Episode #271
Jim Cochran: Growing Real Organic Strawberries In California

Jim Cochran has spent decades proving that organic strawberries in California can succeed when farmers focus on soil, flavor, and long-term quality rather than shortcuts. In this conversation, he looks back on the early years of organic strawberry production, the challenge of building a market from scratch, and the realities of farming on leased land with limited water. He also speaks candidly about labor, certification, and why soil-grown organic still matters in an era of hydroponic competition.

Our Jim Cochran has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Jim Cochran in California, January 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Jim Cochran. Jim, it’s been a while coming. I know that Linley filmed you years ago, and you were one of the pilot farms for the Real Organic Project. Here we are, six years later. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while. Tell me a little bit about your farm.

Jim Cochran 0:35
The farm that we’re on right now – and actually, all the farms are leased – and at this particular farm, I’m just on a year-to-year lease, believe it or not. I tend to rent or lease more land than I farm so that I can rotate around, especially with strawberries. That’s super important with strawberries.

Jim Cochran 1:03
I pay rent on way more land than I actually farm. I pay rent on 50 acres here and farm probably just four acres. I’m limited also by the fact that I don’t have a well. Since I don’t own the land, I can’t afford to put in a well without a long-term lease. This land is owned by a land trust. I’ve, in the past, leased from state parks and from a couple well-to-do landlords who were kind enough to lease me land and were glad to have an organic farmer on it.

Dave Chapman 1:46
You’ve just addressed two of the huge issues of California agriculture. One is access to land – you’re on the coast. I just drove here, and the Pacific was on the right and your fields were on the left. And of course, also access to water. I’ve been hearing a lot about both those things the last couple of days. Yeah, tell me about the water. What do you do? You’re growing strawberries.

Jim Cochran 2:13
Right. On this particular land or ranch, I only have enough water that falls on the ground and drains into our reservoir. There’s no well, and there’s no other source of water – no pipeline water available. Here, it’s extremely limited, and I have to be very careful not to plant too much because if I don’t get some rains during the winter, I wouldn’t be able to grow things.

Jim Cochran 2:46
I grow squash or something just for pies, but nothing else really – no more vegetables. I used to grow vegetables here when I had access to creek water, but I haven’t done that. Now, I pay rent on 50 acres but only farm about four acres, not including cover crops and all of that stuff.

Dave Chapman 3:14
You’re cover cropping, you’re preparing for the strawberries, but that’s your big cash crop.

Jim Cochran 3:18
Right. Actually, the biggest cash crop is sugar snap peas. There’s almost no cost – there’s harvest cost – but of all the crops I’ve ever grown, I’ve grown a lot of different crops. I’ve leased as much as 200 acres and had 100 acres of vegetables, maybe 120 sometimes. In those cases, I did nine farmers markets a week for a long time – not me personally, but my staff.

Jim Cochran 3:58
Now I’m sort of going into retirement mode, where I’m back to where I started 43 years ago with four acres – actually, two and then four acres. Half organic and half conventional at first, because the guy that I partnered with 40 years ago – or the 1980s. Oh, God, I don’t want to do the math. It’s more than 40 years ago.

Jim Cochran 4:34
We both had worked with the farmworker cooperative movement in Salinas, Watsonville, and Santa Maria. In that mode, we were sort of ombudsman managers of a co-op, and most of the members did not speak English. We were the people who dealt with the others – those who provided the fertilizer and chemicals and all of that sort of thing, plus the banks. That was an important one.

Jim Cochran 5:18
We both sort of got the strawberry bug. Mark Mates, my partner at the time, was more interested in chemical farming, and I was more interested in organic farming. This was 1983. So, we did sort of half and half on a total of four acres just to see how it would go, because we were real curious about how well the organic ones would do. It turns out they did okay.

Jim Cochran 5:53
But we planted in a remote area with lots of native insects and variety, and we were growing excellent soil. It worked out better than we expected. When the old-time chemical farmers would come by and talk to us – because we were young guys starting out, and they were curious what the heck we were doing nowadays that we weren’t farming all chemical – they were very helpful to us.

Jim Cochran 6:41
We’d say, “Well, how can we do this without using this fumigation?” They’d scratch their heads and say, “Well, nobody’s tried it in the last 35 or 40 years, or longer, and when somebody did, it didn’t work out so well.” Then, regarding the insecticides, I’d say, “Well, God. I don’t know how it’s going to work.”

Dave Chapman 7:04
What was the fumigation explicitly dealing with? What was the problem?

Jim Cochran 7:14
It was weeds in the soil and various bogus soil diseases. There’s a dozen or so soil diseases that, if you go to the Strawberry Commission’s meetings, the researchers will show you pictures of all the terrible things that can happen to your strawberries. That has the effect of you wanting to spray the daylights out of it to keep the ugly fruit and the half-dead plants from happening. That’s what we both sort of grew up in that environment.

Dave Chapman 7:59
Yeah. That was the mindset.

Jim Cochran 8:03
But it worked. It worked for people who did that. Somebody said, “Well, there are a thousand things you need to do correctly to make a living growing strawberries. You can get away with screwing up on a dozen or two dozen, or even three dozen things, and you’d probably still be able to make a living. But if you screw up on 50 things, then…” You have to be very, very meticulous in what you do.

Jim Cochran 8:45
Just in the beginning, before you’d really gotten your notches on your belt, how did your yields compare to Mark’s, who was doing it chemically, and you were doing it organically?

Dave Chapman 8:54
We were both farming them side by side. He would do the spraying. I’ve got a funny story about that, but I’ll tell you later. Maybe we had 20% less, which was way better than everybody said. “Oh, it’ll be half of what you get on the…” It was a success in that regard. We thought we were doing really well because we charged 20% more than conventionals, but we didn’t take into consideration crop rotation and all the other things that could happen.

Jim Cochran 8:55
So, we should have been charging more at the beginning, but we were testing the market. People had small amounts of organic strawberries, but nobody really was doing large quantities, with the exception of Dale Cook down in this area, but also Cascadian Farm – Gene Kahn. Is Kahn his last name?

Jim Cochran 10:06
What is it?

Jim Cochran 10:08
Kahn.

Dave Chapman 10:08
Gene Kahn, yeah.

Jim Cochran 10:12
Real nice guy, and so is Dale. Wonderful people. We were wanting to create a market that was basically a whole system where we could make it work – you had to sell your crop for a reasonable price and do a really good job of harvesting and delivering it to your customers. But we did find out that it was possible to do.

Dave Chapman 10:48
This is the 1983 – 1984?

Jim Cochran 10:52
Yeah. I participated in a deal with the Agroecology Program here at UCSC, which was sort of the black sheep of the UC Davis Extension, and they kept track of what we were doing.

Dave Chapman 11:16
Who was running that?

Dave Chapman 11:18
Steve Gliessman.

Dave Chapman 11:19
Steve Gliessman was at that point at…

Jim Cochran 11:23
He was a brave man to wade into that world where everybody believed that the way to do it was with chemicals. At any rate, he kept track of everything. Then we jointly did an article that came out in California Farmer. The placement was intentional because it was scientifically valid test plots that showed…

Jim Cochran 12:04
I was growing them organically already, but doing it in a test plot format with organic, non-organic, and that sort of thing. We got solid numbers, and sure enough, it was about a 20% lower yield, but on the other hand, we got 20% more, so it was doable.

Dave Chapman 12:28
Twenty percent more sale price?

Jim Cochran 12:30
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 12:32
Could you describe what the organic market was like at that point? This is a long ago. It was different world.

Jim Cochran 12:39
Yeah. It was almost nonexistence. We had to sort of create it. The people who came before us created it.

Dave Chapman 12:53
Who were a few of those people?

Jim Cochran 12:54
Dale Cook, Bruce Dow, and others. We managed to do a great job of producing an organic crop and selling it, but it was limited. Mark and I had both come from the conventional, mid- to large-scale world, so we were interested to see whether organic could have a place in that world. Sure enough, it eventually came true that we were able to…

Jim Cochran 13:40
One time we had a field day – when you work with USDA, you do a field day as part of the deal. You get visiting farmers to come out and take a look at what you’re doing. Sure enough, we got an amazing turnout. Most of the major strawberry growers in the Watsonville-Salinas area showed up at this little quarter-acre test plot. That got them thinking about it.

Dave Chapman 14:15
It was kind of an exciting time. Something new was happening.

Jim Cochran 14:19
Yeah. We published it in ’89, so it must have been a crop of ’87 or ’88. We were a few years into it already. It was a very exciting time, but scary. I had a job working construction during the winter, and I lived in a little shack of a house. I rented out something a little better than the shack, but not a whole lot more. That meant that I had virtually no housing expense, but it also meant that it was not appropriate for a family – raising kids and so forth. That’s the real test.

Jim Cochran 15:07
Mark wanted to get married and have kids. His wife didn’t want to live in a shack. He went back to school at Santa Clara Ag, and then got into the strawberry plant business – but not the organic plant, the conventional plant. He was successful at that, and they moved to Argentina and lived happily ever after.

Jim Cochran 15:50
He could support his family on that, yeah, but I couldn’t. This was before I had the idea of having kids, and so you have girlfriends and so forth, and they’ll tolerate a rustic lifestyle for a while, but… But it was exciting. We got to try all sorts of different things.

Dave Chapman 16:24
You were doing something that was quite new at the time and quite different from what most other people were doing. Were you finding a community of like-minded people who were also excited?

Jim Cochran 16:36
Yeah. That was a wonderful thing about living in this area – Santa Cruz. It was the headquarters for CCOF. Bruce, Dale, and dozens of other organic farmers were all around here starting out.

Dave Chapman 16:51
When did CCOF begin? Do you remember?

Jim Cochran 16:53
Oh, gosh. I think CCOF was up and going, doing great stuff before I started farming organically. Mark Lipson was instrumental in getting the legislation passed, and Wendy Krupnik also was important, and Zasana, Ben, and many people. There was a community.

Dave Chapman 17:19
Was Bob Scowcroft in there at that point?

Jim Cochran 17:35
He was a little bit later.

Dave Chapman 17:36
A little bit later. CCOF in that point was mostly just volunteers. It was just people who were building a movement.

Jim Cochran 17:48
Yeah. It was exciting. The other thing that was exciting was that all of them were exciting people trying something different and working very hard at it. It was a very exciting time.

Dave Chapman 18:07
Did you get together and have parties? I’m just curious – was it a social thing as well?

Jim Cochran 18:12
Yeah, it was. We did, but I was so busy, I didn’t really have time. I was sort of geographically removed, but it was a great time. I was really impressed with the real pioneers. I was a secondary pioneer. They were all interesting and dedicated people, so it was fun. I could afford to live on not very much money because if you live in a little shack of a house, you don’t do any grand entertaining.

Dave Chapman 19:11
Were the people still living communally at that point, or had that all passed?

Jim Cochran 19:17
Yeah, that had passed. I think people had figured out that the communal lifestyle did not work in production agriculture. It worked in an extended garden and that sort of thing to feed the people there. I didn’t know him at the time, but Michael O’Gorman was over in Tennessee with the farm. Michael’s a really interesting guy. Have you ever interviewed him?

Dave Chapman 19:43
I did interview Michael.

Jim Cochran 19:44
Yeah, good for you. He’s an amazing writer also, and he’s the kind of person who talks in well-organized paragraphs.

Dave Chapman 20:02
In complete sentences. I interview some people, and I love listening to them, and what they’re saying is brilliant, but you try to get a quotation out of it, and it isn’t there. It’s just that they weave things together in a very fragmented pattern. But other people, yes, they speak in complete paragraphs.

Jim Cochran 20:22
I’m sort of a fragmented kind of guy, hence my Curious George teacher. I’ve learned everything I know from Curious George.

Dave Chapman 20:25
That’s right. At this point, you’re growing a community?

Jim Cochran 20:40
Yeah. It was centered around CCOF. So, CCOF would have little functions and so forth. But it wasn’t so much…

Dave Chapman 20:47
CCOF was in Santa Cruz.

Jim Cochran 20:48
In Santa Cruz, yes.

Dave Chapman 20:50
Did they have an office?

Jim Cochran 20:51
Yes, an office about eight times as big as this bench that cracked open during the 1989 earthquake and left a hole in the side of the wall. The walls parted. We had an earthquake in 1989 here, and the walls parted. Mark and Bob would say, “We can look out the window, and we have more ventilation and better views out the window.” Of course, they looked out on a parking lot.

Dave Chapman 21:27
When did certification begin?

Jim Cochran 21:31
They were doing it from the beginning before I came along. There was a certification process then, and it wasn’t as formalized. It was also only one year instead of three years.

Dave Chapman 21:45
The transition.

Jim Cochran 21:46
Yeah. It was much less formal, but it was very thorough because it was all by other farmers who sort of knew the ropes, and they were excellent inspectors.

Dave Chapman 22:06
I have a question about something I asked my friend Harriet Behar. I don’t know if you know Harriet.

Jim Cochran 22:11
No.

Dave Chapman 22:11
She’s a Midwesterner, and she was early in Organic Valley. She’s a very talented dairy inspector. She knows a lot. She can walk on the farm, and she knows what’s true and what isn’t true.

Jim Cochran 22:26
When you said, “She’s a Westerner,” I said to myself, “Oh, I like her already.”

Dave Chapman 22:28
Yeah, she’s great. I asked her once. She’s a great believer in certification and rigor. Of course, certification has gotten so rigorous that it’s actually pushing people out. I’m just curious. I asked her, “Harriet, with all that rigor, tell the truth. Do you think that the actual integrity of the program is greater or less than when it started?” She said, “Less.” Because of the certification of hydroponics and CAFOs, the confinement poultry that is just happening all the time.

Jim Cochran 23:04
Right. I remember in conversations with people about that at CCOF over the years. We really wanted to reach mainstream agriculture. If we were going to be too insular, then it was difficult to expand it that way. So, the way that CCOF grew was a healthy way because they realized that they needed to have a core of inspectors who were not necessarily farmers, but they needed to be dedicated people. But at any rate, it was a great time, but now’s a great time too.

Dave Chapman 23:53
Before we go to now, tell me just back then about the market. When I started, same time as you, actually a couple of years earlier, there was no organic market. Some hippies who had co-ops would buy food and cut it up and in… somebody cut up the cheese in the garage. But supermarkets had zero organic. Of course, there was no certification. As soon as there was a market, there was fraud. But in the beginning, there wasn’t even a market. We watched the market being born from nothing.

Jim Cochran 24:38
We didn’t really watch; we built it. I came a few years later than some other people, but not that many years later. The way I always did it, I would sell the product on quality. If you had really good quality, you could sell to the independent markets – to some of them. I went everywhere, all over the Bay Area. I learned one thing: you never call ahead and say, “Can I talk to the produce manager?” They say, “Oh, no. We already get our strawberries from so and so.”

Jim Cochran 25:24
So, you walk in with the two of the most fragrant, beautiful flats of strawberries you ever saw in your life or tasted or smelled, and that would catch their attention. They would say it was organic, but that wasn’t why they bought it in the first place. Of course, the co-ops were different. In the Bay Area, we’re blessed to have many small co-ops. We even had Veritable Vegetables starting out. So, it was an exciting time.

Dave Chapman 26:16
Tell me what it meant to you. I get that it was exciting. But why was it exciting? What were you doing together?

Jim Cochran 26:25
We were very purposeful in changing the world by a different style of farming to begin with. Those of us, people who worked in Watsonville on the strawberry cooperative movement, we were interested in promoting the cooperative concept as a business model so that people could enter the business without a huge amount of capital – because it takes a lot of capital to grow strawberries.

Dave Chapman 27:06
What made it cooperative? Was it marketing together so I could have a small amount?

Jim Cochran 27:10
No. It was production.

Dave Chapman 27:11
It was cooperatively growing one piece of land as a group.

Jim Cochran 27:16
Yeah. For example, you can’t find a little five acre parcel – you can on the ask. Salinas in Watsonville is all large farms. You can’t start withthe corner of somebody’s farm. You have to find a place that’s isolated, and there are places around like that. That’s what I’d been dealt with up here. When I was starting, there was no small parcels available, except for up in Swanton Valley.

Jim Cochran 27:28
I leased some land that had been farmed before, and that was two acres on one side of the creek and two acres on the other side. We got water from the creek, and that was not regulated closely. We were careful with it. We had a fish hatchery right up the canyon, so people were watching it. But there weren’t the set of rules that there are now about water.

Jim Cochran 27:16
About everything. California has got a lot of rules.

Dave Chapman 28:29
Oh, we do.

Dave Chapman 28:31
There’s a lot of pressure. There’s a reason for the rules, I get it – it’s a pretty fragile ecosystem with a lot of people, and it’s pretty intensive agriculture, and everything’s being pulled, so I understand why there’s so much regulation. But I hear a lot of people are awful, unhappy about all the stuff they have to deal with.

Jim Cochran 28:54
It’s difficult. At times, I’ve hired somebody whose job it is to deal with that. We’ve got OSHA, we’ve got workers comp, we’ve got… I don’t have to tell you.

Dave Chapman 29:10
You can tell them because people don’t know what you’re dealing with.

Jim Cochran 29:13
A dozen categories of regulations.

Dave Chapman 29:16
I heard a lot of talk last night about food safety.

Jim Cochran 29:19
Yeah. Food safety is relatively new. It’s complicated, and with good reason. It’s for a good purpose. But you pretty much have to have somebody on staff who’s not as much of a farmer as somebody who can organize information and get people trained and document it, and do a good, thorough job in each of these dozen areas. But it was very exciting, because we were all very purposeful and we really believed in what we were doing.

Jim Cochran 30:09
We could also see changes. We had been successful, and so we could say, “Well, we’ve done it.” They’d say, “Yeah, but not at a big scale.” But the large conventional growers took an interest in what we were doing. In fact, I gave a few talks down in Salinas 30 years ago, all of them were large conventional growers in the audience.

Jim Cochran 30:47
I said, “Look, just you’ve got a big piece of land. Take five acres and play around with it for a while and just see how… Mix it in with your other stuff. Just see how hard it is to do because it is harder than conventional farming.” Because with conventional farming or chemical farming, there’s a system that’s been shown to work, and there’s many, many, many smart people who’ve been working a very long time at perfecting the system. You follow the rules of that system, and you’ll make money as a conventional farmer.

Dave Chapman 31:32
What are the pitfalls of that system? I understand it works, and you can make money. Why didn’t you follow that system? What was wrong with it?

Jim Cochran 31:44
As I say, I started with the farm worker cooperatives in Salinas, and we farmed conventionally. We handled chemicals and fumigated the soil. I did all that stuff. I was right in the middle of it. I got pesticide poisoning at least once – I was sick for two weeks. That was from an organophosphate insect spray. It wasn’t with the fumigation. I felt the effects of it when I was out there with a shovel behind the tractor.

Jim Cochran 32:28
But those guys really do a good job – the chemical people. They try really hard, and they have a good system for protecting the public and the workers. It’s not infallible. I worked with them for several years out in the field with strawberries and growing them and spraying with different stuff. The one that I did get bad pesticide poisoning from was my own fault because I walked out into the field.

Jim Cochran 33:07
My job was to go around and put the stakes around it. I had ordered the helicopters to come in and spray the field. We had 200 acres, and we had 60 acres of strawberries or something. It was a big operation. I got there at five o’clock in the morning to work, and I didn’t smell the organophosphate material. I said, “Well, I’ve got to walk out there and see if it smells more in the middle of the field.”

Jim Cochran 33:44
I walked out and, it smelled a little bit, but not very much. I got out there, out in the middle of these 60 acres of strawberries. Then the sun started to come up, and I started to feel sick. I could feel, “Oh, I just walked into…” Because sometimes the helicopter doesn’t do it or doesn’t show at the hour where the wind comes up or something, and so I had to verify that they’d actually done it. So, it’s my own fault.

Jim Cochran 34:25
But, I’d have to stop the guys from getting into the spray tank, and cleaning it out from the inside and being inside. I’d say, “No. Don’t do that guys.” But it requires a huge amount of close monitoring to use those chemicals successfully. But the large chemical companies who do the applications all the time, they sort of have it down.

Jim Cochran 34:53
They protect their pilots, tractor drivers, and they protect the people that handle the machinery, and they all are appropriately dressed and stuff. But you turn it loose on the farmer, who’s not quite as meticulous. There’s room for error there. But nonetheless, the old guys came out and helped me get started.

Dave Chapman 35:22
Jim, I have to say you’re not really talking me into going organic right now. You say, “Yeah, I messed up, so I got poisoned. But otherwise it works pretty well.” Yeah. Yet you chose to go a different path.

Jim Cochran 35:33
Yeah. Basically what I said 30 years ago, at least in Salinas, to a whole room full of strawberry growers and some broccoli and cauliflower growers. When I say growers, they had 5000 acres of broccoli or 500 acres of strawberries. They’re major farmers in the United States.

Jim Cochran 35:58
I remember hearing a wheat farmer talk about what he farmed in New York. He farmed 5000 acres or something. I said, “Wow, that’s really big.” I asked him, or somebody asked him, “Well, what are your gross sales?” He said, “Oh, $800,000 or something like that.” I said, “Are you kidding me? That’s not a big farm.” By acreage it was, but not by dollar volume.

Jim Cochran 36:30
The idea was to provide an entryway for former farmworkers who maybe had driven tractors, or maybe just picked strawberries or had a big family or something. They had the ability to pick this up and make a living. Sure enough, a lot of them did. The co ops themselves were not all that successful, but many of the growers were successful.

Jim Cochran 37:00
They’d each get two acres or three acres of strawberries, and an acre or half an acre of cherry tomatoes, and they’d get an acre of zucchini squash. They’d be all divided up. Stuff like broccoli, we’d grow as a group, and it was really amazing to watch. They’d say, “Okay, everybody out. We weed the broccoli today,” because we did that for the company, and it was amazing to see. Everybody out there doing a great job cleaning it up and getting it done properly and quickly.

Dave Chapman 37:51
There people who are very skilled, fast, and motivated.

Jim Cochran 37:53
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 37:54
If you’re a small grower – if you’re growing an acre of whatever – how do you market that?

Jim Cochran 38:03
That’s relatively easy because you don’t need that many customers if you’re growing a variety of different things, because you can deal with some restaurants and one or two local markets, and they’ll take everything you can grow.

Jim Cochran 38:21
Whereas, if you start to get larger, like at the time that I had 30 acres, I was selling to all the Whole Foods in Northern California. At that time, that was at least 14 or 16 stores, and I was their featured strawberry. It’s complicated. You’ve got logistics and… Then we got into farmers markets, which is complicated in a different way.

Dave Chapman 38:56
A different way, yeah. Let me ask you something about Whole Foods. I sell to Whole Foods. It’s a big market for me. I might even say this story again tonight, if you get there because it’s so symbolic for me. One time, I was going from Mill Valley over to Full Belly. I was in Mill Valley staying with a friend, Paul.

Dave Chapman 39:26
Paul Muller?

Dave Chapman 39:26
Paul Hawken.

Jim Cochran 39:26
Oh, I’ve heard the name. I’ve probably met him. Why did you meet Paul?

Dave Chapman 39:31
He’s a writer.

Dave Chapman 39:32
Oh, Paul Hawken. I know him.

Dave Chapman 39:37
On my way out of town, I stopped in the Whole Foods because I like to do that to see what things look like and what they are selling. They didn’t have any organic tomatoes from California. All of the tomatoes were from Mexico. They were hydroponic, they were Wholesum Harvest, and they had the Whole Trade label, which I knew were also from Wholesum Harvest – also hydroponic, also from Mexico. I thought, “Huh?”

Dave Chapman 40:06
I went over to Full Belly. This is the height of tomato season. It was in mid-August. I went and I saw – I don’t know how many acres it was – a couple acres, three acres of tomatoes, untouched, perfect, covered with red fruit. Paul said, “Yeah, we’re going to till it all in. We have no market for it.” I said, “Well, how is it that in Mill Valley, which has got to be a town that…”

Dave Chapman 40:23
A center of organic tomatoes.

Dave Chapman 40:25
The center of organic. They’ll say, “We don’t care what it costs, we just want the right stuff,” and Whole Foods doesn’t have it. I asked Paul, and he said, “We used to deliver several pallets a week to that store. Now we might deliver several pallets every couple of weeks to the whole chain.” Things have changed there.

Jim Cochran 40:51
Yeah. They’ve changed. But I have to give them credit for doing a really good job of bringing a lot of small organic growers to mid-scale. I did that for a while, and they treated me extremely well at Whole Foods.

Dave Chapman 41:13
They treated me well, too. Just to say, I’m not trying to throw a rock at them; I’m just trying to say, “What’s happening?” They’ve changed.

Jim Cochran 41:19
Yeah. I stopped sometimes at Whole Foods, and they have good stuff. Whole Foods grew organically, and they used to say to me, because I knew Walter and Edmond and the wholesale buyers, plus the president of the company. They were solid people. They really supported what I was trying to do, and bought my strawberries to the exclusion of other… I don’t know if that was the exclusion of other organic strawberries.

Jim Cochran 42:15
Eventually Driscoll’s got into organic strawberries. Driscoll’s could supply a large company like Whole Foods. They were matched. Driscoll’s, bless their heart, got into organics too. I had conversations with Miles Reiter about that at least 30 years ago. They did a great job – had done a great job. We’ve been successful. That was part of what we were wanting to do.

Dave Chapman 42:58
They have been successful. But once again, if you go into a Whole Foods in the height of strawberry season in the Northeast, there won’t be any local strawberries. They’ll all be Driscoll’s. They’ll be coming from God knows where. They will not be as good as what you could get at a farmers market.

Dave Chapman 43:17
So, I’m just saying that, yes, Driscoll’s is a brilliant company, and the way they’re able to supply berries to every supermarket in America, every day of the year, is staggering. The fact that they do so much that’s organic is brilliant. The fact that they are doing a lot of that hydroponically is not brilliant. It’s brilliant for them. They’re smart to…

Jim Cochran 43:42
They’re growing organic hydroponics strawberries?

Dave Chapman 43:45
Absolutely.

Jim Cochran 43:47
I remember some discussion about that at EcoFarm Conference some years ago, but I’d sort of forgotten about it. I guess around here it’s mostly…

Dave Chapman 43:59
I would say that still the vast majority of their certified organic strawberries are soil-grown. Blueberries, I’m not sure. It’s changing rapidly. You’ve got almost everything, almost every year. They grow them mostly in bags, but some in pots. The stuff that’s coming from Peru is almost all hydroponic. They just invented an industry. It wasn’t like Chile, where there was already a berry industry and they started to transition to hydro.

Dave Chapman 44:36
In Peru, there was no berry industry, and the investment firms came in and populated the land with plastic bags of coir growing blueberries. I’m just saying that some of what they’ve done is wonderful, but some of it is not wonderful. It actually has wiped out… There’s no organic blueberries left in Florida. There’s one.

Jim Cochran 45:04
I remember Walter and Edmond talking about the difficulty.

Dave Chapman 45:12
This is Walter?

Jim Cochran 45:13
Rob.

Dave Chapman 45:14
And Edmond?

Jim Cochran 45:14
Edmond LaMacchia.

Jim Cochran 45:23
I started selling to Edmond when he was at the very first or second Whole Foods in California. He was in rubber boots all day in the produce department. They promoted from within, and they had a lot of dedicated people in high positions up until a certain point when they maybe – I don’t know whether they have that now – but they were…

Dave Chapman 45:53
A lot of people left, voluntarily or involuntarily, when Amazon bought them. I know the people in the Northeast, all of a sudden… A lot of the produce people stayed, but some went, but a lot of the management left.

Jim Cochran 46:09
They were talking about the difficulty of the younger generation coming up with the same level of passion that our generation had – complete dedication to organics, to small-, medium-sized farms, and not really being interested in the large agribusiness model.

Jim Cochran 46:33
The young people coming up were not interested.

Jim Cochran 46:50
Young people working for them in the produce departments didn’t have the ideological commitment that the older folks had. I don’t know. I don’t want to criticize what they do because if I was in their situation, I don’t know what I would do.

Dave Chapman 47:15
Yeah, I understand. The economic forces are a very powerful thing. Of course, they’re competing with Walmart now, who’s the biggest vendor of certified organic produce in the world.

Jim Cochran 47:27
Yeah. But that’s good in its own way. The deal is, you don’t get everything. If you’re going to grow to that scale, there are going to be some sacrifices. One of them is the missionary commitment to the cause. The people who have a good job, they get paid well, and they like the job, and these tomatoes come from hydroponics, it doesn’t matter that much to them.

Dave Chapman 48:09
It’s interesting to me. One of the things that I’ve seen is that we don’t know which is the cart and which is the horse. We don’t know the chicken and the egg. What we know is that as the stores become more consolidated in their ownership, because I sold to a lot of supermarkets, and right now, all the ones I sold to are owned by three companies. The whole chain got bought up – everybody I sold to. They used to be quite diverse, and they became very similar. There’s a new culture in the store.

Dave Chapman 48:45
There’s a store we sold to, Stop & Shop, which is a big chain in the Northeast. When they got bought by Ahold USA, which is a big Dutch multinational, after three years, I started to hear, “Dave, we got to talk about price.” I go, “Why do we got to talk about price? I haven’t raised the price in 20 years.” “I’m sorry, but stuff is coming in from Mexico. This hydro stuff is very inexpensive.” I’m going, “Yeah, but you know it’s not good.”

Dave Chapman 49:19
“Sir, I know yours is the best, but it’s not dipped in gold.” Those were literally their words, ‘It’s not dipped in gold.’ We got to talk about price.” We did have to talk about price, and ultimately I went elsewhere. But in order for that big company, who they want to buy from is another big company. They want to buy from Driscoll’s, not from you.

Jim Cochran 49:43
It’s much easier to get it from Driscoll’s. They’re pros, and they grow it in three or four continents.

Dave Chapman 49:50
That’s right. Yet, I had somebody complain to me two days ago, who I interviewed, Julie Guthman. She said, “Tell Jim, we really miss him at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, and his berries, too.” There are people who notice the difference.

Jim Cochran 50:10
Yeah. We have a dedicated clientele. We’ve been at this location for 25 years. I think maybe longer, I don’t know. I lose track. But things change. The economy changes, and they may change back again to the more local, small scale.

Dave Chapman 50:35
II hope so. I think it was about 2016. For me, it was kind of the height of the success of organic. In Vermont, the little dairy farms that were certified organic were flourishing. Now they’re all going out of business, and they’re getting paid a fair price for their production. But the stores, all the chains in New England were buying local and proud of it.

Dave Chapman 51:03
We had two film crews come out with the vice president of this and the vice president of that because they were advertising that they were buying local. It’s all gone now. All gone. Now it’s all about price.

Dave Chapman 51:17
Look, we could go longer, but I really don’t want to skip talking about labor and workers because I know that you’ve been a pioneer in organic strawberry production, and then I know you also became – maybe it predated your work in strawberries – but I know that you became very active in trying to talk about worker welfare – and strawberries is very labor intensive – worker welfare in organic.

Dave Chapman 51:54
Somebody told me that you went and gave a talk once at EcoFarm about this, maybe the first talk about this, and there were people in the audience who were outraged. They were like, “You’re going to put us out of business.” So, let’s talk about that.

Dave Chapman 50:40
I think the opposition that I got was more about unionization than it was about labor management issues. I tried to separate those two issues and just basically talk about labor management issues: how much you’re paying people, what the working conditions are, what the benefits package looks like, and that sort of thing. Those are two separate subjects that are related to each other.

Dave Chapman 52:57
The question of helping the workers to unionize without the union or with the union, trying to address how to do better for the workers?

Jim Cochran 53:08
Yes. Many of the organic growers were doing a great job with the workers without the union. I never said anything ill about them. They’re doing a great job. So, I was more looking at the industry writ large, not just what happens in my little neck of the world of organic farming flourishing in many small and mid sized ways. I was just getting interested in getting people talking about pay scales and piece rate, housing, health care, vacation pay, holiday pay, and all that kind of stuff. It was expensive to do that.

Dave Chapman 54:09
Yes, it’s expensive.

Jim Cochran 54:11
Yeah, very expensive. Later on, I started up an employee stock ownership plan, which is, if you’re familiar with the… Are you familiar with that?

Dave Chapman 54:26
A little bit, but you go ahead.

Jim Cochran 54:28
It’s a whole movement across the United States and around the world, for that matter, of companies that sell some portion of their stock or gift some portion of their stock to their employees. They tend to pay better, and the employees have some equity, both mental equity, as well as actual legal equity.

Jim Cochran 54:57
That movement really interested me. I started going to some of the meetings and reading about it. I signed up with a law firm who knew how to organize that. Right off the bat, they said, “Well, you only have 30 workers. That’s a little too small. You really need 50.” I did it for a number of years, but it turned out that they were right – that it’s too small. Spreading those costs over a small operation was too expensive, so I had to give it up.

Jim Cochran 55:36
But I understand that T&A, Tanimura & Antle, in Salinas, who purchased Earthbound Farm, may have developed something like that. I remember talking to Drew Barsoom, a very smart guy…

Dave Chapman 56:16
He’s part of T&A?

Jim Cochran 56:18
Yeah, he is now. He may have retired, I don’t know. But they apparently have undertaken something like that, which I applaud very much. It’s very exciting because along with that comes all sorts of discussions about the workplace and not just monetary things; decision making and all that sort of stuff. It’s really a very progressive movement. I really liked it. But I just couldn’t afford it.

Jim Cochran 56:55
I spent a quarter of a million dollars of our profits over the years, maybe more, on administering that. No, probably a quarter of a million dollars is fair enough. But I love the idea. It seemed like an alternative to the co-op system. Anyway, I’m just glad to hear that T&A is doing that.

Jim Cochran 57:35
The union is another method of doing that because you go through a contract and you have all sorts of stipulations in the contract, and what do you do with this? What do you do with that? For many years, my staff would ask me a question, “What do we do about this or that?” I’d say, “Well, look at the contract, and see what it says.” Easy. You’ve got this sort of built-in HR system because there’s a contract that stipulates all these little details. So, it’s got its benefits.

Jim Cochran 58:17
One of my grandfathers founded a factory that made ornamental bronze in Los Angeles in the 1920s. The other one of my grandfathers was a business agent for the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union in Ohio and for the Midwest eventually. He was a union guy.

Jim Cochran 58:46
So, one was a capitalist guy, and the other one was a union guy. I’m sort of a mix of the two because I loved both of my grandfathers dearly. At any rate, my dad thought I was crazy signing a union contract.

Dave Chapman 59:07
You basically were getting your workers together and saying, “I’d like you to make a union”?

Dave Chapman 59:12
No, it wasn’t like that. In fact, legally, it can’t be like that in California. There are laws against that. That’s called a house union or whatever it is. The way it worked is that Artie Rodriguez came to speak at EcoFarm one year, many years ago. It’s got to be probably 1995 or 1996 or something like that. Were you there?

Dave Chapman 59:13
No.

Jim Cochran 59:14
Okay. He said, “Let’s work together.” Cesar Chavez loved organic food, and we’ll work together. I was one of the only people who raised their hand later and talked to one of the representatives from the union. I just said, “Well, come on in.” The other reason was that I had worked in Salinas as… us co-op managers and technical people were in Salinas, and we were sort of outsiders in Salinas.

Jim Cochran 59:14
We were trying to create an alternative to the mega farm situation in farm co-ops. We were outsiders because of that. The other outsiders there were the union people. We’d have parties where they’d come to our party, or we’d come to their party and got to know them, and got to see that they’re not ogres and they believed in worker rights and in improving working conditions for farm workers, who, God knows, and all of us knew, was necessary. Anybody who’s in agriculture knows that that’s a super important thing.

Dave Chapman 59:14
Yeah. But it’s a great weakness in agriculture.

Jim Cochran 59:54
On the other hand, I’ll say that many of the small- to medium-sized farmers do an excellent job with their workers.

Dave Chapman 1:00:55
Yes, I’ve seen that. Truly, my hat’s off. Some of these people, like Phil Foster, Scott Parker, and Jim Cochran, are just doing such an amazing job of creating a truly respectful workplace in which the people are being paid much higher than most people in agriculture, higher than many of the people I know who run farms.

Dave Chapman 1:00:55
I have a couple of quick questions. One is, you invited the United Farm Workers to come in, and your workers joined United Farm Workers?

Jim Cochran 1:02:08
Technically, I didn’t invite them.

Dave Chapman 1:02:15
Because you’re not allowed to.

Jim Cochran 1:02:11
No. But I said, “Look, I have no problem with you coming to the farm, and talking to people.” And they did that.

Dave Chapman 1:02:18
How did the farm change as a result? There was a contract, right?

Jim Cochran 1:02:26
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:02:28
What did that contract change?

Jim Cochran 1:02:30
It didn’t really change a whole lot.

Dave Chapman 1:02:32
That’s what I was thinking. Because you were already doing that stuff.

Jim Cochran 1:02:36
Yeah. Furthermore, sometimes I’d go to the union rep… If we had somebody that was not getting along very well, or was not performing well, or was causing conflict, I’d go to the union rep and say, “Hey, listen, what do you think about if I lay off this person?” He generally would say, “Oh, I don’t mind. He’s very difficult to work with, and he doesn’t perform well, and so on.”

Dave Chapman 1:03:05
It didn’t have any of the dysfunction that unions can have.

Jim Cochran 1:03:16
Right. They were always on my side and saying, “Oh, you want to let this person go?” I’d explain a little bit about what happened. They would say, “No problem.”

Dave Chapman 1:03:26
All right. Let me ask you the elephant in the room here. Right now, 40% of the vegetables that are sold in America are coming from Mexico or South America, and 60% of berries. Last I heard, those were the numbers. You go, “Whoa, why is that?” I think we know the answer. There are two answers, but the first and biggest one is we’re paying 10 times as much as they’re paying per hour.

Dave Chapman 1:04:01
In California right now, assuming that a grower is following the law, minimum wage is over $15 an hour. I’d say $1.50 an hour would probably be lucky for somebody in Mexico who probably isn’t Mexican. They’re probably from Central America, and they’ve been hired. They’re a migrant, too. How in the world can you compete with somebody where your biggest expense is labor?

Jim Cochran 1:04:25
It all boils down to what I started with at the beginning. It’s flavor and quality. So, if you produce a very high quality product that has excellent flavor, you’ll have a customer for life because with something like strawberries… I feel that way about carrots, too, though. You get a really, really delicious carrot, your go-to snack becomes carrots.

Jim Cochran 1:04:53
If you produce a very high quality product, then you get the upper level of the market, people who are willing to pay an extra dollar a basket, or $2 a basket for a higher quality product.

Dave Chapman 1:05:18
Then you can make a living, and the people who work with you in the field can make a living.

Jim Cochran 1:05:22
Yeah, and they’re proud of what they do. I tell them all the time. I say, “Look, our strawberries are the best in California.” Other people refer to them as the best. Our customers say that. They’re waiting. Right now they’re waiting. We’re having a cooler spring, so the crop is slow in coming on. The customers are saying, “When can we have more strawberries? You can only give me 10?” By now I’d be able to give them 30.

Jim Cochran 1:05:42
If you maintain the quality, you can get the higher price. But you have to have that quality. So, if I was a mediocre producer with a mediocre quality, organic product, I’d have a hard time competing with the ones coming from Mexico. I wouldn’t buy them from Mexico just because I don’t trust the inspection system in Mexico. Because bribery, that’s everywhere.

Dave Chapman 1:06:40
How it was grown, what it was sprayed with, that kind of thing, you wouldn’t trust that?

Jim Cochran 1:06:45
I wouldn’t trust it.

Dave Chapman 1:06:46
That was the second thing. The first thing was labor. The second thing was pretty weak environmental standards.

Jim Cochran 1:06:54
Well, it’s also business standards. Bribery is a way of life in many countries in the world. You don’t get anything done without paying the bribe. When it comes to inspecting something, you take the inspector out to lunch. I don’t know what form their bribes take. It’s undoubtedly more than that, but it’s a endemic thing in Mexico and presumably in lots of other countries.

Dave Chapman 1:07:46
Jim, one last question. I was part of a group that sued the USDA for certifying hydroponic, and you were one of the co-plaintiffs in that lawsuit. Could you explain to me why you were a co-plaintiff? Why you agreed that that was wrong and why we needed to do something?

Jim Cochran 1:08:10
I felt that the hydroponic industry was piggybacking on the work that the organic industry did for 40 or 50 years prior – trying to establish a concept in the public’s mind about what organic farming was. That was always about soil health, farms, and growing things in soil. It was not about growing things in an industrial setting.

Jim Cochran 1:08:52
My objection was that hydroponics can have another name. They can build their own brand that is separate from organic and be able to identify what they do without the use of dangerous pesticides and chemicals that do harm to the planet. So, they could have a new category.

Jim Cochran 1:09:32
I did some thinking about that, and I had an idea, and then I lost it. I don’t know where it is, but I may have heard it from somebody in one of the conversations. “Well, why don’t they call it, X, Y, Z, and just make a new category.” Then the consumer would come to expect to pay a little bit more for soil-grown, naturally farmed products. Then the hydroponic people could have their own niche.

Jim Cochran 1:10:23
I never came up with a good slogan, and that’s not my job to figure that out. But I would think that there would be some sort of civil action that might be able to be brought by a patent attorney who specializes in this kind of thing, and say that, “Look, what we do is this way.”

Jim Cochran 1:10:52
For somebody to imply that they have all the positive aura of organic farming for something that’s actually much closer to industrial farming, just with a different set of inputs, there’s got to be some nomenclature – some catchy phrase – that they could use that would distinguish themselves so that we could maintain our place. It’s relative to our costs. Maintaining stuff in soil, like soil biology, is so immensely complicated. If you can avoid that and just have chemical formulas…

Jim Cochran 1:11:49
I remember one of the old-time conventional farmers that my partner and I knew at the time, this was literally 40 years ago, at least. He was growing down in San Andreas in large quantities – 500 acres of strawberries or something like that. He said, “My job as a farmer is to be a chemist. I plant my strawberries in sandy soil, I do the soil tests, I figure out what chemicals it needs, and I provide those chemicals. The same thing on the insect control.”

Jim Cochran 1:12:49
This guy was really smart and had a degree in chemistry. He was a smart guy and very personable. I really liked him. But it was a different way of farming – closer, in a lot of ways, to the hydroponic method.

Dave Chapman 1:13:07
Hydroponics is kind of the flowering of that way of thinking. It’s, “Not only are we not going to count on the soil, we’re going to get rid of it.” It’s all about the inputs.

Jim Cochran 1:13:19
Yeah. That’s one way of doing it, but it’s way more complicated to deal with 50 major soil organisms, and another 100 minor ones.

Dave Chapman 1:13:45
And we don’t even know what we’re doing. I was just listening to a book as I drove over, and they said, kale and chard – I think they were talking about them – that they have identified 10,000 bionutrients in each one – secondary metabolites that are different from each other. So, the impact on your body is quite different. It’s just that you’re probably unaware of it. You don’t have a refined enough sense of taste to understand.

Jim Cochran 1:14:17
In lots of ways, it’s so complicated. I basically gave up trying to figure it out many years ago. But I just go for complexity in the soil. So, I had the… what do you call it? The shrimp shells, and the mined sea kelps, ancient sea kelp beds, and the other kelp derivatives and various living inoculant of good bacteria, good fungi, and that sort of thing, without really understanding what I’m doing other than creating a more balanced and very diverse soil.

Dave Chapman 1:15:21
A famous physicist said, “Not only is it more complicated than we understand; it’s more complicated than we can understand.”

Jim Cochran 1:15:30
Who said that?

Dave Chapman 1:15:31
I think it was Werner Heisenberg.

Jim Cochran 1:15:37
Heisenberg. Well, that’s interesting. I’m reading a book about a biography of Johnny von Neumann right now – the mathematician who never said that, but I’ll look for it.

Dave Chapman 1:15:57
I was listening to Paul Hawken ‘s books. I got his new book, “Carbon: The Book of Life.” It’s a good book. I bet it’s not super long. I’m listening to the audio. Peter Coyote is reading. It’s very good. That quotation is in one of the chapters.

Jim Cochran 1:16:16
It’s way complicated, but I’m never going to be able to understand it. I never studied biochemistry. Even if I did, it might make me a little too arrogant to think that I could understand what’s going on. So, I just put a lot of really good stuff in the soil. That, I believe, gives me a more complex flavor.

Jim Cochran 1:16:44
I can tell the difference between something that’s grown hydroponically – it doesn’t have the flavor, integrity, or depth. The customer will eventually be able to distinguish that. But as long as the hydroponic people stop calling their stuff organic, because then it gets confused.

Dave Chapman 1:17:15
Yeah, it’s very confused.

Jim Cochran 1:16:16
But it’s a scientifically valid point, I think, because organic farming is not just a list of negatives that you’re not supposed to use. We need credit for how complicated the darn thing is. Are you familiar with the company that does bioassays? What’s their name? (Trace Genomics) I remember the names of the people – Dr. Poornima Parameswaran and Dr. Diane Wu.

Jim Cochran 1:17:42
I don’t know. I don’t do it.

Jim Cochran 1:17:57
They do. They use the same equipment that was used for the Human Genome Project. They analyze soil by placing it into the machine and generating a list of all the genetic diversity in the soil. They give you a readout of what’s in your soil biologically. It’s just an amazing thing. I hope that it catches on.

Jim Cochran 1:18:29
I wish I could remember their names – Dr. Poornima Parameswaran and Dr. Diane Wu. That’s an important thing. They’re both PhDs from Stanford. They’re both really smart, and fun too. I think really smart people tend to have a good sense of humor.

Dave Chapman 1:19:01
Jim Cochran, thank you so much for sitting and talking with me today.

Jim Cochran 1:19:05
My pleasure.

Dave Chapman 1:19:06
That’s great.

Jim Cochran 1:19:07
It’s perfect timing because my butt’s getting tired.

Dave Chapman 1:19:09
Absolutely. It keeps us from talking too long.

Jim Cochran 1:19:13
Yeah, right.

Dave Chapman 1:19:14
All right. Thank you.

Jim Cochran 1:19:15
Sure, my pleasure.