The Palouse Highway begins in a commercial zone — there's a sprawling Target complex, a McDonald's and an expanse of often well-populated soccer fields. But head a little farther south, and the road curves and begins to gently roll until it eventually opens onto the picturesque Palouse prairie. After about 10 minutes going south on the Palouse Highway, hang a left at South Madison Road, go just past the post office and up a little hill, you'll find the Casa Cano farm store.
Jorge Cano and his wife, Madyson Versteeg, have owned the farm for 11 years and have mostly focused on offering wholesale produce to local restaurants and some nonprofits. "For the retail, we'd always put card tables out [by the side of the road]... it was pretty random, and I think it was hard for customers to connect with us," Cano says.
COVID brought an increase in business, and by the time they were filling 30 to 40 orders a day, the couple realized the potential for a more permanent retail space.
The store, though only 2 years old, includes an interior of well-worn wood and metal, both with the sort of patina popular in "farm-style" decor. Here, though, it's legit. "All the materials we collected off of barns we took down in the back of our place... we repurposed it because we had to," Cano says.
The hand-built store is tiny, yet fully stocked for a grocery run. Much of the inventory is produced right at the family farm, while the remainder is sourced from other regional providers. Shoppers will find an assortment of vegetables, fruit, eggs and even coffee from nearby Rockford's LaShaw Ranch Roasters. Frozen fish is courtesy of the Puget Sound Food Hub Cooperative, which also supplies honey kombucha and even peanut butter made in Washington. Shelves of curated organic pantry items include pasta and some canned or jarred goods. "It's just things that we like to eat and that we think are healthy. We don't have anything that has sugar in it," Cano says.
There's also plenty of meat, produced locally. Casa Cano's cattle spend the summer months grazing on grass at the farm, while enjoying non-sprayed hay in winter months. The farm's pigs feast on "non-GMO grain that was grown here on the Palouse and milled just down the road," Cano says. Beef cuts and pork selections, including the popular Casa Cano Farms sausage often found on local restaurant menus, are wrapped in crisp white paper and stored in freezer cases at the back of the store.
Oddly, in such an abundant farming region, Cano says his store is the only option for miles. "We're kind of a food desert, you know? You have to go to Spokane to go grocery shopping, and south of us, the towns don't have grocery stores anymore."
Cano is just finishing constructing, by hand, the farm's next expansion, something that's been in the works for two years: a food storage warehouse. "We've been working with enough farms that we need more space to intake what they bring us and store it. A lot of small farms have an issue of storage on their farm — a restaurant can only buy so many carrots a week. So a lot of this is going to be freezer and cooler space."
While the farm is small, it's part of an intentional, post-pandemic statewide effort aimed at improving food security, to allow "more small farms to be able to fill gaps in times of crisis," Cano says. A farm infrastructure grant from the Washington State Department of Agriculture helped fund equipment for processing locally grown produce that's now sold to at least 10 northeast Washington school districts, Cano says. "So that's really helped us grow."
The Circle of Life
Not a lot gets wasted at Casa Cano Farm. For example, when microgreens from the greenhouses are trimmed, with the tops going off to retail or wholesale buyers, the remaining stems are composted together with piles of wood chips from local arborists. "And we use that to bed our cows and pigs," Jorge Cano says. "Obviously, they add manure to it, and then a lot of vegetable scraps and whatever else is compostable goes into those piles. And then we mix all that to get it hot and kill the weed seeds, and then we make our own soil mix, which we also sell in the spring... It's as closed a loop as we can make it but still not totally torture ourselves."
Casa Cano Farm Store • Tues-Fri, 9 am-5 pm, Saturdays (through June 14) 9 am-2 pm • 12210 S. Madison Rd., Valleyford • To place online orders for pick up or delivery and for more info on u-pick Thursdays, CSA subscriptions, workshops and events, go to casacanofarms.com
