Daniel Weintraub: Future of farming: Local, organic, home delivered

CAPAY VALLEY – An engineer by training, a capitalist by instinct, young Thaddeus Barsotti might represent the future of farming – at least for the growing segment of the population that wants its food organic, local, fresh in season and grown using sustainable methods that preserve rather than denude the land.

Barsotti, 27, runs Capay Fruits and Vegetables here in a peaceful valley, about an hour's drive west of Sacramento and 90 minutes from the Bay Area. The farm, established by two University of California, Davis, grad students in the 1970s and now owned by their four sons, is fast becoming a miniconglomerate in the world of natural foods.

"We really are building a relationship between the consumers and the farm," Barsotti told me as we bounced down the road in his dusty Toyota pickup truck one morning last week, talking produce and profits. "We have 3,000 customers who know I am there in the field on this piece of property growing their food. There's a connection there."

In that sense, what Capay Fruits and Vegetables is doing is a revival as much as it is a cutting-edge business. But the way Barsotti and his brothers are doing it is new. In addition to traditional wholesale relationships and a retail store in the San Francisco Ferry Building, the farm delivers boxes of fresh produce door-to-door to homes and office from Sacramento to San Francisco and San Jose.

The delivery service is Capay Fruits and Vegetables' version of community-supported agriculture, a concept that has been around for a long time. But instead of collecting annual subscription fees up front and effectively selling fractional shares of each season's harvest, Barsotti's farm offers a flexible delivery service – Farm Fresh to You – that customers can tailor to their own needs. A service his mother began with a single truck in 1992 has become a sophisticated operation with a fleet of vans and an Internet-based ordering system (www.farmfreshtoyou.com).

The boxes start with a base of fresh-in-season produce from the farm but are often augmented with fruits or vegetables from nearby fields and from certified organic growers as far away as Washington and Mexico. Those additions are Barsotti's concession to the whims of his customers.

"We're a business," he tells me, juggling our conversation with interruptions from his constantly ringing cell phone. "We are driven by doing well, and that translates into making people happy with our product. All of my beliefs about how farming should be done don't mean a thing if we are out of business."

Barsotti is quick to note that the "organic" label on the farm's products is only the beginning of what differentiates this and other similar operations from mainstream agriculture. After all, any produce grown only with soil amendments and sprays containing products found in the natural environment can use the organic label, no matter what other methods the farm uses.

Sustainable agriculture employs crop rotation to diversify its use of the land, protecting the soil from erosion and preserving its nutrients. Fields are left fallow from time to time, and land between the crops and orchards is in its natural state, allowing local grasses and, yes, weeds, to flourish.

Customers are encouraged to eat food in season, and the farm promotes recipes that help them do that. And while Capay Fruits and Vegetables uses seasonal labor, it also has a crew of about 50 year-round workers, most of whom Barsotti knows by name.

The rap on sustainable agriculture is that, while it makes a nice niche, it's not productive enough to feed the world. Barsotti challenges that notion. He notes that mainstream agriculture can't seem to survive without taxpayer subsidies, suggesting that the industry's practices are not really as economical as its backers suggest. And he rolls his eyes at the amount of local land dedicated to growing feed for cattle – land that could easily be dedicated to the sustainable harvesting of fruits and vegetables instead.

As the price of oil rises and transportation costs drive world food prices higher, buying local could become more economical. And as more consumers understand what production agriculture does to the land, they might demand food grown with more sustainable methods. Eventually, sustainable, locally oriented farming could supply a much larger share of the produce on a typical table.

But for now Barsotti is more concerned about his own business than the future of his industry. The farm has grown by 100 acres in the past eight years, and now totals 300 acres. He hopes to expand by about 20 acres a year. He is trying to create an operation that will stand the test of time, unlike some forms of farming that are the agricultural equivalent of strip-mining, consuming the land's productive value before moving on to a new location.

"I am confident that we'll be as productive in 100 years as we are now," he says.

All Barsotti asks is that the government leave him alone with his customers while ending subsidies and other policies that favor bigger, production-oriented competitors.

That seems like a reasonable request.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Daniel Weintraub, (916) 321-1914. Readers can see his California Insider political blog at CapitolAlert.com.