Sarah Jones never thought she’d be a farmer. She grew up in San Diego and met her husband, Michael, who comes from four generations of farmers, in college in Seattle. But when – after living and working in a couple different cities – they moved to south-central Colorado’s San Luis Valley, where Michael grew up, Jones knew it was where she was supposed to be.
Jones Farm Organics is a fifth-generation family farm that grows potatoes – the San Luis Valley is the second largest potato-growing region in the United States. But when Sarah and Michael Jones moved back in 2017, they started expanding to grains to diversify their business and experiment with rotational winter crops that they can sell. First, they tried classic wheat varieties like Turkey Red and Red Fife, but those didn’t work well for their farm.
Then, Jones tried rye. “The funny thing with rye was that my father-in-law had been planting rye since the ‘80’s as a cover crop,” she said.
As it turned out, rye was the answer.
Locally grown and milled flour sits in Tumbleweed Bread in downtown Monte Vista. The Abruzzi rye was grown by Jones Farms Organic. (Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder.)
Rye uses significantly less water than other common rotational winter crops like alfalfa and barley, which require 24-26 inches of water and 18-20 inches of water per acre, respectively. In contrast, rye uses only 10-12 inches of water per acre. That’s a huge water savings when multiplied across a standard 120-acre field.
Jones wondered how that effect could be extended across the valley. “Could we convert or convince farmers to make some changes to grow more rye and less of these other crops?” she said.
In the end, neighbors were excited to join. Jones and co-founder Heather Dutton launched the Rye Resurgence Project, an effort to get more farmers growing rye – and thus saving water – in 2023.
Storms in the High Desert, and Some “Reputation Rehabilitation”
In the San Luis Valley, water is scarce. In fact, the valley is an alpine desert – it sits above 7,500 feet in elevation and receives around seven inches of rainfall a year, much less than other parts of Colorado.
This year, the water situation in the valley, and across the West, is even more dire. “Our snowpack is sitting at 13% of average,” said Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservation District, and Jones’s co-conspirator on the Rye Resurgence Project. ”We have to be that much more innovative to find these solutions where we can use even less water but still support our agriculture community,” Dutton said.
A field and wetland outside of Monte Vista hold water during a stormy spring day in March 2026. Behind the abandoned house, a farmer’s field has not yet been planted. (Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
Traditionally, in the San Luis Valley, potatoes are harvested in the fall, and many farmers leave their soil bare until replanting the next spring, or grow crops like alfalfa that also require a relatively high volume of water. Rob Jones, Michael’s father, started planting rye to cover the soil over the winter since it protects against erosion during stormy seasons. But under Rob’s stewardship, the rye planted on the Jones Farm was not making much, if any, money.
In spring 2023, a dust storm hit the San Luis Valley and changed the future of rye in the region. In the valley, dust storms aren’t rare in the spring – it’s a windy season all across the Southwest due to rapidly changing daily temperatures and a stronger jet stream moving north at that time of year.
When the 2023 dust storm hit, the Joneses had already started growing rye on their farm and in conversations with Dutton, the idea to apply for a state grant to support other farmers interested in experimenting with rye emerged. “It was working for us. Rye as a cover crop and a cash crop checked all the boxes for us,” Sarah Jones said.
One of the challenges of growing rye to sell was figuring out who was going to buy it. To that end, Jones said they had to do some “rye reputation rehabilitation.” Contrary to what most people might believe, “rye does not taste like caraway seed,” she said.
Jessica Larriva puts away baked goods at Tumbleweed Bread in Monte Vista, Colorado. Larriva sources all of her whole-grain flour from local farmers and millers, including rye flour, which she uses in many of her cookies. (Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
Rye is actually a fairly neutral grain that works well in most baked goods, from brownies to pizza to bread. It also has lower gluten and higher fiber content than wheat. To that end, one of the main goals of the Rye Resurgence Project is to find partners that would buy and use rye: bakeries, distilleries, and millers.
A Rye Resurgence
Kris Gosar’s flour mill and sausage factory is a few miles outside of Monte Vista, Colorado, down a network of dirt roads. Gosar is the owner of Gosar Natural Foods, which produces both sausage, Gosar Sausage, and stone-ground flour, Mountain Mama Flour.
Kris Gosar, owner of Mountain Mama Milling, gives a tour of his mill site outside of Monte Vista, Colorado. Gosar said the clipper cleaner machine behind him is from the 1920s or 30s. (Photos by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
His whole-grain flour doesn’t just support better nutrition; it supports the local food ecosystem that Jones and Dutton are creating with the Rye Resurgence Project. Gosar buys grain from local farmers and mills it into flour, which is used across southern Colorado and northern New Mexico.
“Wheat has wonderful nutrient capabilities, [but] they sift out all the good nutrients to make white flour, and they mill it with a pretty high temperature so it burns out all the nutrients,” Gosar said.
Many small towns across the country used to have their own local mills, churning out fresh flour for the community. Now, milling is a concentrated industry with just 21 U.S. companies controlling 96.3% of the entire milling capacity of the country. Stone ground mills that produce mostly whole grain flour are even more rare. Most large-scale mills produce large quantities of white flour with very few nutrients.
Gosar shows the process from harvested grain to flour, revealing the byproducts of chaff and the rocks that are caught up when the grain is harvested. (Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
Gosar is one of five generations of farmers, including his two sons, who help out with the family business. His parents started the flour mill so that they wouldn’t have to drive nearly four hours to Denver to sell their grain. In the 1970s, they were one of the first organic grain farms in Colorado. Now, Gosar doesn’t grow his own grain, but he does buy it from local farmers in the San Luis Valley. Jones Farm Organics is one of his producers.
Baking Against the Grain
Part of the goal of the Rye Resurgence Project is to connect farmers to consumers and try to get bakers and restaurants to use more rye. One of the bakeries that has taken up this challenge is another local San Luis Valley business, Tumbleweed Bread.
Jessica Larriva, Tumbleweed’s owner, grew up in the valley but learned to bake in Portland, Oregon. When she moved back in 2017 to care for her mother, there was a lack of bakeries in the region. Larriva started selling bread and baked goods out of her house under a cottage food license and eventually grew her business into a wholesale bakery under the name Tumbleweed Bread. In March 2025, she opened a cafe in downtown Monte Vista, selling baked goods, bread, sandwiches, and soup.
Jessica Larriva sits at a table in her cafe, Tumbleweed Bread, in Monte Vista, Colorado. (Photo by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
Tumbleweed Bread is one of the more than 100 partners of the Rye Resurgence Project, all across Colorado. Sarah Jones sees every partner as part of her overarching goal to rebrand rye and other locally grown whole grains, as more than just a “health food.”
“I always like to use the coffee mentality,” Jones said. With coffee, she said, we buy nice beans and grind it fresh each morning. What about flour? “Fifty percent of our calories in the U.S. are from grains. And so why not care more about it? Is it freshly milled? What nutrition is in that? How is it grown? What variety is it? How is it impacting my gut?”
At Tumbleweed, Larriva cares a lot about what goes into her baked goods and loves that, in baking with rye, she is also contributing to the local food system. “We use rye in nearly all of our cookies. Rye is really a lovely grain for cookies,” said Larriva as we sat in her bakery, a sunny space filled with local art. She’s right – her rye shortbread cookies were incredibly tasty, made with rye from Jones Farms Organics.
Larriva recognized that whole-grain bread wasn’t accessible to everyone due to the price point, so she started a nonprofit, Tomorrow’s Bread. The program donates whole-grain loaves to food-insecure Coloradans through food pantries and has partnered with other bakeries to establish programs across the state. (Photos by Ilana Newman/Daily Yonder)
Jessica Larriva and Sarah Jones, whom Larriva calls a “spokesperson for rye,” and the many farmers, millers, distilleries, and bakeries involved, are a testament to the future of the Rye Resurgence Project. The initial goal was for ten farms to grow 120 acres of rye and sell 300 acres of that 1,200 total acreage.
Heather Dutton said that farmers are now growing 3,000-5,000 acres of rye a year, and the project has helped them sell 771,409 pounds of rye at an average rate of $0.62 per pound, more than they were aiming for initially. They’ve even had farmers join the project merely because they see rye working for their neighbors. “Exceeding the amount of money that farmers [were planning on] getting, the water savings that we had hoped for, the soil health goals, it feels really good,” said Dutton. Now they’re focused on the harder part — finding more businesses to buy the rye.
Dutton and Jones and the rest of the Rye Resurgence Project team will continue to seek new partners to purchase rye, and more farmers to grow it. Dutton said they are also looking for other crops that use less water, things that would be comparable to the 12 inches of water per acre required for rye. She said that quinoa and millet are strong contenders.
In the early stages, the real problem with these additional alternative grains is the branding. “We just don’t have a cool name like rye resurgence,” joked Dutton.
The post In Southern Colorado Water Is Precious. That’s Why Farmers Are Growing Rye appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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