A San Tan Valley Farm’s Nov. 7 Dinner Raises Money to Send Fresh Produce Boxes to Pantries and Churches

On a little over three acres at 40792 N. Rattlesnake Road in San Tan Valley, Mark Rhine has spent years growing vegetables, herbs and fruit without pesticides and selling them to his neighbors. On Saturday, Nov. 7, he is opening the farm for an evening meant to get some of that food to people who cannot easily buy it.

The Rogue Rhino Foundation, the nonprofit Rhine founded, is holding its fall fundraiser, titled It Begins in the Soil, at Rogue Rhino Gardens starting at 4 p.m. The evening includes a buffet dinner catered by Little Joe’s Italian Market of Gilbert and a panel discussion called Soil, Food & the Future. Proceeds go to the foundation, which says its main work is getting boxes of fresh, pesticide-free produce to underserved families, local churches and food pantries.

A farm that grew from one man’s garden

The foundation’s fundraiser page tells the farm’s backstory. Rhine, a former broadband contractor, started growing wheatgrass for juicing when his own health, the page says, demanded better inputs. Demand turned a personal garden into Rhiba Farms, a commercial regenerative operation that has supplied pesticide-free produce to Valley chefs and grocery accounts since 2009.

Rhine later started Rogue Rhino Gardens as a private membership club so neighbors could buy directly from the farm. Members order weekly Garden Boxes, which the club says reflect whatever is thriving in the gardens that week, and the farm also sells eggs, honey and meats. The page describes banana groves grown for shade and fruit, on-site composting, livestock and aquaponics experiments on the property. Rhine’s rule, as the page puts it, is to feed the soil, not just the plant.

The farm also sells to the public. The Rogue Rhino Garden Stand is open Saturdays from 7 to 11 a.m. at the Rattlesnake Road farm, and the farm has a booth at the Heritage District Farmers Market in Gilbert, 92 W. Vaughn Ave., during the same hours.

Some of what Rhine grows has a family history. In an essay on the club’s website, he writes that his grandfather, Peter Danna, came to the United States from Sicily as a boy in 1908 and later settled in Portland, Oregon. On a trip back to Sicily in the late 1960s, Danna took cuttings from an old fig tree on the family property and brought them home, where he rooted and grafted them. That fig became known as Pete’s Honey Fig. Rhine writes that he now grows more than 20 Pete’s Honey fig trees at the farm and sells many more.

What the foundation does

The Rogue Rhino Foundation is the farm’s nonprofit side. Its website says it was created to help distribute local, pesticide-free produce directly to people and organizations serving families in need, through what it calls FarmBoxes. The boxes can go to families, churches, food pantries and other community partners. The foundation also lists agricultural education, practical workshops and volunteer and stewardship opportunities among the things donations support.

The foundation says it is a federally recognized 501(c)(3) public charity, with an IRS effective date of April 16, 2025. It also says the Arizona Department of Revenue has provisionally approved it as a Qualifying Charitable Organization for the 2026 calendar year, under QCO code 22989. That status can allow eligible Arizona taxpayers to claim a state income-tax credit for qualifying donations. The foundation notes that it does not give tax advice, so anyone planning a gift for the credit should check with a tax professional.

Its board includes Gilbert attorney Michael Narducci as vice president and certified public accountant Rachel Springsteel as treasurer, according to the foundation’s website. Narducci’s biography there notes that his grandparents and great-grandparents farmed in St. David, in southeastern Arizona.

Who is on the panel

The evening’s panel brings together four people the foundation says work across soil biology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, desert food production, water conservation and human health.

Rhine is the host. Clint Culberson is the founder of Galaxy Gardens, a San Tan Valley and East Valley company he started in 2019 with a partner after leaving corporate work. According to the foundation’s biography, the company installs rainwater harvesting systems, drainage, greywater systems, earthworks and densely planted food forests for homeowners around the Phoenix area. On his own San Tan Valley land, the biography says, he is building a multi-acre agroforestry system with hundreds of fruit trees, intended as a model that could be repeated across the Sonoran Desert.

Patrick King, who goes by The Soil King, is a living-soil consultant and maker of soil and compost products, including the Big Rootz line, which the foundation says was named Emerald Cup Soil of the Year in 2015. The fourth panelist is Pat Miletich, a former UFC welterweight champion and 2014 UFC Hall of Fame inductee who now describes himself as a soil-to-human-health advocate and hosts a podcast.

The foundation says the conversation will cover living soil, water, nutrient density, regenerative growing and the future of food in the desert. The evening is hosted by The Party Favers. The foundation says more menu and program details will be announced closer to the event.

Why soil is the theme

For East Valley gardeners, the topic is a practical one. Desert soils around the Phoenix area tend to be low in organic matter, and many backyard growers spend their first seasons learning to build beds that hold water and feed plants. The foundation frames the evening around that idea, writing that healthy soil supports healthy plants, conserves water and strengthens the local food system.

Culberson’s work is the most directly useful for homeowners. Rainwater basins, mulch and roof-water cisterns are tools any San Tan Valley yard can use, and his biography describes the goal plainly: grow food in the yard and build soil so the next storm’s water stays on the property.

Before you buy a ticket

Tickets are sold through Tixtree, and the foundation lists a few rules worth reading first. Each guest must bring a printed Tixtree ticket for admission. All sales are final and tickets are non-refundable. Dinner is served buffet style, and the foundation says it cannot accommodate individual dietary restrictions, food allergies or special meal requests, so guests with specific needs should plan ahead.

Rogue Rhino Gardens is a working farm with uneven, unpaved ground, and the foundation asks guests not to wear open-toed shoes. It also asks attendees to review its terms of service and complete a liability waiver before Nov. 7. The ticket link, waiver and event details are on the foundation’s fall fundraiser page at roguerhino.org.

People who can’t make the dinner have other ways to support the farm’s work. The foundation runs an Adopt-a-Tree program that lets donors sponsor one of the farm’s remaining trees, and it accepts direct donations through its website. The farm stand on Rattlesnake Road and the Gilbert market booth are open most Saturday mornings, and the club’s pickup locations page explains how a neighbor can host a community pickup spot for Garden Boxes.

Rhine’s weekly field notes on the club’s website give a sense of what running the place involves. In an Oct. 22 note, he wrote that a hard afternoon wind had knocked one of the farm’s large hives, a German-made hemp log hive, off its post. Five people were stung before the crew understood what had happened. After dark, two of them moved the colony, which he estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 bees, into a standard hive box. He closed the Saturday farm stand the next morning, which he wrote was a first in 18 years, while still sending a crew to the Gilbert market.

The same note ended with a reminder that the Nov. 7 dinner was still on. For a farm that started as one man’s wheatgrass bed, the evening is a chance for neighbors to see the work up close and to help send more of its harvest to families who need it.