Regional History Project Oral Histories

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 growing of flavorful, dry-farmed tomatoes (grown without irrigation).

Seeking organic certification for Molino Creek, Lipson began attending meetings of the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). He soon became CCOF’s first paid staff member, working there from 1985 to 1992, steering the organization through the establishment of a statewide office as well as several key historical events that awakened the American public’s interest in organic food. The Organic Center calls Lipson “the primary midwife” of the California Organic Foods Act (COFA) of 1990, sponsored by then-State Assemblymember Sam Farr. Recalling his work with Lipson on COFA, Sam Farr remarked (in his oral history in this series), “I tell the world that the organic movement started in California, in Santa Cruz County, and the guru of that is Mark [Lipson].”

Over the past two decades with OFRF (an organization which he helped to found), Lipson shepherded several historic changes in agricultural funding through Congress, such as a 2008 Farm Bill that secures a five-fold increase in government funding for organic research (though this still represents only one percent of the USDA’s research budget). He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1997 study Searching for the ‘O-Word’, which documented the absence of publicly funded organic research at a critical political moment in the trajectory of the organic farming movement.

Lipson chaired the California Organic Foods Advisory Board from 1991 to 1998. In 1992, he received the annual Sustie (“Steward of Sustainable Agriculture”) Award, presented at the Ecological Farming Conference, and in 2009 Nutrition Business Journal gave him their Organic Excellence award.

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 to Mexico to grow vegetables. After the Barrs returned to California in 1993, Catherine responded to a newspaper advertisement for a market manager, and beat out ninety-five other applicants.

In this interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin at the Barr home in Corralitos, California, on May 13th, 2008, Catherine Barr described the responsibilities and challenges, pleasures and pressures entailed in managing multiple year-round farmers’ markets.

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 Educativo para Pequeños Agricultores, or PEPA, in 1995. In 2003, Reyes also enrolled in that program. After graduating, Collazo worked for eight years as the field educator/farm manager for ALBA, and Reyes continued to farm on land she leased from ALBA.

Collazo left ALBA to farm full time with Reyes on ten acres of land they purchased together in southern Monterey County. They have run La Milpa Organic Farm for the past six years and are certified organic by California Certified Organic Farmers. The financing to purchase their land in South Monterey County came through the help of an Individual Development Account organized by California FarmLink and a beginning-farmer farm loan through the Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. Reyes and Collazo also continue to farm 5.5 acres of land they rent from ALBA.

On their farm—named La Milpa in tribute to traditional MesoAmerican methods of growing many diverse crops closely together—Reyes and Collazo cultivate over thirty crops, including fifteen varieties of heirloom tomatoes; seven varieties of squash; two varieties of cucumber; two varieties of beets; cilantro; two varieties of onions; rainbow chard; celery; four varieties of chili peppers; fennel; purple cauliflower; broccoli; romaine; strawberries; raspberries; golden berries; green peppers; corn; onions; basil; carrots, and green beans.

Collazo and Reyes have raised three sons; one is studying chemical engineering at UC Santa Cruz and another is studying microbiology at UC Berkeley. They both help with sales at La Milpa. Their youngest son is in fourth grade.

Collazo and Reyes have a deep respect for the land that they farm and take pleasure in the crops that they produce. Collazo said, “I love to work the land. I don’t like using gloves, because . . . it’s like taking a shower with an umbrella, you understand, putting an umbrella over yourself when you wash. When I want to work, I want to feel the earth. When I pull the weeds, I want to feel my fingers penetrating the soil, feel that I’m pulling them up, that I’m doing it myself. My hands and my mind are linked. I really love to look around, walk up and down observing, surveying it all and saying, ‘Wow.’ That’s what fulfills me. When I’m at the farmers’ market, when people are arriving, reaching for the produce, and then later passing by, I feel like my self-esteem really rises. . . . But when you arrive over there and they tell you, ‘These are the best strawberries I’ve ever tasted, I’m going to take them’ — that is, they flatter you, ah, it makes you feel a light in your soul, you know?” Reyes added, “Like yesterday, when they had that festival and all of these people came out to buy, a man said to me, ‘I’ve never touched the sky, but with these strawberries I just did.’ So, how do you think that made me feel?”

This oral history was conducted in Spanish at La Milpa Farm on July 26, 2009, by Rebecca Thistlethwaite. Thistlethwaite, Collazo, and Reyes know each other from Thistlethwaite’s work as program director for the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association. The interview was transcribed and sent to Collazo and Reyes for their edits and approval. Then it was translated into English. The transcript appears here first in English, and then in the original Spanish.

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, he relocated to Santa Cruz, where he joined the staff of a local winery before taking a job as assistant manager for the farmers’ market in 2000, eventually moving into the operations manager position.

In this oral history, conducted by Sarah Rabkin on Thursday, November 20, 2008, at Rabkin’s home in Soquel, California, Dhillon discussed the emergence of the Santa Cruz Community Farmers’ Market out of the rubble of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; the market’s growth and evolution over the ensuing two decades, and the pleasures and challenges of managing year-round farmers’ markets in an agriculturally rich, socially diverse, sometimes politically contentious community.

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 a series of California Secretaries of Agriculture on the implementation and enforcement of the California Organic Foods Act of 1990. With UCSC agroecology professor Steve Gliessman, he helped establish one of the first organic farm advising services based at a university. In 2000, the Organic Farming Research Foundation’s (OFRF) Third Biennial National Organic Farmers’ Survey identified Swezey as the most frequently cited “Favorite University Researcher for organic production information.”

In this interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin on November 24, 2008, at UCSC’s Program In Community and Agroecology, Sean Swezey discussed his training in biological pest control at UC Berkeley; his international advising; his research with transitional and organic apple, strawberry, artichoke, and cotton crops; his administrative work with UC SAREP; his collaborative work with farmers, and his university teaching.

After the recorded interview had concluded, Swezey shared his view of California’s Central Coast as a remarkable seedbed for the development and promotion of organic agriculture, saying, “I can’t think of a place that had as many thinkers, doers, and dreamers as Santa Cruz County. This was such a center. And [it’s not just] Santa Cruz County; there was Monterey… This is a fairly unique confluence. We had markets; we had the most accomplished commodity people—super-talented, visionary scientists and growers.”

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 route between New Spain and Alta California. He began gardening in earnest while living on communes in Northern California. He had a stint as dishwasher and prep cook at an early San Francisco vegetarian café (Good Karma) and as an employee of the city’s first natural foods emporium (New Age)—both owned by Fred Rohé, whom Cantisano calls “the founder of the whole natural foods movement.” These experiences, plus exposure to Rodale Press’s Organic Gardening magazine and a speaker’s warnings about chemical pesticides at San Francisco’s first Earth Day celebration, clinched Cantisano’s early interest in organic food.

While living on the shores of Lake Tahoe in the early 1970s, Cantisano and some friends started a natural foods buying club. This evolved into a wholesale distribution company and retail storefront, eventually introducing him to many organic growers and producers in California and beyond. He was involved in early efforts to certify organic farms and products, helping to found California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), and he collaborated in the production of an early organic-products trade journal.

Cantisano has also worked as an organic farmer, growing a variety of crops over the years in a succession of California locations. His search for a reliable source of organic inputs led him to found a farm supply company, Peaceful Valley, which grew at an astonishing pace and currently operates under different owners in Grass Valley, California. His desire for better communication among organic growers in California prompted him to organize a 1981 gathering—featuring a talk by pioneering beneficial-insect purveyor Everett “Deke” Dietrick—that evolved into EcoFarm (whose organizers have recently dropped the hyphen in their moniker.). Cantisano established the first organic agriculture advising business in the country, and served for many years as the only independent organic farming advisor on the West Coast. Operating for more than two decades now as Organic Ag Advisors, he has consulted with hundreds of small and large growers of fruits, vegetables, wine grapes, grains, and other crops—advising both organic farmers and those making the transition from conventional farming.

A lively narrator with vivid recollections of many significant chapters and characters in the history of California organic culture and agriculture, Amigo Bob Cantisano has countless stories to tell. Sarah Rabkin interviewed him on April 7th and 9th, 2008, in the farmhouse kitchen of his Heaven and Earth Farm, located on the San Juan Ridge in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, north of Nevada City.

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 bowled over, and fell in love with it, and felt, I have to do this.” Martin had no training as a gardener. His unfinished undergraduate studies were in English; his interests leaned toward writing and literature. Suddenly infatuated with the Chadwick garden nonetheless, he attended public lectures given by Alan Chadwick on the campus and in town. In 1972, shortly after Chadwick had left Santa Cruz and the UCSC Farm had been launched, Martin began volunteering several days a week at the Farm and Garden. When the apprenticeship program there became formalized under Chadwick successor Stephen Kaffka, Martin applied; after completing the apprenticeship in 1975, he received a grant to start a community gardening program in various locations around Santa Cruz County. In 1977, UCSC hired Martin and a colleague named “Big” Jim Nelson (not to be confused with the Jim Nelson interviewed in this series) to oversee the Farm and Garden. More than thirty years later, countless productive garden beds, fruit trees, and former apprentices bear vital testimony to the effectiveness of Martin’s ministrations. In this interview—conducted on July 11th and August 29th, 2008, at UCSC’s Science and Engineering Library—Orin Martin spoke with Sarah Rabkin about his work with the Farm and Garden and the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, his cultivation of an organic rose collection and orchards of citrus and deciduous fruit tree varieties especially suited to the local climate, and his mentorship of Farm and Garden apprentices.

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. Students and teachers from urban high schools make monthly farm pilgrimages throughout the school year. Guided by Lawson and Vail and other Pie Ranch staff, they experience hands-on learning about soil, compost, weather, weeds and water; the cycles of planting, tending, and harvesting crops; the challenges and rewards of working as a group, and the pleasures of cooking and eating wholesome food from scratch.

Pie Ranch also offers year-long apprenticeships, summer internships, monthly work parties and barn dances, and a variety of educational programs and cultural events. Travelers and locals can sample the farm’s wares at a roadside farm stand downhill from the farm fields, on coastal Route 1—near the historic Steele dairy lands that Pie Ranch, in cooperation with the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), is working to protect.

Jered Lawson and Nancy Vail both bring a wealth of experience to the Pie Ranch project. Lawson is a UCSC community studies graduate and a former Apprentice in Ecological Horticulture at the UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). Between his first two college years, Lawson spent a formative summer at Stephen and Gloria Decater’s Live Power Community Farm in Covelo (Mendocino County), where Alan Chadwick—Stephen’s mentor at UCSC—had been invited to establish a garden project in 1972. Live Power had recently launched the first community supported agriculture (CSA) program in California. Lawson went on to initiate and oversee a CSA program for Santa Cruz’s Homeless Garden Project, and later did the same for CASFS. Increasingly interested in CSA as a marketing strategy for sustaining small farms, he organized a 1995 Western Region CSA conference and created a statewide CSA advocacy and outreach program campaigns for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). He also helped establish farm-to-school and buy-local programs for CAFF, and did similar work with the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley.

Nancy Vail, a graduate of UC San Diego, began learning about farming in a series of post-college internships abroad. Returning to the U.S., she apprenticed with writer-farmers Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, at Angelic Organics (whose proprietor, John Peterson, was celebrated in the 2006 documentary “The Real Dirt on Farmer John”), and at biodynamic Hawthorne Valley Farm in Columbia County, New York. Like Lawson, Vail also apprenticed in the CASFS program, eventually staying on as a second- and third-year apprentice. She went on to share oversight of the UCSC farm operations with Jim Leap, and managed the CSA that Lawson had inaugurated in 1995. After Vail and Lawson’s first child was born, she moved into a part-time position as farm-to-college program coordinator for CASFS. In early 2008, she left CASFS to attend to childrearing and Pie Ranch full-time.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Jered Lawson on March 4th, 2008, at Rabkin’s home in Soquel, with a brief follow-up interview in the Science and Engineering Library at UC Santa Cruz on March 18, 2008. Rabkin interviewed Nancy Vail in the same library conference room on March 18, 2008. These interviews covered Lawson’s and Vail’s individual histories prior to the founding of Pie Ranch. On December 11, 2008, at the offices of UCSC’s Program In Community and Agroecology and Community Agroecology Network, she interviewed Lawson and Vail together about the founding and development of Pie Ranch.

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 interest in garden-based science education began with a love of natural history. As a college student, she transferred from Carlton College in Minnesota to UC Santa Cruz, where she double-majored in environmental studies and biology. Among her formative educational experiences was UCSC’s celebrated Natural History Field Quarter. After graduating in 1983, she worked in outdoor education jobs for the National Park Service, the Yosemite Institute, and the Headlands Institute in Marin County. Eventually, desiring more sustained contact with students, she earned a teaching credential at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

While working as an elementary science specialist in Watsonville and Santa Cruz, Perloff took a Life Lab teacher training, which inspired her to revive an old garden patch at her school. “There was nothing as exciting,” she said in this interview, “as walking into the classroom and the kids would see my keys for the garden, and they would just jump up and down and say, “El jardín! El jardín!”

Perloff began leading Life Lab teacher workshops herself on weekends, and soon was flying around the U.S., funded by a Department of Education program called the National Diffusion Network, to train Life Lab teachers in other states. She joined the Life Lab board of directors, and in 1990 accepted the job of education coordinator.

In this interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin at the UCSC Science and Engineering Library on July 9th, 2008, Erika Perloff described the colorful variety of projects and initiatives that have occupied her attention at Life Lab. She also reflected on the national impact of the program, and its possibilities for the future.

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 the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and was the first secretary of that organization.

Krupnick cultivated farm-restaurant connections in the Bay Area, collaborating with Rosalind Creasy on the book Cooking from the Garden, tending a restaurant garden where she grew produce for Jessie Ziff Cool’s Flea Street Cafe and Late for the Train restaurants on the San Francisco Peninsula, and helping organize the Tasting of Summer Produce festival at the Oakland Museum. Still later, Krupnick managed the trial garden and did outreach and marketing at Shepherd’s Garden Seeds in Felton, California. At the time this interview was conducted, she was coordinating the four-acre educational market garden for the Santa Rosa Junior College Sustainable Agriculture Program.