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The City Slicker
Jason Mark, 33
Alemany Farm, San Francisco
Four years in the field
"We were growing a variety of deep-red carrots called Purple Haze," Jason Mark says. "The kids were like, How come the carrots are a different color? And I said, Well, we're different colors—unlike the foods you get at a Safeway, which is more of a monoculture. We're trying to grow things that reflect the world." Big words for sure, but the Alemany Farm, which sits on the southern fringes of Bernal Heights, is undeniably exceptional. Steps from the rush of the 280 freeway, rows of delicate lettuces, squash and tomatoes grow—not to mention an orchard of apple, avocado and plum trees. The farm, which in 2005 took over four-and-a-half acres of land abandoned by SLUG (the now-defunct SF League of Urban Gardeners), is next door to the not-so-bucolic 165-unit Alemany Public Housing Community—home to the majority of the teenagers who are paid a small stipend to participate in the farm's learning program. Although the farm has recently received funding from the city's Department of the Environment, it used to depend solely on a large group of volunteers—which is how Mark got his start. The UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden program graduate works part-time as the comanager of the farm on top of his job as an editor for Earth Island Journal. (He also coauthored the book Building the Green Economy.) Clad in a John Deere cap, white T-shirt and skinny jeans and leaning against an old Ross road bike, on which he commutes from Alamo Square, Mark could be confused with a hipster. Fortunately, he lacks the required irony. "I get so deep into the row crops. I go out there and get into a zone where I hear the birds," he says, earnestly. "I don't even notice the freeway anymore."
The farm sells at the Bayview Hunters Point market; go to alemanyfarm.org.
The Featherweight
Alexis Koefoed, 43
Soul Food Farm, Vacaville
Three years in the field
Chicken farmer Alexis Koefoed has chutzpah. It's not clear, though, whether her husband and children (now 15, 18 and 20) were confusing this trait with crazy when, in 1999, she moved them from their beautiful house on the Vallejo waterfront to a piece of abandoned farmland in Vacaville with which she had fallen deeply in love. "There was no house on it, nothing," she says. "Just a well, and that was it. So we camped out there for a couple months and lived in trailers for two years while we built a house. My mother was horrified." The next step was to do something with all 55.5 acres. Although Koefoed had grown up in rural Danville, the closest thing she'd been doing to farming as an adult was raising a handful of chickens for eggs. "I was selling my eggs to my hairdresser. And my friend said eggs are a really big deal. I thought—Wait a minute, this might be an interesting business opportunity." By 2006, the cooks at Chez Panisse were cracking Soul Food eggs on their pizzas. A year later, Alice Waters called to ask Koefoed to raise chickens for eating purposes—which, after she agreed, took some trial and error. "When things have gone wrong here, they've gone catastrophically wrong," Koefoed says. "There were days when I was a total girl and crying my eyes out." Today, with the help of her engineer husband, Eric, they pasture 11,000 laying hens—plus 6,000 Freedom Rangers, a heritage breed prized for its meat. In SF, Soul Food sells to such restaurants as Quince, and also at a few retail shops. "When people can buy from us directly, it makes me so happy," she says. "I feel like I'm really feeding people then."
Soul Food Farm chickens and eggs are sold at Prather Ranch Meat Co. and Avedano's.
The Beverly Hillbilly
David Retsky, 36
County Line Harvest, Petaluma
Eight years in the field
With a deep tan and gleaming movie-star smile, David Retsky of County Line Harvest could still easily blend into his hometown of Beverly Hills—until, that is, the ladies of Rodeo Drive got a look at his cracked hands and dirt-lined fingernails. It's clear that Retsky is no gentleman farmer. "I felt really disconnected," he says of his life in L.A. And so, after attending a boarding school in rural Northern California, he decided to skip college altogether. "It was like a midlife crisis—when I was 18." He headed to Israel to work on a kibbutz, then apprenticed in Santa Barbara at Fairview Gardens, which is run by the celebrated urban farmer/author Michael Ableman. Today, Retsky leases 26 acres on a gorgeous Marin County slope, complete with rundown red barns and a romantic old white farmhouse, where the property's owners live. (He also farms another nearby piece of land, where he's built himself a home.) At County Line, depending on the season, Retsky grows specialty Italian chicories, plump Seascape strawberries, piccolo fino basil, squash blossoms, wild arugula and a bevy of lettuces, which he sells to such restaurants as Coi. (Coi chef Daniel Patterson is so dependent on County Line's produce that when Retsky once took a couple of weeks off, Patterson drove out from SF to harvest for himself.) While his two-year-old son, Nico, makes a mess of a sun-warmed strawberry, Retsky boxes up Little Gem lettuces headed to Zuni by way of the Greenleaf truck that's just rolled up. Despite his country life, Retsky considers himself an urban guy at heart. "If Nico wants to live in the city when he grows up, that's fine by me," he says. "I'll visit him all the time."
County Line Harvest sells at the San Rafael Civic Center farmers market.
The Plot Twister
Martin Bournhonesque, 43
Martin's Farm, Salinas
15 years in the field
With farming, the weather misbehaves, the pump breaks just when the heat wave strikes, the aphids show up. "You have to accept an unpredictable life," says Martin Bournhonesque, a third-generation San Franciscan. "And I'm crazy enough to relish that uncertainty." Bournhonesque also relishes the unique lifestyle he's crafted for himself: He splits his time between Noe Valley and the six acres in Salinas that he rents from ALBA, a nonprofit incubator for limited-resource farmers that owns an island of 110 organic acres in a sea of commercial agriculture. For 20 of the city's best restaurants—including Foreign Cinema, Farina and Americano—Martin's Farm grows everything from coveted yellow romano beans to an esoteric variety of amaranth (for which Kokkari chef Erik Cosselmon brought him back seeds from Greece). He cultivates half of his crops in two dilapidated old greenhouses, which provide a nurturing environment for his delicate, restaurant-quality vegetables and allow him to grow things year-round, making farming itself a sustainable business. Bournhonesque—who also works as a sort of produce "broker" for chefs, supplementing his own crops with produce from other nearby farmers—has always been in the restaurant business in some way. He started out working as a busser at Hayes Street Grill in 1984. When owner Patricia Unterman found out he was an avid gardener on the side, she offered to buy his produce for the restaurant, and ultimately invested in his first farm, Pomponio Creek Produce, in Pescadero. "That planted the seed," he says. It's just grown organically from there.
Martin's Farm produce is sold at Bi-Rite Market and at Berkeley's Monterey Market.
The City Slicker
Jason Mark, 33
Alemany Farm, San Francisco
Four years in the field
"We were growing a variety of deep-red carrots called Purple Haze," Jason Mark says. "The kids were like, How come the carrots are a different color? And I said, Well, we're different colors—unlike the foods you get at a Safeway, which is more of a monoculture. We're trying to grow things that reflect the world." Big words for sure, but the Alemany Farm, which sits on the southern fringes of Bernal Heights, is undeniably exceptional. Steps from the rush of the 280 freeway, rows of delicate lettuces, squash and tomatoes grow—not to mention an orchard of apple, avocado and plum trees. The farm, which in 2005 took over four-and-a-half acres of land abandoned by SLUG (the now-defunct SF League of Urban Gardeners), is next door to the not-so-bucolic 165-unit Alemany Public Housing Community—home to the majority of the teenagers who are paid a small stipend to participate in the farm's learning program. Although the farm has recently received funding from the city's Department of the Environment, it used to depend solely on a large group of volunteers—which is how Mark got his start. The UC Santa Cruz Farm & Garden program graduate works part-time as the comanager of the farm on top of his job as an editor for Earth Island Journal. (He also coauthored the book Building the Green Economy.) Clad in a John Deere cap, white T-shirt and skinny jeans and leaning against an old Ross road bike, on which he commutes from Alamo Square, Mark could be confused with a hipster. Fortunately, he lacks the required irony. "I get so deep into the row crops. I go out there and get into a zone where I hear the birds," he says, earnestly. "I don't even notice the freeway anymore."
The farm sells at the Bayview Hunters Point market; go to alemanyfarm.org.
The Featherweight
Alexis Koefoed, 43
Soul Food Farm, Vacaville
Three years in the field
Chicken farmer Alexis Koefoed has chutzpah. It's not clear, though, whether her husband and children (now 15, 18 and 20) were confusing this trait with crazy when, in 1999, she moved them from their beautiful house on the Vallejo waterfront to a piece of abandoned farmland in Vacaville with which she had fallen deeply in love. "There was no house on it, nothing," she says. "Just a well, and that was it. So we camped out there for a couple months and lived in trailers for two years while we built a house. My mother was horrified." The next step was to do something with all 55.5 acres. Although Koefoed had grown up in rural Danville, the closest thing she'd been doing to farming as an adult was raising a handful of chickens for eggs. "I was selling my eggs to my hairdresser. And my friend said eggs are a really big deal. I thought—Wait a minute, this might be an interesting business opportunity." By 2006, the cooks at Chez Panisse were cracking Soul Food eggs on their pizzas. A year later, Alice Waters called to ask Koefoed to raise chickens for eating purposes—which, after she agreed, took some trial and error. "When things have gone wrong here, they've gone catastrophically wrong," Koefoed says. "There were days when I was a total girl and crying my eyes out." Today, with the help of her engineer husband, Eric, they pasture 11,000 laying hens—plus 6,000 Freedom Rangers, a heritage breed prized for its meat. In SF, Soul Food sells to such restaurants as Quince, and also at a few retail shops. "When people can buy from us directly, it makes me so happy," she says. "I feel like I'm really feeding people then."
Soul Food Farm chickens and eggs are sold at Prather Ranch Meat Co. and Avedano's.
The Beverly Hillbilly
David Retsky, 36
County Line Harvest, Petaluma
Eight years in the field
With a deep tan and gleaming movie-star smile, David Retsky of County Line Harvest could still easily blend into his hometown of Beverly Hills—until, that is, the ladies of Rodeo Drive got a look at his cracked hands and dirt-lined fingernails. It's clear that Retsky is no gentleman farmer. "I felt really disconnected," he says of his life in L.A. And so, after attending a boarding school in rural Northern California, he decided to skip college altogether. "It was like a midlife crisis—when I was 18." He headed to Israel to work on a kibbutz, then apprenticed in Santa Barbara at Fairview Gardens, which is run by the celebrated urban farmer/author Michael Ableman. Today, Retsky leases 26 acres on a gorgeous Marin County slope, complete with rundown red barns and a romantic old white farmhouse, where the property's owners live. (He also farms another nearby piece of land, where he's built himself a home.) At County Line, depending on the season, Retsky grows specialty Italian chicories, plump Seascape strawberries, piccolo fino basil, squash blossoms, wild arugula and a bevy of lettuces, which he sells to such restaurants as Coi. (Coi chef Daniel Patterson is so dependent on County Line's produce that when Retsky once took a couple of weeks off, Patterson drove out from SF to harvest for himself.) While his two-year-old son, Nico, makes a mess of a sun-warmed strawberry, Retsky boxes up Little Gem lettuces headed to Zuni by way of the Greenleaf truck that's just rolled up. Despite his country life, Retsky considers himself an urban guy at heart. "If Nico wants to live in the city when he grows up, that's fine by me," he says. "I'll visit him all the time."
County Line Harvest sells at the San Rafael Civic Center farmers market.
The Plot Twister
Martin Bournhonesque, 43
Martin's Farm, Salinas
15 years in the field
With farming, the weather misbehaves, the pump breaks just when the heat wave strikes, the aphids show up. "You have to accept an unpredictable life," says Martin Bournhonesque, a third-generation San Franciscan. "And I'm crazy enough to relish that uncertainty." Bournhonesque also relishes the unique lifestyle he's crafted for himself: He splits his time between Noe Valley and the six acres in Salinas that he rents from ALBA, a nonprofit incubator for limited-resource farmers that owns an island of 110 organic acres in a sea of commercial agriculture. For 20 of the city's best restaurants—including Foreign Cinema, Farina and Americano—Martin's Farm grows everything from coveted yellow romano beans to an esoteric variety of amaranth (for which Kokkari chef Erik Cosselmon brought him back seeds from Greece). He cultivates half of his crops in two dilapidated old greenhouses, which provide a nurturing environment for his delicate, restaurant-quality vegetables and allow him to grow things year-round, making farming itself a sustainable business. Bournhonesque—who also works as a sort of produce "broker" for chefs, supplementing his own crops with produce from other nearby farmers—has always been in the restaurant business in some way. He started out working as a busser at Hayes Street Grill in 1984. When owner Patricia Unterman found out he was an avid gardener on the side, she offered to buy his produce for the restaurant, and ultimately invested in his first farm, Pomponio Creek Produce, in Pescadero. "That planted the seed," he says. It's just grown organically from there.
Martin's Farm produce is sold at Bi-Rite Market and at Berkeley's Monterey Market.
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