In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

CREATING A CLEANER WORLD FROM THE OUTSET

In Business, January/February, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 10

“Most other environmental activism is retroactive - trying to halt, minimize or clean up damage. … Organic farming is biologically oriented environmentalism,” says Jason McKenney from his 12-acre farm.

Keith L. Proctor

TEN YEARS AGO, Jason McKenney merged his passions for biology and farming with his strong sociopolitical beliefs - and landed on a 12 acre farm just south of San Francisco. Schooled in Rhode Island on an environmental education farm where he also taught biology, before moving to California to continue farming. Through a friend, he started working on farm where he learned about local soil types and microclimates, environmental conditions that make California unique as a farming state. He also learned about building relationships with a new and growing sector of organic consumer: small restaurants - frequented by customers willing to pay a fair price for delicious local organic produce prepared with a skilled hand.
Today Jason operates Purisima Greens Farm, eight miles south of Half Moon Bay. Like the first farm he worked on in California, Jason caters a portion of his crop production to restaurant orders. Chefs visit the farm, sit down with Jason, and together they build custom salad types, even deciding the style of how the greens should be harvested. Chefs have a lot to choose from on the 12 acres at Purisima Greens: spinach, chards, kales, broccoli, cabbage, roots, cauliflower, beets, turnips, carrots, strawberries, potatoes, artichokes, summer and winter squashes, onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, dry farmed tomatoes, and more.
Like many successful organic farmers, Jason appreciates the strength in crop diversity. Variety may be the spice of life, and the exciting spice in a good restaurant, but Jason is also thinking in practical terms of economy and marketing: “If you maintain a level of diversity, you can have a buffer to withstand almost any market fluctuation.” In addition to restaurants, Purisima Greens offers Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares from May to December.
Many small farmers attend several regional farmers' markets as a way to earn a living. Jason, however, has chosen only one market - the Alemany Farmers' Market in San Francisco. Here, the discriminating bargain shopper searches the booths, and questions the produce, the price, and the farmer. Unlike the trendy, almost pseudo yuppie feeling of other Bay Area farmers' markets, the Alemany Market is frequented by regular neighborhood people looking for good produce at a decent price. “They really confront the issue of organic food cost,” says Jason. But after five years as a regular vendor, and only one of two organic greens vendors out of hundreds, customers have come to recognize Purisima Greens' produce as cheap, organic food that's superior. His prices are often under those of local retailers, and the market customers know that. Some of them come to the market before sunrise, flashlights in hand, ready to help Jason and other vendors unload and set up their booths so that they can be the first ones to purchase food and wares for sale. “People come out like locusts,” he laughs. “It's fun and energizing.” But the Purisima booth is usually sold out of everything by 10 a.m. The market wasn't always like this, explains Jason. He has watched the Alemany Farmers' Market transform over the years from a mostly Hmong market, with farms based in the Central Valley, to a market of extreme diversity - still with the same Hmong farmers, and now with so many more from around the area. “It's like a superstore in that everything is available, so many vendors and customers. It is the antithesis of monoculture.”
But why enter farming? “Organic farming is biologically oriented environmentalism. It is the best proactive way I know,” comments Jason who thinks of himself as a politically aware person. His motivation for growing organic food is to try to make an equitable living and help create an equitable economy. He says that it is his way of helping to rebuild an economy that serves people in a better fashion. By this, he hopes to be an example that one can grow food in an environmental, economical, and labor sustainable way.
“Most other environmental activism is retroactive - trying to curb, halt, stop, minimize, or clean up environmental damage,” Jason explains. But organic farming is different. It helps create a cleaner world from the outset.
“That's what organic farming is all about,” sums up Jason.

Keith Proctor is editor of the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) magazine based in Santa Cruz, California. This article originally appeared in the Winter 2003-2004 issue of that publication. The sidebars about women in organic agriculture were excerpted from a special issue of CCOF magazine prepared by Keith Proctor with Laurie Cohen contributing.

FROM NURSING PATIENTS TO GROWING PISTACHIOS
IN PREPARATION to retire from nursing in the Southern California area, three friends decided to purchase land in Paso Robles, where they found the “perfect spot” on some hilltop property. With the first 10-acre parcel purchased in 1981, the nurses - Jackie Cooper, Donna Olson and Cecelia Garcia (she still works part-time at a a local hospital - decided to plant pistachios, partly because the competition in the area was fairly minimal, and they thought that maintaining an orchard would be easier than managing ground crops. Thus, NPO (Nurses Pistachio Orchard) was born.
In 1985, they purchased a second 10-acre parcel adjacent to their land. Since they had not yet retired, they continued to visit the land and care for the orchard. It wasn't until 1997 that Jackie, Donna, and Cecelia retired from nursing and moved to their new home they had built on the land.
Like many farmers, they learned from their peers and they also just learned by doing. But for their first substantial harvest, they learned a different way to harvest from a more experienced laborer they had hired. The three nurses discovered that rather than pick each nut as they had thought, they need to lay tarps under each tree. Next they hit each tree with a mallet to cause the ripe nuts to fall on the tarp, from which they gather the nuts and place them in containers. They then haul and dry the nuts. They hire one or two laborers to help with the harvest, but mostly rely on many of their friends and family who come to help out with work and celebration.
From their present orchard of 2,200 trees, 9,000 pounds of pistachios were harvested this past season, out of which nearly 3,000 pounds of split and dried nuts were obtained. Approximately 40-50 trees are replanted each year, having succumbed to deer, ground squirrels and gophers.
Tending to the farm is a job shared by all. Jackie takes care of much of the planning and organizing. Donna tends to mechanical duties, runs the tractor and ATV, and reviews paperwork. Cecelia tends to marketing of their pistachios and is jokingly referred to by the three women as “the laborer.” All three do their fair share of work in the field, checking tree health, pest damage, and irrigation lines. In one way, farming wasn't so different from nursing. Bob has taught these women many things about farming, but they were quick to understand irrigation. “It's a lot like an IV line [intravenous],” they say.

“ORGANIC IS ME”
AFTER gaining experience as an organic orchard grower in 1990, Cynthia Lashbrook started Living Farm Systems two year later - a retail business offering seeds, compost, fertilizers and beneficial insects to organic growers. As a woman consultant with a retail business, many people were quick to dismiss her, not viewing her as an equal. “But when I mentioned my farm, people would wake up and take notice,” says Cynthia.
The land that she farms at present was purchased in 1996, with an adjacent parcel available in 1999. Now divorced, Cynthia lives in a home on this land with her children. Approximately 58 of the 70 acres that she and Bill Thompson manage are in farmland production, with the other remaining acreage as riparian habitat. When they first acquired this new acreage, the orchard appeared stressed and over its peak. But with a sprinkler system already in place, it wasn't very hard to revive the trees. In addition to walnuts and pecans, Cynthia and Bill also grow blueberries, cherries and hay on the newer parcel.
In sharing the work of the land, both make planning decisions, while Bill often tends to the equipment and Cynthia takes care of the paperwork. With the retail business, ag consulting, and working their land, Cynthia has very full days. Beginning early in the morning, after making some phone calls and reviewing paperwork, she often visits several of her consulting customers, many of whom are in transition to organic production.
Challenges aside, Cynthia is very happy with her choice to farm organic-for herself, her children, the land, and for the environment. Although not an organic farmer her entire life, having relearned and reconnected with her innate organic convictions, Cynthia says with a smile, “Organic is me.”

WORKING HARD TO PRODUCE A QUICKLY PERISHABLE CROP
ADJACENT to a seasonally dry riverbed, the organic berry farm operated by Karen Talbot is tucked away deep in California's Pauma Valley just below where her home looks out over scenic Palomar Mountain. While its sand and silt content did not offer the perfect place for ordinary crops to grow, the low pH was no deterrent to her. She has had two acres of blackberries in full production for three years, and is planning to add more.
Have there ever been challenges or roadblocks to her newly chosen career in organic farming? Certainly. However, belief in her Midwestern bred values of honesty, hard work and fairness have helped her succeed in a start-up business in which she is ever learning and ever so enjoying herself. “Organic farming is a beautiful thing to be part of,” she says, in explaining her choice over conventional farming methods. “The obstacles I have encountered were business-related issues in the sense that I've had much to learn about soil fertility, marketing, and labor management, but more importantly I'd say they were personal issues like budget and time management.” Instead of focusing on her lack of experience, she accepted the challenge of learning new things and developing her own talents.
Karen enjoys working through the difficulties of producing a quickly perishable crop, dealing with busy retailers, and balancing her commitment to her family and the needs of her farm.