We recently connected with Melissa Botten and have shared our conversation below.

Melissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

I might shed a tear sharing this. I had the most incredible parents that my siblings and I could ever ask for. We loved on hard. We were also fed really well and healthy all during childhood, food was our gathering time & reflection activity. We ate local food as much as we could, Dad was a hunter and fisherman, so our protein was followed back to the source in most cases. I practice the same nutritional guidelines for my kids and it has offered its weight in gold for our family. From a very young age, my parents were both super supportive and in fact, encouraged me to move to the beat of my own drum. Later in life I am realizing exactly what that meant, I hold it dear to my heart.

I’m quite different than many people in my immediate and extended family, as a very independent thinker, free spirit, actionary, but also very disciplined, hardworking, detail oriented & organized. These skills that my parents rooted me in and encouraged, are extremely helpful as beekeeper, food farmer & mother while I master those crafts.

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?

The journey to where I am now has been a fun and difficult road. However when I look back and reflect, I’ll have to say that I’m humbled but proud of my accomplishments. The journey is not done, we are just getting started.

I work with a collaborative of healing arts, all centered around health, wellness, regenerating mind and body, releasing, healing & preventative care. I started down this path to quite honestly, help myself. I was sick and tired and didn’t quite understand why.

I learned later during my healing process that I was suffering from compound chronic injuries to my heart & soul, which then ripples chronic fatigue to my body physically. Combine exhaustion from being a workaholic, poor eating and sleep, unbalanced regret from a lifetime of people pleasing, plus unresolved grief over losing my parents suddenly in an accident. Then, followed by a divorce, postpartum trauma after two pregnancies with unplanned C-sections and maybe drinking too much wine.

I really had no other choice but to start healing myself and so I did, slowly releasing from the corporate world into yoga teacher training, and Holistic nutritional therapy. Now I practice both of those gifts as professional offerings.

I began to work with Seniors and teach yoga, helping them stay active & their blood circulating. Many people started gravitating towards me after witnessing an improvement in my health for nutritional coaching, recovering from injuries, chronic disease, etc. I just kind of became a go to for all things food related and on a holistic personal level. We do not belong in a world where we check a box. Every person is uniquely them selves and that was my specialty, to find something workable & perfect for each client that I had. This brought me in to peoples kitchens to make discoveries about their food behaviors, encouraging tweaks here and there that were reasonable & that they could follow without being completely endowed to me forever. Giving folks their power back essentially.

At the same time, because I had all this free-time…. I began to bottle some of my ideas, which is now a beautifully curated brand, focusing on Women’s Empowerment, Clean Beauty, Feminine Care, Men’s Health & Mental Clarity.

You’ll find our products here on our website: www.msbeewomxn.com

Nutritional guidance naturally gravitated towards the practice of beekeeping, planting pollinators, saving seeds, knowing your farmers and growing locally sourced food. With the city’s permission, I started a parkway garden project building raised beds with my forever friend Luis. Then I began to teach others to do the same and it spread quickly(the idea and the seeds).

Realizing that this was the root of healing food behaviors, guiding people to trace their food back to the seed and become super conscious about where they source their food. What we are eating & drinking on a daily basis is our long term plan, rather than hiring a nutritionist for life.

When the pandemic hit, everything changed for me, my clients & our local network in the healing arts. I had a lot more time at home with my children, a barley there social life and very little answers for them about what was really going on in the World. Shortly after the first year, we moved our family to Central Oregon where we knew very few people and didn’t have much of a plan.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been as exhausted or exhilarated as I have been in the last three years and oddly enough, I feel like I have anti-aged a decade because of our improved lifestyle. By focusing most of my time on Food Farming and Beekeeping, we have birthed our own sources of ingredients for our Ms.Bee Womxn bottled products (that I used to source from other companies).

I am proud to say that I did not quit. Life is hard enough but bravery won over my anxiety & once damaged, nerve endings. My free spirit lead us here to care and take action toward greater things than myself & trusting in God who always has my back. We are not finished yet. We’ve got plans to continue healing and empowering the next generation.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Oregon offered a whole new freedom for my children & me. I saved so much money by not living in California that I managed to purchase a piece of land outside of town & turn it into a farm. Now it’s a quite impressive apiary at the top of the hill, with farm animals at the bottom. We currently have 30 chickens and four goats with plans to expand. My girls own this farm too and are gradually becoming more interested in our investment.

We officially have a Farm-to Skin brand now and this is our Sister website which connects the farm to our beauty brand: www.sevafreshfarm.com

Any advice for managing a team?

One are the best things that I’ve done is kept an open and honest communication with my team which consists of mentors, vendors, my production side, graphic designer, sourcing partners, tech, other farmers, and the list goes on. We talk about stuff. We problem solve. We are all creative. We are a collective beehive of hard-working women, (& a couple men) full of grit. Everybody knows that I pay people right away as well. In turn, most of my team members put me at the top of the to-do list because of the way I treat them. I am quite blessed in this aspect, a set of behaviors that I learned from my parents. It really simply comes down to reciprocity, the energy that you put into something is generally the energy that you get back. At some point if it isn’t that way, it’s time to reflect and possibly make some shifts for better functionality.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.msbeewomxn.com www.sevafreshfarm.com
• Instagram: @ms.beewomxn @thereal.sevafreshfarm

Image Credits
Sarah Lim Luis Tobon Erik Ramirez COBKA