We were lucky to catch up with Mallory DeVries recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mallory, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

Woodside Acres is a market farm specializing in gourmet mushrooms and pasture-raised poultry. We aim to make nutritious food accessible to our neighboring communities. My husband and I were both raised in rural communities surrounded by fields of inedible crops. We want to help change that.

We’re on a mission “to feed and heal our family and yours with nutrient dense foods”.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My story isn’t a straight line, but rather a series of zigzags. The oldest of four girls, I grew up in rural Iowa, living on packaged food and soda. My parents worked hard, but couldn’t seem to get ahead in the small town that was lacking in opportunity and food options. I specialized in trouble-making and playing sports. I did enjoy the 4-H Club for a handful of years and even worked at the local grocery store, but was still very removed from where my food came from. I simply didn’t care, so long as I had SOMETHING to eat.

I remember going without school lunch at times because our account wasn’t in good standing. The school would give my sisters and I free milk. If there were leftovers after everyone else had been through the line, we would get to eat. I remember the pit in my stomach waiting in line to scan my lunch card, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t make that loud, embarrassing, rejection sound.

By working multiple jobs and through grants and scholarships, I was able to head off to community college after high school where I studied Graphic Communications. I reconnected with Charles, a high school friend, and we started dating. We quickly found out that we loved to cook and eat together and it became our hobby. Learning how to cook was truly lifechanging for our health; both physical and mental. Our interest in food sourcing began after we moved to Indianapolis. We both had good jobs and could finally breathe more easily about where our next meal was coming from.

To prepare for our upcoming wedding, we were on a health kick – working out, watching our macros and micros, and cooking everything from scratch. This is when we began realizing that the food grown locally tasted so much better and packed a higher nutrient punch (these two things are often related). Charles’ sisters, gifted home chefs themselves, gave us a couple of cookbooks that really got into nailing down various kitchen techniques.

When we thought we had it all figured out, we were slammed with a couple of really bad years. Susan, Charles’ mother, lost her battle with cancer just 8 days before our wedding. The following year our first child arrived via a long, traumatic birth and suffered a brain injury resulting in Cerebral Palsy and Epilepsy. A few years later, Charles was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I suffered two small strokes after an accident.

This series of hardships could have broken us. It almost did. Instead, we decided to fight for our lives. We returned to Iowa, we bought some land and decided to apply everything we had learned. I took a contract job with a local non-profit, Healthy Harvest of North Iowa, where I was able to fast track making connections in the local food scene through through teaching cooking classes and focusing on food access.

We grew many of our own vegetables, started a layer flock, pastured our own poultry, and began to heal, sourcing high-quality foods that we didn’t grow ourselves. We re-devoted ourselves to nourishment through cooking and eating. In 2019, we started our daughter on a keto diet, rich in the high quality meat, fresh mushrooms, and organic vegetables as a way to reduce her seizure frequency. In 2020, we decided it was time to begin sharing our bounty with our local community.

We found out pretty quickly that people LOVE gourmet mushrooms and the business took off very quickly. I was able to utilize the connections I’d made working in the non-profit world to get food where it was most needed. Utilizing my background in Graphic Communications made the marketing side of the business a lot easier and more fun, so I decided to offer these services to other small farms in our area. I wear many hats, but this is perhaps the most rewarding one. These services allow producers to spend more time producing food and less time fighting with a computer.

We now have two kids who are doing farm chores and love to cook and invent recipes. Having a flexible career as a mother is truly a blessing. I can drop everything and rush to school when there’s been a seizure. I have extra time in the day to pack a special school lunch and to spend time with our youngest before he starts school, too.

Do you have multiple revenue streams – if so, can you talk to us about those streams and how your developed them?

In addition to our farm sales, I also offer consultation, web design, social media strategy, and eCommerce setup to other local food producers and non-profits. We’ve found other revenue streams as well such as offering classes and workshops in the “off-season”, partnering with other farms, and selling merchandise and digital recipe collections. I’m always thinking about ways to maximize the work I’m already doing to make it the most impactful. Not just for my farm, but for my community. We are currently saving up to install an on-farm kitchen space in which we can create value-added products, host classes, and have a more efficient packing area.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I joke that we could have named our farm Pivot or CurveBall Farm. I think farmers in general are excellent at pivoting; it’s practically expected. As a mother of a medically complex child, I do more pivoting than most. I’ve learned to leave a lot of space for the unexpected and the importance of relationships. My customers not only understand when things change, they send cards.      

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.woodsideacres.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/woodside.acres/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/woodside.acres/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallory-devries-1868584a/

Image Credits
Juliana Sabo