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Sonoma County, a dynamic county combining agriculture and industry, city and country creating unique and varied challenges for its citizens join us as we present some of the information and services provided by the county of Sonoma to help us as we move into the 21st century. Welcome

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to Sonoma County in the nineties with your host, Dana rico and gina Lash. Hello, I'm dana d'Errico and welcome to Sonoma County. In the nineties, Sonoma County is abundant for all of its produce in farming and agriculture. Today I have with me someone that's going to

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talk about the farmer's market in Sonoma County that brings this fresh produce to you and to very spectacular growers that we have Tierra vegetables. So let's join them Rini kif, you are the director of the Healdsburg farmers market and we have lee James who is a

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grower of Tierra vegetables along with her brother Wayne James, also a grower of Tierra vegetables. It's great to have all of you on the show today Rini, can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background and how you became the director of the Hills

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berg farmers Market? Well to begin with, I'm not a, not a farmer by profession, I was raised in Clarksburg in marin County. So I'm one of those folks that have migrated north to Sonoma County to find the old marin County. My husband um is a rancher

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from Montana. So he was the one that was looking for acreage for our five Children to grow up on. So in 1979 we found property in Healdsburg in alexander valley and our teenagers took to the soil um very well and we started to farm and raise

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animals and we inherited on this property um which was a little bit under four acres three fig trees and we hadn't a clue what to do with three fig trees. And that was the year that Healdsburg farm market actually began. It was in its maiden year

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and we heard from a friend of ours that we could bring our figs down and get rid of them in that fashion at the farmers market. So I arrived with my figs and met some wonderful people that began the farmer's market. Um they're uh some of

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them are still in Healdsburg doug stout and tom Peterson are two of the founders of our market and I found this brother and sister team also selling in in its first year, that is a great story victories, That's perfect for Hillsborough. I love. Okay. And then

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um li can you tell me about yourself and a little bit about your background, my background, I actually came from new york originally but quite a long time ago and was brought up in the bay area and my parents, our parents bought land up here in

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Sonoma County to retire on and they decided to make a vineyard and and everybody assumes that my parents We're farmers and we sort of took over their farm but our dad actually worked for us on the farm and he would come help with the markets and

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things. But we started farming in 1980 growing vegetables here in in Chalk Hill Road. Had you farm previously? I took farming classes in school. I took egg classes at the cal poly in san luis Obispo but no I hadn't previously. And what about you? Wayne? I

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came up to Sonoma County um shortly after our parents bought the land up there and attended the J. C. Study bitter culture um under rich thomas and worked in the vineyards a bit and then worked on a truck farm in potter valley for a friend of

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the family. Um Two years 76 77 at that point I was selling at farmers markets and was introduced to them and then in 1980 we went in started to your vegetables. So it sounds like you had a real interest in farming but has farming been in

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your family previously? My grand my great grandparents were was a sheep rancher and my parents now have actually retired again and they raise sheep now up in Oregon. But um yeah we were everybody used to be farmers but just about everything in America, can you tell

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me about the hills berg farmer's market? The background of the farmer's market for Sonoma county and how it came about I'd love to the market is 19 years old and we're celebrating that birthday on july 19th so it's easy to remember. Um It began out of

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necessity. Um our founder, one of our five founders tom Peterson decided he was going to grow um a lot of cherry tomatoes and if you've ever planted cherry tomatoes, you know that five bushes is for too many. And he planted 200 bushes in this little plot

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of land along the Russian river in Healdsburg. And he laughs and says that he just thought that magically the customers would just arrived when the cherry tomatoes, you know, came into ripeness. So there were all the cherry tomatoes and no customers. So he decided that really

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quickly, he needed to do something fast. And the vet memorial farmers market had begun that year. And so with some other folks, they started Healdsburg Farm market. It began with about, I think it got to be about 15 growers the first couple of years on Hayden

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street and under an old prune drying structure. And everyone remembers those days, they, it was a nice nice time. And the market essentially began then and remains now what it is a Tuesday afternoon market and a saturday morning market because you need that companion picking so

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that the produce will, you know, continue to be fresh, right? And we in Healdsburg are blessed with this kind of mini climate of warmth. Um we don't have a lot of fog, the fog, we do get burns off really quickly. So dry Creek valley and alexander

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valley and the town itself promotes a lot of Farming. So our farmers market has probably the most local growers of any farmer's market in Sonoma County, of which there are nine farmers markets, but now we're up to about 50 growers, but essentially the same schedule and

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a lot of the same kind of wonderful produce. Hills Berg I think is the first to get tomatoes and melons, perhaps corn. Um whereas the other markets, they have to wait a little a little bit longer, but they're the first to get very, so it evens

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itself out. What other farmers markets do we have in the county for our viewers. So they have access to them, starting with the southern county, there is Petaluma which meets in the downtown square. And then Sebastopol has the farmer's market in downtown. There's the original santa

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rosa vet, Memorial Farmer's market and santa rosa has three more markets. The latest one is the thursday night event uh which is more than a farmers market. It is really an event. And then um there's a new one in Montecito Shopping center and in Oakmont and

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then Sonoma Valley has a market uh And Hills Berg has a market and I think that should number eight, I think Cloverdale has a Mark, they no longer have a market, they discontinued it, can you tell me is all of these markets, do they meet on

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Saturdays? They every saturday morning or are they at various times. No, they meet at various times. There's a number of saturday markets. Probably saturday saturday is the most common day for markets, saturday morning, saturday morning in those locations, I think there's no monday market, monday is

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the only day. There's not a market. Okay, so they will be on various days through the week, but on on saturday because I know the downtown santa rosa market is saturday morning and it's also on Wednesdays at the Veterans Memorial Building. So it's great. You go

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there, you get fresh produce, let's talk a little bit about that. How does that help the community having these markets? It must help the local growers and if you participate and support these markets, it has to help the local economy. Well folks like lee and wayne

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um take advantage of of two different methods of marketing their produce at farmer's markets. We are one of many methods of supporting agriculture, but uh for the general public, I I suppose it has the most appeal because you can go down and pick out everything that

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you want and it's been picked probably no later than the day before and many times the day that you're looking at it. And this is really impossible to do at a supermarket, A supermarket buys for shelf life and looks, which neither of those commodities lend themselves

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towards taste and flavor necessarily if it does, it's kind of accidental. Whereas at a farmer's market when you're taking the fruit or the vegetable out of the ground or out of the tree and putting it in your vehicle and bringing it to market, you don't have

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to worry that it's not going to be um, you know, ready to eat five days later, if it's going to be right the next day, the folks learn quickly that, that this is the kind of flavor that like a babcock peach has. You don't want to

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babcock peach to sit around for a week. You need to eat it fast, but it's a delightful experience and it's an education for the customers to learn what fresh produce really tastes like it. There is nothing like going to those farmers markets. I attend a couple

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of them to get that taste. It's just, it's real, it's a peach smells like a peach, tastes like a peach, it's just lovely. And if it has to be transported miles to a supermarket, it's just not practical to have something that's not going to keep. Well

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also oftentimes they have to pick it early. So it is, it's still okay a week later when the consumer purchases it, I love the market, just the smells and the tastes are just great. Um lee and wayne. Tell me about your operation and how you market

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your operation, you came highly recommended. People were raving about these boxes of fresh vegetables that you can purchase. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Well that's the boxes that they were talking about is a a new form of direct marketing. Well it's not

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new but it is new in in the county. Um We started out with farmers markets and I would highly recommend anybody who wants to start farming that definitely getting into farmers markets is the way to start farming a small farm. Um I don't I think we

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would have started farming if there hadn't have been farmers markets. That was the reason why we decided to farm is because we knew that there would be an outlet for it. But now we're doing a little more which very much complements the farm market and it's

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called C. S. A. Or community supported agriculture. And this is where we get people to pre sign up to subscribe to our farms produce and we deliver to them once a week. A box of what's right, so you will deliver to the doorstep of these customers

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a box of produce. Do you have to sign up for the whole season to get your box every week? No you can sign up for a shorter amount of time. You can even sign up for one week but we really don't recommend that. Wayne spends a

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lot of time on ebook work now. In fact he as as we've been going through the farming here, he now spends a lot more time on the computer than he does farming. Well not quite he's still more in the field than on the computer but but

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there's a lot more book work with it. But that goes along. So what will someone get if they were to call Tierra vegetables and ask for a box of produce to be delivered? What would they find in their box? Like what they got today? They got

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a number of years of corn which was the first earliest corn that we've ever had. In fact we ate a few on the fourth of july. But they get corn and they get potatoes and lemon cucumbers and eggplant and and beans romano beans and they got

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santa rosa plums and a little bit of garlic and onions to flavor things. So it's just a variety. And it's a surprise every week. It's a surprise every week. And that's one thing that customers through the C. S. A. Need to C. S. A community supported

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agriculture community supported agriculture. Or we just call them box people there's farmers market customers and there's box the box customers and they need to enjoy a surprise. If you go to the grocery store and you decide well I want to have for dinner summer squash and

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you buy summer squash. But if and the same thing if you go to the farmer's market you can pick out what you want here. You you really need to enjoy a surprise and find out that oh today is the first day of the of the gypsy

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peppers and they're coming this week. So you need to figure out what to do with them. Sounds good. We have to break here. Stay tuned. We'll be right back with some more information around here. The ground is hard around here. The goals farther away the dreams

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are still drink. That's why special olympics is here helping people with mental retardation become helping athletes become respected, accepted and you can help too as an athlete, a coach, a volunteer. Special olympics is training for life and that means a lot around here. Welcome back to

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Sonoma County in the 90s were here with some farmers and the farmers market and we're gonna learn all about these vegetables. Okay um you were just talking about Lee the product that you sell at the market and I think you had some pictures down there. If

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you have some pictures of the show our viewers you get and you can purchase a box have it delivered. And is there a phone number where you can be your phone number to contact you if you're interested. This is a picture of a box from the

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fall actually from last fall. But if you're interested in a box delivery or talking to about R. C. S. A subscription you can talk to Evie, my sister and our phone number is in the phone book under tier of vegetables. It's 8378366. So 8378366. And they

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can contact you and get on the mail order or the mailing list and um have vegetables everywhere. So then this is a picture of our field down by the river and we specialize in chilies. We very much like our chilies. So anybody is interested in a

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lot of chilies in there? S a weekly delivery. We really like them. Another thing that we include with our box is also a menu which puts together which has all of the vegetables in the box, serving suggestions and recipes and also a newsletter once a month.

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And is your wife that does all of the planning? So you know what you can serve when you get this box of vegetables. I think it's great. We couldn't really do the farming to run A C. S. A. Is actually different kind of work but maybe

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a little more work than doing the farmer's market. It's not as it's not as and heavy and early days and things but there's a lot of contacting people and Evie takes care of all that. Um Being local Sonoma County farmers and earning your income from this

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operation. What is involved? How difficult is that? And what kind of hours do you put in? Just tell us about it a little about it. There a lot of hours involved in farming. We have to do everything from all the book work to all the sales

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to all the field work. We do have now two full time field workers. So I'm not picking I'm not picking zucchini eight hours a day, which at one point we were doing um and it's um a full time job, but in the winter we do slow

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up a little bit, but winter is no longer vacation really. We have to prepare for next season. We're up in the mornings at 56, sometimes up at three o'clock, getting ready to go to market and you're working until late at night to get things finished up

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work basically until it gets dark and then there's always something that should be done inside to do. You have a uh animals supported agricultural business? We have word um We have some chickens now and they eat some of the leftovers and lay some eggs, but we

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have um a small flock of sheep that actually eats all of the leftover vegetables, everything except for the tomatoes and chilies and stalks, cornstalks and things like that. And they're Shetland sheep, which are wool producing sheep. So do you also sell the wool now, do you

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find that this is an enhancement to farming operation to have the animals? Yeah, vegetables and animals go real well together we used to have pigs and um but I like the sheep better and you get compost back from them and they eat all the extras. Uh

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huh. That's great. And it's a little bit of a relief from always having to work just with plants to see some animals occasionally to how have your farming practices changed over the years. We've gone from more originally it was all hand labor, all individual hand seating

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and everything. And we didn't even have a road a tiller. When we started we've gone into more and more mechanical tractor work more. We bought a mechanical transplant er which picture of some of that here saved us a tremendous amount of labor. This is the transplant.

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It what we could do with four people with the transplant or we could do the same amount of labor in a quarter of the time. Also you've gone to um modern technology, very modern. This this is a very old tractor, this is from the mid-50s, that's

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great but were forced to cut costs somehow. Um And we you know, it's still a lot of hand labor involved because we don't use herbicides in the crops and you know, we avoid a lot of the chemical use. So it's all natural farming. We're not certified

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organic but we farm a lot of organic methods and we do use some fertilizers and other things. But yeah, we it's a natural method. Are there restrictions or regulations if growers says organic versus just homegrown? Yeah. Speaking of organic, that reminds me of the governmental agencies

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that oversee us um we come under the umbrella of two separate agencies. The one that that is directly responsible for us is our agricole State Agriculture Department and here are county ag department oversees us and the manager's responsibility is is when the Ag deputy is not

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present, which is um all but two or three visits a year. We represent that Ag department, so we have to make sure that the farmer is certified to sell that produce, meaning he or she indeed has raised that produce. And the organic certification is a separate

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certification because if they are certified organic, they have to be registered with the state or belong to the California Organic Farming Association. And each of those has a fair amount of rules and a time period that has to pass through to make sure that that land

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um has no pesticide residue and the sprays that they do use are organically correct and acceptable. So all of this is regulated by the state and we're fortunate to have just um not only in my estimation, but all the farm market managers agree that we have

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a wonderful, wonderful county Ag department. They're supportive of us Erik Lauritzen and his crew. There's a number of people um and also the other governmental agency that oversees this is the Public Health Department because the farmers markets have kind of edged out into areas that the

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state did not foresee when they originally gave their approval to farm markets and that is in the field of or not in the field actually it's in it's in process food so often times you'll find jams and salad dressings and vinegars, anything that has to be

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processed then comes under the arm of the Public health Department because that product has to be prepared in a certified kitchen and none of our home kitchens are capable of being certified. Only restaurant kitchens, church and school kitchens can be because you need steel, stainless steel

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sinks and drip pans. And there's quite a bit of regulation associated with. Yeah so but that's wonderful. That's a protective service for the consumer where you are getting good safe safe food products. So so that's great to hear that the government is doing a wonderful job

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regulation our agricultural department and the Environmental Health Department that that pleases me tremendously to hear that from from people. Um Okay I'm missing my questions here getting so involved. What is the most challenging and difficult aspect of the C. S. A. The C. S. A. Which

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is our home delivery compared to the farmer's market? The challenging part about it in a very different part than the growing for the market is that since we are one farm supplying the whole each individual family rather than them being able to pick from different farmers

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at the farmer's market. We have to supply them the variety to go through a whole week. We can't just specialize in peppers and expect them to eat a full box of peppers every week. Um Which we sometimes do. But um so we now have gone back

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actually to what we originally used to do and we have a lot more variety. We have carrots and beans and corn and melons and and a little bit of everything um and that as far as the farming part has been more challenging wayne can probably tell

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you a little bit about the challenge and the challenge nous of the The book work on it. I apparently there's an awful lot of bookkeeping etc to keep up with. Now they're doing this delivery operation, it's just keeping track of who's paid, who has to pay

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when people are getting boxes when they're on vacation. We have, you know at this point we're up to about 70 people to keep track of everybody you know and each week and we do it twice a week. So we break the Group into two different so

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you have 70 clients customers who are purchasing your box and you delivered to the doorstep, doorstep. Very few actually to the doorstep a lot of people pick up at the farm, we do deliver to some people, there's an extra delivery charge and then we have drop

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off points in Santa Rosa and Healdsburg where people can pick them up and then a big portion, not a big portion of it, but a third of it is we met a woman from Berkeley who wanted to do something in farming and wanted to help agriculture

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somehow and she actually is getting 20 to 30 boxes um comes up and picks them up and delivers to people in Berkeley. So we have a portion of our deliveries go down to Berkeley. I would assume that many of our local restaurants utilize the produce that

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is sold at the farmer's market, so that's an enhancement to them and their businesses. Is that the case? It is? Yeah, I think uh many chefs that have restaurants in hills Burg we see it regularly at our farm market when they first came through. I didn't

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know whether the little white coat meant that they were with Sonoma developmental center or the restaurants, but mostly they were from the restaurants and they come back weekly and we at Healdsburg just changed our Tuesday location to the plaza, so we're even nearer to the restaurants

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and they come out and can shop right on their doorstep. What do you think the future of farming is boersen on the county or is there a future? Oh there's a wonderful future. Yeah, the the curve is going up definitely in agriculture. Um I think specialty

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crop farming is a wonderful companion to the grape, the grape growing that we do because if a county becomes a monoculture, we run into lots of troubles like we have with the phylloxera and um pierce disease. Some of them are rearing their heads in the form

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of little bugs and the more um the more variety of produce you have growing in an area, the healthier it is and I think people in the city limits um from the passage of urban growth boundary that many cities have now passed those and that's another

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indication that they appreciate the fact that agriculture is there and they want to keep it and specialty crop farming which you find that the jameses And the farmers in the markets do just promotes this. Is there a phone number where someone can call you if they

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care to join the farmers market, if they want to start doing produce and get additional information from you. And that phone number, that phone number is (431) 195 6 and lots of personalities come to the farmers market as growers. We have artists and artists did this

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poster for us. Her name is Pat Marchand, she's a teacher, artist and farmer. And luckily you'll find that almost all of our farmers have other careers. That James is a very unique that they make their living from farming. Most farmers, they're not able to do the

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so you'll find them in education in dentistry believe it or not in dentistry, Orthodontist physics. That's great. And they farm Well, thank you for being here. I'm sure we're going to see many of our viewers and myself out of the market and we'll be glad to

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talk to you when we see you there. Thank you for joining you. Hope you will join us again next time I'm dana Derek. Oh and this is Sonoma County in the nineties