From the 2015 Young Farmers Preconference — “This Is How We Do It: Learning From Successful Farm Models.”
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Pie Ranch
Jered Lawson and Nancy Vail
Pescadero, CA
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— SNAPSHOT QUESTIONS —
When did you start your farm?
2004 (2005 we hosted our first educational programs)
What do you produce?
Mixed vegetables, fruit, grain, dry beans, cows, chickens, pigs, goats, educational programs; new farmers and changemakers!
How big is your farm?
Pie Ranch (home site): 27 acres total with approximately 10-12 acres in pasture/annuals/perennials; 3-5 cows, 5 goats, 300 chickens; 3-8 pigs. Pie Ranch (at Año Nuevo): 85 acres of mixed vegetables; pasture for cows & chickens.
Where is it?
We are on the Central Coast of California in San Mateo County; we are 20 minutes south of the town of Pescadero.
What is your soil type and topography?
Clay loam, gently sloping or flat.
Do you lease, rent or own your land?
Nancy and Jered own the original 14 acres; Pie Ranch owns the adjacent 13.5 acres; and we are leasing 85 acres across the street.
What are your markets?
Roadside Farmstand open 6 days a week; 50 CSA members through partner schools; sales to restaurants and bakeries; CSA 2.0 sales to large organizations like Google, Stanford, and the hopes of getting produce into SFUSD and hospitals.
Being an educational farm, our “markets” would also include those groups that we attract for fee-for-service programming including schools, universities, non-profits, corporate groups, family/friend gatherings, weddings.
— IN-DEPTH QUESTIONS —
What made you want to start your farm? What was your dream?
Nancy: as a history major in college found food/farming as a way to address social, economic, environmental, political, spiritual dimensions of social change work. Yes, it was my and Jered’s dream to start an educational farm rooted in love and justice!
Jered: to have one foot in daily practical production and one foot in community level social change work, while living and working in a beautiful setting.
How were you involved in farming before you started your own farm?
Nancy: Apprenticed on farms around the world and throughout the US; in 1997 attended CASFS’s Apprenticeship at UCSC and stayed on there for 11 years co-managing ten acres of row crops and orchards, teaching 40 apprentices/year.
Jered: I had only gardening and small farm experience through an internship and then employment at the Homeless Garden Project as an undergraduate at UCSC and then through the 6-month apprenticeship program at the UCSC farm. However, I spent about fifteen years involved in promoting and facilitating urban/rural relationship building through CSA, Farm-to-School, local food campaigns, and local food policy initiatives.
How did you secure land and capital for your farm?
With the help of a friend and creative partnership; low interest loan from a nonconventional lender; a loan from a friend; funding through the NRCS; personal savings.
What did your farm look like in year one?
2004 focused on cover cropping and prepping the ground, establishing relationships with schools; 2005 – grew about 2 acres of a few crops including wheat, strawberries, pumpkins, dry beans, field corn, caneberries, had a couple goats, and a flock of chickens; one committed partner school that came once a month for programming; started building regional partnerships with various groups in the Bay Area. Nancy worked half-time at UCSC to bring in income.
What were some challenges that you didn’t expect to have and how did you deal with them?
• Water challenges – excess salt in one of our wells. We are pumping from an instream pond and only use the salty well water when needed.
• New land; dilapidated infrastructure dating back 150 years – both an incredible opportunity and now the challenge is to raise the funds to restore the buildings and related infrastructure.
• County regulations – working with County officials and pushing for them to consider shifting some of the rules, such as utilizing yurts as affordable housing for farmworkers (including us).
What were some indicators in the beginning stages that made you optimistic for your farm’s success?
• We are located on a beautiful stretch of coast surrounded by 22,000 acres of State Parks, home to mountain lions and elephant seals and yet only one hour from 7 million people.
• Beautiful clay loam soil; enough water (so far!)
• Watching the faces of youth who first came in 2005 and hearing from the teachers what an impact their experience made in their classrooms, in the lives of the youth.
• Folks really liked the concept of Pie, literally and figuratively speaking; from the beginning we’ve gotten a lot of press without being asked.
What have been some landmark events in your farm’s development? (equipment purchases, strategic decision, markets, etc.)
Lower slice-strategic decision; successful outcome with POST running Future Farmlands Initiative; fund development – Cap Campaign that trickled over into stability for our farm; New Market – Food Innovation Lab with Google took is into this next phase of developing a large organization cafeteria-based CSA.
Was there a point when you felt your farm became “established?”
When Nancy was able to leave her job at UCSC and we could start paying ourselves small salaries (2008).
What goals have you met?
• We’ve grown our staff to 32 wonderful folk; 10 board members; almost ½ POC.
• We are Certified Organic, Food Justice Certified & Animal Welfare Approved.
• We have the first Affirmative Conservation Easement in the county with the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which assures the land will be forever farmed organically.
• Strengthened our Youth Programs by employing coordinators based at each of our partner schools as well as a Youth Programs Manager that oversees all programming with K-12 youth.
• We’ve grown our Emerging Farmers Program which now has 5 year-long apprentices, 2 second-year apprentices, 3 summer interns, 1 farm manager.
• We have strengthened our Regional Partnerships with diverse organizations throughout the Bay Area. Examples: Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, Peninsula Open Space Trust, public school districts, Puente de la Costa Sur, San Mateo Food Systems Alliance, Google, Stanford, Rooted in Community, to name a few.
• Our staff collectively completed our first 3-year Strategic Plan which lays out our priorities and strategies through 2017.
How have your goals changed?
We are more explicit around our evolution as an antiracist organization committed to dismantling all forms of oppression; even though we had a vision rooted in social justice, it has become apparent how much more explicit we need to be!
We have also become interested in scaling up our production/supply.
How have you been successful? (financial, production, quality of life, etc.)
• Grounding ourselves in our values of respect, love, justice, responsible stewardship, empowerment, collaboration, diversity.
• Coming back to our vision and mission on a regular basis.
• Creating jobs for youth, farmworkers, other staff.
• Sustaining soil health.
• Building community and partnerships that span generations, rural, suburban, urban environments.
• Balancing mission and financial goals.
• Commitment to work/life balance.
Who or what can you credit for your successes?
• Having a partnership with someone who shares the same dream and values; who is a risk taker with vision but also grounded in the practical; sharing equally in raising children, homemaking, organizational well-being, movement building.
• Diverse voices who guide us in our work – from high school youth to the Amah Mutsun tribe to the Peninsula Open Space Trust to our community of elders to Puente de la Costa Sur to ChangeScale to Google to our staff and on.
• Generous donors and foundations.
• Committed, talented, & passionate staff and board of directors.
• We acknowledge that much of our success also comes from our unearned privilege as white folks (know history) and true success comes when we do the dance of using that privilege and power to leverage social change while committing to dismantling all forms of oppression.
What challenges does your farm face now and in the future?
• Funding
• Water
• Climate Change
Where do you see your farm in five years?
Pie Ranch will offer a replicable and scalable model of a just supply system from seed to table. Pie Ranch will have become the destination of choice for over 50,000 visitors per year that come away with life-changing experiences.
What advice would you give to beginning farmers?
• Be a nerd (stay open to continually learning) about soil, water, weeds, insects, plants, animals, yourself, work, tractors, and the deep and far reaching connections between microbes and human communities.
• Dream big and stretch your dream to embrace other communities of folks you might not normally hang with. “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.” (Mother Teresa)
• Remember every inch of soil in this country was stolen from Indigenous communities and people were stolen from Africa to make the USA what it is today. Racial justice, food and farming are inextricably connected. The act of farming has the potential to heal these wounds that affect all of us, we need more people to cultivate that healing.
• It is white folks’ responsibility to uproot racism as this is a white person’s disease. Don’t take it personally, but do take responsibility.
• If you are white, find out how to do the dance of stepping back and allow yourself to be guided by the voices of people of color while also stepping forward to use your voice to lift up love and justice.
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More on Pie Ranch:
Originally published on March 15, 2016
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