03 · The Vision
A farm, a food hub, and a trailhead as one complete use.
Cooperative in structure · bounded to agriculture · a working precedent nearby
Three components on one site, each reinforcing the others. The farm supplies the market and kitchen; the market and kitchen monetize the farm and pay for the site; the trailhead brings the county its trail and brings the hub a stream of visitors. Remove any one piece and the others weaken. Together they are self-supporting, and together they deliver both of the promises the public already paid for on this ground: farming (1986) and the trail (2020).
Community farm cooperative
A cooperative acts as the single accountable operator, organizing multiple community growers on the acreage. This matches how the county already leases farmland, small plots to community organizations, but gives it one partner instead of many. A companion nonprofit is both a member and a co-steward. On this parcel, farming is not just permitted: it is the recorded purpose of the 1986 easement the public bought.
Bounded food hub
A farm-store market and a value-added agricultural processing kitchen in the restored heritage barn. Scoped as agriculture, not general retail: the market sells on-site and regional farm products; the kitchen processes regionally grown products. The commercial revenue makes the farming self-sustaining and gives growers an outlet.
Trailhead
Our team designs and builds the Snoqualmie Valley Trail trailhead and the on-parcel trail segment, to county standards. This delivers the county's own designated purpose for the land, and a trailhead farm market serves trail users. It runs as a parallel, county-funded track.
The parcel's bank is named county flood infrastructure, and the record shows no documented planting on it by anyone, ever, even as restoration crews work the creek mouth next door. The vision folds the bank in rather than fencing it off: a stewarded riparian buffer, designed with the county and its restoration partners, sized to fit the farmland-preservation easement the way the working precedent next door already does. Farm, trail, and a cared-for bank on one parcel is the valley's fish-farm-flood settlement in miniature, and it makes the shoreline permit stronger, not harder.
This is a food hub plus incubator farm plus shared commercial infrastructure, owned cooperatively. It is not speculative. 21 Acres in Woodinville is a nonprofit on agricultural-zoned land in the Sammamish Valley that runs a farm, a farm market, a teaching and commercial kitchen, and farmer and food-business incubation. Oxbow Farm in Carnation and SnoValley Tilth's food-hub work are nearby analogues. When we approach the county, we point at their own precedent, not an invention.
A farm, a market, and a teaching kitchen on agricultural land, in this county, already operating.The 21 Acres model, our operating template
Why "bounded" mattersThe whole program is scoped and named as value-added agriculture plus a trailhead amenity, not general commerce. The farm store honors the county's farm-store limits (a majority of sales by producers and from regionally grown products, a modest sales area); the kitchen processes regionally grown inputs. That scoping is what keeps the food hub a permitted agricultural use, a compatible operation under the 2020 covenant, and inside the terms of the 1986 easement whose purpose the farming serves. See
the legal path.
The structure serves the county's model
A cooperative master-lessee is the shape the county already leases into.
The county leases in small plots to multiple community organizations. A cooperative orchestrating many growers gives Parks one accountable partner in exactly that shape.
How it stays legal →
How it gets built →