This month, I cooked 6.5 pounds of dry beans. I made 12 new bean recipes and 5 of my regular rotation bean meals. I've eaten beans basically every day of the month whether it's for lunch, dinner, or both meals. I’ve delved deep into the niche bean world and brought you along for the ride. And I’ve also been able to have bean dinners with friends who at some point I am convinced I will convert to be bean freaks like me. It's been fun for me to have something positive and delicious to focus on during a traditionally (and actually) cold and dark month of the year. I hope you've enjoyed these messages and learned something too.
But like … why Bean Month?
First, when I sat down to plan out our marketing strategy for the year, I recognized we never really give much attention to the beans we grow. We’ve never promoted them the same way we do our chiles and part of this is because they sell out so quickly that it hasn’t been worth it for us and we haven’t needed to.
And second, in January I spent a week with 9 other farmers mostly from Northern California (and also one from Riverside!) thinking strategically about our farm businesses through the FARMpreneurs program. To say it was an intense and exhausting week would be an understatement but I did learn a lot and most importantly built a really great community with the other farmers. We each had to make a plan for moving our businesses forward. My goal? Make our business more profitable by farming with less stress by expanding our bean supply.
Expanding Inventory Through Collective Production
Farming is by no measure the right field to be in if you’re looking for a calm and relaxing life. As a farmer, you can work tirelessly to get a crop right, only to have it all undone by an unexpected cold or heat snap (or a fire!). And as someone with a chronic illness triggered by stress, it’s really a mandate to myself that I can only become so stressed with work (it’s not perfect, but I’m working on it!).
In order to reach my goal of being less stressed, I determined that we need to embrace the “collective” part of our name and start working with other farmers to increase our bean supply. We want to have beans available for purchase every month of the year so that we can be a reliable source of heirloom, California grown beans for people like you. But we are constrained by land and time.
So to do this, we’ve identified three other farms that will grow more beans with us this year. We will still grow beans on our farm, but this gives us the opportunity to have more available and increase our profitability. It also means some new bean varieties.
Sammy Tookey of Tookey Farms in Healdsburg, CA
During the farming business intensive, I met Sammy Tookey. Sammy is currently growing mixed vegetables on 10 acres in Healdsburg, and he’s doing it mostly on his own (something I cannot fathom doing). Sammy grew up farming in Southern California and studied Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at UC-Davis. He's not at all new to farming and started his own farm, Tookey Farms, in 2020. He sells produce at Sonoma County farmers markets and through FEED Cooperative.
In
a casual conversation about my bean plan, he said, “I can grow beans for you.” And just like that we secured our first farm to expand with. The goal is for Sammy to grow an acre of 2 different bean varieties (including one new Italian variety), for him to keep some of the crop to sell at farmers markets, and for us to sell the rest. I'm excited to see how the 50 miles between our farm and Sammy's farm affects how the beans grow.
Sophia Bates of Pennyroyal Farm in Boonville, CA
Last year we leased land from another farmer here in Anderson Valley and grew beans there, but it ended up being more work than we had time for. But the draw of having more acres in bean production here in Boonville still felt really important.
We had talked with our friend Sophia about growing beans for us at the other end of town, but our plans never materialized due to dry winters and sick horses. But we’re looking to change that this year!
Pennyroyal Farm produces some of THE BEST goat cheese on the market and we are so lucky to have them here in Boonville. Sophia is the Head Gardener and Grazing Flock Manager at Pennyroyal and has been farming her whole life. She spent a decade on small diversified farms in Maine and spent time working in livestock production before coming back to Boonville to work with her friend Sarah at Pennyroyal. Sophia farms with draft horses and she’s planning on using the horses to cultivate Southwest Gold beans for us - how cool is that!
Matt and Carrie Shiffrar of Rainbows End Farm in Witter Springs, CA
In the midst of my week at that business intensive, Gideon received an email from a farmer in nearby Lake County saying he has 30 acres of land, his dad grew beans when he was a kid, and was looking to see if we wanted someone to grow beans for us.
Absolutely yes we do. Working with someone who has all the old bean production infrastructure (bean special combines!) that is NOT easy to find means that he's well adapted for economies of scale. We're excited to grow over the years with him, and go check out the equipment in action! Matt and Carrie will be growing 3 or 4 new bean varieties for us over in Lake County.
Why this matters
The farmers we’re working with this year all grow at different scales and with really different production systems, implements, and even animals. It’s going to be exciting to grow beans in such different ways. Working with these three farms allows us to dig deeper into the things we’re good at while also making sure we don’t convert too much of our chile land into bean production. And by building these partnership it (we hope) ensures that more of us small farms can succeed!
We have bean threshing equipment to thresh beans from Pennyroyal and Tookey Farms so they don't have to spend their time cleaning the beans by hand. Whether or not we get reimbursed from the USDA, we’ve also purchased a piece of equipment to do the final cleaning and sorting of our beans in-house, on our timeline, and without the introduction of wheat (our beans have been cleaned at a nearby facility that mills wheat).
We have a packaging line to easily pack large quantities of beans as well as the nice bags to put them in. The trust people have in our brand and the people like you who are part of our community help provide a market to sell these beans into (something that new growers would have to spend a lot of time developing). And we’ve got the systems in place to do it (like having a website! And a shipping station! And a schedule that allows time for packing and shipping orders!).
So what do we need to make this happen?
We need you (and probably one of your friends) to get excited and be open to buying more beans from us next year. It means experimenting with bean varieties that aren’t listed in the cookbook you are using. It means looking beyond cannellini, black, and pinto beans. And it means being part of our farm’s success. We wouldn’t be here without people like you. We’re envisioning a future with a more profitable farm and we’re not going to get there by selling fancy housewares (something a consultant told us to do). Instead, we’d love to do it through building a stronger bean supply chain from small California farms.
A Note on Agriculture Policy
It's been a big week of thinking longterm about how some of the imposed and proposed budget and personnel cuts will affect our farm and most importantly, our community.
I spent 4 years in Boston working to increase food access and lessen the burden of hunger on families across the state through experience at 3 different food rescue and hunger relief organizations. And I’m feeling deeply concerned about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps feed over 40 million people in the US, with 1 in 5 program participants being children.
If you haven’t interacted with SNAP before, eligible households receive monthly benefits through basically a debit card. There’s restrictions for what kinds of food SNAP benefits can be used for as well as strict guidelines for who is eligible for the program. With a goal of cutting $230 Billion from the Department of Agriculture, 20% of SNAP’s budget would be slashed. There’s a few ways they can do this and all options result in more people being food insecure. The budget could be cut by reducing household benefits from an average of $6.40 to $5 per person per day (these are projected 2026 budget values). The government could also make eligibility requirements stricter, therefore removing upwards of 9 million people from the program. Another option is to move this federal program to the state level, most likely forcing states to cut benefits, make eligibility requirements stricter, and pull funding from other parts of the state budget.
None of these options help ensure that people who are food insecure get the support they need to stay fed. If the government isn’t helping the people it works for, then what is it doing? You can learn more about this from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The new Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is also pushing a media campaign to prevent undocumented people from using SNAP benefits. These folks already are not eligible for SNAP benefits so her campaign is basically a waste of taxpayer funds to fix something that is legitimately not occurring. I recommend calling your reps and asking that they do everything in their power to maintain the current funding level and eligibility requirements for the SNAP program.
