Móðir Jörð in the east, Hæðarendi in the south, Bláskel in Breiðafjörður, Hraundís in Borgarfjörður, and the Hrísey angelica pickers in the north — and the unconditional commitment it takes to work this way in Iceland.
Organic farming is hard work everywhere. In Iceland, it’s something closer to a calling — and TARAMAR is fortunate enough to draw on people practicing that calling across several corners of the country.
A Field for the Truly Committed
Iceland is not an easy place to grow or forage organically, and the numbers make that plain. The growing season is short — a matter of weeks, not months — bracketed by a late spring and an early autumn. Average temperatures sit well below what most organic agriculture elsewhere takes for granted. And the domestic market is genuinely tiny: Iceland’s entire population is a little under 400,000 people, spread across a country the size of a small nation but with the customer base of a mid-sized city. Even decades into the organic movement here, only a small fraction of Iceland’s agricultural land — roughly one and a half percent, by government figures — is certified organic, and the number of certified organic producers nationwide has historically numbered in the dozens, not hundreds.
That’s not a field anyone enters for the commercial upside. Nobody becomes an organic grower or forager in Iceland because the numbers work out. They do it because they’ve committed, unconditionally, to producing something genuinely clean — and because they love the land and sea enough to keep showing up for a harvest that fights them every step of the way. It takes a particular kind of person to choose that field and stay in it for decades. Every one of TARAMAR’s growers and foragers is exactly that kind of person.
Five Sources, One Standard
Hæðarendi, in the south, in Grímsnes, is run by Svanhvít Konráðsdóttir and Ingvar S. Ingvarsson, who have grown organic carrots, kale, and other produce there for decades . What makes Hæðarendi genuinely unusual, even by Icelandic standards, is what sits beneath it: a geothermal borehole drilled at the farm in 1983 struck water carrying almost pure carbonic acid — naturally occurring CO2 gas dissolved straight out of the ground, with no processing required to concentrate it. It’s a rare enough resource that it has historically been drawn on not just for growing but for Icelandic soft-drink production, and it remains one of only a handful of known natural CO2 sources in the country.
For a grower, that’s a genuine advantage, not a curiosity. CO2 is one of the basic inputs a plant needs for photosynthesis, and commercial greenhouse operations around the world spend real money pumping in supplemental CO2 to push growth — Hæðarendi has it rising naturally from underground. Paired with geothermal heat for the greenhouses and Grímsnesi’s clean southern light, the combination gives the farm growing conditions that are difficult to replicate anywhere else in Iceland.
It’s the kind of detail that invites comparison to Findhorn, the famous ecological community and garden in Moray, Scotland, whose vegetables grew to sizes that puzzled visiting horticulturalists for decades — a site where unusual, hard-to-fully-explain natural conditions met people determined to work with them rather than around them. Hæðarendi’s advantage has a clear geological explanation where Findhorn’s has always been debated, but the underlying story is similar: a small farm, in a difficult climate, sitting on genuinely exceptional ground, run by people patient enough to make the most of it.
Hraundís, also on the west coast, works out of Rauðsgil in Borgarfjörður, where she has grown and hand-tended forest plantings — birch, aspen, sitka spruce, lodgepole pine, larch — since 2000, alongside her three children. The farm has held organic certification since 2007, and every plant she works with is hand-picked at Rauðsgil or its immediate surroundings, far from any source of pollution.
Móðir Jörð, in the east, sits on the Vallanes farm outside Egilsstaðir, run by Eymundur Magnússon and Eygló Björk Ólafsdóttir. Eymundur began farming organically in 1985, and Vallanes became one of the first certified organic farms in Iceland a decade later. Alongside grain and vegetables, the farm has spent years planting shelterbelts of local tree varieties — work recognized with Iceland’s Agriculture Award and the Order of the Falcon, and a nomination for the Nordic Council’s Nature and Environment Prize.
Hrísey, in the north, is where TARAMAR’s angelica comes from. The island’s wild angelica has been picked since 2004 by Bjarni Thorarensen and Sigríður Magnúsdóttir, working under an agreement with the town of Akureyri and local landowners for the right to harvest the plant where it grows freely across the island. It’s genuinely small-scale, seasonal work — leaf picked and weighed by hand, laid out to dry, timed around exactly when the plant is ready and starting to yellow — the same unhurried rhythm found at every other source TARAMAR works with. Hríseyjarhvönn, as the angelica from this harvest is known locally, has built a quiet reputation well beyond Iceland: it has supplied Icelandic herbal medicine producers for two decades, and dried leaf from the island’s most recent harvest has begun shipping as far as China.
Isolation as an Advantage
There’s a real, practical benefit to how few organic operations exist in Iceland, and how far apart they tend to sit. In much of the world, an organic farm is still someone’s immediate neighbor — downwind or downstream from a conventional operation spraying herbicides or pesticides at scale, with drift and runoff that don’t respect a property line. Iceland’s organic growers and foragers don’t have that problem in the same way. The country’s small, scattered footprint means Móðir Jörð, Hæðarendi, Bláskel, Hraundís, and the Hrísey angelica pickers aren’t fighting contamination from next door. An island harvest like Hrísey’s makes the point especially well: there’s simply nothing nearby to drift in from.
Kindred Spirits
Working directly with these growers and foragers is, honestly, one of the better parts of building TARAMAR. There’s no translation needed between how they think about their land, their fjord, or their island and how TARAMAR thinks about a formula — the same instinct toward patience over shortcuts, purity over yield, and a genuine, unforced respect for what nature is willing to give if you don’t push it. It’s the same philosophy behind TARAMAR’s approach to seaweed harvesting: work with people who know the land or the water intimately, rather than treating either as an anonymous input.
Sourcing from these five — spread across the east, south, west, and north of Iceland — isn’t a supply-chain decision made to check an “organic” box. It’s a set of relationships with people who were doing this, against genuinely difficult odds and for genuinely uncommercial reasons, long before it was fashionable to ask where an ingredient came from.
