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.

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

Gliessman’s activities in the field of sustainable agriculture are extensive. He founded and directs the Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA), an experiential living/learning program at UCSC. He heads UCSC’s Agroecology Research Group, an interdisciplinary body of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, research associates, postdoctoral researchers, and international visitors from the agroecological community. In 2001, Steve and his wife Robbie Jaffe (also interviewed in this series) started the Community Agroecology Network (CAN). CAN’s goal is to help a network of rural, primarily coffee-growing communities in Mexico and Central America develop self-sufficiency and sustainable growing practices. CAN markets coffee directly to individuals, institutions, and markets in the United States. Those who wander through the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers’ Market can sample and purchase CAN coffee at the market, UCSC students can drink it in campus dining halls and cafes, and everyone else can order the coffee and have it shipped to their home. CAN and PICA also co-sponsor the International Agroecology Short Course, which Gliessman has taught since 1999 in venues as diverse as Costa Rica, Mexico, and Vermont.

A consummate storyteller, Gliessman reflected on the diverse aspects of his life in agroecology in this comprehensive interview conducted by Irene Reti on three different occasions: April 16, May 25, and June 12, 2007, in his offices on the UCSC campus. Gliessman’s office shelves are packed with books and journals, conference programs, buttons, posters, and other archival material representing forty years of reading and publishing in his field. He assured Reti that he “never throws anything away.” He sometimes referred to these books during the interview; at one point he held up a packet of heirloom seeds from Brazil, at another a bottle of olive oil from his own organic orchard and vineyard, Condor’s Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California—a place close to his heart.

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

Today the California Certified Organic Farmers is one of the oldest and most influential organic certification and trade associations in North America. Janet Brians kept the minutes and records in the early years of the organization, and Grant became the most prolific organic certifier for CCOF in the 1970s through the mid-1980s. He is currently on the board of CCOF. An activist as well, he traveled to Sacramento to lobby for the California Organic Foods Act (COFA) of 1990. Heirloom Organic Gardens is but the latest incarnation of Grant’s organic farming activities. In the second part of this interview, Grant Brians reflects on his more than thirty years in the organic farming movement.

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.

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.

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.

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

Benjamin married another Chadwick protégé, Jim Nelson; in the early 1970s, the two of them moved to four sunny acres in Santa Cruz County’s San Lorenzo Valley in order to build their own blooming Eden. Still thriving in 2009 as a non-profit educational organization, Camp Joy Gardens offers, according to its mission statement, “a model for an alternative future, a trial ground to experiment with, develop and practice organic techniques and explore related philosophies and ideas.” Camp Joy sponsors farm apprenticeships, educational offerings for children and adults, and a community supported agriculture program. Locals flock to the Gardens’ annual spring plant sale and its fall harvest celebration, which features dried-flower wreaths, varietal honeys, and other Camp Joy bounty.

Eventually, Benjamin and Nelson amicably went their separate ways. Since then, Benjamin has worked a number of jobs, including several years with Renee Shepherd’s garden seed company. Although she has not lived at Camp Joy in more than two decades, she remains actively connected to the enterprise. She also volunteers with the Friends of the [UCSC] Farm and Garden—sustaining the legacy she helped create more than forty years ago.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Beth Benjamin at Rabkin’s home in Soquel, California, on June 30, 2009.

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.

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

In this oral history, conducted by Ellen Farmer on March 20 and May 7, 2007, at Thomas Farms, the Thomases describe how what began as a large garden grew into Thomas Farms, now one of the oldest organic farms in California. Jerry was invited to participate in Rodale’s organic certification program that pre-dated California Certified Organic Farmers, and was a founding member of California Certified Organic Farmers. He helped draft the first state organic legislation in 1979. Jerry has served as a County Farm Bureau director and as a member of the County Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee, and frequently speaks at the Ecological Farming Association’s Eco-Farm conference. He has served on the Monterey Bay Certified Farmers’ Market board of directors.

Jean helps run Thomas Farms, and also teaches adult education courses in writing, science and math. A watercolor and monoprint artist, Jean serves on the Pajaro Valley Arts Council; in 2007 she curated Market Motion, an art show about the farmers’ markets in the Central Coast area.

The Thomases have represented the Community Alliance of Family Farmers (CAFF) as members of the Campaign to Save Pajaro Valley Farmlands and Wetlands. They mentor younger organic farmers, and participate in many local farmers’ markets, where their booths are distinguished by a dazzling plethora of colorful sunflowers, zinnias, irises, lilies and other cut flowers.

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

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

As the kitchen garden for upscale Manresa restaurant in nearby Los Gatos (Santa Clara County), Love Apple enjoys a symbiotic business relationship with the two-Michelin-star restaurant and its executive chef-proprietor, David Kinch, who often visits the farm. While Sandberg grows a wide variety of produce for Manresa and for sale in her seasonal on-site farm cart, she specializes in heirloom tomatoes, of which she produces more than 100 varieties. (Locals sometimes refer to her as “The Tomato Lady.”) She sells tomato starts every spring, and teaches popular classes on a wide variety of topics including growing tomatoes from seed, building tomato cages, and gardening in containers. And she has cultivated an effective online marketing strategy centered on her blog/website.

Farming is a second career for Sandberg, a former attorney. She unwittingly launched her new life in the early 1990s, when, hoping to improve her rudimentary gardening skills, she enrolled in horticulture classes at Cabrillo, Santa Cruz County’s community college. A few years later, her early-spring gardening preparations proved unexpectedly successful, and she found herself puzzling about what to do with 290 excess tomato seedlings. She arrayed them in the driveway along with a sign and an honor-system money jar—and passersby quickly snapped them up. Thus was born Love Apple Farm.

“Love apple” is an old French name for the tomato, historically associated with aphrodisiac qualities. The farm’s name also commemorates Harry Love, a former Texas Ranger who led the attack on Mexican Robin-Hood figure Joaquin Murrieta and his band of outlaws in San Benito County in 1853. Sandberg has been told that the house she inhabits, now surrounded by garden beds and greenhouses, was built with Love’s reward money.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Cynthia Sandberg on the back porch of Sandberg’s Love Apple farmhouse in Ben Lomond, California, on March 9, 2009.