Episode #266
Brisa Ranch: Small Farms As Distributors

Brisa Ranch is proving that small farms acting as distributors is an operating model that can compete and succeed against global players, by concentrating on the needs of their community. Farming on the California coast near Pescadero, Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou and Cristóbal Cruz Hernández manage about 120 acres with roughly 45 acres in annual vegetables and fruit, plus cover crops and beneficial insect plantings. Skipping direct-to-consumer sales they focus instead on wholesale relationships with businesses and institutions across Northern California and aggregate from about 15 farms to meet the volume and logistics needs of food banks, schools, hospitals, and more, while reducing middlemen so more value stays with growers.

Our Brisa Ranch interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou and Cristóbal Cruz Hernández of Brisa Ranch at the EcoFarm Conference in January 2026:

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast, and we are recording at EcoFarm 2026, a beautiful, beautiful place in California, an amazing gathering of people. I had set it up so that I wanted to be able to have a conversation with my friends from Brisa Ranch. Did I say that right?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
That’s right, Brisa Ranch.

Dave Chapman
I’m going to let them introduce themselves. So go ahead, Veronica.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Thank you so much for the invitation to have this conversation. My name is Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou.

Dave Chapman
You see why I had you introduce yourself.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
My name is Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
My name is Cristóbal Cruz Hernández.

Dave Chapman
This is great. You three are partners in Brisa Ranch. I would like to hear how that happened. But first, tell us a little bit about Brisa Ranch. What scale are you? What do you grow?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We manage about 120 acres, and we grow annual vegetables and fruits on about 45 acres per year. We grow a pretty wide range of crops. We grow probably about 20 different types of crops, more if you include different varieties. On top of that, we add some beneficial plantings as well. So if you add it all up, it’s probably in the high 20s, something like that.

Dave Chapman
When you say beneficial plantings, we’re talking about cover crops, green manure, or something else?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I was referring to green manures. We do this as well, cover crops. But we do beneficial plantings of certain flowers, for example, with some of our other crops. We do, for example, marigolds, sweet alyssum, and some things of that nature.

Dave Chapman
A host for beneficial insects?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Exactly. We’ve been in business since 2018. In addition to operating our farm, we also operate the Coastside Local Food Hub, which is a food hub that serves our community of farmers in our town in Pescadero. We’re a small town of about 600 people, just a little over an hour, hour and a half, outside of San Francisco, on the coast. That’s pretty much it.

Dave Chapman
How did you all come together? How did you meet each other?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I could start speaking on that, because I was the newest to the area. This year, 2026 marks 10 years since I moved out to Pescadero, and I moved out in 2016 to apprentice at Pie Ranch, where I met these two individuals who had already either been working there or had apprenticed.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
From that working relationship, I know Cole and I were also doing more management work, either at Pie Ranch or at his farm that he was managing at the time. There was already a mutual respect. I saw Cristóbal very much as a mentor, as someone who was at an earlier stage in my farming career.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In 2018, and maybe Cole can speak a little bit more to that, there was an opportunity to grow some crops for a business in Santa Cruz, nearby. We were like, “Oh, I think this might be an interesting project for us to do on the side.” Brisa Ranch was born. I think it took us quite a while to get to the name. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about that.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Every year, what was a side hustle felt like we hit our stride, and we were like, “This really works.” Cole and I are now married. That was not how it started. We went into partnership before we were married. It could have ended badly. It’s gone pretty well ever since. I don’t know if you guys want to add something else.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The two of us met the year beforehand when you were working at Pie Ranch. I was an apprentice there. I think what was very pleasantly surprising about this is that all three of us were working on other farms, managing other farms, at the time we started Brisa Ranch, so it was really a side project for us, growing a very small amount for some local businesses.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Each year it was just like, “Okay, let’s add a couple extra acres, or a couple extra crops.” It really evolved over this first three years or so, pretty organically, to the point where after a couple of years, we were like, “Okay, we can really make this into a business.”

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
But the early stages of it being something we were doing while managing other farms, I thought was a bit unique, in the sense that it forced us to really be deliberate about being efficient with our time and efficient with our markets as well.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think, in some respect, it shaped one of the things that’s unique about our farm, which is how we function in the marketplace. We don’t do any direct-to-consumer. We only do wholesale, working directly, mostly with businesses and institutions throughout Northern California.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Honestly, the beginning of that was really just because we didn’t have time to go to farmers markets. We didn’t have time to do all those additional things. It’s really allowed us to focus in on that, hone in on, “How can we farm the way we want to farm, according to our values, but do so in a way that’s efficient in all contexts, from the farming side to the marketing side?” I think that limitation of time at the beginning helped us develop that model.

Dave Chapman
I love that because I have just interviewed, three farmers who were completely based on either direct-to-restaurant or CSA. It’s so great to see the diversity of ways that organic farms can go. Cristóbal, tell me, first of all, what was your role at Pie Ranch?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
In the beginnings of the 90s, I started working on a conventional farm, and after about 20 years, I transitioned to start working at Pie Ranch as a Facility Manager, because at that time that position was open.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Then, I can’t remember exactly, but I think after one year, I started sharing the responsibilities, mostly helping the farm manager with some of the tasks, specifically in the farm area. Then things happened, and I started taking on the responsibility as a co-manager. Before that, I met Veronica, and then Cole – I can’t remember what year.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
2015 was the year we met.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
You taught me how to ride a tractor. You were the lead instructor.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
For me, it was more than a job. It was a great opportunity to come back and start implementing our principles and also integrity, because some of the youth, especially when they start touching the ground, the soil, knowing, “Oh, this is a place to grow food,” they did more about cultivation and also history in order to have values when they start growing more seriously and taking that work as a business or more seriously.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
It was a pleasure for me to work there, and then, as Cole mentioned, it was our side job starting Brisa Ranch. Integrity, responsibility, and all those aspects fell on our own decisions in order to create a successful project.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
In that case, it was like a half-acre success in that portion of the soil. Everybody has a different pathway, but I think I appreciate everything. For me, it has been my pleasure to continue to be part of Brisa Ranch, and part of the planning process for every single year.

Dave Chapman
A life with meaning, yeah. I get it. How old is Brisa Ranch now?

Dave Chapman
This is going to be our ninth season.

Dave Chapman
In that time, you’ve grown from a half acre to?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Forty-five acres in production.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Then we’re managing about a bit of more acreage.

Dave Chapman
Is the other land protected, or is it growing a green manure that will then become tillage?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. It’s been left fallow for many years.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We’re transitioning it essentially to organic so we can use in the future as…

Dave Chapman
The matchmaker for your partnership was Pie Ranch. That was a place where you came together, you found something that you were looking for, and you found each other. Of course, most people in the country won’t know what Pie Ranch is. It’s famous here. Tell us a little bit about Pie Ranch.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Pie Ranch is an educational nonprofit farm in Pescadero. I very much give them a lot of credit, because at least in our region, they’re one of those farms that really paved the way for transitioning towards organic.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Like Cristóbal said, it’s an area that was very much dominated by conventional agriculture, and Pie Ranch, along with some other businesses, really staked a claim to making that transition. For a while, they had a very great apprenticeship program. They no longer have that apprenticeship program, but it’s something that we’re seeing is missing.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
For myself, I’m a first-generation farmer. I got the bug and interest in farming in my 20s, and there was no clear path, so Pie Ranch was a place where they were doing that intentionally. It’s a season-long program around a pretty small production, but nevertheless, a good setup for that learning. It was like animals incorporated with vegetable production.

Dave Chapman
The couple who started Pie Ranch?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yes, Jared Lawson and Nancy Vail, and they’re currently still leading Pie Ranch. Right now, we lease. Looking at the challenges that farmers face, one of the big issues with apprenticeships was that you finished the apprenticeship and then there wasn’t necessarily a clear next step – where do you go from there?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In trying to address that, it seems that the organization shifted to figuring out that land-access piece. We were at that point when they were trying to think that through. We entered Brisa Ranch. We had already been in production for a year. They had been able to have a lease on a much larger property, and we’ve been there ever since.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think we’ve been in the right place at the right time. From there, we now work with other organizations and landowners to try to… It’s still a challenge for us. We lease all the land where we grow. We don’t own it, or have long-term tenure.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We lease across four properties.

Dave Chapman
Are they contiguous to this?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
No.

Dave Chapman
No. It’s a challenge. You’re like Dick Peixoto – they’re all over the place.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah, but definitely Cascade Ranch, which is the property that Pie Ranch manages, with Leonard Diggs being the leader of that project, has been pretty important for us to, at least, be able to continue every year.

Dave Chapman
Is the reason that Jared Lawson and Nancy Vail of Pie Ranch moved away from the apprenticeship program because they realized they were putting out these people who were armed and dangerous and ready to go, and there was no place for them to start a business, so they switched over to land access?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I’m not sure entirely, but I do think one thing we’ve noticed is that across the board, there’s been a trend towards fewer apprenticeship programs in the last decade or so.

Dave Chapman
Fewer?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Fewer, yeah. I think part of that is that private, for-profit farms are no longer able to offer some of their programs. In addition to that, there are some other groups; I know some universities have also moved away from that model as well.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I’d like to see more of that, to be honest, because I think there are fewer young folks now than there were when we were coming up. I would like to see that as a trend. I think it’s something very important to us as an operation.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
A big part of the motivation for us operating the Coastside Local Food Hub is that we want to have more pathways, especially in our community, for folks just developing their own businesses, especially folks who have been working on farms and really want to get their foot in the door.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We see the food hub as a way to develop the markets so that people are able to grow specifically for those markets, and just have a turnkey entry into having a farm business from a market perspective. So far, we’ve been operating the food hub for the last two years, and it’s been going really well. I think we aggregated a couple million dollars of produce last year as part of the food hub.

Dave Chapman
Excuse me, Cole. The food hub, for people who don’t know, including me, is a place where you bring in produce from different farms, aggregate it, and then sell it as a cooperative.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s cooperative in spirit, not in an official sense. We’re still operating it ourselves, but yes, the idea is that we are doing the post-harvest work, like what a lot of farmers end up doing, which is having cold storage on-farm, making connections with buyers, and handling the last-mile freight. We are trying to take that on and do it for several farms, as opposed to just doing it for our own operation, which we were already doing.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Now we work with about 15 farms.

Dave Chapman
Fifteen farms. As it turned out, you guys were pretty good at processing, marketing, and delivering it. You were good at that, and the other farms maybe weren’t as good, or just… as a small farm, it’s very hard to do everything. You have a partnership of three people leading it.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Right. In fact, we saw that there’s a wide range of need. Some of the seasoned farmers that we work with are focused mostly on direct-to-consumer. They’re doing their thing. They do some wholesale, but they wouldn’t mind access to larger, maybe institutional, buyers, which goes outside of their wheelhouse.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
By working with us, they can continue doing what they do best and still be considered for some other purchases. On the other end of that spectrum, you have folks who are like, “I want to farm. That’s what I know how to do best. I do not want to deal with the marketing or any of that.”

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In some cases, we are working with farmers out in Monterey County, which is about an hour and a half, and in Santa Cruz County, and they don’t even have coolers. They are basically used to growing product and selling it to the closest – here they call them – coolers, which are essentially distributors, at a price over which they have very little control.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The food hub model is very much trying to address that and, through having some level of aggregated infrastructure, give farmers a little bit better control over their pricing.

Dave Chapman
This is really interesting. I was just having a conversation with a woman. She was asking me, “Well, what do you think of this idea of marketing cooperatively?” Because we’re trying to figure out how we survive in a system that is demanding large-scale suppliers. Everything is consolidated: the distributors are consolidated, the retail is consolidated, and the producers are consolidated.

Dave Chapman
Of course, Driscoll’s is a perfect example of a very large company that actually doesn’t farm. They just contract with farmers, and then they’re the marketers, and they’re very good at that – very good at processing and all of that stuff. This is one model for trying to figure out how small, human-scale farms survive in a world that is not very friendly to that scale.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Exactly.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think it’s that. I think the goal of the food hub also is that it gives power as a food hub to essentially try to market directly with some of the larger buyers that are still offering good prices. By that, I’m referring mostly to institutional buyers, which is kind of one of our main focuses of the food hub.

Dave Chapman
Can you give me an example of an institutional buyer?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We work a lot with food banks. That is one of our major focuses. Food banks deal with massive amounts of produce. If you compare the size of just the actual warehouses of a lot of food banks in the Bay Area with the biggest distributors in the Bay Area, the food banks are just as big, if not bigger, because they’re feeding about a quarter of the Bay Area’s population.

Dave Chapman
Say that again, Cole, slowly.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Food banks are feeding about a quarter of the Bay Area’s population – San Francisco Bay Area population.

Dave Chapman
About a quarter of the population of San Francisco is deriving some or a lot of their food…

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
From Bay Area. Like a wider area.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s a massive amount of produce that they’re moving.

Dave Chapman
That’s huge.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah, it’s bigger than Whole Foods, bigger than Sysco, bigger than any of the major distributors. Historically, they get their food from a lot of different sources, but it’s often been through distributors in the past.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
What we have been trying to do with the food hub model is say, “Look, we know that you as a food bank want to source locally. You want to work with small farmers. You want to focus on the quality of the produce you’re getting. We know it’s very challenging because you don’t have the personnel to be calling every individual farmer and asking, ‘What do you have?'”

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Instead, they really want it to be a centralized process, sort of similar to what a distributor can offer, but doing so where the produce is not changing hands so many times and being marked up over and over again.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Via some of the contracts that we’ve had with the food banks here in Northern California, we’ve been able to move a lot of produce, a good chunk of which has been crop-planted, which is awesome. We’ve been able to tell farmers in advance, like, “This buyer wants this many pallets of collard greens this week, this week, this week,” and so on.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We have other contracts that are more just open market, where they request certain items based on an aggregated price sheet that we put out each week. That’s really been an important component. We’re also working with school districts, hospitals, and universities. We’re really trying to get more and more into the university space as well, because it’s another space that is moving large volumes.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Our goal, to a large degree, is how we can find partner institutions, partner organizations, and partner companies that share the same vision – they want to see more small farms, and they want to source their produce well – but logistically, they’ve struggled to find a way of doing it while working with farms independently.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
If we work together as a food hub system, aggregate our produce, and market it where there’s one point of contact for that buyer, it changes the dynamic so they actually can work with us, as opposed to having to go to a major distributor that is giving poor prices to farmers.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
That’s really been our focus: how can we open up new markets? How can we shift the markets that exist to make it easy enough for buyers to work with a food hub like us, so that the end result is better pricing for farmers.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, and better food for the people, the clients of the food bank. The food banks have money. They pay you.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yes.

Dave Chapman
Where do they get that?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s a really good point. Right now, that’s been an effort, and several organizations have been involved. The Local Food Purchase Assistance Program (LFPA) has been federal funding given to the states. This is all remnants of the pandemic era, when we saw that supply chains fell apart, and we wanted to deal with this two-pronged issue.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We have increasing degrees of food insecurity, and our small farmers are struggling to sell their product. The idea was, through this federal and then state program, to work with aggregators, so more localized distribution could work. We were partnered with the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, and over two years, we were able to do that.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Of course, the funding situation has changed, but we’ve been really impressed by… They were so interested in continuing to do this that right now, I think they’re finding alternative fundraising and funding mechanisms to at least continue this in some way.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think what we’ve been able to demonstrate is that it is possible. The idea of volume, when it’s coordinated, thought through, and done in advance, is that you can pull the amount of product you want from the smaller producers, as long as it’s done very intentionally.

Dave Chapman
That’s brilliant. That’s great. I had heard that the USDA completely cut off the funding for that food shelf from farms.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
They cut the federal funding recently. Marcus is in this past year, but the funding is kind of expiring, I think, by this spring, essentially. The food banks, though, have their own alternative funding sources, some from other federal programs, some from programs are by the state, and some from local municipalities as well. They have such a wide range of funding.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Because of the success of that program, working with the five area food banks, they are going to utilize other funds that they have elsewhere and just continue working with us, which is great. We are very excited about that, and we really want that to be something that is grown in the future and replicated. With the LFPA funding, we would love to see it continue as it has been.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The great thing about it also was that it gave food hubs, which represent relatively smaller growers, the opportunity to prove themselves, essentially, that they can move these types of volumes. To give an example of the volumes, with one of the contracts that we had last year with a program called Boundless, organized by the five major Bay Area food banks that feed the greater San Francisco Bay Area, we were moving about 36 pallets a week of produce into that.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
All of it was crop planned beforehand, so farmers knew what they would be growing. We are doing the same thing again this year. The goal is how we can develop those relationships with folks who otherwise would be going to major distributors that just do not treat farmers well, and then shift the way they purchase to working with us.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It obviously takes a learning process, and there is work to be done on both sides, in terms of us making it as easy for them to do so. I think that is the direction we would love to see.

Dave Chapman
It’s great. Let’s just say, here’s a pallet. You’ve got 36 pallets. Let’s take one pallet. You might conceivably be able to sell that pallet to the Whole Foods in Mill Valley, which used to buy 50 pallets, but now they buy one pallet.

Dave Chapman
We know that’s changed. But the price that you might get if you were delivering it to that Whole Foods compared to if you were delivering it to the food bank, where is the difference?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s a really good question. I think the pricing component is interesting because we spend a lot of time working with the food banks to figure out what price point needs to be hit. What we often find is that we see distributor spreadsheets, and we know what they charge to their end users. We charge a bit more, but it’s not that much more. It’s a matter of degrees in terms of the difference.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The difference, though, is that the farmers we’re sourcing from are getting the vast majority of the value of that price. If they’re getting it through a distributor, the farmer is often getting under 10 percent of that price.

Dave Chapman
Really?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In many cases, yes. We know from farms that work with some of the big distributors, in terms of sending their product to them, and then it goes from them to another distributor, it kind of gets its price eaten up.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think the goal here is how we can have as few hands changing as possible in getting it to the end user, to keep the prices as competitive as possible, so that the majority of the money stays with the farmer.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Whole Foods more broadly, I think, had a tradition and a good record of working with farmers directly. I think that obviously has dwindled over time.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Now the idea is, “Okay, can we, through this mechanism of having this farmer-led model that has a close relationship with farmers, create an alternative way that we can regain those types of relationships that, in this consolidation that you mentioned, have been lost because you’re trying to get the lowest price point?”

Dave Chapman
I’m sorry Veronica, say that slowly, just so I understand. What was it that was lost?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think that increasingly large retailers, especially as there’s been merging and consolidation…

Dave Chapman
Big consolidation.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
…even those that had the values of working directly with farmers, that has decreased. One of our first major contracts as a farm business, this is pre food hub, we were the sole organic pumpkin provider for Whole Foods for the state of California and Nevada.

Dave Chapman
Wow, that’s a lot of pumpkins.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yes, a lot of pumpkins. It was great. Honestly, this was like?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
2021 I believe it was. 2020 if I can remember

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Something like that. It was not that long ago. It was an interesting project. We started off working with winter squashes. It’s something that we felt really comfortable doing. In fact, our region, sort of historically, is known for pumpkins. Anyway, we started that. We did that for a couple years. I think we saw that there was definitely a shift away from that.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Away from sourcing directly from farmers.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
From sourcing directly and so it no longer worked for us.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The chain no longer was interested in buying from a farm. Why do you think that is?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. At least the pricing that was offered was…

Dave Chapman
It got worse.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. Pricing, I think, also, degree of honoring commitments is one of the challenges as well. I think that was a challenge. I think to a large degree, the concern that we see a lot in the distribution space, or the purchasing space, is that consolidation is out of control.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
There are so few distributors now. It seems like there are a lot because there are many different names, but if you actually look up who owns what, there are very few parent companies that kind of own everything. In turn, they are really dictating the market and pricing.

Dave Chapman
In distribution.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In distribution, but even in grocery stores and retail, we’ve got maybe six companies. They are all supermarket chains. The barrier is that there are so few independent grocery stores anymore. There are almost none.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think it has really gotten to a point where we need to think creatively about how we can reimagine both the distribution side, in terms of having food hubs get into these markets, while also fully recognizing that the model that worked historically, where you could just go to Whole Foods and move a lot of product, has changed.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Even some of the larger distributors that used to move a lot of organic product have changed because of this consolidation, and so there is this race to the bottom. I think the goal for us is how we can get stuff directly to our end client, which for us has predominantly been institutional buyers, and some other business buyers as well.

Dave Chapman
That’s really interesting. God, there’s so much. Talk about scratching the surface.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, go ahead, Cristóbal. There’s so much interesting to talk about here. I think a lot about the consolidation. I think it is strangling our democracy. It’s not just, of course, in agriculture – it’s in everything. Every industry that we deal with, almost every business that we deal with. Funeral homes – they’re incredibly consolidated now. There are only actually a couple. Drug stores too. But we see this very much in food, and it’s a big deal.

Dave Chapman
I have two very different questions. I’m going to ask Veronica first. Do you think there will be a rebirth of smaller stores ever, or do you think…? We see that there’s a problem, which is that even though it looks like there are a lot of choices, a lot of different stores, when you go into the store, you think, “Oh my God, there are so many brands, different things. What an amazing amount of choice.”

Dave Chapman
But what we know is that people are actually losing their ability to go into most supermarkets in America and find produce that was grown on a good farm with good soil, with people who are doing it in a deeply organic way. It’s becoming almost impossible to find.

Dave Chapman
People don’t realize it because they go, “Look at all the organic products that’s available,” but it is all a product of an industrial system. What you all are doing is becoming a rare thing in our stores.

Dave Chapman
Do you think that, as people develop a hunger for that, there will be a bunch of new kinds of small chains coming up, or do you think it will turn to food delivery? What do you think?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I don’t know. I think it’s a hard call. I’d like to say that I would hope we move more in that direction. Like you said, I think we’re underestimating the amount of choice we actually have. We were talking yesterday about the logistics aspect.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Because we know that our food is not going to be consumed within a week sometimes, that limits what varieties you can even grow, because of potential shelf life. Luckily, we are dealing in some of the most highly perishable products ever, which is obviously a huge challenge.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
But I think as long as we are not really dealing with the consolidation as a true violation of antitrust protections or so forth, I don’t know if we’re going to move in that direction, which I know sounds very pessimistic, but it’s sort of how it feels.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
That’s why, though, I will say this, kind of hitting at the top of your question: we feel it’s very important to look at what we do grow. Certainly, we grow crops for market, like the things that people want: your cabbage, your fennel, your tomatoes. But we are also very interested in growing some crops that are of cultural significance to communities that maybe are not served by typical markets.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I know winter squashes are something we do well, and I know what Cristóbal especially is doing, like saving seeds from certain special varieties.

Dave Chapman
You’re saving your own seeds?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Yeah, we are saving big portion of the seeds.

Dave Chapman
Is that improving the strains for you?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Every farmer needs, according to the region and what crops are suited to that region, there’s opportunities for farmers – small and medium size. I don’t know what the median size is, but small farmers – they call them small farmers – have the opportunity to go through our distribution model.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
There is also a lot of micro-farming in this area. It’s a big opportunity for not only fifteen farmers, but also more than that, to grow particular things to feed our community. Personally, I love to talk about seeds. If I have a bunch of jars – many, many jars – sometimes I totally forget what kind of seeds I’ve saved. It is something not only necessary, but also satisfying.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
In order to harvest, we need to sow the seeds. We need to think a little bit more about where they come from.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Cristóbal, being from Oaxaca, has brought a lot of really unique varieties of crops from Oaxaca. I think our favorite one is Chilacayote, which we grew about 30,000 pounds of last year. I believe you should talk more about how you’ve bred the seeds over time, and how it’s…

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
I’m so happy. I’m so glad. Four years, I don’t know how many. More than… I’ve totally forgotten right now – pounds of seeds are feeding our community, not just in our region or our small town of Pescadero. But luckily, the food bank is distributing to other communities.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
They got surprised because they really love the squashes, and they were asking, “Oh, where do they come from? For many years, I didn’t get this squash at the stores.” I think it’s very relevant. It’s more than pounds of production. I think it is bringing the connection from that community on the other side of the hill to this side, everywhere.

Dave Chapman
Let me ask you a question. That’s beautiful, Cristóbal. But, so you all are certified Real Organic. Are the people in your food hub all organic?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
No.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s predominantly organic, but there are some that are not. I think for us, the main focus of the food hub is really to serve our region, our community. We try to find most opportunities for farms that are organic, and some that are Real Organic, we try to encourage folks to shift to Real Organic as well.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think because the goal is to serve our community as a whole, we also want to try and find opportunities for growers across the board.

Dave Chapman
You all have been great champions of Real Organic. I can’t say thank you, because you are us. I really appreciate that you’re part of this. When you sell organic produce to a food bank, do you get a premium because it’s organic, or is it just produce?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
No, and the fact that we do work with non-organic farms, there’s a price point difference, because there is value in that. This is true for all our buyers, whether it’s institutional, business, or wholesale – whatever. Part of it is that that’s what the market is looking for. For us, we especially want to give that better price to the organic producer.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Our hope really is that because we are working with buyers that value the organic label and the organic practices, and obviously conveying what the Real Organic Project means on top of being certified organic, in some way, it becomes a mechanism by which we convince folks to transition. That is sort of the ideal behind that. Right now, it seems like there is definitely interest in that.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think one thing that’s relevant to this particular topic, and that also speaks a bit to the conversation about consolidation we were having a moment ago, is that we’re not going to beat the huge distributors at their own game. But what we can do is find their blind spots and identify the areas where they’re not serving their communities or their clients.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
For example, a moment ago, the different crops that we grow that are more culturally relevant – a lot from Oaxaca, like that Chilacayote that we mentioned, and a number of other unique crops – those are things that major distributors are not going to carry.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yet, there’s clearly a lot of folks in our communities who want those crops, especially because it’s a crop that they may know from the country they’re originally from, but can’t find here in the US. So there is a market for those things that’s being overlooked.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In addition to that, coming back to the topic of organic, we’ve found that a lot of buyers, whether they’re businesses or institutions, have set goals, like actual policy goals, that often revolve around sustainability or social impact. A lot of them have goals specifically saying they want to purchase X amount of organic, X amount of local, or X amount of produce from socially disadvantaged farmers under the USDA definition.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
What a lot of those buyers have told us is that when they’ve worked with big distributors, the distributors can’t even tell them what country the product is coming from, much less which farm. We can, because we have a relationship with the farmers. We can tell them exactly every detail about the farm and where it’s coming from.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The buyer then has full control when making decisions about purchasing individual items, saying, “I want this because it’s in accordance with our values and policy goals that we have as an organization.” We can make sure there’s transparency when working with us to do so. I think that’s a really important part of this entire conversation.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
What I’d love to see is getting to a point where, beyond just the local or organic, some policy goals go further – kind of like Real Organic – where that’s also part of their conversations and goals. For example, if they set policies saying they want X amount of their produce to come from farms that are Real Organic certified, because of all the benefits to society, to eaters, and so on, then we could really start making bigger changes.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
But I think right now, there are enough folks who just literally want to know what farm it’s coming from, and that makes a difference.

Dave Chapman
Do they share…? I understand why they would want to buy from you, and it so aligns with the values that people at least aspire to. They can’t always live their values, but they aspire to that, and it’s like, “Oh, thank goodness somebody is able to do this in a way that we actually support.”

Dave Chapman
Do they pass that information on to both their funders and their clients? If it’s a school, are they telling the students, “Hey, this is Brisa Ranch, and they’re fantastic. Aren’t you glad we’re getting the food from them?”

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. I think part of what we’re trying to do now is really make ourselves available to those buyers who are committed to working with us. Going to the schools and speaking – the farmer who’s delivering every week is speaking to you or coming out to the farm – and we definitely encourage that, and we do see it happen.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think we’ve been very lucky, and it’s probably not just luck, it’s also the dedication and hard work. But I think we’ve found that these organizations, businesses, and institutions really like working with us, because it’s finding the right… we were talking about this yesterday, about being a translator for the logistics needs.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Sometimes, as farmers, we live it. You are in your production; this is the world you live in, and it’s hard to see outside of it. I think we’re sort of that in-between, able to convey the needs of the buyer to the producers we’re working with, and vice versa.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah, I do think that they are reaching out, and that’s why they want to continue working with us, as long as the funding is there, because we are very set on the fact that farmers need to get paid. It can’t just be based on good intentions, but that’s what we’re seeing.

Dave Chapman
How many people work for you at Brisa Ranch?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We have six full time year round employees.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Plus the three of us.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. Then we do have part-time administration help, and seasonal employees who are from our community and work part-time with us during the main season.

Dave Chapman
Can I ask a question about…? It’s my understanding that when California passed their new, much higher minimum wage, that included farm labor. Did I get that wrong?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yes, that’s correct.

Dave Chapman
It does include farm labor. That was a big step, right? They didn’t used to.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
No. The minimum wage in our county is higher than it is in the state.

Dave Chapman
What is the minimum wage?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s $17.95/hour and it’s for everyone.

Dave Chapman
$17.95 is the minimum wage. Congratulations. Has that worked out well for your farm?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We pay above it.

Dave Chapman
You pay above the minimum wage?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah. It’s a high minimum wage, but it’s also an expensive area to live in, and that’s the reason for the minimum wage being high. Frankly, proportionally, it probably should be higher. That makes it very challenging for other elements of how businesses operate. We have a high cost of living where we are.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think one other, different thing is there’s been a bit of a strange change in regulation with overtime. It has made a difference in farming. I know a lot of folks in California have had challenges with this, where if you’re over 40 hours a week, you’re given overtime, regardless of industry or time of year.

Dave Chapman
Time and a half?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah, time and a half, right. For that situation, that really increases pay by over $9, give or take. So what ends up happening in our community, and a lot of other communities, is because many businesses don’t want to pay people overtime, they are very strict now about 40 hours a week.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Before, a lot of farm workers would want to work maybe a six-day week or some extra hours. We kind of have this like musical chairs situation, where employees from one farm, after they’ve reached 40 hours a week, will work their Saturday at another farm, and then that farm will have… it’s a funny change.

Dave Chapman
A walk round for the people who really want the hours, but the farmer can’t afford to do that. That’s good.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Yeah.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
The minimum wage increase comes with challenges as a business owner, obviously. You’re trying to keep up and make sure that there is something at the end of the day for you to take home. We’re a three-member partnership.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I think it’s great, and we always try to keep above that. I think the increase every year makes it harder and harder for us to do that. But yeah, we definitely see the reason for it.

Dave Chapman
We could talk a long time, but you probably have workshops to get to. I just want to point out that I thought it was so interesting when you were talking about Pie Ranch. I interviewed Tom Broz a few days ago, and he was also talking about Pie Ranch and how Jared was going around really introducing the concept of CSAs to California.

Dave Chapman
It was a radical idea at the time. Now it’s very common, and it’s really taken off. He didn’t invent it; it was happening a little bit elsewhere, but he was an early adopter here. I love that you all came out of Pie Ranch, and that wasn’t what you brought out at all.

Dave Chapman
It’s beautiful to see that there are so many different ways that organic farming can succeed and can look. They all take a lot of hard work, creativity, and intelligence to put together, which you’re doing.

Dave Chapman
I noticed before we started, when you were talking, you were all speaking in Spanish. That’s kind of the common language the way English is in science and around the world. In California agriculture, Spanish is the common language. I don’t think I’ve met a farm owner who didn’t speak Spanish fluently, whether they were Anglo or not.

Dave Chapman
Could you just briefly tell me your cultural background and how you came to this? Veronica, where do you come from?

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I’m originally from Miami, Florida, which is sort of that very special corner of the world where Spanish is very much a primary language for everyone, and it’s a melting pot of many backgrounds and countries of origin.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
My mother was from Venezuela, and my father from Guatemala. Definitely coming from that as a child, my siblings and I learned to relate to this: with parents from two different Latin American countries, you really appreciate the very specific cultural differences and specificities of every single country.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Moving out here, just from every region in Mexico, is completely different. Anyway, I grew up in that environment, went off to study something completely different, and was doing some international work when it came to agriculture.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
When I came out to California, I was like, “Oh my goodness, my background, my Spanish is my native language. There’s something here. There is a way for me to fully experience what it is to be a farmer because of that language.”

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Right now, our team – even though they are English native speakers – has Spanish as our common language. That is the language that we speak with everyone.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
A little Spanglish.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
A little Spanglish, absolutely. That is actually my language, by the way. Spanglish is the language I speak. It’s funny how every operation – and especially here on our coast, where we are really building teams – we see a lot of California agriculture seasonal workers coming in and out.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
No, in our community, you’re building a team. To see all the different backgrounds and different regions from Mexico and Central America on our farm, and to have that common language, it’s pretty remarkable.

Dave Chapman
That’s great. Cristóbal, how about you? What’s your history?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
I am from Oaxaca, Mexico. I came to this country in 1989.

Dave Chapman
How old were you then?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Almost 18 year old. Obviously, I grew up with my community in Mexico speaking only Spanish. Coming here, it was like, “Oh, okay,” [speaking Spanish] – all workers only spoke Spanish, not English. Communicating every single day, and I’m still learning the language.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
I have a lot of respect for my culture and my ancestors. I learned a lot from them, and still, I have a desire to, at some point, teach a little bit of the knowledge that came from my ancestors. English is hard, but we are here. Oaxaca is beautiful, and Mexico is beautiful.

Dave Chapman
In Oaxaca, were you speaking Spanish, or was there a different dialect?

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
A little bit of Zapotec but not much.

Dave Chapman
Not much; mostly Spanish.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Yeah, Mostly Spanish. It’s a big city, Oaxaca, and you can meet mostly all languages.

Dave Chapman
A lot of languages, yeah.

Cristóbal Cruz Hernández
Also from Guerrero, they can enjoy the markets, like El Mercado. They speak different languages, and there are one or two representatives guiding the conversation to get the best deals. But it’s actually beautiful. It’s good..

Dave Chapman
And Cole?

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
To give a bit of context, I have my family that farms in the Midwest and in Southern California. The Midwest is more my mom’s side, and my dad’s side is from Southern California. On my dad’s side, we’re Greek. This is actually the one-hundred-year anniversary of when my family first immigrated to the United States back in 1926.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
I’ll get to Spanish in a moment, but I think this is a funny story, or at least an interesting story, in the context of agriculture. My family that immigrated here came from an island off the coast of Turkey, originally called Lesvos, and different parts of my family, when they immigrated here, had a tough time in the United States in the beginning.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
They came out and worked on laying track on a railroad for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company from West Texas to Oxnard, California, near the southern end of the Central Coast. It was a pretty rough environment with harsh conditions. They did that for a couple of years until they finally finished the railroad line in Oxnard.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
When they did, the railroad company fired everybody because there was no more work. What’s wild is that at that time, for them to buy farmland in the neighboring county, in Ventura County, near Oxnard, was cheaper than a railroad ticket back to West Texas.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
They decided to buy a small plot of farmland, a couple of acres, and start a flower farm. The flower farm lasted for about 50 years after that, up until I was about ten years old. I think that is an interesting difference in terms of opportunities for farmers now, especially for immigrant communities, because at that time it was a very viable way of starting a business.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
You kind of had a real pot at the end of the rainbow, so to speak. It’s much harder now for folks across the board who are getting into farming, whether they’re from the US or not, but especially for those who immigrated here, because it’s much harder to buy land and start a business.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We’ve really done the opposite of progressed in terms of making small farming a viable way to make a living and get started. I think that also is a motivating factor in terms of some of the work that I do personally. I grew up speaking a lot of Spanish and a lot of Spanglish.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s funny because I know a lot more of the Mexican Spanish, because it’s our community. When we go to visit relatives in Miami, it’s like Cuban Spanish. Her family is in Guatemala, but you hear a lot of Cuban Spanish there. It was very different.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
You mentioned that whole background as being second generation, and I think that’s why, yes, we’re farmers, and that’s where we focus much of our work – growing food in our little piece of the world, even though it’s not really ours yet. We treat it as such.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We’re motivated to work with many other farmers that we see, maybe because we know those stories and can communicate directly. I think people come to us because they feel like they can share that, and we can work with them in a way that they feel comfortable doing.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
In many ways, being native Spanish speakers and having a mix of cultures positions us well to be an intermediary as we try to develop what this new iteration of agriculture in our community and region is going to look like, given that it is mostly made up of immigrant farmers in our area.

Dave Chapman
More recent immigrants. We’re all immigrants, really.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Absolutely, we’re the more recent immigrants.

Dave Chapman
My people came over just in time to get drafted for the Civil War: “Take them off the boat, put them in a uniform, give them a gun.” They were just getting away from potato famines. Thank you, all three of you, so much. This is a great conversation.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We appreciate it.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
It’s funny. I noticed we didn’t even get into our…

Dave Chapman
This will be part two. There will be part two.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
We appreciate what you guys are doing. We think it’s really important to have this differentiation in the marketplace in terms of having real organic. We could spend another hour talking about it, but it’s something that we see is very critical, both in terms of the values that we have personally and how we see the market.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
If we can get the market there, then we can really shift how land is actually managed to a large degree. It’s a process. But we appreciate the work y’all do.

Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou
All right. Thank you.

Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou
Thank you.