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.

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 trips and events.

Harlamoff grew up in a (then) relatively rural section of suburban Soquel, in Santa Cruz County, with a large garden that provided much of the family’s food. Her own struggles as a hands-on student in schools that emphasized rote memorization, and the strategies she cultivated to overcome those struggles, yielded insights that later helped her excel as elementary school teacher. In 1987, during Harlamoff’s first year teaching school, a Life Lab workshop for teachers rekindled her childhood interest in gardening, and set her on a path that led to joining the Life Lab staff in 1996 and eventually taking on the executive director position.

Sarah Rabkin conducted this interview at Harlamoff’s home in Soquel, California, on July 8, 2008. Harlamoff told detailed stories about children excelling in garden-based settings who had struggled in conventional classrooms. Outside the house, goats played and rested in a large fenced area, while in Harlamoff’s kitchen, adjacent to the room where the interview was being conducted, her exuberant dogs got into occasional bouts of benign mischief.

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 of Programs and as manager of the organization’s Rural Development Center and Farm Training & Research Center. Since the time of this interview, she has taken a research position with UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. And she opines regularly about farming, food, and social justice on her blog, HonestMeat.com.

Thistlethwaite grew up on the fringe of a Portland, Oregon, suburb, with a love of the outdoors and an interest in environmental issues. She majored in natural resources management at Colorado State University, with a semester abroad in Belize studying ecology, biology, and sustainable agriculture. While working as a ranger in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, she sampled organic produce proffered by a backpacker. That taste lured Thistlethwaite into an apprenticeship with the farmer who produced it: Mary Jane Butters, of Paradise Farms—a former wilderness ranger herself.

Other farm apprenticeships followed, and then a master’s degree in international agriculture and development at UC Davis. After graduate school, Thistlethwaite worked and studied in Guatemala and Honduras, pursuing interests in tropical agriculture and biodiversity, eventually returning to the U.S. to work for ALBA. After she and Dunlop met at a California Small Farm Conference in 2002, they founded TLC Ranch.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Rebecca Thistlethwaite on July 15, 2008, at Thistlethwaite and Dunlop’s home in Aromas, California.

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 to restaurants and sells at farmers’ markets, where he creates eye-catching displays to attract customers.

In his mid-twenties, Perez is one of the youngest organic farmers to run such a burgeoning enterprise. His success testifies not only to his dedication, skills, and entrepreneurial savvy, but also to the effectiveness of the program that mentored him and his father in organic farming: the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA). The son of Mexican-born parents, J.P. was born in Salinas, California, in 1983. When the young Perez was a teenager, his father, who was growing raspberries and cut flowers on five acres of leased land in Watsonville, offered him the choice of working full time with him in the fields, or concentrating on school. Fully aware of the hard work and low pay he could expect as a farmer, J.P. opted for school and opportunities for alternative employment.

As it turned out, Perez’s academic career took him full circle. After trying a variety of majors at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), he gravitated toward earth systems science and policy. This field of study led him into two internships with ALBA and another at Serendipity Farms in Carmel Valley. Eventually, J.P. persuaded his father, Pablo (the “P” in “J & P”) to enroll with him in ALBA’s Programa Educativa para Pequeños Agricultores (PEPA), which trains small farmers in organic production methods and marketing techniques.

Pablo and his wife, Florencia, now oversee most of the farming operation on acreage that the family leases from ALBA, while J.P. takes primary responsibility for sales and marketing. The family hopes to buy its own farmland, where they aim to raise livestock and orchards as well as row crops.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed J. P. Perez on June 22nd, 2009, at Rabkin’s home in Soquel, California.

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, and other benefits including an employee stock ownership program. In 2006 Cochran received the Honoring Advocates for Social Justice in Sustainable Agriculture (Justie) Award from the Ecological Farming Association.

Cochran began Swanton Berry Farm in 1983 because he wanted to try to grow strawberries organically. He was the first (modern) commercial organic strawberry farmer in California, and in 1987 the California Certified Organic Farmers certified his farm. Cochran’s methods became a resource for other organic strawberry growers, and in 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded him the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award for developing organic methods of growing strawberries that did not rely on the soil fumigant methyl bromide. A key component of Jim’s success was his partnership with UC Santa Cruz agroecologists Steve Gliessman and Sean Swezey in on-farm research.

Travelers along the North Coast of Santa Cruz County visit the Swanton farm stand on Highway One, where they pick strawberries by the sea, and savor the fabulous jams, truffles, strawberry pies, scones and other treats concocted in the kitchen. When no one is minding the store, customers pay on the honor system, a lesson in trust that Cochran encourages. A photo exhibit documenting the agricultural history of Santa Cruz County and of the United Farm Workers is displayed above long comfortable tables where customers sip coffee supplied by the Community Agroecology Network.

Ever a visionary, Cochran joined the Roots of Change Council’s Vivid Picture Project, which is “daring to dream up a comprehensive vision of a sustainable food system in California.” He discusses all of these aspects of his career in this interview conducted by Ellen Farmer on December 10, 2007, at Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, California.

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 led to her involvement in the North Valley chapter of the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). She became an inspector for CCOF, and in 1985 began serving on the CCOF board that developed the first organic certification standards and materials list in California. She is a founder of the Organic Materials Review Institute, and worked as a contractor with the National Organic Standards Board and the USDA to develop federal organic standards. Sonnabend is also a lifetime member of the Seed Savers Exchange and teaches classes in Seed Saving at the UC Davis Student Farm and at the UCSC Farm and Garden. She works on diverse projects for the Ecological Farming Association, and until 2008 coordinated the Eco-Farm conference at Asilomar, an enormous task. Irene Reti conducted this oral history at the Ecological Farming Association’s offices in downtown Watsonville, California, on April 23, 2007.

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 as irrigation and laser leveling.

Attracted by the organic price premium, Peixoto decided to transition to organic farming, and began Lakeside Gardens on a 55-acre farm in Watsonville in 1996. His conventional farming friends thought he had “lost his marbles,” but Lakeside Gardens has been very successful and Dick has become a spokesperson for integrated pest management, hedgerows and other organic farming methods. The company has expanded their operation to a total of 1200 acres, including fifty different parcels in the Pajaro Valley, many of which border on hospitals and schools trying to reduce pesticide exposure. Lakeside also farms on 500 acres in El Centro, making them one of the larger organic growers on the Central Coast and in California. They grow 75 different crops. All of their produce is California grown, and shipped by Albert’s Organics and other organic food distribution companies across the country to grocery stores such as Safeway and Kroger’s, as well as Whole Foods.

Peixoto is outspoken on food safety, water supply, open space preservation, and other issues affecting agriculture, and is often quoted in the media on these topics. Ellen Farmer conducted this oral history on April 18, 2007, at Lakeside Organic Gardens in Watsonville.

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, cherries, nectarines, peaches, pears, and persimmons throughout the year. (A rarer delicacy available to a few farmers’-market patrons are home-grown capers, the pickled flower buds of plants propagated from a thirty-year-old bush planted by Betty’s mother.) Betty Van Dyke and her three sons took over from her father in the mid-1970s. While son Peter and various grandchildren now carry most of the day-to-day responsibility for the ranch, Betty still holds down two weekly farmers’-market booths, and commutes frequently to Gilroy from her Santa Cruz home to help with ranch work during busy seasons.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Betty Van Dyke at Rabkin’s Soquel home on April 16, 2008. A lively storyteller with an easy smile, Van Dyke shared memories of picking apricots on her grandfather’s farm as a small child, working and playing alongside migrant dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma and Arkansas, discovering surfing as a college student in the 1950s, and running an evolving Van Dyke Ranch.

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.

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 in Kentucky, then to an apprenticeship at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and finally to his current position at the Homeless Garden Project.

The Homeless Garden Project runs a two-acre market farm in Santa Cruz that trains low-income and homeless community members in sustainable agriculture, also supporting a CSA that provides organic fruits and vegetables to Santa Cruz County residents. As farm manager of the Homeless Garden Project, Glowaski brings together his passions for economic, social, ecological, and food justice. With his friend Cooper Funk, Glowaski also runs Urban Eggs, a consulting business that teaches city residents how to raise chickens in their backyards. This interview with Paul Glowaski was conducted by Irene Reti on February 9, 2009 in the Regional History offices at McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz.