Many hearts, one farm: The Three Hearts Farm west of Bozeman

A customer walks away from the Three Hearts Farm market stand after talking with owner Rachael Hikes on June 10, 2022.

Rachael Hicks holds cherry tomatoes from this seasons harvest on July 29, 2022. Hicks starts trellising tomatoes in June and tends to them throughout the summer into the fall.

Hoop houses and a storage barn at Three Hearts Farm pictured through a window on June 16, 2022.

A customer walks away from the Three Hearts Farm market stand after talking with owner Rachael Hikes on June 10, 2022.

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It’s 9 a.m. on Friday morning and Rachael Hicks is placing coolers full of fresh produce from her farm at the market stand. The wooden stand sits at the top of the gravel road that runs through her farm. Her sister-in-law carries over loaves of sourdough bread and bags of granola she made earlier that week.

The pair greet Ben Dueling, the owner of SporeAttic, as he approaches with baskets of mushrooms. Then Dylan Fishman, founder of Foxglove Flower Farm, arrives with arms full of flower bouquets to sell.

The market runs until 6 p.m. with people coming and going to buy produce from Three Hearts Farm. At the end of the day, Rachael and her kids take down the stand and use the produce that's left.

The market, which sits along Love Lane, started out with an “honor system” payment method. But as the number of businesses using the land grew, Rachael moved the stand closer to the houses for more supervision.

In Bozeman, housing prices are going up and neighborhoods are being built on what used to be farmland. In this way, Three Hearts Farm stands out from the developments surrounding it.

Three generations of the Hicks family tend to and care for the land in addition to their two tenants. Dueling grows mushrooms in a customized shed that Rachael’s husband built. Fishman and his partner, Alyssa Stewart, were leasing land from Rachael until recently when they decided that they wanted to expand their flower farm and buy land of their own.

But with increasing land costs in Bozeman, they instead decided to move to Vermont, leaving Foxglove Flower Farm behind.

“The land owners who have the land are aging and they are not passing it down to their kids… But you have all these young people who want to farm and they can’t afford any of the land,” Hicks said. “It’s frustrating.”