Adjusts to the Challenges of Uncertain Times

by Krissy Scommegna

If you’ve driven the stretch of Highway 128 between Boonville and Philo, you’ve probably noticed the big wooden barn situated between 2 vineyards. Well, that’s us—the Boonville Barn Collective. We’re a small farm focused on producing hard to find chile powders, but we grow more than just peppers. Our farming operation spans both sides of Highway 128, with chile peppers, dry beans, and strawberries on one side of the highway and our olive trees and processing facilities on the other. Overall, we have about seven acres in production in the heart of the Anderson Valley.

In 2011, while I was working as sous chef at the Boonville Hotel, I first learned about Piment d’Espelette. We used this sweet, spicy Basque red chile powder constantly in the kitchen, but it was pretty expensive to import. With Johnny Schmitt’s encouragement, my dad Roger Scommegna, his vineyard foreman Nacho Flores, and I set out to see if we could grow a local version of the pepper. Anderson Valley has a similar climate to the Basque region in France, and Nacho’s first trial of 50 plants, sowed in June of 2012, resulted in a successful harvest of chiles in September. Piment d’Ville was born as the pepper of Boonville!

We grew more chiles with each consecutive year, and the business evolved from a startup to a stable operation. It was a good time to take a break, allowing me to move to Boston in 2015 to pursue a master’s in Food, Agriculture and the Environment from Tufts University. I led an anti-hunger nonprofit and worked as a whole animal butcher, and my partner, Gideon, worked as the Development and Marketing Manager for a regional non-profit food hub. We both reached the point in our careers where it was clear a change was needed. Coming back to Boonville seemed like both the most challenging and most rewarding option.

So Gideon and I moved back to Boonville and formed the Boonville Barn Collective shortly thereafter in January 2020. While we started as a farm focused on producing California-grown Espelette pepper for restaurant chefs, our goal is to both diversify what we grow and to encourage more home chefs to explore domestically grown spices—and that goes beyond our Piment d’Ville. Nacho has been cultivating different crops from Mexico that are hard to find here in Mendocino County, and we’re looking forward to helping him share what he grows with both our local community and across the country.

Now the foreman of the Boonville Barn Collective, Nacho has been farming since he was 10. Hailing from Michoacán, Mexico, his family has been growing peppers, corn, and tomatillos for generations. Switching to the French pepper took some adjustment, but over the past nine years, Nacho has learned the ins and outs of growing and drying these chiles. As a Mendocino Renegade certified farm, managing nutrient deficiencies and pests requires just a bit more work. In addition, the cyclical drought conditions over the past few years continue to challenge how and what we are able to grow.

As the pandemic started to change our world in March, we recognized the importance of investing in feeding our community. Nacho and Martin Flores, our Assistant Foreman, planted seeds for a staff garden that helped feed 40 people throughout the summer. Watching restaurants across the country close down was the warning sign that our business plans for the year needed to shift. We sat down to think about what we could grow that could be consumed locally. We knew we didn’t want to completely revamp the farm, since we do well producing shelf stable goods! We decided to shift some of our cropland to dry beans.

For the past five years we’ve been growing heirloom Italian beans, but in small quantities for local restaurants and friends of the farm. As we explored what we could easily add to our fields, it became clear that expanding bean production made the most sense. As seed suppliers began to sell out, we raced to secure pinto and peruano beans to plant in a section of the farm that was originally slated for peppers. As summer transitioned to fall, we knew our next challenge would be figuring out how to thresh the plants. Once the plants die back and the pods dry, threshing involves removing the dry beans from their pods and winnowing away any of the remaining plant matter. Our production is too small to require any kind of commercial bean combine thresher (think Iowa cornfields-size), but too big to thresh by hand. In the 1960s, there were solutions for farms like ours. Called “bean specials,” they were manufactured for smaller operations, but fell out of production as the USDA encouraged farms to “get big or get out.”

One of Gideon’s friends from college reached out with plans for a bike-powered bean thresher, and Nacho immediately got to work building one. This year, our five different varieties of dry beans were all cleaned with our bike-powered bean thresher. Nacho, Martin, Gideon, and I all spent time on the bike, but Martin was truly the main bike thresher. Together we rode our way to 1,000 pounds of dry beans.

This year, we’re launching the Boon Box, our take on a CSA, but from a farm that grows little fresh produce. Delivered three times a year, the subscription box allows us to have the capital we need in the winter for seed purchases and for making improvements on the farm for the next growing season. Customers are guaranteed beans, and we’ll share some of the peppers we grow on a micro scale for ourselves, giving individuals the opportunity to try out new varieties. It’s also a way for folks to give us feedback on what we’re growing, helping us determine which special crops they’d like to see become a mainstay going forward.

While 2020 was not the year we had planned when we started the business, I’m proud of our team’s resilience. We’ve pivoted and figured out how to make things work, whether facing an almost empty irrigation pond or a complete shift in what our business looks like. It hasn’t been easy, by any means. It’s a game of shifting energy, adjusting expectations, and focusing on what is most important. And then a lot of hope that we made the right choices.

We’ve had time this year to think about what we could improve and do differently. Much of this has been centered around how we can better take care of our land by implementing climate smart practices. This past summer, we received a $10,000 grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Healthy Soils Program to plant a 1,000 foot hedgerow along the edge of our property. We worked with Linda MacElwee of the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District to design the hedgerow, focusing on native plants that are adapted to our climate, provide pollinator habitat for our bees, beneficial insects (does anything eat that cucumber beetle?!), and will sequester carbon in the soil. While we can’t easily transition our tractors off of diesel, we can change the way we use and produce energy on the farm. Our goal is to install solar panels on the barn in the near future to generate power back into the electrical grid.

Looking to the future, we hope to continue thoughtfully expanding the diversity of crops we grow, while keeping the focus on shelf stable products. We’re working to bring attention to not only spices from a single origin, but those that are truly farm to jar spices, like ours here in Boonville. In a part of California that cares so deeply about where their food comes from and how to support local businesses, we hope our chile powders earn a dedicated home in your spice drawer.

Visit www.boonvillebarn.com to learn more about the Boonville Barn Collective and their products. Many retailers across the county including the Farmhouse Mercantile and The Disco Ranch in Boonville, Surf Market in Gualala, Barge North Co in Mendocino, Harvest Market in Fort Bragg, Mendocino Bounty and the Ukiah Natural Foods Co-Op in Ukiah, and Mariposa Market in Willits.

Table of Contents photo and p 29 photo by Gilbert Bages. Photos pp 30 and 31 by Krissy Scommegna.

Krissy Scommegna owns and operates the Boonville Barn Collective with her husband, Gideon Burdick.