Hunter would come to visit for a bit and see Isa working morning until night in very dangerous neighborhoods where murders were common. She was saving some money that they could use to buy some land, but the work was really stressful. Tequio was originally going to be in Mexico. “Everyone loved it!” Isa laughs, their love for each other clearly visible in their smiling faces. “She gave me purple glittery sunscreen to wear and didn’t tell me that I sparkled! It was my first day in class!” Hunter complains. She and Hunter met in the library at Ecology Action. Augustine and Marisol encouraged Isa to travel to the US to take the biointensive internship in Willits. “With the Biointensive method, you also see results very quickly, which is satisfying,” she adds. You want everyone to participate, to get digging. Isa explains that when you are working in gang-ridden, low employment areas, you want people to get involved. Although the company does non-profit work, forming it as a for-profit was easier to get off the ground. She did not have access to farmland, so she founded a company, with friends Augustine and Marisol, which brings biointensive farming methods to troubled neighborhoods. As she studied environmental science, she became interested in social justice as it related to access to land, farming, water rights. Isa’s hometown is Aguas Calientes in Mexico.

An encounter with a garden manager in the Bay Area introduced him to the non-profit Ecology Action, initially at their garden in Palo Alto and then with an internship at the research mini-farm on Pine Mountain in Willits, and he felt drawn to this way of life. A student of economics and business, Hunter began to recognize that the business practices being taught had brought on the financial crisis. Hunter’s family was severely impacted by the great recession of 2008, and his younger brother began cooking primarily plant-based meals to save money.

Hunter Flynn and Isabel Quiroz came together from very different backgrounds. This is an idyllic place a stone’s throw from Highway 101, but it feels a world away.Īccording to Isa Quiroz, tequio means “collective work for shared benefit.” And the couple that founded Tequio Farm has cultivated and come to rely on that here. As you wind down the slope towards Tequio Farm, you might pass a herd of white deer (a gift to the previous owners from William Randolph Hearst), or the happy cows of the Church of the Golden Rule, or Seabiscuit’s historic stud barn. Ridgewood Ranch is nestled in a verdant valley just south of Willits.

Golden rule farm willits ca