People of Augusta

Better Living Through Flowers

Dreaming of Flowers

Jessica Hall grew up in a local, farming family. Her father was an agriculture and 4H instructor at the local high school, and she was raised under the Future Farmers of America creed: I believe in the future of agriculture.

After graduating from high school in Augusta County, Jessica moved in with her sister Stephanie during college, recalling “We always fed off each other’s energy.” She studied horticulture at Virginia Tech, where she met her future husband. His job with the Natural Resource Conservation Service brought them back to Augusta.

Working in distribution as a nursery supplier, she fell in love with being in greenhouses. Waiting tables in downtown Staunton, she built community connections and customer service experience. When she and her husband bought their current farm with her parents, as a new mom she tried to be a vegetable farmer, growing green beans with a baby daughter on her hip.

“Absolutely all of those connections have meaning,” she says. “They helped us become who we are.” But all the while, her dream was to launch a flower farm.

Family farming in the flower industry had been decimated. 90% of all flowers in the US are imported, and there weren’t local examples for her to learn from. But Jessica knew. “I’m an artist at heart,” she says. “My true medium is flowers.”

 

A Family That Grows Together

The conviction to take the flower farm leap began on a family vacation. Soon, Jessica’s sister Stephanie moved back to Augusta and a true family enterprise was born in Harmony Harvest Farm. “When it was just me and my mom, we were only a two legged stool,” Jess recalls. Stephanie took over the website, communications, and built a robust e-commerce platform.

The company grew quickly into a wedding supplier and floral designer. Soon they became a Whole Foods supplier, branching into the wholesale business. While most of their flowers are grown onsite, they began partnering with regional and American farms to expand special offerings for brides.

Growing and supporting American production was core to their vision, so when they learned that a company manufacturing flower frogs was going out of business, “We bought the company with zero inventory and $50,000 worth of backorders.” Moving the heavy manufacturing equipment from New York to Augusta, Jess had finally found an entry for luring her husband into the business, and he now runs their manufacturing arm.

 

Better Living Through Flowers

Jessica says her core mission is to help her family and others “Live a better life through flowers.”

That philosophy carried the business through many ups and downs, but most recently through the COVID industry-wide shakeup. As weddings across the board were canceled and large events disappeared, the flower market plummeted. Jessica found herself becoming a working mom with kids in the home but suddenly no sales pipeline.

Knowing the capacity of flowers to bring joy to hard times, she launched the Happy Box, an interactive project for kids at home with their parents. Boxes of flowers, educational lessons, and something to make you smile began flying off their shelves.

“Then, as air traffic shut downs stopped flower imports, suddenly we were one of the only suppliers. We started shipping bouquets, gifts to keep people going through dark days. We’re the only farm to date that ships to wholesale and consumers directly.” Soon, they found themselves the recipient of the FedEx National Small Business Award, adding a heated greenhouse for year round flower production.

For Jessica, flowers are more than a metaphor for good living. “We use flowers to talk about the importance of family farming. Flowers are a bridge between so many communities.” Connected to small rural farms that are often conservative, yet sponsoring the Staunton Pride and spreading awareness of local social organizations on the business’s social media feeds is just one example of how Jessica strives to make flower farms a “place to have conversations that don’t have to feel so hard.”

We have on-farm manufacturing. We lobby on Capitol Hill, and I’m raising four kids. We’re piloting seed breeding programs, and many days I wake up at 3am, because as an entrepreneur that is my best thinking time.”

“My industry can be very dated,” says Jessica. But she and her family are shaking that up. “Here, we sell products from American farms. We’re women-run. We’re multigenerational.

A family endeavor, Harmony Harvest Farm is a colorful mix of love and ambition, a place where boundaries blur into beautiful bouquets of business, community, and care.  “I love living here,” says Jessica. “This farm is set up to be both my home and a dynamic future of agriculture.”

 

Check out Episode 15 of the Shenandoah Valley Life Podcast to hear more about their reason for moving to the Shenandoah Valley, their purchase of the farm, and the number of business assistance programs that have helped them quickly expand.