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GourmEt nEWS FEbruArY 2018 www.gourmetnews.com SuStAinAbilitY 1 6 Olive Ranch Continued from PAGE 1 resource," he said. "Water is going to be the major economic factor in production agri- culture in California over the next 10 to 20 years. It will affect what crops will be planted where." Olives are an ideal crop, according to Kelley, for a regulatory environment that the California Department of Water Re- sources says is designed to make water con- servation a way of life in California. Olives are low-input, not just in terms of the water they require, but also in terms of their vul- nerability to insect pests and weeds, which means that growers don't have to spray them with a lot of chemicals or give them a lot of water to persuade them to yield an economic crop. "We can plant the trees on soils that aren't optimal for other crops and still have a good production level," Kelley said. "Even conventional orchards are as close to organic as you can get [without ac- tually being certified for organic produc- tion]." Growing the Soil Through a partnership with California State University Chico, widely known as Chico State, California Olive Ranch has, for the past year and a half been involved in a project called the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative. This project has involved redi- recting the pomace, the olive mass that's left over after the oil is pressed from it, into compost piles instead of using it as cattle feed. "Today the byproduct of the produc- tion process is fed to cows. We say that's why California cows are so happy, but it's not a long-term viable solution," Kelley said. That pomace contains, in addition to valuable organic matter, a variety of other nutrients, including potassium. Potassium deficiency causes olive trees to set less fruit and results in smaller fruit. The min- eral is also important to many other phys- iological processes for the trees, and adequate levels assist the trees in resisting the effects of drought. Potassium can be provided to the trees with chemical fertil- izer, but composting the pomace and re- turning it to the soil under the trees increases the soils' organic matter, which helps it retain water, as well as merely pro- viding the trees with necessary potassium. This composting process is an important part of the company's plans to cut its car- bon footprint through regenerative agri- culture practices, Kelley said. "Many of the building blocks for this are already in place with our large-scale composting op- eration," he said. "We have already con- verted a portion of the orchards to organic and will continue to do so. We think the regenerative agriculture approach will bring benefits there as well." Educating Both Growers and Consumers California Olive Ranch will be spreading the knowledge that the company is acquir- ing through this pilot composting project to its grower partners around California and through educational institutions around the country, even as the company responds to increasing demand in the American market for higher quality olive oils. That demand is the result of greater awareness among consumers about the health benefits of high-quality extra virgin olive oils over lower-quality olive oils, Kel- ley said. "Extra virgin olive oil is an incred- ibly healthy product," he said. "Many people haven't been exposed to extra virgin olive oil, and the growth in that awareness is probably the primary driver of our growth." "If you look at the shelf, it looks different than it did 10 years ago," he added. "Con- sumers are continuing to buy the higher quality product." Kelley noted that a decade or so ago, extra virgin olive oil ac- counted for about 52 percent of American olive oil sales. Today, it's about 70 percent, he said. "We're seeing less of the lower quality oil on the shelves, with some of the smaller players finding it easier to get shelf space," he said. "I think those preferences will continue." While the heart of California Olive Ranch's production is in California and is expected to continue that way, the com- pany is working to meet that growing de- mand for high-quality olive oils through imports from Italy, through its Lucini Italia subsidiary and through its recently an- nounced Lucini brand of oils produced in Argentina. The company is also looking to expand in other South American countries as well as in other regions around the world where high-quality olives can be grown. "You cannot make high-quality olive oil out of bad fruit," Kelley said. "This requires quality control throughout the production process as well as through the distribution network. Olive oil has four enemies: time, light, heat and oxygen. We have to look after all of those to maintain quality all the way to the consumer's palate." Some of the $35 million in new funds will be invested in more automated har- vesting and milling equipment, continu- ing a mechanization process that allows the company to compete in the global olive oil market, particularly as Califor- nia's minimum wage rises to $15 an hour. "We'll continue to invest in automation methodologies, starting in the field but continuing throughout our supply chain That's part of the commitment to make sure that our employees get good benefits and a living wage," Kelley said. The em- ployees also benefit from a workplace safety record that's well above average for the agriculture industry, and the mecha- nization contributes to that safety. "Train- ing is linked directly to quality control and is managed by a full-time safety manager," Kelley said. With this new investment, Kelley's feet are firmly planted in California's soils, but his eyes are on the horizon. "Ultimately, my job is to notice that the world is changing for the better," he said, "and that we're part of the leadership team that's leading that change." GN Recurrent Droughts Threaten California Cheese bY lorriE bAumAnn Catalina bleats insistently from her pen in the Toluma Farms nursery barn as farmer Tamara Hicks approaches. Slender and long-haired, Hicks has the sun-kissed com- plexion of a woman who spends much of her time outdoors, and she doesn't have the bottle that Catalina, a pure white Saanen kid born several weeks ago, is hoping for. Toluma Farms is a 160-acre farm in west Marin County, California, and Hicks and her husband, David Jablons, bought this farm in the rolling hills near Point Reyes in 2003 with the idea that they could become agents of change in the local food produc- tion system and in the debate about climate change. "We made a conscious decision that we could be part of the conversation about restoring the land," Hicks says. They've sunk most of their children's potential in- heritance into this property, and over the past few years, as it's increasingly affected by climate change, California is giving them a practical lesson in what the state's climate means to the future of local food. The period from 2012 through 2014 was the driest three-year period ever in terms of statewide precipitation; exacerbated by record warmth, with the highest statewide average temperatures ever recorded in 2014. Every California county has been in- cluded in the U.S. Department of Agricul- ture's drought designations at various times between the beginning of 2012 and the end of 2014, when the state passed its first-ever law designed to protect the state's ground- water from the effects of too much pump- ing for agricultural purposes. Unlike most other natural disasters, drought is a gradual crisis, occurring slowly over a period of time. There's no sudden event that announces it, and it's not usually ended by any one rain storm. The impacts of drought get worse the longer the drought continues, as reservoirs are de- pleted and water levels decline in ground- water basins. Marin and Sonoma Counties have been the heart of northern California's dairy in- dustry since 1856, when Clara Steele made the first known batch of cheese in this part of the country from a recipe she found in a book. Hicks and Jablons take some solace in the knowledge that this property has a long history of having sufficient water. Califor- nia's most significant historical droughts have been a six-year drought in 1929-1934 – the Dust Bowl years, the two year- drought of 1976-77 – a comparatively short drought that nevertheless had very serious effects on the state's groundwater, and an- other six-year drought in 1987-1992. The 1929-1934 drought was comparable to the most severe dry periods in more than a mil- lennium of reconstructed climate data, but its effects were small by present-day stan- dards because the state's urban population and agricultural development are much greater now. When they found this property, 18 miles west of Petaluma, in an area where they'd been coming for weekend camping excur- sions for years, it was a dilapidated farm with a history of dairy production that had been abandoned and the pastures neg- lected. Ten thousand old tires had been piled on a hillside in an ill-advised attempt to prevent the slope from eroding and were spilling down into the road. Other dis- carded junk had been dumped around the house or buried in backhoed pits. Neither Hicks nor Jablons had any expe- rience in farming – Hicks is a clinical psy- chologist and Jablons is a surgeon, both with busy practices in San Francisco – but they felt that their financial resources, their skills in forming and maintaining helpful relationships with other people and their commitment to their values could see them through the challenges of returning the farm to its historic use as a productive dairy farm. "It's a good thing that we are both equally committed to the idea of restoring the farm to health and making a statement about the value of sustainable agriculture and a healthy food system," Hicks says. Otherwise, she adds, their marriage might not have survived the challenges of figuring out how to turn derelict pastures and an ad hoc landfill into a financially and ecologi- cally sustainable family farm. After more than a decade of work with the Natural Re- sources Conservation Service to rehabili- tate the pastures, hauling away the tires and other garbage, building a guesthouse that's rented out for in-depth educational farm stays and meeting space, and opening a creamery for making cheese, the farm hasn't yet fulfilled that dream of sustain- ability. Hicks is hopeful that the artisan cheeses from the Tomales Farmstead Creamery she opened on the property in 2013 will be the final piece in a patchwork of enterprises the couple operates to sup- port the farm, but returning the land to health will probably take a few more decades, she estimates. "We're not prof- itable yet," she says. "I'm not sure if it's pos- sible to make a living as farmstead cheese producers." Tomales Farmstead Creamery makes and sells five cheeses made from the milk of its herd of 200 goats and more than 100 East Friesian sheep. The cheeses all have names that reflect the heritage of the coastal Miwok Indians who lived here be- fore the Europeans arrived. Kenne is a soft-ripened goat cheese with a wrinkly Geotrichum rind that's aged for three weeks. Teleeka is a soft-ripened cheese made with goat, sheep and Jersey cow milk – the only one in the collection that's not a farmstead cheese, since the Jersey milk comes from Marissa Thornton's dairy farm just down the road. Assa, a word that means "female" is an aged goat cheese with a chardonnay-washed rind. The name is a tribute to the many women who work on the farm as well as the female an- imals that produce the milk. Liwa is a fresh goat cheese aged just three days – the name means "water." Atika is an aged sheep and goat cheese with a McEvoy Olive Oil rind. Atika won a second-place award from the American Cheese Society in 2014, in the creamery's first time to enter the awards contest. GN

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