Heat, Heart, and Harvest

Krissy Scommegna (BA ’11) has always had a thing for food. From restaurants to nonprofits, and all the way back to her time at the University of Denver, cooking and eating have been central to Scommegna’s personal and professional pursuits for the last two decades.

While at DU, she explored the world—trekking through the Sierra Mountains of Guatemala, staying in a Soviet-era apartment in the Czech Republic, and walking the beaches of Mexico. She says those study abroad experiences made her a more adventurous eater.

Since graduating in 2011 with a degree in environmental science, Scommegna has turned her passion for food into a career. Now, as owner and operator of Boonville Barn Collective, a small-but-mighty farm in Northern California’s Anderson Valley, she’s bringing flavors from around the world into kitchens across the country.

Every June, the Boonville team—a tireless group of four, plus some help here and there—puts more than 70,000 chile plants into the ground by hand. When September rolls around, that same team harvests what can sometimes amount to more than 30 tons of chiles—you guessed it—all by hand.

“We harvest everything into buckets,” Scommegna says. “We pass those buckets down the line and then dump all those buckets into a big bin, fill up the big bins, bring them to our greenhouse, where everything is washed, and then we put them on big drying racks.”

Then the stem- and seed-picking begins, followed by a drying and grinding process that yields more than a dozen chile powders and flakes.

“It takes a lot of time, and it’s expensive to do it, but we think our product is that much better at the end,” Scommegna says.

That 30-ton chile harvest doesn’t include the strawberries, olives, and 14 kinds of dry beans that the farm also produces.

From cooking to cultivating

Agriculture and entrepreneurship run in Scommegna’s family—her father owns and runs Signal Ridge Vineyard in Mendocino County, California—but she did not start out as a chile farmer. For a while after college, Scommegna worked as an intern at a small hotel in Boonville, a job that developed into a full-time role in the
hotel’s kitchen.

She gained farming experience working in the hotel’s small garden, weeding and managing the harvests. The hotel’s restaurant used a lot of locally grown ingredients—but relied heavily on one particular imported spice: a chile powder from France called piment d’Espelette.

“It’s a little sweet, a little spicy, and has a really lovely, rich flavor,” she says.

Importing piment d’Espelette was expensive. So, given her experience in the garden, Scommegna began to wonder—could she grow the Espelette chiles herself, right there in Boonville?

She asked her father’s vineyard manager, Nacho, about it. “He was like, ‘Of course I can grow these for you, no problem,’” Scommegna remembers. “So, he grew the peppers and came into the restaurant that year with two tubs full of beautifully ripe chiles.”

Scommegna worked full time in the kitchen and grew and processed the chiles on the side. She then decided she no longer wanted to cook and moved to Boston to enroll in graduate school at Tufts University, studying agriculture and food policy. From there, she worked in various food-related roles—from running an antihunger nonprofit program to apprenticing as a butcher—before she and her then-boyfriend, now-husband decided to chase a dream and move back to California to found Boonville Barn Collective.

Building more than a business

On the farm, no two days look alike. Sometimes it’s working in the hot afternoon sun, planting chiles or shoveling soil. Sometimes it’s driving an hour away to hand-deliver online orders.

Scommegna says that’s part of the fun.

The farm, which is the largest-scale producer of Espelette chile powder—dubbed Piment d’Ville—outside of France, has grown to 10 acres. Scommegna says she loves living in the small town and being a part of the farming community.

“A focus for us is being able to provide good jobs for people in our community,” she says. “Being able to communicate with everyone that I work with is really important, so I spent the past two years taking a lot of Spanish classes to become a better boss and a better coworker. We’re really working on creating something that is what we all want it to be, instead of just what I envision it to be.”