Organic farmer takes advantage of microclimates

Jamie Collins followed a path familiar to many successful organic family farmers—expanding her skills at a large, established farm, striking out on her own, growing large enough to experience the perils of the wholesale market, and finally finding success after scaling back to a diversified operation of crops sold directly to restaurants and at farmers markets.

She takes advantage of the microclimate differences among a number of relatively small fields scattered around Monterey County to be able to harvest a wide variety of crops over a very long season.

"I started my own farm in 2001 with four acres in Moss Landing," said Collins, who grows fruits and vegetables on five Monterey County coastal sites. "Eventually, I got a couple acres in the Carmel Valley, and started growing heirloom tomatoes. We got another five acres in mid-valley, and started selling heirloom tomatoes to Trader Joe's before they were very popular."

Collins discussed her farming operation with the farmers who came to one of her Carmel Valley fields during the farm tour before the 36th Annual Ecofarm Conference in Pacific Grove.

She goes to four farmers markets in San Francisco, one in Pacific Grove and a seasonal market in the Carmel Valley, and also sells directly to restaurants and customers who sign up for a weekly bag of fresh produce.

"When you go direct, there's no middlemen," Collins said. "When you sell wholesale, there's three or four middlemen, and they want to use their brand, not yours. I even had people want me to buy boxes with their name, when I already had my own. It's annoying and it can devastate a small farmer."

In order to sell direct, however, it is necessary to have numerous crops over as long a season as possible, and it helps to have fields with different climates.

"Right now, we're harvesting 15 different crops so we can go to farmers markets all year," Collins said. "We grow a total of about 50 crops. In the Carmel Valley, we're above the fog line, so we can grow our peppers, squash and tomatoes. We're about the only row crop farm in the area; everybody else is putting in winegrapes."

Collins studied agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo before landing a job at Earthbound Farms.

"Earthbound Farms started in the Carmel Valley just a few miles up the road from here," said Amigo Cantisano, the organic farm advisor who has led every tour since he started the tradition more than a quarter century ago.

Collins said she started her first field in the business she calls Serendipity Farms almost by accident, as she was looking through the newspapers hoping to find a rental for a friend who had stayed in her living room too long.

"I had a friend sleeping on my couch for long enough that I was looking for an apartment in the classifieds when I found my first four acres of organic ground," she recalled. "Hence the name, Serendipity."

The direct-marketing business works now, but it came after a distressing lesson in the perils of trying to grow for the wholesale markets, and in letting the business get too large to stay close to the plants.

"We grew too fast," Collins recalled. "In 2009, we cut back from 40 acres to 20, and made more money. When you own a farm, you start because you love being around the plants. But you find you're spending more time running a business. I decided to downsize, increase the farmers markets and start a CSA. I sell about 60 percent at farmers markets, and the rest is split among the CSA, a few restaurants and some U-pick. People come and pick hundreds of pounds of tomatoes."

The business is not without complications, however, as it is easy to lose an important piece of the market puzzle.

"I have a good relationship with one restaurant that will take almost everything I have left after a farmers market at a discount," Collins said. But she cautioned, "Chefs move around a lot. You may be making $10,000 in sales to a restaurant, and then the chef moves away."

There can even be complications in developing a business selling to consumers who come to buy at farmers markets.

"We do up to 12 markets a week when we have blueberries, and six or seven the rest of the year, but there's politics at the markets," Collins said. "Some of the markets are in it to make money, and you can be on the waiting list for 15 years and never get in, even though you are just a few miles away."

The challenges that come when the weather is too hot or cold, or too dry or wet, are multiplied for farmers who grow scores of different crops to serve direct markets.

"We have an acre of blueberries in Corralitos, so that makes five parcels," Collins said. "The blueberries didn't get the chill they need in the winter, then it was too cool in the spring. The yield was down about 25 percent."

A completely different complex of weather problems affected the harvest season for her tomatoes.

"Sometimes our tomatoes will go all the way into December, because we're only five miles from the coast," Collins said. "It was so hot in the summer last year, the tomatoes were all done by the end of September."

Like most California farmers, however, she was relieved to see the rains early in 2016, as lemons she grows in the warmer climate of Aromas came back to life.

"We haven't had any problems with water here in the Carmel Valley, but in Aromas our pump went down and we started pumping sand," Collins said. "Right now the lemons are amazing. They really made a comeback when the rains came."

(Bob Johnson is a reporter in Davis. He may be contacted at bjohn11135@aol.com.)