On the stretch of road between Hanksville, Utah and Capitol Reef National Park is a town called Caineville. There is, at least, a dot on the map identifying Caineville, and road signs that lead to it, although when you're in Caineville it's hard to tell if it exists at all or whether it stretches from somewhere a few miles back to somewhere further on up the road. If you're driving along, trying to find a radio station (pointless) or staring too long at the mesas or into the blue sky, chances are you'll miss it.

Nevertheless, there are folks living in Caineville, and it's one of those places that looks like it might harbor a few interesting characters. Sure enough, if you're adventurous and not in too much of a hurry, you'll find one there. Randy Ramsley owns and runs the Mesa Market with his wife Debra, and if you like cinnamon rolls, good bread, coffee, salads, and want some fresh vegetables for the road, the visit's more than worth it. It's probably the only place where you can buy organic vegetables within 200 miles in any direction, from a guy who grew them himself.

I stopped by for a visit at the end of June. Arriving late morning, I had the chance to see Randy in action with a new, uninitiated customer--a woman from Ohio, touring the southwest with her four kids. She was in Mom-mode. She scolded Randy.

"You know what you need? You need to put your sign about 500 feet further that way, so that people who are clipping along out here at 70 miles an hour, they have time to slow down."

Randy replied. "We weed out the weak by being a little obscure."

"Yeah? Well, I had to turn around."

"See? You're a strong one." Randy blended up her item of choice from the menu, a frozen melon drink, made with last year's preserved honeydews.

"Whew! That's good!"

Randy offered her an array of vegetables--chard, cabbage, basils and lettuce. She loaded up and added a bag of fresh cinnamon rolls and was on her way, stoked.

Randy and I sat down on the porch to talk. By the way, meteorology is always a good way to start a conversation with a farmer…

How do you like this weather? Rain in June--can you believe that?

It's absolutely perfect. We didn't get any of the rain, but we've had a flush come down the river. Really, I prefer not getting the rain this time of year because it just spatters everything and it can completely wash out the ditches. So it's better if up-county gets it and it comes down the river and I can regulate it. I'm getting the cloud cover in the afternoon, and that's what I need to grow a garden down here.

I've got a question unrelated to anything except--here we are--and something I've been wondering for a while. Where is Caineville?

Yeah, where is Caineville? Well…Caineville used to be the largest community in Wayne County. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, this was the place. That old building down across from the hotel, that was used as the old schoolhouse, courthouse, mailhouse…everything was there. There's a road that runs along the backside of the Reef, and that's where the majority of Caineville was in the early years. Back then there was also a little town down here called Mesa, and another one called Giles, just down toward Blue Valley. So there were several little towns, and the river used to flow straight across, it didn't flow down in so deep, and the pioneers had their farms right next to the river. It was a little meandering stream that they would irrigate their fields with.Later on, the Church established Loa as the center and they put the main church up there, and that began to draw energy away. There were also some big floods that came through…a really wet period. The floods started the river-cutting and washed out all the irrigation ditches and they couldn't maintain them. They just gave it up and left.

Do you know the origin of the name?

There are two schools of thought on that. The old-timers call it Cainesville. They always use the possessive. Just like Hanksville. So I believe there's somebody named Caine that they named if after. Although some people say it's because they grew sugar cane here. They did grow sugar cane and that was originally for molasses for the Church. Then they learned that they could turn it into whisky, and take it up to Price and sell it, so then they hauled it up to Price.

How did you end up choosing Caineville as a place to live?

I think Caineville chose me as much as I chose Caineville. We were going hiking into the San Rafael Swell one weekend and we couldn't get there because of some road work going on. We accidentally became enamored with the area and I met a few people down here. I bought the property in 1994. This is my seventh full year out here. Gave up the city life and moved out here seven years ago. Before that I was in Salt Lake for 25-30 years.

But why Caineville as a place to grow and market vegetables? Seems like an unlikely spot for this kind of venture. A challenging one, at least.

I ran into an old boy down here named Dee Hatch that had a place called the Garden of Weedin'. I'd stop and talk with him about gardening, because I couldn't believe anybody could garden out here, and he kind of enticed me. He didn't know much about gardening, really, but I could see what was going on. I could have sworn this ground couldn’t grow anything, but it was growing stuff. My grandmother started me growing flowers and vegetables when I was four years old or so, in South Dakota. I've been growing all my life, even in my hippie years when I was in high school I'd have carrots growing somewhere or something. The Gurneys--they're a family with a big nursery catalogue--were friends of mine. I used to hang out with Grandpa Gurney. His house had all these beautiful flowers and vegetables and Jay his grandson and I were friends, and we'd take care of his garden for him when he was an old man. I tried to do an organic farm in South Dakota in 1971. I was way too young. Didn't own the land, didn't have the equipment, didn’t have the tenacity to stay with it, and nobody knew what organics were back then.

…how did you know, back in 1971?

Robert Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine. Great magazine. And I graduated from high school in '69 when the back to the land movement was going on and I was part of that. Anyway, moving back toward the present, I was in Salt Lake City and I came down here and said OK, I'll start a little garden. I thought I could write off the trip down here if I started a business and sold a few vegetables. So I incorporated, and I'd take a few vegetables back to Salt Lake and sell them at the health food stores. It was a giant loss, but I could write it off. Then the Capitol Reef Café started buying from me--the garden was getting bigger and bigger. At the same time I was burning out in Salt Lake. I was doing kitchen and bath design. I would leave my store in Salt Lake on Friday at 6 o'clock, drive down here and farm until 4 o'clock Monday morning, then drive back to Salt Lake and have the store open at 9 a.m. I did that every summer for two or three years. Finally, Debra and I decided it was time to move. I knew there were thousands of people going by here, and out in the middle they had no distraction other than the scenic quality itself, so it was an excellent opportunity. Plus I knew that Torrey, growing the way that it was, was going to be supportive. So I could cover expenses in Torrey and anything I could make out of the store here was cream, is how I'd broken the numbers down. That's kind of the way it goes. It fluctuates year to year, some years Torrey does better, some years the store does better.

If you moved down here in the late nineties, during the years that you were getting started you had some rough weather, with the drought.

Oh yeah. I pulled out statistics that had been kept from 1946 until 1992, on Hanksville and Capitol Reef. They had every month's average, highs, lows, and rainfall, and the average temperature in July and August for all that time was 98 degrees. Well, I can grow in that. Because if that is the high, and nighttime temperature drops into the seventies--those are good growing conditions. But about the time I gave up the good job and moved down here the temperature jumped to 102, 105, 115 degrees. When it's that hot the plants just shut down, they stop setting fruit, they stop growing. That's what's happened to me the past five years--I've been waiting out July and August. Middle of August I've picked up another yield. But we've learned to adapt, too, with added-value items, and the bread thing.

You've got a wood-fired brick oven out here…

I bake bread every day. I start at 6:30 a.m. and it takes 5 hours. There's also an oven story. Early on I was baking inside. One winter I studied baking bread and by spring, I could bake pretty good loaves and was serving bread with salads. Then one day a lady stops in and talks with Debra and says you should get this book called The Bread Builders. So Debra orders the book and gives it to me, and it's got a plan for that oven in it. At the time I decided no way, I've never laid a brick in my life, that's way over my head. But Debra egged me on and I said oh all right. You can't lay brick in the winter, so I had to start it in spring when I'm busier than the dickens. In August I finished the oven. We decided to bake the first batch of bread one day, and as we're pulling out the very first load, the lady who suggested the book--who we've never seen before and never seen since--pulls in the driveway and buys the first loaf of bread out of the oven. Since then, people from all over the world have sent me books and recipes and flour. A friend who was a professional baker for 45 years sent me his best artisan bread recipes. I had a customer, this French guy--again a professional baker--come by and he worked with me for half a day showing me some tricks, so what you see is kind of an evolved series of recipes and people that I've met. At times I would have lost money if it hadn't been for bread. I could make more money just baking, but I like raising vegetables, and sustainable agriculture is what I'm interested in.

So talk a bit about that. How much land are you farming?

I've got 1.7 acres of vegetables and 50 fruit trees and 2.2 acres in cover crop. I'm just beginning to see the payoff of five years of cover cropping. It's becoming easier to work the soil, which means a reduced level of physical input on my part. For years I struggled with different cover crops but now I use oats and yellow clover. One fall I was scratching my head and wondering, OK, what am I going to use for a cover crop this next year? And all over the ditches, everywhere I look, there's yellow clover. It grows well, it's taproot busts up that tight soil that I've got. It's very forgiving, you can mow it or you don't have to mow it. But it took me years to figure that out. Now that I have, my soil quality's coming up. It's an incredible process, learning to grow out here in this environment. So many things that you take for granted, you can't take for granted out here. It requires really good observation and really good thought. You have to think about stuff and be logical and reasonable.

Who are your customers?

Mostly tourists. Whether it's here at the store or in Torrey we pretty much rely on them. I have two or three restaurants in Torrey that I deal with. Café Diablo, that's a wonderful place. Capital Reef Inn & Café are great customers, very supportive. Without them, I wouldn't be here. Now I also do a farmer market, and I'm the only farmer there. At Robber's Roost bookstore, Saturday afternoons. So everyone is learning to meet me there. We're building community too. Getting old timers to meet the young people in Torrey. It's just a good thing.

So, what is this symbol that is part of your market sign?

I found this symbol on a wall down in North Wash near Lake Powell. It's just a little symbol, I thought it was cool and that it looked like something growing. So I took a picture of it and we adopted it as our logo. I'd looked through a number of books trying to find something out about it and couldn't find anything. One woman--an archeologist--has come in to the store and said she's also seen it in another place. There is a symbol very similar to this in the Hopi tradition. As near as I'm able to tell, the head of it is a cloud, and then it's lightning, and corn and water. That's what I think, but it's only my interpretation.

How have your neighbors responded to what you're doing out here?

Well, I like to think I've had a positive effect in the neighborhood. Though it takes a while for people to understand what you're doing. But right now one of my neighbors--the rancher who has the land all around me here--is very seriously considering going into natural beef and natural lamb, as a side. Still maintaining his cow-calf operation but pulling out a certain number of head and seeing if we can't make a go of that. I'm really interested in it and want to work with the marketing side of it.

You obviously depend on irrigation. A lot of years the reservoirs around here run dry about mid-summer and the irrigation water runs out. What do you do when that happens?

Well, we hope we don't run out of irrigation water. The lower Fremont is a pretty consistent source, and we haven't run out even in these drought years. We have some political problems with allocation, but the source is good. Water everywhere, though, is the issue for farmers. The aquifers are going down in the midwest, and everywhere, the cities are taking it away from agriculture, politically. They're not interested in keeping agriculture alive in America, and that's something we need to change as farmers, as organic growers. It's essential that we become involved in changing the consumer's mind about the food that they're eating. Because without agriculture in America there's no hope for co-existence with the environment, we're just totally false, in a false environment. I've had people come in here and tell me that I'm using water that the cities could be using and that I should be out of business. And my reply is, where do you think your food comes from? It's a sad state of affairs.

But then it's amazing the number of people that stop through here and encourage me…because they think it's unusual what I'm doing and they're interested in sustainability. It's good to show people it can be done.

As organic growers, we have that intrinsic power that is contained in our product. Because we're not just promoting our own welfare and our own existence, we're actually promoting the potential for continued existence of mankind. I know for a lot of people it's weird to put it on that kind of scale, but I really think that's where we're at. It's not that this plagues my every thought, but it's in the back of my mind.

Gardening balances you: it's physical, it's emotional--you've got to love it, you've got to be emotionally involved in it, and it's intellectual--you have to think. So gardening, farming is a perfect system to use to get balance in your life. So that's why I do this. That's why people have all these little gardens in their back yards. People understand how important this is, we intuitively understand our connection to the universe. And if you grow a true product and get people started on it, they will want to come back to it.