How One Colorado Farm Turned a Desert Crop into a Water-Saving Movement

Sarah Jones didn’t grow up dreaming of farming—she grew up in San Diego. But when she and her husband Michael moved back to his family’s operation in Colorado’s San Luis Valley in 2017, she found herself asking a question that would reshape agriculture across the region: what if farmers could grow something that actually saved water instead of draining it?

The San Luis Valley sits above 7,500 feet in an alpine desert that gets roughly seven inches of rain annually. Potatoes dominate the landscape—the valley is the second largest potato-growing region in the United States—but after harvest, farmers traditionally leave fields bare or plant water-hungry crops like alfalfa. When Jones Farm Organics started experimenting with different grains for winter rotation, they tried wheat first. It didn’t work. Then came rye. The difference was stark: rye needs only 10 to 12 inches of water per acre, compared to 24 to 26 inches for alfalfa and 18 to 20 inches for barley. On a standard 120-acre field, that’s a dramatic difference.

What started as a single family’s crop experiment became something bigger in 2023. That spring, a dust storm swept through the valley—a not-uncommon occurrence in a region where winter leaves soil exposed and spring brings fierce winds. Sarah Jones and Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservation District, saw an opportunity. They launched the Rye Resurgence Project to convince neighboring farmers to switch to rye as both a cover crop and a cash crop. Today, farmers are growing 3,000 to 5,000 acres of rye annually through the project, and they’ve sold over 771,409 pounds at an average of $0.62 per pound.

But growing rye was only half the battle. The real challenge was getting people to actually buy and bake with it. Rye had a reputation problem—most people associated it with caraway seed and dismissed it as an old-fashioned health food. Enter Kris Gosar, whose Mountain Mama Flour mill grinds whole-grain flour from local farmers just outside Monte Vista. And Jessica Larriva, owner of Tumbleweed Bread, who sources rye from Jones Farms Organics and uses it in nearly all of her cookies. These aren’t industrial operations pumping out white flour for supermarket shelves. They’re part of a local food ecosystem built on the premise that 50 percent of calories in the American diet come from grains—so why not care more about where they come from?

The Rye Resurgence Project now has over 100 partners across Colorado: bakeries, distilleries, and millers who understand that rye isn’t a trend or a health fad. It’s a practical solution to a real crisis. With snowpack in the San Luis Valley sitting at just 13 percent of average, innovation isn’t optional—it’s survival. And it turns out the answer was growing quietly in fields all along, just waiting for someone to recognize its worth.