A Quiet Revolution

“Check this out!” Bart Rayne, co-owner of Next Generation Organics in Homedale, motions me into another shed crammed onto their small property across the street from the Owyhee County Fairgrounds. “It’s a cool-bot,” he says, opening the door to a Styrofoam-padded cell inside the shed. “It works like a walk-in cooler, but I built it with an old air conditioner I got for free.”

A small-scale farmer myself, I appreciate his resourcefulness. “And over here,” he continues, “I’ve taken this water heater and hooked it up to heating coils I ran along the benches in Elayne’s greenhouse.” This tour is emblematic of the couple’s elegant straddling of the urban-rural divide, where the castoff of consumer culture provides inexhaustible fodder for ingenuity.

The Raynes purchased Bart’s grandparents’ old house in 2005, and later began growing and selling plant starts at the Meridian Farmers' Market, quickly moving to the busier Boise-based market. The Next Generation in their name is not only a nod to their agrarian grandparents but also to the adoption of a new philosophy in agriculture. Young people like the Raynes are flocking to farming with a focus on organic food grown for local markets.

To see them, along with their 7-year-old daughter Sadie, smiling and chatting easily with shoppers at the Boise Farmers Market over their colorful, overflowing market booth, one would never guess they were once too intimidated to come to the market in Boise. Over the past five years, they’ve built a following offering high-quality organic plant starts in the spring and unusual varieties of produce in the summer, all with a refreshing humility. They credit Canyon Bounty Farm’s Beth Rasgorshek with mentoring them on growing plant starts, and they’ve tried to develop a niche at market that doesn’t step on other growers’ toes. They made the decision to move to the new Boise Farmers Market from the Capital City Public Market last year because so many of their mentor farmers were making the switch.

“I think we’re many people’s secondary farm. They’ll go to their old favorite farmers first, and then come to us and pick up a few unusual things we have that others don’t,” Elayne Rayne says. “I love growing the unusual stuff—if you’re going to work that hard, you’d better like what you’re growing.” Bart Rayne agrees. “I love offering people something they can’t find anywhere else.” Their mulberries, harvested from the tree that runs along the canal bank behind their house, draw a crowd in early summer, and their mind-boggling array of specialty peppers and eggplants take the stage as the season scorches along. They’ve tried microgreens, pie cherries, rare shallots and, new for 2013, varieties of corn bred specifically for polenta.