20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 12-18, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com believes thousands more are eligible. Certification is free, and like USDA organic, requires a site visit from an inspector. As a past member of ROP’s standards board, Dixon has been in the midst of some technical debates about how to be inclusive but also hold the bar high. For example, the standards require ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep) to get at least 40 percent of their diet during grazing season from grass, not grain. On top of that, they require animals not be kept in isolation. “We have revisited it three years in a row now, and we have kept it so that they cannot be in isolation. We have kept pretty strict standards,” Dixon says. There’s no limit on how big a farm can be, but Dixon says the practices tend to keep farms relatively small— there are only so many dairy cows you can move in a day if they leave the barn. “Ecological practices are themselves scale-limiting, although our standards don’t have a size or dollar amount,” Dixon says. And size—both of a farm and of the business—is not inherently bad, she adds. “When I started as an organic farmer, there was zero market for organic. Now, of course, it’s a big business. There’s nothing wrong with that—we want it to be a huge business, we just don’t want it to be dominated by a few huge players. Inevitably they end up controlling it and redefining it to suit them, and they lose track of what it was there in the first place.” But the farms certified by the Real Organic Project, including 13 in Monterey County, are still tracking with why it was there in the first place. • At JSM Organics in North Monterey County, Javier Zamora reaches down for a young head of romaine and gives a solid tug. “Look at those roots,” Zamora says. “Those are some big roots for this tiny little lettuce.” The romaine is growing alongside carrots, still tiny. Zamora pulls out a little purple carrot, covered in soil, and holds it to his nose. “You can immediately smell clean, healthy soil,” he says. He shakes off most of that soil, then takes a bite, noting he can do so freely because his farm is organic and there are no pesticides in this soil. When Zamora bought this land six years ago, it was already certified organic, but crops were rotated less frequently—he encountered a predominance of brassicas, crops like broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale. They can invite nematodes and a condition called club root. Early on, he found that when he planted Brussels sprouts, the roots were damaged. So the next year, he planted an entire field of marigolds—nature’s soil-cleaner he says, instead of fumigation. “It’s beautiful, but you have to be kind of smart about it,” he says. “I am not a scientist, but I have seen it work.” It’s that kind of philosophy in action that earned him certification from the Real Organic Project. Strawberries are especially susceptible to pests, and in conventional farms, the soil is fumigated. Zamora instead uses a crop of broccoli. It means he can’t plant strawberries in the same place consecutively, which takes planning. And you can’t follow tomatoes with eggplants, which host the same diseases. The diversification pays off in terms of soil health. When he acquired this land, soil tests showed 3-percent organic matter. Within three years, it rose to 5.5 percent. “That’s just incredible—it’s like a human having no cholesterol,” Zamora says. But perhaps more importantly for a small operation like JSM, diversification pays off in terms of business. Sugar snap peas are just coming up between rows of blackberries, which are all but finished for the year. Green beans—bonus for being nitrogen fixers—are growing among the tomatoes. As the romaine is harvested, the carrots—now tiny, between lettuce heads—are just maturing. Next to those rows of lettuce and carrots, hibiscus flowers from the summer are hanging upside down to dry. Marigolds, lining a hoop house of tomatoes as a natural form of pest control, will eventually be harvested and sold as cut flowers. “Everything that I plant needs to bring money,” Zamora says. He sells mostly to Bi-Rite in San Francisco and to the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op; he’s found a better year-round market to the north. (He sells seasonal berries to Elroy’s and Andronico’s in Monterey.) Zamora has been successful. In 11 years of farming, he’s gone from working with just his wife and two daughters to 48 employees, including one whom he’s training to take over someday. Five years into farming he bought his own 200-acre ranch, with 68 farmable acres. (The Elkhorn Slough Foundation holds an easement on the ranch, which guarantees 132 acres— including where Carneros Creek runs through the property—remain as wildlife habitat. Well managed farms are included in many ESF easements: “Farmland is part of the equation, part of the tapestry of protecting the watershed,” says Ross Robertson of ESF. Zamora says the nonprofit’s $1 million toward the easement enabled him to buy his own farm.) In some ways, farming was a return to his roots. Zamora grew up in Michoacán, Mexico, and remembers picking strawberries on the family farm as a child. But it was a lifetime until he returned to farming. Zamora followed friends to Los Angeles and worked in the restaurant industry, then lost everything in the 2008 recession. In 2011 he enrolled at Cabrillo College and in 2012, began farming on rented land in Monterey County. Just across the street from JSM, rows of plastic line a sloping field, ready for strawberries to be planted. From a distance, there’s no way to know whether that field is conventional or organic, but it is obvious that it’s not Real Organic Project-certified— and you can tell a Real Organic farm when you see one, or smell one. “The producer must select and implement tillage and cultivation practices that maintain or improve the physical, chemical, and biological condition of soil and minimize soil erosion,” per ROP’s standards. The emphasis on soil means a departure from the use of “substrate”—sometimes coconut coir Dave Chapman, right, and Linley Dixon, left, are codirectors of the Real Organic Project. The nonprofit’s mission states: “In this time of concern about the erosion of integrity in the USDA, Real Organic remains exactly what organic was always intended to be.” “What you have seen is a takeover of the USDA organic standards by big business.” Courtesy Real Organic Project Courtesy Real Organic Project
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