Faulkner County family honored for vegetable farm
VILONIA — Growing up in Iowa, Tara Stainton said she was “very aware” of farm families of the year.
“Corn and soybeans are the big row crops there,” Tara said. “To me — a small vegetable farmer — it feels like a huge honor just to be considered Farm Family of the Year. … It’s such an honor. Typically, this honor goes to much bigger farms.”
Tara and her husband, Robert Stainton, along with their sons, Milan, 6, and Gus, 3, are the Faulkner County Farm Family of the Year. The family owns 45 acres near Vilonia and raises vegetables and cut flowers on 5 of those acres they call Rattle’s Garden. They have been farming for eight years.
Among the plants the Staintons grow are cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard, onions, squash, spinach, kale, beets, garlic, cabbage, zucchini, collards, radishes, lettuce, carrots, sunflowers, potatoes, heirloom tomatoes, basil, strawberries, turnips, corn, snap peas, green beans, eggplant, peppers and cauliflower.
“We are a small certified organic flower and vegetable farm,” Tara said. “We grow specialty organic vegetable varieties chosen for how fantastic they taste. We grow cut flowers because we love them.”
Robert works full time off the farm and comes home to the farm “almost like a second job,” Tara said.
“Our responsibilities around the farm are clearly divided,” she said. “Robert has built every structure on our farm, including the barn we live in. The rest of the farm work is taken care of by me, as well as our seasonal help and interns.
“We have three sales outlets. We sell at the Hillcrest Farmers Market in Little Rock. We sell through our farm-share program, which is a subscription service in which about 100 families sign up for weekly boxes of food twice a year, and we belong to a cooperative of organic farmers from across the state that contracts us to grow vegetables.”
Tara is the board chairwoman for the farmers’ cooperative, New South Produce Cooperative, which is supported by Heifer International.
Tara said their sales to the New South Produce Cooperative “account for about a third of our vegetable sales and provide a year-round outlet to move food, which has allowed us to maintain a part-time farmhand through the winter.”
Tara, 39, and Robert, 46, have been married 12 years. They met in Jonesboro.
Tara is a daughter of Jim and Connie Sjostrom of Springville, Iowa. She graduated from Springville High School in 1996 and from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 2000.
“I graduated from Luther College with a bachelor’s degree in education and from Arkansas State University-Jonesboro with a master’s degree in education in 2002, although I never did teach,” she said.
“I moved to Jonesboro to attend ASU to pole-vault,” she said, smiling. Tara said she trained under Earl Bell, who is a three-time Olympic, former world record holder in men’s pole vaulting and an ASU graduate who established Bell Athletics in 1991 in Jonesboro.
“I did jump 13 feet,” Tara said. “That was good. Things have come a long way since then for women polevaulters.”
Tara went to work for the city of Jonesboro after she graduated from ASU.
“I ran the city’s youth sports program,” she said. “I was six months away from moving back to Iowa when I met Robert. I was going to buy my grandpa’s farm in Iowa.
“That was 12 years ago,” she said.
Robert is a son of Bob and Brenda Stainton of Jonesboro and a 1988 graduate of Jonesboro High School. Robert graduated from ASU in 1995 with a degree in engineering and from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1997 with a master’s degree in environmental engineering. He is an engineer for The NRI Group (Natural Resources Investment Group), LLC, in Little Rock, which works to restore wetlands and streams.
Tara said the couple moved to Faulkner County to be closer to family.
“We wanted to be north of Little Rock, which is closer to Jonesboro and Iowa,” she said.
“The first year we were married (2005), Robert worked out of town a lot, and I didn’t have family in the state, so to give myself something to do, I started a garden. I soon became a firm believer in organic agriculture. My garden grew, and I started selling vegetables in 2008,” Tara said.
“We knew we eventually wanted to raise a family in this kind of lifestyle, and in 2010, I quit my last job to start farming full time, while pregnant with our first son. Once the ball got rolling, it really snowballed and has grown by leaps and bounds every year,” she said.
“Despite the fact that my parents live in Iowa, they are very involved with the farm,” Tara said. “My dad has helped me put up every structure on the farm and handles maintenance of tractors and vehicles that Robert doesn’t have time for. My mom used to work in the field right next to me but gladly gave that up for baby-sitting when she became a grandma.
“Our two boys are 6 and 3. Staying home with them has become my first priority, but as the farm has grown, they’ve grown up in it. They love working in the greenhouse with me. My 6-yearold teaches interns to transplant. [The children] harvest, gather eggs from our laying flock and play in the dirt. I consider them my marketing division, as our social-media following is important, and our customers have watched them grow up on the farm.”
When asked about the name of their farm — Rattle’s Garden — Tara laughed and said, “Rattle was the name of Robert’s first dog. … We are dog people.” For more information on Rattle’s Garden, visit the website rattlesgarden.com.