May can be a fraught month for Vermont farmers, as the weather wavers between summer sunshine, chilly downpours and night temperatures that threaten to paint the ground with frost. Hours are packed with crucial tasks such as shaping beds, seeding, planting and transplanting.
But on a bright May Monday at Breadseed Farm in Craftsbury, there was a prevailing air of calm. As late morning arrived and blackflies zipped through the air, leaving welts on skin, owners Kayleigh Boyle and Doug Wolcik, plus a helper, were in the lettuce beds with hoes, knocking down weeds and talking sparely.
Elsewhere on the property, a timber-frame barn that serves as the farm’s wash and pack station, newly built from hemlock, was neat and organized, its gleaming stainless steel sinks temporarily empty.
Inside the farmhouse — painted the color of boxed mac and cheese — a kitten mewled and stretched her paws. Bread was rising: It would be ready to bake just in time for the preparation of staff lunch.
Boyle, 38, and Wolcik, 41, both of whom had extensive prior farming experience, bought 16 acres in the Northeast Kingdom in 2020 and dedicated one acre to no-till, regenerative farming. They have three high tunnels, two of which are lightly heated in the spring, and a series of lower tunnels and netting that offer weather and pest protection to many of their field crops. On their sliver of cropland, the couple have built Breadseed into a model for financially viable agriculture through shrewd farming choices and marketing know-how.
“With every decision on the farm, we prioritize the soil health.” Doug Wolcik
While many small farms struggle to turn a profit, Breadseed was in the black within three years of its first planting — even as Boyle worked a full-time job at Salvation Farms, a gleaning nonprofit in Morrisville. Since June 2024, both partners have been fully self-employed.
“Everything happened earlier than anticipated,” Wolcik noted. “It was much faster than I thought it would be.”
The couple are an open book about how they achieved this rapid success, offering consulting services to other small farms and even joining Québec farmer, author and entrepreneur Jean-Martin Fortier — founder of the Market Gardener Institute, which offers organic farming education — on his podcast, “The Market Gardener Podcast With JM Fortier.” Boyle and Wolcik shared their story and strategies in an episode entitled “$200K Revenue on Just 1 Acre! The No-Till Success of Breadseed Farm.”
Breadseed’s products — including greens, baby potatoes, young ginger and petite winter squashes — are sold at the Montpelier and Stowe farmers markets, as well as a handful of stores, including the Genny in Craftsbury and Wilson Farm in Greensboro. Its popular Super CSA share, which can be augmented with flower bouquets in the summer or additional microgreens, runs 34 weeks a year. There are shorter-term options available, too.
Although Boyle and Wolcik aim for an extended season, storage crops aren’t their thing. Approximately two-thirds of their products are quick-growing plants in high marketplace demand that can be planted in succession, including salad mix, radishes, scallions, tender Hakurei turnips and cute little gem lettuce heads.
The couple attribute the farm’s quick rise to their wealth of management experience, all of which they were able to bring to bear as they started their own operation. “We’d managed farms — managing the crew, managing the budget,” Wolcik said. “We were just doing it with other people’s money.”
Added Boyle, “We had, on other people’s budgets, bought the greens spinner, the harvester. We’d gotten to trial them and to see how much time they saved.”
Through those trials, they’d realized that purchasing certain medium-scale tools up front, even if the costs seemed daunting, would pay off in the long run.
However, both farmers generally favor human labor, and they eschewed heavy and pricey gas- or diesel-powered equipment, such as tractors, when planning their farm. Operating with broadforks and other hand tools, rather than a John Deere or a Kubota, significantly reduced their initial capital investment.
In this choice, Wolcik said, they were considering both the short- and long-term viability of the business. Good stewardship of the land and the health of their soil, he noted, are factors in all of their business decisions.
Although they’ve each been farming for 17 years, Boyle and Wolcik took separate paths into agriculture. Boyle grew up in the Northeast Kingdom and attended high school in Danville. At Emerson College in Boston, she designed a degree in nonprofit marketing. The skills she learned there help her market Breadseed on social media as well as through a newsletter and the farm’s website.
In 2009, Boyle was hired as an assistant grower at Gaining Ground, a nonprofit farm in Concord, Mass., that provides free, organic produce to people experiencing food insecurity. In 2011, she became the farm’s comanager.
Meanwhile, Wolcik studied sustainable agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, spent a couple of growing seasons in Northern California and then went “WWOOFing,” working on farms in Argentina and Chile through the organization Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms.
The pair met in April 2013. While seeking staff for the summer season at Gaining Ground, Boyle received a late application from Wolcik, who was just returning from South America. Why is a guy with this much experience looking for a job so late in the game? she wondered, while calling him to set up an interview.
For the next eight years, Wolcik was on staff at Gaining Ground, working his way from assistant manager to comanager with Boyle to farm manager. By the middle of his second season, the two were a couple.
In 2016, Boyle split off to manage the produce farm at Gibbet Hill Grill in Groton, Mass. There, dishes such as roasted tandoori carrots and parsnip-parsley soup are made with ingredients grown on the property.
Her new gig afforded the pair free housing. “We both had farm manager salaries, and we could bank some money by not having any rent or many food expenses,” Boyle explained. In 2020, they were able to invest some of their savings in the land that would become Breadseed.
The move to Vermont, back to where Boyle grew up, was a boon for both of them. The rural area, and the opportunity to work at home rather than in the Boston suburbs, “was more fitting for my lifestyle,” Wolcik noted. “It was weird to work on a beautiful farm all day and then sit in traffic for half an hour to get back to Kayleigh.”
Some farmers are unwilling to ever let a tiller touch their land, and it can take years to get new beds fully established, but Boyle and Wolcik decided they were willing to be a one-till farm: They would plow the land a single time in the fall, with a tractor leased from a neighbor, and never do so again. Beds would be hand-built their first spring.
“We were taking on a mortgage. We were leaving jobs,” Boyle said. “We needed to get the farm up and running quickly.”
They embraced the no-till growing method because both had observed its benefits firsthand. “We’d seen some great results,” Wolcik explained. “Less weed pressure, healthier plants, less disease, fewer pests. With every decision on the farm, we prioritize the soil health first, [asking], ‘How does this decision affect the overall health of the ecosystem?'”
Plus, working with hand tools brings the farmer closer to the land. “Instead of sitting on a tractor for 500-foot rows, we kind of live it and breathe it,” Wolcik said. “You can see the whole farm standing in one location. It’s really organized and intensive.”
Boyle and Wolcik also like to find their customers close by. Right down the road at the Genny, also known as the Craftsbury General Store, buyer Kit Basom stocks Breadseed Farm products and watches them fly off the shelves.
“It has been fun to watch Doug and Kayleigh establish their farm here in Craftsbury and eke more and more production off of its very modest footprint,” Basom said. “They’re lovely people to do business with … The quality is always beautiful, and [it] comes from just a couple miles up the road.”
At the Capital City Farmers Market, Jen Roberts, a Craftsbury native, makes a point of visiting her hometown farm for produce. “I buy lots of different greens from them and especially love their zesty salad mix,” she said. “I’ve also gotten lovely flowers and a beautiful dried floral wreath that Kayleigh made.”
Roberts follows Breadseed on Instagram in order to anticipate the items she’ll be able to buy each week, and she looks forward to hearing more personal thoughts from the farmers, too. “In addition to their great produce, Doug and Kayleigh are a big reason why I always stop by their stand,” she remarked.
Amanda Ochoa, another Montpelier market customer, agreed. “Our connection with Doug and Kayleigh quickly morphed from farmer-customer to friends,” she said. “The respect they have for their land is evident in the quality of food they bring to market.”
Ochoa particularly likes pairing Breadseed’s spicy microgreens with her backyard eggs, Red Hen Baking bread, Cabot Creamery‘s Seriously Sharp Cheddar and some chile crisp in a breakfast sandwich.
“It has been a real privilege to watch Breadseed Farm expand and grow,” she said. “Each season we look forward to more offerings and infrastructure updates.”
A willingness to question assumptions and constantly reevaluate is a hallmark of Boyle and Wolcik’s style. As they look to the future, Wolcik explained, rather than expanding in size, their aim is to become more efficient and innovative on the land they have.
“It’s really cool being a seasonal business,” Boyle said. “We get to reevaluate every year. What did well? What didn’t do well? Even with this little plot of land, we have a lot of possibility.”
Learn more at breadseedfarm.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “On Solid Ground | Through no-till, regenerative farming, Craftsbury’s Breadseed Farm offers a model for financial stability”
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2025.
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