Growing · Varieties · Equipment · Animals · Selling legally
How to grow microgreens, and whether you can legally sell them where you live.
How to grow them, which varieties are worth your trays, what equipment actually holds up, and whether you can legally sell them where you live. Every regulatory page names the agency, cites the rule, and carries the date it was checked.
Where a rule is involved, the answer starts with the wording of the office that has authority over it, not with a confident claim that has nothing behind it. We put the citation next to the answer and say plainly which part you still need to confirm for your own setup.
Selling microgreens legally
The answer is not just different by state, it is different in kind. Florida puts washed produce inside its exemption; Colorado’s exemption is written around greens the customer will wash. Arkansas treats a tray sold with roots attached as a sprout. Georgia says you need a license at all.
Most sites answer this with cottage food law, which usually does not apply to microgreens at all. These pages answer it properly, one state at a time, and show you the statute.
- FederalCottage Food Law and Microgreens: The National PictureThere is no federal cottage food law. Across all fifty state guides on this site, cottage food is the operative law for raw microgreens in four states and the wrong law in forty six.
- FederalFederal Tax and Business Structure for Microgreens GrowersThe IRS decides you are farming by activity and profit motive, not acreage. A greenhouse counts, which puts most microgreens growers on Schedule F rather than Schedule C.
- FederalWhat Does the FDA Require on a Microgreens Label?A plain package of cut microgreens needs three federal statements: identity, net weight, and who is responsible. Nutrition Facts and an ingredient list usually do not apply, and here is exactly why.
- FederalAre Microgreens Covered by the FDA Produce Safety Rule?Microgreens are covered produce, but most small growers fall under the cutoff. The real 2026 figure is $34,324, not the $25,000 everyone quotes.
- FederalDo You Need a Federal Permit to Ship Live Microgreen Trays Across State Lines?No general federal permit exists for moving a living plant interstate. The two questions that actually decide it are your quarantine status and what the receiving state demands.
- FederalAre Microgreens Legally Sprouts? The Subpart M QuestionFDA says microgreens are not sprouts, so Subpart M does not apply. The line is leaf stage at harvest and whether you sell the roots, not what you call it.
- FederalWhat Does USDA Actually Govern for Microgreens Growers?USDA does not regulate microgreen food safety. It runs organic certification, voluntary GAP audits, and grant money. Here is the boundary, stated precisely.
- State guides · 52 published
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Puerto Rico
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
Growing guides
Trays, medium, light, water, and the failures that teach the most. Written from crops actually grown, not summarized from other sites.
- 01Why do my microgreens taste bitter? Usually because that crop is supposed to
- 02The blackout period: two different jobs wearing one name
- 03How to buy microgreen seed, and what the label cannot tell you
- 04Day 8 against day 14: what you are actually trading by waiting
- 05Do you need a heat mat? The arithmetic says probably not, and it can overshoot
- 06How to cut a tray: the height is a safety control nobody has costed
The variety directory
Flavor, difficulty, days to harvest, and what usually goes wrong with each one. Each variety grown and written up on its own.
Equipment, tested
- How it is tested
- Same bench, same room, same varieties, run long enough to fail.
- What gets recommended
- What held up. Not what a manufacturer sent, and not what pays best.
- What you also get told
- The weak point. Every pick has one, and the review says so.
Feeding microgreens to animals
- The question people ask
- Can my bearded dragon, chicken, rabbit or tortoise eat these?
- How it gets answered
- Species by species, with the evidence named, and the gaps named too.
- What you will not get
- A confident blanket yes. Different animals and different situations call for different judgment.
Why the sources are shown
Someone reads a page here and decides they can legally sell at a farmers market. That deserves more care than a blog post usually gets, so these rules are not optional.
Every claim is cited
A state agency, a statute, or a land grant extension service. No source, no claim.
“Not published” is an answer
Where a state publishes nothing, the page says exactly that and names who to call. It does not invent a number.
Every page is dated
A visible verified-as-of date, because a cottage food law can change in one legislative session.
Checked on a schedule
Volatile figures every six months, structural ones yearly, and immediately when a rule changes.
Who writes this
Cal Hewitt has grown every variety in this directory in his own trays, publishing here since 2022. Twenty years as a business analyst before that, which is why the pages about money do the actual arithmetic.
He sold commercially for a period and is not selling now, so these guides are not written in competition with the reader.