Meet the urban farmer with big plans for future of food in Kansas City

Editor’s Note: This interview is part of Voices of Kansas City, a project created in collaboration with KKFI Community Radio and Kansas City GIFT (Generating Income For Tomorrow), a nonprofit supporting Black-owned small businesses, to highlight the experiences of Kansas Citians making an impact on the community. Hear the interviews on KKFI 90.1 FM, Fridays at noon, or at KKFI.org. Do you know someone who should be featured in a future “Voices of Kansas City” season? Tell us about them using this form.

Ophelia’s Blue Vine Farm is tucked just beyond 18th and Vine streets. The vision for the urban garden, complete with a greenhouse with grape vines dangling from the ceiling and tomatoes ripening in the sun outside, was dreamed up by Mike Rollen, who learned how to garden from his grandmother, the business’ namesake. But this isn’t any ordinary farm. It’s focused on sustainability and community.

Kansas City Star reporter Anna Spoerre sat down to talk with Rollen about his passion for food and farming. Their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is presented in a question and answer format to capture Rollen in his own words.

Meet Mike Rollen

Anna Spoerre: Mr. Rollen, thank you for being here today. So, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you? Where did you grow up?

Mike Rollen: A little bit about myself. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. The Show Me State. But I spent all of every summer with my grandmother in Springfield, Illinois. I used to take the Greyhound bus to visit her.

She raised some incredible children. Two of them actually ended up in different years playing for the New York Giants. So the family was highly competitive, highly successful. She was a seamstress. She grew up on a family farm in Arkansas, which is still there today. And in spending the summer with her, I learned so much about life: a little bit about farming and gardening and stuff. There was incredible memories of pulling out greens out of her freezer in winter and the taste of those.

And so as the years progressed, when I got married and moved to Kansas City, I started to get back into gardening because I wanted my boys to know what real food tastes like, you know, like real tomatoes. I missed seeing some of the stuff in nature that I used to want to see when I was growing up, like milkweed and apples or crab apples and so it was just me gardening on different lots in the city.

I had some great people who mentored me, some master gardeners — Growing In Ivanhoe. They had spots for us to plant these vegetables and sell them at one small farmer’s market. And we just really did what we could with what we had at the time. And it was an opportunity for me to grow this produce and learn how to grow in different soil types, different areas within the city, and then meet different people and learn from them.

I like to say I failed my way to greatness because we spent so many years getting it wrong. But from that, we learned so much. And some of the stuff that I learned or some of the things that I do aren’t really in any book, you know, they’re through experimentation or through learning from other Black farmers.

A lot of times I think when you go to school for an agricultural program, they’re going to teach you a certain way and when you get out, that’s the way you’re going to do it. But failure is the process. So we were growing this produce on different lots in the city, selling it through small farmers markets. When coronavirus had come about, the market had closed because a lot of the older people were scared to come out of the house and no one really wanted to do the market.

I had just finished having Ophelia’s built. It had been built a year. We were growing in it, but we weren’t selling out of it. And so I said, “OK, well let’s just put in a walk in window.” And then we got a point of sale machine and let’s just make it so people in the neighborhood can come and they can get some of the things that we grow from right here.

I also had an idea for how to make it efficient, how to heat the space. I bought a pellet stove in the middle of summer from a teacher who had tenure, but he had gotten laid off and he had this stove in his garage for two years and had never even taken it out the box.

So I had the idea that if I heated my greenhouse space with biofuel, then it would be more sustainable. And also it would lower my cost because for years before, I would rent spaces in these professional greenhouses and they were heated by electricity or natural gas. And it would be thousands of dollars a month. And so I was thinking, you know, pellets, corn, that’s kind of the key. And so the proof of concept, the first year it worked, we went out and Ivanhoe and the city and all the lots and I dug up all the rosemary like crazy idea.

I dug all those plants up, you know, and I plant them in a greenhouse and we got through the first year. Now if you go in there we have rosemary bushes that are 4 years old, 4 or 5 feet tall. And so sustainability was a big thing for us. We couldn’t grow a lot of stuff, but we could be a blessing to some folks. And so I just had the opportunity and a passion to just keep doing what I was doing and around that time, I got a $25,000 grant from KC GIFT, which is where we’re at now.

They realized that I was making a difference in a neighborhood and wanted to help me with resources, professional resources, as well as setting up meetings with different suppliers and wholesalers. And from there they set up the meeting with Hy-Vee and then we went in all their stores here in Kansas City. They’re the one who introduced us to Sun Fresh, so we got into there.

But really the product sells itself. And I say that because you have to be passionate about what you do. And if you’re passionate about what you do, then success, I think, will follow you. And then the money will come. Everyone asked us what it took to this point. It just took a lot of hard work and I hate to say it, but it took working four hours about every day for five years.

What an amazing story from start to finish. Take me all the way back to your grandmother’s farm, Ophelia. And put us in that place. What about being there in the garden with her was so inspiring to you as a child?

What really inspired me was the lessons I’ve learned from her as far as the ethics of hard work, and I pass that down through my boys as well. When you’re a child, if you’re working hard, not sitting at home playing video games, but actually being of service to others, then those are things that will follow you throughout the rest of your life.

You’ll be successful, and when times get hard, you’ll know what really hard work is, because that’s what it takes to be competitive now. And that’s what she was and her success was getting up and doing the hard work. My grandmother, she was a seamstress as well and had a shop in her house.

I would spend the summers with her and she would wake us up with the smell of bacon. She would cook bacon in the kitchen and you would smell it. And then you would go in the kitchen thinking you were getting some bacon, but the bacon wouldn’t be ready for another hour. And so she would say, “Oh, you’re up.”

And she (would) always say when you sleep in late, “What do you think? Today’s your birthday?” And she had this really nice old school vacuum cleaner, like $1,000 like back in the day.

She was the type of woman that would vacuum the floor every morning. She called it: to get the sleep out.

To see the lines, you know, but the cleanliness, her habit of doing that, the pattern of doing that, I think that’s what makes me successful, because people want consistency. And so that’s what we try to provide. We try to be consistent with what we do, consistent with our hours, consistent with the work that we put into it.

But the greatest thing was the life lessons and the hard work ethic and being nice to people, being responsible. She was a Jehovah’s Witness and so she used to go out and get all of her community service hours done in January, but still go out. I think that passed down to me, although I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness, but that sense of caring for others, and trying to help. Homeless people, there’s a camp across the street from us, and they’ll come over and they will ask for water and they’ll fill about 55 gallon jugs.

I’m not the type of person, because that’s how my grandmother raised me, to say, “Oh, no, that’s going to cost me. That’s $25 a cubic foot. Go on and get away from here.” There has to be a humanity that’s passed down to people, you know, because people have different stories or are at different points in their life.

And so more than just this variety plant here and this is the spacing, I think that what her family taught her, what her mother and father taught her and what she’s taught me, I try to pass down to my children. So it’s more about the lessons, the theory, the philosophy that’s carried over. The reason we have her face on all of our T-shirts and on the brand (is) because I think everyone can relate to that older Black woman with the pearls in that time and she definitely has a spirit that drives us and is inspiring.

So your full-time job is not Ophelia’s, right? You have many other careers that you’re also passionate about?

I do. I do a lot of stuff. And often people ask me, “Is this your full-time job?”

Yeah, it’s my full-time job, but I have a lot of full-time jobs. I’m, like most people, multidimensional. I was going through film school and I did this film called “Kansas City Murder Factory.” It went to the Kansas International Film Festival.

We sold out the festival twice. And since then, it lives on Amazon and it deals with homicide in the urban core in Kansas City. So even back then when I was in film school at Avila, there was this community service component. And that film was great because it changed how police dealt with homicide victims.

That is one of the things that it did. One of the detectives came over and he was like, “We saw this film, and when we showed it, we were kind of mad. Not mad at you, but how we were treating families of homicide victims.” So they went back and they redid the procedure of how one homicide detective may have 10 cases and the other may have two. And so the allocation was off. And so he couldn’t return to service calls, and they had all these problems. But that was really able to highlight this problem that we have. And it was because I grew up in St. Louis. They say you can’t see the picture when you’re in the frame.

So I came and said, “Wow, how is there a generational homicide within all of these families? Why is nobody talking about this? Why is nobody talking about these urban issues?” And so I did “Kansas City Murder Factory.” That year, The Star put my hands on a cover. I was holding 35 millimeter film.

It was a series on inspiring people in the arts. I think that people are multidimensional, so I have a lot of things that I love to do and I love to explore. I teach video production. I have a company that I do high-end corporate projects with on the video side, I’m a drone pilot, I’m a father. I host a show on 107.3, KC’s R&B and hip-hop. I’ve been in radio for 25 years. My first cousin is a rapper. His name is Ludacris. He just got a star (on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) maybe a month ago. I think service just runs in our blood; being competitive just runs in our blood. We just want to be the best.

We want to win. So when I take on a project, I take it on 100% or I don’t do it. I think if it’s something that you love, it’s easy, because you obsess about it, you think about it. How can I do this? How can I be better at this?

How can I learn from this? And I think the magic that happens on Vine is people have seen me build that business from just an empty lot. There was no electricity, there was no water, there was no infrastructure. They’ll drive by and they honk their horns, it’s like the weirdest thing ever.

For years they’ve always honked their horns. Every once in a while they’ll stop and they’ll say, “I want to buy something. I’ve watched you for years.” And I think my success is their success. When they see me working and they see Ophelia’s starting as a lot, expanding this, being in the grocery stores, they know with hard work the American dream can be achieved and that’s inspirational.

When I die, I don’t want it to be as though I didn’t make a difference. I want to pass on the knowledge, which is what a farmer is doing to me as he’s retiring. And I just want it to be a service to others, which is really what life should be.

You mentioned to me earlier that part of your motivation to do this was you wanted your sons to know what a vine-picked tomato tastes like. So can you tell me about the role your children played in you saying, “Let’s get this started here in Kansas City?”

On our YouTube channel, Ophelia’s Blue Vine Farm, we’re not really selling anything. We just do these videos to show how we grow produce and we have over 100 videos. And in it, I have one of my baby girl. She was 2 or 3 at the time and she went out, she picked a tomato and she bit into it. And then she picked a green tomato and she bit into it, and it was great. But she won’t eat tomatoes out of the grocery store because the taste is different.

What we do is homegrown varieties. There’s a different taste, there’s a different flavor. The commercial agriculture is not set up for that. They want varieties that you don’t have to baby, that if they get too much water they won’t crack. Or if they get too much sun, they won’t split. But the taste on a homegrown tomato is just incredible. And that’s really how the real food should taste. It should taste like the heirloom stuff. And so that’s what we grow is the heirloom stuff, because it has that taste, it has that nutritional value.

We grow it right. We grow organically, sustainably, we grow it in soil. And there’s an art to it at the end of the day. There’s no greater feeling than having someone come over and pick some grapes off the vine at Ophelia’s Blue Vine and taste them and have the experience. They’ll remember that for the rest of their life. They taste the tomato that’s vine-ripened. In the store, you don’t get that. In the store, they pick it when it’s still green. And then in a couple of days, it turns red. And so when truly you can pick a tomato that has ripened on the vine, it’s more work. But we’re all about work, then it’s a different experience. Why I have Ophelia’s Blue Vine farm on 24th and Vine is because I wanted to do something for that area.

Originally there was no investment in that area when I bought those lots. All the investment went into (the) Power and Light (District). But I recognized, like Congressman (Emanuel) Cleaver, that it was a diamond. Vine is 13 blocks, but it is Black history. You can stand on Vine and can see straight down to 70 Highway.

In the songs when they’re talking about going to Kansas City and being on Vine, this is the area they’re at. It has so much culture, even though it’s industrial and a lot of stuff is gone, it just has so much value to it. And so I said I want to be a part of this renaissance and this rebirth. That’s why I put it on Vine. We could have put it in Lee’s Summit, we could have put it in Peculiar, and in those places it wouldn’t have been significant. But having it in this area and having this beautiful greenhouse with no bars and $500 stained glass doors, and antique planters and old heirloom roses, it’s all a throwback to a childhood memory or to another time, a distant time.

And so when people walk by, they can really stop and reflect on their life. We had a lady last year and she was disabled and she would come down on the sidewalk. I have yellow heirloom roses outside Ophelia’s, and she asked if she could have one. She said that she’s been looking for those for 20 years. Her father used to have some of those in her garden when they were young. She said that she felt like that was God reminding her that she’s in the right place. Those are the types of experiences that we want to make in people’s lives.

You have been very intentional about sustainable farming practices. Can you talk a little bit more about why that’s really important to you and what that looks like in practice?

Yeah, so my goal is to be 100% sustainable. I think we’re always looking for shortcuts. And I think like Henry Block would say, there are no shortcuts in life. And that’s really how you’re successful. And so what I wanted to do was just build Ophelia’s through a lot of hard work and the sustainability aspect of it was the fact of, I didn’t want to have to buy my inputs.

I want to get away from buying inputs, buying seed, buying fertilizer. I want to get away from utilizing natural resources, electricity being attached to the grid and stuff. That’s what was so instrumental that getting a $25,000 grant from GIFT enabled us to buy a stove, a 200,000 BTU furnace that heats our greenhouse with biofuel, corn.

Now we’ve partnered with Vine Street Brewing down the street and I actually take hundreds of pounds of grain back a week by hand because we’re not trying to burn any — it’s crazy — but we’re trying to keep our carbon footprint low. We’ll feed it to the chickens, the chickens will poop, and then it creates gas and methane. And then we can reclaim that to heat or we can reclaim that on a small scale to cook. We want to show that it can be done.

Even though it’s on a small scale, it can be scaled up. We save our own seeds. I always say saving your seeds is printing your own money because if it’s an open pollinated variety, meaning it’s not been genetically engineered or modified, you can save the seed and every year you can replant it.

That’s sustainable systems where you’re not having to have a lot of high energy costs, LED lights and systems where you’re not having to heat such large spaces. I think our future now is greenhouses that are below grade that are somewhat underground. We want to get to where we have efficient, effective, sustainable systems, where we harvest water, we’re using wind and solar and a lot of different strategies. By keeping the inputs low, it shows sustainability can be done and it also brings the price down for the consumer.

Why is Ophelia so important in the space and time in this community?

When God told me to start Ophelia’s, I just felt it, you know what I’m saying? I felt like I was really called to do it for some crazy reason. And I say that because I bought those lots from the land bank and I had put on the form that I wanted to do an urban vineyard and community gardening. I hadn’t heard back from it for months.

And then in a frantic, they called me. I had set the money aside in a cashier’s check and I had lost it and it took like a day to find it. And I finally came in and they were like, “Well, if you didn’t come in today, then we were going to take the property back.” And then after that, you couldn’t buy anything on Vine. I realized Vine was historic. It’s only 13 blocks. It represents Black excellence in Kansas City. And I guess right around that time, some other people did, too. But I just felt like having this space that I could do something community-based was important for the community.

I never wanted to be the urban farmer who just sells to high-end restaurants.

Most people that are urban farmers, they just sell to really high-end restaurants. You can’t really trace the impact in the community. But a lot of the grant money that you get is based on being in that poor area, but you’re really not reaching out to the people who live in that area.

What we wanted to do was to really reach out to the people who live in the area. So we went in, got with the USDA, and we have a program that takes senior farmers market vouchers. We had a lady who came down last year and she was able to get more than just herbs, all types of vegetables, collards and whatnot.

And she said, “I walk around City Market and the only person who would take these vouchers, all they had was garlic.” And so we just knew that we were in the right moment when we were doing that, and that’s going to sustain us because we’ll have lifetime customers. And we’re already starting to see that now that we’re selling more outside of Ophelia’s.

But I just want to have a relationship with the community and to be able to know their story. And in return they look out for us. If someone is prying around or trying to break in, they’ve run them off. We have neighbors run them off their places, and then we’ve just reached out to the people in the community.

Even the homeless people, even doing something as caring as giving them water, which is a resource that they don’t have. They have everything else, but they don’t have water. And water is life. But giving away water has really helped them. And it’s helped us because they look out for Ophelia’s. That’s why you can have a plastic building and have no one damage it, you know. So it’s really been a win-win situation for us. And we’ve gotten to know their stories. We have a YouTube video on our channel of a person who was homeless that we hired.

We paid him over the years to do work for us, and he ended up finding housing. But not everybody makes it. Ophelia used to go out in the morning and witness the people. If you can help just one person, or if you can save just one soul, then that’s the ticket. I felt like I was called to do it, even though it just made no sense. I’ll never forget someone told me, “Yeah, you’re really going to make money selling herbs in the hood?” And that was my wife.

It was kind of a crazy idea. But I knew it had value, so that’s why I stuck with it. I kind of felt like Noah felt in one of the Bible stories. Can you imagine you’re doing something for so long, for so many years, you’ve never seen rain, their children’s children’s, and you’re still out there building this boat?

I just figure that along the lines, if I keep walking the path, it’ll make sense. Maybe we haven’t really scratched the surface of where we’ll be, but I think there is something to be said about having a strong local food system in combination with the global food system when the food can’t get into the country and because of climate change, they can’t even move it really across the United States, the truck shortages, air conditioner problems.

My idea, we go back to sustainability. I want to try to go back to the land bank and get a piece of property so that we can do hydroelectric and using the power of water as energy. I think if we just show it can be done on a small scale and people can see it. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve shown we can heat a greenhouse. We’ve got the olive tree in there. It’s not even in the ground. So we know these systems work, but very few people are really doing that because it’s hard.

There is a story you told earlier that I thought illustrated so well the importance of having a strong local food system. And that was the time you saved Thanksgiving dinner for a lot of people.

We did Christmas orders and Thanksgiving orders for Hy-Vee Supermarket and we did all of their 2020 over 20 stores. One of the other providers, there was an ice storm last year and they couldn’t get their product in so they ordered hundreds of units.

And so we were able to go open up the greenhouse. It was crazy. I went out and met up with my worker, bless her soul. We went out in this high storm and we got everything that we needed to put this order together, wrap it and deliver it. It was a beautiful thing to be able to step up when you can, even if it’s just one store, even if it’s just a couple hundred people, even if it’s something as small as some basil or some sage to make your stuffing mix.

Where can people find you? And second of all, what do you sell? What’s out on the stand on the weekends?

We have a lot of stuff on 2416 Vine. We’re open to the community Saturdays and Sundays from 12 to 5 and from us and other local growers through our co-op, you can come down and you can get organic produce, you can get green mixes, you can get green tomatoes, you can get okra, you can get cantaloupe, watermelon and all the fresh herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano.

You can also go to our Facebook or website, www.opheliasbluevine.com , and we have videos, we have our story, we have how you can contact us if you want to come out and volunteer, if you want to donate a piece of equipment or just anything, or if you just want to learn. Mainly we just want to inspire people.

We really don’t ask for donations or anything like that. We just want to inspire people and show people what we have. And I think the product speaks for itself. If you like cooking with fresh herbs and you want the best fresh herbs in Kansas City and possibly the world, just come to Ophelia’s, and I say that not jokingly. I say that because of our obsession, because we teamed up with Missouri Organics and we spent $30,000 on a soil test and just as much to fix it.

We brought life back to the urban soil because I wanted to fix the problem. A lot of the earlier grants that we were trying to receive, people would say, “This space makes no sense. Just find another space and we’ll give you the grant.” And we stuck with it because we wanted to fix the problem.

And in the end, we took up with a lot of smart people and we did. But a lot of that starts with the soil and soil this life. Earlier, you talked about one of the beets that we grew in Edwardsville, Kansas, and that soil has been farmed by a Black farmer for over 30 years, a Black family farming probably well over 100 off K-32 and the beets were as big as a person’s head.

And that’s just the average because the soil has been worked so well. So growing in ground, in the soil, it’s kind of a lost art. But if the soil is right, the plants are going to be healthy, they’re going to be less free. There’s going to be less disease. And so with all of our products that are grown in there, you’re going to smell the difference and you’re going to taste the difference.

That’s why we’re in this game. We’re in it to inspire and be the best we can, even if it’s just a small greenhouse with a small footprint, we still want to make a big difference.

This all started with learning from your grandmother. And now you’re teaching your sons and your daughter, too, as she gets older. How is that going?

It’s great. I love it. They love it. It gives me a chance to work with them and interact with them and have them have social skills and interact with other people. And it’s just been a great experience, you know, besides just the farming aspect of it.

I think the hard work aspect is the most important. But being around them, being a father figure in their life has been extremely important and they get it. I remember one year we were at the Ivanhoe Farmers Market. A lot of times we’ve lost money, you know, because you pay a market fee to get in and then it rains and nobody comes.

It’s off the map. It wasn’t like Brookside or any of the other fancy ones. We would be out there Friday night, the night before harvesting fresh collards out the garden on 37th and Woodland and the streetlights would come on. And then the next morning they would be up early and it’d be hot and we’d have the tent out, or it’d be raining.

I remember one time it was raining, I asked my boys, “Are you sure you guys want to go? It’s raining. We’re probably not going to make any money.” And my son Elijah, he’s 15 now, he was probably 8 then. He said, “You know, Dad, it’s not really about money.” And it’s really not, And so that’s why now we even go back there and do a couple of markets just to be out, to give back and to be around certain people and feel the vibe and whatnot.

I think they’ve learned a lot from me, but I think they’ve learned even more from the people in the community that they’ve met over the years.

When you look at Ophelia’s, big picture, fast forward, what do you hope the bigger impact is in Kansas City, in 18th and Vine, for future generations?

One of the reasons I love KC GIFT is the fact that they have a slogan of, if 10 people give $10 a month, then we can really help out the community and small Black businesses. And I was blessed to get a grant. It’s just incredible to have people believe in you and have people help you and then being able to get your business to a point to where you can help other people and you can build generational wealth.

But when I say generational wealth is something that I want to build for me and my family, it’s just not so they can go and party on yachts. It’s so they can really help people, so we can employ people, so we can give people jobs, which is what they need. And I really would like to work more in some capacity helping homeless people, helping people who have been incarcerated for a very long time and people with mental disabilities and in certain issues where they can’t hold traditional jobs, you know. So maybe it could be a situation where they can come down for an hour or two and pot some plants and we can give them some great benefits and really change your life. And so I see Ophelia’s getting to a point where we’re growing outside of Kansas City. Everything is coming back to 18th and Vine, 24th and Vine, all the produce. And that’s kind of our outlet.

The great thing about this area is it’s so multicultural and as far as a distribution point, we can be anywhere within no more than 25 minutes.

So it’s a great distribution point, and I think people need another place in the city to come and buy the fresh foods and vegetables and herbs. And from people who really care about it, people (who) are really going to quality control it.

And so I want to see us do that and expand and go into other cities and export to other cities, ship produce to other cities. But really inspire people with this strong local distribution model that exists with the global model, because I think they both need to work together. Because there will be times when we’ll have crop failure and there’ll be times when people from these other countries or even from California and Georgia, they just lost all the peaches, you know. So where would we be if the people in the Midwest weren’t growing varieties of peaches? And so that’s what we need to get back to. We need to put some funding out there and some highlights out there, some help out there for farmers or people who build local sustainable food systems.

Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you’d want to highlight that we haven’t talked about?

I would like to highlight the unsung people who’ve helped me along the way: The KC GIFT, The Kansas City Star. Truthfully, because a lot of times you don’t realize how you inspire people or how one thing can lead you into a direction.

I’m honored to have been blessed and have people want to tell my story and people help me out and support me, which is what GIFT has done over the years, and The KC Star did years ago and didn’t even realize. It’s just awesome to be recognized as someone making a difference in Kansas City because really, that’s what it’s about.

When we leave, we can’t take any of this with us. And so I want people to remember me as a person who really cared, as a person who helped others. And who inspired people.

Maybe that’s one of my greatest assets is I just love showing people something and then having them take it from there, and inspiring people to do whatever it is that they do, to do their art, to live in their art.

The greatest word of advice I guess I could give would be to live your dreams and not your fears.

I love that. It has been amazing just to hear your story and thank you for sharing it again with even more people. There’s so many incredible people doing incredible work in Kansas City and it’s the positivity and inspiration that we all can benefit from. So thank you for doing this and for taking time.