From Short Seasons to Six More Weeks at Grace Gardens

Just outside of La Grande, Ore., where the Grande Ronde Valley rises toward the mountains, Mike Burton tends a garden that defies easy categories. On any given week, he might be harvesting napa cabbage, pulling sweet winter carrots from beneath the snow, or walking visitors past raspberry canes so heavy with fruit that one friend has been known to disappear into the patch for an hour at a time. Burton raises more than 70 crop varieties at Grace Gardens, alongside dahlias that his wife, Tony, grows for flower arrangements. All of it is built around a simple philosophy: "My strategy is I raise what I like to eat, and I like to eat a real diversity of plants," Burton states. 

That philosophy has personal roots. About eight years ago, Burton suffered a serious health crisis that put him on life support for eight days and in the hospital for three weeks. A lifelong gardener with a career in agriculture, he responded by doubling down on what he already knew: that food grown in healthy, biologically active soil is nourishing. Today he teaches regenerative agriculture at a college in western Oregon, drawing on previous experience working in conservation.  

At the start, Burton faced two resource concerns he couldn't solve with compost and crop rotation alone: wind and a short growing season. The Grande Ronde Valley is known for both. High winds routinely damaged tender plants and increased water loss through transpiration, while a late spring thaw and early fall frost compressed the calendar on both ends of the year, limiting what Burton could grow, and when.

Raeanne Bettencourt, NRCS Oregon Small Farms Specialist for the John Day, Umatilla, Snake River Basin, worked with the Burtons on their application. Bettencourt explains that pinpointing this kind of limiting factor is the starting point for every project her office takes on. "The whole goal is to come out, identify resource concerns and implement our conservation practices to address those resource concerns," she says.

A site visit with Bettencourt confirmed what they already suspected: wind and season length were holding the operation back, and soil health was a closely related concern worth addressing at the same time. 

The Burton’s applied for assistance through NRCS's Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and received cost-share funding for a high tunnel. High tunnels are unheated, plastic covered structures that shelter crops planted directly in the ground. They're built to solve exactly the problems the Burtons were facing. By shielding plants from wind, hard rain, and temperature swings, high tunnels let growers extend their season earlier into spring and later into fall, sometimes growing year-round. 

Because the structure also blocks direct rainfall, growers can pair it with precision tools like drip irrigation to deliver water and nutrients more efficiently. It gives them far more control over pests, pollen and pesticide drift than an open field allows.

Bettencourt describes the season extension benefit in concrete terms. A high tunnel in the Grande Ronde Valley typically adds "anywhere from four to eight weeks both at the beginning of the spring and into the fall." 

Just as important, the structure protects the soil itself, she explained, "shielding the soil from environmental factors, from the weather to wind and water erosion.”

High tunnels work best paired with soil health practices like cover crops, crop rotation and minimal tillage, all of which further reduce erosion, suppress weeds and improve the soil's water-holding capacity.

In December 2025, NRCS launched the Regenerative Pilot Program, a $700 million effort designed to fund whole farm regenerative conservation plans that bundle practices like high tunnels, cover cropping, and rotational grazing into a single, outcomes-based conservation plan. Each plan is built around the producer's own goals, with results tracked and credited back to the farmer over time. It's a model well suited to an operation like Grace Gardens, where wind protection, season extension and soil biology were never separate problems to begin with, but interconnected pieces of the same system.

At Grace Gardens, Burton now harvests lettuce into January and picks cauliflower in May instead of July, gaining roughly six weeks of additional growing season. The tunnel also protects Tony's dahlias from wind breakage and gives moisture-sensitive crops the shelter they need to thrive. Combined with no-till, compost-driven soil practices and a rotational grazing system for his horses, the high tunnel has become one piece of a fully integrated operation, one where nothing is wasted. As Burton puts it plainly, "I basically move carbon around."

Bettencourt sees the Burtons' operation as a good example of how NRCS's cost-share programs are designed to work as a partnership. The process starts with a straightforward application, after which a certified planner visits the property, identifies resource concerns, and helps build a conservation plan suited to the producer's goals. But the plan only delivers results, she notes, when the landowner follows through, tending beds, rotating crops and documenting practices for NRCS inspections, exactly as Burton does. 

She also points out what operations like Grace Gardens mean for the surrounding community. "When you know the landowner and you come out to their property, you know right where your food was grown. The landowner can tell you its entire story, from when they seeded it to when it was harvested," Bettencourt says. 

Programs like EQIP and the Regenerative Pilot Program are built to serve growers at every scale, whether you have a half an acre or 3,000 acres plus, ensuring that small, community-rooted operations like the Burtons’ have the same access to conservation support as much larger farms.

For the Burtons, that community connection is the whole point. Grace Gardens has always operated on word of mouth and a weekly harvest box, with an open invitation for neighbors to walk the rows. Mike Burton has no plans to slow down. He's expanding the garden, exploring a self-serve roadside stand and fielding requests from customers who want to learn his regenerative techniques for themselves. It's a partnership between a producer's dedication and NRCS's conservation programs that solve real problems. Working in tandem toward the same conservation goals, the Burtons and NRCS have set Grace Gardens up for years of fruitful growing seasons to come.

Reach out to your local USDA Service Center today to see what resources are available in your area.