Sunray Farm of Sonoma marks third year as founder reflects on vision, balance and business

Maggie La Rochelle is helping to make magic happen on an acre just outside of Sonoma.

She’s half of the couple behind the climate-resilient, ecologically-geared Sunray Farm, a labor of love for La Rochelle and her husband, Matt Gunn, that is now entering its third year.

For La Rochelle, who grew up in Napa and knew nothing about gardening or farming at the time, its also a reflection of her commitment to holistic community development and a good work-life balance.

She first got the opportunity to learn about her new trade at the UC Davis Student Farm. She first went onto the farm while doing research, but she was inspired by what she saw and it led to a love of horticulture and sustainable ag.

“I observed just how powerful it was for students to be learning to garden and farm, including myself,” she said.

La Rochelle and Gunn have a 5-and-a-half-year- old boy named Jules. When they got the opportunity to create Sunray Farm, they knew it was the right opportunity for their small family.

“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. “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.”

Working the farm also gives La Rochelle the opportunity to realize her vision of a more holistic community.

“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.

They are incorporating age-old sustainable practices on the farm. 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.

“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. “We are just one of a larger community of local farms doing this work.”

La Rochelle said one of the most important ways to sustain the farm’s fertility is to take good care of the soil.

“Our health is the soil's health is the plants’ health and we evolve together,” she said. “The approach to sustainable agriculture from a living soil perspective is perhaps the most powerful part of that,” she said.

Sunray has two main vegetable fields off Arnold Drive, where they grow around 25 types of crops throughout the year. “We only grow on one of them per year, and the other one is in cover crops in the summer,” La Rochelle 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 get great shelf life on our stuff because we keep it hyper local,” she said.

They plant their crop rows densely so that there’s less exposed soil in the bed. They use compost and do a lot of soil testing to make sure the soil minerals are in balance.

“We also use a very small amount of tillage out here,” she said. “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.”

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.

“They're a really nice crop for us because they're the only crop that we grow wholly in the greenhouse,” she said. “It's a really great crop to grow in the winter because we can still consistently produce something for the restaurants.”

They’re encouraging biodiversity on the farm with hedge rows of flowers planted that provide habitat and food for pollinators. They even have wildlife corridors crossing the property.

The farm was built with climate resilience in mind. 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. They have lots of solar panels and a goal of being a net-zero farm, meaning they absorb the same amount of carbon emissions they produce.

Feichtmeir, who purchased the property in 2016, had also dug a well, built two homes and a barn before he brought in La Rochelle and Gunn in 2020 to start the farm on an acre of the property.

La Rochelle said that she and her husband appreciate Feichtmeir’s vision of integrating a highly sustainable and ecologically sound farm on his property. In a time when small farms are struggling, Feichtmeir’s vision is helping at least two farmers to thrive.

But it took them an entire year of intensive work to create the infrastructure of the farm and to be ready to produce in 2021. That wasn’t a problem because the pandemic shut everything down.

“It really made it convenient that we didn't have anywhere else to go,” La Rochelle said. “We had this beautiful property, so all we wanted to do was work on it.”

And the changes in life and work put in motion by the pandemic have made locally sourced and sold produce more of a priority, La Rochelle said

“Pre-pandemic, it seemed like maybe farmers markets were still enjoyable, still nice to go get a cup of coffee and walk around and have a sense of community, which are all wonderful things, but perhaps not necessarily as a real solid food source.”

But supply chain woes in the past few years led to an appreciation of locally grown food and farmers markets. “I think there was a real silver lining there,” La Rochelle said.

So far, they are doing the Tuesday Petaluma East Side Farmers Market where they sell veggies, microgreens and flowers. Afterwards they donate all of the food that doesn’t sell to the nonprofit Sonoma Overnight Support for their meal program.

La Rochelle said they appreciate all of the businesses they work with as well as the kind neighbors around the farm who have been supportive.

“That has just made everything, you know, joyous for us — to have such a positive reception,” she said.