Meet Jamie Levenhagen

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

Jamie, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

We moved from the city to our farm in 2018. In 2020 when the whole world shut down like many others, I was brought home to work my fulltime IT job, homeschool my kindergartener at the time and care for my other two younger children. It was during this crazy time that I decided to take a couple days a week and bake with my youngest son Henrik. We started recording this series Baking with Henrik on my personal Instagram page. We had transitioned to growing our own food, raising our own food and finding healthier ways to feed our family. Shortly after I came across a video about the benefits of sourdough. My husband came home from the office one day and I told him about it. He honestly kind of brushed it off because he knew I had a lot on my plate at the time and would never have time for it. My determination has always been something that has gotten me through just about everything including working fulltime at home, running a farm, homeschooling and raising our three kids. I took this challenge and did hours upon hours of research, baked and failed, took a course from a master sourdough baker and spent over a year learning every single thing there is to know about baking sourdough. It was during this time of switching back to this healthier way of eating bread that I found my true passion. Feeding other people great quality bread and desserts without all the added ingredients we typically see in the grocery store. Being from a rural area our options here are very limited unless you drive to the bigger cities. I wanted to bring these better options to people around us.
Baking sourdough started off very small with friends and family ordering and a crazy idea to do this massive market to sell our products just one time. This is where the hobby turned into something much bigger. We left that market and started selling weekly in our city. It continued this way until I met a lady who I consider a dear friend now. She found out I was making sourdough breads and sweets and told me I could do drop off at her business in our smalltown. The rest is history! We went from having less than one hundred and fifty people on our social media pages to over two thousand five hundred today. We started doing monthly markets along with our weekly customer orders, broke ground on our bakery on our farm, created two commercial items, became commercially licensed so we can ship and sell in stores/restaurants, brought my husband Andrew into the operations each week because the workload is more than I can do alone with a fulltime job and put our products into two stores in our state. I also created an online sourdough class that I did for over a year, created my own sourdough regular and gluten free starters for sale, created an online gluten free course, 1:1 regular sourdough class and opened an online sourdough store on our website.
Our expansion over the last four years has been pretty wild and very amazing for us and our small community. We’ve had customers take our gluten free online course who were in tears because they haven’t had bread in ten plus years. One customer who orders our gluten free sourdough items told us that we changed her life. Regular sourdough is still my passion, but I’ve always said everyone deserves great quality bread/food and we are so honored to provide that for others. This year we’ve been focusing on finishing our bakery on the farm, expanding our business, creating more commercial items all while both my husband and I working fulltime outside of the home. Our purpose to provide great quality food has expanded from our smalltown to across our state to across the entire United States.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’ve loved baking since I was a young teenager. It is really amazing to see this entire thing come full circle as something I used to enjoy as a young girl and now get to do every single week as a grown adult. The fact that my husband and I get to provide amazing products to our surrounding communities is just icing on the cake.
Building our own bakery on our farm is really something I’ve dreamt about. It started off as a small dream so I could work from home, take care of our kids and still raise them on the farm. When we broke ground for the building in July there were many tears of joy.
Sourdough has really exploded in areas so as a baker we need to stand out. We pride ourselves in the fact that we use fresh fruits, fresh zest, fruit from our farm, eggs from our free-range chickens and no preservatives. Our sourdough is fermented for a minimum of 24 hours to a maximum of 72 hours this includes all breads and desserts. The fermentation is the entire reason we bake sourdough and yields the maximum health benefits for our customers and ourselves. At Sourdough on the Farm we will never cut corners because our customers health depends on it.
We are in the process of expanding our commercial items into more local stores and adding more items to our lineup. Currently we have our regular sourdough starter, gluten free sourdough starter, sourdough bread mix and our sourdough pancake mix. A new launch will hopefully be released early 2025! Our goal is to have these products available for those looking to improve their health and feeding their body cleaner items no matter where they live at.
Market season is closed for the year, but you can find us online at www.sourdoughonthefarm.com and/or on our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sourdoughonthefarm for further ordering information.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Determination, belief in yourself and remembering why you started. I’m a very stubborn person and when someone tells me I shouldn’t or can’t do something I make it my goal to do it better and bigger than I even dreamt of. This goes for pretty much everything I do in my life. I think if you have a dream on your heart, it was put there for a reason. Chase it. Believe in yourself and never give up. You will run into roadblocks, and you need to have the ability to stand back and remember why you started in the first place. If it matters to you then you’ll find a way to make it work. Most importantly you need to just keep going. Find people who will support you in your journey. Just because one person doesn’t support you and see your dream doesn’t mean you should quit.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

We would be overjoyed to collaborate and work together with other businesses! We’ve worked with Meet the Minnesota Makers, To Greener Pastures, Lauren McBride’s Mother’s Day Gift Guide, American Mom, Rough and Tumble Farmhouse YouTube Channel and Fill Thy Cup coffee shop on her birthday celebration.
It would be amazing to work with a company who has the ability to do a collaboration with our newest commercial sourdough bread mix, sourdough pancake mix, sourdough starter and gluten free sourdough starters in a store or online setting. It would also be really amazing to work with someone in the commercial bakery equipment manufacturing especially since our new bakery is being built. We can be reached at sourdoughonthefarm@gmail.com for collaboration details.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sourdoughonthefarm.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sourdoughonthefarm
• Facebook: bit.ly/sourdoughonthefarmfb
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-levenhagen-916820247

Image Credits

Rebecca Lynn Photography