Little did 10-year-old Audrey Tehan know, as she furiously shielded her fledgling beet plants from a pounding hail storm on her family’s farm in Sisters, that one day, she’d be helping to grow more than 100,000 pounds of fresh produce in that same spot and helming a nonprofit that distributes the bounty to Central Oregon residents.
“Growing up on this piece of property, we raised cattle for the restaurant, and then my mom and I always had a small garden here,” recalls Tehan, 36, as she gestures to the expanse of land, greenhouses, and buildings that are home to Seed to Table Oregon (https://www.seedtotableoregon.org/), a nonprofit of which she’s the founder and executive director. S2T, as it’s sometimes called, aims to build “community health and wellness through equitable access to fresh produce and through farm-based education.
“I just loved the process and the challenge of seeing if I could get something to grow here. And then, just like the sheer joy of harvesting what I’d grown, like salad. One of our favorite meals growing up was canned chili, and I’d harvest my fresh lettuce and have it with our canned chili. I just loved that and being able to experience that joy of bringing people together at the table,” she said.
Eating chili and homegrown salad with Tehan as a youngster were her parents, John, now 75, who owned and operated Bronco Billy’s in Sisters, and Peggy, now 67, a former CPA. She’s also got two siblings. Her sister Hattie, 34, is a Spanish teacher at Sisters High School, and her brother JC, 32, is a snowboard instructor at Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation (MBSEF). Today, Tehan’s parents still live on the farm, helping with Seed to Table, to which they lease part of the farm. They lease another portion to Mahonia Gardens, a small market-garden business.
Tehan was introduced to “experiential education” while attending Sisters High School (she’s a 2007 graduate). She then furthered her passion for the environment and outdoors while studying at Southern Oregon University. In 2013, back home in Central Oregon after graduating from SOU with a degree in environmental sciences, the Sisters School District superintendent called Tehan and asked if she’d like to start a farm-to-school program, run out of a greenhouse refurbished by the high school’s Science Club and using a $16,000 grant the district had received. That program morphed into Seed to Table, and now 12 years later, the nonprofit has eight greenhouses on the Tehan family farm, provides educational offerings for more than 1,000 students in grades pre-K to 12, and distributes more than 50 tons of produce a year to Central Oregonians.
“I think I had no idea what it would become,” Tehan said. “In the back of my head, I always had a vision of farming and growing vegetables and working with the local community. I always had a little bit of an idea of starting an experiential program around food, but I figured I’d have to go away and make a lot of money elsewhere and then do it.”
Through its “Feeding Families” program, Seed to Table distributes its fresh produce to 2,200 Central Oregon residents weekly through collaboration with 16 different organizations, including High Desert Food & Farm Alliance (https://hdffa.org/); the CORE food pantry (https://coresisters.org/) and Kiwanis food bank, both in Sisters (https://sisterskiwanis.org/food-bank/); and the Council on Aging of Central Oregon (https://www.councilonaging.org/).
“It is the most amazing and wonderful partnership. Their organization is just incredible,” said Cathy Lang, director of nutrition services for the Council on Aging of Central Oregon. Lang runs the Meals on Wheels program, which delivers fresh meals to residents aged 60 and older who are homebound. “They have the education piece where they teach children about farming and vegetables, and where their food comes from. But then they also have a donation piece, and this is where we come in. In the summertime, they donate an amazing quantity of fresh, delicious vegetables to Council on Aging.
“We use those fresh vegetables to make meals to send out to folks who can’t leave their homes or can’t cook their meals on their own, so it’s an incredible gift to our population,” Lang said. “We serve seniors, and it’s an incredible gift to them. Many of them can’t afford to buy these fresh, delicious vegetables. And it’s this very, very wonderful product that’s close to their home. We also give it out to our in-person diners, whatever we’re unable to use in making meals. We put out baskets of this fresh bounty that we get from Seed to Table, and then these folks get to take home free veggies. You should see the excitement on people’s faces.”
Seed to Table also offers 200 community-supported agriculture shares, available on a sliding scale. People can sign up for a weekly “share” of the harvest, which is a large box overflowing with seasonal produce, typically featuring between 12 and 20 different items, during the growing season. For those who can’t pick up their share box at the farm, Seed to Table delivers them and has pick-up options at Central Oregon Locavore (https://centraloregonlocavore.org/) in Bend and at the Sisters Farmer’s Market, which Seed to Table runs.
“Our whole mission is around building community health and wellness through equitable access to fresh produce and through farm-based education. Our produce distribution, like the Feeding Families program, is really designed to make sure that anyone who would like to have fresh, local food can have it, no matter their income. We’re really working with those who have barriers to access fresh food, and that can be a lot of different things. It can be the cost or transportation, not feeling safe coming to community spaces to get that food, (physical) abilities, houselessness,” said Tehan, adding that for the latter, they ensure they have “produce that can be eaten without a lot of cooking, so a lot of carrots, a lot of cucumbers, fresh salad mixes.”
Seed to Table also engages with approximately 1,000 Central Oregon students each year, with students working hands-on at the farm, growing their own produce, and also having classroom sessions at their schools centered around cooking and learning about farming.
“Our goal with the education programs is to really give kids opportunities to engage with fresh foods and to try new foods and become connected with where their food is from, while also getting to experience the hands-on education that farms can provide. I really believe that you can teach just about any subject on the farm,” Tehan said, explaining that students plant, grow, and harvest their plants while incorporating other educational topics into their farming, including learning about a variety of aspects pertaining to the countries from which particular plants and spices originate and honing their math skills while cooking with those spices and produce.
“We’ll start seeds with them in the classroom, and then the students come out onto the farm,” she said. “They do a big harvest field trip, where they’re harvesting potatoes, carrots, beets. They’re learning how to make salad dressing, and often in the fall, they’re doing seed-saving activities and learning about plant parts and plant life cycles. After they’ve started seeds in the classroom, they’ll come back out here and plant them. We have a student garden area, and they’ll transplant their seeds into the ground. Then they’ll come out again and harvest their items and make big salads.
And they’re also learning to love new foods that they might not have tried before.
“They’re learning about ‘don’t yuck, my yum’ and that just because somebody else likes something or doesn’t like it, we all have our own individual taste-bud experience,” she said. “It’s incredible. We’ve had students who say ‘I only used to like beige foods before I came to Seed to Table’ or ‘I didn’t know what kale was.’ We’re giving kids that opportunity to learn with their hands in the dirt and to really connect with fresh food and with the community and the possibility of what we can grow here.
“The other idea that we really want to foster here is providing a learning experience where all students can thrive, no matter their learning style. We want the farm to be a place where students that may not thrive in traditional classroom settings can have a different outlet and a different lens on what that learning can look like,” she added.
Seed to Table conducts a summer farm program for children ages 5 and under and then a summer farm camp for those ages 6 to 12 and offers high-school agriculture classes through partnerships with Cascades Academy and Sisters High School. Additionally, in 2020, the organization took over the management of the Sisters Farmer’s Market (https://www.sistersfarmersmarket.com/).
The market is open on Sundays from June through October at Fir Creek Park in Sisters and features approximately 52 vendors each week. Tehan said that this year, the market generated more than $500,000 for vendors and provided other programs aimed at community members, including the weekly POP (Power of Produce) club for kids. The POP club offered activities for youngsters, who also received a $5 voucher to spend on fruits and veggies at the market.
S2T has 10 full-time employees during the farming months (February through December) and currently a five-member board. There are also more than 60 regular volunteers.
“The community support that we have had has been incredible. This wouldn’t be possible without so many hands and so much work from the volunteers,” said Tehan. “Many of them are coming out and volunteering multiple hours a week. And we have a lot of individual donors and grant funders, and then our team also generates a third of our budget from our sales.”
Seed to Table wholesales some of its produce to local businesses, including Newport Market, Oliver Lemon’s, and The Barn taphouse and food carts. Those sales help offset expenses and the
“The farm has doubled in size in the last four years, and that has really been to meet the community demand, which has been huge. We can’t fill the demand or the requests that we get from food pantries and from schools, but we’re trying to expand to meet that need. In just four years, we’ve gone from producing 40,000 pounds of food to more than 100,000,” Tehan said. “Farming is so challenging, in any area, but Central Oregon definitely makes it very difficult. There are such temperature changes, from it being freezing and then all of a sudden going to over 100 degrees. Plants don’t like that, and so our team, who’ve been here now for six years, they’re all just learning so much every year. That’s been critical to being able to double the amount of production on the same footprint that we have. We’ve also been fortunate enough to get some grants to invest in infrastructure.”
Heaters in the greenhouses have upped productivity by 30 percent, but you won’t spy any large farm machinery operating at Seed to Table. Rather, the farm uses a “market garden” approach, using all available space to produce a bountiful harvest.
“We’re growing all of our crops very close together, and we’re using a lot of hand tools, like a walk-behind tractor or a wheel, hoe, or wire weeders. It has its challenges in terms of being very physically demanding on our team, but we only have this space, so it’s allowed us to use it as effectively as possible,” Tehan said.
Part of the farm is now bordered by a housing development, Tehan said. However, the proximity of families and neighbors has further bolstered the nonprofit’s commitment to giving back to the community.
“The neighbors have been wonderful. They’ve really embraced the farm. A lot of their kids ride their bikes up to our summer programs, and they buy the produce through the produce share,” Tehan said. “We’re really trying to be a community asset and trying to be a model here of how agriculture and food is woven into our everyday lives and how being physically connected to your food can be really beneficial for the farmers and for the community.”
This article appears in the Source December 25, 2025.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
