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.

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 of this excerpt; and to Jerry Thomas, who called our attention to the existence of Lönnberg’s oral history with Pasqual. The complete oral history with Nick Pasqual, entitled A Very Rough Road: The Life of Nick Pasqual, is available in the Special Collections Department of the UCSC Library.

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.

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 about ‘the deep recesses of the compost pile.’ Again, it was love at first sight. She had her first professional gardening experience in 1970, as an employee of the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California. Starting Four Sisters in 1978 on marginally fertile land in the hills of Aromas, California, she and Robin have since built up twenty-eight inches of topsoil using compost and green manure. They grow kiwi fruit, apples, avocados, greens, and flowers.

Gammons’ involvement with farmers’ markets goes back to her participation in the founding of markets in San Francisco (Alemany Market), Berkeley, and downtown Santa Cruz. The Watsonville market hired her as manager not long after its 2000 inception. Under her leadership, it now hosts some forty vendors, and provides unique income-generating opportunities for local Latino farmers and food vendors.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Nancy Gammons on Monday, January 26th, 2009, at Four Sisters Farm in Aromas, California.

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. When Harley fell in love with Tim Duarte, the local restaurateur who eventually became her husband, Pescadero became her new home.

Harley took up residence on a nine-acre farmstead originally built in 1910 as a cow dairy—and shuttered, like many small local farms, after California’s industrializing dairy industry migrated to the Central Valley. She worked for a while for Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin at nearby Jacobs Farm. In 1982, she acquired six goats from a local dairywoman. The herd began to grow; one thing led to another, and Harley Farms was born.

Sarah Rabkin conducted this interview with Dee Harley on April 8th, 2009, in a private residence at Harley Farms. Outside the small cottage, guard llamas looked on while goats played atop a chicken tractor in the middle of a green pasture; small children participating in a farm tour reverently cradled newborn kids; flowers bloomed in garden beds. Dee Harley described the origins and evolution of her business and the day-to-day life of her small farm. She also articulated the values that inform her choices as a farmer and a businesswoman: deep community ties; a sense of responsibility to the local economy; dedication to the health of the herd and the land; creation of a high-quality product; truth in advertising; a sense of whimsy; a fierce resistance to unrestrained growth, and commitment to the preservation of an intimate, sustainable operation.

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.

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 products.

Nelson was an early protégé of Alan Chadwick at the UCSC Garden, where he met his first wife, Beth Benjamin. After leaving the Garden, the couple briefly experimented with farming in Canada. They eventually returned to Santa Cruz, where one day Chadwick shared with them a letter he had received from a Boulder Creek landowner, Cressie Digby, who expressed interest in providing four acres for young organic farmers to cultivate. In 1971, Nelson and Benjamin established Camp Joy Garden on Digby’s land

In this interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin in Jim Nelson’s home at Camp Joy Gardens in Boulder Creek, California, on August 20th and October 23rd, 2008, Nelson talked about the founding and early days of the UCSC Garden, his experiences with Alan Chadwick, the creation and evolution of Camp Joy, and his philosophy as a farmer-educator. Two farm dogs slept nearby on the living-room floor, and the scent of ripe pears drifted in from the kitchen, which was filled with crates of newly harvested fruit.

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 Roseman and two other partners; the other two are owned by local resident Bob Locatelli.

New Leaf contributes up to ten percent of its profits annually to local nonprofit organizations. The business pioneered a sustainable-seafood labeling program named Fishwise, as well as many other marketing and educational innovations. Their newest location on the Westside, just around the corner from the original location of Our Neighborhood Co-op, opened in March 2009. As of this writing, New Leaf faces competition from two new Whole Foods stores sited only a few blocks away from two of their locations. Recorded at a key historic moment, this interview documents the corporatization and ongoing consolidation of the natural foods industry over the past twenty years.

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 from Cornell University, and now directs UC Davis’s Center for Integrated Farming Systems. He is also director of the California Biomass Collaborative and extension specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He chairs the BioEnergy Work Group for the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and participates on several advisory committees for the California Energy Commission and California Air Resources Board. Kaffka conducts research on water quality and agriculture in the Upper Klamath Basin, and the reuse of saline drainage water for crop, forage, energy biomass feedstocks and livestock production in salt-affected areas of the San Joaquin Valley. He has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University in agronomy and a B.S. from UC Santa Cruz in biology. In May, 2008, Kaffka was the subject of an NPR documentary, “Are Organic Tomatoes Better?” which featured his research comparing the nutritious value of organic versus conventionally grown tomatoes.

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, he harvested grapes in 110-degree heat—straining to keep pace with his fellow workers, and learning firsthand about the human costs of large-scale, profit-first farm practices.

After graduating from Fresno High in 1973, frustrated by the circuitous and drawn-out aspects of political activism, Leap sought to challenge the agribusiness status quo in a more direct, hands-on way. He ended up founding a successful small farming operation of his own, where he emphasized sustainable methods, drawing inspiration and guidance from innovative Central Valley growers. He also worked as crop production manager for a federally funded program that trained Native American farmers, a position that enabled him to run field trials for novel production techniques.

At thirty, Leap returned to school, completing an agricultural science degree at Fresno State while maintaining his farm, and graduating with honors in five years. He envisioned continuing on to a master’s degree and eventually becoming a farm advisor. Instead, at a friend’s urging, he applied for the operations-manager position at the UCSC Farm, and was offered the job, which has been more than a full-time occupation ever since. Sarah Rabkin interviewed Jim Leap in the Regional History Project offices at McHenry Library, UCSC, on June 9, 2008.