm

Image Credits

Sarah Wallach, Galina Golikova, Elizabeth Kreppel