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With every bean they plant, harvest and sell, Shonri Begay and her partners at Three Sisters Bean Farm are connecting their local community to a heritage food source with cultural significance.

Nestled in the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona, the six-acre Three Sisters Bean Farm produces heirloom beans to sell at local farmers markets and to high-end chefs and caterers. Together, Shonri, her mother R. Cruz Begay (“Cruz”), and their friend, Carol Fritzinger (“Fritz”), run the farm, which produced about 100 pounds of dry beans in 2023.

The farm is a recipient of AgWest’s New Producer Grant, which provides $15,000 for beginning farmers to help launch their business. The grant program was started in 2023 and awards approximately 30 grants each year to new farmers throughout the Association’s service area.

An Indigenous woman, Shonri’s interest in farming traces back to her roots in the Tohono O’odham tribe in Arizona.

“Not knowing my Indigenous languages, there's a big barrier for me to access a lot of cultural knowledge and activities,” she said. “Farming is one thing that brings me closer to my grandmothers and how they lived their lives.”

Cruz learned to farm from her mother and offered the land on which her home is built to start a farm. Fritz, a former river guide and lifelong gardener, manages a community garden at the Museum of Northern Arizona and lends her expertise on beans and all things growing.

Grant funds propel business

Three Sisters is focused on growing bean varieties that originated in the Americas and were grown by Native cultures: runner beans, bush beans, lima beans, and particularly, tepary beans.

Besides their cultural significance as a Native food source, beans are an inexpensive source of protein and fiber and offer other health benefits, particularly for Indigenous groups battling higher rates of obesity and other health problems, Cruz explained.

“It feels really good to grow these heirloom varieties, and hopefully inspire others to grow them as well,” she said.

During their pilot year, with help from friends, the women cobbled together a watering system from used parts and pieces. In 2024, they used the New Producer Grant funds to purchase and install a new drip system, saving them both water and money.

Typically, crops in their area depend on water from the monsoons that occur between July and September. When they don’t get the rains, the women are forced to tap into municipal water—at municipal rates.

“This grant we got from AgWest was a great help in getting us established and investing in some of the infrastructure we needed,” Fritz said, adding that they also purchased a wheel hoe, benches for school groups and materials for a composting system.

According to Shonri, the grant application itself was a useful exercise in developing the farm’s business plan—including a formal budget.

“The process of applying for the grant was really helpful for me in conceptualizing the farm as a business, and dreaming big about where we can go from here,” she said. “I hadn’t done that yet.”

Community connection

One of the cornerstones of Three Sisters Farms is fostering strong community connections, especially among students and tribal groups. High school groups regularly come to the farm, and in 2024 Three Sisters was selected to host a young apprentice for 12 weeks through the Phoenix Indian Center’s workforce development program.

For the three “sisters,” trial-and-error is baked into their business plan, and each of them contributes to the farm based on their individual backgrounds and experiences.

Carol Fritzinger, R. Cruz Begay and Shonri Begay

“Traditionally, ‘three sisters’ refers to the Native American practice of growing corn, beans and squash together,” Shonri explained. “We’re doing a piece of that here, by working together.”

Working for beans

Most of the production at Three Sisters is dry bean. The women get their seed from Native Seed Search in Phoenix, and from the community garden Fritz runs.

Because beans thrive in warm soil and do not tolerate frost, the women plant toward the end of May or in early June. In 2024, a mid-September frost threatened to damage the crop before harvest, but fortunately most of the pods were able to dry on the plants. Their first year, the crew had to clip the bean plants prior to a frost and finish drying them on-site in a hoop house.

“In a perfect world, the pods dry on the plant, because a frost will damage the beans if they’re still green,” Fritz explained.

To help amend the soil after the growing season, Fritz has developed a three-bin compost system, aided by green waste collected from nearby river trips. The compost is added to the ground soil before the first snow falls; chickens and goats also roam and graze the field during the off-season.

One surprising fact about heirloom beans is the sheer variety of colors and patterns they can produce. Orca beans, for example, an heirloom bush variety, feature a striking black-and-white pattern, while others showcase vibrant purple speckles reminiscent of an Easter egg.

“That’s one of the things we have going for us: The beans are pretty,” Fritz quipped.

Collaboration is key

As they near the end of their second full year in business together, it’s clear that each woman cares deeply about her craft, their community and for one another.

For Fritz, their collaboration is their strength.

“Just being able to honor each other and our ideas, and work together to see what we can do, is both challenging and fun, and a learning experience,” she said. “Through it, we've all gotten to know each other better, too, and that's been a really positive thing. I love that.”

For detailed information on the New Producer Grant, including eligibility and application process, please visit the AgWest New Producer Grant page.

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