Grand Canyon Times

Agpac of the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation issued the following announcement on Oct. 16

Nearly one weekend a month I head out on state route 87, kind of a back way to get to Dad, Pat Murphree’s, place, in order to skip a portion of the traffic on Interstate 10 before getting to Casa Grande and then Arizona City. All these years, I’ve been passing one of the most unique and interesting farming operations: Ramona Farms.

Ramona Farms, established in the early 1970s, represents the convergence of modern and traditional farming. As you turn left off 87 between mileposts 153 & 152, you’re a bit mystified about what might be going on here. Processing equipment and a non-descript farm office begin to give subtle hints. The “Welcome” sign tells you to come on in.

On the Ramona Farms website, Ramona Button is quoted saying, “My father, Francisco ‘Chiigo’ Smith, an O’dham farmer, grew many traditional crops on my mother Margaret’s ten-acre allotment located near Sacaton, on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona. My mother was an herbalist and traditional healer. My father grew corn, chilis, tepary beans, various types of squash, gourds, Pima wheat, melons, and sugar cane. Together, they taught me the value of our traditional foods to our daily nutrition and way of life.”

You get a sense she holds her family heritage and her culture close. And when I visited with her recently, she told me of the time her dad placed her on a large boulder and told her to close her eyes. He proceeded to teach her how to sense her surroundings, listen to the sounds and try to even try and identify what insects and small animals might be chirping. Her appreciation for the land and nature is grounded, certainly.

Ramona’s husband, Terry and she began farming on that very same allotment of her mother’s in 1974. “Our first crops were barley and alfalfa,” Ramona explains. “After expanding a few years later, by leasing land from my relatives and other community members, we added cotton, corn, and wheat.”

But the Buttons were called to even more by her elders when it came to the farm. “In the late 1970s, some community elders asked us to grow the Bafv (tepary bean), which had nearly become extinct due to the lack of water that put many of the local subsistence farmers out of business,” Ramona explain on the website. “We discovered that my father had left a few seeds of the white and brown tepary beans in glass jars in a trunk in the old adobe house that I grew up in. It became clear to us, especially with the urging of our community elders, that it was to become our mission to ‘bring the bafv back’ to the community. We were able to get started with those few seeds of each color and learned how to produce the beans on a small scale. Once we perfected our production techniques, we were able to develop our bean project into a larger enterprise and now market our beans in the local community and surrounding areas, in different colors and package sizes. We also offer other wholesome American Indian grown traditional, heirloom and non-traditional food products.”

Standing out in her bean field, Ramona Button explains the health benefits of the tepary bean.

So, this couple that’s launched a thousand seeds, well thousands of seed, can mostly take pride in rescuing the Pima peoples’ native seed.  

A farm profile of Ramona and Terry Button, owners of  Ramona Farms in Pinal County. Most historical information provided by Arizona Farm and Ranch Hall of Fame.

An ongoing series of our farm and ranch businesses.

Growing up years : Born in Sacaton to Francisco ‘Chiigo’ Smith, a Tohono O’odham and Margaret (Johnson) Smith, an Akimel O’odham (Pima), Ramona learned to grow traditional crops from her father, but her mother taught her the traditional ways of healing using traditional methods and desert medicinal plants, something that Ramona was keen to embrace.

A farmer, farm laborer, and blacksmith, Chiigo also made adobe bricks and helped build homes and delivered water to residences by team and wagon. Ramona’s mom, the herbalist, learned how to use plants to heal from her own parents. And despite being nearly blind, Margaret was a good cook and homemaker.

Being the farmer, Chiigo taught his daughter the importance of gathering and saving seeds. And ever busy, he was continuously working with the soil, studying and experimenting on how to improve his five garden plots, often improving soil fertility by using cow and chicken manure from the animals he raised for milk, eggs, and meat.

Along with the ten-acre field, in which he grew barley for the horses that he used to pull his wagon and plow the fields and wheat for sale and to make flour for their biscuits and chemait (tortilla), he leased another two allotments totaling sixteen acres from Margaret’s Uncle Frank Johnson and his wife, Elizabeth. In his five-garden plots, he grew tomatoes, chilies, squash, sugar cane, gourds for dippers and rattles, melons and Pima corn and tepary beans.

Their twpo main food crops were tepary beans and Pima corn. But Ramona’s dad was most known for his remarkable ‘long green chilies.” Chiigo had perfected the growing of chilies and had great tasting mild, medium and fiercely hot skok ko’okol (extremely hot chilies) that would leave white blisters on the lips of the uninitiated.

Like those native tribes with a tradition of farming in their culture, gathering and saving seed was core to her father’s preservation of some of their native varieties, like the tepary bean. He would save a certain percentage of the best seed from one season and plant them the next, never planting all the saved seed so that if in the event of a crop failure, there would still be some seed left to plant again. Chiigo told his daughter that she should be aware and to stay true to the traditional ways of growing and preparing and eating the tepary beans, Pima corn, and grinding her own Pima club wheat for flour to make che-chemait, tortillas.

Native to the Americas, many credit the Native Americans with the development of the corn, or maize, plant to what we have today.

Later, when Ramona and possessed with a heart to help people, she began formal training as a nurse. Her training took her to Los Angeles, Phoenix and then back to Sacaton. With a degree as a licensed practical nurse, Ramona worked for the U.S. Public Health Service Indian Hospital in Sacaton. The director of nursing, observing how interested Ramona was in learning and how well she worked with people and cared for patients, offered Ramona an opportunity to take advanced training in Rapid City and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

On this extended training trek, Ramona would meet Terry Button, and the rest would be history.

Terry Button’s growing-up years couldn’t be more different. He was an east coast boy. Terry was born in Thompsonville, Connecticut, the eldest of nine children to Edward and Kathryn Button. They later moved further south to Middletown, where Terry and his three brothers and five sisters were raised. Their father was a WWII veteran, grew up on a tobacco farm in Thompsonville and later became an agronomist, getting his degree from the University of Connecticut, and eventually became head of Research and Development for the Connecticut Highway Department.

Terry, along with his two brothers, Karl and Dale, worked for their father on weekends and spring and summer breaks from school. Their mother, Kathryn (Hales) Button, grew up on a farm in Snow Hill, near Salisbury, Maryland, on the Delmarva Peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay. So, agriculture was by no means foreign to Terry.

Kathryn was the first woman in the Hales family to attend and graduate from college, where she earned a degree in elementary teaching, skills she would hone while raising and educating her nine children, all who are well educated and successful. She was a devoted mother who instilled in all her children a thirst for knowledge and exceptional skills in writing.

Terry attended Middletown High where he lettered in track and cross-country and was a member of the National Honor Society. He attained the rank of Life Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and attended Wesleyan University and studied linguistics and ethnomusicology, among other disciplines.

While running cross-country, he met two exchange students from the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona and picked up a little of their language, a skill that proved invaluable when he met Ramona in South Dakota, as it was a dialect of her Pima language which she spoke fluently.

A clear sign of how Terry would become intertwined in native American culture, while still in High School, he was at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota one summer. He became quite close to one of the Lakota Sioux families, William and Nancy HornCloud. In a highly ceremonial process, Terry was honorarily adopted during a Hunka ceremony, into the William and Nancy HornCloud Lakota family. In fact, Terry became a Lakota singer, traveling to Powwows and ceremonies in South Dakota, Montana, Colorado and New Mexico. In between these excursions, he broke horses and performed ranch work with his adoptive father, Bill HornCloud.

Chance Encounter, Sort Of : You may recall that Ramona’s director of nursing took notice of her and sent her to South Dakota for more training. This was around the same time Terry was hanging out and working with the HornCloud family.

Terry and Ramona met while she was at the Pine Ridge Indian Hospital on the reservation. If truth be told, it was a setup. Millie HornCloud, Terry’s adopted sister, suggested the two meet.

Once Ramona’s training was complete, she wanted to head back home to her own people to apply what she’s learned. So, when she returned home to Arizona, Terry followed Ramona to Sacaton where they were married, December 1972.

They soon began to farm on the family allotment, around 1974, growing mainly barley and alfalfa. By leasing from her mother’s Uncle Frank and Aunt Elizabeth that land that Chiigo had leased from them, Terry and Ramona had enough acreage to keep Terry busy learning to farm as he worked at a gas station attendant in Sacaton and Studies automotive mechanics at night school.

Their Farming Business : In 1976, Ramona and Terry realized an opportunity to expand their farming business. Ramona leased additional land from relatives that had been farmed several years earlier before drought and loss of water delivery had forced the land to be abandoned, leaving it to be overrun with mesquites and more. A tragic period in history, Pima farmers in the early 1900s had lost their ability to irrigate their fields due to drought and the uncontrolled diversion of water from the Gila River by non-Indian settlers, many Pima families perished from famine.

Ramona had always felt a calling to bring much of the previously farmed land back. She and Terry saw an opportunity. “I dreamed I’d see greener landscapes here than the dry desert,” Ramona explained on a recent tour of their farm.

In 1976, Terry’s youngest brother, Dale, moved from where he was working in Florida and helped Terry clear the trees, brush, and old fence lines in order to consolidate ten-acre allotments into larger fields and install concrete-lined irrigation ditches in order to farm more efficiently.

Realizing that they would need to purchase equipment to farm with, as customer services were unavailable in the remote reservation area, and noticing that there were several local Pima individuals who were also interested in farming and had begun to consolidate some of the small allotments in nearby villages, Terry and Dale started a company they named Button Brothers Tillage. As the operation became more efficient, Ramona leased more land for the brothers to operate.

One of their largest customers, farming 1,200 acres mostly with his own equipment, was a Pima farmer named Harlan Bohnee, who, seeing an opportunity to pursue a career in teaching at Scottsdale Community College, approached Terry in 1980 to custom farm and manage his acreage. By 1982, Harlan, Terry, and Ramona formed a farming company known as Stotonic Farms, Inc., named after the village where Harlan had grown up farming extended family lands with his father.

In 1981, another of Terry’s brothers, Karl, graduated from the University of Arizona and came to work on the farm with Terry and Dale. That year, Terry and Ramona purchased a 652-acre irrigated farm on Mirage Flats near Hay Springs, Nebraska, where, while continuing to farm at Gila River and run a small cow-calf ranching operation with Bill HornCloud, then in his 70s, on the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The brothers learned about commercial dry bean production and harvesting, knowledge which put them in a good position to adapt their production techniques for the tepary beans which Terry and Ramona wanted to increase the production of for some time. Terry and Ramona sold the Nebraska farm in 1987.

In 1990, the couple and brother, Dale, formed a company known as Dart Properties, LLC in Stanfield, Arizona where they raised cotton and durum wheat. In 1990 there was not enough water behind the Coolidge Dam on the Gila River at San Carlos for there to be any water allocation for the 100,000 acres of the San Carlos Irrigation Project. Needing to have land to farm to meet their debt obligation and provide work for their employees, Terry, Karl, and Dale leased from the City of Mesa a 1,600-acre tract of land south of La Palma and East of Eloy which had been purchased by Mesa for its water rights. They surveyed the property, rough leveled some fields, reorganized the irrigation water distribution system with one mile of earthen ditch and a new canal turnout which they received permission for the CAIDD board to install and farmed three bale cotton there for the two years that they had it leased using only three-and-one-half-acre-feet of water per year.

Meanwhile, Terry and Ramona accompanied the Gila River tribal delegation and representatives of the Gila River Farms to Washington D.C. to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Indian affairs to support a request for funding by Congress of an “interconnect canal” between the CAP aqueduct east of Coolidge, Arizona to the “Pima Heading” of the San Carlos Indian Irrigation Project, in order for the Gila River Indian Community to receive its contract Central Arizona Project Water that it had no facility to convey it to the reservation. Little did the Buttons know that the money was appropriated, the Gila River Farms Construction Division was awarded the contract and by April, the interconnect canal was completed. Central Arizona Project supplied water to the reservation at a cost of $55.00 per acre-foot to the grower. Since the water was now available and the leases had to be paid, the Buttons were now farming 7,500-acre-feet to farm.

“Those were interesting times,” say both Terry and Ramona.

Beginning in 1995, with the help of a longtime friend and their son, Edward’s, godfather, Tim Robinson of Casa Grande, the family grew, harvested, packed and sold into all of the major grocery chains and in small brokerages from the Mississippi River to the West Coast and from Canada to Mexico, four-dozen ears place-packed in waxed cartons and slush-ice injected and shipped from coolers in Maricopa, Eloy, Phoenix and the Salt River Indian Reservation and finally from Yuma, as local cooler space was overtaken by the thousands of acres of cantaloupes that were then being grown in Pinal and Maricopa counties for Dole and Del Monte.

Today, Terry’s brother, Dale, farms cotton, durum wheat, garbanzo beans and Bermuda grass hay on the Stanfield farm. Harlan Bohnee retired from the Button and Bohnee farming partnership while Terry, Karl, and Danny Mark continue to run the 4,000-acre commercial farming operation and grow the traditional crops organically for Ramona’s American Indian Food, LLC, dba, Ramona Farms.

What Inspires Their Efforts ? Along with their mission of bringing back the traditional foods of the Pima, Terry, and Ramona have worked to set an example for other Indian community members to become engaged in agriculture. It has been their mission to encourage entrepreneurship within the Gila River Indian Community and to promote the use of Indian land, water and labor resources by Indian people to develop the local economy of their reservation communities.

Terry has been instrumental in re-establishing agriculture on the reservation, improving water distribution to Indian farmers, and providing customer farming and harvesting services for small and beginning Pima farmers. He is always available to give advice and assistance when asked. The Buttons are noted for the consistent quality of their production of commodity crops including cotton, durum wheat, alfalfa, and Bermuda grass hay. They are noted for their consistently high quality and tough, but fair, price negotiation.

Thanks to hard work and family devotion, encouragement of friends and landowners and great partners, Ramona Farms has been successful for more than 42 years.

Their Heritage Crops : As mentioned earlier, Ramona was asked by the elders of her tribe to begin growing again some of the Pima people’s traditional crops. As a result, Ramona Farms has been a leader in the growing and harvesting of traditional Native American food crops and the preservation of indigenous heirloom seeds since the 1970s. In additional to growing traditional Pima crops of tepary beans and Pima corn, they also grow Hopi blue and Supai red corn varieties obtained from trade with neighboring tribes, as well as acculturated food crops brought by Jesuit Missionary, Padre Kin, who in 1685, was the first European to make contact with the Akimel O’odham (Pima). These crops have been grown by the Pima for over 300 years, and include black-eyed peas, garbanzo beans, white Sonora wheat, Pima club wheat and melons. Ramona and Terry and their family also grow commercial crops of cotton, alfalfa, Bermuda grass, durum wheat, barley, oats, corn and grain sorghum on several thousand acres of Gila River Indian Reservation land.

Terry explains that commercial crops, like cotton, durum wheat and alfalfa, help finance their work with the heritage crops.

All three children and grand-niece, Maria Pablo grew up helping in the fields irrigating, driving tractors and weeding endless miles of cotton, corn and bean rows during their summer vacations from school.

Brandy, their eldest daughter, a chef, helps to promote their native food crops, using them whenever she caters for large gatherings and special occasions. Velvet, the second daughter, who possesses a flair for creating exciting and attractive food dishes and has a passion for gathering the wild foods of the desert, develops recipes using traditional foods in new and unique ways, provides cooking classes and demonstrations and with the help of her ‘sister,’ Maria Pablo, Ramona’s grand-niece, promotes the products at trade shows, farmers markets, conferences, and schools where they help Ramona educated young students about their wonderful culture and “native foodways” and encourage them to eat healthy traditional foods and learn about how they are grown and prepared. Edward, Terry and Ramona’s youngest, helps with the growing and harvest of the beans and studies holistic nutrition.

Terry’s brothers, Dale and Karl, have worked with Terry running the farms since 1976 and 1980 respectively, and sister, Karen, employed with the family farm since 1986, manages the office, accounting, and internet-based store. Another important member of the farm business is an irrigation foreman, Danny Mark, a Pima tribal member who has been with Ramona Farms since 1981. The family farming organization has been in business since 1974, starting with Terry and Ramona working the ten-acre allotment belonging to Ramona’s mother.

Original source can be found here.

Source: Agpac of the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation