The post Can Cooperatives Save Mezcal? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Erika Meneses never set out to form her own mezcal cooperative. But a series of setbacks—the pandemic, a job loss, and, most devastating, the death of her husband in 2019—pushed her to innovate. Meneses’s husband was a mezcalero, a mezcal producer. Together they worked at the cooperatively owned brand Sanzekan in Guerrero, a state on Mexico’s Pacific coast. After losing her husband and then her source of income in 2020, Meneses decided to take what she had learned at Sanzekan and apply it to her own community of Chilapa in the mountains of Guerrero.
She asked local master mezcaleros, or maestros, if they were interested in producing and selling their mezcal collaboratively. Meneses believed that if they banded together, they could reach larger markets while remaining faithful to ancestral practices. Four maestros joined her.
They named the brand Aguerrido, meaning fierce or valiant. “The cooperative is a warrior that does not give up, that fights, that defends its culture, but above all, defends traditional mezcals,” Meneses says. By “traditional mezcals,” she means agave-distilled spirits that reflect local terroir and are made in small batches according to ancestral methods, rather than mass produced.
“The boom has done a lot of damage. Traditions are being lost in communities.”
The need to distinguish and defend traditional mezcal is a result of the spirit’s explosive global popularity. Over the last decade, Mexico’s mezcal production increased by approximately 700 percent, with the majority designated for international markets. In 2019, the United States surpassed Mexico to become the world’s largest mezcal market. And as with demand for other Mexican crops—such as avocados and corn—the American obsession with mezcal unleashed a host of downstream effects that impact small producers most acutely.
Many brands are no longer producer-owned, Meneses explains, but rather run by businesses with the capital to invest in flashy marketing. Some foreign-owned brands offer to buy mezcal in bulk from small mezcaleros being squeezed from the market, leading to industrialized production methods.
As a result, many mezcaleros turn to unsustainable practices to produce greater volumes in the short term at the expense of their futures. “The boom has done a lot of damage,” says Meneses. “Traditions are being lost in communities.”
Traditional mezcal production is synonymous with sustainability. Producers have historically practiced rotational agave growing, selective harvesting, and small-batch distillation. But when they try to keep up with unsustainable demand, ecological damage follows. As growers across Mexico and as far north as the Western U.S. are realizing, agave opens the door to a lucrative market.
In some cases, communities are deforesting hillsides to make room for monocultures of fast-growing agave. Meanwhile, rare agave species—which can take up to 35 years to mature—are disappearing from the wild. Overharvesting and monocropping both threaten the agave’s genetic diversity and local biodiversity.
Agave plant photo courtesy of Aguerrido.
In the face of these challenges, mezcal cooperatives are designed to protect small producers. At their best, collectively owned and cooperatively operated brands model a future in which mezcaleros can maintain ancestral and ecologically beneficial practices, while still gaining access to an exploding market.
Preserving Ancestral Traditions
Despite her entrepreneurial savvy, Meneses says that Aguerrido’s members “are not businesspeople—we are farming families looking for a market.” The collective’s core members are lifelong mezcaleros, old enough to remember a time when mezcal faced social stigma.
“They were always fighting to continue making mezcal, even though they hid it, even though it was not well paid,” Meneses says. “They feel proud to say, ‘I make a very good mezcal passed down from my grandfather.’” The four maestros—Don Refugio, Don Ciro, Don Tomás and Don Antonio—carry on their families’ traditions in their own techniques, which in turn inform Aguerrido’s ethos.
Each co-op member complies with mutually established growing, harvesting, and production regulations. Because of agave’s long lifespan, some mezcal producers succumb to the temptation of harvesting immature, unripe agave. These plants have lower sugar content, which requires more of them to produce the same volume.
Rather than “looting the hills,” Meneses says, Aguerrido’s members select only mature plants for production. They plant more agave than they harvest, and all replanting is carried out with close attention to the ecosystem as a whole. “That is another agreement, that you must reforest—but without damaging the ecosystem, removing woody trees, or damaging the soil.”
The members of Aguerrido raise their fists as a nod to the cooperative’s logo, symbolizing their desire to raise their voices and fight to preserve their traditions. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)
The mezcal production season runs from February to June. Then they turn their attention to cultivating other crops such as corn and squash. Meneses says this choice is part of Aguerrido’s effort to maintain soil health and biodiversity, despite the larger growing trend among producers and growers to monocrop agave. The group’s vision is “to protect our mezcal precisely from people who only seek a particular benefit for themselves.”
And instead of focusing on short-term profit, she says they’re working to produce mezcal as they always have—in small batches with ancestral techniques.
Member-led Sustainable Practices
Bordering Guerrero is the state of Oaxaca, the beating heart of Mexico’s mezcal industry. Oaxaca accounts for 85 percent of mezcal production and is also where mezcal’s ecological impact is most visible. “Communities are becoming like dust bowls because of monoculture of agave,” says Niki Nakazawa, co-founder of Neta Spirits.
But this isn’t the case everywhere. In Logoche, a 110-person village in Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur region, traditional practices still rule the day. Neta Spirits represents the 12-family cooperative Grupo Productor Logoche. Neta purchases from the producers and commercializes the mezcal under the Neta brand. The 12 member families oversee everything else, from planting to distilling to bottling to labeling. An elected committee, appointed by the cooperative, organizes the bottling and labeling process.
Unlike some neighboring communities, producers in the village of Logoche prioritize the long-term health of the land. Members plant their fields with multiple varieties of agave in alternating rows to preserve genetic diversity and insulate the crops from disease and pests. They use the milpa system of rotational planting, which includes crops like corn, beans, and squash to enrich the soil and prevent erosion. Using goat and donkey manure, they prepare natural fertilizers to replenish the fields.
The cooperative also follows the indigenous custom of harvesting agave during the full moon, when they believe the plant’s heart or piña is most concentrated with sugar. Pooling their labor, resources, and profits allows the cooperative to preserve ancestral—and often more labor-intensive—methods.
Community members in the village of Logoche work collectively to roast the agave hearts that will then be crushed and fermented before distillation. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)
Though much larger, Banhez Mezcal follows similar cultivation practices. A cooperative of 44 families in Ejutla, Oaxaca, Banhez adheres to a member-established code of conduct that focuses on the sustainable management of their agave fields. Its collaborative structure also incentivizes responsible production, including better waste management.
Mezcal’s distillation process produces an acidic liquid waste called viñaza, which can pollute local water sources. Not long ago, one Banhez member built his palenque—distillation site—in a location that impacted local groundwater. When the community realized that viñaza was threatening its water quality, the member took out a loan from Banhez and rebuilt the palenque elsewhere.
“When you look at the brands that are able to maintain environmental ethics, it’s really down to ownership,” says Alex Jandernoa, director of education at Banhez. “In order to move [a palenque], you have to keep producing mezcal. If you’re not part of a cooperative, you can’t move. You don’t have the money; you don’t have the safety net.”
Rooted in Indigenous Values
In some cases, it’s less the cooperative business model and more a community’s cooperatively held values that insulate producers from market pressure. Nakazawa says Grupo Productor Logoche’s collective ethos is rooted primarily in traditional customs. Logoche, like hundreds of Oaxaca’s municipalities, is governed by two systems: the federal government and customary indigenous laws called usos y costumbres. Grupo Productor Logoche’s cooperation, Nakazawa says, “is rooted in older ways of participation.”
In communities governed by customary indigenous law, “people participate directly in the well-being of other members of the community and in the stewardship of the land.” Every village member participates in communal work, called tequio, in lieu of paying taxes at the local level. Because mezcal is Logoche’s main industry, everyone pitches in at some step during production, and pricing is set by community consensus. “The idea of cooperativism and collectivism is really embedded in those forms of political participation,” says Nakazawa.
The Cooperative Potential
From a commercial perspective, Meneses believes that cooperatively owned brands have an advantage in their product diversity. In the case of Aguerrido, each bottle is a unique representation of the local ecosystem, the agave, and the producer’s skill. “[Consumers] can find diversity in expressions from each producer,” she says.
Maestros del Mezcal, a nongovernmental organization representing hundreds of small producers across Mexico, provides financial and technical support to preserve traditional production practices and protect the land from exploitation. Maestros recently launched a collective brand under the label MDM Asociación Civil, exporting its first shipment to the U.S. last year.
Members of Grupo Productor Logoche gather in their cooperatively owned and managed bottling plant. (Photo courtesy of Aguerrido)
“I do think collective brands can help preserve tradition—by pooling fiscal and regulatory resources and providing easier access to the markets, which is much more costly and time consuming for just one person to do,” says co-organizer Rion Toal. He thinks it’s a model that could be applied successfully to other Mexican products for export. In the case of coffee, for example, “if small producers were able to form co-ops and roast their own beans and legally export them, they could make a lot more money per kilo.”
As pressure from foreign demand mounts, Mexico’s mezcal producers face a choice: turn to industrialized methods and damaging cultivation practices for quick economic gain or differentiate by preserving and promoting ancestral methods. The cooperative model makes the latter option easier. Collective ownership helps producers preserve mezcal’s roots, without losing a foothold in the market.
Meneses says that Aguerrido’s cooperative model looks beyond turning a short-term profit and focuses on the community’s future in mezcal production. “The idea is to be aware, to use good practices—not just right now but also for the future, for the new generations.”
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]]>The post What Role Can Vineyards Play in Conserving California’s Biodiversity? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>At Gamble Family Vineyards in Napa, California, the beavers are becoming a problem. “I’m speaking about it calmly right now,” Tom Gamble laughs. “On my worst days, I’m more like Bill Murray in ‘Caddyshack.’”
For years, Gamble Vineyards has worked to create a more biodiverse habitat on vineyard land, including establishing animal sanctuaries throughout the property and donating acreage to the Napa River Restoration project. Now the river’s growing beaver population is chewing the trees that Gamble has planted over the last 20 years.
“It’s interesting to see that we solved an issue, but it’s creating another issue,” says Gamble, the vineyard’s founder. Giving back habitat to native species is a matter of fine-tuning, of getting the ecosystem in balance—and this sometimes takes some effort. “But the biodiversity is worth it,” Gamble says.
As on a vegetable farm, growing wine grapes in a way that increases biodiversity leads to a host of benefits. Bringing in good bugs keeps pests in check. Building healthy soil creates a teeming—and productive—microbiome that helps sequester carbon. Planting hedgerows around the vines preserves native species, gives birds a place to roost, and keeps vine diseases from spreading. And of course, there’s the intangible benefit of having a farm, and a life, that’s in balance. “I grow grapes to make wine to sustain a life that can be enjoyed outside and with nature—and the more nature I’ve got, the happier my life is,” Gamble says.
A growing number of California vineyard owners agree with Gamble that farming with a focus on biodiversity is worth the time, effort, and financial investment. Winemakers around the state, including Gamble, Benzinger Family Winery, and Bonterra Organic Vineyards, have worked for decades to protect native species and regenerate the land. Others, like Pisoni Estate, are broadening their focus to include holistic habitat restoration.
Joseph Brinkley. (Photo by Sara Sanger, Fetzer Vineyards)
Grapevines cover 635,000 acres in California—nearly double the size of the crop in the state in 1990. Given this scale, a commitment to growing grapes to boost biodiversity can produce a number of environmental benefits, as threats to the land—including urbanization, clearing, and climate change—intensify.
“In the event all of California’s wine grape acreage were to be farmed regeneratively, such a widespread shift would contribute toward the mitigation of climate change,” says Joseph Brinkley of Bonterra Organic Vineyards in the Northern California town of Ukiah, in Mendocino county. In addition, vineyards would face less virus pressure, thus reducing the need for pesticides and synthetic inputs. The need for water would decrease and the health of watersheds and ecosystems would improve.
“We would see a continued growth and resurgence of species: beavers, bobcats, coyotes,” says Gamble. And instead of posing a threat to native habitats, California’s vineyards would instead play a key role in restoring the ecosystems of working land.
The Wine Industry as Friend and Foe to Biodiversity
Known for their mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers, Mediterranean wine growing regions in California, Italy, Spain, and Central Chile, are biological hotspots, but they traditionally don’t fall under protected land status because of their practical use as agricultural lands. And the Golden State is at particular risk for habitat destruction, given its high population density and explosive development.
Because grapes are a perennial crop that can grow for many years, growers can build a diverse ecosystem around the vines with practices like planting cover crops, installing hedgerows, and supporting birds and pollinators.
The wine industry is in part to blame: clearing grasslands, shrublands, and oak woodlands to make way for grapevines represents a key driver of habitat loss in California. And because grapes are typically grown as a monoculture on floodplains or hillsides, their cultivation reduces ecological diversity and threatens native species like California oaks, native grasses, and riparian vegetation.
Vineyards also pose an opportunity to increase biodiversity. Because grapes are a perennial crop that can grow for many years, growers can build a diverse ecosystem around the vines with practices like planting cover crops, installing hedgerows, and supporting birds and pollinators.
The wine industry is also uniquely poised for this kind of investment. Because wine grapes are a specialty crop with high rates of return, vineyard owners can more easily afford to invest in new, biologically beneficial ways of operating.
Wine drinkers are also increasingly willing to seek out and pay for eco-friendly wines. One study revealed that consumers show more willingness to pay for wine that is produced respecting biodiversity practices in the vineyard. Dr. Adina Merenlender, a conservation biologist who studies the role of vineyards in habitat restoration, cites wine lover “traditional respect for terroir” as a selling point for such products.
Three Elements of a Biodiverse Vineyard
Soil is key. And wine growers, as a rule, are focused on amending and conserving their soil through natural means like composting, installing erosion barriers, and cover cropping.
“This is an area where growers have a lot of incentive,” says Merenlender. “Nobody wants soil erosion, [and] soil health is very much in their own interest.”
Examining the soil during Bonterra’s soil health pilot. (Photo by Erin Malone, Fetzer Vineyards)
At Bonterra, Brinkley brings sheep into his vineyards and uses their manure to improve soil biology. In addition, Bonterra’s cover crop program has introduced around 10 species of plants to the vineyards, which attract more pollinators.
The second element of biodiversity is habitat conservation and restoration. This includes practices from planting hedgerows where birds can roost to employing Integrated Pest Management (IPM).
“We don’t think of it so much as habitat conservation, but rather as life enhancement.”
“We don’t think of it so much as habitat conservation, but rather as life enhancement,” says Brinkley. “We manage riparian zones and wildlands in order to cultivate biodiversity.” In this way, Bonterra creates an environment where native plants and animals, birds, and raptors can thrive without interference.
The third piece of the puzzle? Water. “In a Mediterranean system, water is habitat,” says Merenlender. Proper water management—including storing winter rainfall to be used for irrigation in the dry summer months—protects the habitats of streams and rivers from being drained for vineyard irrigation.
Biodiversity in Practice
Gamble Family Vineyards focuses on all three elements. Through involvement with the Napa River Restoration project—a landowner-initiated movement to reduce riverbank erosion and improve riparian and aquatic habitats along the Napa River corridor—the vineyard helps create an intact local watershed.
Meanwhile, Gamble practices cover cropping and minimal tilling to increase carbon sequestration and micronutrients. Recently he has also experimented with planting non-vine greenery as a border between his vines and his neighbor’s. In addition to providing habitat for insects and birds, these hedgerows relieve the virus pressure that comes when vineyards are jammed up against each other. “Sometimes it’s like kindergarten; [the vines] spread germs amongst each other,” he says.
“We’re setting aside good land that could be used for vineyards to plant crops that are not generating revenue. It’s right in the long term for our ranch and for the planet. But are we sacrificing short-term profits? Probably.”
About 150 miles south of Napa and 30 miles inland from the Monterey Bay sits Pisoni Family Vineyards. The Pisonis have used regenerative practices for years, but it’s only within the last handful of years that they have shifted their focus to increasing biodiversity and cultivating polyculture too. Mark Pisoni, the resident farmer, attributes this change to seeing the results of bringing in beneficial insects such as hoverflies and parasitic wasps (which feed on mealy bugs).
The Pisonis have worked on this land for generations, first as dairy farmers, then vegetable growers, and now winemakers. What’s striking is how little of the land they cultivate: of 280 acres, they have planted only 35 with vines. Much of the ranch remains undeveloped, home to native trees and plants that grow undisturbed. “We leave a lot of our ranch in its natural state,” Pisoni says. “I think that’s really important—not planting every corner of land.”
The latest addition to the cultivated vineyards is the insectary garden, which provides a home to native plants and food for the birds and insects that keep pests at bay. Dreamed up by the farm’s Special Projects Manager Jazmin Lopez, this three-acre garden sits at the center of the vineyard. “The idea is that it creates this island of beneficial insects that will go out and assist us with pest management,” Lopez explains.
Mark Pisoni working with the vineyard’s bees. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pisoni)
She and Pisoni worked together to select native California plants for the garden, choosing species that would amend the soil and use minimal water. They picked plants that flower at different times of the year in order to provide a habitat and nectar source for pollinators year round. The oasis of California buckwheat, silver lupine, and sagebrush is now a key part of Pisoni’s pest management strategy. Lopez sees this project and others like it as a way to “use the strengths of Mother Nature” to increase the health and sustainability of the vineyard.
Barriers for Growers
Boosting biodiversity in vineyards sounds like an obvious solution to conserving California’s increasingly depleted native habitats. But there are obstacles, from capital to policy to market demand. For most growers, the barriers boil down to two things: time and money.
“We’re setting aside good land that could be used for vineyards to plant crops that are not generating revenue,” says Pisoni. “It’s right in the long term for our ranch and for the planet. But are we sacrificing short-term profits? Probably.”
This type of farming is also time-intensive. Lopez and Pisonia dedicate hours to the insectary garden, actively monitoring beneficial insects and making sure pests are not entering the vineyard.
Gamble is quick to point out that not every California grower can afford to farm grapes this way. In places like the Central Valley, grape growers often work next to other agricultural crops that get sprayed by pesticides. The Central Valley, he says, also lacks the same type of high-end branding and consumer market that regions like Napa and Sonoma have.
He sees finding a market willing to pay for these efforts as the biggest obstacle for vineyards that want to join the fight for conservation. “Consumers are our partners, and we can progress as fast as they are able to afford our wines,” says Gamble, whose wines range from $90 to $140 per bottle. “[But] if you can’t get a sustainable price for your product, you will not be in business.”
In his experience, the younger the wine drinker, the more they care about biodiversity. Wine makers who choose to pursue habitat conservation will need to find and market to this kind of consumer.
And then there’s a larger cultural barrier, which might be the most significant of all. “The biggest hurdle is the paradigm shift from a crop monoculture to a diverse—and commercially viable—farming system,” says Brinkley. “Overall, it’s a holistic approach that may not be intuitive at first, but the land is a demonstrative teacher.”
For Pisoni, his farming practices are linked inextricably to a long-term vision for land cultivation. “These are generational commitments you are making to these vineyards,” he says.
The Need for Incentives
Merenlender believes an important next step in moving away from monocrops among California’s vineyards is for land trusts to provide strategic easements to growers, which will reduce the cost of habitat restoration.
For example, a grower may decide to remove vines from a marginal strip of land—an area that’s too wet or too rocky—in order to allow native species to recolonize. Merenlender suggests that private and public land trusts offer easements to counteract the cost of removing those vines. This policy change would provide incentive for more growers to make space on their land for passive species recolonization.
“We need incentive programs that are more strategic than just putting an easement across the whole plot of land,” she says. “If it’s too much of a cost for the producer, then let’s [ask] the land trust sector to offset those costs strategically.”
Better growing practices can’t make up for the amount of native habitat that has already been cleared to plant grapes, Merenlender says. But while they “don’t replace the protection of these intact ecosystems, working lands are still super important to focus on. And the vineyard has opportunities to make [these lands] more diverse.”
The post What Role Can Vineyards Play in Conserving California’s Biodiversity? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Rolando Herrera Is Blazing a Trail for Latinx Winemakers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>At first glance, the pairing might not seem remarkable, but it’s not usually how Napa’s wine industry works. Most winemakers hire vineyard contractors to do the on-the-ground work—or they simply buy grapes from existing vineyards. “What I’m doing today, it’s what a lot of people did back in the ’60s and ’70s,” Herrera says. He admits that within his circle of winemaker friends, “they all think I’m crazy.”
But Herrera couldn’t imagine making wine without growing the grapes himself. On a Wednesday afternoon this fall, he was in the field, as he usually is, walking the slopes of Mt. Veeder to mark the land for a new vineyard. He talked lovingly about Veeder’s soil: “It’s just beautiful loam, a gold-reddish soil full of nutrients. It has a beautiful rich topsoil, but [since] it’s a hillside it’s also rocky, and drains really well.”
One of the grapevines that Herrera farms. (Photo credit: Rocco Ceselin)
This kind of attention to soil, the topography of the land, and the nuances of each vineyard’s microclimate is exactly what sets Herrera apart. He has his hands in every stage of his grapes’ growing cycles, and he tries to farm with as few inputs as possible, paying careful attention to soil health. This devotion to the land has deep roots, extending back to his great-great-great-great grandparents.
From Dishwasher to Winemaker
The Herrera family has made a living from the land as far back as they can remember. Herrera’s ancestors in Michoacán, Mexico, were subsistence farmers, and his grandparents farmed a 15-acre parcel in the village of El Llano, growing produce to feed the family and sell at local markets. As a boy, Herrera learned to love the soil alongside his grandparents and cousins, picking his first cucumbers and tomatoes at the age of four.
“Most of my practices are no different than what they were for my grandparents, way back,” he says. “My grandparents always said, ‘Value the most important elements in farming: the sun, the air, and the soil. Take good care of [the land], and allow the dirt to represent the produce that you are harvesting.’”
In 1975, Herrera’s father brought his wife and children across the border to the Napa Valley, where he worked in agriculture. At the time, Napa resembled El Llano: sweeping fields of produce beneath green hills. Herrera joined his father in the fields on weekends, eating cherries and walnuts as he helped with the harvest. “It was a beautiful childhood,” he says. “I loved everything about Napa, and for me it was very easy to want to come back.”
[newsmatch_box]The family returned to Michoacán after a few years in the States, but Herrera felt pulled to the Napa landscape and the opportunities it represented. When he turned 15, he asked his parents for permission to return, knowing he could accomplish more in Napa than El Llano. He returned (first undocumented, and later earning citizenship), joined his older brother in the Valley, and enrolled in a local high school. In those early days, the brothers lived in a plant nursery, and Herrera washed dishes to support himself.
Over the years, he worked as a dishwasher, line cook, and manual laborer. After a summer of breaking rocks at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Herrera’s work ethic impressed owner Warren Winiarski enough to land him a spot crushing grapes in the cellar. Herrera worked nights and attended school during the day. After three years, he was promoted to cellar master. “That’s where Mi Sueño’s story begins,” he says.
Herrera learned everything he could about winemaking during his seven-year tenure as cellar master, taking classes on viticulture and enology on the side. After he married his wife, Lorena, the two set their sights on turning their passion for farming and wine into a sustainable livelihood. Lorena’s parents had also came to California as migrant workers, and she shared Herrera’s love for farming and wine.
The Herrera Family. (Photo credit: Rocco Ceselin)
In Napa’s elite wine industry, many build their wineries from existing wealth. But Rolando and Lorena didn’t have that option. “This industry is [made up of] the wealthiest people in the world,” he says. “So how do you compete with that?”
The Herreras encountered plenty of barriers on the road to making Mi Sueño—Spanish for “My Dream”—a reality, but the most intractable was financing. “The winemaking wasn’t as difficult for us,” Herrera says. “We had the know-how. But just—how do we afford to buy grapes? How do we afford to buy barrels?”
In 1997, the Herreras produced their first 200 cases of Chardonnay. The wine quickly found an audience, selling out three vintages in a row. While the reception was thrilling, the success pushed the family into years of financial strain.
The Herreras kept Mi Sueño afloat by refinancing their house, riding lines of credit, and working multiple jobs. Herrera took a job as head winemaker with Paul Hobbs Winery after Hobbs hired him to consult with South American clients. At the same time, he built up a small roster of consulting gigs. “I’d wake up, go [to work], and come back to sleep for a few hours—it was around the clock, working seven days a week,” Herrera says. “All of that went towards paying the bills and buying a little more grapes. That’s how we did it.”
Paving the Way for Latinx Winemakers
Since those early, scrappy days, a lot has changed. Mi Sueño now produces between 8,000 and 10,000 cases of wine every year. The winery is internationally recognized, and Herrera’s wine has been served at three different White House dinners (the 1999 Los Carneros Chardonnay in 2001, the 2006 Russian River Pinot Noir in 2008, and the 2006 Herrera Rebecca Cabernet Sauvignon in 2010). Since 2004, Herrera has turned his full attention and energy to Mi Sueño—where he is both farmer and head winemaker—his vineyard management company, and his consulting work.
But a lot hasn’t changed, including Rolando’s tenacity and work ethic. “His attention to detail, from exploring different regions and different cooperages to estimating proper barrel aging, sets him apart from many other winemakers,” says Rich Aurilia, owner of Red Stitch Wine Group, where Herrera consults as the winemaker. “We’re very confident in the fruit we get because we know first-hand who’s out there taking care of it on a day-to-day basis.”
Rolando Herrera holding his healthy soil. (Photo credit: Rocco Ceselin)
Now that he’s found success in an insular industry, Herrera wants to break down doors for other Latinx winemakers to walk through. He employs a team of full-time, year-round workers, many of whom are Latinx. The Napa wine industry runs on seasonal labor, but by owning both his winery and his vineyard management company, Herrera can maintain a permanent crew and move employees between the vineyard and the cellar. This allows him to provide stable jobs and a consistent income to the team he calls family.
In 2010, he founded the Mexican American Vintners Association (MAVA) with a small group of other vintners. “It was no longer a question of whether we wanted to unite and form a group—it was a responsibility that we had,” he says.
The group exists, in Herrera’s words, “to be an inspiration, to be role models, to be a home and a hub for Latinos and minority people to come and ask us questions, and to show the path for all the new generations that want to do this. We don’t want them to trip on the same rocks that we did. We share with them our experience: what we did, what worked, what didn’t work.”
[pico_box]Aurilia adds, “He’s had a huge impact on other Latino people in the wine industry—whether they’re vineyard workers or people who work in barrel rooms or people who are interested in making wine. You can look at him and say, ‘If this guy can put his mind to it and do it, why can’t I do it?’”
Devotion to the Land
Today, Herrera Vineyard Management covers vineyards across the Napa and Sonoma regions—he and his team currently manage 40 acres, and they planted an additional 45 in 2019—Herrera lets soil variation and microclimates dictate his rootstock and irrigation choices. In the Carneros region, where he grows Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes, the soil is built from limestone, silt, and sand. In his Tierra Blanca vineyard (named for the soil’s white color), located in a cooler area closer to the Bay, he says, “We put a rootstock that can stay a little more on the top of the soil, not go too deep.”
But a dozen miles west at his Russian River vineyard in Sonoma, Pinot Noir grapes grow in completely sandy, loam-rich soil. Here, Herrera plants a more vigorous rootstock that reaches deeper into the earth. He also irrigates more frequently and in smaller amounts to compensate for the quick-draining soil. “Some of my vineyards here—and this is something I saw in Mexico—are only a quarter of a mile apart, but they have different soils and different microclimates [depending on] the land,” he says.
Rolando Herrera in his vineyards. (Photo credit: Rocco Ceselin)
Soil and microclimate aren’t the only things that inform Herrera’s choices. “Every year Mother Nature gives us a different growing season, and that alone creates hundreds of different variables,” he says. The subtle shifts in weather are what keeps Herrera in the field, testing his grapes against the humidity, temperature, rainfall, wind, and erosion of a given season.
In all his vineyards, Herrera farms in a way that prioritizes soil health. “I do everything I possibly can to minimize any herbicides and fungicides out in the vineyards,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges we have is weed control. I invest a lot in labor—moving weeds with a shovel—or mechanically, with instruments, instead of just spraying.”
To avoid erosion, especially during the rainy season, he plants cover crops and spreads hay on particularly steep areas. He visits his vineyards right after rainstorms to get a sense of the water flow and how his team can redirect water into creeks. “There’s not a lot for me to create out here, other than just continue to learn, learn, learn,” Herrera says.
Every harvest season, Herrera tastes every varietal until each one hits the notes he wants: ripe fig, honey, plum. “There are years when we have to drop 20 percent of grapes on the floor to get that quality,” he admits. But fine-tuning the grapes’ brix levels, flavors, and acidity results in a wine that is completely his own.
Herrera’s farming philosophy hasn’t changed much from the one his grandparents handed him in Mexico. His approach to farming is intuitive, almost innate, inherited from a long history of devotion to the land and attention to the soil.
“For me, there are really no secrets to being a great farmer,” he says. “If there are, I’d say: respect your land, love your land—and [put in] a lot of work. Some of my vineyards I’ve been farming for 25 years, and the more I’m out there, the more I love farming [them].”
Photos © Rocco Ceselin.
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]]>The post Chef Claudette Zepeda-Wilkins Celebrates the Women Making Mexican Cuisine appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>It’s been a busy few years for Zepeda-Wilkins, who is featured in this season of KCET’s “Migrant Kitchen.” In addition to competing in Top Chef and Top Chef Mexico, she worked in pastry at San Diego’s El Bizcocho and later as chef de cuisine at Bracero Cocina, Mexican Chef Javier Plascencia’s well-loved San Diego outpost. Her new restaurant, El Jardín, which opened in June in San Diego, pays homage to her Mexican heritage by making use of ingredients and recipes sourced from home cooks across Mexico, including her family members.
At El Jardín, Zepeda-Wilkins not only makes food, she tells stories, too—stories of her mother and aunts and grandmothers, of her travels through Mexico, and of the women who carry on Mexico’s complex, nourishing, diverse cuisine. Dishes like “Jalisco Style Pozole Rojo” and “Seared Fish a la Veracruzana” are nods to her family’s history and highlight the distinct regionality of Mexican cooking.
Despite El Jardín’s sophisticated take on Mexican food, Zepeda-Wilkins wants to make the dishes her grandma made—like albondigas or meatballs—and she wants to top them with greens grown in the restaurant’s namesake on-site garden, plate them on ceramics sourced from Mexican artisans, and serve them with a story. El Jardín employees are eager to share the history behind each dish, which region it comes from, and the people who inspired it. “Food is the one language we all speak,” Zepeda-Wilkins says, and it’s a language she speaks fluently.
Civil Eats recently spoke to the chef about cooking on the border, the women who inspired El Jardín, and what it means to celebrate immigrant cuisine.
You were taught to cook by female relatives. What story does your cooking tell about the women who carry on Mexico’s culinary heritage?
A lot of the style and the story that resonates with me is the ability to do something out of nothing. I’m pretty sure it’s a mom-talent in general, but the ability to make—with no money—a nutritious, full meal for your family is something that I’ve seen more and more throughout my travels in Mexico. The adaptability of these women is really something that I admire.
What happens to a lot of these women is that their stories go untold if they don’t have daughters. A lot of women die alone in tiny villages because the husbands emigrated to make money and send [it] back to their family. Half the time [the money] stops abruptly, and they never hear from them again. If there’s not a female to carry on the recipes of their family history, everything dies with them.
How do you meet the women who inspire El Jardín’s menu and aesthetic?
I have a really beautiful network of chef friends and photographers and food historians in Mexico who help me get in contact with them, and then I take care of the relationship from there. Because they have to also trust me. When I purchased my plates in Mexico, [for example] I couldn’t just pick up the phone and make an order. [I had to] actually do the work and go to Mexico and shake the person’s hand who makes them. The amount of work that goes into it is unimaginable, but it’s so worth it. For me to be able to help an artisan in Mexico—that’s the point of this whole thing.
Did you always imagine opening a restaurant that focused on regional Mexican cuisine?
Mexican food, yes. But the idea of regionality really manifested two years ago. Going [to Mexico] and meeting all these women to get the foundation and inspiration behind [El Jardín] came to fruition two years ago, and now I’m starting to go back, because I need to get another insurgence of creative juice. My feet need to touch that ground. I need to meet these people and eat at their homes again. Even if it’s the same meal, I come back a different person after every conversation, after every story they tell.
How has the changing immigration landscape impacted food communities in the San Diego/Tijuana border region?
You see Haitians who were left in Tijuana a few years ago working at the fruit stands; you go to the airport and they’re working at the tarmac. You see all these beautiful Haitian chicken spots popping up [in Tijuana now], which is really cool. That’s something people really don’t understand about Mexico. We might have all our own problems, and we might be a hot mess politically, but we are a country that accepts anyone who comes in and really embraces [them].
Really, all our cuisine is a mestiza cuisine [from the Spanish word for someone of mixed ethnic ancestry]. If you were to make [strictly] Mexican cuisine, you’d have to cut onion and garlic out, and you’d be left with just tomatoes and chilis—still delicious, but you’d miss the roundness of the flavors that are notorious for us, our holy trinity: tomatoes, onions, and chilis.
Through the seven regions [of Mexican cuisine], you can see where different cultures landed and meshed with our indigenous ingredients, and all the beautiful dishes [that] came about.
What three ingredients can’t you cook without?
At the moment, it’s definitely dried chilis. Also the pit of the sapote mamey fruit. It has a beautiful almond flavor, and most people just discard it—I think it’s Mexico’s hidden secret. And the third would be kombu—dashi kombu broth. Super random, but that’s kind of me.
What gap in San Diego’s culinary landscape does El Jardín fill?
What we bring to San Diego is a different approach to Mexican food. What [the city has] right now as far as Mexican food is tacos from old-school taco shops, [or] everything drenched in canned enchilada sauce.
It makes business sense to just do tacos and burritos and nachos, but we’re so much more than that as a culture. You go to Mexico state or Mexico City and you have some of the most beautiful food made by chefs who have traveled the world and come home. Why can’t we be that? [Mexicans] learned all these techniques from all these different places, and we made our food.
My cooks are young; I’m young. We’re a contemporary Mexican restaurant with old roots. We’re trying to do our best and also be true to who we are. I want to make the food my grandma made and present it to you on a beautiful plate with greens that come from our garden.
What challenges do you encounter cooking Mexican food in the United States?
Being so close to the border, the theme that I constantly have working against me is the fact that Mexican food is still not perceived as something that you should spend money on. No one values Mexican food this close to the border. But I pay my cooks a living wage. I pay my dishwashers more than minimum wage because they’re taking care of the plates that I handpicked in Mexico.
What do you want people to learn about Mexico when they eat at El Jardín?
We lived in Imperial Beach [less than 10 miles north of the Mexican border with California, but] we were in Tijuana almost every single day growing up. I personally consider myself Mexican more than I do Mexican-American, because my parents always had us in Mexico. My dad worked in Mexico my entire life, and my mother speaks incredibly broken English and never worked in America. I have a very skewed upbringing [in that] we are more proud of our Mexican heritage than the average first-generation [family].
We want customers to come [to the restaurant] with an open mind, regardless of where they’re from. Ask us questions and be inquisitive. Learn about who we are as a culture. We do have a lot of knowledge, and we do have a lot of things to say. I always say that we have to educate people—without being pretentious, obviously. So I empower the front-of-the-house team to be the storytellers. Right now in my rewrite of the menu, I’m making it a lot more approachable for people who don’t read Spanish so they don’t fear not knowing what they’re going to get.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Photos courtesy of KCET.
This article was produced in partnership with KCET’s “The Migrant Kitchen.” A version of this article also appeared on KCET.org.
Now in its third season, “The Migrant Kitchen” will air an episode profiling Zepeda-Wilkins on November 21. The trailer for the full third season is embedded below.
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]]>The post The Co-op Farming Model Might Help Save America’s Small Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Though these farms are run by people with diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and motivations, they all seek to rebuild what’s been lost over the past century: a connection with neighbors—whether personal, economic, or both—and a sense of the mutual support that keeps rural communities alive.
The Digger’s Mirth Collective Farm team. (Photo courtesy of The Intervale Center)
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this connection was generally established through a community’s general store. Farmers gathered there to repair their tools and swap news. Men and women traveled into town from their farms, bringing eggs, butter, and produce to sell. The general store was the nucleus of rural life and an early model of the consumer cooperative. In 1920, 2,600 consumer co-ops—the majority of which were general stores—met locals’ needs, forged social bonds, and fostered community resilience.
Though the general store has been largely been erased from the U.S. landscape, the cooperative tradition remains in other aspects of American life, from credit unions to food co-ops to farms. Civil Eats spoke to farmers from four row-crop farm co-ops about the benefits, obstacles, and future of cooperative farming.
‘We Operate the Farm to Benefit the Members’
Farmer co-ops—which range from small to very large—have been around for nearly as long as people have been farming. But as worker-owned businesses undergo a revival, community-scale farmers are also turning to cooperative, more collaborative farming models.
Farming lends itself to multiple cooperative models. Agricultural cooperatives, such as Organic Valley, are groups of individual farms that have come together to meet common needs, from inputs like seeds and fertilizer to services like distribution and marketing. Then there’s the consumer cooperative, in which customers (such as CSA members) own and govern the farm. Worker cooperatives—a fairly new development in agriculture—refer to worker-owned farms.
Sorting and washing root vegetables at Intervale Community Farm. (Photo credit: Jill Rotondo)
In particular, the worker cooperative model is a natural fit for farming. Beginning farmers need land, start-up capital, labor, and diverse skills to launch a business. In a cooperative, farmers can pool financial resources and strengths, thus spreading out costs and drawing from a range work experience. This means more adaptability and resiliency—two things any farmer will tell you are essential.
Mai Nguyen supported new cooperatives for years at the California Center for Cooperative Development. Now the California organizer of the National Young Farmers Coalition (and a farmer of heirloom grains), Nguyen sees a growing trend toward cooperation in agriculture. “Like any other form of social relationship, cooperation is easily forgotten because it’s not commodified,” says Nguyen. “There aren’t many well-established models of farms run by worker cooperatives—but that’s changing.” Through involvement in the co-op sector, Nguyen advises cooperative farms in California, including the collaboratively minded Solidarity Farm.
While new farmers might be wary of sharing management with customers or co-owners, farms can function collectively with great long-term success. Take those two neighboring farms in Vermont, Intervale Community Farm and Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm.
Like a credit union or the outdoor goods store, REI, Intervale Community Farm is a member-owned venture. Ninety percent of the farm’s business comes from its CSA program, and, like a consumer cooperative, CSA members can buy in as co-owners. “It was a pretty natural pairing to think of this as our enterprise, collectively,” says Andy Jones, the farm’s manager. “Consumer cooperatives were created to benefit the people who are patronizing them. We don’t run the farm in order to make a profit or because it’s a charitable enterprise, we operate the farm in order to benefit the members.”
This focus on service over profit gives the 30-year-old farm literal and emotional buy-in from community members. Intervale’s CSA serves around 600 households in the summertime; of these customers, 340 are co-op members and partial owners of the farm. This makes them “totally committed to the farm, in part because the farm is totally committed to them,” Jones says. Because of this collaborative ownership, Intervale calls on its members for decision-making and support, from raising funds for new greenhouses to sticking with the farm through difficult seasons. When Hurricane Irene devastated the Northeast, “we lost all of our crops, and yet we had a ton of community support,” Jones says. Because Intervale had fostered a cooperative identity, CSA members stayed with the farm through its season of shortage.
Photo credit: Abby Portman for Intervale Community Farm
That same year, Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm next door also suffered; the farmers managed to earn a small profit—enough to net each farmer the equivalent of $5 an hour. It wasn’t much, but had the farm been structured in a typical hierarchy, the owner would have already paid out the labor and been left to bear the losses alone. “In our case, as bad as it was, no one was in debt,” says Dylan Zeitlyn, one of the founders of the worker-owned farm. “We were more resilient because of [our model]—it could have bankrupted somebody.”
Like Intervale’s decision to share ownership with CSA members, choosing to share ownership among workers was a natural choice for Diggers’ Mirth. When the farm started in 1992, the original worker-owners were already involved in other cooperatives, from a collectively run political group to collectively run households. “We had a philosophical alignment with non-hierarchical structures,” says Zeitlyn. “[We felt] the people doing the work should be in charge, and should reap the rewards or failures as the case may be, in an equal way.”
As all farmers know, those failures will come. Several days before I spoke to Ellee Igoe, co-owner of Solidarity Farm outside San Diego, the farm had suffered through its hottest day yet. Temperatures peaked at 121 degrees and Solidarity lost 70 percent of its chickens and 30 percent of its crops.
In the face of challenges like these, Igoe and her husband, Hernan Cavasos, continually ask themselves, “How do we adapt and become resilient?”
Photo courtesy of Solidarity Farm.
Part of the way they’ve built resilience is through fostering a collaborative spirit on the farm. Solidarity began as a worker-owned farm, though its owners didn’t go through the complicated process to achieve legal recognition. Instead, Igoe and Casavos shared ownership with two friends. When health issues and tuition payments forced their co-owners to take a step back, Igoe and Casavos decided to continue operating collaboratively, albeit without shared business ownership.
As Igoe sees it, all farmers would benefit from adopting a cooperative model, sharing resources and responsibilities with other like-minded food producers. For their part, Solidarity rents land from the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians, who are also farmers, and works with the tribe to steward Native land. They’ve invited other tenants to share this stewardship; today Solidarity operates alongside growers of sunflowers, apples, sprouts, and indigenous cover crop seeds. Igoe, Cavasos, and the other tenants share chores, such as watering and making deliveries, as well as resources from tractors to water.
‘We Say No to Each Other a Lot’
While cooperative proponents believe they create more resilient farms, the model can also slow innovation. “There’s a conservativeness to the collective, as far as change,” says Zeitlyn. “There’ve been times when it’s felt like we say no to each other a lot.”
New Roots Cooperative Farm in Southern Maine struggles with this resistance to change. With multiple farmers come multiple opinions, for better or worse. “A challenge is the time it takes sometimes to reach decisions,” says Jonah Fertig-Burd, director of Cooperative Food Systems at the Cooperative Development Institute. (Because New Roots’ farmers—Seynab Ali, Batula Ismail, Mohamed Abukar, and Jabril Abdi—were busy with harvest and don’t speak fluent English, we spoke to Fertig-Burd, who helped New Roots incorporate as an agricultural co-op.)
New Roots Cooperative Farm farmers: from left, Seynab Ali, Batula Ismail, Abdi, and Mohammed Abukar. (Photo courtesy of New Roots Cooperative Farm)
As refugees, the four Somali farmers face additional barriers to land, markets, and support. But farming collectively—which they’ve done since 2006—helps. “They are able to pool their resources and support one another in accessing the land, infrastructure, equipment, markets, and capital,” says Fertig-Burd. To date, the four farmers have raised over $100,000 to launch their farm.
A cooperative farm was a natural fit for Somali Bantu values, which emphasize equality. “In Somali Bantu culture, they have a practice [called] Iskashito farming,” says Fertig-Burd. “Families work together on a larger plot of land to provide crops for wholesale markets. Somali Bantus also use Ayuto, a cooperative lending circle, to help families meet financial needs.”
Jones of Intervale Community Farm is surprised that more CSA programs haven’t adopted a consumer cooperative model. “I think it’s partly because co-ops are unfamiliar in the U.S., which is not the case in Latin America, Europe, Japan, and [elsewhere].”
Mai Nguyen agrees. “I find that [among] people who come from countries where co-ops were developed and supported by the government, they’re more likely to develop,” Nguyen says. In their work with cooperatives, Nguyen has found that immigrant and refugee communities formed the most successful cooperatives.
‘Our Strengths Are Combined’
Regardless of whether a farm is structured as a worker cooperative, a consumer cooperative, an agricultural cooperative, or simply functions collaboratively, cooperative models yield diverse ownership with a wider skill base. The single-owner model, Nguyen says, means relying on a “monoculture of the mind,” adding, “We know it’s important to have polyculture in our seeds and farming system, and in turn we also need that in terms of who’s managing the farm.”
As Zeitlyn puts it, “Our strengths are combined and our shortcomings fall by the wayside.”
Batula Ismail works in the New Roots Cooperative Farm greenhouse. (Photo courtesy of New Roots Cooperative Farm)
With a new generation preparing to grow food, the model could offer a solution to common impediments. “There’s an interest in farming, but a lot of this interest is coming from an intellectual perspective—from college-educated, middle-class young people,” Nguyen says. “They don’t want to be paid the way farm workers have been paid.”
Many don’t want to rely on undervalued, undercompensated labor either. The cooperative farm model gives young farmers control over both their business ethics and their salaries. Young, worker-owned farms continue to take root around the country, with Flying V Farm in Placerville, California, joining the ranks earlier this year.
Igoe is hopeful that these new cooperative models will draw more young and under-resourced farmers to the land. “Land stewardship needs to be redistributed,” she says. “Maybe co-ops will be a model that can mature along with social change. Maybe this is the beginning of better conversations about equity.”
Top photo: Cooperative farming at Intervale Community Farm. Photo credit: Brian Shevrin.
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]]>The post In the California Desert, the Bautista Family Grows Hot Dates appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“A customer thought of it,” explains Alvaro Bautista, one of five Bautista siblings. “We discussed the name because it seems like a double-entendre, but she convinced us that it was going to work. She said, ‘When they see it, they’re going to remember [you].’”
The name, along with a logo of puckered lips, has done its job. Today the family of date farmers lives and works on a 14-acre property of 1,000 date palms, each of which produce 200 pounds of fruit every year. Their dates are a staple at farmers’ markets from Santa Monica to Palm Springs, and their online store regularly sells out for four months out of the year.
The Bautistas farm dates in the Coachella Valley of California, where more than 90 percent of America’s dates are grown. In contrast to many commercial growers, they practice a more labor-intensive style of cultivation, hand-pollinating their trees instead of relying on mechanized pollination, and harvesting multiple times a year.
While most growers allow their dates to ripen to a drier texture on the tree before harvesting once in early fall, the Bautistas begin climbing their trees in August to hand-pick individual fruits at peak ripeness. This attention to variance in flavor and texture has earned them a cult following at farmers’ markets and, with the launch of their online store, around the country.
Different varieties of dates await packaging in the Bautista’s processing house.
The Bautista Family Date Ranch sits in a desert town called Mecca at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unlikely landmark in the middle of Southern California’s desert. Driving east from San Diego, the 15- by 35-mile Salton Sea appears as a wash of blue against the beige expanse. The sea was formed when the Colorado River flooded its banks in 1905. Cities on its banks enjoyed a short heyday as resort towns, but when the sea’s salinity became inhospitable, and fish started rotting on its shores, vacation destinations transformed into polluted ghost towns. But date palms thrive in this desolate, sandy landscape, with the scorching, 110-plus-degree temperatures, extreme sunlight, and deep underground aquifers producing tender, syrupy dates.
Dates were first introduced to America in the early 1900s, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored global excursions to bring back exotic foods; explorers traveled to the Middle East and returned with offshoots of date palms which they introduced to the Saharan-like valley.
Most commercial growers in the region focus on two popular date varieties: deglet noor and medjool. But the Bautistas’ relatively small-scale operation produces seven varieties: medjool, khadrawy, halawy, honey, deglet noor, zahidi, and barhi, each with its own characteristics and flavors.
The ranch, which has been farmed organically for more than 50 years, feels like an oasis. Thickly growing palms shade the property. Roosters crow, and a warm breeze rustles the fronds. Pecan, guava, and mango trees supplement the family’s date intake—up to a pound a day during harvest—and a herd of animals roam the ranch freely.
“That’s the best part of my job,” says Alvaro. “I go to Los Angeles [for markets], and then I get to come back here.”
All in the Family
The Bautista family’s success has been decades in the making and has not come without its share of suffering. The five siblings’ father, Enrique Bautista, and his wife, Graciela, immigrated to the Coachella Valley from Michoacán, Mexico in the early 1970s. Enrique got his start in agriculture working with grapes and citrus plants and eventually began farming dates.
By the late 1990s, Enrique was working as foreman on a date ranch and living across the street with Graciela and their five kids: Alvaro, Maricela, Alicia, Jaime, and Enrique, Jr. When the owners of the ranch retired, they offered the business to him, extending a private loan that made the purchase possible.
Agriculture was in the Bautistas’ DNA—the family had spent seasons processing grapes and harvesting apples side by side—so it was only natural that Enrique’s wife and children would join him on the date ranch. His wife and daughters managed the packing house and administration, while his sons oversaw the growing and farmers’ market sales. During harvest season, everyone went up into the trees.
Enrique and Alvaro check up on trees at the edge of the ranch.
Then in 2004, a car wreck on the way home from a market left Enrique paralyzed. After the accident, the family hunkered down on the ranch. They cut back on markets and sold palm trees, hiring more people to take over Enrique’s work. They created paths between the rows of trees so he could still manage his property from an electric wheelchair. Alvaro took over sales, driving hours every day to farmers’ markets across Southern California. Even though the Bautistas banded together, they still struggled to keep the family business afloat.
It was a customer’s belief in the value of their fruit that saved the ranch. Pro bono, she designed the website 7HotDates.com, a play on the high temperatures that coax the palms into producing. The new name and website, launched in 2011, created a buzz at farmers’ markets and directed a surge of customers to the online store.
Once the Bautistas could field orders online, they discovered a community of date aficionados around the country who were eager for fresh dates of all varieties. Their five to six mail orders per week shot up to dozens per day—and now they sell up to 90 orders a day during harvest season to customers as far away as Canada.
While most customers pay online with credit cards, the Bautistas still offer to take payments by an honor system, a return envelope tucked in each box of dates. And they still work together. Alicia is the office manager; Alvaro is a farmer and farmers’-market salesman; and Maricela runs the packing house. Enrique’s other two sons live and work nearby, and Enrique continues to oversee the ranch from his scooter-friendly pathways.
Reflecting on how his family weathered the aftermath of his accident, Enrique says, “You have to work hard. That is the best recommendation.”
“And enjoy,” adds Alvaro. “It’s a lot of work, but if you enjoy it and know that you are doing it for the best of your family, it’s a lot easier.”
Farming Organically and By Hand
Although many things have changed since the Ranch’s early days, the Bautistas have remained committed to certain practices, like minimal processing. While many commercial date growers subject their fruit to hydrating, dehydrating, steaming, and glazing to maintain the fruit’s appearance and shelf life, the Bautista’s dates are never steamed, frozen, or heated and are packaged in their natural, pit-in state.
Additionally, one of Enrique’s first decisions as owner was to pursue organic certification. The ranch’s first farmers registered the property as organic, and having worked on conventional orchards around chemicals and pesticides, Enrique wanted his own ranch to be free of toxins. The Bautistas began the organic certification process in 1999 and received their official certification in 2002.
Alvaro demonstrates the by-hand thinning technique for young medjool buds.
As a certified organic operation, the Bautistas use free-ranging goats, cows, sheep, chickens, and even peacocks—known for killing snakes—to manage the property. Rather than relying on the pesticides used by conventional date farms, the ranch relies on animals to keep pests and date predators at bay. “We have a zoo,” says Enrique of the more than 100 animals that do their part to eat pests, trim weeds, graze on the cowpeas cover crop, and fertilize the soil with organic matter. The animals’ manure alone accomplishes 80 percent of the soil building.
On the ranch—which functions as an interconnected system whose distinct parts serve a whole—the work rarely abates. “With date palm trees, there’s always something to do,” says Alvaro. “It takes about seven months from blossom to harvest, so it’s almost like a baby.”
Not only is the work demanding because of the dates’ long growing cycle, but the Bautistas also inject specialized care into every farm task. “[When] everything you do is for the trees, they’ll produce more,” says Enrique. “The more you invest, the more they give.”
Whereas since the 1970s, many commercial growers—certified organic as well as conventional—have turned to mechanized pollination methods to save time and labor, the Bautistas hand pollinate every tree on the property each spring. When the male palms that ring the ranch begin to blossom, Alvaro and other employees harvest their pollen and dust it on the stalks of the female trees individually —a more labor-intensive method, but one that ensures thorough pollination of every palm. Once pollinated, in lieu of using pesticides, they hand-tie cloth bags around their dates to protect them from birds and bugs.
Pollinated date bunches are covered in paper to contain the pollen.
Other days, they walk through the palms and hand-thin every medjool tree. Because the medjool date is larger, the fruits easily grow too tight, causing fermentation. Picking three date buds off the stem for every bud they leave on prevents insects or infection from multiplying inside the dense bunch. “[Medjools are] a little more labor,” Alvaro admits, “but everyone loves them because of their size.”
This attention to their customers’ preferences is what sets the Bautista’s dates apart. While most date producers harvest only once in October, the Bautistas are up in their trees by August, as soon as the dates are ripe.
This makes for trickier packing—younger fruit is sticky and retains moisture—but it also means they capture a flavor and texture rarely found elsewhere. After August, they harvest once or twice more, allowing them to monitor the fruit and pick every date at peak ripeness.
This isn’t the most efficient way to harvest, but the Bautistas aren’t after efficiency. They’ve built a successful ranch and a loyal fan base out of two things: hard work and care—for both their customers and their trees.
Top photo: Enrique Bautista, owner of the Bautista Family Date Ranch, sits in front of his children Alicia (L), Alvaro (middle), and Maricela (R).
All photos © Annelise Jolley.
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]]>The post A Farmstand for Everyone appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This operation, run by Groundwork Denver, has all the makings of a traditional farm stand: locally grown produce, friendly employees, and regular customers from the community. Only the payment structure is distinct: Groundwork’s stand is one of a handful around the country offering produce on a pay-what-you-can basis.
And across the country, this trend is on the rise. From restaurants to museums to yoga studios, businesses are making their services available to everyone through sliding pay scales. Frustrated by the price of produce and the notion that healthy food should cost more, farm stands in Denver, Central Ohio, San Diego, and beyond are adopting a pay-what-you-can model. It’s an innovative approach to increasing food security, but one that hasn’t been widely adopted just yet. And those who are offering the model are learning—sometimes by trial and error—how to design a self-sustaining social enterprise.
Produce with Dignity
Groundwork Denver, which operates two farm stands in urban gardens, found its biggest initial challenge was alleviating embarrassment for farm stand customers who couldn’t afford the suggested amount. Their envelope system now offers a discreet, dignified way for customers to give what they’re able.
“We went with this method because we want people to feel comfortable paying exactly what they can afford,” said Heather Henfrey, urban farm sales and marketing coordinator at Groundwork.
Photo credit: Heather Henfrey.
Henfrey estimates 60 percent of Groundwork customers pay a suggested amount, with the remaining 40 percent split between those who pay over and those who pay under. What makes the biggest difference is normalizing the transaction, Henfrey said. Now that people are used to the envelope system, “[they] don’t seem embarrassed; they’re just excited to get the fresh produce.”
Sprout City Farms also operates in Denver, running three summer farm stands in the city’s food deserts. Meg Caley, one of its founders, said they price produce with suggested donation amounts—usually slightly below market price. Suggested prices make more sense to customers, she noted, rather than telling them to give whatever they can, and it adds a sense of dignity and ownership to the transaction.
“It’s helpful for people to have a little skin in the game,” Caley said. “If you’re giving something away completely for free, people tend to value it less.”
Not all farm stands display produce with suggested donation amounts, however. Urban Farms of Central Ohio originally used “donation-based” language to indicate that customers could choose whether or not to give anything, but recently switched to “pay-what-you-can,” which the farm says both empowers customers and brings in a small amount of revenue. With out a suggested prices, customers’ donations fall anywhere from spare change to $10 or more.
Building the systems to make such a farm stand work can also pose a challenge, as Coastal Roots Farm, a nonprofit community farm in San Diego, found when they started their social enterprise in 2016.
“We started doing this as an experiment and were surprised how little had been done,” said Coastal Roots Farm’s founding director Daron “Farmer D” Joffe. “There was no point-of-sale [POS] system to support it. So we’ve been experimenting and hacking our way through a POS system to find the most dignified—and manageable—way to do this.”
Profitable Model for Socially Minded Organizations?
Pay-what-you-can farm stands could be seen as an evolution of the “honor system” used by many small farms, in which customers select produce and leave payment at unmanned stands, sometimes offering more than they owe. Similarly, these stands give visitors a chance to pay it forward, inviting more-affluent customers to help their neighbors afford local, seasonal veggies that might otherwise be inaccessible to them.
Photo courtesy of Coastal Roots Farm.
These farm stands act as a platform to educate people about their local food system and increase food security. But they often struggle with the economics: Even if half of their customers pay more than the suggested amount, it’s usually only by a small margin. Customers who can’t usually afford seasonal, nutritious food give what they can, but this amount tends to fall well below the suggested donation price, causing the farm stand to take a financial hit.
Given their low revenue, most farms aim for pay-what-you-can stands to become self-sustaining rather than profitable. The stands function best within mission-driven organizations that can subsidize with fundraising or other programs, farmers say. When Coastal Roots Farm began designing its social enterprise in the spring of 2016, it struggled to find other examples among community farms.
Caley of Sprout City Farms said she, too, finds the model a better fit for farms with social missions—such as nonprofit farms focused on education or increasing food access—than farms focused on earning money. And she’s aware of the issues that arise when nonprofit farms sit next to for-profit operations.
In 2015, Americans spent just over 6 percent of their household income on food, compared to 30 percent in 1950, Caley explained. “That drop in the price of food has hugely affected farmers and their profitability,” she said, which adds another factor for Sprout City to include in their work. “We try to be careful in choosing neighborhoods where we work—we want to make sure we’re not price-gouging our farmer brothers and sisters who are trying to make a living,” Caley said.
Photo courtesy of Coastal Roots Farm.
“Good food should be for everybody,” said Henfrey of Groundwork Denver. “While the sales from market stands aren’t enough to cover all operating costs, we actively pursue other revenue streams so that we can ensure this important piece of our programming continues to provide our neighbors with healthy options.”
Joffe of Coastal Roots Farm sees pay-what-you-can farm stands as a viable and beneficial social enterprise for community farms. “Our ethos is that everything we do here—from produce distribution to education—should be accessible to everyone,” he said. “As a nonprofit, we are able to access funds to support this model of farming. But we’re trying to develop a model for community farming that builds accessibility into its business plan from the beginning.”
Nonprofit farms may be the first to model pay-what-you-can stands, but the enterprise offers a way to build food access into any farm’s DNA. As long as farms subsidize with other programs—such as wholesale to restaurants and CSA memberships—Joffee said there’s no reason the system shouldn’t take off among for-profit farms, too. It’s an effective piece of any farm hoping to build a just food system and increase local food security. “We see this as a growing enterprise,” Joffe said, “and we’re optimistic about the model.”
Disclosure: the author works as Coastal Roots Farm’s communications manager.
Top photo courtesy of Coastal Roots Farm.
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