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Steve Pavich

Steve Pavich opens his tale with one of the more frightening reasons to become an organic farmer. He

was well acquainted with the troubles and joys of farming, having grown up in a farm family in Delano.

Steve attended California State University at Fresno from 1967-71, at the height of anti-establishment

struggles on college campuses everywhere. The rebellions of those times, his curious mind, and his

commitment to good health led him into his organic farming journey, and that of his family with him.

The family’s huge commercial endeavor was unique in scaling up organic farming at the time, and as he

notes, the Paviches helped set the standard for many years.

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A Near-Death Awakening

It was in July, 1971, when a little paddlewheel on the bottom of the agitator had fallen off in the tank of

the spray rig we used to spray zolone and omite dibromide, a bunch of organophosphates and

carbamates in our fields. We needed to bolt that paddlewheel back on inside the tank. The tank was

empty, except for a little bit of water inside it, but it was still fuming with toxic chemicals inside there.

I said to the guy, José, who’d told me it was broken, “Just go ahead and repair it.”

He says, “I’m not going in that tank!”

I said, “Why not?”

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He goes, “You think I’m stupid? Going inside that tank with those fumes? We got to clean the tank out

first. We can do it tomorrow because that tank is just too toxic now.”

I should have paid attention to him because he was a lot smarter than me. I said, “What are you? A man

or a mouse?”

He told me, “I’m a mouse.”

So I said, “I’ll show you what a real man can do.” And I went in that spray tank.

In two seconds I was overcome by fumes. He had to pull me out of the tank, saying, “¡El stupido! I told

you not to go in the tank!”

When I could breathe again, I admitted, “I’m really sorry. I am el stupido.”

That experience naturally made me question: How can these chemicals in that tank be good for

anything? Not only did we spray it into the air like a nerve gas in a war, but it gets into the water, into

the soil, into farm workers and owners of operations on these farms. Getting overwhelmed by those

fumes just solidified for me the fact that those chemicals can’t be good.

I realized we had to find an alternative, a better way of farming. I was very frustrated with all the

problems on our farm, but not ready to give up yet. I loved farming. It was my whole way of life.

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Family Farm Origins

Our family had moved from Tomales Bay to Delano when I was five years old. It was a big change from

the ocean fog. When we moved to the Delano sunshine and 105 degree temperatures, I just wore shorts

and went barefoot all summer. We had a ball living on a farm with no boundaries. We’d leave on our

bikes at 8 a.m. and come back at 5 o’clock at night. We’d ride horses bareback, swim in reservoirs and

ditches. We weren’t rich kids, but we had freedom that few city kids or rich kids have.

My father also taught his kids to work. He emphasized, “You have to know how to work and

accomplish what you say you’ll do. If you’re going to do something, do it efficiently and just get it

done! Then you have plenty of time to play.” I’d help my dad irrigate. He taught me how to drive a

tractor and a jeep through the fields. You learn a huge diversity about how things work at a young age.

It seems that most kids now don’t know how anything works, except their texting. As farm kids, we had

a broad introduction to the world, and it was fun. I was my dad’s shadow. He’d say, “Go get the jeep.”

I’m seven years old and driving the jeep!

My dad’s a wonderful human being, always there to support me and guide me. Even when I got in

trouble, he knew how to discipline me. I was a rebel from day one. I questioned everything. I wasn’t

trying to fight him. I’d just always ask, “Why are we doing it that way?”

My dad would complain, “Why can’t you just do what I say and not question everything? We’re doing it

that way because I said so.”

I’d persist, “I know you said so, Dad, but why would you do it that way instead of this way?”

We’d have these spirited conversations that I loved. My dad let me be me, with my own personality.

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Precursor to Conversion

I did go off to college and finished a bachelor’s degree in plant science from Fresno State. I thought I

was supposed to know everything or at least something. But it seemed like everything that I

implemented in the field failed. My dad would look at me and say, “It’s not working, Steve. Whatever

you did, and whatever I did, both of us have failed at making this chemical system work properly.”

We tried a lot of different angles, but our farm location was unique. The quality of the irrigation water

we pumped was five times worse than on anybody else’s farm. It had salt and hydrogen sulfide in it,

which gives off a rotten egg smell. When we added the commercial fertilizers and everything else, it

made the situation worse. So it wasn’t just that day in the tank. We were having a hard time every day,

making rounds on the farm and seeing everything looking terrible. I was thinking, there's got to be a

better way.

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Influences and Epiphanies

The tank incident was the biggest event, but I probably had four or five major events or influences that

contributed to finding my path to organic. In the beginning our farm was very small, 130 acres of table

grapes in Richgrove, California. By the time I graduated from Fresno State in 1971 and came home, we

had about 240 acres, and then we purchased some property that year, which took us to about 450 acres.

My dad had been using the conventional chemical systems for about twelve to fifteen years, and they

were exploding in his face. When I got back, the problem was severe. My dad wasn't trying to defend

grapes that lacked flavor or that were getting eaten up by bugs. He just wanted a solution that would

work and be sustainable and made economic sense so we could stay in business. Meanwhile all the

principles of biology, cell microbiology, plant physiology were collapsing because of the over-

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chemicalization of the soil. At college, they’d taught me that chemicals were good. So the answer to

good farming, I believed, must be that my dad didn’t know which chemicals to use.

I was going to show him that the Ortho Chevron Chemical Company technologist

in Richmond would lead us into a nirvana of growing the best table grapes

anywhere. That was my premise. In half a season I realized it was an utter failure!

We were just putting more chemicals on a chemically wasted system.

I trusted that I had the necessary tools from the university and from major corporations whose business

is to grow crops. I thought they’d teach farmers how to use insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides to

put nature into submission. Now that idea really strikes me as wrong-headed, that we’ll overcome

anything that nature throws at us, as if nature were the enemy. In my mind, nature should be our friend,

and if we truly do study nature, we can use that knowledge to overcome whatever we face.

Meanwhile, nobody at that time had defined the word organic very well. I was trying to understand what

I wanted to do, but there wasn’t much information. There was Lady Balfour and the soil association, and

Rodale on organic gardening stuff, but that wasn’t appropriate for farming. I’d read Silent Spring by

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Rachel Carson. She taught me about disasters, but not how to farm. Dr. Van Den Bosch1 from Berkeley

was also questioning pesticides. But nobody was putting together the commercial enterprise of

producing food organically and delivering it to your customer organically. How do you apply those

strategies to many more acres on a commercial farm? I’d felt lost.

Then a real epiphany for me happened under a grapevine on August 29th, about 3 o’clock in the

afternoon, 1971, in the Emperor table grape field. I literally got down on my knees to ask, “Now what?”

1 Robert Van Den Bosch professor of entomology, chairman of the Division of Biological Control at the University

of California at Berkeley, and one of the world's most outspoken proponents of integrated pest management. His

book The Pesticide Conspiracy came out in 1989.

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I remember being underneath that vine, just like it was yesterday. I put my hands up in the air and said

“If there’s a power or some supreme being, Buddha, whatever, would you please help me out? Because I

really love farming. I don’t want us to go down the tubes without having a chance to make it work.”

Then I got a message from God. “Give credit where credit is due in nature, and the answers will come to

you.”

I accepted. “Okay, we’ll see what happens here.”

The very next day my mom made a beautiful lunch for the family. We were reading The Fresno Bee,

and the Country Life section was open to an interesting article. This guy had a natural technique of using

limestone to make soils healthier and more vibrant, more microbially diverse, with an increase in yield,

all in a natural way. My dad said, "Look at this!" It was like a lightning bolt coming into the room.

That's how our organics basically got started. We invited that man to the farm. His name was Watt

McGugan because he was a bright as a light bulb, and that was his nickname, Watt. He ended up

teaching me everything I know about chemistry. He had worked on the Manhattan Project back in the

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late ’30s in Chicago. He was that brilliant of a chemist. After six months there, he decided to come back

to agriculture and put his mind to use for saving the planet.

For me, it was an amazingly odd segue from praying under the grapevine to the next day my “savior”

coming to me, saving us from ourselves, and starting us on a long journey. Watt McGugan was the

catalyst. He was my mentor those first years.

We took Watt’s first lesson from the newspaper about applying lime, and it was so dramatic. When we

first put the limestone on, just a little thin layer on top of the dirt, it completely changed the chemistry of

the soil. We were amazed. That was our first success.

First Lessons in Organic Farming: Composting

Composting was important from the start. After we met with Watt, I wanted to make compost right

away. But we still had lots of questions, like how you make enough for a large scale farm, and how you

turn and spread it. It was problematic to make all your own compost; we had to make around 5,000 or

6,000 tons a year in the beginning. Eventually that grew to 20-30,000 tons, which was a lot of compost.

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We got in touch with a gentleman from Colorado named Ray Duvall who had a small company called

New Era Farm Service,2 of which I became a financial investor. Ray had a gentleman involved who

made the first commercial compost turning machine in the United States, the windrow machine, built in

1953. We learned you had to make the compost with the right timing and amount of water applied. We

used our first seaweed in 1972 from a company out of Norway. Nobody was using seaweed back then to

put on their plants, but we immediately recognized its value. All these methods he had were amazing to

us at the time.

When we first looked for a good manure source, I was pretty picky. I wanted to know how the farmer

himself was farming the alfalfa or barley, and whatever they were using as a feed source. How heavily

2 http://www.newerafarmservice.com

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chemicalized was it? How many antibiotics were they using in their animals? We knew that high

amounts of antibiotics in the compost pile could be detrimental to the composting process, the

thermophilic digestion. We found a dairy of an old country Portuguese gentleman in West McFarland

who did really good work, with a low antibiotic system, so we made quality manure out of that.

We also used pomace from a winery. Nobody ever liked to use it, so we took it. It was free. Later, when

we had land in Arizona, we used gin trash, a great composting material. It was hard to manage because it

was always balling up. Eventually, it’d break down. It took a lot of water and management, but the end

results were great. We had a lot of trials and tribulations. If you didn’t water properly as the heating

process is taking place, it can dry out, and then you have to start over again. You can make all kinds of

mistakes. The timing has to be plus or minus 10% of right where it needs to be. Otherwise you can lose

a compost pile very quickly and have far greater problems with it.

The first time we made compost, we thought we were short of magnesium in our field, so I put dolomitic

limestone in the compost pile. Halfway through, I said, “Okay, we’ll mix this in and see what happens.”

Well, the amount of dolomitic limestone dropped into that pile killed the microbes sensitive to that

limestone. That environment was too hot. The microbes were screaming, “You’re frying us!”

We had lots to learn! We learned we could cut the composting time almost in half by using humic acid.

About thirty days into the initial heating up process, you put about one to two gallons per ton of humic

acid in the pile. That accelerates the process, so the compost is done in about 65 or 70 days instead of

105 days. That was a really interesting lesson. Over time, we evolved to make even better quality

compost and ended up with the Luebke compost system from Austria. I emphasize quality, not half

baked, because most of the compost today is about half-way or two-thirds done because of the cost.

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The Smell of a Good Soil

I was beginning to understand that we have trillions of species that occupy the planet, yet we know so

little about them. 97% of all microbes have not even been discovered or analyzed. Conventional farming

techniques have tried to force these microbes into submission without really understanding how soil

biology works. The attitude was that microbes were inconsequential. So what if you killed a few? Plenty

more microbes out there will survive your chemical onslaught in order for you to produce more yield,

more grapes, more everything. We never questioned the negative impact on soil microbes.

From the first day I started farming organic, microbes hit my consciousness.

“Boom!” I saw it when we grew cover crops and put on limestone or rock

phosphate or compost. Quality of inputs is crucial. It goes back to giving credit

where credit is due: that is, soil microorganisms doing their work.

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Enacting Changes, Living Between Communities

After I went through my epiphanies, I got to a point where I thought I knew how to farm better. But

remember I’d been living in a different universe in the late ‘60s. I came home to Delano, a very

conservative farm area, where if your hair was even close to below your ears, you were a hippie. And I

had long hair back then, not really long, but down to my shoulders. My parents would hear, “Wow, what

happened to your son? He’s a hippie.”

My mom told me, “You need to cut your hair.”

I insisted, “Mom, I like it this way.” They rolled their eyes and lived with it.

At the same time, I was trying to find out why conservatism would be anti-organic. What's so wrong

with organic if it’s better? It was a paradox, living in a very politically conservative community while

these seemingly radical practices, like growing your hair long or going organic, were occurring.

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I myself crossed between communities. Conventional people would say I looked like a crazy hippie.

Then when I did cut my hair some and I’d go visit the hippies, they’d look at me and say, “You look like

you’re pretty conservative. Are you a CIA plant? We don’t know if we can trust you.”

In those early days of turmoil, trust was something we had to gain. People would say, “Oh, they’re a

bunch of dope smoking hippies,” but some of those folks became my best friends, and it wasn’t about

smoking dope or anything else strange. I’d go visit their farms, and yeah, it was a little “hippy dippy,”

but it was okay. I didn’t want to go there and critique them and say, “You know, your plants look like

they need a little water. You better get out there and irrigate them now,” or tell them there were too

many weeds. I’d go, “Where’s the squash? All I see is weeds!” We’d have fun.

My friends actually did ask me to critique them. “Steve, tell us where we screwed up.”

I’d say, “A plant likes to have freedom to grow. If it’s being crowded out by weeds, it’s really hard for

the freedom of that plant. You can have a few weeds. At my place you see some weeds under the vine,

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yet the vine seems to be doing well. It’s a happy symbiotic relationship. But if it’s a one-sided

relationship and the weeds are taking over, your plants pretty much go south.”

Sometimes they’d push back on our big scale production. “Oh, you’re just a capitalist farmer.”

We’d laugh about it. I found out they were really good people. They wanted to save the planet and they

were dedicated to what they were doing. They weren’t going to let money run them.

For me, too, in the beginning, I wasn’t in it for the money – or even later on. I was forced to pay bills, of

course. You couldn’t be financially reckless! But going organic was the right thing to do, and so I

figured God would somehow provide for us all on the financial side, as long as I did the right thing.

Painting the Ecology Symbol on the Pavich Water Tank

My wife at the time, Karen, was a sweet woman, very supportive of the organic thing and very helpful

in many ways. She had some distant relatives of hers that floated in from Denmark. These guys were all,

"Yah, yah, organic!" They were hippies, into the Whole Earth Catalog of 1977 and the green movement

and its symbol.

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I told Karen, “They don't know anything about farm work! They’re from Copenhagen.” But I asked

them, “Maybe you know how to paint."

"Oh yah, we're good painters."

I said, "Okay, you can paint that water tank."

Karen picked a bright orange color. Then they said, "Why don't you put the Earth-green peace symbol

on it? It's an organic farm. It would be a nice symbol.”

I agreed to it. My dad really didn't care. So people would drive by and see a bright tank painted in crazy

colors with the ecology symbol in green on the side. My brother thought I was out in left field

sometimes. We had fun with some of these frivolous things that we did. "If people don't like it, so

what?" Back then, it looked like organized graffiti.

All About the Green: The Nitrogen Fix

I loved talking to the old-time growers, learning about their methods. I’d go to the oldest guys in their

eighties, hunched over, barely able to walk. They'd always tell me great stories. I often asked, “How did

commercial fertilizers work out for you?" This one guy, Art Murray, was a cotton farmer from

Oklahoma. Old Art goes, "Damn, Steve, I put that commercial fertilizer on, and all of a sudden it went

from a bale and a half to three bales to the acre overnight! I couldn't believe how it worked."

I said, "What happened subsequent to that?"

He says, "Ten years later I was back to the bale and a half I started with, but I was spending more money

on pesticides and everything else, and making less than I was back on the bale and a half back ten years

ago!"

I said, "That didn't get you much."

"Yep. That's why I'm the ditch tender now in the irrigation districts." He lost his farm.

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Back then that lesson from Art taught me about commercial fertilizers. I later got the same stories from

other farmers, too. Nitrogen provided a false sense of security to farmers in the beginning. If you look at

the history of commercial fertilizers – ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, UN32, Ken 17 – they

were only started in the fifties. Before that, everyone farmed organically by just putting on heavy

amounts of manure. Five, six, ten tons to the acre of raw manure, and there was plenty of manure to go

around. Then they’d rotate crops. They might have a lot of undigested organic material out there, so the

yields were always a little bit off when they had too much ammonia from the manures in the system.

They may not have been using proper rotations. So several flaws were in that system.

I used to hear, "If organic was so good, how come we're not farming like we did in the ’30s?"

I’d reply, "Because a lot of their success relied on benign neglect. There was no real system."

James Watt3 would say, "I'm not going back to the ’20s and ’30s."

I’d say, "Neither am I! Come take a look here and tell me if it looks like ’20s and ’30s farming."

Questioning Authority

Back then, the university claimed, "It’s impossible to farm organically on seven hundred acres.”

3 Known for his anti-environmentalist policies, James Watt was the US Secretary of the Interior from 1981-1989

under President Reagan.

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That's when Amigo Bob Cantisano4 and I first met, in 1974 at a university meeting. Jerry Brown was

governor and he wanted to open up the conversation about alternative agriculture. What are those crazy

hippies doing? Amigo and I were the only ones posing critical questions. Why are you using so many

chemicals? Why don't you look at alternatives? Have you heard of organics? They discarded everything

we said and instead defended the idea that organophosphates, carbamates, methyl fluoropyridine, and

DDT, all that stuff was still okay.

Eventually we almost had to shame them, that they were the whores of chemical companies. The only

way that they could attack us was by saying, "You can only do that on a five acre field."

I’d say, “Well, I'm farming seven hundred acres organically."

They hated that. They’d reply, "Oh, you're lying. You must be cheating."

We developed all these ways of educating people that didn't believe it could be done on a large scale.

Every year we’d invite university folks and hippie friends to the farm for a tour.

"Walk anywhere you want to. Talk to anybody. It's wide open.”

They’d say, "That's grapes. That won’t work in vegetables." Or "Organic grapes are easy to do.”

I said, "Really?” I told them about how we’d gotten eaten up by Pacific spider mites one year. We

learned something hard from that.

I remember that James Watt saying, "You organic guys, you're going to plunge the world into mass

psycho starvation mode." I sat there, thinking, really?

I remember years later, in 1987 or so, speaking in front of the National Academy of Science. They

invited Amigo Bob and me because they wanted to know what the heck organic farmers were doing.

4 Amigo Bob Cantisano is a pioneer organic farmer, a Kokopelli-like figure who went from one place to another,

gathering and sharing new ideas. As Peaceful Valley Farm Supply and then Organic Ag Advisors, he spread

supplies, practices and knowledge of organic to many growers.

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Well, it was quite an experience to learn what little knowledge they themselves had! On a scale of 1 to

10, their knowledge base was maybe a 2 as to what organic farmers actually do in the field. We had

questions like, “How are you going to find enough manure if you’re using 100 tons of manure per acre

to produce a crop?” They didn’t call it compost, and this was 1987!

Amigo and I looked at each other. “Did we hear that correctly?” Nobody in his right mind would dump

100 tons of raw manure per acre! That’d burn up the crop. It’d be three years before you could even

stick a disc in there.

This guy goes, “Well, that's what I understood you guys did.”

I asked, “Who would you have talked to? No organic farmer would state that!”

People were saying, “Wow, this is some battle!" Not really, but it was exciting. I was doing what I was

supposed to do: Question authority, make them squirm a little.

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Marketing Organics in the Beginning

We were a hundred percent organic from the early days on. For us, that was just a way of farming, no

matter what we did. But at first we’d sell only 5% of it as organic. The rest we sold as conventional,

even if it was really organic. People didn’t know they were eating organic grapes because the grapes

were ending up in conventional markets and stores. The problem, we knew, was that the American

public didn’t know what the word “organic” meant.

When we started selling our grapes as organic in the early’ 70s, we decided to state exactly what we

were doing in the field. So we said we weren’t using any commercial fertilizers or toxic insecticides,

including dusting sulfur, which is a fungicide used by farmers for 5,000 years. We put little 4x6 cards on

white parchment paper in every single grape box, explaining what we did without using the word

“organic,” because a lot of people thought organic just meant no chemicals. I signed my name to it.

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After ten years we’d done well with the farming and we had all these organic grapes; but it was a

challenge convincing buyers. They just said, "We don't give a you-know-what about organic in the chain

store system." I must have heard that a thousand times. "Go use your little alternative co-ops, but it ain't

happening in this store!" We tried to do everything we could, every kind of crazy idea we could come up

with, to convince big chain store buyers to put a sign up: “Organically grown grapes.” Please!

Then in 1982 or so, my brother Tom, said, “We need to define this more narrowly so that people can

latch onto a word. It can’t be a paragraph, just a word.” That's when we looked at the California

Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), because they had a chapter in Fresno. I decided to go to a chapter

meeting and see what that was all about. Tom and I went back and forth for a couple of months and then

decided, we need to be a member of the team. So we finally committed to the word “organic” in our own

marketing – and stop inserting essays into each box!

It was a kind of torture, like we were a bar of soap underneath the drop, drop, drop of water, getting

worn down, trying to convince them that they need to go organic. Or maybe we were the water, wearing

them down until they could see the value of organics. Finally, we broke through. It took forever.

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Breaking into Commercial Markets Big Time

Alar was probably the breaking point5 when we went from 10% or 15% of our crop being sold

organically to as high as 40% and 50% after Mothers and Others6 and Meryl Streep’s involvement in a

TV ad.

It just flipped overnight into the demand -- because the timing was right. All this talk for ten, fifteen

years: "Organic is better. Pesticides are bad. You're poisoning everybody. It's not good." "Ah, that's all a

bunch of bologna. Bologna, bologna." Finally it came to the point where, Boom! Alar's right in front of

them. Perfect storm. Everybody bought in.

The chain stores finally said, "You know what, I'm throwing in the towel. I am so sick and tired of

defending pesticides. I'm so sick and tired of having to deal with this crap. These apple growers, they

threw this crap in here and it's hurting our sales. Let's look at organic." Then Tom and his wife at the

time, Tonya, were able to make important connections to the supermarkets, like with Dick Spazano, the

5 Alar is the common name for the chemical daminozide used on apples to regulate their growth. A “60 Minutes”

investigation aired on 3/30/89 launched the Alar crisis, a toxic chemical scare which led to it being banned. 6 Mothers & Others was a group of concerned citizens who worked with NRDC to expose the dangers of Alar.

Meryl Streep championed the cause, made a public service announcement and testified to Congress.

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head buyer for Vons; Harold Alston for Stop & Shop; Kerry Hodges with Ralph’s; and Tom Riley with

Raley's. They did the groundbreaking work of marketing organic. A few bold buyers signed on.

Tom and Tonya would bring me in as the farmer with the cowboy hat and boots, kind of use me as a

circus show. Not really, but it was fun because a lot of those buyers had never met the farmers who

could talk farming. "Steve, tell them about organic farming." Tonya would do a marketing talk about

"value added" and use all the buzz words. She was really great at it. Then I’d talk about the land, the

soil, the air and farm worker safety and worker conditions, all the positive things about organic farming.

They liked that. Dick Spazano said, "Gosh, Steve, I never knew any of this stuff even existed. I was told

you can't grow crops without using chemicals or we'll all starve to death." That's the fear. Like with

Monsanto: Without GMOs we all starve to death. They love that threat. "You're going to die."

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Then we expanded in a new way as marketers. People use the word “brokers,” but I don't like that word

because it's got negative connotations, as if I don't care what you get as long as I get my commission.

No. We knew and cared a lot about the really good but small organic growers out there on twenty acres

or two hundred acres who needed a good marketer. They were in the same boat we were in twenty-five

years earlier. By putting enough of these growers together, we created an organic marketing system of

up to sixty-five growers and seventy-five different crops. That marketing strategy really put us in a

different league. It was a good high!

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The Arizona Adventure

Our Arizona operation started early on, in 1971. I’d just graduated from college and my dad sent me to

Europe. I was travelling on my own with my backpack. Of course, I was interested in seeing farms

there and understanding for myself how they could farm for several centuries in Europe! We've only

been farming in California for a hundred years. Going to Europe opens your mind about understanding

the longevity of soil. But my father sent a Western Union telegram to get on home. “We have a new

farm in the desert in Arizona.” We chose that farm because we couldn't afford land in the Coachella

Valley of California, whereas Arizona was still cheaper in the desert. We’d found this guy that had

grape farms. He was an electrical engineer who always wanted to be a farmer, but he really didn't know

how to farm. So the price for the farm was right, and we jumped in.

Desert farming was a whole new experience, an even more intense level of pumping salty water on

saltier ground. Farming is a humbling experience. I may not appear to be humble sometimes because I'm

aggressive in my values and my belief systems. But every time I’d go out there I’d learn something; and

it was always humbling on a daily basis.

Harquahala Valley was named after the Harqua Indians. How they lived was unique in the 120 degree

heat of the desert, with no running water. The Indians used springs in a little mountain spot about four

miles from where they did all their farming in the early days. The name means "high,” – Harqua –

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“water" – Hala. The water in the wells was deep. Harquahala was a beautiful, very spiritual place with

high energy, and it was always clean in the desert. You had one hundred miles of visibility every day

and the most beautiful night sky that you can imagine. At night the coyotes would howl at the moon.

At the time, Arizona provided a good break from the mood and everything taking place in Kern and

Tulare county, big agriculture. Harquahala was all cotton farmers and alfalfa. I was the only table grape

grower in the middle of nowhere. We had fun. I had great farmer friends in Arizona who’d call me,

"Steve, the crazy organic guy." Cotton guys were spraying like crazy back then, but they were still

friends of mine. They looked at my organics as marketing. They didn't get all wigged out that "they’re

going to take away my chemicals!" They just saw it was marketing.

Catastrophe Strikes, and Yet….

It started in ’98 with El Niño. The year of our demise. The year that we went out of business. It’s the

year that we had to look back at how could this have possibly happened? Thinking that we had all these

successes and everything's running, basically had it your way going into the '90s. In the late '90s, you

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were running the organic thing on a large scale. For us, it just became the timing of everything was

wrong. We decided to do our greatest expansion in the history of our farm that year. We had offices in

Santiago, Chile, and in Cape Town, South Africa. We had huge plans, bringing organic to the southern

hemisphere, getting them on board. Our debt-equity ration was marginal. So even though we had debt

we figured that the organic thing was so strong, we could overcome any worst-case scenario. Then came

rain and crop failures. ’98 was the big El Niño year, horrendous. Everything from the Arizona desert to

Delano was rained on. We also ended up with insurance losses. What happened was that the worst-case

scenario times five occurred.

We were full throttle all the time. Maybe caused the piston to blow. Years later, when we look at where

we've been, we can say, "We made our mark, and it's a good mark." We have our roots in the farming

community all over. Tom is still farming here on a much smaller acreage, and he loves it. I may not be

in the business now, but I'm personally involved in the organic community and also the organic fertilizer

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movement in a lot of different ways. I spend a lot of time in the southern hemisphere still, in Peru, Chile,

and Guatemala, in bananas. I haven't slowed down in that respect. My passion is the same. It's full

throttle organic. I'm not here to judge people if they're not organic. I work with conventional growers

making a slow transition into using carbon in their soils. I'm not politically pure. I'm one hundred

percent organic in my personal life, but I also work with a lot of farmers in education, part of dealing

with nutrition in soils and plants.

Facing the Lingering Critics and Lingering Questions

I still find people out there criticizing organic farming. They say you can’t grow all crops organically,

like bananas or tropical pineapples. But they are grown organically. Then you hear, "Well, organics are

happening on such small acreage." No, it's actually happening on much bigger acreage than you think.

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South of here, look at the Grimmway operation.7 It’s unbelievable: a huge organic farm in the middle of

conventional agricultural fields. You smell the soil and you know it's organic. They’ve utilized

machinery and technology on a big scale. It’s pretty impressive. I'm not here to defend big farms, but I

support equal opportunity for everybody, including them. They feed a lot of people.

7 Grimmway acquired Cal-Organic, started in 1984 by Danny Duncan, one of the first conventional growers to

convert. Grimmway has built on Cal-O’s success, expanding until Kern is the largest organic county in California.

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Kern County is the center of organic intensive agriculture in the United States. I know personally of

probably ten thousand acres in Kern and Tulare Counties that are transitioning to organic right now.

That’s amazing: ten thousand acres in one year! Kern and Tulare Counties, the chemical center of the

universe, now becoming the organic center of the universe.

There’s also been a huge influence from organics on conventional growers. A lot of them say, "I've

taken the best of your guys' organic practice, and it's definitely made my conventional stuff way better."

Every conventional grower I've worked with has at least fifty to sixty percent of their program as

organic now. That's awesome!

Naysayers who want to hang onto conventional chemical agriculture will go down with the ship. I

believe the market eventually will push them out. I hope the whole San Joaquin Valley is organic one

day. I say that with a straight face and with conviction and feeling. That’s my mission in life anyway.

The New Frontier of Soil Microbiology

My favorite subject is still soil. When we first started farming this land, it was like sand. We called it the

“Blow Sand Farm.” It was really a challenge to make this sand into soil. So I know what it takes to build

the soil.

This little piece of ground here, when you feel it there's a certain feel that it has to it that is just so nice.

This ground is just like a fine wine when it has the microbes living and really enjoying themselves being

in this environment. There's no hostile enemies ready to go ahead and blow them up, okay? Hostile

enemies being chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. There's no hostile enemies for these

beautiful little microbes living in that little, just happy and enjoying themselves and actually thanking

me now psychically… So yeah, that's what that little piece of dirt represents to me.

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Better treatment of soil can also make farming an answer to global warming. People don't give farming

enough credit! All plants – all our grapevines – produce photosynthesis. They take in carbon dioxide,

CO2, and they provide oxygen, O2. Is the San Joaquin Valley as great as the Amazon forest? No, of

course not. It's not as thick or diverse or as heavy of a producer. But we’re learning to sequester the CO2

in the soil, which is where it needs to be, as opposed to its gassing off or oxidating out. We’re taking

advantage of soil aggregates, the components between the clay particles, a gel-like material that holds

the soil together and holds in the CO2. So soil aggregates are very important.

The Future of Organic Farming

Crucial to the system of the future is the marketing. Look at farmer's markets. In Santa Cruz there's

twenty or thirty of them now, everywhere. That means there's choice, and that gives a guarantee that

every weekend farmers can harvest their foods and take a certain segment to the marketplace.

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One challenge is being able to get the supplies of different fertilizers for the expansion of the organic

movement. If it's one million acres now and in three years it's two million acres, that's a lot of material

that needs to be generated to supply those farms to grow the crops. If there's not enough fish fertilizer to

go around, what will we do for nitrogen? We're going to come up with soy nitrogen, grow our own

nitrogen. All kinds of things can be done. Unfortunately, most farmers are doing that work themselves,

evolving on their own, without support from the universities. They're not at the forefront. They're always

leading from behind.

I don't think that this movement is stopping or even slowing down. Walmart went from supplying no

organic food to becoming the largest supplier of organic food in a couple years. How could that have

happened? What were they telling their growers to entice them? “You've got to grow organic.

Otherwise, we're not going to buy your stuff”? Go to any Safeway now and you’ll find sixty or seventy

organic items. Ten years ago there were five or six. Now Sprout's stores, the alternative to the Beverly

Hills Whole Foods, are sprouting up all over the place.

You've got CSAs, community sponsored agriculture. Do you know the name of the farmer you're buying

food from? A lot of people think that's very important. I do. I read the label. I know those farms I'm

buying from, whether they're doing a good job or not. More information is more liberation and more

understanding of how the system works. You've got to know everything. That's going to make organic a

greater success than it has ever been.

At first I was fighting just to walk into any store and buy food that wouldn’t have a bunch of crap in it,

that didn’t have to be washed, that wouldn’t make me think, "I'm killing some gut bacteria with this

one." I know this sounds crazy, but I’d like to know that if I go roll around in that dirt, or if I even ate

that dirt, it wouldn’t have a negative effect on me.

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Twenty years ago I thought this movement was going to tank. When we first started, we heard, “You

organic kooks are never going anywhere." I’d go, "We'll see about that.” And here we are, twenty

thousand organic acres in Kern County.

The full revolution is not likely to happen in my lifetime, but at least we're getting there, moving in the

right direction. The organic movement is not just rich people buying bourgeois food. It's low income

people buying organic stuff in Safeway or Walmart. You know why? They've connected the dots. It's

not just us elegantes that know the secret handshake. The secret's out and won’t be stopped.

The four year olds I'm around now say, "I didn't have my broccoli today, Mom." Or reminding her to

"Buy organic, Mom!” Four year olds! Awesome.