Melissa grew up in the suburbs, but has farming in her DNA. Her great-grandparents had a chicken farm in rural Indiana and Grandpa Pappy was famous for his bantam Wyandotte fighting roosters. After living in the suburbs most of her life, Melissa yearned for the country and in 2005 convinced her husband to move to a rural area so that she could have “just 3 chickens.” Three became 7, 7 became 100, 100 became 200. Each time, she promised she wouldn’t add more to the flock, but the family knew better until the entire family was involved in a 3,000 bird organic pastured poultry business.

While raising kids and running the farm operation, Melissa discovered private, state and federal grants that were available to small family farms. Over the years she received close to $1 million in grant funding. Have you ever heard the joke about how to make $1 Million in farming? Start with $2 million. Well, she didn’t start with $2 Million, but she invested the grant money into the farm and built it up, receiving national recognition for the quality of her eggs and the high standards of animal husbandry that she practiced.

In 2018, she pursued an MBA degree because she “didn’t know what she didn’t know”, completing that in 2020. In 2021, she sold her thriving farm business to a neighboring farm to work full-time helping other farmers build their farm businesses through writing grant applications, business and marketing plans, feasibility studies and providing other technical assistance.

She focuses solely on grants in the food section: farmers, ranchers, fishers, food processors and food related non-profits. She has a remarkable success rate, bringing more than $10 million into the farm economy in the last five years. The Value Added Producer Grant is her absolutely favorite program for small and medium sized farmers (the closest thing to free money out there!) and she has been involved in more than 67% of the money brought in to Washington State through this federal program in the last five years.

If you have a US-based farm or a ranch or are in any way involved in bringing delicious food to market in the United States, let’s chat! I offer free half hour consultations to any farmer or food producer interested in expanding their farm business.