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Going From Conventional to Organic

Farmers Kathleen Rose and Paul Schoellhamer wanted to become certified organic. Little did they know what they were up against.

By Julie Besonen

Kathleen Rose was “in shock” when she opened the thick envelope from the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) organization. The roughly 30-page form, she says, “made income tax forms look like a piece of cake.”

No stranger to paperwork, Rose, 61, had been a Soviet analyst in Washington, D.C. Her husband Paul Schoellhamer, 63, had worked extensively on Capitol Hill, helping to write legislation for the Clean Water Act. In 2006, Schoellhamer’s father died, turning the couple’s world around. They couldn’t bear to sell the five-acre family farm in Watsonville, Calif., where they had planned to retire. Soul-searching and discussions with their two grown children led them to act sooner than they’d intended. They quit their jobs, sold their house in Chevy Chase, Md., bought out Schoellhamer’s two siblings and moved back to the farm after being away for 33 years. “It felt like coming home after one long foreign service posting,” Rose notes.

Old Adobe Orchard had been in Schoellhamer’s family since 1971, producing apples by the ton for Martinelli’s cider and apple juice. Avocados, apricots, kiwifruit, Eureka and Meyer lemons, nectarines, navel and Valencia oranges, pears and feijoa (also known as a pineapple guava) were also grown commercially, “with all that that implies—chemical fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, etc.,” explains Rose.

But becoming farmers themselves—organic or otherwise—had not been their dream. Back in the early 1970s, when they’d helped Paul’s father plant the trees, they were living on a commune in Santa Cruz as “hard-core hippies,” Rose says. They had no running water or electricity, which meant they were not naïve about the rigors of rural life. However, the nest egg they had carefully nurtured over the years in D.C. was damaged by the economic crisis. They needed to produce supplemental income from the 65 Bacon and Hass avocado trees and 60 apple trees—and that meant finding the market for them.

First Came the Customers

In agriculturally rich Pajaro Valley, Watsonville is between Santa Cruz and Salinas on California’s Central Coast. The mild climate and diverse terrain are ideal for growing a wide variety of produce. Once the couple had moved back to the land, Rose watched a giant strawberry field across the road being industrially fed by chemicals and irrigation and thought, “I don’t want to live like that.” She expressed respect for commercial farming, but it wasn’t the path she wanted to take. Her husband told her that going organic was fine with him, but it would be up to her to make it happen.

She found out that farms making less than $5,000 per year were exempt from official USDA certification but could still be registered organic. The fee for the inspection and an assessment of the land’s history cost $125. Schoellhamer’s father hadn’t sprayed pesticides during his final years of life, which gave the farm a head start for organic classification, a process that takes a minimum of three years for the transition. As part of the registration, Rose had to tell USDA exactly what she was growing and how much acreage she had, then pass an inspection by a county agricultural commissioner and agree on an estimate of how much she was going to sell. After the initial registration, she would renew annually through the mail for a $50 fee.

While the whole farm was registered organic, Rose decided to concentrate on their most potentially lucrative crop, the avocados. She acquired a producer’s certificate that allowed her to sell them at a local farmer’s market.

“It took us a good three months to build up a clientele,” says Rose. They contracted with another farmstand in the area and also signed up with a company selling produce online. Success posed a new issue. By 2009 they realized that they’d be hitting the $5,000 threshold before the end of the year. It was time to apply for CCOF certification and pay the fee, which was in excess of $700.

“It was unbelievably more complex and rigorous than just being registered,” says Rose. “But once you have outlets that are counting on you to be organic, you’re boxed in. We had to move ahead.”

Beginning the Certification Process

In filling out the forms, Rose had to reconstruct their weekly picking and selling records and document where and how the produce was sorted and stored, making sure they had segregated tools from any non-organic practices on the farm. They purged their two barns of pesticide sprayers and contaminated tractor attachments. Rose provided details on soil management, seed and rootstock origin and chronicled how in 2008 they’d organically replenished their soil’s deficient nitrogen content. At the time, rather than lay down nitrogen fertilizer around the trees, they sowed a winter cover crop of bell beans sourced from Peaceful Valley, a farm and garden supplier for organic farmers. Hand-seeding bell beans was far more labor intensive than applying fertilizer, but by spring, when they mowed and tilled over the whole orchard they found the soil had been naturally enriched. The legumes are specifically designed to produce nitrogen and are not harvested. Schoellhamer’s father had always left the soil naked over the winter rainy season, which made the topsoil run off. The bell beans protected the soil and kept it in place. But that was just one step of the process.

Detailing Pest and Plant Management

A key part of organic farming is how you choose to handle bugs and other threats to your plants. In addition to completing the form detailing their pest management efforts, Rose submitted photos of her “pest management team”: Bobcats and coyotes took care of the gophers. Red shouldered hawks, black shouldered kites, gopher snakes, red headed woodpeckers, a great horned owl and a pretty little bluebird aided with insects. “It’s not about getting back to nature,” Rose notes. “It’s about managing nature.”

Returning wildlife to the land was a conscious decision. Rose and Schoellhamer left two of their five acres unfarmed. The property is on a ridge that slopes down toward a gully. To protect against erosion they planted native perennial grasses on the steepest part of the slope. “Paul’s father had always plowed it,” Rose says, “which led to a loss of soil.” A local plant society advised them to rip out non-native weed species and reintroduce native plants.

Once the native grasses took hold, Rose looked out the window one day and saw “a billion birds chomping on the fields. We never used to have bluebirds and I’m wondering if the variety of grasses we have now has brought in different birds that are attracted by a wider variety of insects.”

The Inspection

Next came an on-site examination of the farm by a CCOF officer who brought a copy of the 30-page form and went over it item by item, walking the property for two-and-a-half hours and filling in any gaps. She noticed sticky Tanglefoot banding the trees, an organically approved barrier against ants, and jotted it down. She examined every pail, can, nook and cranny in the outbuildings for pesticides, herbicides or non-organic fertilizer, like a policeman following a trail of evidence. (According to CCOF, if the inspector has concerns about the farm, the consequences will depend upon many things including the gravity or extent of the specific area of non-compliance in question. Non-compliances can be both major and minor, and the certification process will sometimes include ‘corrective action requests’ from CCOF to the farm.)

“She did not leave a stone unturned,” Rose says, “asking to see our soil testing and water testing records, asking where we got our mulch, what seeds we were planting.” The full inspection report was sent back to CCOF for a second-stage review where a certification specialist ultimately ruled that Old Adobe Orchard was in compliance. The CCOF seal was granted to the farm on March 12, 2010.

CCOF certification must be renewed annually, with an on-site inspection each time. For a farm that makes less than $10,000 a year, the renewal fee is $170 plus roughly $250 for the inspection. Rose is eligible for a rebate of up to 75 percent of organic certification costs (not to exceed $750) through the federal Farm Bill program, which is administered at state level.

The Continuing Benefits and Challenges

Rose likens farming organically to “having a front row seat on the mighty Darwinian struggle in the animal and plant world.” She says, “There’s a battle going on between the native grasses and the invasive grasses; a battle between the avocado trees and root fungus; the bobcats after the gophers, ground squirrels and rabbits; the praying mantises against the insects. At night I can hear coyotes fighting with each other.”

The certification form she filled out is not a snapshot in time, but rather a living document that will be amended if any changes are made to the farm. Working by themselves, she and Schoellhamer pick 150-200 pounds of avocados per week, sort, wash, box and truck them to the farmstands and their online sellers. She prefers not to say how much money they’re making, but allows it’s a small margin of profit. In the off-season, Rose and Schoellhamer spend four months daily hand-pruning the apple trees and kiwi vines. It is so much work that the couple has taken only two weekends off in the past six months, one of them to attend a Bob Dylan concert.

“What I’ve learned is what an enormous amount of commitment, time and patience goes into this process,” says Rose. “The people who certify did not rubber stamp us, they did not let anything go by. Now when I see something stamped CCOF I trust it.” |SFM|

Julie Besonen is the food editor at Paper magazine, writes a weekly restaurant column for nycgo.com and has contributed to The New York Times and the New York Daily News.