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Warren Weber

Owner of the oldest organic farm in California, Warren Weber dug in his farming roots on the coast

north of San Francisco in 1974, enthused by the back-to-the-land rush. Following an early decision to

reject the use of chemicals in his fields, Warren consulted a county agricultural expert who admitted he

knew nothing about growing organically. So Warren relied on a wealth of reading among philosophers

and scientists whose work, going back over a century, promoted the benefits of organic soils and a

natural life. Those readings, along with community collaboration, taught Warren how to grow in his

own fields.

Among accomplishments, Warren initiated the baby lettuce boom, first for Chez Panisse and then all the

great restaurateurs. He has served the California organic community over many years: as president of

California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF); co-founder of the Organic Farming Research

Foundation (OFRF); president of Marin Organic; and vice-president of Marin Agricultural Land Trust

(MALT).

His Star Route Farms is nestled among hills in Bolinas, on the Marin coast north of San Francisco,

enjoying cool ocean breezes and a Mediterranean-like sun. Reading Warren’s stories, we can imagine

him pointing to his green fields of lettuce just there, while his hands show us the flow of the creek that

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helps his plants thrive. Warren here evinces his commitment to hard work, wisdom gleaned from

disappointments, and above all, love for the land. His hard-earned lessons become ours.

Childhood Inspirations

I grew up in a somewhat rural neighborhood outside of Saint Louis. My dad built a house on a five-acre

parcel on Bridle Creek. Around us we had a neighbor raising sheep, another with a chicken farm, and

one growing strawberries. During the summer, old man Litzinger was disking out fields and putting in

cow peas and corn. It was all very small scale. As kids, we played in the creeks and in the caves.

I remember being maybe seven, running through Litzinger’s field, and I reached down and pulled up a

plant. I held my hand up, and a little black-eyed pea was looking up at me. I looked back at that pea and

thought, “My God! That is fantastic!” It was a seminal experience for me, incredible. I just got the

magic sensation of another world and a relationship with the land. It attracted me, but I never said to

myself that I wanted to be a farmer. I never thought about it that way.

Later we moved to Connecticut. When I was fifteen, I started working on farms in the summer until I

went off to college at Cornell. After graduating from college, I had to join the army, but in the six

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months before I had to leave, I taught Latin and English at a private middle school. I liked that a lot, so I

later taught for a few years. Ultimately, though, I decided, “I don’t want to still be doing this when I’m

an old man at 45!” I wanted to immerse myself in more literature, so I studied English at Wesleyan and

then came out to grad school at Berkeley. After the Ph.D., I had to choose whether to go into academia. I

then realized that while I like the intellectual life a lot, I’m not suited for life as an academic. I’m too

much like my father, not really cut out for the back-biting scene in academia.

My father was a wonderful man who’d had a difficult life. He was in the advertising business in Saint

Louis. When the business moved to New York, our family moved, too. Then things fell apart for him.

The business was much more cut throat there. Being responsible for making all the presentations just

wore him out, and he had a nervous breakdown. Interestingly, my mom then said, “We can’t live here

anymore. Let’s go somewhere else.” We decided on Virginia, and they bought a farm there. My dad was

as happy as could be, growing corn and raising angus. The last part of his life was really good because

he had that going for him. So when I found people in academia nervous and anxious all the time – and

I’m an anxious person anyway, I have it in my bones – I realized, like my father did, “This isn’t good

for me.” When I shifted, it turned out that he was very supportive of me, which was gratifying.

While I was at Berkeley, I was already doing stuff around agriculture, including helping to start a land

trust in Lodi. I was driving around California with a guy named Steve Bridge who was very interested in

land trusts. He was probably thirty or forty years older than I was. We drove around the state looking at

farms. That was really good for me because I got to see a lot of California. I was totally blown away by

it, coming from back East, and now driving down to Santa Barbara and Ojai in January and walking

under a blue sky on a perfectly calm day! We walked into a citrus grove and down a row of beautiful

green trees with big orange globes hanging on them. California agriculture really looked like it could be

the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

“Finding Our Way”: The Early ’70s

A lot of people in the late ’60s were looking to leave the cities. It had to do with Vietnam and all the

social movements at the time, the anti-establishment scene. Some young farmers had come from

farming backgrounds, but many of them were also hooked into the urban turmoil. Basically, it was a lot

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of pretty highly educated people, brought up in the ’50s grey-flannel-suit generation, like me, trying to

do something different. People were striking out on their own in new ways. We had an incredibly fun

sense of discovery. “Hey, what’s this? Let’s do it!” It was very exciting.

We were drawn to Bolinas by my friend Russ Riviere. My wife and I came out looking for land. Down

the road there, we saw blackberry bushes. Fallen into the bushes was a big piece of plywood painted

with the words “For Sale” and a phone number. The sign must have been there for a while. We looked

over the fence at a big flat piece of ground and thought, “Let’s look into it.” At the time it was irrigated

pasture. We bought it, twenty acres, and kept leasing to the Texeiras who were using it. Very slowly we

expanded, inch by inch, quarter acre by quarter acre, putting in our own things and starting to produce.

The early years, the ’70s, were just great. We were pretty much self-taught and teaching each other.

We wanted to do vegetables, but we didn’t have any experience growing vegetables. We knew about

organic practices and wanted to do it that way. I’d been reading Rodale,1 and we knew about Lady

Balfour and the soils association from Britain, that whole start of the organic movement.2 We thought,

“Let’s figure out if we can do vegetables organically because we don’t want to use those pesticides.” So

it was just a series of steps, finding our way.

The seminal book for most of us was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, her 1962 exposé of the damage

caused by chemicals in agriculture. We wanted to figure out how to grow without doing that. Of course,

people had raised food for 10,000 or 12,000 years without having those chemicals, so we knew it was

possible. We just didn’t know if we could do it on a bigger production scale.

1 J.I. Rodale, an American, began to popularize the idea of organic gardening in the 1950s with his publications. 2 In 1946 an organization was formed by scientists, farmers, and nutritionists called the Soil Association of the

United Kingdom. They emphasized the connections between farming practices, the health of plants, animals, and

humans, and environmental health.

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We have more acres now, but at the time we had just twenty. I called up a UC Extension guy and asked

him for information. My hair was long, of course! But it was California, and everyone was friendly

enough, first name basis. Very different than the East Coast, and I loved that. The guy I reached said,

“Well, in this county we know a lot about dairies and livestock, but not about vegetables. So let me call

up somebody else.” He called U.C. Davis and got a guy named Vince, the head of lettuce crops in

California. Vince turned out to be a really nice guy. He arrived in one of those yellow nylon zip suits

that people wore in those days. To me it was a strange outfit, but my hair was down to here and I was

surely looking very funky, so he probably thought I looked pretty strange, too.

He stood here and looked around. “You want to grow lettuce here? I don’t know,” he mused. “First of

all, in California the minimum acres to grow lettuce is 200 acres. You have twenty, so we can’t advise

you how to successfully grow commercial lettuce on this.” He thought some more. “And you’re saying

you’d like to do it organically. Well, we can’t tell you anything about that. So basically I have nothing to

offer you.” And he left!

That was the reality for a long time. U.C. Davis didn’t come around for quite a while, until they started

taking the organic industry seriously. It took a lot of years before the Sustainable Agriculture Research

and Education Program was developed, with instigation from me and others. At first the organic

movement was growing fast, but it was still so small, it didn’t matter. Only in the ’80s when it was

growing at 20% a year and starting to mean something, that they began to look at it. Then they were

helpful and have been ever since. Now it’s a totally different world. Years later when I went down to

Coachella Valley Ag extension, the agent down there, Jose Aguilar, already knew about organics.

But in the beginning, we had to learn from each other. The CCOF (California Certified Organic

Farmers) had just started in ’72, and we signed up right away in ’74. We travelled to Certified Organic

Farmers meetings or other meetings, bunking overnight, sharing information.

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Our first, basic rules developed. The big default rule was, do not use synthetically compounded

chemicals whatsoever. So okay, what do we do then? Then we have to figure out how do we fertilize.

Well you know you have cover crops: green waste; animal waste. Number two was, Build the Soil. Feed

the soil, not the plant! Then we just experimented. The rule-book, so to speak, developed as we tried

things.

Little by little, we grew, but it was primitive at first! I got a caboose, and we moved into that. I got a

windmill in Lodi; I hand dug a well and set that up. We got the water to pump up to the tanks on top of

the caboose. Then we ran the water through the firebox of the stove we cooked on. That heated up our

hot water. The shower and the toilet were outside. Even though there was electricity here for the pumps,

we weren’t going to use it if we didn’t have to. Being self-sufficient was hugely important. It was very

much “back to the land.”

For plowing, we started with one horse I got through the Zen Center, from a man who was

growing sorghum using horses, and making syrup. I started with one, then I got a team. I found

some

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equipment, a beautiful sulky plow which I used until I went to tractors. We were trying to do it the way

that Scott Nearing talked about how to live simply on the land.3 But it was simply back breaking!

When we started, we were all by ourselves, but then others were drawn in. In the first five years or so,

people like us, college kids, came out and worked. It was fun! It’s great to think back on all the people

we associated with in those years. We had incredible plans, like seceding from the union and just

exchanging all our produce and stuff up and down the coast. It was really wild.

Becoming Real Farmers with a Drive to Succeed

So many of those dreams were never realized. A lot of people tried, but not many succeeded. Very few

found a way to stick it out on the land, make it work, and take the hardships. I don’t know what it is. A

certain temperament? A certain drive? Patience? Passion? I think part of the reason that some people

succeeded was that they had a business attitude about it. They had to have that.

The organization called the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) was

the mother organization for the whole movement. It was mostly in Europe, the United States, Australia,

and some in South America. It formed in 1972, and in ’79 or so, they had a conference in San Francisco

with people from all over the globe. As part of the meeting, visitors could go around to local farms. I

was too busy working to go to the meeting, but some people came to this farm.

I remember asking them, “What are your impressions of California?”

They said, “It’s very different here than in Europe, Australia, Africa, very different.”

I asked, “Why is that?”

They said, “You’re all trying to make money.”

3 Radical political activist and writer Scott Nearing (1883-1983) advocated a philosophy of simple living, such as

Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (NY: Schocken Books, 1970).

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They were impressed that we were very practical in that sense. Maybe it’s partly that they saw we were

developing the first organic rules around that time, in 1979, and saw us starting this organic movement

in California, a state that was already a hugely productive agricultural kingdom.

I think some of us were ashamed not to try to be productive. Not that we wanted to be like conventional

agriculture. We just wanted to succeed. Some people did say, “Money doesn’t really matter. We don’t

care about that.” But we were working and learning in the context of real farming and production.

A lot of us were trying to glean information we could use from conventional farms. How do you set up

your beds? What kind of cultivators do you use? What kind of plows? What’s the process? How much

ripping are we doing? How are we going to make our manure? – as we called it then. How can we do

this successfully without using chemicals? We had that drive to find out. And in my view today, those

were the people who succeeded. If you go to any of these farms, you’ll find that the really successful

ones, those that aren’t marginal anymore, have that attitude.

Looking at the next generation now, that continues to be my view. We really need to make sure the next

generation has entrepreneurial skills. You’ve got to have a good business attitude if you’re going to

succeed because, frankly, it’s a marginal business, and the margins are small. A lot of people just stop

farming because it’s not working out for them. That’s okay. They go on and become chefs or go into

advertising or something they can be more successful in. But for us to have this movement continue to

prosper and build, not just in this country but in the whole world, we need more business analysis.

How to Shock Prince Charles

In the beginning, when it came to using strong chemicals for weed control and other things that we

weren’t skilled in, we just didn’t want to do it, but it’s very tempting for people. The traditional method

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for fertilizing has always been shoveling manure around. Making piles and piles, mixing them and

turning, waiting and mixing some more, and then spreading it on the fields. That’s time consuming

work, doing weed control that way. But ignorance was bliss. And that bliss was helpful because it meant

we got through the trial and error phase – although we spent longer at it than other people might have,

like those who said, “I’m not doing this anymore! I’m going to just go get it in a bag.

The compost standard came later, requiring aerobic digestion at 140-170 degrees Fahrenheit for fifteen

days. In fact, Prince Charles came here on his visit, and we walked the farm. He was asking how we did

this and that.

And he asked, “What kind of manure do you put on your fields?”

I said, “We don’t. We’re not allowed to.”

“What?!” he said.

I replied, “We’re on a ‘compost standard.’ You can put manure on your cover crops and that gets turned

under, but on your cash crop you have to have compost.” He was pretty surprised by that. I said, “That’s

the standard in America now.”4

As a standard, it’s a good thing. It mostly has to do with nitrates in the soil and in the water, too, because

if you just put manure on, the nitrates can leach down.

, For more on Prince Charles’ visit in 2005, with Warren Weber featured in the article, see the report in the New

York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/us/organic-farmings-american-heartland-awaits-royals.html]

and in the San Francisco Chronicle [http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-down-to-earth-visit-by-a-royal-

highness-Tour-2597698.php]

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Gnarly Organic Potatoes

Not too many people were growing row crops here in the county. A big reason is that Marin doesn’t

have a lot of row crop ground and fertile bottom soils. My connections with row crop people were in

Santa Cruz, Yolo County, and southern California. One guy from the early years named Russell Wolter

was growing fifty acres of lettuce down by Watsonville. He was our organic guru. We’d go try to learn

what he was doing.

We had our misadventures and continual problems, like flea beetles invading the brassica, or trying to

harvest garlic in June, and then the rain comes and ruins the whole crop as it’s drying in the field. Just

about every crop can be difficult. We could never get potatoes right; they’d always get early blight. It’s

not great potato country on bottom-land out here, I don’t think, but we would try. It was one of the first

crops we did early on, in ’74.

We’d bring them to the natural food stores in the area where we were selling at the time. People would

love them! They looked like they’d been mauled, terrible looking things, but people would love them

because they were organic. They’d say, “Oh this must be organic because it doesn’t look conventional.”

Potatoes normally had smooth skins, perfect for marketing. Ours were these gnarly things, and people

would knock us over to get to them.

We had no problem selling in the early days. But then it changed. The industry got more sophisticated,

which is good. And we got more sophisticated. Over the years, we’ve tried almost everything you can

grow in this climate zone and in these soils. We ended up focusing our selection not only on what grows

well, but also what people want and how it’ll look at the market and on the plate.

Building the Organic Movement

By 1980 it was becoming a complicated movement, consumer-driven not farmer-driven, in my

experience. We were the agents of change, but consumers in the alternative culture movement and

people supplying food in markets shaped it, saying, “We want organic produce!” Natural food stores

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were springing up, promoting organics. Farmers could never have done it alone. Eventually, big stores

came in and developed organics. But in the beginning consumers were the active political force.

In Marin our first sales were to all these little stores: Our Store, Campolindos; Living Foods; and Good

Earth, which has survived. Then we sold to places in the city, including farmers markets. One day I had

more peas than I could sell at the stores here, so I went to the oldest farmers market in south San

Francisco. In those days, you could just walk in, sign up, bring in your little truck, park it for the

morning, and sell your peas. After a couple of hours, I was getting itchy. I’d sold three boxes of peas,

but I had fifteen boxes more. “Oh my God,” I thought, “this won’t work!” And I had to get back to the

farm, with all this stuff to do there.

Well, I had the phone number of Veritable Vegetable. They were distributors that started out as a co-op.

We were all working out new forms of ownership and operation back then. So I called the guy. He said,

“Come on over.”

At the time Veritable was basically a garage on Alabama Street. The guy opened his garage and I

brought my little truck in.

He said, “Those are pretty nice. Are they organic?”

I said, “Yeah, they’re organic.” We were certified from the very beginning.

He said, “Oh, that’s cool man. That’s really cool.” He looked me in the eye and he said, “Are you for

profit?”

I said, “Well, it depends what you mean, but here’s the deal. I have all these expenses. I had to spend

money for the seed and feeding my horses and gas for the truck. You’re going to pay me, and I’m

hoping there’s something left over for food for my kids. That’s the profit.

He said, “Cool, that’s great, I got it. Don’t worry. That’s not a problem.”

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Early in the movement, some people thought we shouldn’t be for profit, that it should be more of a do-

gooders movement. Another side to the movement was scary, what I call the religion side of it, people

into organic practices almost as a religion. A little bit of the Steiner stuff,5 like the practices in

themselves are the end goal, and as long as I’m doing the practices correctly, nothing else really matters.

Steiner was a pantheist. Some people were burying a spoonful of manure in a cow’s horn and believed

everything would be okay now, all in cosmic balance, that kind of thing.

Then there were the people who didn’t want to sidle up to the government. They didn’t want to go down

the road of standards because a lot of us were against the establishment. I remember one meeting around

’78 at Fort Mason, right before we wrote the first standards, which came out in ’79, when we got the bill

passed for the health department in Sacramento.6 At this meeting, we discussed setting standards. Some

people really did not want them. I was a little worried myself because we were definitely starting down

a regulatory path. A lot of us were free-thinking kind of people.

But I remember saying, “We have to be clear here: this is not a religion. We’re not doing organics

because we’re trying to espouse a myth, but because we actually want to be successful farmers. We’re

not necessarily making a lot of money, but we want to be able to provide this kind of food to people. So

let’s disabuse ourselves of the idea that it’s religion.”

It was important to get standards for certification, I felt. One reason was that consumers were asking,

“What’s really going on here? We don’t know what is organic. What does that really mean?” Sometimes

there was a wink and a handshake between buyers, or between sellers of produce and distributors.

5 Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was a philosopher and social reformer with a spiritualist approach to education and

science. In 1924, he published a book that inspired many organic farmers, using organic principles, Spiritual

Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture. 6 In 1979 the California Organic Food Act (COFA) was signed, defining organic practices in California.

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Consumers can’t always know what happens on a farm. It’s easy to get those chemical fertilizer bags,

disk it all in, and people won’t know what’s going on. That happens. Human nature is human nature,

with good and bad, Manicheism, and all that. So I say trust, but trust with verification.

Anyhow, that meeting went on for a couple of days, talking about the certification process. Those were

great discussions. In the end, we did get the government to come in, and we now have a big industry.

Eventually we acknowledged, we’re going down a certain road. And we did.

The Baby Lettuce Boom

Then there was the baby lettuce thing. It began for us around 1987, when Sibella Kraus came out here

on behalf of Chez Panisse, for Alice Waters. Sibella was running around the farm, looking at everything.

She said she wanted smaller lettuces.

I said, “We have some lettuce, but it’s not going to be ready for another six weeks. I’ll show you.” We

were down by the front field, and I pointed them out. They were tiny.

She says, “That’s what we want.”

I said, “No, you don’t. You don’t want that. It’s not even leaf lettuce yet.”

“No,” she insisted, “That’s what I want.” And she asked if we could cut some.

I thought, “Oh no, you’re not going to cut that! It’s not ready to be cut.” But I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

I took out my knife and was cutting while looking over my shoulder, hoping no one was seeing me do

this. Because in my mind it was such a ridiculous thing to do.

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Of course, baby lettuce became a huge deal. It was very interesting selling to Chez Panisse. Then we got

a following with other chefs, like Jeremiah Tower and Paul Bartoli. We’re packing this stuff out, and it’s

featured in Time magazine and Newsweek with all these other beautiful foods, and there we were. The

publicity helped me understand what we were doing: creating something not only very tasty and full of

life but also aesthetically beautiful. California cuisine and particularly the salads at that time were

fabulous. Forget iceberg and Romaine! It was really fun and we learned a lot.

I went to Alice, and I said, “Maybe we could get the greens into stores.”

Alice said, “I’ll help you. You just talk to Todd Koons and Patricia Curtin.” Patricia designed Chez

Panisse menus and posters. Patricia came up with a great label; and Todd designed a specially made

plastic box. We started selling those in stores with four or five different kinds of lettuce, arugula, maybe

a little frisee, very pretty and colorful. We adopted the word “mesclun” from the French for “mixture.”

In France it’s a salad of mixed leafy greens.

Then Dale Coke started using “spring mix,” and that worked well. It makes you feel something. It was

very successful. Mesclun doesn’t make you feel anything! So there’s that trade off. I guess some of the

stores weren’t too interested in having hippies bring in “mescl’n.”

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We were one of the very early adopters of arugula. We tried it and loved the taste. It grew nicely here, so

we just went with it, and other people loved it, too. It's all about the taste. Arugula can be nutty,

somewhat peppery, depending on the soils and the time of the year. When you get that real nutty flavor,

it holds up nicely and takes dressings well – hazelnut or balsamic dressings – just great. Arugula is

versatile. It’s amazing how it took off.

Another thing that I liked then and still do is a chicory frisee salad, a huge delight. A walnut vinaigrette

smooths out the bitterness. A little bit is fantastic. And frisee is so beautiful when properly blanched in

the field! So we learned how to grow them. Frisee was a taste Americans weren't quite ready for, but

arugula became huge. You’d even find an arugula joke in the New Yorker every once in a while. That's

good for business. We don't care what you say about us, just keep talking about us.

All those greens mark another part of my development because Amy Nathan and I got together in 1987.

She had called me because she was doing a book on salads, a really lovely photo essay book with under-

lit photographs, that Chronicle Books did.7 When I met her, we both had this salad thing going on at the

same time. That’s still practically all we still eat now.

Abbess Alice

I always say that in Chez Panisse, Alice created an abbey, and that she's an abbess. She created this

place where people come and learn, and then they go off and start their own little monasteries. There’s a

7 Salad by Amy Nathan and Kathryn Kleinman (Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1985).

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kind of medieval feeling to it, I think. The way she’s done it is natural, an evolving culture that spins

itself out into the world.

I learned a lot by selling to restaurants. I remember one time I was at Stars, and we had brought in boxes

of undercut arugula to sell, meaning with some roots on them. They were so fresh and lovely! This one

woman was ruthless. I felt like I was in the army. She looked at the box and immediately pulled up the

one plant in the box that had a few holes in some of the leaves. With a terrible, scornful look, she said,

“What’s this?” I’m thinking, Oh my God! I'm the farmer. I cut it and brought it in myself, and I'm being

told, “This is not good enough for this restaurant.” I learned a lot about aesthetics the hard way. There’s

nothing like being told your product is not good enough. For me, that lights a fire.

So we got better. It wasn't like five years earlier, going into the natural food store where they're

clamoring for the dirty potatoes just because they’re organic. Restaurants at first weren’t interested in

organic but in style. Later, they appreciated having organic food, like Alice and Jeremiah, because

they're educated people. They knew what was going on in the culture. But I remember saying to Alice

and others in the beginning, “Organic does make a difference. You've got stuff coming from I don't

know where and it's not organic. There's agronomic responsibility here that you need to understand. It’s

not only about what's on your food, but it also has to do with workers. And the water table. How we use

our resources. What we're doing out here. What’s going on in the soil. Are we sustainable? Are we

farming in the best possible manner?” I said, “Those things are important to us. So I hope you can look

for organic.” Of course, they all got it.

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Feeding the Soil

This brown, mineralized soil we have is called Blucher loam, a beautiful, deep, 45 to 60 inch clay loam.

Not too strong on clay, but some clay. A soil chunk can ball up when there’s clay in it, but this you can

break down nicely. It’s not “dobby.” It’s a fantastic soil created by this creek flooding over millennia. In

fact, the creek still floods the fields when it’s really high. It spreads out across the fields, then slows

down and drops soil particles, building up this soil, millimeter by millimeter over centuries.

For us to build this soil, we use the standard organic process, which is growing cover crops and then

mixing in compost. In the beginning I did everything by the book, including soil tests, but we slowly

realized that just by judging our crops, we don’t need to test it. We haven’t done a soil test in thirty

years. We keep doing this program and it’s a truism; but feeding the soil, not the plant, is the foundation.

We have a couple of important strategies. Besides composting and building the soil, we rotate crops. It’s

a strategy to hedge the biological bet. Having a lot of different crops seems to work. Even if one crop is

not doing well, other crops may be fine because a particular disease or pest doesn’t hurt them. If we had

everything in brassicas, or everything in arugula, and we had flea beetles, they’d take over the whole

farm and we’d lose everything. We don’t do that. We rotate our crops. Then we’re also hedging our

biological and our financial bets. Another way to hedge our biological bet is by having different crops

come in at different times and in smaller plantings. We also hedge the financial bet by having a lot of

different people buy our stuff. If you have monoculture and you’re a large 10,000-acre farm, you can put

big blocks in, but you have big risks.

So those are our key principles.

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Spending on Organic Foods

One question about organic is who can afford to buy what you want to grow. Then there’s the question

about who likes what you want to grow. Plenty of people like what we want to grow, and they’re from

all social strata. It's true that chefs are selling produce at a pretty high end in all these restaurants.

They’re expensive, but we also have farmers markets and stores.

If you look at organics from an economic point of view, you have to look at the food dollar, how much

people spend for food. Food is very cheap in this country; Americans actually spend very little on the

dollar in relative terms. You're still spending less of your disposable income on food than people do all

around the world. If you’re going to a farmers market, maybe you spend 15% or 20% more on produce

than if you went to a big conventional chain store, but you still may not be spending very much of your

dollar. If you're poor or relatively poor, if you're at the poverty level, you can pretty much still buy

organic if you want to, but you have to want to. I think that's the question.

So maybe our organic produce is 10% to 20% higher, but we don’t feel bad about that. It also costs more

to grow it; a lot more labor is involved. The bottom line is that successful organic farmers are just

following the same kind of margins as successful conventional farms do. We all have those margins.

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Organic Goes Big: The 1990s

When Dale Coke started putting the spring mix in a bigger box in the stores, that transformed

everything. A lot of people got into creating larger farms, and subsequently some went under.

In ’89, I also started to farm on a bigger scale, down in the desert.

Until then, we’d seen this movement as a renaissance of small farms in California: five, ten, twenty

acres. Fifty acres was a lot in the ’70s. I call it a renaissance for small farms because back in the ’50s at

least 20% of conventional farms in California were also twenty acres or under. Bush peas, cherry

tomatoes, beans, all kinds of berries, strawberries – they all used to be small crops. Families made a

living on five acres of strawberries until the big fat strawberry came along and changed demand.

In the ’50s, California had a healthy industry of small farms, but they petered out as the pesticide

industry began to dominate larger acreages. So the organic industry came in as specialty crops, with

small farms in the ’70s.

The really big change was watching this industry grow at 20% a year. It doubled every three and half

years, becoming relatively huge. It started so small that it never looked very big. But by the late ’80s and

early ’90s, it was a recognizable industry in stores all over the country.

The big question for farmers was, “Do you keep growing with this thing? Do you keep expanding?” For

me, I was trying to straddle it: I knew I never wanted to be a farmer with 4,000 acres of vegetables, yet I

wanted to be part of the action. So I put money into expanding. I went to the desert and we got 100 acres

down there. Then I thought, “Okay, this is working out pretty well.” I was trying to use my intuition.

But in the late ’90s, the industry crashed when big conventional growers got into organics. Grimmway

Farms was huge, I think they were doing 40% of all conventional carrots nationwide. They decided to

do some organic carrots. Well, Grimmway could take just 1% of their operating expenses and still put in

hundreds of acres of carrots. They could then offer their produce to Whole Foods for next to nothing.

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They just wanted shelf space, just to get into the market. They didn’t care about price. All of a sudden,

Earthbound got into the industry, too. Within just a few weeks, the price of mesclun and spring mix

dropped from $11 a box to $5 a box. Our cost was about $9… So we were out of business.

Warren Ruminating on His Role

I may be the oldest organic farmer in California, but I didn’t start it! It wasn’t my idea. I just participated

in the movement. I got in the boat and rowed with other people at that time. A lot of life is about luck,

beginning with your gene pool, which is totally luck, right? I’ve been very fortunate to be part of an

interesting endeavor. While farming suited my personality, being an organic farmer has also allowed me

to make something of a difference. That’s important to me, so I feel hugely rewarded.

I admire the people in the movement and the industry who’ve done a lot more than I have, the people

who participated actively in the political process. I like to initiate things and follow through a little bit,

but I have no stomach for the hardcore, awful stuff: in our industry, all the problems with GMOs, the

fight at the national level over federal rules, and all that. I also admire people in academia who fight that

stuff through, or in the advertising business – all the people who have such difficulties yet get through to

create something better. Farming is easy in comparison.

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My contribution was just being there and being allowed to have a voice. People say they think of me as

an intellectual. I'm actually not. As for soils and agronomy, many people know lots more than I do, and I

love listening to them. But I'm not a scientist. I barely squeezed through Agronomy 101! I remember

being told in the beginning of the course that this would be one of the hardest classes we’d take in the

sciences because all the sciences are involved in studying agronomy: chemistry, biology, physics, flora

and fauna, water, mineralization and properties of soils. I hate to say it, but I probably found out more

from Debra Koons’ film Symphony of the Soil than I did in Agronomy 101. It was hard.

But I have learned that there is a universe in this soil. And the soil has its own atmosphere. There’s

nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen in the soil, as in the air, in different configurations. It’s so complex.

Studying the soil is a little bit like studying the Hindu gods. They say nobody in a lifetime could

possibly be able to tell all the Hindu god stories created over the years. It’s like that with the soil, a cool

universe that has a lot going on in there. Maybe the soil is like our universe itself with all this matter and

“unmatter,” the dark matter, and we’re part of something very much bigger that we will never entirely

understand.

I'm very practical. I'm perfectly willing to simply live with the soils here and treat them the way they

deserve. In return we’ve been rewarded by them. The truth is that I like the productive aspect of

farming. I just love the outdoors! I love trying to balance these natural relationships. I’m not a soil

scientist; but I do know we’re very dependent on the soil microbes. We put mycorrhizal fungi, for

example, alongside our plants to stimulate activity. What actually happens, how the plants are protected

from disease and insects, how they get more nutrition – that’s all the dark matter.

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What Lies Ahead

Since 2000 I’ve delighted in seeing a resurgence, a newfound fun in the organic scene and in agriculture.

The Greenhorns are certainly part of that.8 We had that same feeling ourselves back in the ’70s. In the

’80s the scene got stale and even more so in the ’90s. Kids would leave ranches because they were too

marginal and the dairy industry was failing. You couldn’t make any money on beef, really. They’d go to

Cal Poly or Davis and become vets or fertilizer salesmen or teach, but they wouldn’t return to the farms.

Now they're coming back. Marin Agricultural Land Trust has done a terrific job of preserving ranches.9

Now the ranches are being integrated horizontally and vertically with new products. Many young people

are coming back into farming in various ways. Now we have not just cattle dairies but sheep and goat

dairies. Some folks are vertically integrating their dairies to create cheeses. We have poultry coming

back, not just chickens, but ducks. We have more orchards and a lot of bush berries. There’s another

renaissance going on, and it’s being done organically and without GMOs. It can be done. If we can do it

here, we can do it in lots of places. That’s exciting. And young people are basically running it, of course.

8 The Greenhorns are dedicated to recruiting new farmers to creating healthy farms for those who work them and

those who eat from them. Their manifesto is well captured in the book Greenhorns: 50 Dispatches from the New

Farmers Movement, Zoe Bradbury, ed. (Workman Pub., 2012). See their website: http://www.thegreenhorns.net. 9 Learn more about the Marin Agricultural Land Trust at http://www.malt.org/

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A tension has always existed between organic farmers and the academic agricultural community.

Academics didn’t much get behind organic farming initially, but they did get behind sustainability,

which includes organic farming. Sustainability can also include limited pesticides, like Integrated Pest

Management. It can include a lot of things. That approach is more comfortable for them in relation to

their research, promotion, and changes that they’d like to see in conventional agriculture. My feeling has

always been that if it’s sustainable, it also has to be organic.

We now have an industry that’s working well, with a lot of big players in it. Over the last thirty years,

we’ve developed this industry in a pretty sophisticated way. For example, we now have botanical

products we didn’t even have before. A lot of research has been incorporated, so we’re becoming ever

more sophisticated and lighter on our feet than we were in the old days.

Meanwhile, new challenges to organics are coming from GMOs, a huge challenge, much bigger than the

pesticides were. Some people say, “Maybe some of what’s going on in GMOs is okay. Maybe there’s

good stuff there that we ought to really consider.”

I say, “Okay, consider it! Where’s the analysis? I'm willing to consider everything.”

Organic farming does work. We’re moving towards something sustainable, and

growing every darn crop organically that can be grown conventionally, on every

scale. It’s in every market, the poor and rich segments of society. We have it in

America, Europe, Australia. New Zealand is practically completely organic! We

can grow organics in deserts, in Africa, all over the world. I think it still hasn’t

even proved itself yet entirely.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but in the horse and buggy age, New York used to have a problem with too

much manure. It was a big battle fought for a long time. Just as the problem peaked, the automobile

came along and “solved” it, initiating a smog problem in its place. Similarly, in the 1990s, the

Environmental Protection Agency wanted to solve the problem of sewage disposal by classifying

biosolids as organic matter, encouraging the spreading of sewage sludge as an acceptable organic

practice. We fought that battle, and we won.

I’ve never felt that I was in an ideological battle, even if I’ve helped win a place for organics. I have a

lot of respect for conventional farmers, but I take a certain pleasure in knowing that we’ve grown food

that’s not been exposed to hazardous materials, which otherwise might have been exposed. That makes

me feel good.

The GMO thing and all these technologies are complicated. We have to be firm about not making

changes that end up destructive or put off the consumer who trusts us. That’s really important. On the

other hand, we have to be fair and open-minded. We can’t just say, “No, I don’t want to see or hear

anything about it.” We may actually be making an intellectual, scientific mistake.

Truth in labeling is an important case in point. Congress wants to pass legislation that says you don’t

have to acknowledge that you have GMOs in your food.10 We’re trying to say, “Wait, we want people to

know what’s in their food. If you’re so confident that GMOs are such a good thing, fine. Let people

know. Let people make these choices based upon knowledge and testing.”

The organic industry started on the basis of truth in labeling, having to explain what organic even

means. People said, “You have to tell us whether this is organic or not. You have to get certified.”

We’re saying the same thing. People need to know what a GMO product is, what’s involved in it, how

it’s been tested. What do we know about these products? The consumer has a right to know. I don’t want

to adopt a technology that’s not good. I want to be careful. Rachel Carson showed that she had the facts,

the research, the knowledge. We continue to need that kind of attitude. That’s just being intelligent.

10 In March 2016 House Republicans offered legislation for voluntary rather than mandatory labeling. Also that

month, General Mills decided it would start labeling. Campbell’s soup had done so earlier.

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The movement has always been crucial for me in terms of how we can transform the earth with it.

What’s imponderable is population growth. Where the Earth is going is thoroughly wrapped up in our

species, the size of our species, and our incredible impact. I have a hard time feeling sanguine about the

future if we don’t create balance between the Earth and the numbers of our species. We once had an

easy balance; we were so naïve. Maybe we’ll get smart enough to learn how to live with fewer

resources. It’d be very interesting to be here in 500 years.

Of course, some people say organic agriculture can’t feed the world, so we shouldn’t go down that path.

I'm not sure that’s true. It’s like what they used to say about Christianity. Don’t knock it because it

hasn’t really been tried. That’s what the deep Christians would say. Maybe that’s a good analogy for the

organic movement because it hasn’t really been thoroughly tried. Our practices haven’t gone deep and

wide enough. I always say that, given our short history in organics, going on fifty years, we ought to

assume we should keep trying. We need to challenge other technologies, GMOs or anything else that

comes along and say, why don’t you work for us?

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I’ve got to tell you this story. I went to China in 1984 with my brother and Orville Schell and a few

other people. Garry Herzberg was leading a group of about ten people. We read in the papers about a big

fly epidemic in China, and they solved it, but not with pesticides. They solved it by having a contest

throughout the whole country. Deng Xiaoping said, “Okay, we’re going to solve this by having people

collect flies, and the person who collects the most flies is going to get the Mao Award” or whatever they

called it. Everybody in the country started collecting flies. Nearly a billion people had jars and jars and

jars of flies. So they solved the problem. Isn’t that a trip? We reach for the sprayer. We reach for the

pesticide. I thought that was pretty amazing. That’s an organic solution.

We can do it. We have technology. We just have to figure it out.

⸙