Shone Farm

Last week Sarah had a field trip to Shone Farm for her ag economics class at the Santa Rosa Junior College and I got to tag along. Shone Farm acts as an outdoor, hands-on classroom and laboratory for the SRJC. They have forest, pasture for the ewe and lamb program and beef cattle, horses, 60 acres of wine grapes, and a sustainable agriculture area which includes olives, a market garden, and an organic vineyard. It is located just north of Forestville in the Russian River watershed.

They have a problem with predators gobbling up their lambs so they pasture llamas with the sheep to keep the lambs safe.

The organic farm section of Shone Farm sells produce at farm stands on the SRJC campus and through a CSA program. This white board shows what was in the CSA boxes for that week.

The ag program works with the culinary program, providing ingredients for the culinary students to cook with. In return, the culinary students give the farm cooked food to put into the CSA boxes, making them unique as most CSA boxes have only fresh produce. This week the culinary students made foccacia.

Water is an issue on Shone Farm. They use surplus water from the Russian River--this means that years when the water flow is too low the farm does not get water. For these dry summers they cannot grow vegetables.

Below you can see their sprinkler system for the veggies:

Shone Farm also irrigates with reclaimed water, but not their veggies, only the pastures and the vineyards (via drip to avoid contaminating the fruit). This means that even during dry years their vineyards and pastures have water.