Farm (to Kitchen) to Market:
Open House at El Sueño Enterprises

— Wylie Harris

Richard Ortez

A "farm to kitchen to market" operation is how small farmer Dick Ortez describes his business.

On Saturday, May 20th, from noon until six, visitors can literally get a taste of just what that means, when he hosts an open house for all comers at El Sueño (The Dream) Enterprises in Glencoe, outside Stillwater.

The Kerr Center, in partnership with USDA's Risk Management Agency, is sponsoring the free event.

Here's a sneak preview: the taste of El Sueño is rich with diversity in all aspects of the business, from production to processing to marketing.

For example, Dick Ortez's garden plots produce nearly twenty different fresh vegetable crops, everything from cabbage and cantaloupe to scallions and summer squash. And that's just the vegetables.

El Sueño Gardens' harvest also encompasses four varieties of common bean, and a host of grains, including wheat, rye, milo, oats, barley, millet, spelt, corn, and rice, as well as more exotic species like buckwheat, amaranth, and quinoa.

"What you have in me," says Ortez, "is someone who is deeply committed to sustainability, deeply committed to diversity."

It's his efforts at diversifying in the bean field that have made Ortez a two-time recipient of Kerr Center producer grants, supporting his work toward developing varieties of dry beans that perform well in Oklahoma and can form the basis of a line of value added products.

But Ortez emphasizes that his operation is about much more than just the beans, and May's open house is meant to showcase the whole farm — and the kitchen, too.

Adding Value in the Kitchen
"Nurturing your meal from seed to table," is El Sueño Enterprises' marketing slogan. That refers to a range of production and marketing activities every bit as diverse as the gardens' bountiful harvest.

Ortez does sell a small amount of each crop as fresh produce at the Stillwater Community Farmers Market. But, he says, "I don't plant anything I haven't already developed a value-added product I can make from in my kitchen." The majority of his crops pass through that kitchen before they go into his customers' hands and mouths.

Working in a licensed, on-farm commercial kitchen, Ortez turns El Sueño Gardens' produce into a line of processed products that he sells, alongside his fresh produce at the farmers' market, under the name Boarding House Classics.
Fresh cabbage becomes sauerkraut. Fresh beets get pickled. Sweet and hot peppers come out as salsa and chile verde. Boarding House Classics' other value-added offerings include vinegar peppers, Louisiana hot sauce, dried beans, cracked wheat & rye, dried basil, and chili powder. There's also a vinegar bean salad made with twenty different varieties of beans, each with its own distinct texture and flavor.

In addition, Ortez bakes breads fortified with some of the many grains from El Sueño Gardens and makes soup to sell at his booth at the farmers' market. One week's offering was cream of potato; the next week's customers savored curried squash.

Such fresh-cooked offerings actually represent a scaling back in the food service side of El Sueño Enterprises. For a decade, Ortez ran a café in Stillwater, again serving up dishes built around what he grows on his farm.

He's now closed the café to focus on the farming and processing aspects of the business, but still serves up an occasional meal through his Boarding House Catering service.

"In everything I market, I have at least one thing I've grown," Ortez says. That's a model of vertical integration more commonly encountered in stories about giant agribusiness companies. Instead, Ortez is turning it into a path toward viability for small farmers.

Integrated Approaches
The farm and the commercial kitchen have been complementary parts of Ortez's business since he started it in 1994. The kitchen, situated in a converted mobile home, began life on the farm, and then moved into Stillwater to accompany the café venture. Since the closing of the café, the kitchen has relocated back to a corner of the farm's 74 acres.

El Sueño Gardens, the farming part of Ortez's operation, doesn't occupy much more space than the trailer. He grows his immense diversity of crops in half a dozen 60' by 60' plots, in a vegetable-grass-legume rotation.

To Ortez, the integration of food production and processing makes sense in an operation the size of his. For a small producer, he points out, production costs are always going to be high enough to prevent effective competition with larger farms on high-volume, low-profit margin crops.

"So," he says, "you have to come up with something that customers can't get somewhere else." With their added value and distinct marketing identity, preserved foods — dried, canned, and otherwise — offer a seemingly inexhaustible list of possibilities.

Another advantage to Ortez's style of micro-integration, he says, is product longevity. If he doesn't sell a piece of fresh produce on market day, he explains, it's basically lost, unlikely to retain its quality until the next market the following week.

Canned and dried items, on the other hand, have "a shelf life measured in years," so that if they don't sell one week, it's easy to bring them back again and again until they do.

Ortez's personal history is as varied as his garden production and processed product line, and that diversity of experience makes him uniquely qualified to implement the business model he's developed.

He's retired from an academic career as a microbiologist, which included teaching classes on "food microbiology." As such, he has an in-depth understanding of the processes involved in, say, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut. He also had insight into why the commercial kitchen licensing regulations required the things that they did.

Learning More
Anyone curious to know more about — or just hungry to sample — Ortez' current and future cropping and processing plans can do just that at his open house on Saturday, May 20th.

Both the kitchen and the farm will be open for browsers beginning around noon, with light fare available for snacking. Ortez will lead a guided tour every hour or so until early evening, with visitors welcome to come and go as they please.
The open house will offer a view of all aspects of El Sue–o Enterprises — "from seed to table," in keeping with the spirit of its slogan — and provide a wealth of ideas for small Oklahoma farmers and food producers interested in maintaining and enhancing their own business viability.

Directions to El Sueño Enterprises
El Sueño Enterprises,
4204 N. Bethel Rd., Glencoe, OK 74032
405.377.8542
From the intersection of Highway 51 (E 6th Street) and 108 (S Rome Road), east of Stillwater:
Go north on 108 for four miles, to Richmond Road. Turn east onto Richmond and go two miles, to the intersection of Richmond and Bethel (cemetery at southwest corner of intersection). Turn south on Bethel and go half a mile. On the west side of the road, thereÕs a brown mobile home (the commercial kitchen) with a driveway to its north. Park at the road and walk up the driveway to the house.

Field Day begins at noon and goes until 6. Bring a lawn chair.
If weather is rainy or looks to become rainy the field day will be cancelled and held the following Saturday, May 27. Call Alan Ware the morning of the field day at 918.658.5267 if you have a question about whether the field day will be held.

These events are presented in partnership with the USDA Risk Management Agency

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