Episode #253
Leonard Diggs: Building Community-Based Farms for the Future

In this episode, Dave Chapman speaks with Leonard Diggs, a lifelong farmer, educator, and president of the EcoFarm Association, about how community-based farms can transform our food system. From his early days at UC Davis to studying natural farming under Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan, Leonard has spent decades exploring what it means to grow food with integrity, respect, and reciprocity. He reflects on the roots of California’s organic movement, the lessons of cooperative agriculture, and his vision for a future where food sovereignty begins at home. “We don’t just need more stores,” he says, “we need home sovereignty – people growing and making 30–40% of what they use.” This conversation is a roadmap for rebuilding real communities through farming that feeds both people and place.

Our Leonard Diggs interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

You can subscribe and download episodes of our show through your favorite podcast app, our YouTube channel, or stream the audio-only version here:

Dave Chapman interviews Leonard Diggs in California, late spring, 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today to Leonard Diggs. Leonard, thank you. I met you in your role as… Are you Chair of the Board at EcoFarm? Did I get that right?

Leonard Diggs 0:15
The President, we used that still.

Dave Chapman 0:18
Yeah, that title. Good. We got to talk, and I was impressed, and I wanted to learn more about EcoFarm. But before we do that, maybe tell me a little bit more about you. I know that you’ve got a long history in agriculture. What brought you to that?

Leonard Diggs 0:38
I think the way I normally tell it is that I like being outside. I grew up on the outskirts of town, and so got a chance to hang out in the country a lot on my bike and with my friends. We’d ride our bikes out to the river and out to the country. My sisters and I would get on peach, pear, and tomato trucks that were always cruising through town, and grab the best peach or the best pear that we could find on the truck.

Leonard Diggs 1:12
We also had walnuts not too far from where we lived, just as many of these rural communities have small patches of English walnuts and black walnuts. There was a place where you could take those in gunny sacks and sell them. Then they would sell them in Sacramento for confection production.

Leonard Diggs 1:40
All of those little experiences were what led me towards agriculture. It’s not just one; it was multiple little experiences. Once I decided I liked being outside, I became a mountain camp counselor and was part of the YMCA, which was a great tradition growing up. I thought from that experience that I wanted to be in forestry, and I wanted to work in a forest.

Leonard Diggs 2:11
When I started thinking about college, I started thinking about where I could go to study that. Through a circuitous route, I ended up first going to UC Irvine because I wanted to study biological sciences, and that was a good place to do that. I almost switched to humanities because I really liked humanities also. Yet I transferred back from UC Irvine to UC Davis, which was close to where I grew up.

Leonard Diggs 2:43
That was one of the reasons that I avoided going that direction in the first place. I wanted to try to go someplace different. But I transferred back to UC Davis, and I could only transfer into Ag Science Management.

Leonard Diggs 2:59
Once I was in it, and through other influences, I realized that was a pretty good major. I’d grown up around agriculture, doing all these things in ag. I had one of my first big jobs working on a farm, being a box boy, which meant in that day you loaded all the trailers that went out to the field to pick up the tomatoes.

Leonard Diggs 3:26
You loaded them up with bins. They were wooden bins at that time, what we call macro bins now. They were wooden bins, and they’d go out to the harvester. The harvester would fill them up, and the tractor would bring them back and drop them. Then, as a box boy, I’d load them up onto trucks that would then take them to the cannery.

Dave Chapman 3:46
You grew up in California, outside Sacramento, and it’s so interesting because clearly farming was all around – agriculture was all around. You’ve already mentioned two jobs as a young person, that you made a little money gathering up walnuts and putting boxes in the bins.

Dave Chapman 4:09
I grew up on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was also a serious farm area, but not big. There wasn’t that hustle and bustle; it was a smaller thing. I’m amazed out here in California by the intensity of agriculture. It’s because a lot of it’s fruits and vegetables, so it’s very labor-intensive and involves a lot of people.

Dave Chapman 4:45
Where I grew up, it was a lot of Amish people farming and dairy farms. Our neighbors were Amish, and they’d have a generator that they’d run at milking time, but otherwise, they were completely non-electric.

Speaker 1 5:02
Growing up in California, I didn’t realize the history until I went to UC Davis and was looking at agricultural history, but I did recall all my experiences. I grew up during the Bracero Program, and so there were lots of men, mainly from Mexico, who were coming to work on farms. They would stay on the farms and then come into town just once a week, on Sunday.

Leonard Diggs 5:34
They would walk up and down the main street of the town, shop, and hang out with their friends. It was one of those experiences that showed who really was doing the farming in that community.

Dave Chapman 5:51
Bracero, for people who don’t know, means “strong arm,” I think. This was a program kind of like the H-2A program is now, where people could come in legally documented to work, but they had to go back, mostly to Mexico. It had some good things about it and some bad things about it, but that program went away.

Leonard Diggs 6:17
It did go away.

Dave Chapman 6:18
Then, for a while, pretty much a lot of farmworkers were undocumented. But there’s also now the H-2A program, where similar people have work papers to come for a period of time, then go back.

Speaker 1 6:35
Yeah, it’s just a smaller part of what really happens here in California because there are so many more employees here than can come in on those H-2A visas.

Dave Chapman 6:45
Yeah. A lot of people in America hear a lot about undocumented labor, but they might not have ever seen anybody who was undocumented in many parts of the country. But here, there are people all around you who don’t have papers, but this is what drives the whole economy.

Speaker 1 7:17
Yeah. Usually, my feeling is that they’re invited to come work here – they’re hired when they come to work here – but we villainize them for being here. It’s an odd situation.

Dave Chapman 7:35
Is that kind of attitude here in California, in the farm areas?

Leonard Diggs 7:39
No?

Dave Chapman 7:40
Okay, because I wouldn’t have thought so.

Leonard Diggs 7:42
No. I’m thinking more nationally, how we portray that.

Dave Chapman 7:46
Yes, they’re being villainized nationally. I know, it’s really crazy because the whole thing collapses without them. They’re essential workers; they’re not just… It’d be nice to have them here. None of this works without all those people who are not only willing to do that work, but who are quite good at it.

Speaker 1 8:08
Very. It’s not just on the farms. It’s in the kitchens and in construction. Wherever there is hard, physical work being done, you’ll find immigrants there doing it.

Dave Chapman 8:26
I want to come back there, but I want to go back for a minute to… You started after UC Davis? Did you go into a farm job?

Speaker 1 8:43
While I was at UC Davis, I was staying at a co-op house called the Agrarian Effort. The Agrarian Effort was focused on what we could do to be more self-reliant. We had about an acre and a half of garden. We did a lot of gleaning and bought most of our things at the Food Co-op. It was my first experience toward self-reliance and organic production systems while I was there.

Leonard Diggs 9:18
It also became apparent that there wasn’t much representation of that at UC Davis at the time. UC Davis was considered then to be the top university for agriculture in the country. Cornell was considered number two. Now, there may be some difference of opinion about that, but there were a lot of agricultural courses at UC Davis – everything from pomology to viticulture to row crops.

Leonard Diggs 9:49
It was pretty widespread, yet there wasn’t much attention given to the production of organic, sustainable crops. That’s what resonated with me, and I realized it living in that house. There was a student farm on campus that got a little attention because a law was passed in California requiring the UC system to give more attention and support to organic and sustainable production than before.

Leonard Diggs 10:29
I think Senator John G. Petris was the person who made that effort. Because of that, UC Davis made a bigger investment in the student farm – not much, but a little – and provided other inroads into small farm and sustainable farm production that I got to see as I came of age during that period.

Dave Chapman 10:53
Could you give me some years when you were there, just to place this historically?

Leonard Diggs 10:58
Yeah, mid 70s.

Dave Chapman 10:59
Okay. I’m just a little bit older than you. That was when it was starting to happen across the country. Organic had been around for 40 years, but it was really starting to blossom.

Speaker 1 11:23
Correct. There were people who were starting to provide services. That was when Peaceful Valley Farm Supply came of age, and Amigo Cantisano opened that up. It was one of the few places where you could go to get organic products for farming and gardening.

Leonard Diggs 11:46
I think that’s the other thing I should emphasize – that starting out as a gardener was hugely significant for me because it gave me an appreciation for the care you take when you’re gardening. The little things: being able to make compost, being able to turn beds by hand, being very careful about not stepping on the bed after you turn it, and not causing undue compaction.

Leonard Diggs 12:16
When you take those lessons and transfer them into farming practices – what you can do on a farm scale to respect the soil in the same way and give it that same kind of care – it becomes more nuanced how you do that.

Leonard Diggs 12:35
I realized, having been on farms all over the state and in many other places around the country and abroad, that some farmers haven’t come from that tradition; they’ve come up in a mechanical tradition.

Leonard Diggs 12:51
We have a tractor that’s really common in California, probably in many other places too, called a Mudder. The first time I saw a Mudder tractor working was harvesting lettuce late in the fall in a wet field. Being able to go out there in a wet field with big wheels on the tractor and drag that out – tearing up the soil in the process – was one way to ensure the harvest got out.

Leonard Diggs 13:23
Then they would just use horsepower to come back and rectify that – multiple passes with a disc, multiple passes with other implements besides the subsoiler – so that often, by the time someone had a field bed ready, they had made fifteen to twenty passes of various types of implements to get it ready.

Leonard Diggs 13:48
For me, seeing that as I started coming of age in farming was striking. I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of forcing of the soil.”

Dave Chapman 13:59
Yeah. It’s so interesting – I started with the garden too. Before that, I started eating organic vegetables out of my best friend’s parents garden – out of their mom’s garden. Early days, she was reading “Organic Gardening,” and she kept a beautiful garden. For whatever reason, we actually realized that this was delicious food, and we liked to eat it.

Dave Chapman 14:22
But I also started in early to mid 70s, doing some gardening. You’re right. It molds you. That’s how you start to approach it on a farm. I think if you skipped that and just went straight to the tractor, you would have a different perspective.

Speaker 1 14:47
You do. I taught tractor driving for many years when I managed a college farm. It was an effort for me to teach the students that the tractor was a tool for anyone. It was a means to an end, and that managing your soil positively was the real end, and how to not be so enamored with the tractor and all the tools associated with it, but with the process you were trying to create.

Dave Chapman 15:26
Did you, in your training at UC Davis or anywhere else, have mentors who were significant in your education?

Speaker 1 15:40
Yeah. I had to work the whole time that I was in college. Fortunately, there were a lot of work-study jobs on campus that I was always able to get. I used those to move around to different programs. I worked in the Horticulture Department and in the greenhouses. I worked at the Arboretum and learned all of the various plants that were growing there.

Leonard Diggs 16:09
I then had a job later on working for the extension agents. There were extension specialists housed at UC Davis. One was for vegetables, one for potatoes, and one strictly for tomatoes. I would work with their field trials and their field techs. That was very informative for me to learn what it was specifically that they were focused on.

Leonard Diggs 16:42
Potatoes at that time were about potato chips. I’d never seen a potato chip potato before working with that extension specialist. The size of it was humongous. You never see a potato that size in the grocery store, but they’re grown specifically to make potato chips. There were a lot of things that I learned along the way.

Leonard Diggs 17:10
In terms of mentoring, there were so many places. I worked for a tire company, changing tires on cars, and trucks. Occasionally, farm equipment would show up. All of those little pieces that you put together in terms of what it takes to be a farmer and what it takes to be able to do things yourself, to fix things, to make things work.

Leonard Diggs 17:41
I have a Class A license, which I’ve kept since I was 18, and I hauled a lot of ag commodities during the summer between classes. Just before the fall season would start, I’d drive all the way up into the fall season. It was a great opportunity to be out in the fields and to see those same products that I had worked with as a kid being pulled out of the field, but hauling them out, taking them to the cannery.

Leonard Diggs 18:13
The big cannery where I grew up was right across the street from where I lived as a kid. I got to haul, kind of full circle, tomatoes as a young adult into that cannery. There were a lot of just little pieces that made a huge difference in terms of the lessons that I learned.

Dave Chapman 18:36
They were making tomato sauce.

Leonard Diggs 18:37
They were making tomato sauce.

Dave Chapman 18:39
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know how much of the tomato sauce in America comes from California. I’m sure a lot came from Florida. I’m not quite sure about that, but probably still quite a lot from here.

Leonard Diggs 18:43
It’s quite a bit.

Dave Chapman 18:57
Yeah, I’ve seen the commercial harvest at Scott Park’s place. It’s kind of mind-boggling. They have this device about as big as this room driving over the tomatoes, and they just come shooting out the back into a semi-load. They keep those machines going nonstop. It’s pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 19:21
Yeah, now they use the full trailer itself to load up in the field, whereas when I was coming of age, it was bins that were then put on flatbed trailers. But now they have these. That changed too in my time. I used to haul those trailers also.

Leonard Diggs 19:42
But as a kid, everything was hand-picked on the harvester. There was no electronic sorting, and they were then put into wooden bins that would be loaded on flatbeds and taken to the cannery.

Dave Chapman 19:57
Right. Everything has gotten more mechanized and thus less expensive. Agriculture has changed a lot from when you were at UC Davis, and a lot here in California. When you were starting, organic farming almost didn’t exist as a commercial enterprise. It was just beginning. Did you look at that and go, this is what I want to do, or did it take a while for that to come to you?

Leonard Diggs 20:34
No, it resonated with me. Once I started realizing that I had a green thumb and wanted to do that, it had to be organic because I had gone through the emotional roller coaster of what we are doing to this planet.

Leonard Diggs 20:34
I felt really concerned about what I started feeling when I was in my late teens, around 17 or 18, about what it seemed like we were doing. Being able to transfer my concerns into organic production was essential. I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for that.

Dave Chapman 21:18
Did you feel connected to a community of like mind? I’m just interested in that. It was certainly true for me, around that same era, that it was exciting – but it wasn’t just exciting for me. It was exciting because there were other people doing it.

Dave Chapman 21:40
We definitely had a sense of mission, a sense that we wanted to change the world in a positive way. What a wonderful thing to do, to change the world positively by growing food.

Speaker 1 21:55
Yeah, definitely. Being on the edge of the Vietnam War, and seeing what civil unrest and protest looked like, and people speaking out, informed me a lot about the power of making choices as communities and as individuals in those communities. College campuses are places where people become aware and come into their own.

Leonard Diggs 22:28
That was the first place I heard Frances Moore Lappé come and speak. To begin to hear her say that if you have a dream that you see evolving in your lifetime, it’s not big enough, and to begin to develop strategies to work on some of these impossible things, and some of these things that were dismissed by the establishment, and to realize that this is really a better direction to go, and it seemed the right direction.

Leonard Diggs 23:05
There were quite a few people at UC Davis and in that community of Yolo County who were focused on alternatives in agriculture.

Dave Chapman 23:17
Did you happen to know Dru Rivers back then, because I think she was in that same program at UC Davis and in the gardening program. I think she was doing that organically. I don’t know if I got that wrong.

Speaker 1 23:32
Yeah. I met Dru when I was at UC Davis, because one of her friends was my housemate at the Agrarian Effort. Kirk became a farm advisor, along with two of the other housemates that were there who became farm advisors in California. Kirk went to Florida first and became a farm advisor, and then he came back and focused on strawberries.

Leonard Diggs 24:02
One of my housemates and roommates went to Sonoma County as a farm advisor, which is how I ended up going to Sonoma County and farming there through a connection that he established for me. There were quite a few people that ended up in that area who ended up being influential in California and in organic agriculture in general.

Dave Chapman 24:31
That’s great. Do you remember the guy…? He was a professor. I think he was at UC Davis, and he had been at Rodale. He was their chief scientist. Bob… It drives me crazy. I can never remember his name. I talked to him. He’s since passed, but I talked to him…

Leonard Diggs 24:55
Bob Scowcroft

Dave Chapman 24:56
Not Bob Scowcroft. I’m talking to him tomorrow. He’s still around. Anyway, I know he and Dru did a thing where they went out and spoke to a group of conventional chemical vegetable farmers. They were doing it through Extension. The Extension guy said, “No one’s going to come.” The guy was very discouraging about it. He said, “No one’s going to come. No one wants to hear this.”

Dave Chapman 25:06
She said there were 300 farmers in the room when they got there. They did want to hear it very much. Again, it was very early days, but many people were looking for an alternative and trying to understand if this was something that could work for them.

Speaker 1 25:42
There were a lot of people like that. A lot of names have slipped my mind right now, but Bill Sims, I believe, came from the Midwest and had even been at Rodale, and then came to UC Davis, if I’m not mistaken. There were quite a few trailbreakers.

Leonard Diggs 26:15
I also read Larry Korn’s edition of One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka, as he edited it for Masanobu Fukuoka. The book came to UC Davis, but he didn’t. He was in Washington State at that time. I had a motorcycle then, and I drove my motorcycle to Washington State, which was a pretty good ride from California, to go see Larry talk about Fukuoka.

Leonard Diggs 26:48
I was really inspired by it when he talked. I said, “I really want to see this and go and find out what he’s doing.” He said, “Well, just go. Just show up.” I said, “Really? Where?” He told me where it was. I went back to UC Davis, and I studied Japanese for about a year. Then I ended up going to Japan. I got to Tokyo, bought a bicycle, and rode my bicycle from Tokyo to Shikoku.

Leonard Diggs 27:23
Then I showed up at Fukuoka’s property, not quite knowing where, because my Japanese wasn’t that great, but not quite knowing where he was. Then coming to his door, I realized I had come to his door because his granddaughter came to the door.

Leonard Diggs 27:41
I asked about him, and she said, “Otō-san desu.” I said, that can’t be her father, because I thought she said, “Otō-san.” I got led back to his house, and she said, “Otō-san desu.” I realized she was saying, “Grandfather.” So, anyway.

Dave Chapman 28:08
I’m so impressed that you spent a year learning Japanese in order to go and study with him. How long did it take to ride a bicycle from Tokyo to his place?

Speaker 1 28:22
It probably took me about a week and a half, I think, is what I vaguely remember. I was young and adventurous. I had been in Mexico because I wanted to go to Guatemala and Belize. I’d gone by train, and in the middle of the night, both my girlfriend and I had our backpacks stolen. I’d bought all the stuff that I planned to take with me on the trip to Japan too, so I just ended up traveling light.

Leonard Diggs 29:05
I had this old army blanket that I rolled up inside my backpack, and I’d throw it out with my space blanket. I don’t know if you remember those space blankets, but between a space blanket and an army blanket, that was what I ended up using at night.

Leonard Diggs 29:23
What I learned about Japan is that there’s a lot of countryside, and people tend to maintain it. The cities didn’t consume it – at least at that time, they didn’t. So, I was just throwing down wherever I could, in between towns, and then finally made my way there.

Dave Chapman 29:48
What was Fukuoka like?

Speaker 1 29:54
He was embracing. When he came to the door, his house was down in the village, and his farm was up on the hill. He walked me up to his farm and offered me a place to stay. Then, on the daily, he would be there and work with the team of other people who were staying, farming, learning to farm, and have these little lessons. But nothing extensive – just whatever was on the fly.

Dave Chapman 30:34
I read that when I was young too, but for people who have never read “One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka” or don’t know about his work, could you just give a little bit of an explanation of what he was talking about?

Speaker 1 30:51
Do-nothing farming was one of the ways he described it, and basically meant working with nature and not trying to utilize human intellect to overcome nature. He was very much about saying that it’s really the mind of men that gets in the way of having a direct relationship with nature.

Leonard Diggs 31:20
He was great at drawing, and he would make these typical kind of, and I don’t really remember the name of these particular brushstroke style Japanese drawings that you make. They almost resemble fixed stick figures, but are more unique and artistic.

Leonard Diggs 31:39
He had this one drawing of the natural farmer, who would be sitting above ground with his arm on his head, laying next to a hole, with a person down in the hole with their pickaxe digging it out. The natural farmer wasn’t involved in that, as they watched someone using techniques and strategies that didn’t really lead anywhere.

Leonard Diggs 32:14
That was one of the key tenets – how to no-till, reduce tilling, reduce chemical use – no chemical inputs. One of the other key things was how to utilize the seasons in ways that people sometimes ignore, like knowing the natural sequence of crops.

Leonard Diggs 32:39
For example, he would pelletize lots of his seed. If he had a crop of rice growing in the field, and knew that that crop would naturally be followed by a winter grain, like barley or wheat, he would pelletize the barley or wheat and throw it into the rice paddy while the rice was still growing.

Leonard Diggs 33:07
The rice might be up, let’s say, 8–10 inches and hadn’t headed out yet, but he would throw in these pelletized seeds of the next season’s crop so that there would be a natural succession of the grain sprouting within the standing crop of rice and starting to grow within the standing crop of rice. By the time you harvested the rice and left the straw, this next succession of plants would be coming through that straw.

Leonard Diggs 33:42
That grain interplay that he did was something that the Lundbergs, I think, utilized mechanical techniques to try to mimic in that they would fly, like you would do in California. You’d fly the seed into the rice paddies here. Usually, you flood the rice paddies in California, and once the water is there, then the planes fly the rice seed in.

Leonard Diggs 34:12
The Lundbergs tried to, I think, mimic some of Fukuoka’s techniques by flying rice seed in or flying other seeds into the fields that were already planted. I don’t know how much success they had with it, but they played with it.

Dave Chapman 34:30
Did you find the quality of what was growing there, or the quality of the soil, to be exceptional, or was it just a mess?

Speaker 1 34:41
No, it wasn’t a mess. There was not that. It’s hard to describe. It was a system of farming and a system of food culture so that throughout every phase of the year, there was something going on that made sense during that time of the year.

Leonard Diggs 35:10
For example, if daikon radishes were grown, that was also a time when the daikon radishes got big enough to harvest and cut in such a way that you could hang them to dry. Drying the daikon radishes was something.

Leonard Diggs 35:27
When I got there, not too long after I arrived, it was when the bamboo shoots started coming up. This is the timber bamboo – the bamboo that would grow maybe 30–40 feet tall. Timber bamboo, when harvested young, has about a four-inch diameter, and it comes out of the ground on the daily, shooting up maybe about six inches or so tall.

Leonard Diggs 35:55
There’s a particular tool, which is very useful. Fukuoka was adamant about emphasizing that this was a particular Japanese tool, and the way it worked was based on how Japanese people used their bodies. They used more pull techniques. He had a whole discussion about that in terms of the Western style of pushing versus the Japanese style of pulling.

Leonard Diggs 36:28
You’ll see it sometimes in certain kinds of martial arts too, like judo, for example – the pull techniques versus the push techniques. Karate may be more based on pushing, but judo and Aikido are more based on pulling. He had those same lessons to teach about how to use tools properly. There was a particular Japanese tool that was kind of like a pickax, but rounded with no point on it.

Leonard Diggs 37:01
You’d use it to get bamboo shoots out of the ground when they came up. There was just a certain technique, and with that tool, you could pop out the bamboo shoots. Those were taken to market during that time of year. Sending off those early bamboo shoots was a very important crop.

Leonard Diggs 37:28
There were just lots of little things like that. One of the things he talked about, which he mentions in his book but was very specific about on his farm, is how you weed and the impact of whether you cut a weed or bend a weed over. If you treat weeds a certain way, they respond a certain way.

Leonard Diggs 38:04
He believed it was better to bend a weed over and suppress it, as opposed to cutting it. He would talk very much about how Western culture does a lot of cutting, but cutting is not always appropriate, and if it is, it is for certain times and situations. There were lots of nuanced lessons, I’ll say.

Dave Chapman 38:33
This is so interesting. How long did you stay there?

Speaker 1 38:36
Not very long – a few months, maybe two or three months, I think.

Dave Chapman 38:41
You spent a year learning Japanese. What did you do after that?

Leonard Diggs 38:47
Lots of things.

Dave Chapman 38:49
Were you traveling around the world at that point, or did you come back?

Speaker 1 38:53
No. I came back from Japan. That was a time at UC Davis when they had what they called Planned Educational Leave Program. You could take a Planned Educational Leave and go do something, take a quarter or two quarters off, and then come right back in to start your studies where you’d left off, which I utilized to do things like that.

Leonard Diggs 39:28
I found it really meaningful, because every time I came back from a PELP – which is the acronym that was given – every time I came back from that, I had a different perspective about what I was focused on learning. I’d go into a class with a completely different perspective of something I knew I needed to know now that I didn’t have coming in as a student without any knowledge. That was very helpful.

Leonard Diggs 39:55
But I ended up managing a demonstration farm. It was based in Sacramento and was designed to demonstrate all the crops that we grew in California. I learned to grow crops there. I grew rice, kiwis, and cotton.

Leonard Diggs 40:14
I would travel around the state and meet with growers who were growing those crops and learn techniques from them that I could use to deploy at the Demonstration Farm so that during the three weeks that was the big season of that demonstration farm’s heyday, we would be able to have all of those crops mature at the same time, which was a feat – to be able to have all of those crops available in late September for people to come see.

Dave Chapman 40:48
Was that Demonstration Farm mixed, all organic or chemical?

Speaker 1 40:55
When I first got there, it was very chemically oriented. After a year of just working it, I then became the manager. I ended up bringing all of my buddies who were organic growers, and we started managing it organically. We were still using some synthetic fertilizer at that stage because Grow More was something that made things really grow quickly, and you could force, but we transitioned lots of the spots to organic.

Leonard Diggs 41:27
We had a garden that was designed for a family of four, and that was the size that it met. We grew all organic vegetables in there to demonstrate, “Well, this is about the size that would grow the vegetables that you need if you have a family of four.” So, yeah, I was able to transition.

Dave Chapman 41:51
I have to change channels and skip a lot of years here, because there are a couple of things I really wanted to make sure we visited. The first one is EcoFarm. I think EcoFarm is just hugely inspiring to me. I didn’t go back when I began. I had never heard of EcoFarm, and I’d never been to California agriculture. I started coming really from the Real Organic Project. I started coming to EcoFarm, and I was like, “Whoa, amazing gathering of people. Amazing conversations going on.”

Dave Chapman 42:30
I think I told you that I’ve probably only been to a handful of workshops at EcoFarm, but my education has been vibrant. I’m just talking to people non-stop, and really great and interesting people, all kinds of people.

Dave Chapman 42:46
Tell me about your relationship with EcoFarm. You are now the president. Tell me how that happened, and how did you become part of it?

Speaker 1 43:02
I got exposed to EcoFarm early on and went to a few of the very early conferences before they went to Asilomar.

Dave Chapman 43:12
As early as winters?

Speaker 1 43:13
No. La Honda is, I think, the one that I went to first. It wasn’t the first one that they had. I didn’t go to the very first one.

Dave Chapman 43:25
At La Honda were they in one of the camps?

Leonard Diggs 43:29
Yeah, I believe so. It’s been so long, but I think they probably were in one of the camps.

Dave Chapman 43:33
I used to go to Tai Chi workshops in a Boy Scout camp. I think it was in La Honda. It’s beautiful – very funky cabins, just this beautiful band shell. It was really pretty special.

Leonard Diggs 43:47
Yeah, not far from here.

Dave Chapman 43:48
Yeah, that’s right. Just down the road. What was that like?

Speaker 1 43:57
When I was at that stage, what was exciting about it was to learn from fellow farmers and to meet a group of people who were committed and passionate about organic production. That was the uniqueness of it. But I was also at that age where I mainly had my head down and my butt up.

Leonard Diggs 44:24
I was out doing it and not really going to places to learn as much about it as I was just focused on doing it, spending hours and hours and hours just doing it. Also, being a poor farmer, I wasn’t always going to every conference because that didn’t make sense for me. But that was my first inception.

Leonard Diggs 44:50
Then I’d go from time to time, not every year. There are people who go every single year. Then, when I managed the college farm, I would send my staff and the students to the conference. I made sure that we found stipends so that they could go. I didn’t always go. I would go occasionally, but I would send my staff.

Leonard Diggs 45:16
I was given an award, and I went back to receive it. One of the board members said to me, “Hey, Leonard, would you be willing to be on the board and consider being on the board?” I said, “Yeah, I’d consider it.” One thing led to the next, and I ended up on the board.

Dave Chapman 45:36
Yeah, that’s great. Did you know Amigo Bob and all that?

Speaker 1 45:40
I did. I used to drive from Sacramento to Grass Valley to where Amigo store was at Peaceful Valley and to the Peaceful Valley Farm Store to pick up my stuff – to pick up the tools, the fertilizers, and the seed. That was the only place to really get that and get it in bulk at farming scale. I got to know Amigo during those days when I would drive to the store before he started his consulting work.

Leonard Diggs 46:16
Then, when I moved to Sonoma County to start an organic farm, I contacted Amigo. I had him come up and do a consulting thing there. Then, when I became the farm manager for the college farm in Sonoma County, the Santa Rosa Junior College farm, he came to the farm a couple of times. I had a long-standing relationship with him.

Dave Chapman 46:44
He’s such a huge influence on so many people. He is one of those people who really, I think, changed the course of organic farming in America. I never knew him well. I called him a long time ago – I don’t know, 30 or 35 years ago. I called him for advice. Somebody said, “You should talk to Amigo Bob.”

Dave Chapman 47:13
I called this guy. I didn’t know who he was, and we talked for an hour and a half. He never charged me a penny. I think that was very common. He was just a generous person, just trying to grow this movement as best he could. I did eventually get to meet him, but by the time I met him, he was ill. I met him at EcoFarm, of course, the mayor of EcoFarm.

Dave Chapman 47:45
Tell me, what is EcoFarm for you now? What are your hopes and dreams for it? The world keeps changing, and I know that things change for EcoFarm too. Is it healthy? I know that there are a lot of people my age who love it. Are there young people coming in?

Dave Chapman 48:08
I see that it’s getting to be a much more diverse crowd. I know that’s not a mistake. I know there’s been a lot of effort to reach out to different communities and get young people in. Are you part of that? Is this part of your vision?

Speaker 1 48:21
Definitely, it is. It’s one of the things I said right away when I got on the board. When I was asked if I’d be interested in being President, I said, “Well, then we have to make this more accessible to a lot more people and affordable.” It’s not easy at that beautiful location that we’re at to make the venue work for some people.

Leonard Diggs 48:44
I think if we’re going to be relevant going forward, we have to consider maybe stepping away from a legacy location like Asilomar. Wonderful location, but if that doesn’t allow us to share this knowledge and have that convening and that community – which really doesn’t require it to be at that location – then it needs to be changed.

Leonard Diggs 49:19
I’m constantly focused on what’s it going to take for us to get more farmers here? What’s it going to take for us to be more accessible and relevant? A lot of the people who started EcoFarm in their 20s, most of us are now quite a bit older. We remember how it’s been, and we like the way it is and the place that it is.

Leonard Diggs 49:46
I push on that envelope quite a bit and say, “Hey, this has got to be relevant for this generation, or it’s going to just peter away. So, what can we do to make these changes?” I think there are multiple things that we can do. One is that we can consider – is there a topic that’s relevant for folks to know more about?

Leonard Diggs 50:12
We oftentimes just keep repeating the workshops, and while many of them are good and worth repeating, there are also issues that are more relevant to the times and what people are concerned about. How do we begin framing that in ways that are meaningful for this generation? I often talk these days about how, when I was at UC Davis and became aware of organic farming, it was all about organic versus conventional.

Leonard Diggs 49:23
Now, for me, it’s all about community-based farms versus commodity-based farms. How do we begin to focus on what it’s going to take to maintain those relationships that are associated with community-based farms versus these value propositions which are associated with commodity-based farms?

Dave Chapman 51:09
I just want to interrupt you for a second because I want to understand better what you’re talking about. Give me an example in your mind – what is a community-based farm?

Speaker 1 51:19
A community-based farm is probably a farm that’s somewhere between 5 to 500 acres. Their products are sold in a bioregion. Most of it is going to places where they know it’s going, and many times the people who are receiving it know that it’s coming from them.

Leonard Diggs 51:42
There’s a connection to the communities, and they’re responsive to the communities: to the values of the community, to the broader communities, the ecosystem, and all the members of the ecosystem community, and focused on what it takes to have working landscapes, conservation landscapes, and biodiversity all merged together in the same place. It’s that relationship and the focus on local communities in terms of where the food goes.

Leonard Diggs 52:12
Whereas a commodity-based farm is, as I said, a value proposition because it’s undifferentiated. All those tomatoes that I talked about earlier would all go to one cannery. You’d never know which farmer they came from, and it would all be about the contract that the farmer could get for the best price. It wasn’t about where it was growing or who was around them and who locally would buy it, because that’s not where it was intended to go.

Leonard Diggs 52:46
The relationships and the care of the people and the community around their farms are different. I think that if we are going to have farms that are meaningful going forward and that give us healthy communities, healthy soils, and healthy food, they have to be focused on the community. That’s what I mean by community-based farms.

Dave Chapman 53:12
This is great. As I hear you and understand you, the community-based farm inherently has a social mission that even extends beyond just the health of the soil and the farm, and it includes the health of the community. That’s part of the reason why that farm exists. Did I get that right?

Leonard Diggs 53:40
Absolutely. We’re not growing this food just to sell. It’s not a market-based solution. It’s for food. It’s for people to eat. It’s quite easy to lose track of that when you’re on your own farm. I have a motto: I don’t want to grow anything on my farm that I don’t like to eat. It’s something that I should want to eat first, and that I should want to feed my family with first, and then feed the layers around me.

Leonard Diggs 54:13
That model is consistent with my other sense of purpose, which is that we look at sovereignty from the standpoint of your home. It’s not just about sovereignty as it is often looked at on a larger scale – what sovereignty means to the state, what it means to the nation, what it means to a people. I think of it more like home sovereignty.

Leonard Diggs 54:41
We speak a lot about food deserts. Food deserts don’t have a solution, in my mind, of putting more stores in the community closer to where people live. Food deserts are broken by having home sovereignty, by having neighborhood sovereignty, where people grow a larger percentage of what they need and make a percentage of what they use.

Leonard Diggs 55:07
I’d like to see people making and growing 30% to 40% – that’s what resilience really is. That’s what breaks a food desert. It isn’t having more stores. It starts with home sovereignty, with people being willing to actually do things themselves.

Leonard Diggs 55:28
That’s challenging because we’ve come of age in a time where it’s all about specialization. It’s all about going and making your money someplace else and then buying the rest of what you need, specializing in this one thing, and then using the money you make from that to buy everything else.

Leonard Diggs 55:45
So then we don’t invest so much in some of those basic home skills that I think we all have to be responsible for. Yet we’ve moved toward the conveniences of having it come from someplace else. I think it starts to break us. It starts to break us as a community and as a people if we aren’t producing some of what we need.

Dave Chapman 56:11
Okay, this got big. It’s a big conversation. That’s great. Home sovereignty and community farming – these are very connected.

Leonard Diggs 56:26
They are.

Dave Chapman 56:27
Yeah. Are there examples for you where you go, “I see it happening here and here”?

Speaker 1 56:38
I think the urban farm movement is the most tactile place for me, where I see folks growing food in urban communities, either as sole proprietors or in these non-profit situations where they’re growing food in neighborhoods, community gardens, and such, designed specifically to feed people. But people are seeing the food where they live. They understand that food grows in a certain way, and then it’s eaten.

Leonard Diggs 57:20
That’s something that I’ve seen as the best example. I haven’t seen it scaled up enough in terms of the ring away from the cities. Urban farms being that close ring – the next ring being these 5 to 500-acre small landholders. I’ve seen some things like what’s been going on in Sonoma Feed. Sonoma has created a cooperative of farmers who are working together to market their products. But I haven’t seen the kind of cooperative efforts that you see in other places.

Leonard Diggs 58:00
I was in Spain, specifically in Valencia, to look at what was going on with vegetable growers. I was part of a group that the Secretary of Agriculture in California put together to go and look at climate-resilient activities that are going on and that can be shared in Spain. What I was impressed by was the number of cooperatives there and how many – not just farm cooperatives, but bank cooperatives, research cooperatives – and how they work synergistically.

Leonard Diggs 58:37
Now, did they get everything right? Is it all organic? Is it all fair labor practices? No, but I think they’ve got some basic principles that they’re pulling together under this cooperative umbrella that allow people to work together, interface with each other, and realize it’s this effort that they do together.

Leonard Diggs 58:56
Many of them have maybe six hectares of land, and yet it’s that combination of multiple six-hectare farms that are now producing 40% of the vegetables going into Europe. That is an example for me of what we might be able to do more of here in the States, specifically in California.

Leonard Diggs 59:22
Lots of layers, lots of issues associated with that. Land tenure is a huge one. How do we get to the point where we have a Community Farm and Land Trust, where farmers are now – like homeowners’ associations – you would have your farm owners’ association, and the land would be held in trust.

Leonard Diggs 59:46
The farmers would be able to manage their business through the arc of their professional lives and hopefully have these collaborative, communal relationships with each other and with their community in ways that sustain their business. Also, find ways that they’re able to support themselves in retirement, because that’s also the issue.

Leonard Diggs 1:00:07
With farms buying land, maybe eking out an existence over the course of their business, and then selling the land at the end of the rainbow, because that’s where the pot of gold is. That’s the only way they can actually make it – by selling the land.

Leonard Diggs 1:00:21
Restructuring that in ways that allow these examples of community-based farms that allow in perpetuity farming to go on in those communities, is really what’s behind it all. That’s a big mix that I just threw at you, but it’s all intertwined and really important.

Dave Chapman 1:00:47
Just before we go, I think we probably have to go soon.

Leonard Diggs 1:00:50
We do, yeah.

Dave Chapman 1:00:54
I hear what you said about Spain, and it’s exciting what they’re doing with cooperatives. Do you see community farms – not necessarily owned by the community, but farms for whom that is their mission, that they accept that responsibility as well as making a living? Do you see that in California among some of the farms?

Speaker 1 1:01:17
I see pieces of it, but as you are probably well aware, the best examples of that are intentional communities – many of them are religious-based communities. It’s hard to see farms because we’ve come of age in an economic system and a system that’s also trying to individualize us. As we become more individual, and we are more focused on the economy, it’s challenging for these entities to work together and come together.

Leonard Diggs 1:02:00
Tomato cooperatives in California – as I was growing up, my friends who were farmers, their fathers were part of these co-ops, where they got together and bought a cannery. It seemed like the right path for them to take as a farm-owned cooperative, but as individual farmers with individual ideas and aspirations, it was really hard for them to hold it together.

Leonard Diggs 1:02:29
I think it’s a major value shift in what it is we teach each other, and teach the next generation, about how important it is to collaborate with each other. Without those lessons on collaboration and opportunities to train on how to collaborate together for the long haul, it is very hard, and so I have not seen that many examples.

Dave Chapman 1:03:01
I look forward to talking to you next year and hearing what you’ve learned in the interim about how this can develop and what comes next, because these are exciting ideas. But we’re probably supposed to go to this dinner now. Leonard Diggs, thank you so much. I’m really glad we did this.

Leonard Diggs 1:03:21
Yeah, thank you.