Meet Bryan Mesa

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bryan Mesa a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Bryan, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

My fondest memories from childhood come from learning how to cook with my abuelita in Michoacan, Mexico. To this day, at 90+ years old, she still makes her own tortillas and forages herbs for her tea. My abuelita’s love is in stark contrast to the rest of my childhood. I was confronted with many challenges growing up. When I was five years’ old, my mother broke her back and that was the first time I saw her shoot up. Like so many others in her situation, she became trapped in the cycle of opioid addiction. Meanwhile, my stepdad, who was suffering from his own generational trauma, held me to an idea of perfection. Any deviation from that idea or any mistake I made was met with extreme corporal punishment. As a result, I struggled with being who I was. I felt disowned and abandoned by my parents. I was afraid to be my true self and struggled with the fear of death at a young age. I turned to gangs, violence and drug addiction myself – a reflection of the chaos around me.

But life has a way of offering redemption in unexpected but familiar places. For me, that place was the soil. After a few childhood years in Mexico, I moved to and grew up in San Luis Obispo County in California, the breadbasket of the United States. Surrounded by farms and wineries, agricultural courses in schools, and my father’s landscaping business, having my hands in the soil was healing (even amid the chaos). But, in my quest to escape the violence around me, I thought I needed to find something different. I ended up in Seattle pursuing a career in the finance industry as a credit underwriter. But that was soul sucking work, so when life offered me a chance to move to Hawaii, I took it. It was then my purpose started to come into reality. At the time, I couldn’t find fresh local produce at farmer’s markets to make the Mexican food I grew up on. So I thought I would grow it myself.

Farming was more than just a physical act—it became my lifeline. As I plunged my hands into the earth, I reconnected with something much deeper, my purpose and my calling: the ancestral practices of growing produce, especially corn, which holds profound cultural and spiritual significance for me and my heritage. It was as if farming was calling me home all along.

Corn, the heart of so many meals and traditions, became a metaphor for my own healing. Each seed planted and nurtured felt like a step toward finding my purpose, reclaiming my identity and rewriting my story. Through farming, I found connection—with my culture, with the land, and ultimately with myself.

Today, it’s a privilege and honor to share this journey with our community, growing food that nourishes the body while honoring the traditions that saved my soul. Sharing our heirloom corn and produce isn’t just about food—it’s about celebrating resilience and heritage, overcoming adversity against all odds, the will to survive and thrive, healing wounds from generational trauma, and the incredible capacity for growth, both in the fields and within ourselves.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am the founder, owner and CEO of De La Mesa Farms. I oversee the day to day management of the farm, while also spearheading new strategic initiatives, capital improvements, marketing, and financial planning. At any given time, I could be found weeding carrot beds, soliciting new wholesale accounts, designing new aquaponics systems for salad greens or updating our 5-year business growth plan. Over the last year, I have spent significant time training staff so that I can focus my attention on larger-scale projects, including a value-added division of the company to make and sell nixtamalized corn tortillas, building a new farm store, expanding operations to other States with a franchise model and launching a nonprofit to address issues such as food insecurity and the lack of affordable farmworker housing.

I started farming in Hawaii in 2016 when I couldn’t find fresh Latin produce to make the home-cooked Mexican meals that I grew up on and learned how to cook from my abuelita in Michoacán, Mexico. At the time, it was difficult to source Latin produce in Hawaii, and together with the growing popularity of microgreens, I was able to build a successful business. Heading into 2020, I had even secured a grant for a free 5-year lease of land from Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii (a legacy landowner). At the start of 2020, my farm was expanding rapidly; however, with the extended closure of farmers’ markets, restaurants and hotels across the island of Oahu as well as increasing costs of materials, all caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to relocate closer to family and purchase a 2-acre farm in Tacoma, Washington. While the decision to sell all my assets in Hawaii and restart farming from scratch (and on land unseen and not previously commercially farm), was significant, I wasn’t scared. In fact, restarting farming operations in a new location gave me the chance to be more thoughtful and intentional about how I wanted to farm and the relationship I wanted to build with the communities I was joining and the land I was stewarding.

2024 marked the official launch of Tortilleria Renacimiento, a value-added products line specializing in masa, tortillas, and other products made from our heirloom corn. We began selling tortillas, masa, tamale kits, and polenta at farmers markets, direct-to-consumer through our online store, and adding them to our CSAs. Corn is such an important part of my heritage, and growing it has been such an important part of my own healing journey, that it has been an honor and privilege to share this with our customers and community.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1. Resilience
2. Optimism
3. Financial Literacy

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I think it is better to go all in your strengths and hire people that complement your skill set. By doing so, I have built a team of employees, volunteers, community partners and more who help make De La Mesa Farms what it is today.

De La Mesa Farms is only as successful as the people in it, so I seek to hire people who are passionate about the mission of De La Mesa Farms and small-scale agriculture more broadly. Because our farm is so small, we can’t afford to have siloed, overly specialized employees; over time, everyone is trained to help with everything. By training our employees to develop a broad set of skills and capabilities, we empower them to become leaders on the farm, bringing their unique perspectives, new ideas, and fullest selves to work. This is not only an investment in employee retention and satisfaction, it makes our farm more efficient, flexible, and innovative and, frankly, a more enjoyable place to work.

I take time to help staff understand the business at all levels, from tomato pruning to long-term financial projections, because I believe I have a responsibility to help cultivate the next generation of farmers and business owners in our community. Empowered employees aren’t just an asset to my farm, they are, I hope, long-term assets to the world of regenerative farming.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://delamesafarms.com
• Instagram: @delamesafarms
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/delamesallc
• Youtube: @delamesafarms6657
• Yelp: https://yelp.com/biz/de-la-mesa-farms-tacoma

Image Credits

Credit for Headshot: Pierce County Business Accelerator
Credit for Farm Photos: Natalie Mesa