Recent rhp_oralhist_cmov items

Godfrey Kasozi, Former Apprentice, Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Godfrey Kasozi was born in 1970 in Karusandara, a small village in Uganda. He lives in the town of Kasese in western Uganda, just outside of Rwenzori Mountains National Park. He studied agriculture at a university in Uganda. In 1997, he founded the Centre for Environmental Technology and Rural Development (CETRUD) in western Uganda, which is working to create a more sustainable economy and environment within the country. In search of practical training in organic farming methods that he could use at CETRUD, Kasozi came to UC Santa Cruz in 1999 as an apprentice with the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems program. There he received valuable skills, returning to Uganda to establish a demonstration garden, and training programs in sustainable agriculture, nutrition, seed distribution, animal husbandry, and the use of traditional herbs and medicinal plants. Ellen Farmer interviewed Kasozi at her house in Santa Cruz, California on July 30, 2007, when he was in Santa...

María Luz Reyes and Florentino Collazo: La Milpa Organic Farm

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

María Luz Reyes and her husband, Florentino Collazo, run La Milpa Organic Farm on land they lease from the Agriculture & Land Based Training Association (ALBA) near Salinas, California. They grow 5.5 acres of mixed vegetable crops that they sell at farmers’ markets in the Salinas, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay areas.

Collazo was born in 1963 in the municipality of Purísima del Rincón, in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. He studied agricultural engineering at the college level in Mexico. Reyes was born in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1965. Due to difficult economic times in Mexico, they decided to immigrate to the United States under the Amnesty Law of 1985. Collazo worked harvesting and packaging lettuce in Yuma, Arizona, and in the Salinas and Imperial Valleys of California. Reyes worked off and on at an asparagus packing facility. Eventually Collazo enrolled in a six-month course at the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association known as the Programa...

Richard Merrill: Writer and Educator

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Merrill is perhaps best known for editing the 1976 anthology Radical Agriculture, a formative text in the sustainable agriculture movement, along with the 1978 Energy Primer: Solar, Water, Wind, and Biofuels. Merrill was born in San Mateo, California, in 1941, and earned his MS in population biology at UCLA, studying with ecologist Monte Lloyd just as the modern ecology movement gathered power. He went on to study ecology at the Ph.D. level with another eminent ecologist, Joe Connell, at UC Santa Barbara, but left the academy to dedicate his life to the community-based teaching and activism that he considered more relevant during that time of tumultuous social change. He was profoundly inspired by the writings of the anarchist social ecologist Murray Bookchin.

Merrill helped start the El Mirasol urban organic farm in Santa Barbara, California. In 1975, he founded the Environmental Horticulture Department at Cabrillo College, which he directed until retiring in...

Stephen Kaffka: Pioneering UCSC Farm and Garden Manager, Agronomist

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen (Steve) Kaffka came to UC Santa Cruz as a philosophy student in 1967 and began volunteering in Alan Chadwick’s Student Garden Project in the same year. He worked side-by-side with Alan Chadwick and eventually became the student president of the Garden in 1968. In this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer at her house in Santa Cruz, California on August 31, 2007, Kaffka shares his recollections of Alan Chadwick and the Garden in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the period after Chadwick left, when Kaffka managed the Farm and Garden and formalized the apprentice program through University of California Santa Cruz Extension.

Although Alan Chadwick was deeply troubled by the specialization and fragmentation of scientific practice within the academy, paradoxically, Kaffka, perhaps Chadwick’s closest apprentice at UCSC, ended up with a distinguished career as a research agronomist. After he left UC Santa Cruz in 1977, Kaffka earned his Ph.D. in agronomy...

Jim Leap: Farm Manager, Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Since 1990, Jim Leap has managed the 25-acre farm at UC Santa Cruz—designing crop systems, overseeing production, purchasing and maintaining equipment, teaching apprentices, supervising staff, coordinating field research, helping write training manuals, and educating students and visitors about the farm. In March, 2009, he was recognized with the UC Small Farm Program’s Pedro Ilic Award for Outstanding Educator. The honor is named for an influential Fresno County small-farm advisor who was an important mentor to Leap.

With California family roots reaching back to the 1850s, Leap grew up in California’s Central Valley. His father, an independent insurance agent and anti-racism activist, wrote policies for the United Farm Workers at a time when other insurers refused the organization’s business. Growing up in the 1960s, the young Leap was exposed to UFW grape boycotts, Teatro Campesino productions, and other activities connected with the farm worker movement. As a teenager,...

Mark Lipson: Senior Analyst and Program Director, Organic Farming Research Foundation

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Lipson is senior analyst and policy program director for the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF). In these interviews, conducted by Ellen Farmer at Molino Creek Farm on June 5, August 25, and December 21, 2007, Lipson describes his long and productive career working on behalf of organic farming policy at the state and federal levels.

As an environmental studies major at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lipson focused on planning and public policy, addressing issues such as offshore oil drilling on the California coast. While he was a student, he helped found a student housing co-op, and served as president of Our Neighborhood Food Co-op, a natural foods store that eventually morphed into New Leaf Community Market. After graduation, this involvement with the co-op movement inspired Lipson to help organize Molino Creek, a co-operative farming community located in the hills above the ocean near Davenport, California. Molino Creek pioneered the...

Guillermo Payet: Founder, LocalHarvest.org

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Guillermo Payet is the founder of Localharvest.org, a leading organic and local food website that maintains a public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers’ markets, and other local food sources; helps eaters find products from family farms, as well as other local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their area.

Payet grew up in Lima, Peru, in the 1960s and 1970s. His family visited small farms in the Andes and fishing villages on the Peruvian coast, where he learned to savor the taste of local food. As Payet writes on his website, “During the 1980s, Peru was victimized by two opposing forces: the dehumanizing economic colonialism of transnationals, and the misguided rage and violence of the Maoist Shining Path. These two forces wreaked havoc in the country . . . Family farms found it impossible to compete with cheap, subsidized agricultural products dumped into Peruvian markets by richer countries,...

Wendy Krupnick: Pioneering UCSC Farm and Garden Apprentice, Educator, Horticulturalist

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Wendy Krupnick was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1953, and grew up in Crestwood Hills, a progressive, cooperative community in the Santa Monica Mountains. Over the past thirty-five years she has been involved in nearly every aspect of sustainable agriculture. Her oral history, conducted over the telephone by Ellen Farmer on August 15, 2007, provides a broad perspective on the evolution of this movement.

Krupnick came to UC Santa Cruz as a transfer student from UC Santa Barbara in 1973 and majored in biology. She volunteered in the Chadwick Garden (under Steve Kaffka) as a student, and then returned in 1976-77 as an apprentice at the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden. Later she served as the garden coordinator for the Farallones Institute’s Integral Urban House in Berkeley and the Institute’s Rural Center in Sonoma County. At the same time, she worked with pioneering organic farmer Warren Weber at Star Route Farm in Bolinas, California. Through Weber, Krupnick joined...

Cynthia Sandberg: Love Apple Farm

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Cynthia Sandberg is proprietor of Love Apple Farm—an establishment unique among Central Coast small farms in its combination of biodynamic techniques, an exclusive supply relationship with a single high-end restaurant, a focus on heirloom tomatoes, a rich public offering of on-farm classes, and a successful Internet-based marketing strategy.

Love Apple occupies two productive acres in Ben Lomond, in Santa Cruz County’s San Lorenzo Valley. Sandberg farms according to the biodynamic principles developed in the 1920s by Rudolph Steiner, and is seeking certification for Love Apple through Demeter USA, the country’s only certifying agent for biodynamic farms. In addition to shunning synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, a certified biodynamic farm must also be managed, according to Demeter’s website, as if it were “a living organism,” minimizing waste and external inputs.

As the kitchen garden for upscale Manresa restaurant in nearby Los Gatos (Santa Clara County), Love...

Erika Perloff: Director of Educational Programs, Life Lab Science Program

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Erika Perloff directs educational programs for the Life Lab Science Program, a nationally recognized, award-winning nonprofit science and environmental organization located on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Founded in 1979, Life Lab helps schools develop gardens and implement curricula to enhance students’ learning about science, math, and the natural world. The program has trained tens of thousands of educators in more than 1400 schools across the country.

Life Lab’s specialized projects include LASERS (Language Acquisition in Science Education for Rural Schools), now renamed the Monterey Bay Science Project, which trains teachers to teach language development through scientific exploration. The organization’s Waste Free Schools program helps teachers and students reduce school waste through conservation. Its model Garden Classroom, located at UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, is used for teacher training and school field trips and events.

Perloff’s...

Bob Scowcroft: Executive Director, Organic Farming Research Foundation

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If we had to choose one individual who most inspired us to undertake this historical project about sustainable agriculture, it would be Bob Scowcroft, currently the executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. In 2005, as we were beginning to explore the roots of this movement, we came across the transcript of a speech that Scowcroft had recently made at the Ecological Farming Conference (Eco-Farm). Scowcroft challenged the audience:

One can’t focus on the future until one has a solid grasp of the past. One of our collective failures has been the lack of attention paid to our written and oral history. Only two or three of the participants in the “Asilomar Declaration” [a statement in support of sustainable agriculture that was drafted at a three-day congress immediately before the 1990 Eco-Farm Conference and ratified by the 800 individuals who attended that conference] discussion are here today. Several have passed away. Others have left the sustainable-agriculture...

Jerry and Jean Thomas: Thomas Farm

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jerry Thomas grew up in the Los Angeles area and attended college at San Fernando Valley College (now California State University, Northridge), where he earned a master’s degree in urban/economic geography. He is a fifth-generation Californian on his mother’s side of the family. After a stint in the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America, Jerry and his wife, Jean (who also grew up in LA), wanted to leave smoggy and congested Los Angeles. They moved to the Santa Cruz area in 1970, and became back-to-the-landers on five acres of land in the foothills of Aptos.

In this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer on March 20 and May 7, 2007, at Thomas Farms, the Thomases describe how what began as a large garden grew into Thomas Farms, now one of the oldest organic farms in California. Jerry was invited to participate in Rodale’s organic certification program that pre-dated California Certified Organic Farmers, and was a founding member of California Certified Organic Farmers....

Zea Sonnabend: Ecological Farming Association

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As with many members of the organic farming movement, Zea Sonnabend’s passion for organic agriculture grew out of an early involvement in the back-to-the-land and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. Born in 1951 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Sonnabend dropped out of college in Philadelphia to work on a farm. But then her interests took a more technical, scientific turn, as she returned to school to earn a BS in plant science from the University of Massachusetts and a MA in plant breeding from Cornell University. After graduation, Sonnabend came to California, and worked for several years at the Isla Vista Food Co-op and the Mesa Project demonstration garden run by the Community Environmental Council in the Santa Barbara area. At the Mesa Project, Sonnabend was mentored by ecologist and horticulturalist Richard Merrill, and by organic activist and writer John Jeavons.

In the 1980s, Sonnabend farmed organic figs, peaches, and vegetables in Tehama County, California. This...

Sean Swezey: Entomologist and Integrated Pest Management Specialist

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As an entomologist and integrated pest management specialist, Sean Swezey has held a variety of demanding and influential posts. He has served as associate director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Davis-based University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (UC SAREP). He has held research and teaching appointments at UC Berkeley, Cornell University, and UC Santa Cruz. He has also worked as a consulting entomologist in Central and South America with the Organization of American States and with the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Swezey has helped pioneer organic growing techniques for several important California crops, successfully challenging entrenched assumptions about the inevitability of chemical-intensive production. He wrote and edited a University of California organic apple production manual—the first such manual for any organic commodity. He has advised...

Ken Kimes & Sandra Ward: New Natives Farm

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Both Ken Kimes and Sandra Ward grew up in Southern California. They met in the Los Angeles area, but moved to Santa Cruz in 1980. Together they founded New Natives Farm, a greenhouse-based farm certified by California Certified Organic Farmers in 1983, and located in Corralitos, California. There they tend organic sprouts, including alfalfa, wheat grass, pea shoots, sunflower sprouts, broccoli, and beans. In addition to managing their farm full time, Kimes and Ward are both outspoken activists dedicated to the sustainable agriculture movement. They are longtime members of California Certified Organic Farmers. Kimes served on the board of Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) for many years, and worked for Santa Cruz Trucking, an organic foods distribution company affiliated with the local health food cooperative, Community Foods. In this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer on May 3, 2007, at New Natives Farm, Kimes and Ward share their recollections, impressions,...

Reggie Knox: Community Organizer

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As a community organizer focusing on sustainable agriculture, Reggie Knox has become a kind of Renaissance Man of sustainable agriculture, working with a remarkable number of organizations serving farmers. He currently works with California FarmLink, helping keep the state’s farmland in agricultural production while connecting farmers with technical and financial assistance as well as affordable land. He coordinated the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) Lighthouse Farm Network, connecting a statewide network of growers, advisors, researchers, and other agricultural professionals interested in reducing pesticide use; he eventually became CAFF’s state program director. He worked with California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) on national standards development.

Knox grew up in Davis, California, and spent summers in the Sierra Nevada, where he developed enthusiasm for natural history. As a child he worked in a backyard plot with his father; in high school, he...

Juan Pablo (J.P.) Perez: J&P Organics

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Juan Pablo “J.P.” Perez founded his J & P Organics Community Supported Agriculture program in 2006, while he was a college student, with a subscriber cohort of five friends and advertisements on Craigslist and a campus electronic marketplace. Today, Perez employs his parents and siblings in his expanding farm enterprise, which serves about 300 (and growing) CSA subscribers in towns as geographically and economically disparate as Prunedale, Pacific Grove, and Palo Alto.

J & P Organics offers an unusually generous roster of subscriber options, including home delivery for all customers and a choice of pay-as-you-go weekly, alternate-weeks, or monthly orders. Customers who grow their own vegetables can opt to receive boxes only during the months when their gardens lie fallow. Perez’s CSA boxes contain a colorful variety of fruits and vegetables, plus optional fresh eggs and flowers—and he has plans to include more exotic variety in future shares. He also delivers...

Russel and Karen Wolter: Down to Earth Farm

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Born in Pacific Grove, the descendent of pioneers who came to California with the De Anza party in 1774, Russel Wolter has been farming “organically” since he was fourteen, when his mother forbade him to use chemical fertilizers and sprays on their ranch in the Carmel Valley. That was in 1947, decades before organic certification, but Wolter’s expertise in organic farming methods became a valuable resource to a newer generation of farmers who began farming organically in the 1970s. After his mother’s death, Russel and his wife, Karen, farmed forty-five acres of the family ranch as Down to Earth Farm, growing a variety of crops, including sweet corn, tomatoes, squash, red and white chard, kale, collards, cucumbers, apricots, plums, winter squash, pumpkins, and fava beans. They distributed their produce through Bud Capurro’s distribution company based in Moss Landing, California, and also sold directly at farmers’ markets in the area. Down to Earth Farm was part of the original...

Nick Pasqual (an excerpt)

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Many of our narrators mentioned Nick Pasqual, a Filipino immigrant. Nick is a pioneering organic farmer who helped found both the California Certified Organic Farmers, and the Live Oak Farmers’ Market at Green Acres School. Beginning in 1963, Nick sold vegetables (some of which he grew) at his stand in the Village Fair area of Aptos, California. His own vegetables were organic before the word was in popular or legal usage. When he had to close down the stand at the Village Fair, Nick helped organize the Live Oak Farmers’ Market and until very recently, Nick and his wife, Velma, sold vegetables at the Aptos Farmers’ Market at Cabrillo College. We had wanted to interview Nick, but he declined because of ill health (Nick is now in his late nineties). We are grateful to Allan Lönnberg of Cabrillo College, who granted us permission to reprint an excerpt of the transcript of the oral history he conducted with Nick in 2006; to Nick and Velma Pasqual who graciously agreed to the republication...

Scott Roseman: Owner, New Leaf Community Markets

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Scott Roseman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. He came to Santa Cruz in 1977 to study sociology at UC Santa Cruz. While he was a student, he joined Our Neighborhood Food Co-op, located on the Westside of Santa Cruz. After graduation, Roseman worked for the Alternative Energy Co-op, an organization devoted to renewable energy technologies. It was there in 1979 that Irene Reti, who conducted this oral history, first met Roseman while she was an undergraduate student at UCSC doing an internship in alternative energy systems. After the Reagan administration withdrew government funding for solar energy, Roseman took a position as a floor manager at Our Neighborhood Food Co-op.

In this interview, conducted on February 20, 2008, at Roseman’s house in Santa Cruz, he described the evolution of the co-op into the Westside Community Market in 1985, and eventually into New Leaf Community Markets, a chain of six stores. Four of the New Leaf stores are owned by...

José Montenegro: Farm Operations Director, Rural Development Center

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

José Montenegro grew up in Providencia, a small farming community in the state of Durango, Mexico. As a child, he was troubled by the impoverishment of rural life in his community. He studied agronomy in Mexico in 1988, and despite sadness about leaving his homeland, decided to emigrate to the United States. This oral history focuses on Montenegro’s period as farm operations director of the organic farming training program at the Rural Development Center (RDC). Located on a 110-acre farm eight miles south of Salinas, the RDC was originally founded in 1985 by the Association for Community-Based Education (ACBE) of Washington, D.C. The RDC initiated a ‘Farmworker to Farmer’ program where agricultural workers received training that allowed for their advancement on the job, in farm management or possibly farm ownership. In 2000, Montenegro left the RDC to begin Proyecto de Arraigo, a program that offers training and resources to farmers in rural Mexico. Meanwhile, the RDC transformed...

Jered Lawson and Nancy Vail: Pie Ranch: A Rural Center for Urban Renewal

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jered Lawson and Nancy Vail make up two thirds of the founding partnership that operates Pie Ranch—“a rural center for urban renewal.” With San Francisco-based colleague Karen Heisler, Lawson and Vail began establishing this working farm in 2002 as a place where city youth could learn about food. The non-profit organization’s mission, according to its website, is “to inspire and connect rural and urban people to know the source of their food, and to work together to bring greater health to the food system from seed to table.” Mission Pie, a sister business located in the city’s Mission District and overseen by Heisler, employs local young people in baking and selling pastries concocted from the farm’s products.

Perched on a coastal hillside in southern San Mateo County, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, Pie Ranch’s triangular slice of land now produces “everything you need to make pie”—from pumpkins, berries and tree fruits to eggs, milk, butter, honey and wheat....

Jim Rider: Bruce Rider & Sons

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As a grower and shipper of organic fresh market apples in Santa Cruz County’s Pajaro Valley, Bruce Rider & Sons is currently a rarity. Pressured by the apple industry’s shifting economics of scale, many of the valley’s formerly abundant orchards have given way to berry fields; others now supply apples only for juicing and processing. Jim Rider grows seventy-five acres of Mcintosh, Honeycrisp, Jonagold, Braeburn, Fuji, and other varieties well suited to the local climate, while his brother Dick runs the company’s packing operation, handling some seventy-five percent of the organic apples in California.

A fifth-generation orchardist and experienced horticulturalist, Jim Rider enjoys a reputation as a savvy, innovative grower. He is an adept and enthusiastic grafter, and has made strategic selections to produce a succession of varieties that ripen on the Central Coast when customers in other climates crave them. He saves on labor and equipment by growing on rootstock...

Melody Meyer: Organic Foods Distributor

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Conducted by Ellen Farmer on June 8 and September 22, 2007, Melody Meyer’s oral history documents the extraordinary transformation of the organic foods sector between the 1970s and the early 21st century. Meyer was born in Iowa in 1960; she was introduced to organic and natural foods at age sixteen, when she began working at a natural foods co-op in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She moved to Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and joined Community Foods, a collectively owned, collectively run natural foods store, where she stayed for six years. There she met many local organic growers who came to sell their produce in the store and through its affiliate, Santa Cruz Trucking.

After leaving Community Foods, Meyer became Watsonville Coast Produce’s first woman buyer, developing an organic distribution program. Later she was hired by Ocean Organics, an organic foods distribution company located in Moss Landing, California. She moved on to work for six years for Scott Hawkins of Hawkins Associates,...

Jeff Larkey: Route One Farms

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jeff Larkey was born in Montreal, Canada, but his father’s family has been in California since 1849. Larkey spent part of his childhood in the Carmel Valley of California, and in Davis, California, working summers in the fields and processing plants of the conventional agriculture world. He came to Santa Cruz in 1973 to enroll in Cabrillo College’s solar technology program, where he also studied horticulture with Richard Merrill. In the late 1970s, Larkey moved onto a commune on Ivy Lane in Live Oak—an unincorporated, then still somewhat rural area of Santa Cruz County, where he and his fellow commune members grew basil and garlic as well as other crops on four acres of land, and transported them via bicycle to sell at the Live Oak Farmers’ market. These crop choices helped establish a taste among local community members for fresh pesto, creating a lasting legacy.

In 1981, Larkey left that commune to farm along the fertile floodplain of the San Lorenzo River on Ocean...

Dick Peixoto: Lakeside Organic Gardens

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dick Peixoto (pronounced Peh-SHOTE) exemplifies a recent type of organic farmer who, after a long career in conventional farming, transitions to organics for a mixture of reasons. Peixoto was born in 1956 in Watsonville, California, the grandson of immigrants from the Azores Islands who have been farming in the Pajaro Valley for the past 100 years. He grew up on the family ranch on Green Valley Road. His father worked off-farm for a fertilizer and pest control company in Watsonville, in addition to working on the family ranch. Peixoto spent his childhood riding around with his dad, dragging spray hoses around apple orchards in the Pajaro Valley. He dates his farming career to eighth grade, when he hired neighborhood kids to pick tomatoes on his family farm so he could market them. In 1976, when Peixoto was a senior in high school, he and his brother, Jim, began growing string beans commercially. Soon after, Peixoto began farming on his own, learning lettuce growing, as well...

Jim Nelson, Camp Joy Gardens

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jim Nelson runs Camp Joy Gardens, a sunny, redwood-ringed 4.5-acre farm in Santa Cruz County’s San Lorenzo Valley. One of the Santa Cruz area’s first farms to shun chemical pesticides and fertilizers, Camp Joy was inspired by the example of Nelson’s mentor, Alan Chadwick. Employing biodynamic principles, the farm grows a bountiful harvest of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and other products using home-grown hay mulch, cover crops, fertilizer from on-farm goats and chickens, and other organic inputs. A community supported agriculture program distributes weekly produce baskets to twenty-five local families.

As a non-profit educational organization, Camp Joy offers tours and programs for local schools, presents workshops for adults, and hosts apprentices from all over the world. Locals flock to the annual spring plant sale and fall open house to wander the colorful orchards and gardens and to buy seedlings, fresh bouquets, dried wreaths, honey, jams, candles, and other farm...

Orin Martin: Manager, Alan Chadwick Garden, CASFS

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Orin Martin manages the Alan Chadwick Garden at UC Santa Cruz, where he is widely admired for his skills as a master orchardist, horticulturalist, and teacher. Martin grew up an athletic and outdoors-oriented child in Massachusetts, Florida, New York State, and Ohio—without any interest in gardening, which struck him as “an onerous chore, and kind of sissy stuff, actually.” While he was in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s, as a student at American University, he “got politicized” by current events: some 100,000 citizens marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In 1969, exhausted and alienated after a lonely struggle to avoid the military draft, Martin followed some friends to Santa Cruz, where he heard about “this place called ‘The Garden’”—the one being cultivated by Alan Chadwick and his protégés on the UCSC campus. “I wandered up there one morning,” said Martin in this interview, “and I was just...

Rebecca Thistlethwaite: TLC Ranch and the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

With her husband, Jim Dunlop, Rebecca Thistlethwaite runs TLC Ranch on 20 rented acres in Watsonville, Santa Cruz County. The initials stood for “Tastes Like Chicken” until the ranch stopped raising meat chickens; now, in keeping with TLC’s social and environmental philosophy, it’s “Tender Loving Care.” TLC currently raises pork, lamb, and certified organic eggs—more than 200 dozen per day, from more than 3,000 pastured chickens.

Thistlethwaite and Dunlop emphasize scrupulous “beyond-organic” animal husbandry and resource stewardship. They sell pasture-raised meat and eggs to local restaurants and at farmers’ markets in Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Santa Clara Counties. TLC eggs are also available through several CSA programs and at a variety of grocery stores and other retail produce outlets in the Monterey and San Francisco Bay Areas.

In addition to the family business, Thistlethwaite has worked with the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) as Director...

Amy Katzenstein-Escobar: Life Lab Teacher

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Amy Katzenstein-Escobar was the first pilot teacher for the Life Lab Science Program. She was born in 1956 in New Jersey, and grew up in Southern California. She came to UC Santa Cruz in the mid-1970s and entered the community studies major. She received a Ford Foundation education project grant to teach migrant children from Watsonville, became a teacher, and then began teaching at Salsipuedes School, where she participated in a pilot project for Life Lab in 1980. She discusses her Life Lab work in this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer on July 27, 2007, in an office on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Betty Van Dyke: The Van Dyke Ranch

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Born in 1932 to Croatian American farmers in the Santa Clara Valley town of Cupertino, Betty Van Dyke saw her fertile home ground transformed, in a few decades, from seemingly endless orchards to unrelenting urban sprawl. As the energetic matriarch of a popular family-run fruit-growing business, she has since participated in the region’s organic agricultural renaissance, overseeing one of the first California operations to grow and dry fruit organically (becoming certified in 1986), and playing an active role in the early days of California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). And as a member of one of the region’s noted surfing families, she built this thriving business while sustaining her love affair with Pacific ocean waves.

Van Dyke Ranch sits at the base of the Gavilan Mountains in Gilroy, Santa Clara County, on a southern exposure perfectly suited for growing sweet, flavorful Blenheim apricots and Bing cherries. The ranch produces fresh fruit in season and dried apricots,...

Beth Benjamin: Horticulturalist

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Arriving at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1967 for her first year of college, Beth Benjamin was immediately drawn to the colorful beds blooming on a hillside below Merrill College. By springtime, she had joined the core group of young people working in this new campus garden under master horticulturalist Alan Chadwick. One of very few women to enjoy Chadwick’s steady mentorship during this period, Benjamin eventually arranged for a leave of absence from the university to devote herself to the garden—a hiatus that became permanent when her passion for the project overtook her interest in formal schooling.

Benjamin married another Chadwick protégé, Jim Nelson; in the early 1970s, the two of them moved to four sunny acres in Santa Cruz County’s San Lorenzo Valley in order to build their own blooming Eden. Still thriving in 2009 as a non-profit educational organization, Camp Joy Gardens offers, according to its mission statement, “a model for an alternative future, a trial...

Amigo Bob Cantisano: Organic Farming Advisor, Founder, Ecological Farming Conference

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most widely experienced and influential figures in California organic agriculture, Amigo Bob Cantisano is perhaps best known as the founding organizer of the annual Ecological Farming Conference, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in January 2010 and is the largest sustainable- agriculture gathering in the Western United States. Recognized among conference-goers for his adept leadership of Eco-Farm’s popular bus tour of Central Coast organic farms—and for sporting trademark shorts and sandals no matter what the weather—Amigo (a high-school girlfriend gave him the nickname) has been involved with diverse aspects of organic foods and farming since the late 1960s. In 1990 he and his wife Kalita Todd received the Stewards of Sustainable Agriculture (Sustie) award from the Ecological Farming Association.

Cantisano is a ninth-generation Californian, directly descended from a lieutenant in the 1775-76 Juan Bautista de Anza expedition, which created the first land...

Jo Ann Baumgartner and Sam Earnshaw: Organizers and Farmers

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jo Ann Baumgartner directs the Wild Farm Alliance, based in Watsonville, California. WFA’s mission, as described on the organization’s website, is “to promote agriculture that helps to protect and restore wild Nature.” Through research, publications, presentations, events, policy work, and consulting, the organization works to “connect food systems with ecosystems.”

Sam Earnshaw is Central Coast regional coordinator of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. Working with CAFF’s farmscaping program, he helps farmers plant hedgerows and create grass waterways, improving production while increasing biodiversity and wildlife habitat on their lands. In 2009 Earnshaw was awarded the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign’s Pollinator Advocate Award as part of an international effort to promote public awareness of bees, bats, butterflies, beetles, and other animals that enable the reproduction of over seventy-five percent of flowering plants. In 2008 Earnshaw and...

Darrie Ganzhorn: Director of Programs and Operations, Homeless Garden Project

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Darrie Ganzhorn is Director of Programs and Operations for the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1958, Ganzhorn studied marine biology at UC Berkeley. She worked at the Hopkins Marine Station after graduation, but when her son was born, she had an epiphany. “I didn’t want to do research anymore. I wanted to do something based on human needs. I wanted to do something that wasn’t esoteric, that was more basic and vital,” Ganzhorn said in her interview. She found meaningful work at the Homeless Garden Project, where she interned in 1991, not long after the Project was started by UCSC philosophy professor and social visionary Paul Lee. Influenced by the ideas of the radical educator Myles Horton, Ganzhorn began to edit “Voices from the Garden,” a series of newsletter profiles of homeless people who worked in the Garden. This interviewing experience infused her with an appreciation for oral history that she brought to the interview...

Nancy Gammons: Four Sisters Farm and Watsonville Farmers' Market Manager

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Nancy Gammons is both a longtime organic farmer and the manager of a weekly downtown farmers’ market in the largely Spanish-speaking city of Watsonville. Four Sisters Farm, which she and her husband Robin named in honor of their daughters, produces a variety of fruits, vegetables and flowers on five rolling acres in Aromas, California.

Gammons found her way to both of these callings by following her heart. (“I’ve approached everything in my life,” she says, “in kind of a romantic way.”) After falling in love with the Spanish language in high-school classes, she went on to major in Spanish in college, spending time abroad in Spain. Her facility with the language has since enabled her to make close connections with the Spanish-speaking workers at Four Sisters, and with farmers and other vendors at the Watsonville market.

In the 1960s, Gammons came across a copy of Robert Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening at a friend’s house, and was drawn to Rodale’s rhapsodizing...

María Inés Catalán: Catalán Family Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

María Inés Catalán was born in Santa Teresa, Guerrero, Mexico, in 1962. She immigrated to the United States in 1986 and picked broccoli and carrots in the Salinas Valley of California. Her father was also a migrant farm worker, but her grandfather had owned land that the family farmed in Mexico. Catalán’s life took a different turn when in 1994 she entered an organic farming training program at the Rural Development Center in Salinas. (This was an earlier incarnation of what is now known as ALBA, the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association program). This incubator program helps farm workers become organic farmers by providing training in farming and marketing, and leasing them land.

After graduating, Catalán became the first Latina migrant farm worker to own and operate a certified organic farm in California, and the first Latina in the country to found a farm that distributes produce through a community supported agriculture program. María Inés and her family...

Catherine Barr: Manager, Monterey Bay Certified Farmers' Markets

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Catherine Barr manages the Monterey Bay Certified Farmers’ Markets (MBCFM), a consortium that includes the oldest and largest farmers’ markets on California’s Central Coast. Founded in 1976, MBCFM now boasts a total of more than eighty vendors at four locations, including Aptos, Monterey, Del Monte (also in Monterey), and Carmel. (At the time when this oral history was recorded, MBCFM had a now-discontinued market in Salinas, while the Del Monte location had not yet been established.) Certification ensures that the fruits, vegetables, meats, and other products available at these markets are grown or raised in California by the farmers who sell them.

Barr moved in the late 1960s from the eastern US to Santa Cruz, where, she jokes, she discovered that vegetables do not originate in a can—“my first real shock as far as to where food really came from.” Her agricultural education continued when she married a fourth-generation flower grower, Jonathan Barr, and moved with him...

Roy Fuentes: Fuentes Berry Farms

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As president of Fuentes Berry Farms, Rogelio (Roy) Fuentes is one of many independent growers producing organic berries for Driscoll’s—a company that was initiated more than a century ago by two strawberry farmers on California’s Central Coast, and has since evolved into an international concern devoted to research, breeding, production, sales and distribution of conventionally and organically farmed strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. Driscoll’s CEO Miles Reiter and his brother Garland, CEO of Reiter Affiliated Companies, are the grandsons of Joseph “Ed” Reiter, who began growing strawberries in the Pajaro Valley with Dick Driscoll in 1904. The Reiters have a reputation for providing partnership opportunities for talented, hardworking, ambitious Mexican American farmers.

Fuentes was born in San Pedro Tesistan, Jalisco, Mexico, and came to Watsonville, California, as a teenager. He spent summers harvesting the berry fields his father managed. After...

Barney Bricmont, Founder, California Certified Organic Farmers

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The first oral history we conducted for this project was with Bernard “Barney” Bricmont. On March 7, 2007, Ellen Farmer set up her recording equipment on the very same kitchen table where, in 1973, six organic farmers founded the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). An earlier, one-year effort by Rodale to create a certification program for organic farmers had floundered, and Bricmont called farmers together to form a statewide organization. However, most of the farmers were too busy to take on this task and Bricmont decided to administer CCOF from his Santa Cruz home. He served as founding vice president the first two years, and then became president of the organization from 1975 to 1985. Many of our narrators acknowledged the critical contribution of Bricmont’s generous volunteer work in the founding of the organic movement on the Central Coast of California.

Barney Bricmont was born in 1938 in San Jose, California, long before the valley turned from growing...

Drew Goodman, Earthbound Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Drew Goodman is CEO and co-founder, with his wife, Myra, of Earthbound Farm, based in San Juan Bautista, California. Two years after its 1984 inception on 2.5 Carmel Valley acres, Earthbound became the first successful purveyor of pre-washed salads bagged for retail sale. The company now produces more than 100 varieties of certified organic salads, fruits, and vegetables on a total of about 33,000 acres, with individual farms ranging from five to 680 acres in California, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Mexico, Canada, and Chile. Earthbound Farm currently distributes its products to more than seventy percent of all US supermarkets—among them Costco, Wal-Mart, Safeway, and Albertsons—and to some international markets.

In a single year, by Earthbound’s reckoning, organic production on this scale averts the use of more than 305,000 pounds of toxic and persistent pesticides and 10.3 million pounds of synthetic fertilizers, conserving about 1.6 million gallons of petroleum and...

Roberta Jaffe, Founding Director, Life Lab Science Program, Co-Founder of Community Agroecology Network

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Roberta (Robbie) Jaffe grew up in New York in the 1950s, and moved to Florida when she was sixteen. She attended the University of Florida and University of South Florida, and graduated with a degree in sociology. During and after college she was deeply involved in the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement as a field organizer and boycott organizer for the state of Florida. Jaffe first came to the Santa Cruz area with her then-husband, Jerry Kay, who was also active in the sustainable agriculture movement. They farmed ten acres near Elkhorn Slough, and in 1976, Jaffe helped start the first farmers’ market in Santa Cruz County, at Live Oak School.

After that marriage ended, Jaffe studied horticulture at Cabrillo College with Richard Merrill, and took a position with a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) program called Project Blossom. As part of that program, she co-founded a school garden at Green Acres School in Live Oak, a semi-rural area near Santa Cruz,...

Lyn Garling: Former UCSC Farm and Garden Apprentice Coordinator, Farmer, Entomologist

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Lyn Garling was the apprentice coordinator for the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program (UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden) from 1984 to 1992. Garling is an entomologist by profession, with a fierce passion for the insect world, ecological literacy, and human justice. Before she came to UC Santa Cruz, Garling taught ecology in Nicaragua after the Nicaraguan revolution, and conducted biological studies in Costa Rica and Mexico. At UC Santa Cruz, she designed and taught the first comprehensive science curriculum for the apprentice program, pushed the Farm and Garden to be more responsive to issues of class, race, and ethnic diversity, and managed the Farm and Garden’s roadside and wholesale marketing, among other contributions.

After leaving UC Santa Cruz, Garling moved to Pennsylvania, where she became an education specialist for that state’s Integrated Pest Management program, focusing on outreach to inner city residents at risk from exposure to toxic pesticides used in urban...

Gail Harlamoff: Executive Director, Life Lab Science Program

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Gail Harlamoff is Executive Director of the Life Lab Science Program, a nationally recognized, award-winning nonprofit science and environmental organization located on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Founded in 1979, Life Lab helps schools develop gardens and implement curricula to enhance students’ learning about science, math, and the natural world. The program has trained tens of thousands of educators in more than 1400 schools across the country.

Life Lab’s specialized initiatives include LASERS (Language Acquisition in Science Education for Rural Schools)—also known as the Monterey Bay Science Project—which trains teachers in the region to teach language development through scientific exploration. The Waste Free Schools program helps teachers and students reduce school waste through conservation. And the organization’s model Garden Classroom, located on the Farm at UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, is used for teacher training and school field...

Nesh Dhillon: Manager, Santa Cruz County Community Farmers' Markets

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Nesh (pronounced “Naysh”) Dhillon is operations manager for the Santa Cruz Community Farmers’ Markets, which include locations in downtown and Westside Santa Cruz, Live Oak, Felton, and (added in 2009, after this oral history was recorded) Scotts Valley. All operate open year-round except the Felton market, which is open May through October.

Dhillon’s parents both grew up poor—his father in a farming family in northern India, his mother in rural Oregon—but with a preference for fresh, nutritious foods, which they passed on to their son. A high-school education at a Jesuit institution in Portland, Oregon, instilled in the young Dhillon a deep concern for ethical behavior, cooperation, and justice—values that, he says, have also informed his career choices. Initially aiming toward medical school, he shifted direction when he discovered sustainable agriculture at the University of Oregon. After a stint of post-graduation employment in bars and restaurants on the Oregon coast,...

Amy Courtney: Freewheelin' Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Shareholders in Freewheelin’ Farm’s community supported agriculture program enjoy an unusual perk: delivery by bicycle-drawn trailer. Freewheelin’ founder Amy Courtney, a 1997 graduate of UCSC’s Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture, strives to produce fresh, healthy food while minimizing her environmental footprint. Courtney started the farm in 2002 with almost no motorized vehicles, incorporating used equipment and recycled materials wherever possible in the farm’s operations. She and her current farming partners, Kirstin Yogg and Darryl Wong, still haul all of their CSA shares by bicycle six miles into Santa Cruz.

Courtney’s work as a farmer springs not only from a love of land and plants, but also from a commitment to social justice, community health, and cultural vitality. She majored in community studies as an undergraduate student at UCSC; before founding Freewheelin’ Farm, she worked with school gardens, Santa Cruz’s Homeless Garden Project, the United Farm...

Congressmember Sam Farr

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

United States Congressmember Sam Farr, one of the political heroes of the sustainable agriculture movement, was interviewed by Ellen Farmer on August 23, 2007. A fifth-generation Californian, Farr was born in 1941. He is the son of California State Senator Fred Farr, who sponsored a law requiring toilets in the fields for farm workers, as well as other landmark environmental legislation.

Sam Farr began his career in public service in 1964, in the Peace Corps in Colombia. Before his election to the House of Representatives in 1993, Farr served for twelve and a half years in the California State Assembly. In 1990, Farr authored the California Organic Standards Act, which established standards for organic food production and sales in California. This piece of legislation became one of the models for the National Organic Program’s federal organic standards. Farr now serves as co-chair of the National Organic Caucus in the House of Representatives, and worked with organic...

Dee Harley: Harley Farms Goat Dairy

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In the village of Pescadero, forty-five minutes’ drive north of Santa Cruz, Dee Harley runs San Mateo County’s only active dairy. Harley and her staff care for a herd of more than 200 American Alpine goats, crafting the animals’ milk into sought-after cheeses (chevre, feta, ricotta, and fromage blanc) that have consistently garnered awards at national and international competitions. An increasingly popular agritourism destination for denizens of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas, Harley Farms also offers leisurely, informative tours of its entire dairy operation, from the birth of hundreds of kids each spring to the on-site sale of delicate white cheeses decorated with fresh herbs and colorful edible flowers grown on the farmstead.

A native of Yorkshire, England, Harley discovered Pescadero while traveling in California as a young woman. In the gently rolling coastal landscape and in the rural community’s intimate spirit, she saw reflections of her verdant birthplace....

María Luz Reyes and Florentino Collazo: La Milpa Organic Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Jacobs: Jacobs Farm/Del Cabo

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Larry Jacobs is the co-founder of Jacobs Farm/Del Cabo with his wife, Sandra Belin. He was born in 1950 in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles, California. As a young man, he owned and managed a tree nursery. When aphids infested some of his trees, a pesticide inspector sold him Metasystox to apply with a backpack sprayer. Jacobs temporarily became very ill from pesticide exposure. Vowing never to apply pesticides again, he searched for alternatives. Jacobs was lucky to find a mentor in Everett (“Deke”) Dietrick, a pioneer in the integrated pest management field, who taught him how to control the aphid infestation through IPM methods.

Shortly after that, Jacobs left the nursery business to study soil science at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. After graduation, he moved to Vermont to apprentice with Helen and Scott Nearing, world-famous grandparents of the back-to-the-land and simple-living movements in the United States. In...

Dale Coke: Coke Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Dale Coke grew up on an apricot orchard in California’s Santa Clara Valley. In 1976 he bought ten acres of farmland near Watsonville in Santa Cruz County but continued to work repairing fuel injection systems rather than farming at his new home. In 1981, a struggle with cancer inspired him to rethink his life and become an organic farmer. His neighbor, who had grown strawberries using pesticides and chemical fertilizers, asserted that strawberries could not be grown organically. Coke set out to prove him wrong. He sold his first organic strawberries at Community Foods, a local natural foods store, and began marketing berries, baby zucchini and “exotic” lettuces to Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, and later other high-end restaurants across the country. Coke can be credited with the invention of the spring salad mix, an assortment of baby lettuce greens, now one of the most lucrative products sold by the organic industry. He originally rinsed his greens in...

Paul Glowaski: Garden Director, Homeless Garden Project

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Glowaski, Garden Director for the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California, was born in 1979 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. During the summers, he helped on his grandfather’s grain and cattle farm. Glowaski studied Latin American history at DePauw University in Indiana, and traveled to Mexico as part of a delegation of college students to Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas shortly after the Zapatista uprising. He was part of the Chiapas Media Project in the Mexico Solidarity Network. His experiences with farmers in Chiapas affected him deeply. After graduation, Glowaski joined Americorps’ National Civilian Community Corps, and worked with people who are homeless. He continued this work at the Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington, Vermont. Interested in urban agriculture because it offered self-sufficiency and food security to those in low-income communities, Glowaski decided to pursue training in organic farming, embarking on a path that led first to an organic farm...

Jim Cochran: Swanton Berry Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Jim Cochran was born in Carlsbad, California in 1947. He came to UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s as an undergraduate student to study child development and 19th century European intellectual history. As a student at Merrill College (one of the UC Santa Cruz residential colleges), he lived up the hill from the Chadwick Garden (Student Garden Project) and admired the organic food and flowers grown on that steep hillside. After he graduated, Cochran took a job as an assistant to organizers of Co-op Campesina, a farm worker-owned production co-op in the Pajaro Valley, California. He later helped several farmer co-ops in Central California with marketing and financial planning. This shaped his future role as founder of Swanton Berry Farm, famous as the first certified organic farm in the United States to sign a labor contract with the United Farm Workers (UFW). Swanton Berry Farm offers their workers low income housing on site, health insurance, vacation and holiday pay, a pension,...

Janet and Grant Brians: Brians Ranch

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This two–part interview with Janet Brians and her son Grant Brians, conducted by Ellen Farmer on July 19, 2007 at Brians Ranch in Hollister, California, documents their pioneering work as organic farmers and founders of California Certified Organic Farmers. Janet Brians holds a master’s degree in East Asian studies from UC Berkeley and a master’s in library science from UCLA. In 1973, she and her husband Robert (who worked in the computer industry) were living on the San Francisco Peninsula. Desiring relief from the increasing smog and urban congestion, they bought one hundred acres of farmland in Hollister, California, which came with several historic buildings that dated back to the 1860s. The Brians’ restored and preserved these structures and founded Brians Ranch, where for the past thirty-six years they have grown row and orchard crops organically. Their son, Grant, spent his teenage years on the ranch, and has been an organic farmer his entire life. Janet Brians feels...

Stephen R. Gliessman: Alfred E. Heller Professor of Agroecology, UC Santa Cruz

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

An internationally recognized leader in the field of agroecology, Stephen (Steve) Gliessman is the Alfred E. Heller Professor of Agroecology in UC Santa Cruz’s Environmental Studies Department, where he has taught since 1981. He earned his doctorate in plant ecology at UC Santa Barbara, and was the founding director of the UCSC Agroecology Program (now the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems). His teaching focuses on agroecology, sustainable agriculture, organic gardening, ethnobotany, California natural history, botany and ecology. He is the author of the groundbreaking textbook Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems (Second Edition, CRC 2006), and numerous other books and articles. In 2008, Gliessman became the chief editor of the internationally known Journal of Sustainable Agriculture.

Gliessman’s activities in the field of sustainable agriculture are extensive. He founded and directs the Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA), an...

Andy Griffin: Mariquita Farm

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Andy Griffin runs Mariquita (“Ladybug”) Farm on twenty-five acres in Watsonville and Hollister. In collaboration with Steven Pedersen and Jeanne Byrne’s High Ground Organics in Watsonville, Griffin and his wife, Julia Wiley, sell much of their produce through a community supported agriculture venture called Two Small Farms.

Possessed of a quick mind and a powerful command of language, a wry and robust sense of humor, and strong opinions gleaned through extensive experience in the farming and marketing of organic produce, Griffin is also a prolific writer, blogger, and radio commentator. With farming roots reaching into California’s 1970s organic-farming renaissance, he has plenty of stories to tell.

The great-grandson of California farmers and son of a plant ecologist, Griffin took agriculture classes through the Future Farmers of America program at Carmel High School, then went on to UC Davis to study range management. Disillusioned by the pesticide-heavy focus...

Tim Galarneau: Activist and Researcher

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In its March/April 2009 issue, Mother Jones magazine called Tim Galarneau “the Alice Waters of a burgeoning movement of campus foodies.” Galarneau is a co-founder of the Real Food Challenge, a national campaign promoting sustainable food sourcing in college dining halls. In his day job with UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), he coordinates the Center’s Farm to College project. Since his undergraduate days at UCSC, Galarneau has helped spearhead numerous initiatives to transform the way the nation’s schools, hospitals and other institutions navigate the high-volume acquisition and preparation of food.

Galarneau and others brought about one such transformation—now a model for other institutions—on their own home ground. Students at UC Santa Cruz look out from their hillside campus over rich agricultural lands, including the 25-acre CASFS farm in their own backyard; yet until 2005, they had little access to locally grown organic food. Now,...