What it is
Agritopia is a neighborhood with a farm in the middle of it, which sounds like a marketing line until you stand in the parking lot off Ray Road and look at the alfalfa. Joe Johnston’s parents bought the land at Higley and Ray in 1960 and farmed cotton and wheat on it; when his father retired, Joe, instead of selling to a subdivision builder, planned a subdivision himself, 166 acres and 452 homes around a working farm, and broke ground in 2003. The farm is still there, about a dozen acres of organic vegetables and fruit trees with sheep and chickens, certified organic since 2014.
What a visitor comes for is the row of buildings along the fields. Joe’s Farm Grill is the Johnston family’s ranch house, turned into a burger-and-fries stand with a patio and lawn, famous beyond Gilbert since Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives filmed it. The Coffee Shop next door is the old tool shed and won an episode of Cupcake Wars. And Barnone is the barn: a cylindrical 12,000-square-foot metal shed from the 1950s, built from melted-down World War II aircraft and used for grain, that reopened in November 2016 as a marketplace for a dozen small businesses, among them Garage East winery, 12West Brewing, a florist, a letterpress and a couple of kitchens.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has no farm you can walk through, and because this is the one East Valley stop that fills a whole afternoon with a family without anyone complaining. It also pairs: the Heritage District and Joe’s Real BBQ, which the same family built, are ten minutes north, and SanTan Village is ten minutes south.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 60 and Higley Road. One parking lot, everything walkable. October to April, mornings; summer, lunch and the barn. Two to three hours. Our Scottsdale with kids note has the heat rules.
When to go
Saturday morning, October through April. The farm is green, the lambs are out, and the coffee line is short before ten. Joe’s Farm Grill fills by noon; eat at 11:15.
Weekday afternoons are the quiet version, with Barnone’s tenants open and the patio at the grill half empty. Check the individual shops’ hours; the makers keep their own, and a couple close early in the week.
Summer is for Barnone, which is air-conditioned, and for a fast lunch at the grill. The farm walk is a sunrise-only proposition from June through September.
What to do, in order
- The Coffee Shop. Coffee and a cupcake in the tool shed, first thing.
- The farm paths. Walk the edge of the fields; the animals are along the fence.
- Joe’s Farm Grill. Burgers, fries and whatever the farm has, eaten on the lawn under the trees.
- Barnone. The barn: the winery and the brewery pour on site, and the florist, the letterpress, the salon and the kitchens fill the rest of the ring. The tenant list turns over, so check the site before driving down for one shop in particular. An hour, more if you are buying.
With kids
This is the family afternoon the East Valley does best: a farm, a lawn, a burger and a cupcake, all within three hundred yards. The brunch note has Scottsdale’s family rooms; none of them has sheep. For the adults, the winery and the brewery in the barn make the trip fair, and our breweries note explains why the East Valley brews better than Scottsdale does.
The neighborhood
Agritopia’s houses wrap the farm on three sides, with the school, the community center and the retirement home inside the loop. It is a private neighborhood but the farm-side businesses are public and the parking is theirs. Higley Road south of the 60 is the newer Gilbert, big-box and subdivision; this is the one corner of it that remembers the fields.
The story
The land was a homestead of the Reber family before Jim and Virginia Johnston bought it in 1960 and put it in cotton and wheat. Their eldest son Joe had already changed Gilbert once, opening Joe’s Real BBQ in a derelict 1929 grocery downtown in 1998 and starting the restaurant revival of the Heritage District. When his father retired in the 1990s and the farm’s neighbors were selling to builders as fast as Gilbert’s population could absorb the houses, Joe drew up a different plan: a neighborhood of 452 lots, a church school, a community center and a retirement home arranged around a farm that would keep farming. Ground broke in 2003, and the word for what he built, agrihood, did not exist yet.
The farm was run organically from the start and certified in 2014. Its produce goes to a members’ farm box, to a food pantry and to the Saturday market in the Heritage District; outsiders have noted that the farm box program is small, and the farm’s economics have always depended on the restaurants beside it. Those came in the 2000s: the family’s ranch house became Joe’s Farm Grill, the tool shed became The Coffee Shop, and the Food Network found both. The last piece was the barn. The cylindrical 1950s grain shed, built from melted-down aircraft, reopened on November 22, 2016 as Barnone, with a dozen makers, four of them run by Jim Johnston’s descendants, including a winery and a brewery under one curved roof.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale was a farm town too, and kept none of it; the last fields along the Arizona Canal went under golf courses and subdivisions by the 1980s, and the city’s agricultural history survives in street names and our Hohokam notes. Agritopia is what one Valley farm family did instead, and it is worth the drive partly as a lesson: this is what McCormick Ranch might have looked like if someone had kept forty acres in crops at the center of it.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to US 60 east, exit Higley Road and go south about six miles to Ray Road; the entrance to the farm-side businesses and parking is on Ray just west of Higley, at 3000 East Ray Road. Forty minutes with no traffic, an hour from North Scottsdale, and the 60 is slow eastbound on weekday afternoons. From the Heritage District it is ten minutes down Gilbert Road and east on Ray. No transit worth using from Scottsdale.