About
The Full Story
In 2011 Joe Naiman-Sessions was introduced to sustainable, organic, and regenerative agriculture while completing an AmeriCorps term of service, and has maintained a passion for backyard gardening and community based agriculture ever since. In 2013 Joe and his wife Miriam completed the Montana Master Gardeners course and began cultivating food at home, in addition to Joe volunteering at Cloud 9 Farm in Wilsall, MT and assisting the North Valley CSA in 2014. If you go back even further, ever since toddlerhood, and various careers, Joe has been always digging in the dirt!​
During the winter of '21/'22 Joe was tired of purchasing produce from thousands of miles away, if not from another continent entirely. So, he set out to bring his family’s food closer to home, so close it started in their home! Exploring hydroponics and other food crops that could be produced indoors, his family instantly fell in love with microgreens, especially pea shoots and sunflower (a kids’ favorite).
Then in 2022, seeing the opportunity to provide his community with local grown produce, Joe founded N Bar S Microgreens out of his home. In May of 2023, the farm outgrew its 120 sq. ft. space, and Joe moved to their current location in the heart of Helena's famed Last Chance Gulch.​ In the fall of 2023, Joe started to explore providing local edible mushrooms to Helena, a first of its kind in a decade. Returning to his regenerative agriculture roots, N Bar S began cycling spent trays and mushroom blocks to worms to help keep his production waste out of the landfills and transform it into the best organic fertilizer on the planet, worm castings!
Mission
N Bar S Microgreens provides the freshest, most flavorful, and nutritious produce for Helena, Montana, and the surrounding area through supplying living produce, backyard garden vegetable starts, and shortening the supply chain with year-round local harvests.
Vision
N Bar S envisions a healthier central Montana community through access to affordable, healthy, and fresh produce with short supply chains that support local environmental conservation efforts.
Sustainability
At N Bar S we are committed to reducing our carbon footprint. Sustainability is at the heart of what we do – we are committed to organic practices, we occupy empty spaces in our city center, and we nutrient cycle our biproducts.
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Local agriculture that shortens the miles our food travels is essential to combating greenhouse emissions. We also have weighed the options for out packaging and have found post-consumer recycled plastics to be the least impactful for a community like Helena. We ask that our restaurant partners wash and sanitize their containers and return them to us on a weekly basis for reuse.
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We are proud to have vertically integrated vermicomposting into our operations to provide worm castings from the most nutrient dense plants, bioactive fertilizers, and coco coir. These castings are nature's best fertilizer as they unlock latent nutrients in the rhizosphere.