When Vanessa Swenson and Michael Townshend started Wildland Cooperative Inc., they envisioned a burgeoning land filled with trees, flowers, and crops cultivated using regenerative agricultural practices set amid conservation corridors spread throughout the 60-acre property. 

Three years in and after incorporating beer, wine, and a local art and goods market, the Green Bluff cooperative is set to be profitable by year-end with an estimated annual revenue of $500,000, says Townshend. 

“We’ve all been working really hard to get to that profitability state,” he says. “It’s a new business, once we’re there, we’ll bring more people on board.” 

Swenson, who is married to Townshend, says momentum has been building every year as more people discover the farm and attend special holiday events like Mother’s Day, and u-pick flowers, which draw in visitors to the co-op. 

“Things are moving in the right direction,”  says Swenson, who anticipates a busy October at the farm that will require the cooperative to prepare for large crowds of visitors. 

It also has been a good year for applying and securing grants from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, that helps the cooperative restore soil health to the land, build hoop houses to protect crops, and install a large cooler along with a wash-and-pack station to clean and store produce on site. In all, Townshend says Wildland Cooperative has received about $65,000 in farming grants. 

“What the NRCS wants is improved soil health,” Townshend says.

In regard to the hoop houses, he adds, “I’m really excited for ... all the trellising we can do for things like cucumbers and tomatoes.” 

Wildland Cooperative was established in 2021 by Townshend, Swenson, and Jake Losinski—who has since moved on—on the former grounds of Townshend Cellars tasting room, originally founded in 1998 by Townshend’s father, Don Townshend. Located at 8022 E. Greenbluff Road, Wildland Cooperative is one in a collection of family farms spread across 12 square miles of rolling hills, about 30 minutes north of downtown Spokane. 

The cooperative is operated by a team of five, which includes four worker-owners: Swenson, Townshend, Riley Eason, and Caitlin Mahoney. The tasting room is a renovated split-level home with large windows overlooking the farm and Mt. Spokane in the distance. The main service floor is 2,500 square feet and features a bar with brews and blended wines, and a market with home goods, jewelry, art prints, and specialty food products from local makers and artists. The upper level of the tasting room is cordoned off for administrative offices. Wildland Cooperative also sells its own apparel featuring Northwest wild plants and flowers designed by Swenden, who has a background in art and graphic design. 

About 20 acres of the farm are dedicated to growing Christmas trees, says Swenson, a continuing practice from when it was Townshend Cellars. In the winter, the farm hosts U-Pick Christmas tree adventures where guests can chop down their own tree, located mostly in the area behind the tasting room. While about a third of the farm is planted with Christmas trees, there are sections of the tree farm that are left undisturbed, allowing for a natural rewilding to occur, Swenden says. 

“Some areas are designated as wildlife corridors and areas to just leave wild,” Swenson says. “Maybe trying to establish some agroforestry practices there … because it really adds to the beauty around here.” 

For growing crops, Wildland Cooperative practices regenerative organic agriculture, Swenson says. According to the USDA, regenerative organic agriculture “prioritizes soil health creating farm systems that work in harmony with nature to improve quality of life for every creature involved.” A few of its principles include minimizing the physical, biological, and chemical disturbance of the soil, keeping the soil covered with vegetation or natural material, and increasing plant diversity. Other practices also include composting, agroforestry, and managed grazing.

Out of 7 acres dedicated for farming, about 3/4 of an acre currently is being used to grow crops, says farm manager Riley Eason. Not including flowers, the farm produces over 60 varieties of crops including onions, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, peppers, watermelon, and herbs.  

“We are learning to master certain varieties of things instead of being so diverse,” Eason says. 

While the vision is to expand slowly to include perennial crops alongside agroforestry practices, Eason says she also wants to create more beds for noncash cover crop rotations.  

Cover cropping is a regenerative agricultural practice of growing crops to provide nutrients to the soil rather than as a primary harvest crop, Eason says. For example, buckwheat can be grown and killed before it seeds, leaving nutrients in the soil. That leftover biomass can then be used as mulch, instead of outsourcing wheat from somewhere else. 

Eason says that while regenerative agriculture has picked up in popularity in the past couple of years, it’s an ancient practice. For Eason, climate anxiety, wildlife habitat loss, and the unsustainable direction in which the food system is headed drive her passion for regenerative agriculture. 

“That’s where my drive comes from and where I think so much of the push for regenerative agriculture comes from and wanting to gather that wisdom again,” Eason says. “So much of it has been lost, and there is a whole new generation of people trying to return to their roots.” 

Townshend is mostly in charge of keeping the books, but also brewing beers and small-batch wine in collaboration with his family business Townshend Cellars. A few yards west of the taproom, Townshend oversees an 8,000-square-foot brewery and winery. In February, Townshend completed the installation of a seven-barrel brewery system for $250,000. Wildland Cooperative shares the brewing system with Spokane-based The Grain Shed, and Black Label Brewing Co. 

“If you’re looking at it from a scale of breweries, it’s a big-small brewery or small-big brewery. It’s right in the sweet spot,” Townshend says. “The plan is still to get more tanks in here. You have up to 14 tanks in here for brewing beer.” 

Wildland Cooperative buys local grain from Spokane Valley-based LINC Malt, which procures grain from the Palouse and malt from Yakima, Washington.

“We live in a great beer state,” he says. 

As a licensed winery, Wildland Cooperative blends all its small-batch wines on-site in collaboration with Townshend’s brother, Brendon. In the future, he says he’d like to bring the process completely in-house, but for now, his family’s winery is a convenient benefit while he works to get the cooperative to a more established place.