Rainshadow Organics: Abundant Organic Farming—in the Desert

“We’ve expe­ri­enced incred­i­ble abun­dance,” Lawrence told Organic Connections. “This is espe­cially true because every­body said that we couldn’t grow food where we are located. We have zero frost-free days—historically in the last 100 years every sin­gle day of the year has frozen at least once. Even on a good year our last frosts are in mid-June, and it starts to freeze again mid-August. So it’s pretty cold and challenging.”

Creating Diversity

The range of crops Lawrence pro­duces is quite var­ied. “Rainshadow Organics is 130 organic acres,” Lawrence con­tin­ued. “We grow grain both for our ani­mals and for human con­sump­tion. We mill fresh flour weekly. We have about 8 acres of row crops, and roughly 50 dif­fer­ent kinds of veg­eta­bles, fruits, herbs and flow­ers. We also have 10 green­houses and a big root cellar.”

Business has thrived. “It’s grown 100 per­cent each year,” Lawrence said. “We have a CSA for 85 fam­i­lies, and this is the first year we are doing a year-round CSA; plus we go to three farm­ers’ mar­kets, and we work with about half a dozen restau­rants and two gro­cery stores.”

Coming Home

Lawrence grew up on the land she is now farm­ing but, as many chil­dren do, left to pur­sue school and other adven­tures. “I was born and raised on my fam­ily farm,” Lawrence said. “I’m 30 years old and have a master’s degree in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence. I spent most of my time in and out of col­lege as a river guide all over the American West, in Central and South America and in East Africa.”

Three years ago, how­ever, Lawrence’s par­ents asked that she return home. As it hap­pened, that request coin­cided with a piv­otal time in Lawrence’s con­scious­ness. “I came to farm­ing at a time when my fam­ily was really need­ing help,” Lawrence said. “It was also at a time when I was read­ing Michael Pollan and start­ing to have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the food issues and what we’re faced with right now: how to cre­ate good, clean, fair, local food for as many peo­ple as possible.

“When I was grow­ing up here, we raised Texas Longhorn cat­tle and hay con­ven­tion­ally. It was def­i­nitely a fam­ily farm—it wasn’t a big agribusi­ness type of thing—but it wasn’t organic. So when my par­ents needed me to move home, I didn’t want to con­tinue just rais­ing hay and beef. I really wanted to change that and pro­duce more human food, and def­i­nitely organically.

“My fam­ily farm had a lit­tle two-acre plot that had never been farmed—it had some grass and that was it. So it was able to be organic imme­di­ately and that’s what I started with. Then over the last three years we have tran­si­tioned the whole place to organic.”

Learning to Grow

There is much to learn about sus­tain­able farm­ing, and Lawrence has been quick to employ as many meth­ods of infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing as pos­si­ble. “My ecol­ogy back­ground was very help­ful, just for hav­ing a sense of the needs of liv­ing things,” she explained. “But my mom is a mas­ter gar­dener, so I lean on her heav­ily for ideas and advice. My dad is a great farmer as well. I have a smart phone and Google a lot of stuff. And I try things—I just give it a try.”

An exam­ple of what she has had to edu­cate her­self on is the han­dling of pests—an issue that con­ven­tional farm­ers com­bat with thou­sands of dol­lars’ worth of chem­i­cals. “We use worm-casting tea, applied foliarly [directly to the leaves], which has been a great deter­rent,” said Lawrence. “Also grow­ing things in a per­ma­cul­ture fash­ion with plenty of mulch, work­ing on my liv­ing soil with all my ben­e­fi­cial microbes and insects, and plant­ing a lot of flow­ers, using bio­dy­namic meth­ods, and plant­ing with the bio­dy­namic calendar—all of these play a role. Overall it’s done through hav­ing the health­i­est sys­tem possible.

Click any image above to enlarge.

“I can’t say it’s all mas­tered, although it def­i­nitely works out pretty well con­sid­er­ing I pro­duce so much food with very lit­tle experience.”

Reaching Out

In addi­tion to cre­at­ing a busi­ness, Lawrence has worked hard to make her healthy food avail­able to those who need it most. For the first two years, her food fed the patients in two local hos­pi­tals. “I really wanted to sup­ply the hos­pi­tals because I believe that sick peo­ple should have the best pos­si­ble food,” Lawrence said. “I felt good about facil­i­tat­ing that. It was very excit­ing. Going into my sec­ond year I had a con­tract with both these hos­pi­tals, and I took them a lot of food.”

Severe bud­get cuts have tem­porar­ily sus­pended the hos­pi­tals’ abil­ity to pur­chase and pre­pare fresh organic food—but Lawrence has found other ways to aid those in her com­mu­nity that need her. “We’re doing work-share CSA mem­ber­ships for peo­ple who can work for their food and thus not have to pay for it,” she said. “And we are sub­si­dized through the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council so that we can pro­vide CSAs to peo­ple who are on food stamps. We sup­ply fab­u­lous inex­pen­sive food for those peo­ple as well.”

Continuing to Meet Challenges and Expand

“Our focus is really on food access and food secu­rity for our area, which is chal­leng­ing here, like I said, because of the cli­mate,” Lawrence con­cluded. “We’re con­tin­u­ing to learn how to grow, how to extend our sea­sons. That con­sists of, one, grow­ing more year round, and oth­er­wise doing more food preser­va­tion both in the root cel­lar and in frozen, dried and canned goods.

“We’re clos­ing our loop all the time too, apply­ing more sus­tain­able meth­ods and using less fuels and renew­able fuels. I run my deliv­ery truck on waste veg­etable oil. We’re build­ing a big facil­ity that’s going to be for our milling and poul­try pro­cess­ing and will also include a com­mer­cial kitchen; it will all be solar powered.

“We are con­stantly mov­ing toward effi­ciency with our water, build­ing our soil and build­ing our com­mu­nity. We are work­ing for a really pos­i­tive impact on the world instead of a neg­a­tive one—instead of every bite you take trav­el­ing an aver­age of 1,500 miles and hav­ing huge impli­ca­tions all over the globe with genetic mod­i­fi­ca­tion, chem­i­cals, fos­sil fuels, and poor liv­ing and labor sit­u­a­tions for farm­ers. Every sin­gle bite you take has an effect on the planet; we want the bites that we take and the bites that we pro­vide to be hav­ing a pos­i­tive effect in our world.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.rainshadoworganics.com.