Nevis family launches hydroponic gardening enterprise – Park Rapids Enterprise

Hubbard County’s only commercial hydroponic farm is the brainchild of Eric and Becky Hudrlik.

Dubbed The 4 Word Farm, it all started out as a hobby garden until July 2021.

Summer 2024 marks their third year of hydroponic production in their rural Nevis greenhouse.

“We started this business kinda for fun, but it’s not a lot of fun all the time,” quipped Eric.

“It’s a lot of work,” Becky agreed. “In the summer, it’s from dawn to dusk some days.”

The pandemic was both a catalyst and a hindrance.

“COVID was a big reason why this whole thing came about. I was working as a director of maintenance, which just means I was in charge of a lot of toilets at a memory care facility,” Eric said.

He quit that job to become a full-time gardener.

It’s a family-run business. Their two sons – Simon, 17, and Wyatt, 14 – help extensively. Their eldest son is a senior at Nevis High School. He aids in planting, trellising, mowing, weed whipping, harvesting and selling at the farmers markets.

Becky works full-time for Hubbard County, but assists whenever needed.

They built a 50-by-50-foot root garden plot. “It’s a no-till method, so we laid down cardboard, then compost,” Eric explained.

The first year or so, they used occultation, or tarping.

“It’s where you take a large tarp. This one is black on one side, white on the other. We laid it down for a summer to kill off the weeds. That helped a lot,” he said.

Greenhouse materials were delivered in August 2021. The Hudrliks gradually erected the structure, finishing in October 2022. It was primarily delayed because each family member acquired COVID-19 in succession.

A second garden bed is behind the greenhouse, with a third in the works.

Eric envisions upwards of 10 plots total in the future. “We’d certainly need employees at that point or some time before then,” he said.

The Hudrliks are still expanding. They currently use half of the greenhouse, with plans to build out the other half.

Upscaling will be a slow and thoughtful process, they said.

The University of Minnesota Extension Office (UMN) describes hydroponics as “the cultivation of playing roots in a liquor nutrient solution rather than in the soil. The plant’s roots can either be in water, sand, gravel, perlite, pear moss, sawdust, coir or rockwool.”

The system offers many advantages to the home gardener, the UMN says, including higher yields, no weeds, minimal soil-borne pests and disease, more vigorous plants, less space and the system can be automated.

The main purpose of the Hudrlik’s hydroponic greenhouse is producing lettuce and greens, in general. The 4 Word Farm plants buttercrunch, red and green summer sweet crisp, red and green incised, oakleaf and five star lettuces, among other varieties. These make the foundation of their salad mixes, according to Eric.

They grow basil, parsley and kale as well.

Their garden plots are mainly root crops, “but, as you see, we have peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, field tomatoes,” Eric said.

They also grow strawberries, salad turnips, peppers, cabbage, beets and much more.

Eric starts everything indoors by seed, Becky explained.

“He lets me have one row for flowers,” she joked. (She loves dahlias.)

Eric said they have a sustainable operation “in that it uses very little water in comparison to what field crops would use.”

Eric admits there is “pest pressure” on their 10-acre farm. They fight it in a variety of ways – insect netting, for instance. Thrips, leafhoppers and aphids are the bane of any garden, he says.

“We don’t use any chemical pesticides or herbicides on the ground,” Eric explained. “If it’s in the ground, it’s all organic, so we’re trying to be good stewards of the soil.”

They use crop-specific, synthetic fertilizers in the hydroponic system. “What that means is that the plants are uptaking the nutrients, and there isn’t anything left out of balance that we have to discard on a very frequent basis,” he said.

The Hudrliks would like to use organic fertilizers, but those are currently cost prohibitive.

“I can buy feather meal. A big, 65-pound bag will last me the whole year,” Eric said.

Feather meal is a byproduct of poultry processing that’s used as an organic fertilizer and in animal feed.

“It smells horrible,” Eric said.

“But it works,” added Becky.

The Hudrliks grow microgreens in a climate-controlled trailer on the property.

Microgreens are harvested when they are seedlings, just after the cotyledon leaves have developed. They range in size from 1 to 3 inches, including the stem and leaves.

According to the UMN, vitamins are 4 to 6 times more concentrated than in full-grown plants.

“It’s very nutritious because the plant is so compact,” Becky said. “You’re basically stunting a plant. They’re very good on salads.”

Microgreens are grown in the dark under about 15 pounds of pressure. In about a week’s time, they are hand harvested.

The farm grows sunflower, broccoli, radish and pea shoot microgreens.

They utilize a bucket and rain gutter setup for growing tomatoes, like romas and juliettes. It was invented by Larry Hall of Brainerd.

“I just thought it was neat, so I built it,” Eric said. “It’s a wicking system.”

Each bucket has a hole in the bottom and sits in the rain gutter. A garden hose with a float is hooked to the system. “As the water gets low, it automatically fills up,” Becky said. “You don’t have to weed or water.”

Vertical strings allow the tomato plant to climb. “By the end of summer, we actually need a ladder to pick the tomatoes because they do get all the way up there,” she said.

“If you use the proper growing medium, you can avoid fungal problems,” added Eric.

He tops off the buckets with specific nutrients every day. “We get really heavy yields off of that.”

The Hudrliks sell their produce at both the Nevis and Park Rapids farmers markets. Lettuce and microgreens are their best sellers.

They also peddle French breakfast and Easter Egg radishes, which Becky said are popular.

Customers also seek bunching onions, salad turnips and carrots.

Soil testing through the UMN was key to their success, adds Eric. Their land, for example, had a high phosphorus content, for example.