montereycountynow.com/bestof BEST OF MONTEREY COUNTY® 2025 43 AGRICULTURE BEST FARMERS MARKET Old Monterey Farmers Market Alvarado Street between Del Monte and Pearl, Monterey (831) 655-2607, oldmonterey.org Readers chose this farmers market as their favorite, and that’s not a game in the Salad Bowl of the World. However, a refreshing lack of strategy is needed to attend the Old Monterey Farmers Market. Feel free to marvel at each vendor’s competitive edge in full view, offering valuable tokens like postcard-perfect strawberries and bountiful floral bouquets. Held every Tuesday afternoon year-round, everybody wins at this Best Farmers Market. BEST BIG GROWER - FRUITS AND VEGETABLES Driscoll’s 345 Westridge Drive, Watsonville (800) 871-3333, driscolls.com Newton’s Apples is a board game for kids where the board is tilted, apples are placed along eight vertical tracks, and you use gravity to roll them to the bottom—before your opponent blocks your path with a crate. It was a clunky game, but the concept is easy: Produce in motion stays in motion. Driscoll’s may not grow apples, but they certainly have weight when it comes to their rank in the marketplace. In Monterey County, their focus is firmly on berries—but their gravitas in the market has made them a heavyweight, earning them the title of Best Big Grower for Fruits and Vegetables. BEST ORGANIC GROWER Earthbound Farm 150 Main St., Suite 300, Salinas (800) 690-3200, earthboundfarm.com Back in the early 2000s, a life simulation game took off—one where you could build homes, design environments and shape the daily lives of virtual people. That game, of course, was The Sims, and it took teens, especially ’90s children, by storm. Years later, cottagecore made its way into the Sims universe—a romanticized take on rural life where your virtual person could live off the land, tend a garden, befriend wild rabbits, bake organic pies and make organic jams from scratch. In real life, you might not see people chatting with woodland creatures, but there is Earthbound Farm— and it’s about as cottagecore as it gets, especially at the farm stand tucked just off Carmel Valley Road. The stand perfectly embodies the organic roots and harmony with nature that the brand represents today, reaching millions of consumers through owner Taylor Farms. BEST AG INDUSTRY LEADER Bruce Taylor Taylor Farms, 150 Main St., Suite 300, Salinas (877) 323-7374, taylorfarms.com If Bruce Taylor felt compelled to declare, “King me!” every time he changed the agricultural industry, he would be wearing a precarious hat of checkers pieces. When Taylor launched Taylor Fresh Foods in 1995, his focus on prepackaged salads and cut vegetables snagged the first crown. Over the last 30 years, Taylor has added more healthy convenience foods, like dinnertime vegetable meal kits and lunchbox snack packs, that are now household staples for Americans nationwide. BEST WOMAN IN AG Abby Taylor-Silva Kahn, Soares & Conway, 512 Pajaro St., Salinas (831) 676-0958, ksclawyers.com In The Last of Us—a show based on a video game set in a post-apocalyptic America—there’s a badass heroine named Ellie Williams, a fierce force for good who fights fungal-born zombies and tries to save humanity. Well, the ag industry has its very own Ellie Williams right here in Monterey County: Abby Taylor‑Silva, managing director of regulator affairs for the law firm Kahn, Soares & Conway, which specializes in agricultural law and legislative advocacy, among other things. When Taylor-Silva was with Ag Against Hunger previously, she helped deliver over 100,000 meals to local growers and their workers during the pandemic, and supplied food to school districts when they needed it most. A true heroine of agriculture—among us. BEST AG EDUCATOR Hartnell College 411 Central Ave., Salinas (main campus) (831) 755-6700, hartnell.edu Zoom out above rural Monterey County and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the crop fields below like an intricate topographical chess board. In the local multibillion-dollar (yes, billion!) agricultural industry, Hartnell College is like the Bobby Fischer or (the fictional) Beth Harmon of it all, mastering the techniques and tapping into local resources to educate future generations of growers, engineers and food Best Ag Educator | Hartnell College
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