A Farming Odyssey
Growing up in the tumultuous 1960’s, I embraced in my early adulthood what was called the ‘Back to the Land Movement’, an attempt to find a simpler and more peaceful lifestyle out in the country. In 1969 I sat in on my one college class, Organic Farming, taught by organic farming pioneer Dr. Bargyla Rateaver.
I then embarked on a fifty-year agricultural odyssey, one that put me repeatedly at the helm of some of the most exciting and influential farming ventures of the last half century.
Looking back, I was out front on every progressive part of agriculture: studying organics in the 1960's, practicing regenerative agriculture in the 1970's, pioneering the locavore movement in the 1980's, taking organics mainstream in the 1990's. Introducing new crops, new ways to grow, always striving to be a good labor manager, and never, ever compromising my ideals.
And I was able to do this without education, my own land, or government support. Most importantly, I did it with real life farming - not conceptually - showing the world these things could be done with scale and profitability.
Farming was most everything for me: my livelihood, my art, my gym, my sense of purpose, my way of impacting the world, my church. An emotional and financial rollercoaster, it was excruciatingly difficult, sometimes unbearably so. But that only added to the sense of accomplishment when successes came. Over time, the successes came almost unabated.
The Farm: 1971-1981: Planting Seeds
In 1971, my wife and I became founding members of the nation’s largest intentional community – or ‘commune’ – called ‘The Farm’, in middle-south Tennessee, not far north of the Alabama border. Despite my youth and relative inexperience, I ended up in charge of growing the community’s food. As the community grew to 1,500 people, including our four children, that responsibility became an enormous one, a journey filled with glorious successes, disappointing failures and a never-ending education.
We were practicing vegans, so producing our food meant growing it, not raising livestock. At our peak, for several years, we were able to grow 90% of the community’s food on more than 1,000 cultivated acres within a fifty-mile radius – something that has not, to my knowledge, been repeated since.
We grew soybeans, and processed them into soy milk, tofu, ice cream and more. It grew a variety of other dry beans, including kidney, black, pinto and lima beans, plus dry black-eyed peas. It raised every major grain but rice – white corn, yellow corn, wheat, oats, barley, rye and buckwheat – and milled its own flours and cereal products. Peanuts, popcorn and sesame seeds added variety to the diet.
We grew a great array of summer vegetables – sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers and green beans – with a strong influence from regional favorites – okra, crookneck squash, butter beans and black-eyed peas. Cool weather crops were mostly greens – cabbage, collards, turnip greens and acres and acres of kale (long before kale was cool). A large canning and freezing operation turned our excess produce into canned tomatoes, pickles and frozen vegetables for the winter.
We grew larger acreage of potatoes and sweet potatoes for twelve-month supplies. Sweet potatoes were both a dietary mainstay, and selling certified sweet potato seed stock and transplants became a cottage industry. A two-story potato barn housed sweet potatoes up top where it was heated and onions and potatoes down below.
Forrest soil, compost, sand and sawdust were trucked in for what was a very sophisticated plant growing system. We dismantled and reconstructed a large glass greenhouse that was complemented by numerous cold frames, all heated by a wood burning boiler that was also used, organically, to sterilize the soil mixes.
And we were deeply committed to improving our soils. Crews went out daily to shovel out walking horse stables, clean cotton gins full of nitrogen-rich waste, gather fields of spent hay and more. Every scrap of food waste on the Farm was collected and composted – an enormous accomplishment. A box car each of rock phosphate and granite dust, were added to the fields.
We were pioneers in using cover crops, decades before cover crops were common. We used a mix of red clover and barley for fields we wanted to turn in early and hairy vetch and rye for fields we could leave in to late spring. And we grew all our own cover crop seeds, planting the legumes and the grains separately for better harvest.
And while the land owned by the community needed a lot of improvement, we were close to farm land in neighboring counties that were world renown for their phosphorous rich soil. This allowed us to grow most of our grains and beans with relatively little fertilizer (potassium for the legumes, both potassium and nitrogen for the grain).
In early years we made money growing and producing sorghum molasses. And later we attempted growing vegetables for both wholesale and retail markets, including two winters in Homestead, Florida, the nation’s southernmost growing region, but inexperience in marketing produce and Florida’s coldest weather snap in a half century forced us back to focusing on feeding ourselves.
After eleven years at The Farm, I moved away with my wife and children. Our kids had literally grown up eating what their dad had grown. And I had an education in farming and working with others that would benefit me during my entire career.
Trinity River Farm: 1982-1985 and present: Growing Roots
The next four years was a family affair. It was after returning from World War II that my father joined in with my mother, uncle, two aunts and grandparents to buy the most beautiful piece of property they could find in Northern California, along the scenic Trinity River north of the small town of Willow Creek.
Dad never succeeded at making a living farming and eventually moved our family ten miles north onto the Hoopa Indian Reservation where he taught school, then later down to the Bay Area suburbs. The farm even sold once, before ending back in the hands of my Uncle Fred.
The awe of nature, love of the land and the desire to grow things became part of our family DNA.
In 1973, two years after I launched my farming career in Tennessee, my brother Tom returned to the family land and began farming vegetables and caring for the fruit trees. So, for my second farm operation, I became partners with Tom on Trinity River Farm.
With deep rich soil - water available right out of the river and beautiful warm summers, the farm became known for its flavorful tomatoes - and later on, peaches - as well as a cornucopia of other fruits and vegetables. Everything was sold and still is sold right at the farm, with now a second produce stand in the nearby town of Willow Creek.
Tom and I started a bedding plant business when I was there in the 1980’s. The demand heightened for ornamentals at that time and my brother is encyclopedic with his knowledge of flowers. Demand exploded again all these years later, with the onset of Covid in 2019, so my niece created an add-on array of succulent plants and a beautiful pick-your-own bouquet flower garden.
Tom, my sister-in-law Kay, my nieces Susan and Molly, and Susan’s husband Jordan have turned the farm into a thing of beauty that provides a spectacular array of fruits, vegetables and plants for the local community and summer tourists. I spent much of the last two seasons helping them out and plan to be back up there the first of spring. Getting to farm with family on the land I was born on has made me fall in love with farming all over again.
Genesis Farm, 1986-1990: Branching Out
After four years with my brother, I decided to strike out on my own. I quickly found an employment offer with an agricultural training program for Southeast Asian refugees run by Catholic Charities in Livermore, California, about an hour outside San Francisco. I took on the job of Farm Manager.
I immediately went to work building Genesis Farm, putting in 25 acres of vegetables on the farm’s flat, Class 1 soil and another 120 acres of small grains on its rolling hills. A dozen men from Laos, many of them farmers, became my crew. My kids ran the produce stand in the summer when they were out of school.
Moving to Genesis corresponded with the birth of several new seed companies – Le Marche, Shephard’s Seeds, Ornamental Edibles – offering new and exciting varieties coming from Europe and Asia, as well as some long-overlooked American heirlooms. And the San Francisco Bay Area was the epicenter of what became know as California Cuisine-food crafter around the supply of local, seasonal and fresh produce.
Genesis became an early provider of year-round, baby-sized varietal lettuces for the region’s high-end restaurants that were creating colorful and tasty salads.
The number of fruits and vegetables in the modern supermarket tripled in the 1980’s. My mentor, Bill Fujimoto, ran the renowned Monterey Market in Berkeley, CA. Bill and Monterey Market were at the forefront of introducing new vegetable varieties and rediscovering some old ones.
Tomatoes were my number one crop at Genesis and I planted both determinate and indeterminate varieties. We picked fully ripe tomatoes each day. We’d pack them out in the afternoon, load the truck and deliver early the next morning to Monterey Market, other markets and terminal buyers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
In our third year, 1988, Catholic Charities dropped their project and I took over their farm, adding another 100 acres of vegetable land in nearby Sunol, CA. But struggles lay ahead. I was never well capitalized and when my well went dry on the home farm the next summer followed by the earthquake taking down the Bay Bridge between me and many of my customers, I began wondering what the future held.
Genesis Farm was a great experience for me and I found out that if I kept learning and gaining experience, the opportunities in farming would keep coming.
In 2008, when the Slow Food movement held its first national convivium in San Francisco, Genesis Farm was honored as one of the “pioneers of the locavore movement.” During the ceremony at Greens Restaurant(one of my former customers), hosts Alice Waters and Bill Fujimoto were surrounded by press cameras when they saw me walk into the room. After not seeing me for almost 20 years, Bill pushed people out of the way and said he wanted to have his picture taken with “a real farmer.”
TKO Farms, 1990-1995: My Salad Days
When a study came out in 1990 linking agricultural chemicals in apples to birth defects in children, the demand for organic food skyrocketed overnight. There was only one problem – no one was producing any sizable volume of organic product.
One enterprising man, who had worked at some of the country’s best-known high-end restaurants, stepped up. Todd Koons started TKO Farms (Todd Koons Organics) on the first organic farm in Salinas, California and then went looking for someone to manage his production while he introduced packaged salad mixes, varietal lettuces, baby spinach, Asian mustards, arugula, radicchio, frisee and many other new items to the American consumer who had been eating salads made of iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes for decades.
After visiting numerous farms across the state, Todd asked me if I would run his farms. It was like getting called up to the major leagues – maybe the Yankees. Every field I planted, every move I made would be watched by the other farmers as the crops were all new and on top of that, organic. Todd already had a dozen workers and I quickly enlisted them in helping me manage the production. All the extra eyes were critical as we tried to control insects and weeds organically on a scale that had never been done before.
I also had to come up with a year-round, uninterrupted supply of two dozen salad crops with harvest windows measured in as little as a few days. To do so, I converted a network of prime conventional farmland ranging from California’s central coast down to the Mexican border into intensive organic production. I trained the crews to grow, harvest and pack up what would become 40,000 boxes of gourmet salads a week.
My job tasks included finding the land, securing the water, transitioning to organic production, purchasing the equipment, hiring the crews and putting it all into production. I was responsible for the production, the sales projections, budget and most of the labor. I traveled to Europe and Japan to get seeds and worked with American seed companies to develop new, exciting and disease resistant varieties.
Our salads were purchased by the nation’s leading chefs, the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton White Houses and every Oscar, Emmy and Grammy ceremony during that time. We became the first organic supplier for food distribution giant Sysco and most US supermarket chains.
Equally notable was our labor management. I worked alongside my crew. With twenty years of farming already under my belt, I did not have to ask anyone to do something that I did not enjoy doing myself. I focused on creating things often missing in the lives of farmworkers – personal recognition, opportunity to advance, a fair and equitable environment. I also developed mathematical win/win situations for employees. For every box they grew/harvested/packed, their pay would increase and my cost per unit would decrease.
For five years TKO had phenomenal growth, making it one of the most watched farms in the country. In a short timespan we jumped from 12 employees to 500, from 30 acres to 1,600 and from $300,000 in annual sales to $25,000,000.
I look back at my days at TKO (Todd called it ‘Todd Koons and O’Gorman’) fondly. It was fast-paced, exiting and fun – while having a huge impact on how the nation ate and farmed.
Earthbound Farm/Mission Organics, 1996-1997: Scaling Up
Early in 1996, a whirlwind of investments and acquisitions led to an almost overnight reshuffle of the organic salad business. Drew and Myra Goodman, owners of Carmel-based Earthbound Farm, and one-time competitor of mine, were catapulted to the head of a powerful new organic grower/packer/shipper consortium named Natural Selection Foods. I got hired by the new company to manage Mission Organics, its organic farming division.
Packaged salads, including the spring mixes we popularized at TKO, were the backbone of the new business. Many of my employees, landlords and growing partners came over to the new company with me, giving the company a solid base of organic farmland, growing capacity and market share. The new owner/investors began upgrading the packing and packaging processes, creating its own blended organic fertilizers and mechanically harvesting baby salad products.
We also began adding a lot more organic acreage, growing quickly to over 3,000 acres in production. This included new land around Yuma, Arizona, the winter producing region fed by the Colorado River, fields in the southern – and warmer - end of the Salinas Valley, and new holdings up and down the ‘Westside’ region of California’s Central Valley. One fun farm was Earthbound’s home farm in Carmel, which offered a wide array of fresh vegetables and flowers sold directly to local customers, very much like the operations at Trinity River Farm and Genesis Farm.
In addition to our salad crops, I was now planting and harvesting fields of full-size lettuces (iceberg, romaine, green leaf, red leaf and butterhead), as well as broccoli, cauliflower, celery, green onions and much, much more. We were becoming a one-stop shop for year-round organic vegetables.
I was introduced to a lot of new techniques: using labor contractors (‘contratistas’) to help with transplanting, thinning and weeding, and running mobile ‘walk-behind’ harvest platforms to pick and pack crops like broccoli and lettuce in one pass through the field. Simultaneously, I learned a lot of new organic practices as well. Earthbound had a long-time relationship with ‘Amigo’ Bob Cantisano, who mentored us all on the use of beneficial insects, compost teas and soil amendments.
Earthbound was a different type of experience for me. Nominally, I was in charge, but the new owners’ vast experience in volume vegetable production had me essentially reporting to them. I no longer handled the crop plan, the budgeting, the hiring or the equipment purchases. But what I gave up in autonomy, I gained in knowledge and experience.
One crop my new partners did not know well was tomatoes, so I eventually moved over to managing their tomato production. I was handling plantings throughout California and, for the first time, in three different states in Mexico. Particularly memorable was our plantings in Sinaloa, where the heart of Mexico’s winter vegetable production lies, partnering with one of the two organic growers there at the time. This would be my first experience with indoor production.
I worked through the winter in Yuma, Arizona. I would check on crews harvesting broccoli and lettuce close by, then head south across the border to eat lunch at a taco stand and visit our baby salad and cherry tomato fields. I’d get back to Yuma in time for dinner, and the arrival of a truckload or two of large tomatoes from our Sinaloa farm.
I got to experience every aspect of the operation that got fresh organic vegetables out of the fields and onto the dinner tables across the country. Feeding America its vegetables is dependent upon a partnership with the good people of Mexico. It is a business that relies on the backs, the hearts, and the goodwill of our Spanish speaking neighbors.
Jacobs Farm/Del Cabo, 1998-2008: The Harvest
After two seasons at Earthbound, I wanted to farm in a way that was closer to my ideals. I wanted more latitude to run it the way I wanted to run it and, if possible, continue farming in Mexico. My old boss at TKO, Todd Koons, brought me to meet Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin, owners of Jacob’s Farm/Del Cabo, Jacob’s Farm was a grower of organic culinary herbs in Central California and had started a unique grower’s cooperative, Del Cabo, with 150 landowning families in the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula.
Larry and Sandy had met on Elliot Coleman’s farm in Maine, and were close friends with Helen and Scott Nearing, whose book, Living the Good Life, inspired a generation of back-to-the-landers. The Del Cabo growers were producing high value basil and cherry tomatoes and air-freighting them to Los Angeles. They asked me to go to the Northern end of Baja to start growing basil and tomatoes in the summer when it was too hot for them down south.
After several months of driving down dirt roads, greeting local farmers over fencerows, and gaining their trust, I was able to help a number convert some fallow land to certified organic and start production the first of 1998. I would mentor the growers, grow their transplants, provide them with organic inputs, sort and pack their crops to head to the states, at first just a few pallets a day with a local trucker.
By my second year, I started renting our own farms, still producing about 30% with outside growers, and building five unique growing regions from the middle of the peninsula north. Eventually we had 1,000 employees farming 1,600 acres under my management, shipping 3 to 4 semis north each day. Demand for our vegetables and herbs skyrocketed once we were able to establish year-round production.
Small tomatoes became my biggest crop, eventually planting 700 acres on poles each year. Grape tomatoes quickly took over cherries, and over time we began breeding and adding our own unique and colorful varieties. By the time I left Del Cabo, my group was packing a half million clamshells of organic small tomatoes a week, 10% of the US market, and the overwhelming majority of organic ones.
My second crop was basil which we would bunch for retail sale and pack loose for restaurants. Bulk boxes were pre-sorted and sent to Los Angeles and San Francisco for placement in retail packs. At first, growing basil was stressful, mostly for its post-harvest challenges, but I grew to love it, and we soon were shipping a semi-load of fresh cut organic basil a day.
Another important vegetable for us was peas – determinate English peas and indeterminate snap peas and snow peas that we would grow on poles. Being a legume, the peas were great for rotation, and we got to reuse some of the 130 semi loads of stakes we had purchased for our tomatoes. Equally important, the November through May harvest kept many of our employees working year-round.
Mexico is the largest exporter of tomatoes in the world, and most of it is now done indoors. I got to grow 30 acres of indoor, trellised tomatoes, rotating with cucumbers. Our tomatoes were organic, planted and cared for in soil, just as we would outside; the structures kept out wind, dust and disease vectoring insects. I got to learn from some amazing growers down here, most notably my friend David Rifenbark, who shared some of his insights for a recent FVC conference.
Coming to the end of 2007, I was President (Administrador único in Mexican legal terms) of Agroproductos Del Cabo. I oversaw a growing region that stretched from the Northern end of Baja California down to Vizcaíno in Baja California Sur. I was also the only American employee. It was time to let the Mexicans run the company.
The Del Cabo growing region I developed thrives today, and hundreds of farms have since converted to organic production. The farms are now run by the children and grandchildren of my first growers, who benefited from steady employment, fair compensation and help each year with school supplies. Many of the children finished their education because of this advantage and are now doctors, lawyers and agronomists.
Farmer Veteran Coalition 2008 to present: The Next Generation
Figuring out what to do next was not easy. One large American company wanted me to manage their production across four countries: US, Mexico, Guatemala and Chile. Others wanted me to start my own company. But my heart was telling me something different.
I wanted to help new farmers, in part because of my own success as a first-generation farmer, but also because I knew how much we needed them.
And so many things were pointing to working with veterans. My daughter was at Ground Zero on 9-11. My son joined the military a few weeks later. The Carsey Institute came out with a report about how disproportionately rural our all volunteer military had become. I had an inspiring conversation Carolyn Mugar, Director of Farm Aid, about her work with soldiers returning from Vietnam.
Walking away from farming at the zenith of my career, and stepping into doing something that was almost non-existent at the time - helping the men and women coming home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to become farmers – was not without some trepidation.
But there was a palpable energy in the idea. When the first veterans that embraced farming got involved, a powerful story about hope and transformation emerged. As the story circulated on social media and was featured in Dulanie Ellis’s seminal documentary Ground Operations: Battlefields to Farmfields, farming became a new mission to a growing number of veterans.
I formally began Farmer Veteran Coalition (FVC) on February 12, 2009 and was immediately invited to be a part of the Coalition for Iraq + Afghanistan Veterans (CIAV). My first presentation about veterans and agriculture at one of their DC conferences was attended by a dozen USDA leaders. By the very next day, Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, embraced our effort.
The question soon became, not would we grow a national organization, but what type of organization did we want to be?
I wanted an organization that reflected my love of American agriculture, my deep belief in the opportunity it offered and my affinity with all those that got up early to put food on our table, even if they farmed differently from me.
We encapsulated those ideals in our Guiding Principles. Support came from Farm Credit, Farm Bureau, and Farmers Union, in a rare show of industry unity - as well as AgrAbility, which helps farmers with disabilities realize their farming potential. Those groups helped build FVC, and they sustain it today.
I wanted to support collaboration. Many projects by many organizations would sprout up to help veterans find their place in our agricultural community. FVC would be there to support them wherever and however we could.
We also succeeded in getting support for veterans written into the 2014 Food and Farm Bill, including the establishment of the office of Military Veteran Agricultural Liaison. Funding became available for organizations that helped veterans learn to farm, and veterans gained priority access for grants in numerous NRCS and FSA programs.
Two FVC projects stand out from my time at the helm of the organization. The Homegrown By Heroes label gave veterans a way to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, becoming both a financial boost and a well-deserved sense of pride.
The Farmer Veteran Fellowship Fund has awarded more than $3.5 million in small grants, making critical purchases of farm equipment, livestock and other items on behalf of veteran farmers and ranchers. Kubota Tractor Corporation has strengthened the Fund with its donation of five tractors every year through their Geared to Give program. The Fund has been so effective in enhancing the farm and ranch businesses of FVC members that I have chosen it as my priority moving forward.
Also important to FVC are our stakeholder conferences. For veterans living and farming in our most rural communities, getting to meet other farmer veterans leads to lasting bonds of support, friendship and opportunities to learn from each other. As farming helps our members find a new mission, our conferences help them find new camaraderie.
Farmer Veteran Coalition has touched many lives. According to the testimony of our members, it’s saved many. Working closely with men and women at the moment of their transformation from experiences at war to that of farming, and creating life, has profoundly enriched my own life.