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.

Catherine Barr manages the Monterey Bay Certified Farmers’ Markets (MBCFM), a consortium that includes the oldest and largest farmers’ markets on California’s Central Coast. Founded in 1976, MBCFM now boasts a total of more than eighty vendors at four locations, including Aptos, Monterey, Del Monte (also in Monterey), and Carmel. (At the time when this oral history was recorded, MBCFM had a now-discontinued market in Salinas, while the Del Monte location had not yet been established.) Certification ensures that the fruits, vegetables, meats, and other products available at these markets are grown or raised in California by the farmers who sell them.

Barr moved in the late 1960s from the eastern US to Santa Cruz, where, she jokes, she discovered that vegetables do not originate in a can—“my first real shock as far as to where food really came from.” Her agricultural education continued when she married a fourth-generation flower grower, Jonathan Barr, and moved with him to Mexico to grow vegetables. After the Barrs returned to California in 1993, Catherine responded to a newspaper advertisement for a market manager, and beat out ninety-five other applicants.

In this interview, conducted by Sarah Rabkin at the Barr home in Corralitos, California, on May 13th, 2008, Catherine Barr described the responsibilities and challenges, pleasures and pressures entailed in managing multiple year-round farmers’ markets.

Conducted by Ellen Farmer on June 8 and September 22, 2007, Melody Meyer’s oral history documents the extraordinary transformation of the organic foods sector between the 1970s and the early 21st century. Meyer was born in Iowa in 1960; she was introduced to organic and natural foods at age sixteen, when she began working at a natural foods co-op in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She moved to Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and joined Community Foods, a collectively owned, collectively run natural foods store, where she stayed for six years. There she met many local organic growers who came to sell their produce in the store and through its affiliate, Santa Cruz Trucking.

After leaving Community Foods, Meyer became Watsonville Coast Produce’s first woman buyer, developing an organic distribution program. Later she was hired by Ocean Organics, an organic foods distribution company located in Moss Landing, California. She moved on to work for six years for Scott Hawkins of Hawkins Associates, where she pioneered transporting organic produce from California to distant markets such as Bread and Circus, Wellspring Grocery, Mrs. Gooch’s, and other small natural food store chains in the Midwest and on the East Coast, many of which were eventually bought by Whole Foods. In 1995, Meyer left Hawkins to start her own distribution company, Source Organic. Her Jack Russell terrier, Dylan, became president of the company and had his own voice mail and e-mail account. Dylan settled under the table during the oral history, and his contented snores can be heard on the audio recording of this interview.

In 2000, Source Organic became a subsidiary of Albert’s Organics, which in turn was bought by United Natural Foods International (UNFI)—a reflection of increasing consolidation in the organic foods industry. In 2006, New Hope Media awarded Melody Meyer the Spirit of Organic award, honoring organic leaders nominated by their peers in the industry.

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.

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.

In its March/April 2009 issue, Mother Jones magazine called Tim Galarneau “the Alice Waters of a burgeoning movement of campus foodies.” Galarneau is a co-founder of the Real Food Challenge, a national campaign promoting sustainable food sourcing in college dining halls. In his day job with UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), he coordinates the Center’s Farm to College project. Since his undergraduate days at UCSC, Galarneau has helped spearhead numerous initiatives to transform the way the nation’s schools, hospitals and other institutions navigate the high-volume acquisition and preparation of food.

Galarneau and others brought about one such transformation—now a model for other institutions—on their own home ground. Students at UC Santa Cruz look out from their hillside campus over rich agricultural lands, including the 25-acre CASFS farm in their own backyard; yet until 2005, they had little access to locally grown organic food. Now, thanks to several years of collaborative effort by students, staff, and farmers, all of the UCSC dining halls daily serve certified organic produce; they also provide coffee purchased directly from farming communities that have personal relationships with UCSC students and staff, thanks to the UCSC-based Community Agroecology Network (CAN). The campus contracts for organic produce with a consortium of local farmers; carefully developed purchasing guidelines not only prioritize the direct acquisition of local, organic food, but also emphasize equitable labor relationships, environmentally friendly farming practices, humane animal husbandry, and a university food service that is as much about education as about feeding a hungry campus population.

Sarah Rabkin interviewed Tim Galarneau on March 19, 2008, in his office at UCSC’s Oakes College. He described in detail the path that led him into farm-to-institution research and advocacy; he discussed the effort to transform food sourcing at UCSC and elsewhere, the new tools and techniques for social organizing that he and others have successfully employed in service of a food revolution, and his larger vision for the future of food.

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.

If we had to choose one individual who most inspired us to undertake this historical project about sustainable agriculture, it would be Bob Scowcroft, currently the executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation. In 2005, as we were beginning to explore the roots of this movement, we came across the transcript of a speech that Scowcroft had recently made at the Ecological Farming Conference (Eco-Farm). Scowcroft challenged the audience:

One can’t focus on the future until one has a solid grasp of the past. One of our collective failures has been the lack of attention paid to our written and oral history. Only two or three of the participants in the “Asilomar Declaration” [a statement in support of sustainable agriculture that was drafted at a three-day congress immediately before the 1990 Eco-Farm Conference and ratified by the 800 individuals who attended that conference] discussion are here today. Several have passed away. Others have left the sustainable-agriculture universe. Who has collected their papers? Where is the Center for Organic [Farming] History Research? Who is collecting the oral histories of these and many other important attendees?

Who is Bob Scowcroft? we wondered, and the rest is history, or rather the documentation of history.

An activist, Bob Scowcroft first joined the environmental movement to work on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in the early 1970s, and later became a national organizer on pesticide issues for Friends of the Earth (FOE). As organizer for FOE, he set up a table at the Natural Foods Merchandiser Trade Show, advocating a ban on Agent Orange because of the drift of that herbicide onto nearby farms. Barney Bricmont (also the subject of an oral history in this series) and two other organizers from the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) paid a visit to his table, and introduced Scowcroft to the organic farming movement. Scowcroft soon became the first professional environmentalist to attend and present at the Ecological Farming conference, then held at a muddy church camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Scowcroft moved from the Bay Area to Santa Cruz, and in 1987 was hired as executive director for CCOF. He led that organization through tremendous expansion during the exponential growth of the organic industry over the next few years. In 1992, Scowcroft left CCOF to found and direct a spin-off organization, the Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), whose goals are to “sponsor research related to organic farming practices, to disseminate research results to organic farmers and to growers interested in adopting organic production systems, and to educate the public and decision-makers about organic farming issues.” He has served as executive director of OFRF for the past seventeen years.

In 2006, the Ecological Farming Association awarded Scowcroft the prestigious “Sustie” award for lifetime achievements in sustainable agriculture. He has been engaged in nearly every political development in the national organic and sustainable agriculture movement in the past twenty years—from the controversy over the contamination of apples with the pesticide Alar in the late 1980s, to the fight to pass the California Organic Foods Act of 1990, to battles over federal standards for organic certification in the 1990s, to recent lobbying efforts to secure more funding for organic farming research in the Farm Bill. This in-depth oral history with Scowcroft, conducted by Irene Reti on December 18, 2007, and January 11, 2008, at her house in Capitola, California, provides a vivid, “in-the-trenches” perspective on the history of this social movement that is transforming the agricultural and cultural landscape of the United States.

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.