Farming is the most natural way in the world to make a living, but not the easiest. There are a billion people in the world growing food to sell or to feed themselves as subsistence farmers. In 1800 around 90% of Americans were living on farms. The reality that 80% of us now live in urban areas is a new one. Throughout human history, most people have been farmers.
If people become farmers now, they are responding to deep cultural yearnings. For years, when I said that I grew vegetables for a living, people at parties would light up, and say, “You know, I have always dreamed of doing that!”
The reality is less shiny. It takes a lot of skill and hard work to successfully grow crops. It is a physical job, although it often makes you feel mental. There is the stress, mostly about money. Farmers have a high suicide rate. We are 2 to 3 times more likely to die from self harm than the general population.
Money, money. After the fields, the final challenge is selling all those beautiful crops. Some people are remarkably successful at the horticultural side of farming, only to stumble and fall at the gates of commerce.
There are two basic ways to market farm crops: retail and wholesale. Retail means selling direct to the eater. Farm stands, farmers markets, and CSAs. Wholesale is everything else; selling to distributors, supermarkets, restaurants, and schools.
The markets for farm products have changed dramatically in the last 30 years. In the 90s, it was relatively easy to sell organic produce to the supermarkets as the stores discovered that organic was actually what many people wanted. Organic milk, grains, and vegetables became staples for most supermarkets, which scrambled to buy from the small local farms. Now those relationships have evaporated, and most organic products sold in stores come from far away, supplied by huge farms that don’t look much like the picture on the carton.
“We don’t want a bigger piece of the pie, we want a different pie.”
—Wynona LaDuke
In the years before they created Pie Ranch, Jerod was traveling around Northern California preaching the gospel of this new thing he had heard about called CSA, which stood for Community Supported Agriculture. The concept of CSA has been around for a long time. In America, I first heard the idea from the work of Booker T. Whatley in the 70s. He was focused on economic models to support black farmers in the Southeast. CSAs also came to the US out of Europe through the Biodynamic community.
In the CSA model, eaters come together to support individual farms, sharing the risks and the rewards of each cropping season. Eaters would prepay for the year and get a box of food once or twice a week. It cuts out the middle people of distribution and retail. It offers a path to customers for the farmers that isn’t dependent on location, location, location. And it offers a very different kind of relationship between eaters and farmers. The preferred pronouns are we, us, and ours.
It has been remarkably successful. There are now estimated to be over 10,000 CSAs in the US. That is remarkable. Some have long waiting lists of people wanting to join. Others struggle to find enough customers to survive. But certainly CSAs have been a lifeline for many small farmers.
The other, more traditional path has been to wholesale our crops. But whereas supermarket chains might have been very receptive to the offerings of a local farmer 30 years ago, today they are focused on buying exclusively from huge distributors. The supermarkets have gotten bigger as well, owned by a handful of companies. As Austin Frerick says, “Big Guys like Big Guys.”
This week’s interview is with Brisa Ranch in Pescadero, California. Describing themselves as “a diversified value-driven farm,” Brisa is the creation of three partners: Veronica and Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou and Cristóbal Cruz Hernández. All three of them met while working at Pie Ranch. Cristobal was the farm manager who taught Veronica how to drive a tractor. Now they run a thriving farm together.
I interviewed Veronica, Cole, and Cristóbal at EcoFarm last January. The three of them are an amazing celebration of difference. Veronica’s parents immigrated from Guatemala and Venezuela. She went to college at NYU and then to the Peace Corps. Ultimately she ended up at Pie Ranch as an apprentice in their Emerging Farmers Program. Cristóbal left Oaxaca, Mexico as a teenager and immigrated to the US. He has spent his adult life in agriculture, becoming the farm manager at Pie Ranch. Cole’s family immigrated to the US from Greece generations earlier to work laying track for the railroad. When the job ended, it was cheaper to buy a little land and start growing cotton than to travel back to Greece. Cole met Veronica and Cristóbal when he also joined the Emerging Farmers Program.
Together they are an American story, blending threads from around the world to make the fabric of our country.
And they have an entrepreneurial spark that is creating some heat in Pescadero.
Brisa has gone an entirely different way from the CSA model. They created a farm hub, meaning they have gathered a group of small local farmers who want to sell their crops into a wholesale market, but don’t have the marketing chops or equipment to do it individually. Farmers need coolers, packing areas, and trucks. And most importantly, they need the skills to deal with buyers and negotiate contracts.
And they need enough scale to be noticed.
In a world where the stores, distributors, and farms just keep getting bigger and more consolidated, Brisa is marching to a different drummer. They are compiling the produce from small farms and delivering the crops to the customers. They also grow 45 acres of vegetables on their rented land, so they aren’t just consolidators.
There is one more special innovation that Brisa has accomplished. They are selling much of their produce to institutional buyers, meaning food banks and schools. At this time, the greater San Francisco area gets about a quarter of its groceries from the food banks that feed under-resourced people. That is a staggering number to me. And much of that food is high quality organic food coming from farms like Brisa Ranch.
The USDA terminated the Local Food for Schools (LFS) and Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) cooperative agreements in March 2025, cutting over $1 billion in funding. This was a significant shift in priorities for the USDA, making American agriculture more industrial and more chemical. It pushed schools and food banks into buying more of their food from huge consolidated suppliers.
These were very visionary government programs. In a time when people are debating MAHA, cutting these programs was clearly a shift to making America less healthy, and also cutting significant government support for small, often organic, farms. These programs allowed schools and food banks to buy fresh food directly from local farmers.
More than 40 states participated in these programs, which provided nutritious food to schools and supported local economies.
Somehow Brisa has managed to keep supplying their institutional buyers as the food banks in Northern California have shifted their funding to state and private gifts. Is Brisa a sign of the future, or just an agile small business staying one step ahead of the elephants crashing through the room?
Time will tell. Either way they are rocking it.
Dave
