Most farm websites do not have a page like this. Most farms write the polished story and leave the rest in private group texts. I am writing this one out loud because the people who supported MicrogreenFX through the last year deserve more than silence.
Have you ever had a year where every single thing you were supposed to be able to count on, money, schedule, family, partners, pulled out from under you at the same time? That was 2025 for our family. I will not pretend it was just bad luck. Some of it was. A lot of it was harder than that.
We lost family.
That is the first thing you should know, because everything else has to be read against it. We lost loved ones in 2025. The kind of loss that does not file itself away and let you keep moving. The grief was real, the months long, and there were weeks I had to choose between showing up for my family and showing up for a farmers market. I chose my family. I do not regret that choice.
Two contracts went unpaid.
Outside the farm, I work other contracts to keep the bills covered while we grow MicrogreenFX into something that can stand on its own. In 2025, two of those contracts went south. Over five thousand dollars in earned wages I never saw. One company simply did not pay. The other closed their entire contractor program and walked away from what they owed.
When you are a small family operation with three kids, you do not have the legal budget to chase that money down. You absorb it. You eat it. You wake up the next morning and you figure out how to put food on the table that does not come from the trays. So I hyper-focused on putting more than just microgreens in front of my family. That came at a cost to the farm. It came at a cost to events we had committed to. It came at a cost to customers who deserved better than the radio silence they got.
A family member we love is fighting addiction.
I am not going to share details. They are still our family, and their story is theirs, not mine. But the impact on the farm was real. Tools were tampered with. Trays we had grown for events were sabotaged in a way that made them un-sellable. We pulled out of more than one market that week because we could not in good conscience put a product in front of you that we were not certain about.
You can love someone and still be devastated by what their illness costs you. Both of those things are true at the same time. We are still in it. We do not know how the story ends. We are doing what families do, we keep showing up.
Zander arrived. Fiona and Xavier kept growing.
In the middle of all of it, our third child Zander arrived. New babies are joy. New babies are also the most physically demanding chapter a family will go through. If you have three or more kids you already understand. The math of attention does not divide neatly into thirds. Fiona, our oldest, has carried the heart of this farm since she was eight. Xavier knows our products better than most adults do. Zander is the youngest, and he needs the most right now.
Celine and I had to rebuild our days from scratch around three very different children, each of whom needed to feel like they were the most important. None of that is visible from the outside. It looked like we were just slow.
A partnership we put our hearts into ended.
For the last few seasons we partnered with a farm in Harleysville to deliver microgreens directly to their CSA members. We poured into that relationship. We paid out of our own pocket to help build their microgreens shares. We donated time. We donated resources. We sent customers their way, people who came to MicrogreenFX first and would have signed up directly with us, because we believed the partnership was worth supporting.
When new leadership came in, they decided to replace us with a different supplier at a higher price point. I was vehemently against that price increase. I offered them a higher wholesale discount to absorb whatever extra they needed. The honest critique of our work, and the only one they offered, was that, soon after Zander was born, we were 15 to 30 minutes late on a couple of deliveries.
Have you ever had a chapter of your life where you knew you were doing the best you could, and someone still held you to a standard that did not account for any of it? That was that conversation for us.
We are not going to wage a public argument over it. We hope that, when leadership cycles through again, the door will be open to rebuild what was lost. Until then, we are reaching out to those CSA members directly with something we think honors what they supported. If you were one of them, watch your inbox.
Why we picked fewer markets this year.
We could have stretched ourselves across every event we used to do and burned out by August. Instead, we sat down at the kitchen table and chose the markets and partnerships that made the most sense for our family this year. Fewer events. Better presence at each one. More energy left over for the kids and for the work that actually matters.
That decision is not a retreat. It is the same instinct that made us walk away from USDA Organic certification when our internal standard was already stricter than the certification required. We do not measure ourselves by how visible we are. We measure ourselves by what we put in our customers' hands and what we put on our own kids' plates.
What I want you to know.
Anyone who has been around MicrogreenFX for any length of time already knows we are kind, careful, and supportive of the people around us. That is the entire ethic of this farm. We grow food the way we grow it because that is how we want our kids to eat. We treat customers and partners the way we want to be treated.
But here is something I have learned the hard way this year: there will always be people who do not care how heavy life is. They hold you to a standard they would never hold themselves to. They expect you to be on time when their world is steady and yours is on fire. That is not a fair way to measure anyone in 2026, and it is not a fair way to measure us in 2025.
We are still here. The farm is still growing. The standards are higher than they have ever been. And we are coming back into the season with our eyes open and our priorities in the right order.
If you stuck with us through the silence, thank you. If you lost touch and you are reading this for the first time, welcome back. The microgreens are still being cut at sunrise, by the same family, in the same Schwenksville greenhouse. The MicroThrive Soil is still ours. The standard is still beyond organic.
And the door at the kitchen table is still open. If you want to talk, text me. (484) 642-7639
Sergio, Celine, Fiona, Xavier & Zander