Property owner Mark Feichtmeir dug a large storm water basin that’s used for irrigation on everything but their crops, and so far they’ve had enough water. The farm was built with climate resilience in mind. They even have wildlife corridors crossing the property. They’re encouraging biodiversity on the farm with hedge rows of flowers planted that provide habitat and food for pollinators. “It's a really great crop to grow in the winter because we can still consistently produce something for the restaurants.” “They're a really nice crop for us because they're the only crop that we grow wholly in the greenhouse,” she said. They grow microgreens in their greenhouse, where they grow pea shoots, sunflower shoots and what they call a “farmers' mix” of microgreens, with broccoli, kale and red radish. “That's a really important environmental practice for us, to be able to support the ongoing life of the soil in our beds and not till it up all the time.” “We also use a very small amount of tillage out here,” she said. They use compost and do a lot of soil testing to make sure the soil minerals are in balance. They plant their crop rows densely so that there’s less exposed soil in the bed. “We get great shelf life on our stuff because we keep it hyper local,” she said. They do the same with their three small flower fields where they grow 16 different kinds of organic annual flowers like sunflowers, scabiosa, bachelor buttons, sweet peas and dahlias. “We only grow on one of them per year, and the other one is in cover crops in the summer,” La Rochelle said. Sunray has two main vegetable fields off Arnold Drive, where they grow around 25 types of crops throughout the year. “The approach to sustainable agriculture from a living soil perspective is perhaps the most powerful part of that,” she said. “Our health is the soil's health is the plants’ health and we evolve together,” she said. La Rochelle said one of the most important ways to sustain the farm’s fertility is to take good care of the soil. “We are just one of a larger community of local farms doing this work.” “A super small farm like ours could very easily just sell to restaurants, but we make a point to also be at a farmer's market so that people can put our produce on their grocery lists,” she said. It’s the kind of work farmers were doing for generations before synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers came along: crop rotation, planted according to the seasons, companion planting and letting the soil rest. ![]() They are incorporating age-old sustainable practices on the farm. “I want people to have the opportunity to access and enjoy really high-quality food and flowers from a farm they know is farming with their health and the land's health front of mind,” she said. Working the farm also gives La Rochelle the opportunity to realize her vision of a more holistic community. “It's really just a joy to watch him be free and cruise around this place and learn so easily in such a natural way.” “For him to be able to have this experience and for us to have a really integrated home and work family life was probably the most important reason that we chose to farm,” she said.
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