Poppy Fielding
Why I did this
My parents made a hobby farm for our family and bought a literal barn to restore and live in. It is still the best home I've ever had. There was a garden, and my dad let me sell our strawberries at the local market. I was eleven. That's when I found out that working for myself was my jam, and the same summer I figured out why my dad's tan stopped at his neck.
He took construction work through the seventies and eighties, whenever he could find it. Then he came home to a barn that needed restoring and a garden that needed hoeing. It was more than one person could carry and he had no way to put it down. No rest built in, no help coming, and no skills for coping with any of it. He drank and smoked himself to heaven.
I miss him dearly. I miss what we should have had.
What I understand now is that he wasn't a victim of laziness or greed. He was living in a world with no safety net. No backup plan, no care of any kind for a man who is overworked, tends land, and works with his hands. People like that have no choice but to keep going, and sometimes it costs them everything.
Then I watched the immigration crackdowns. Hardworking men and women having their lives torn apart, not by a system that merely fails to hold them up but by one working against them on purpose. Same hands. Same work. I had to do something.
So in 2025 I started Poppy Fielding, to build a supply chain where small growers could actually compete, get paid fairly, and be seen doing it. Cold chain, logistics, delivery, drivers. The only version of that which works is a big one, and a big one runs on capital. So I went and raised.
What I have to show for that year is a set of very polished presentations and an expensive cap table.
My fundraising efforts culminated in an evening with a wolf in sheep's clothing, an investor who spent the whole of it trying to get me up to his hotel room. I was done.
I'm not going to be a good professional about that anymore. There are a million and eleven women with a version of this story, and our discretion is a load-bearing part of how it keeps working.
A technical woman pitching social good is a square peg looking for a hole that isn't cut. Eventually I called uncle. The corporation is dissolved.
What's left is the part that never needed funding. People are still growing flowers in California, and most buyers have no idea they exist. So I write them down.
Kellie Hartwell Los Angeles
Know what you're buying.