May 2025
By Michele Miller
What’s What New Port Richey
It was a planting day. In January.
Tanner Kauffman arrived in his gold minivan just after the morning fog had lifted on the Spring Hill field, leaving a wake of glistening dewdrops on the fennel fronds, and the dill cropped up between the recently harvested rows that farmhand Benjamin Stonesmith was dumping wheelbarrows of compost on in preparation for the next round of planting.
On the agenda for Tanner was the unloading and planting of hundreds of tender Jericho Lettuce seedlings that had been started and hardened off under the hoop house back at Theo’s Harvest, a biodiverse, urban farm and the Kauffman family homestead that’s situated on two house plots on Virginia Ave in the city of New Port Richey.
A 50-day crop, that lettuce would land on the plates of local consumers in about a month, Tanner figured. A fair share was already claimed by chefs at area restaurants with a portion set aside for CSA customers, local farmers markets, and shoppers at Wright’s Natural Market, who could pick up a mixed salad bag along with the yellow and red beets, snow turnips, robust collard greens grown in soil just blocks from the store.
After a brief walk-through and Benjamin’s update on recent soil testing, Tanner got to hand-spreading granulated organic fertilizer, then hand-raking a raised path and gullied rows for the seedlings that would be laid into the rows in no time, courtesy of the second-hand plant potter he purchased last summer for about $600.
“It’s not always perfect, but it’s a time-cruncher no matter what—a real game changer. We can get a whole field planted in five days”, Tanner said, walking backward as the machine plopped the cardboard ribboned plants.
A 22-mile, half-hour drive from Theo’s, the off-site plot Tanner tends on someone else’s land is a boon and another step to expanding the footprint of the farm he took full ownership of in May of 2024. Between the two sites, Tanner and crew are now farming just under a half-acre.
A year in, and there have undoubtedly been hiccups, but also good fortunes to count.
Among them, the fall crops survived two hurricanes. A loyal base of CSA customers. A newer customer who buys in bulk. A hook-up to city water at the New Port Richey farm was a necessary expenditure because the well on the property had been salt intruded. The discovery that the Brassica crops thrive there despite the higher salt content, while lettuce – a major money-maker – grows in happy abundance on the Spring Hill plot.
The opportunity to tend the 7,000 square foot plot is Tanner’s end of a “handshake deal” made with Pete Kanaris, the owner of GreenDreams Nursery, a retail and online business located in Shady Hills that offers permaculture services throughout Florida.
It’s just one of the innovative ways Tanner has put his mark on the spread originally known as Freedom House Farms, which was founded and eventually sold by Jim Kovalski, a local legend and leader of New Port Richey’s urban gardening movement.
How it works –
Tanner cleared the tall weeds that had grown there and enriched the soil while expanding the farm’s growing space. The land, which is classified agricultural, garners a tax break for Pete under the Greenbelt Law.
“He gets to farm more land and hopefully get more restaurant customers and make more money while allowing me to keep my Green Belt, so it’s working out well for both of us,” Pete said.
Photo | Michele Miller (January 2025)
How Theo’s Harvest came to be in a fraught farming industry is an example of how small farming as a successful local industry might progress if two sides are on the same page, there’s community support, and some serendipitous alignment.
Tanner was a fledgling farmer working a friend’s plot in Boca Raton, searching for a better way to support his future wife and family in what is a cost-prohibitive field, especially for those starting out.
He connected online with other urban farmers, sharing ideas. Landed on some YouTube videos and a $200 gardening course produced by Pete Kanaris, of Green Dreams, many of which featured Jim Kovalski’s farming methods he applied in Florida and Maine, where Jim farmed during the summer months.
Tanner took the course and then reached out to Jim for more advice. That blossomed into a mentorship, friendship, and a test partnership when the yearning to live full-time with his wife and young daughter called Jim to make a permanent move to northern Maine.
(Read more about that here in a story published in May 2024.)
Jim desired that the farm continue, and so the two worked out a creative financial deal that enabled Tanner to take ownership, with Tanner taking out a bank mortgage on one property and Jim holding a mortgage on the second property.
That he is in this position at the age of 30 is not something Tanner takes lightly.
“I owe so much to Jim,” he said while speaking on the importance of community support for local farmers during a presentation held In April during “Earth Week” at the New Port Richey Public Library.
It was a given that change would come as the Freedom House Farm evolved into Theo’s Harvest, a name taken from Tanner’s late grandfather, who had a story that didn’t end well.
Theo, the last direct lineage of land-owning farmers in Tanner’s family, was a father of five who came upon hard times. He ended up selling his stake in the South Carolina spread to his brother. In hindsight, it was an unseemly, regretful deal that led to ruin as the family spiraled, Tanner said, noting that Theo moved his family to central Florida, where he took up carpentry and his sons took up drugs.
Photo | Michele Miller
Renaming the farm after his grandfather and putting his name on “Big Red,” an old pick-up truck that came with the farm, offered some recompense – a retribution of sorts. As does Tanner’s innate desire to follow in Theo’s and Jim’s footsteps, albeit blending longstanding practices with more modern methods, he continues to seek out.
Aside from being a farmer, Tanner is a family man with a wife, Ana, and two young daughters. Two mortgages. Two part-time employees. And all that goes with it.
Courtesy of Tanner Kauffman
The need to build bigger profits and grow more food is urgent.
Tanner has been successful in that vein, he shared during his recent Earth Week talk at the library, impressively rolling what was a $30,000 – $40,000 profit margin under Jim’s ownership to about $100,000 this year.
The Kauffmans generated some income by renting out the second home on the farm to the Ahava Microschool, a one-room schoolhouse teaching concept where the garden is part of the curriculum and where their daughters attend school just a few steps from their home.
Photo | Michele Miller
To boost production, Tanner reformed the garden rows, separating them into designated plots. He extended the planting season by fashioning an indoor, temperature-controlled seed starting room and installing an outdoor hoop-house.
“The density is the same, but the turnover is faster,” said Tanner, who also acquired timesaving equipment such as a refurbished produce spinner and the pot planting machine.
“We’re doing more growing based on demand,” said Tanner, who has assembled a local farm-to-restaurant customer base by meeting regularly with chefs at Estuary in New Port Richey, Little Lamb Gastropub in Palm Harbor, Crown and Bull and Caracara in Dunedin, and The Tides Seafood Market & Provisions in Safety Harbor.
“We have the beauty of selling to chefs who are hip to some of the stranger things that will grow here,” he said. “We’re growing a specific kind of cauliflower for Estuary. One chef told us that he would purchase 50 pounds of Chinese broccoli. To accommodate that, we have to change the way we plant the food and how we schedule succession planting.”
The Kauffmans have also hosted two “Farm to Table” dinners with Chris Falzon, executive chef and owner of the Crown and Bull Restaurant – 20 seats at $100 a piece helps pay the bills, but it also gets the word out and offers an invitation to the community to take part and support the “buy/eat local concept.”
As did the free garden tour that the Kauffmans hosted in March, which drew 60 people.
Theo’s Harvest presently serves some 40 CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) customers, a valuable, supportive base that helped carry the farm through the slow summer months with $350 – $700 half-year and full-year memberships paid in advance. (Taking orders now here for half and whole season)
“Without our CSA customers, we would have starved,” he said, noting that while their patronage is important and well appreciated, the burden should not be upon members of the community for his farm to survive.
“The goal next season is not to be as dependent on the CSA.”
Tanner also hired two employees- Benjamin and Riley – who he pays $20 per hour to mostly tend the Spring Hill plot and work the booths at Wrights Farmers Market and the New Port Richey Library’s Tasty Tuesday Community Market.
“Tasty Tuesdays has turned out to be really good for us,” Tanner said. “We take anywhere from $700 to $1,000 on a good day.”
The booth does okay at the biweekly Wright’s Markets held on Sundays, but Tanner would like to encourage customers to venture indoors, where his produce is available seven days a week.
“Really, you can get the same thing inside that you can get outside at the booth,” he said, adding that he would love to sell more of his produce to Wrights and all the downtown New Port Richey restaurants – something that would raise the elevation of local business and serve the local community in a forward-thing manner.
Why wouldn’t you want to purchase a bag of lettuce or a tomato that was harvested that very day rather than produce that has spent days and weeks traveling to and across the country?
But there has to be buy-in for that to happen.
There is some movement that way, spurred by a welcome windfall with the addition of a new regular customer, Nicole Dube of Dube’s Farm and Market in Wesley Chapel.
Nicole, a former army brat who grew up living on army bases, took up small farming upon quitting her corporate career of 20 years with Target and decided to work her property in Wesley Chapel.
Since then, she has established an online and onsite farmers market as well as a non-profit Mobile Market to deliver healthy food to students in schools in East Pasco County, seniors, and other people living in food desert neighborhoods.
In 2024, Dube and her daughter, London, delivered 400 pounds of locally grown produce a week to students served by the school’s summer feeding program via Food is Health, a 6-week educational supplemental program, made possible by grants and a partnership with AdventHealth and UF/IFAS Pasco Extension.
“I have a passion for getting people healthy food and watching kids experience that aligns with that purpose,” said Nicole.
She is parlaying her childhood experiences growing up in government food deserts, where the commissaries carried mostly non-perishables, and her professional career in corporate leadership with recent stints as a Master Gardener, Leadership Pasco, and member of Pasco’s Food Policy Advisory Council.
Her goal is to build bridges within the local farming community.
“Living on a military base, fresh food was the last thing we would eat. It was a struggle with four kids,” she said.
Nicole was first introduced to home farming by her mother-in-law, an art teacher who tended a garden in the family’s backyard in western Massachusetts and grew sunflowers for lessons on Van Gogh and tomatoes for still-life inspiration. Now her granddaughter happily picks fresh vegetables from the Wesley Chapel home gardens regularly.
While some of the food for her markets is grown on Dube’s farm, Nicole supplements what she can’t grow enough of with produce from Theo’s Harvest, Shady Oaks Farm, and a few other smaller farms.
“I didn’t expect to be selling $800 of produce to her a week,” Tanner said, noting the boost to business.
That is the point and the purpose, said Nicole.
“I’m so envious of what he’s doing over there,” she said, pointing out that among other things, Tanner provided 100 pounds of carrots a week during the winter growing season.
“He’s not growing blindly. He has a goal.”
So does she.
“I want to make sure we have good soil to grow on, and that people like Tanner who can do that can keep doing it.”
“If I can make connections in the community, that’s how we’ll do it,” she said. “If I know someone who wants to farm and someone with 5 acres of land they aren’t using, then why not connect them? I think there are people out there who are willing to do that. To be part of that.”
Nicole has also purchased a second mobile market vehicle and is consulting on the building of a 6,000 square foot food distribution center in Wesley Chapel that would accommodate local farmers wanting to grow more who don’t have the space to store and distribute large harvests.
“I want to make farming a viable job in our community,” she said, citing a fact that 86% of those farming under 10 acres of land need a second job to support themselves.
“That’s not right. Farming is a full-time job.”
For the farmer, and hopefully the people they employ.
The idea of the lone virtuous farmer working every aspect of the operation and toiling day and night doesn’t appeal or make sense to Tanner or his wife, who is a mainstay in the family farming operation.
Photo | Michele Miller
“Ana is always on me about that,” Tanner said, adding that she sets a strict 4 p.m. end to his work day to help him keep a comfortable work/life balance.
It’s why he pays two employees $20 an hour to help out on the farm and run the markets so he can spend Tuesdays at the farm and Sundays with his family. It’s why he encourages and facilitates ways for his employees to explore farming and its different aspects in their own way.
“Everyone has their own purpose. Their own special talents – why not utilize them?”
Riley, who spends most of her time harvesting crops at the Spring Hill spot, has a penchant for growing flowers and has started her own flower plot as an experiment to stock bouquets for market.
Benjamin, who has the gift of gab that Tanner professes not to have, mans the markets. He has also contributed to Theo’s by purchasing a two-wheel tractor to use at the Spring Hill Plot. Last fall, he made his first attempt at farming at his family’s property in New Port Richey.
Photo | Michele Miller
He’ll try again, and so will Tanner as he focuses on the summer growing season, which tends to be sparse because of the Florida heat. Now is typically the time for sweet potatoes, okra, and cover crops to take root.
But with lettuce being such a good seller, he’s going to give it a go and has started seedlings that will be planted under shade cloth and harvested early so they don’t bolt. There’s also the thought of growing more squashes, such as the Seminole variety, that can be stored and kept for longer periods.
“Let the summer greens trial begin!” Tanner recently wrote about the effort in a recent social media post. ” One of our goals this summer is to keep our salad orders filled. This is a goal for many reasons: cash flow, employee retention, and customer retention. We aren’t totally confident we will succeed, but we are feeling optimistic at the moment.”
Since its inception the New Port Richey’s fabled urban farm has been a cornerstone that helped spur a local movement that has given rise to volunteer-led community gardens, the city’s compost program, city ordinances that allow residents to garden in their front yards, and food festivals and horticulture events that serve to educate about what can be successfully grown in Florida’s tropical climate such as okra, sweet potatoes, collard greens and loquats.
Tanner has proved himself to be a worthy, forward-thinking guardian, according to Dell deChant, chair of the city’s Environmental Committee and founder of the USF Urban Food Sovereignty Group and New Port Richey FarmNet.
“Theo’s Harvest, the successor to Jim Kovaleski’s Freedom House Farm, the first major market garden in the city, is the city’s initial witness to urban agrarianism,” he wrote in a recent email.
“Today, under the stewardship of Tanner and Ana Kauffman, Jim’s pioneering work has expanded significantly, and Theo’s Harvest has become a major sustainable food-production hub, with a growing regional impact.”
Indeed, the movement to grow and purchase local produce has taken root throughout the country, spurred in part by the advent of COVID in 2020 and supply-chain shortages that drove people to local sources.
“I think small farms like Tanner’s are going to feed the future for this world,” said Pete Kanaris, reflecting on the rise of his own business, which he transitioned toward permaculture after meeting and befriending Jim Kovaleski.
“When we originally started Green Dreams, we modeled it around the Victory Garden movement, and every year, it’s getting a little bit better and getting more popular. Especially after COVID, when people wanted to start their own gardens and buy more locally-grown food.”
The coming tariffs could be more beneficial for local farmers is a current thought taking root, Kanaris added.
Even so, it’s an uphill climb for those wanting to enter the field.
The University of Florida has predicted that the state could lose about 3,000 square miles of farmland in the next 45 years, according to a November 2024 WUSF/NPR story. (Competition for land forces Florida agriculture to innovate.)
Operational costs are rising, and farm subsidies, largely allotted to big “factory farms,” don’t trickle down to the smaller farms. Federal cuts to agriculture subsidies, such as a $10 million cut to the USDA’s Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grants Farm to School federal grants, are another hit to small, local farms that have established partnerships with school systems in their communities.
Add to that the much-cited fact that 57 percent of today’s farmers are over the age of 60 and nearing retirement.
There are plenty of young farmers who are willing and able to step up. But with limited resources, those who want to farm must be creative.
Fostering partnerships, as Tanner has done with Jim Kovalski and Pete Kanaris, can crack open a door to ownership, bigger yields, and profits while controlling prohibitive upstart expenses and ongoing overhead costs.
Some farmers, such as owners of The Four Root Farm in Connecticut, have turned to “Cooperative Farming” as a means to purchasing land and keeping operational costs down by sharing equipment. Community Land Trusts (CLT), where members of the community purchase property to lease out to farmers, offer another avenue.
(You can’t have local food without local farms, which requires local farmland, Concord Monitor (4/2025)
Others have adopted “how to do more with less” methods that include growing in unique, smaller spaces and using less fertilizer and water.
It’s a practice Jim Kovalski established, in part by spreading layers of free city compost at Freedom House Farms and encouraging other home gardeners to do the same, as he carved out a place at the forefront of the local urban gardening movement.
A practice that Tanner has built upon and then some.
Photo | Michele Miller (January 2025)
For more information on Theo’s Harvest, visit theosharvest.com. To sign up for the coming CSA season, click here.
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About the author –
Michele Miller is the owner of What’s What New Port Richey and the writer, photographer, website designer, and advertising salesperson for this local community news effort she created in 2020 after a 25-year career working in the Pasco bureau of St. Petersburg/Tampa Bay Times. You can reach her at mmiller@whatswhatnewportrichey.com
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