Lucas Janssen has a love for music — playing live, teaching others and recording it. But when the COVID-19 pandemic reduced opportunities for all three of those things, he turned his passion for food, sustainability and health into a new business that fills a unique niche in Yakima County agriculture. He started a business called Atavus Farms that grows microgreens.
"The main thing with microgreens is they're really nutritionally dense," Janssen said, noting he focuses on four main varieties: broccoli, radish, sunflower and peas. He started growing microgreens in the fall of 2021 and started selling them at the Downtown Yakima Farmers Market in spring of 2022. Their popularity has expanded since then, to the point where Janssen said he sold roughly $20,000 of the plants in 2025.
He said he has no formal background in agriculture, but his parents were into plants and gardening, and that love of plants was passed on to him. It just took a little while — and the drastic changes of the pandemic — to turn that love into a money-making venture, with a greenhouse on the south side of his home stacked with numerous shelves of microgreens.
"That basically means you gig a whole bunch and teach a whole bunch," he said. "A lot of things lined up all at once. I spent the better part of the pandemic teaching music online, and started getting into gardening."
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