Episode #197
Larry Jacobs + Sandra Belin: Building Organic Supply Chains With Integrity

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Our Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Dave Chapman interviews Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin in California, winter 2024:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to The Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin pronounced different ways. Owners of Jacobs Farm in California. And certainly the inspiration, founders, and organizers of del Cabo, which is a cooperative venture, I know it’s not technically a cooperative, but it’s collaborative venture small farms in Mexico.

Dave Chapman 0:34
I’d like to.. the symposium this year is going to be about the consolidation of power in the food system, which is getting more and more consolidated as we go along. And you’ve done an amazing job of providing a way for a whole lot of small farms to mark it together to an American audience and make a living and make a much better living than they were able to make. Last time where you said that now the managers of the place or the kids are the first people who were, who were farming and they were able to send their kids to college because of this is a amazing thing to see that. Let me ask first, how’s it going for them? Is it that I know from talking to many farmers that the market has gotten tougher and tougher in the US. And if if you could describe why it’s gotten tougher for people, I would appreciate it because the eaters have no idea about any of this, they don’t know what’s going on.

Larry Jacobs 1:49
I’m going to take a crack at this.

Larry Jacobs 1:51
So..we have to look historically at what happened during the pandemic. During the pandemic, the restaurant, business shrunk because people weren’t eating out the retail business or the people were cooking at home. So their demand for food at home. And for the bath cooking and preparing food at home increased. So the we found ourselves in a very good market, solid market that was able to provide a real a fair price to everything through our supply chain. And we experienced that through the pandemic. So the every year at the quarterly, our team gets together and looks at how much product was produced compared to how much product was ordered by key customers, and then adjust six months ahead for how much should be planted.

Larry Jacobs 3:00
The attempt to synchronize how much was is grown with how much we’re going to sell. And ultimately, so we don’t have you know, there isn’t a bunch, a lot of food grown that doesn’t get sold. So just to be efficient. So we use the last three years numbers, and we added a couple of percentage points of growth. But those included these pandemic years. So we can’t went into 2022 based on 2019 20 and 21. With a little bit of growth in there. We implemented the production plan and bought seeds and the seeds are pretty expensive and organized, how many hectares or acres were going to be planted and that whole motor went into effect.

Larry Jacobs 1:53
And then along comes 12 2022. And the pandemic is ending the number of people buying food in the supermarkets, people started going out to eat so they were cooking at home a little bit less. And I suspect that what we did based on our last three years of numbers, other companies did as well. And there was a glut of product all the different kinds of cherry tomatoes that del Cabo specializes in on the market. Along with that, we found ourselves with the large conventional hydroponic players who had now’s slotted in some organic production. And they had maybe it planned their production based on the demand that they saw in 20 and 2001 as we did the end result was we had too much production for the for the market that we had And at the same time, our new competitors were pretty good at knocking the doors and picking up some of our market share. So we lost a little bit of market share through the combination of the two things, lots of production beyond what the demand was other players with lots of production and a loss of some market share due to competition resulted in tough times.

Larry Jacobs 4:09
Prices went way down. And that caused the so there would we’d have to cap with the growers were growing in what they in terms of shipping the market. So it was product thrown away at the field level thrown away at the packing level thrown away at the warehouse level. And, and then that coupled with lower prices really made a sad state of affairs. And along comes inflation, the prices of everything packaging went up, fertilizers went up, pest control, and everything went up. And the peso got, was worth..

Larry Jacobs 6:08
The dollar became worth less. And all of the del Cabo growers are their income is in dollars, because the sales and dollars and then they will take their dollar and convert it into pesos when they’re buying things locally. So all of a sudden, their sale value became less because the dollar became less, as well as their assimilation for everything that they were doing.

Sandra Belin 6:32
There was a perfect storm. Yeah. And so that’s like 2022. And it’s looking really bad for growers. And so then we think, okay, maybe 2023 will be better. And it became a little bit better, but not enough. And then ironically, now, for this growing season, it’s a killer market. There’s no tomatoes to be found anywhere. There’s no herbs, there’s everything is in scarce supply. But we don’t have the supply, in part because of growers were…

Larry Jacobs 7:06
They were reluctant to come through and hit the plan the way it was planned.

Dave Chapman 7:13
Because they got burned.

Larry Jacobs 7:14
Because it was such a bad year, the previous two years.

Sandra Belin 7:17
And that’s a piece of it. But then it also was a weather factor.

Larry Jacobs 7:21
There was a hurricane. There was frost there was he I mean, the weather is this changing weather patterns, unpredictable weather patterns is a is a very challenging. Yeah, it’s hard to plan, you’ve got to plan for the unpredictable, there’s this no other way around it,

Dave Chapman 7:40
you know, I saw a little good tomatoes, not unbiased compared to you, but a lot of our crop is. And we had a rough time. But I didn’t know these reasons. It’s like people don’t know, why wasn’t there any toilet paper? Why wasn’t there any milk on the shelves? At the height of the pandemic? Why, you know, why weren’t there any eggs did the farms suddenly stop producing now, it’s just that they were selling to distributors who are selling to, to restaurants, and nobody’s going to the restaurants but they weren’t set up to put that in little containers and take it to the stores. So so

Sandra Belin 8:19
people that had the retail part of the market did well, during the pandemic. And then afterwards, people that did well selling food service in that they suffered during the pandemic. It seems like a lot of them afterwards they did well.

Dave Chapman 8:36
A lot of the people who were booming during the pandemic, I mean, a lot of the small farms, there was kind of a collapse afterwards. But there was a hope that people would continue to buy from CSAs. And I and you know, directly from the store or from the farms. And I don’t think that proved to be

Sandra Belin 8:56
the case that kind of ended at the end of the pandemic. In our

Larry Jacobs 8:59
case, it wasn’t through C at the del Cabo group. There’s this 40 communities up and down the Baja Peninsula consolidated under this one, logistics and marketing brand and lots of teams doing a lot of the pieces working with them. The the primary sales through retailers, so the large retailers, we don’t do the big box stores but everybody else and during the pandemic sales were good. And we were there was no there wasn’t things being left in the you know, there was a it was efficient system was working really well. Plan was good. We’re meeting the demand for what we had planned for each one of these different customers. We had projected what they were buying with we’re hitting the numbers, and it was like almost like working retail

Sandra Belin 9:55
and CSAs direct sales all that you know we’re pretty good during those years. But then it was the fall off when Yeah, changed how they were. So then if people were doing food service, that was their chance to, yeah, if they can survive the pandemic. So

Dave Chapman 10:15
my experience of it is that so many of these chains I sold to are now owned by one chain. I mean, a Dutch multinational, owns three different major outlets for us. And when that company buys these chains, it’s not good for us. And I don’t think it’s good for the eaters, their customers, it’s just good for the shareholders have a hold? Right. But I’ve been, I dread hearing any customer being brought up by a multinational but at this point, they almost all happen. They’re very few left wakemans is still out there, family owned, but you know, Star got bought up and and handovers got bought up and Stop and Shop got bought up and giant got bought up and FreshDirect got bought up. And whenever they do, the culture changes, it takes a few years. Because the company goes, Well wait, let’s see what happened. And then things go badly for people who offer what we offer.

Sandra Belin 11:25
So I don’t know yet. They’re less forgiving. So it’s sort of like you either need to fulfill you’re measured on your fulfillment. And it’s hard to be fulfilled when you’re not to a certain scale. And we fall down on that. So we lose market because we don’t fulfill those kind of guys who don’t always have what they need. Yeah, we’ll gap. Yeah, yeah. gasps

Larry Jacobs 11:50
we do we do a pretty good job. Yeah. But we’re not, it’s when these weather changes, we get a hurricane. There’s a hole in your production. So it doesn’t wipe us out. But it decreases the volume that we have. And we were we try every year to compensate for that too. Well, let’s plant a little bit more here and a little bit more or less, move things around a little bit every year, you know, there’s an adjustment made. And the big investment we need to make as a as an organization is in, in season extending structures, so that there’s more overlap. Yeah, and then we also have to get good at what to do. If everybody comes if all this stuff really lines up, we don’t want more than people are gonna buy. Right? So there’s, there’s a delicate balance there, because the food waste can be real thing. If you have too much, then people are going to eat and in, there’s a bit of a crystal ball of figuring out what that number is. But then planting the right amount for that number. That that takes into consideration all the things that could go wrong, is some luck, I guess it takes some luck. I

Sandra Belin 13:16
mean, that magical moment that doesn’t happen very often is when there’s high demand and low supply, but you happen to have that supply. And the prices are way up. And the reverse is the opposite. Obviously, when there’s over supply, and you’re also over supplied. So

Dave Chapman 13:35
the problems you’re describing, or are the basic challenges of being in agriculture, but I have experienced problems that seem to have more to do with the agricultural systems of retail and distribution than they do with just with the challenges of being a farmer. And maybe that’s not your experience. I’m curious, if you look at eight years ago, and you look at now is still Cabo growing, or is it not growing?

Larry Jacobs 14:07
Cotton was last two years shrinking, shrinking. And we’ll see where this goes in the next five. Yeah, it’s going to depend a lot upon new leadership and younger people. And we’ve got the families that are involved today on the del Cabo side are many are the grandchildren, the grandchildren of the farmers and the families that we started with. And the I can count on one hand, the individuals who were in that first group in this room where we had this idea and planted the ideas and ask, who wants to do this? I think there’s two or three people out of 10 left. Yeah, so that’s life.

Dave Chapman 14:54
Yeah. So it started as a small group though.

Larry Jacobs 14:58
It started as 10 families tend individuals, well to not to be turned out to be a cause to dropped out. Yeah, there was enormous skepticism about the ability to grow crops, the Tropic of Cancer, without all the new chemicals that were being promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, and being taught through the universities, even though we saw that most of these farmers weren’t using any of these chemicals, but they were hearing about them. And that the the Ministry of Agriculture, the Department of Agriculture, was monitoring was walking through these fields all through this county. And they were doing all throughout the country. And whenever they would see an insect problem, they would require the grower to do something, while these guys didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have the wherewithal to buy these chemicals, but they were being told they should.

Larry Jacobs 16:05
And if they didn’t do something there, they had, they just found their crop. That’s what I was hearing. So there was a lot of pressure beginning, it’s the very beginning of this idea of you need to use these chemicals to control these insects. So we kind of showed up at a really critical time, just in time, just to try. And and then the irony was at the Ministry of aqua, the local Department of Agriculture was open to hearing about a different way to control the insects and agreed to doing to us providing a weekly workshop to their agronomist about biological control. And we were fortunate to have a guy like Everett Dietrich is mentoring us on how to do this stuff. And so we provided classes to the local Ministry of Agriculture agronomist who are the ones going out in these fields and telling the guys they got spray.

Dave Chapman 17:11
You are providing classes for the government agronomist? Yes, the local

Larry Jacobs 17:15
government Rodimus two times a week in the afternoon. And after a couple of months, they were very excited about biological control and how to do it. And they became our extension workers. That was sort of a, you know, the chip, they got the chip, they got excited about how well biological control worked. And they became evangelists for biologic control in the county. At one point, we proposed a change in the legislation for the state to make that county to require all farming and accounting to be organic. That the flip side was the hotels or spraying their ornamentals. For these exotic insects, they would bring over for the ornamentals they bring over from the mainland, which would eventually become our problem. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 18:13
They resisted the idea of going without chemicals. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That

Sandra Belin 18:18
was not a popular idea. It was a parallel development happening because there weren’t really very many hotels when we were there. But that was just starting to go. And it was beginning to change the landscape to being a tourist destination. And I mean, the airport was a palapa was nothing, there was

Larry Jacobs 18:40
a palm leaf roof and you kind of walked in, walked out and it was it was delightful. I mean,

Sandra Belin 18:48
today tarmac and load playing thing you know, with your old jalopies, you know, I was before high security and so it was a different era. But the whole community really got behind us because this was a seen as a way to be bring income into the community through agriculture as an agricultural community, but they had no market for what they were growing. And so people the customs people, the the Federico who was the equivalent of the USDA there that did the inspections and everybody was just way into making, making it they bent over backwards.

Larry Jacobs 19:29
Yeah, funny story that one of the growers who provided a lot of leadership with the coop down in the tip of the Baja who passed away during COVID from COVID. He would tell a story that we’d go into that Sandra and I would show up in a field test to work with these guys. And some of the kids came up to us and said would say to their dad, tell her and Sandra we ran out of milk we we need more milk for our car our coffee. Well, we’re providing the milk as a as a as an insect and a virus control mechanism. But the kids tell her and Sandy we need more milk for our coffee but we have it was a good experience. I

Sandra Belin 20:21
think the the best story about if we’re gonna go down memory lane. I don’t know if we want to do that. But it was the Donald Turo story. And I don’t know if you already told that story. But that just classic on how to get your head on straight on what’s important. The punch line of the story with them.

Larry Jacobs 20:39
So Don Arturo is the director of the head of customs. In the County of San Jose del Powell. He had an office with a in downtown, there was a big door with a big skeleton key to open the door. And there were several desk inside. At one time, this must have been a place with a lot more activity. Because when you went into his office, it was dark and dusty in the typewriters, and all the deaths were covered in cobwebs. That’s how often they were used. And they were the old fashioned kind, you know, they’re not electric typewriters.

Larry Jacobs 21:24
This was 1985, 1986. And we had no idea how to get this stuff out of the country, export what was going to be required. So when I talked to the head of customs, and he listened to what we wanted to do, and he didn’t explain what we need to do, he just said, come back a couple hours before you’re going to have your first shipment. So we did come back a few hours. And he asked us how many boxes and how many kilos and what were the product. And then he the the typewriters were standing up on the and on their, on their backside, he flopped down the typewriter. He put pulled five pieces of blank white paper and four pieces of carbon paper in between them, rolling them in the typewriter and began punching with two fingers. Em, keep saying what he was doing, but this was like a laborious saying, and he was clicking the thing and going rolling up and downs. And we’re supposed to go to the airport with this load of summer squashes. And it was cherry tomatoes.

Larry Jacobs 22:41
And he was doing something you know, and then he put in some numbers. And when it was all done, I don’t remember how long it took. It seemed like it took forever. I said, Well, I gotta run, is it done? And he said, Yes, it’s done. And he pulled out something and he stamp stamp stamp stamp. And he handed me the form. And I’m racing back to the airport. And I’m looking at this thing. And he had created this beautiful form. With squares and rectangles, we’re putting in data, the date and what the product was and the Harmonized Tariff code for code for the export and how many kilos it would and how many kilos per unit and then the extension of it and it was always official hat typewriter made customs for. That was okay, so we got the first one out. A few days later, I came back to do another one. And he pulls out five pieces, or pieces of car rolls of thing up.

Larry Jacobs 23:43
But during this whole process, he’s asking me questions and we’re talking and he’s telling me about the sugarcane production and the the export of beef from the area when he was a kid. And I’m hearing this this rich history of the area and he’s asking me questions and so this happened, you know, for for like a week or two and I just one day I just look at kindness. It’s an hour sitting in waiting for him to make this form and make his job easier and make his job easier. So I took the form that I whited out all the just the information he was typing in and I would give him and I there was actually a photocopy machine in town. I wouldn’t photocopied, like 30 of these things and showed up with a car and paper all set up and all he had to do was put in the numbers. And he looked at it crestfallen that he was and he looked up and he said cabbage you’re gonna leave in a few minutes and he the the hour that we were there talking was system was really important to him. Yeah.

Sandra Belin 25:02
At the time addicts change more than anything.

Larry Jacobs 25:07
And, you know, at the moment, we were living in a world where we got to get the shipment out, and we had guests. But, but there was this other side that we learned that was really important was the time with this older man, he must have been, you know, our, almost our grandparents age, who was sharing the stories and enjoying the interchange, the interaction that we were he was having with these two foreigners in his office. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 25:39
It’s all very personal everything you’re talking about that, you know, you’re training these agronomists to learn about bio control. And, you know, this is people talking to people. And it’s not transactional in the way that we think of business. Versus money. There’s business people trying to make a living, but there’s something else.

Larry Jacobs 26:04
And the damn it the doctoral hit us, we really we, we, we learned something from Donald twirl that in a way that we hit that was unexpected. And it was at a time when people when the Americans are their movements that we’re going to deal with mixing customs, they’re going to ask for a bribe, they’re going to want money from me to do this. That never happened. That never, in fact, when somebody who worked for him, did insinuate that they want a bribe or something we were importing, that guy got schooled.

Dave Chapman 26:40
How many? How many families are part of del Cabo now?

Larry Jacobs 26:47
There was over 1000 is probably close to 400. I’m three to between three and 400. Today. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 26:58
Amazing, dude. I have to ask, do you feel a sense of personal responsibility to make this work for these human beings?

Larry Jacobs 27:08
Of course, yeah. But the other part of it is, I think we’re old enough and realistic enough to be in a place that things are a seed sprouts, it grows, and it dies. And things have their life in their time. Some things lasts longer than others, we’ll see where this thing goes, we’re working on moving it into a trust model after what we saw over the organic, organic, organically grown, grown Co Op do and what was the closed company that did serve a tropical Patagonia. And that trust seems like a good mechanism for holding an idea, a company that was started with some very clear objectives that were grow food in a way that’s healthy for people and for the environment.

Larry Jacobs 28:09
And do it in a way that improves the economic well being for these families that are growing food, and do it and do it. So it’s economically sustainable, sustainable, don’t do it as a nonprofit, make it so it pays its bills and pays for its own innovation, and generates its own capital, that ultimately, you can use to help nonprofits do other things. But But pay your own way. While you’re doing that. Yeah. So

Sandra Belin 28:37
I think a lot of our effort this year has been we’ve made several trips down to the Baja after two years or more not going down because the pandemic we stopped traveling and and, you know, that is trying to gauge Well, where are the growers now? Know how much does this mean to them having this market? And, you know, are they ready to throw in the towel or not? And we get the feedback. And we don’t know if we get the 100% truth, because there’s always the other side where the frustration, the frustrations are certainly there because the market hasn’t been kind to the growers the last few years.

Sandra Belin 29:19
But there’s the feeling that this is this is their livelihood. This is their lifestyle, this is what they’ve done. And this is their legacy with their family. So they have their kids and their grandkids involved. And this is the world they know. And so I think they don’t want to let go of it. They want to make it work. So that’s the task at hand. How do we evolve to be a smaller movie before we maybe get bigger again? And what’s happening with the market and what’s happening? How can we grow more efficiently what tools are needed in this 21st century that would be helpful in in in far Farming more, more economically. And there’s a labor in Mexico, there’s a labor shortage, too. So, I mean, it goes all the way around. But some very

Larry Jacobs 30:14
I think both Senator and I got a big shot in the arm, as we were visiting in, in working with the different families, because there was definitely clear enthusiasm. Let’s power through this, let’s find some answers. And the exciting stuff has been, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of excitement around worm composting right now. And a lot of the farms are building small worm raising operations and how to extract the juices from the worms. And everyone is seeing this as working and how do we manage this soil fertility in a way that’s lowers the cost while improves the productivity and improves the soil life, and this seems to be working. And there’s an all the each one of these communities and individual they’re all excited about, there’s an enormous amount of excited about it, excitement about it.

Larry Jacobs 31:18
And building, we just shipped a bunch of old barrels that were cutting in half. And, and for some of these small farms, you put put together 10 of these half barrels, and they become little worm farms. And out of the bottom of the barrels, you take out the exudates. And and now you run that the exudates back into your irrigation system. And that’s seems to be working in terms of extending the harvest period for a single planting where you have a fixed costs that can be pretty significant per hectare. And now you can be harvesting over a long period of time, which means more high quality units without having to replant, which means Okay, now we can we can compete with these hydroponic guys on price, if that’s what we have to do. But let’s find ways to really grow crops that are healthy and have that flavor that we’re we were known for for all these years. And this seems to be it’s there’s a lot of excitement seems to be working. So that’s what we’re scaling right now, as we’re sitting here. Lots of people are doing this right now working on scaling the worm farming is as a adjunct to the cherry tomato and the zucchini and garlic and the peas and everything else.

Dave Chapman 32:47
At our conference in churchtown last fall, we had a woman named Zephyr Teachout Cohen speech, she wrote a book called break them up, break them up. Yeah. And she’s she goes right for it. She’s a law professor. She’s really good on antitrust. And she believes we actually have the laws, we just don’t enforce the laws, and that it would be illegal for a company to be 6% of the market, let alone 70% Like Driscoll says I mean, I mean, it’s beyond. It’s beyond illegal, right. But the federal government’s not enforcing those laws. And that really changed in the Reagan era. Before that they were using those laws, some of them are very old. And some of them were from 1900.

Dave Chapman 33:40
And but she in her book, and actually, in her talk, she talks about being chicken ized. And she’s looking at the poultry industry. And the model that they have for scaling is, is to have many small chicken farmers that sell to these four meat giants. And the deal is that those those chicken farmers have no control over anything. They have to buy their baby chicks from the person they’re calling the company they’re contracted with. And they have to do things exactly as the company wants. When the lights go on. When the lights go off. The only thing they have any choice about is how much they pay labor. Right, which they can’t afford to pay almost anything because they’re everything. They don’t have any control over the price of the market. They’re essentially serfs in the system, and they’re sharecroppers.

Dave Chapman 34:41
So that is such stark contrast to what you’re talking about. In in the relationship between you and all of the farmers of del Cabo. I just want to call that out that this is a different model for how we could feed ourselves. And those tomatoes are in the store. And they’re very good. And, you know, Paul Hawkins told me once about you guys, they do everything right, except for one thing. I’ve told you this, they don’t tell their story. Because their story is amazing. And we need to find ways to market the truth. Because people will respond to that if we can figure out how to do it.

Larry Jacobs 35:24
And am I I would, I would answer. Hi, Paul. We tell our sower really well eat our fruit. It’s all in eating it. And the words are it’s smoke and mirrors. It’s produced the crop. And then if you’re interested in how it’s being grown in the people that are that growing it?

Sandra Belin 35:45
Well, we’re happy to tell you about that. Yeah. But the important thing is providing people really good food, and doing it a way so that people are making a decent living doing it. And it’s all about the grower. It’s all about for growers. I mean, that wouldn’t exist if growers weren’t all in. Yes. And there will be some fallout, you know, of that. I mean, that’s what’s happening. agronomists are going well, this guy’s heart’s really not into it anymore. You know, they’re there. They’re the third generation, and they’re not really a farmer, not like their dad, not like the grandfather. And so there are some people that will fall to the wayside. But the guys that are all in I mean, it’s, that’s what we’re here to support. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 36:35
But I have to disagree with you a little bit.

Larry Jacobs 36:37
I hear what you’re saying. Because

Dave Chapman 36:40
I saw the acabo. For years on the shelves, I had no idea that you were any different from, you know, sunset or, or, or, you know, awesome harvest, or any other big company selling tomatoes, cherry tomatoes on the market. But you are very different. It’s very different. And I think that the differences, absolutely, we should be able to taste it. And we can, but that is not going to be enough. We know that Doritos sell really well. And they’re basically bad for you. Yeah, it’s bad food. There’s a lot of bad food, junk food. It’s really bad for people, but they buy a lot of it. So I think that, that we need to give people a true story about why this is matters why it’s different. And you have such an exceptional opportunity because the real story. You don’t have to whitewash this or greenwash it, you just have to tell the truth is is remarkable. People do care about worker welfare. They don’t care as much as they should they need to learn about it. But they do. Well, this is the best worker welfare, small farmers making a living, tending their small farms. You

Larry Jacobs 38:03
know, we believe me we believe in that I know. And we agree, we, we got interested in this because we were running a small nonprofit in Central America. And we saw what it was like for people not to have enough economic well being to go to the doctor, or see the dentist or, you know, buy, get buy things that they would have to buy as their society moved from a trading society. And everyone deserves to have enough economic well being to buy the things they need, and not to suffer because of it. And the standard are, one big reason for starting to Aqaba was to address that issue, let’s create an economic opportunity for people who want to farm who want to grow food, to be able to make a decent living doing it and let’s work our ass off to make it happen.

Larry Jacobs 39:07
I don’t know if it’s good or bad that we’ve got to sell to we used to have in the market is consolidated and there are less retailers than there were 50 years ago. I don’t have any control over that. But what we do have some control over is we can consolidate work to consolidate a lot of small growers to be able to fulfill the needs of what these bigger retailers require to be on their shelf and be the opportunity for a small family run farm to be able to have that channel in and make a decent living doing it and have the support of the conservative the back office support that they couldn’t afford otherwise. Yeah To get into those in on that shelf space and the food safety issues, how do you comply with all those food safety regulations in well enough to pass the audits? How do you learn about it? How do you do all the record keeping? How do you create those systems? So that guy with a few acres, can afford to do all that stuff?

Sandra Belin 40:24
No, there’s a few of them that we’re using.

Larry Jacobs 40:30
Even our farms in California, sometimes we were, why are they wanting us to do that? You know, why can’t we use peanut butter in our in our mousetraps, and it was because of an hour. But, you know, just providing the support, and the organization. Initially, we

Sandra Belin 40:46
were a vehicle to connect the people that had no connection to market in a wealthier part of the world. And we were a vehicle for that. So it was all about connecting markets connecting people and their livelihood, which was farming with a market that could pay them decent wage, because they were their product, because they wanted to buy an iPhone, just like we do. There weren’t any iPhones back there, there wasn’t even a telephone line. So we had to set up a radio to communicate. So it was way before any of that. And then it was having the support staff now, you know, as more rules and regulations came on the Organic Act and all that paperwork that needed in the food safety and all of that. And so we have people that deal with that day in and day out that support growers and being getting all their I’s dotted and their T’s crossed, so that they pass all of that gobbly gook it’s it’s,

Dave Chapman 41:56
it’s it’s complicated. And it’s a beautiful thing. Let me ask, we’ve never talked about it, I know that you attempted to do something like this in Africa. We did. It didn’t work as well

Larry Jacobs 42:10
didn’t, it was a bigger lift. The the bureaucracy in East Africa was daunting. The we had were working with a company and out of rotor two out of Rotterdam. And the crop that we were going to grow for export was red curry squash in butternut squash. Because that logistics were something we need to grow something that would that would last in arriving could condition on a marine ocean carrier. That was the distance to market was just too far unless you were to put things on planes and the cost of putting things on planes was was extremely high. And so we had a we had developed connected with a market. So the market piece was there.

Larry Jacobs 43:16
It was like 60 Marine containers of red curry and butternut squash. We researched, picked varieties that we that from a reputable seed source Seed Company, European seed company that would be resistant some of the diseases that we identified in the area that had decent yields. And they had good flavor. We just didn’t expect the five species of fruit flies that we discovered that the best agronomist that we could hire had no idea was even a potential problem. So there was both agronomic issues that had to be resolved. The organic certification took three years because we had to transition ground. That was even there was ground that didn’t have chemicals applied to but it was still a three year transition process for the for the certification for the European surveyor certifier to accept it. A good example of just how long it took to open a bank account and to get the company registered in the country. To get a driver’s license was a stack of papers like this and 10 trips, maybe three or four trips to the bank and back

Sandra Belin 44:49
in materials were really had existence so it meant usually going getting to Kenya to get pallets. I mean Wood was plentiful and The forests in Tanzania supplied the wood but nobody was making pallets. So, box Bachman box manufacturing, I mean and then just the reality people are growing up with was to load things by the pallet load with a forklift was really foreign people didn’t grasp that that was a tool that would be really helpful instead of handling one by one one by one everything.

Larry Jacobs 45:32
We had a warehouse we had a forklift, we had pallets, a truck would come with supplies on pallets. And then we would come up to see how the unloading was coming in. They were doing it all by hand. And so,

Sandra Belin 45:44
I mean, everywhere you would just see it, it was it was astounding. I mean, but as a people reference, we’re just over the moon friendly and willing to do just about anything. They were some of the nicest people we’ve ever met was

Dave Chapman 46:00
the farming before you got there basically self sufficiency or a local economy of farmers markets,

Larry Jacobs 46:09
it was self so people would farm was very much what we saw in Latin America, we would grow maize beans. And that probably came about because of the Portuguese in the from, from Latin America, but maize and beans were the was the basic crop and anything left over would be sold. And then there was some things are millet and manioc. Yeah, were more traditional African crops and Taro. And then there were some vegetables being grown in specific areas, tomatoes, onions, and there were Yeah, there was all these Sakuma wiki was a Swahili word for every week. So they they it was a kale kind of a kale that was perennial kale, and they would strip the leaves as a plant got bigger and bigger, bigger, so sicoma week, every week. And those will go to local markets. So there’s

Sandra Belin 47:12
eggplant, the local eggplant, a small yellow eggplant, but with tomatoes, we’re in

Larry Jacobs 47:18
six villages. And we were growing another one. In Tanzania. We established it and when there was about 300 families, by the time we stepped back from it, and pass it on to another board to another organ to another CEO. We handed it off,

Sandra Belin 47:39
it joined forces with another existing business that was doing sunflower oil and pulses, dried beans, and

Larry Jacobs 47:47
they when we stepped back after five years and had it off, we had ground certified with irrigation system set up. We had farmers knowing how to grow these crops, they were growing weed introduced some improved varieties of onions where they were really happy with the with the varieties because their yields were better. We had identified a new tomato pest the was OTA you know what, that isn’t English. It’s a bad one. But wiped out tomatoes in Italy for a while. It came from South Africa, South America, South America, excuse me. And so we we found it and reported it to the Minister of Agriculture. We researched what the biologic controls were. We work with a Brazilian Cemil chemist to had a company in Riverside two who developed a an attractant that he combined with a pirate with a gigantic product that would attract it in and stop the fly from spreading. We created these little lamp solar lamps with water with little soap on it that would catch the males at night.

Larry Jacobs 49:06
And with with some tools, we were able to manage this thing without any toxic chemicals because even the toxic chemicals didn’t work. And it just is gonna develop resistance when they did so. So we had some things going, and the red curry squash was in the butternut squash, we were able to sell locally to the expat community. And it was now a matter of scaling it and working out the bugs. And then it was a as we told our board, look, we’re not spring chickens anymore. It’s time to find some younger blood here. And to pass this on and they wanted to scale it. They wanted to grow it much faster. They want to go to 100,000 families and we were at 300 and it taken five years to get there. But we had agronomists we had an accounting staff If, you know we had some salespeople, we had a team. And that was half the battle. Because one of the first day we were there, who do we asked to do things? It was just us. So we didn’t speak Swahili. We didn’t know. You know, he went silent Street to drive on. So.

Dave Chapman 50:18
So we could you live there for

Larry Jacobs 50:20
five years. We lived there for five years. So we built the team. And we had to weed through a few people that were the one who was writing up fake invoices to get reimbursed for travel. And we got a good team together, they were solid, they work together, they understood every one of the agronomists, we had to retrain, because they came out of the best university in the country. And they and what they were taught was organic, it was low yield and high cost. Way to teach them. It’s it’s low cost and high yield. And when they started seeing that was a reality that we get comparable yields, and we could do it at lower cost by using local materials and get stopped using those expensive chemicals. They go, Ah, this, this actually might work. Yes. So there was this mindset coming out of the university stills like here in the 60s and 70s. Were the new way. And the right way to do is with was with all these chemicals, of course, you know, the Bayer stuff and the Syngenta chemicals and you know, they said no, no, we need cover crops, we need to work on soil fertility, we need to bring life back into the soil, you need more organic matter. Look at the organic matter levels. It’s happening. When you look at take samples from these fields, where were you using your rare, you burned up all the nitrogen, all the organic matter, you’re gonna start to have problems and they were. And that was a reality. Did

Dave Chapman 51:46
you did you encounter any of the gates effort at bringing the Green Revolution to Africa was that in Tanzania,

Larry Jacobs 51:54
it was we didn’t work with it. Yeah. We didn’t interface it. You know, it’s interesting, when you bring a market to people, they’re enthusiastic. And so we made some really good friends with some of these farmers. And these guys worked really hard. There were no, people weren’t using tractors, they were working out fields, with the whole

Sandra Belin 52:23
land was pretty marginal, I mean, most of the land didn’t qualify to be had had chemical exposure. And so some of the pieces of ground were pretty marginal and stony that hadn’t had that exposure to chemicals. And so it was a tough call, especially around that area where we were around Arusha area. And farther afield, there was more ground that was pure, still hadn’t

Larry Jacobs 52:53
been hadn’t goes on. But the the team that came in after us wanted to grow it much faster, made the decision to buy an existing company that was growing and exporting the sound source and pulses. And they had a very good idea. And that was to have this hub and spoke system where you’d have a hub of services and equipment and tractors, harvest equipment and stuff, they would reach out to so many kilometers around it and replicate that all over the country. But our point was, look, the markets organic Yeah, that’s the growing market stay focused on the organic, they lost that. And they were doing trials with it. But then they would take ground that was we had gotten certified, it was clean and never had anything. And it would put chemicals.

Larry Jacobs 53:44
And we were like, This is our last month here. And this is the wrong thing to do guys preserve that ground that didn’t have any chemicals on it and get it certified certainly don’t use the chemicals on any of their cannon ground and without something happened. When we stepped back they brought on some other agronomist with this other company that didn’t have the same. We had built this DNA into the small team that we had, who, who were beginning to sound like organic, enthusiastic, where they would say if these chemicals are bad, we’re poisoning ourselves. We shouldn’t be using it. We can do this biologic control, but now they had this other bought this other company. And they had their melting the two cultures together. And it was it was a bigger company with existing exports. And they were dry farm and they were farming with the rains.

Larry Jacobs 54:36
That was the other comment we had to them was like really, you can’t depend upon the rains in East Africa. You need to have irrigation and you need to deal with flooding. So if you got fields where there’s no you got to put in ditches you got to be now before the rains come. And sure enough, they had a couple years of theory they got flooded out or they got dragged there, the rainfall was so low, and they weren’t putting it more organic matter into the ground, which would have helped with the drought and stuff. And so they they after a couple years, they pulled the plug. Yeah. It was heartbreaking to us because we put five years into it and the base was there. And they could have stuck with an East African market.

Sandra Belin 55:25
I think there were also some issues of corruption that came out that we’re not quite sure what it was. But I mean, that was really common corruption. Every every aspect of doing anything there that you really had to be

Larry Jacobs 55:39
keep your antennas. Yeah, yeah. It was a good experience for us. Yeah. As always, we learned a lot. Yeah, we came back with another little bit of another language. Lots of friends. No, we’re

Sandra Belin 55:51
still in communication with a lot of these. Yeah, no, they make lifelong friends, for sure.

Dave Chapman 55:58
Let me ask you a few other questions. One is, there’s right now there’s been a challenge to the idea of these group certifications in southern hemisphere. And I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of that. And the concern is that is that there’s a lot of room for fraud. And of course, I would like to also talk about the room for fraud in America. Yeah. So but Well, let’s start with those groups. Certifications. What do you think what do you do you think? Yeah, it’s pretty dodgy, or do you think no, it actually works pretty well. Obviously, it makes it possible for the small farms to get certified. And I just

Larry Jacobs 56:40
I so we worked with when this when we first started this thing in 85. We had the we had to figure out how we’re going to certify hundreds of farms in a way that was affordable. And we wanted to work with a certifier that had integrity. We chose Oregon tilth as a certifier. And we worked with Oregon till the time CCF was not certifying outside of California and here they were first sccf And they did not want to go outside of California. So but Oregon tilth was willing to do that. And their first two inspectors came down and they said look, we’ll go through every farm every single farm started sunrise and came in at the end of the day is was dark, we’d see him show up and they were covered and dusted and went to every single farm and said look less developed some kind of a system where you’re coming in and checking some number of these farms. And and we’re checking our system, our internal system to maintain the integrity of it.

Larry Jacobs 57:53
Because there’s no way for you guys to be in every looking at these farms multiple times a year. You’re gonna show up once there’s gonna there’s got to be a lot more integrity if there’s integrity in our own internal system to really manage this thing. So with the organic with Oh, are you trying to stay with it with a certifier that we’re using? Uh huh. With, with with tilth, with Oregon tilth, we developed a system and you know what would be a good system would work. And that’s a system that Oregon tilth promoted and work with to be used for small scale farmers. So

Sandra Belin 58:41
it also worked to was an internal system across growers. That is because they were shipping as a group. And it needed to be organic, legitimately organic with no pesticides, residual, all of that kind of stuff. Is that is that everybody would lose. If they found one box, if if somebody screwed up, everybody would lose. So to leave people, the farmers self policed each other. I think that really kept people honest. Because you didn’t want to be the person that would screw up. And you would and everybody was related to. So I mean, it’s, it’s the you they really made it so that, you know, there was no temptation.

Larry Jacobs 59:36
But we also had our own independent team of agronomists that were in their fields constantly and not to do they weren’t there to inspect their organic practices. They were there to monitor their insect and disease pressures to work with them and how to resolve these things. Work. We did have some rules like you had to have a car Over crop, you had to apply some compost. And if you don’t do the cover crop, you don’t get the starts the next season, there had to be a little bit of a hammer and stick for some for some individuals. But the, our agronomists understood, the integrity of the system was critical. And so we had eyes and ears on these fields all the time not to be, you know, not thatthere was that that there was more modeling, I think.

Sandra Belin 1:00:29
I agree that people believed in, they, they were afraid they didn’t want to be in that position of being somebody that was screwed up for any irony was the one.

Larry Jacobs 1:00:40
One guy caught one grower that we threw out was, was an American grower who had really asked us to join the group because he wanted to be part of the sales and logistics and all the backup support. And our team found residues and open materials in his warehouse. And that was it. There was no discussion at that point. It was He was done.

Sandra Belin 1:01:10
And it was totally, it was a third of the way up.

Larry Jacobs 1:01:15
And it’s yeah, it wasnot close to what it was. But the fact that it was an American, it was so ironic.

Sandra Belin 1:01:23
I thought we’ve had we don’t know if it was him, or one of his guys just decided to..

Larry Jacobs 1:01:28
We don’t know, we had the one instance we had with the growers in the coop was the use of chlorine in a you know, in a well, and that when they use the chlorine to disinfect the well, it didn’t get reported. And our agronomist red flag that it said, look, we got to check this has got to go through our certifier. This isn’t okay. And ultimately, it was okay. But it was interested in CR system work. It worked. Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:01:59
Okay. So at least for the for the farms you’re working with. It seems like a very fair system that has integrity, I think.

Larry Jacobs 1:02:09
Yeah, yeah, it’s got a it’s got a lot of integrity. It would be really hard for it would just be very cost prohibitive, the cost of the certification would be astronomical, to every year, because he got little farms that some of us are an acre. And you got to you’re driving what these dirt roads to get to these little farms. They’re not they’re not all compacted in one place.

Dave Chapman 1:02:35
What would somebody gross off one acre?

Larry Jacobs 1:02:38
How they could be grossing? $30,000? Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:02:45
So hard to pay for a certification at a $30,000 just starts

Larry Jacobs 1:02:50
to get really expensive? Yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:02:51
Yeah.

Larry Jacobs 1:02:52
I would just go back I, you know, I, I think where this is more applicable is the coffee. And in the, in the chart, chocolate growers. These are all little tiny farms, some that they’re carrying the sacks of stuff out on their backs or under barrels out in the mountains, and to get up to these places and visit all these ranches. But I do think you need a robust internal system, that the internal system needs to be audited, and checked and reviewed and to keep people honest, yeah. And

Dave Chapman 1:03:28
so what about what about in America and the United States of America? I know that you discussed with Arielle, some cases that you you know that we’re throwing, so acid so…

Larry Jacobs 1:03:40
Chuck Benbrook has been collecting a lot of the data, the residue data that’s publicly available that says the EPA or FDA collects from the grocery stores. And a couple years ago, you can look at the data, there was a lot of spinach coming out of out of the desert that had fungicide residues on it that were they weren’t materials that were permitted on organics. And I don’t know if they were even within the limits of would have been a bit unconventional stuff, but certainly was not a conventional inorganic material. And it was repeatable. You could see these tests were coming up positive. And these were organic, certified organic products. As far as I know, nothing ever happens.

Larry Jacobs 1:04:35
So there’s the integrity within the system. It’s really our past we’ve reported cases we’ve had our own case, no action is taken, or at least we’re not aware of it. There was when basil had this mildew on it that really wiped out basil in Mexico our basil production was significant for What we were doing, at one time, we were shipping 60,000 pounds a week of basil for all these little tiny farms that was consolidated into this 60,000 pounds a week. And that was putting kids through college. And, and, and really paying, allowing families to buy to support themselves and support themselves well, but this mildew wiped it out. Yeah. And that’s ended our, the basil production for a while. And we kept seeing other companies shipping organic basil. And some of our large customers were saying to us, Look, we’re gonna, we’re gonna drop you, you guys aren’t supplying us a little guys have it.

Larry Jacobs 1:05:54
And then we’d have our weekly production meetings and talk to her the agronomist and said, Look, these other guys are doing it, figure it out. And so our team developed a screening method for mildew, which was a flat of basil plants with their first or second true leaves with 20,000 spores per milliliter of mildew, which you would spray on the plants on the flat. And then we have another flap that you wouldn’t spray. And then we would cover that with the plastic containers and have the humidity would be really high and have it at 25 degrees Celsius, which was the optimal temperature, temperature for the fungus to develop. And we could tell, and we could spray all kinds of stuff. So we tried every material that was approved for organic certification for controlling funguses. And we spray the material on and then we spray our solution of spores on and we cover it up and set it in our little innovation room and come back a couple of days later and check. Nothing work. So our team developed that process. And they went through methodically and tested every material that was registered with Omri. And that would be approved by Oregon tilth. Nothing worked. Zilch.

Larry Jacobs 1:07:20
And so they came back and said, Look, there is no material to control this. We are separating the plants out to have more air circulation, we’re doing everything we can to keep them dry. But when the conditions are right for moisture on the leaves, there is no way to stop this disease, we need to develop some genetic resistance to it. But in the meantime, this is it. And there’s no way. And then we’d say but these other guys are doing it. And they said finally out of frustration. They said they’re cheating. We don’t believe it. We tried everything and we’re not going to do, we’re not going to do anything else. We’re going to work on developing that rigid resistance. And we’re working on cultural practices. But you guys gotta believe us. That’s and we don’t believe that these guys are doing it. So we went out and bought samples in the supermarkets and tested them. And everyone had residues of, of, of conventional fungicides over and over again. I think we did it three times. So it wasn’t hundreds of tests, but three times we and we supply that and provide that information to state of California. We don’t know if anything ever happened.

Dave Chapman 1:08:40
But yeah.

Larry Jacobs 1:08:43
That was our stats or story. But there’s a there’s a rainbow here. Three, four years later, we developed a resistant variety with our own little in house breeding team without a lot of money, with no outside capital. Just observing and, you know, Sandra and I went out and collected seeds from wild basil plants in the Zanzibar archipelago and in the Indian Ocean. And we brought all those seeds back and our team grew them out and crossing and just different use.

Sandra Belin 1:09:21
They had I don’t know how many varieties but if they had to use for every different variety, and they may brooms out of some of the Basil, basil branches, but everyone had a different name and a different use when they were all basil.

Larry Jacobs 1:09:38
We had to learn all these different Swahili names for basil, but they were all different and they all smelled but there was some resistance in there. And we got lucky our team got lucky and something crossed and we’ve and and it had resistance because we had a screening process we could we could screen it and we could see oh, this this we split Read with 20,000 spores per milliliter. It’s a lot and nothing got sick or half the tray didn’t get sick.

Dave Chapman 1:10:07
Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. It’s a little bit late. Let me just do you have any anything you want to say last stuff that’s important to you know that you think it should be spoken

Larry Jacobs 1:10:26
Yeah, I think a bit don’t give up there’s there are solutions to difficult problems and that the tortoise usually wins the race. We just gotta be persistent and keep trying. Despite all the all the things that seem to be going wrong in the world, life is getting better if we look at it over a long enough frame of time, and and it’s the color our all of our collective energy to try to get to a better place and just, we got to be optimistic and keep trying.

Sandra Belin 1:11:07
In this exciting time and ag right now, there’s a lot of new inventions and a lot of new tools and a lot of innovation happening. It makes it really exciting times that didn’t exist even a few years ago.

Larry Jacobs 1:11:24
Maybe that this confluence of Moore’s Law faster computers in vision technology will result in tools that are affordable for a small family farm, to be able to grow crops really well and take a lot of the labor out of it and bring back an economic life to the small 510 20 Acre Farms. We hope so.

Dave Chapman 1:12:03
Alright, Sandra, thank you very much.