Taylor Getting is a pilot, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Calyx Creek Lavender & Lodging, an innovative agritourism destination just outside of North Liberty, Iowa.
Taylor shares the story of how he and his wife transformed a sand-laden Iowa farm into a thriving lavender oasis complete with thousands of plants, on-site product lines, and architecturally unique treehouses. He discusses the challenges and surprises of starting a small business, the importance of community and creativity in agriculture, and how Calyx Creek has become a sought-after experience for both locals and visitors. Taylor also dives into the nuts and bolts of growing lavender in Iowa, developing new products, and building a team.
Sponsored by MidWestOne Bank, this is the latest edition of the CBJ’s Real Success with Nate Kaeding and notable Iowa business and cultural leaders.
Real Success with Nate Kaeding was named Best Business Podcast at the 2024 Iowa Podcast Awards.
Nate Kaeding: How did the idea for Calyx Creek Lavender come about?
Taylor Getting: I’m one of the founders, along with my wife. We lived out in Seattle for a couple of years and inadvertently stumbled across a lavender farm on San Juan Islands. Even as a guy who doesn’t frequent flower farms, I thought it was actually pretty cool. It’s not something you see every day, so I just kind of filed it away in the back of my head.
When we moved back to Iowa, we started a church and were living in Riverside, trying to find a farm. My wife grew up on a farm, and that was really important to her. For me, I remembered going to visit my grandparents and doing farm things like getting eggs and getting messy. That could be fun. It was really challenging to find a farm around here, but we kept looking for a long time.
We also knew we wanted to engage people in it. We’re so urbanized now that you don’t get out to see the farm or where your food is coming from. People are excited about that and want to know the story behind things. We wanted to build that bridge between rural and urban Iowa and get people involved in what agriculture looks like.
We finally found a farm and bought it in 2022. Before we even bought the farm, we thought, “Hey, I think this might actually work.” We’d tried this like seven times before, but it hadn’t worked out for various reasons. Farms are normally sold by families, so all the family has to agree, and it gets chaotic.
When it looked like this one was going to work out, we had to decide what we were going to do. We’d have some row crops like corn and beans, but what would be our expression of farming? It’s honestly borderline impossible to get into row crop farming; it’s too expensive. The equipment alone is millions of dollars before you have a chance to make anything. So we had to think outside the box.
One night, before we’d even moved to the farm or closed on it, I wondered if we could do lavender. I don’t know why it popped into my head. My wife said she was putting on lavender lotion on her hands, so maybe that gave me the idea. I started Googling: “Can you do lavender in Iowa?” Turns out, you need the right soil type. A couple days later, I went out to the farm and asked if we could just walk around. I’m not much of a farmer, but I looked down at the soil and thought, “This looks like sand.” There was sand everywhere, which is interesting because there’s a DNR report about how there used to be sand dunes here millions of years ago.
It turns out that’s perfect for growing lavender. We started planting in May, before we even closed on the farm, and the sellers let us start planting, which was awesome. Our initial vision was 800 plants and maybe some fun lodging so people could come out and enjoy it for a couple nights. We thought about glamping tents and a little farm stand. But by the time we actually got into it, we ended up with 4,000 plants because I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were rolling hills of lavender?”
The scope creep was real. The glamping tents turned into treehouses with fiber internet, air conditioning, and heated floors. They’re not your children’s playhouses. Our farm stand became a just-shy-of-5,000-square-foot building. Then we realized we could do special events like weddings. Now, we have 8,000 lavender plants, a lavender labyrinth, eight different varieties, soon-to-be four treehouses, a suite inside the main building, shop classes, and events. It’s a full-on thing. This is no side venture.
What have you learned about starting and running a small business?
Taylor Getting: If I could go back, I’d tell myself to really think about this before doing it. We always say we want to promote and help small businesses, and we were for that too, but when you do it, it really is incredibly hard. There are so many ways for it to go wrong and so many unexpected battles that wear you down. I don’t want to deter anybody, but I want to be realistic about the challenges and why so many small businesses don’t make it.
Kudos to all those people who are up at ten or eleven at night trying to get back to emails. Even on the drive here, I looked at my email and thought, “Oh no, I’m behind.” It’s great because people are excited about the farm, but it means you have to hire staff, which creates a whole new set of complications — how many staff, what positions. Especially in our world, there aren’t a bunch of lavender farms or treehouse resorts around to call up and ask for advice. We’re writing the playbook as we go. But if you don’t mind the hustle, it’s a lot of fun. Just appreciate small business owners and give them grace when they fall short. Keep loving on them. They’re doing it because they love it, but also because they love their community. For us, we think this is a great thing for Iowa.
Was there a moment you realized Calyx Creek was really working?
Taylor Getting: It always felt like the vision was good. If you’ve taken a business class, you think about a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Our biggest threat is winter, but we don’t have a lot of competition in our space, and there’s a lot of opportunity. We’re constantly learning about all things lavender and what it can do — like how effective a bug spray it is. We didn’t know that at first, but it turns out it’s incredibly effective against ticks and mosquitoes, so we started developing that.
The real moment was July 4 weekend of our first season. Lavender starts blooming the first or second week of June through the last week of July. That July 4 weekend, people showed up and it was like, “Okay.” For us, it’s a real ebb and flow. You hope the summer goes well because it’s our one peak time. You have to store up for winter. That weekend, people came out, and I think maybe the Press Citizen or the Gazette did an article and people just flooded in. I thought, “See, newspapers aren’t lost.” Also, our lodging that first summer, two weeks in, we had 80% occupancy for June and July with no advertising. It was just, “Hey, this is a real area that people are excited about.”
What are your main products, and what do people love most?
Taylor Getting: Our best seller is probably the simple syrup. People love putting it in their coffee and cocktails. We do a lavender Collins — a Tom Collins with lavender — and I think that’s pretty great. Most people come out for the margarita, which I didn’t expect. People will say, “We were going to go to dinner, but we’re coming out to grab some margaritas first.” The lavender margarita is apparently where it’s at.
This year, by far, the most popular new product has been magnesium rub. We shipped three orders this week, all of them magnesium, and another order to Colorado. Most of us are magnesium deficient, so people will put it on their feet before bed or on sore muscles. It’s just been (flying) off the shelves.
During the summer, the bug spray is super popular. People ask if it really works, and it legitimately does. The National Institutes of Health has a study that says lavender oil is 89% as effective as DEET in repelling ticks and mosquitoes. You lose about 11% effectiveness, but it doesn’t smell like you’re spraying cancer all over yourself. Parents love it because they can spray it on their kids’ faces and feel fine about it. It works great against sweat bees and horse flies. The only thing it doesn’t work on is those black bugs that come in the fall and bite you.
Everyone’s on the tallow kick right now, so we have a tallow. Lotions are always a fan favorite. We do our own honey. I tell people I don’t put it in anything — maybe on a biscuit — but I just eat it straight up. Bees bring the flavor. Some people with a refined palate can get the lavender hints, but it just tastes really good as mono-sourced honey. We don’t infuse it yet because you lose the value of it being raw, and a lot of people with allergies want local honey.
There are great resources in the state, like Iowa State, for developing your food product line and keeping it safe. We also have some great partnerships. We love working with people who love what they do. There’s a chocolate studio in North Liberty. Anne takes our lavender and makes painted chocolates. If you stay in the treehouses, we have chocolates in there. You can buy them in boxes: lavender dark chocolate, white chocolate, lemon, etc. We have other partnerships with local vendors who use our lavender in dishes and products.
What’s the farm’s size and layout?
Taylor Getting: We have a 20-acre parcel that the farm sits on. Most of that is woodlands for the treehouses. There are about nine acres where the lavender is. We’re debating whether to extend off that parcel this year. We planted a lot — 8,000 is a really big lavender farm, especially by U.S. standards. The farm itself is 200 acres with about 153 acres of corn and beans, and then the lavender and woods.
How do you juggle running the farm while working as a pilot?
Taylor Getting: It really is a little bit of the wind blowing. The times I’ve tried to really structure it, it just doesn’t work. I’ve read a ton of business books and time management books, but anytime you’re starting a new business or have a side hustle, sometimes you can’t prescribe it enough. Things are going to happen you never expected. You can try to fight it, or you can roll with the punches and trust the process. A lot of times, it works out.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Sometimes some plates get dropped. Having good people and being patient for good people is important. If you get the right people in the right seat on the bus — it’s true, but I don’t think we’re patient enough to wait for it.
What does your team look like?
Taylor Getting: Seasonal is so hard. In the off-season, how do you stack up for the main season? Kudos to our partners: Wilson’s Orchard, Colony Pumpkin, Walker Homestead. It’s an ebb and flow. We try to sit around two or three full-time, and in the summer we’ll have 20. You have to hire someone who loves lavender and is willing to work in a field in the summer, in the heat, and care for plants. You need people to run the front counter, a cafe, help ship products and make products. Just trying to find the right people for the right seat is really hard. We love teachers — teachers who have the summer off and are looking for something fun.
What events and experiences do you offer at the farm?
Taylor Getting: When the season gets rolling, we’re bringing back Friday nights on the farm. We do wood-fired pizzas with Maggie’s Pizza, lavender margaritas, and live music. Our lavender wreath-making class is super popular. We can do that year-round, and it’s a great private event for friend groups. We have five drying racks in the building, full of lavender. We’ll use that all up before the end of the year, debug it, distill it, or put it into products, then restock the racks.
What are the business fundamentals of selling lavender?
Taylor Getting: It’s complicated. We do a ton of direct-to-consumer because most lavender in the States is imported — probably 97%. Our more direct competitors are Bulgaria and France. Bulgarian oil and buds are tough to compete with because their cost of labor is nothing. We can definitely compete with French lavender. People have said our lavender and our lavender ice cream is better than Provence, France.
When people come out and do a tour, we’ll smell two different lavenders. There are five different species in total, but we can only grow two in Iowa. Even between varieties, you can tell the difference. People’s eyes open — they think lavender is lavender, but there’s a reason we grow eight varieties. Some make bug sprays, some make syrup. If you mix the two, you won’t enjoy the syrup, but the bug spray will still work. Just like wine, there are 20 different smells out there. I don’t know why French is better — probably just marketing.
We sell by the ounce if it’s essential oil, by the pound for buds, and then our value-added products.
Did you have any trouble getting lavender established?
Taylor Getting: I don’t even know who to consult. Some folks are out there, but a lot are still new. Some have been around a long time, but they have much smaller farms. Doing it on this scale is a whole different thing. Our first year, most plants took really well. We have great soil for it. We’ve made some mistakes, but for the most part, we executed really well.
Our first winter, we had heavy snows that split plants right down the middle. We fixed how we do that, so it’s not much of a problem now. We had one greenhouse. I sometimes tell people, you may buy a plant from a greenhouse, get it home, and it dies. You feel bad, but sometimes it’s just a bad greenhouse plant. We had the same variety from two growers: one in Pennsylvania and one in Iowa. The Iowa stuff tanked and we had to replant half of it. The same variety from Pennsylvania, we lost 30 plants compared to 275. Where you get your plants matters.
How do you see the future of agritourism in Iowa?
Taylor Getting: We do well in seasons, but not all of our seasons align. When we’re slow, someone else is busy. Kristi over at Walker Homestead said it well: you go to Napa, and they could all look at each other as competition, but they don’t. They’re all together on the same boat. If one succeeds, it helps all of them. That’s the mentality here. You come to Iowa City or the corridor area, and there are all these opportunities to have farm experiences and build stronger Iowa farms.
At a Farm Bureau conference, it was all young farmers. I thought we’d be the odd ones out because we don’t do pork, beef, corn, or beans. But people were super interested. These young farmers know this is not the future of their farm. How do we think about this differently? What other crops can we grow? We’ve had conversations with people looking for land access and growing crazy stuff I’d never thought of before. The only way economically to make it work as a new farmer is to think outside the box. It’s not going to be row crop. I think this is the future. I hope it’ll be a good thing for small farmers as farming changes.
