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.

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.

María Inés Catalán was born in Santa Teresa, Guerrero, Mexico, in 1962. She immigrated to the United States in 1986 and picked broccoli and carrots in the Salinas Valley of California. Her father was also a migrant farm worker, but her grandfather had owned land that the family farmed in Mexico. Catalán’s life took a different turn when in 1994 she entered an organic farming training program at the Rural Development Center in Salinas. (This was an earlier incarnation of what is now known as ALBA, the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association program). This incubator program helps farm workers become organic farmers by providing training in farming and marketing, and leasing them land.

After graduating, Catalán became the first Latina migrant farm worker to own and operate a certified organic farm in California, and the first Latina in the country to found a farm that distributes produce through a community supported agriculture program. María Inés and her family have run Catalán Family Farms on fifteen acres of rented land in Hollister, California, since 2001. Their farm was certified organic by CCOF in 2005. The Cataláns grow kale, chard, strawberries, tomatoes, corn, onions, pumpkins, chiles and carrots, among other crops that they sell through Laughing Onion CSA and at farmers’ markets around the Salinas, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay areas, including the Ferry Plaza Market in San Francisco, and the Berkeley Farmers’ Market.

In addition to her farming, Catalán is also an activist who devotes herself to improving food security for low-income communities, especially Latinos. She worked with the group P.O.D.E.R. (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights), in San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission district, to deliver CSA shares to their members. Over the years her CSA project has also collaborated with schools and churches, and with the Homeless Garden Project’s CSA in Santa Cruz; it has delivered boxes to people who are home-bound, and provided information about her CSA in Spanish. Catalán set up a farm stand outside the government office in Monterey County, on the day when women pick up their WIC (Women, Infant and Children) allowances. She founded her own non-profit, Pequeños Agricultores en California (PAC), to help immigrant farmers acquire organic certification, helping them apply for grants and loans and work towards owning their own land. Catalán Farms also invites local high school and college students to visit and learn about organic farming. A group of eighth graders camps out each year for a week at a time and works the land. In 2008 Catalán was honored by the Center for Latino Farmers for “her tireless work in advocating for organic farming and assisting limited resource producers using her own funds.”

This oral history was conducted on July 27, 2009, in Spanish, by Rebecca Thistlethwaite. Thistlethwaite and Catalán know each other from Thistlethwaite’s work as program director for the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association. The interview was transcribed and sent to Catalán for her edits and approval. Then it was translated into English. The transcript appears here first in English, and then in the original Spanish.

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.

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.

United States Congressmember Sam Farr, one of the political heroes of the sustainable agriculture movement, was interviewed by Ellen Farmer on August 23, 2007. A fifth-generation Californian, Farr was born in 1941. He is the son of California State Senator Fred Farr, who sponsored a law requiring toilets in the fields for farm workers, as well as other landmark environmental legislation.

Sam Farr began his career in public service in 1964, in the Peace Corps in Colombia. Before his election to the House of Representatives in 1993, Farr served for twelve and a half years in the California State Assembly. In 1990, Farr authored the California Organic Standards Act, which established standards for organic food production and sales in California. This piece of legislation became one of the models for the National Organic Program’s federal organic standards. Farr now serves as co-chair of the National Organic Caucus in the House of Representatives, and worked with organic policy activists to increase support for organic farming research in the federal Farm Bill.

Recognizing the contributions of the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program to the field of sustainable agriculture, Farr secured a line item for the program in California’s higher education budget. Speaking before the 110th Congress on October 4, 2007 (in remarks entered into the Congressional Record), Farr said, “Since entering Congress, I have worked hard to share the story of the UC Santa Cruz Farm's important work with my colleagues. Congress has responded with a total of over $3 million in direct appropriations to the UC Santa Cruz Farm since 2000 to assist with its important research and extension work with the rapidly expanding organic farming sector. Indeed, the UC Santa Cruz Farm’s influence has been far-reaching, inspiring many sustainable agricultural programs at other universities, including UC Riverside, Cal Poly, and USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.”

Ellen Farmer had some previous contact with Sam Farr through her graduate studies in public policy at California State University, Monterey Bay—a program with which Farr has close associations. She interviewed Farr at his office in Santa Cruz.

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.

Andy Griffin runs Mariquita (“Ladybug”) Farm on twenty-five acres in Watsonville and Hollister. In collaboration with Steven Pedersen and Jeanne Byrne’s High Ground Organics in Watsonville, Griffin and his wife, Julia Wiley, sell much of their produce through a community supported agriculture venture called Two Small Farms.

Possessed of a quick mind and a powerful command of language, a wry and robust sense of humor, and strong opinions gleaned through extensive experience in the farming and marketing of organic produce, Griffin is also a prolific writer, blogger, and radio commentator. With farming roots reaching into California’s 1970s organic-farming renaissance, he has plenty of stories to tell.

The great-grandson of California farmers and son of a plant ecologist, Griffin took agriculture classes through the Future Farmers of America program at Carmel High School, then went on to UC Davis to study range management. Disillusioned by the pesticide-heavy focus of that program, he eventually completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

Griffin’s practical education took place in a series of jobs on farms—including Cargill-owned sunflower fields in Davis, an organic garden that supplied produce to Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, the Straus family dairy and Warren Weber’s Star Route Farms in Marin County, and a ranch in Santa Barbara County. After stints as a produce distributor, he eventually established Riverside Farm with partner Greg Beccio. The proceeds from that successful salad-greens business funded the creation of Happy Boy Farms, now run by Beccio—and eventually helped Griffin establish Mariquita Farm.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Andy Griffin at her Soquel home on November 6th and December 16th, 2008. In addition to rollicking anecdotes, Griffin’s extensive transcript provides trenchant insights into the evolving economics of organic production, distribution, and marketing on both small and large scales.

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.

As a community organizer focusing on sustainable agriculture, Reggie Knox has become a kind of Renaissance Man of sustainable agriculture, working with a remarkable number of organizations serving farmers. He currently works with California FarmLink, helping keep the state’s farmland in agricultural production while connecting farmers with technical and financial assistance as well as affordable land. He coordinated the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) Lighthouse Farm Network, connecting a statewide network of growers, advisors, researchers, and other agricultural professionals interested in reducing pesticide use; he eventually became CAFF’s state program director. He worked with California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) on national standards development.

Knox grew up in Davis, California, and spent summers in the Sierra Nevada, where he developed enthusiasm for natural history. As a child he worked in a backyard plot with his father; in high school, he created an extensive garden with some friends as an independent study project. As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, Knox became interested in the intersections of agriculture and community development when he took a course with prominent California agriculture scholar Bill Friedland on the economics and politics of United States agriculture. He double-majored in earth science and community studies.

Knox’s early farming experiences began during his senior year in college. Various internships and jobs connected him with influential local farmers such as Frances Corr and Dennis Tamura of Blue Heron Farm, Sam Earnshaw and Jo Ann Baumgartner of Neptune Farms, and Mark Lipson of Molino Creek Farm. He interned with Lipson in the offices of CCOF (a position that eventually became a paid job), and with the Natural Resource Conservation Service (then called the Soil Conservation Service).

Knox also conducted a ten-month field study in France, working with a regional natural park. A Rotary Foundation scholarship took him to Sri Lanka to do agricultural research and consulting. He spent six months in Japan, including a visit to Masanobu Fukuoka’s model no-till grain farm. He attended an International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) conference in Burkina Faso, traveled in Northern Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Botswana, and consulted for AID in Madagascar.

This interview with Reggie Knox, conducted by Sarah Rabkin in her Soquel home on December 8, 2008, reveals some of the ways in which these varied experiences and influences have informed Knox’s current work, contributing to his efficacy as an agrarian community organizer.