Bloomsbury Farm in Smyrna, Tennessee, started as an experiment. In 2009, Lauren left her job as a social worker in Nashville and returned to her parents’ home to try her hand at organic farming. “I literally just threw seeds in the ground and tested things,” she says. When she took the harvests to the local farmers’ market, the enthusiastic response encouraged her to keep going. “I tried rutabagas, and people flipped out,” she says. “People in the south don’t like them, but I had a customer [originally] from the Midwest who said, ‘I love rutabagas!’ It was just a trial-and-error thing.”