Chris Rasmussen, grow manager for Pine River Shares Community Food Farm, picks a spinach leaf in the seedling house at the farm on Jan. 3, 2025, in Bayfield, Colo. Photo by Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Trust
Inside the seedling house is a study in green.
Buttercrunch lettuce, beet greens, baby chard, mini broccoli, sweet peas and the tops of heirloom carrots thrive in their warm quarters, protected from the cold outside.
At 10 a.m. on a Friday in early January, Grow Manager Chris Rasmussen watched for aphids—sap-sucking insects. Touching soil and feeling various leaves as she assessed the crops, Rasmussen talked about the persistent mice that want to snack on what she’s grown. She revealed that baby bok choy, while easy to grow, is a crop on the do-not-plant list because the community prefers basics like spinach.
From all appearances, the interior of the seedling house looked like it could be July or August despite it being the first month of the year. The morning low temperature in Gem Village, 18 miles east of Durango and two miles west of Bayfield in southwest Colorado, was 28 degrees. But that’s just a snippet of what was to come in the months ahead.
The seedling house is part of the Pine River Shares Community Food Farm, a 10-acre tract behind the Kubota tractor dealership in Gem Village. The farm has been preparing for an extended growing season starting this month. The plan is to produce vegetables late into the fall using space inside the 9,000-square-foot triple house—three conjoined high-ceiling greenhouses—and two outdoor 1,700-square-foot low tunnels.
The renovations of the buildings and initial work to prep the soil on the 10-acre farm are part of a push to transform Pine River Valley by increasing fresh food production. In this case, transform means to restore. The farm will serve as both a demonstration of the land’s potential and a significant, steady source of local food and produce. The farm is a project of Pine River Shares, which aims to bring people and resources in the valley together to promote a healthy community.
The Pine River Shares Community Food Farm is shown in this photo from Jan. 3, 2025, in Bayfield, Colo. The 10-acre farm is part of a push to transform Pine River Valley by increasing production of fresh food. Photo by Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Trust
The Pine River Valley—roughly 275 square miles and stretching 23 miles from Vallecito at the north to Ignacio, on the Southern Ute Reservation—was once a bountiful source of food. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pine River Shares director Pam Willhoite said, Native populations and non-Native settlers lived off the land. As highways and roads were built after World War II, many residents left their homes and farms for jobs in the wage economy. That led to fewer home gardens, grain crops, dairies and mills.
The Pine River Shares Community Food Farm is part of the Field2Fork project, a blueprint for rebuilding the Pine River Valley food system. The plan identifies actions individuals and communities can take to overcome barriers to accessing affordable, healthy food and increase local food production and processing.
The opportunity to buy the farm came in 2022. Willhoite loved the property and brought the idea back to her team. Lengthy negotiations led to a price reduction from generous sellers who appreciated Pine River Shares’ vision.
In January 2024, Pine River Shares purchased the farm for $450,000. The nonprofit received American Rescue Plan Act funding, which covered a third of the cost. Local donors supplied another $150,000. Grants and the organization’s reserves provided the final third. Additional funds have been raised to support 24 months of farm operating costs and improve the infrastructure.
“There’s an incredible communal feeling. It’s unique,” said Paul Pavich, a volunteer at the farm who recently retired from a career as an English professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango. “I have never felt this kind of intensity around a project.”
Simon Miglinas, a 14-year-old who attends Bayfield Middle School, also volunteers and said he sees the need in the community. “I like helping people. It’s the kind of thing that I found that would be fun,” he said. “It makes me feel like I’m actually doing something to help.”
Pam Willhoite, Pine River Shares director, helps a volunteer unload bags of leaves on Jan. 3, 2025, at the community food farm in Bayfield, Colo. Photo by Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Trust
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of community members utilizing the Pine River Shares food support programs has increased from 700 people per month to 2,500. The organization, now in its 12th year of operation, is based in the former Bayfield Primary School, which was turned into a hub for community groups after voters approved a bond to build new schools.
Pine River Shares staff and volunteers run a longstanding community food-sharing program, filling backpacks every week so 200 students can bring home the equivalent of six meals, and operate a “freecycle” shop that provides residents with a source of free clothing and housewares, among other resource-sharing efforts.
The farm purchase and ambitious plan to provide fresh produce to the valley has created a massive to-do list spearheaded by Rasmussen, a river ecologist with a doctorate from the University of Oregon.
The work has intensified this year. Design the irrigation systems outdoors and inside. Build water storage for greenhouses during non-irrigation seasons. Improve the triple house’s floor grade to eliminate areas where groundwater seeps in. Drill a well for potable and backup irrigation water. Explore grant options for solar development. Improve business relationships and collaborations with other local producers.
Rasmussen said the first year served as a proof of concept. Volunteer teams planted seeds, watered, nurtured, harvested and distributed 5,000 pounds of food (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beets, turnips, broccoli, cabbage, squash and greens) to community members. The team also learned what works. While romaine lettuce is “absolutely gorgeous,” Rasmussen said, it’s a slow grower, and the farm team learned to plant spinach or faster-growing lettuces such as buttercrunch instead.
A lettuce seedling grows in January inside the seedling house, as displayed in this photo, at Pine River Shares Community Food Farm in Bayfield, Colo. Photo by Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Trust
Rasmussen is undaunted by the prospect of shifting to a larger operation. She said that’s partly because the current food production system makes no sense.
“We take water from the Colorado River Basin, and we ship it all the way to California to grow our greens, put them on a truck, to ship them all the way back up here and put them in our grocery stores—in cellophane,” Rasmussen said. “That whole system is so fragile. It’s convenience now, but if you start digging into the system, it’s fragile. That’s insecurity to me.”
An economic class issue exists in rural America, Willhoite said. The demand for Pine River Shares services, including food sharing and free meals, proves that the valley needs to reclaim its ability to feed itself. Low-income community members who hold down two or three jobs still can’t keep up with housing, utility and fuel costs, according to Willhoite, “so we offer one free thing: food.”
The community farm is designed to demonstrate that food insecurity can be addressed.
“The thing that thrills me the most is when groups of people take control of their lives by identifying barriers to their well-being, looking for the root causes of those barriers and developing a shared analysis that informs collective action for change,” Willhoite said. “That’s the model of success that Pine River Shares is reaching for with the Community Food Farm.”
Pine River Shares Director Pam Willhoite inspects old potting soil for reuse on Jan. 3, 2025, at the Pine River Shares Community Food Farm in Bayfiled, Colo. Photo by Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Trust
Heather Houk, horticulture and agriculture production specialist in La Plata County for the Colorado State University Extension office, said she is “wildly impressed” with the Pine River Shares Community Food Farm. Houk has consulted with Willhoite and Rasmussen on eradicating the tobacco mosaic virus from the farm’s indoor growing spaces.
“It’s definitely important that we have spaces like Pine River Shares that are creating more thriving means of getting food, fresh vegetables and fruits in people’s hands,” Houk said.
Houk, an agricultural consultant for 25 years, has also helped recruit volunteers, connected the community farm with master gardeners and provided technical support to keep the greenhouses free of pathogens.
“Whenever there’s a call, the community chips in and helps,” volunteer Kim Winsett said. “I know some of it’s a learning curve, and that happens with everything you do, so there might be some little snafus along the way, but we learn from it, and we move on. We adapt.”
Volunteer Brittany Miller runs her 35-acre farm with ducks, chickens and alpacas a dozen miles north of Gem Village. The farm includes a large grow dome chock full of vegetables. She sells eggs to the Grub Hub Food Pantry at Fort Lewis College, which provides free food to students experiencing food insecurity. Originally from Oklahoma, Miller previously worked mapping leases for oil and gas companies and moved to Colorado during the pandemic.
With her deep knowledge of poultry breeds and breeders, Miller is helping the community farm develop a hen share program. She said she started volunteering at the farm because she’s nervous about how the economy will fare in the near future.
“It would be good to have some capacity here to provide and meet the needs,” Miller said. “If Chris [Rasmussen] can envision it, she can make it happen. She’s a force.”
Willhoite said the food farm looks like any other agricultural effort, but it’s more than that.
“We’re creating a new system of autonomous community food production,” she said, “where the food and any profit from the food remain in our community to benefit the people living there.”
