FRANKFORT, Ky. – To most folks, a backyard garden is not a place to start a business. But for Olivia Moore, of Frankfort, made perfect sense.

Moore, a 2021 graduate of Western Hills High School in Frankfort, turned a small garden into a thriving vegetable growing business. As part of her FFA Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE), she grew vegetables for five customers her freshman year. By her senior year, she had more than 500 customers.

Her efforts didn’t go unrecognized as she was named the 2021 Kentucky Star in AgriBusiness at the FFA National Convention and Expo in Indianapolis last October.

“From a young age Olivia has loved being outdoors and loved being involved, and when we had a small family garden she was down there in that garden all the time,” said Moore’s mother, Pam. “So, as she got ready to enter her freshman year in agriculture, she just saw that as a natural fit.”

Moore used her gardening experience and created her first product – weekly vegetable boxes. These boxes included a convenient recipe card, which suggested meals based on what’s inside each box. Now that she had a product, she needed customers.

 “My main customer base to start with was just family members and people that my parents work with because I hadn’t developed a real strong customer base,” Moore said. “But once I started advertising my products through social media that’s when my customer base really started to take off.”

As her customer base grew, so did her need to grow her business. She named her business Moore Goodness, to both honor her family name and serve as a mission to bring goodness to her community.

“Moore Goodness really came about my freshman year when I started my time with FFA and I started to develop my SAE and I started applying for different grant applications because I knew that I wanted to get some different equipment to really start expanding the garden operations.”

Her persistence paid off when she was awarded a grant that changed everything.

The Kentucky FFA Agricultural Venture Capital Grants (Shark Grants) are for young agriculture entrepreneurs who have a great start up idea and are seeking funding. Students may receive up to $5,000 in “venture capital,” an investment in their project that they do not have to pay back.

Students must create a business plan that details the description of the business, marketing strategies that include a target market and competitors, the estimated cost and expenses, personal finances needed, legal and safety regulations, and logistics of personal management. Moore also had to complete a four-six minute video about her business plan.

“The Shark Tank Grant that the Kentucky FFA provided was definitely the pivotal point because that’s what allowed me to expand my operation the most and that’s why I have a greenhouse today,” she said. “So just being able to apply for those different grant opportunities not only helped to give me the money to fund my project, but also really made me dive in and develop my project and the business plan that I wanted to build off of.”

More has also grown her product line, enabling her to utilize all her resources through the year.

“Using the garden, I developed five- and 10-pound produce boxes, which I then sell to the community members, and that includes a variety of fresh vegetables out of the garden. In the fall season, I transition into the mum crops. In the spring, I make use of my greenhouse, which got constructed in early 2020, and this has been my second season using it.”

Her spring production also includes hanging flower baskets, bedding plants and starter veggies.

As with any business, there’s a multitude of stumbling blocks.

“This project has its fair share of challenges as any small business owner I’m sure would say,” she said. “To me the biggest challenge has been persevering even through the difficult times. I remember specifically when building the greenhouse, there were times when it felt nearly impossible because things seemed like they were going wrong, or I didn’t feel like I had all the right funds or the knowledge base to pull everything together, but at the end of the day, I realized that there is a reward on the other side of getting through all those struggles, and that it really does pay off.”

Moore is now a freshman and ag education student at University of Kentucky. She will eventually transfer to Texas Tech, where she will seek a degree in ag communications.

“She started this business with that family garden, took that idea and morphed it into her own business, through the greenhouse, through the mums, through those vegetable boxes – she’s really created the prefect SAE,” said Jenna Burke, Moore’s high school ag teacher.

FFA is certainly in Moore’s bloodline. Her grandfather was an FFA adviser and ag teacher. Her mother and father were FFA and ag education teachers in high school, though in separate states. Her sister, Emery, graduated from University of Kentucky with an agriculture degree. Not surprising, then, that Moore was the 2021 Kentucky Star in AgriBusiness recipient.

“When her name was announced, I was just overjoyed because it was so great to see,” said her father, Myron. “She’s the first Star that Western Hills has ever had.”

Moore was just as stunned as her father.

“It was the best kind of shock that there could have been,” she said. “I really felt that in that moment, everything that I had done over the past four years had really paid off and I could go out and show that anyone really can take hold of something as small as a family garden and turn it into something as big as the operation that I have today.”

Moore credits ag teachers Burke, Jeff Schaffer and J.R. Zinner for her FFA progress through high school.