Made Local Magazine March-April 2014

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Vol. 1

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EAT LOCAL:

SUPER SHARP DRINK LOCAL:

SPIRITS RISING

Turns out, all the cool kids are butchers

GROW LOCAL:

RADICAL FARMING DROUGHT GRANGE LEXICON S U S TA I N CRUSADE WONKERY

Molly Best and Lisa Modica

SONOMA COUNTY M A R /A P R 2 0 1 4

FREE

delicious

refreshing refreshing

alkalizing alkalizing naturally naturallyengergizing energizing boosts boosts metabolism metabolism

promotes promotes healthy healthy digestion digestion

replenishing

thirst quenching

Cook with inspiration!

Please bring our bottles back.

Enjoy. Return. Repeat.

We miss them.

To take full ownership of our To take full ownership of our product and its packaging product its packaging from startand to finish, we need from start to finish, we need our bottles back! our bottles back!

Play your vital part in the Play your vital of part in the great circle ‘buch. great circle of ‘buch.

Enjoy. Return. Repeat.

Enjoy. Recycle. Repeat.

TM

New tantalizing cookbooks

available at Copperfield’s

Books, your local

independent bookstore

pEtaLUMa • santa rosa • sEBastopoL • hEaLDsBUrG • CaListoGa • napa • san raFaEL

VISIT US ONLINE AT cOppErfIELdSbOOkS.cOm

One of the many delights of pulling together a bimonthly publication is watching certain threads emerge. For this March/April edition, the thread that became most dominant as we reported it is the difficulty of defining words and terms that we use every day.

It began with a visit to filmmaker Douglas Gayeton’s Petaluma ranch to discuss the “Lexicon of Sustainability” video project that Gayeton and his wife, Laura HowardGayeton, have produced to dissect such terms as “grass fed,” “free range,” and “cage free.”

Soon, without any effort or direction on our part, it became clear that nearly every story in this issue concerns itself with lexicon, definitions, and language. Take “sustainable.” Please.

Published by the Sonoma County GO LOCAL Cooperative, Made Local Magazine is devoted to telling the stories that underpin our county’s Food Action Plan. Described (but not defined!) as a “guide to local action on food production, land and natural resources stewardship, job development, public health, and equity in our food system,” the Plan was adopted by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 2012.

Sharing the stories of the people who represent the Plan—the farmers, producers, artisans, technologists, artists, processors, and purveyors—is not something that can be quickly encompassed or easily parsed.

PHOTOS: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

Because Sonoma County can’t be codified in just one manner. We welcome your reports of those people and projects that you think help to illuminate an aspect of our county’s multifaceted food story. You’re invited: Help us define it.

Gretchen Giles EDI T OR Gretchen@madelocal.coop

Terry Garrett P UBL ISHER Terry@madelocal.coop

vol. 1, issue 2 | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | M A D E L O C A L . C O O P

5

Lemon PoPPy Seed Protein PancakeS

"The thing a bee profits from the most is that it derives its sustenance from the very parts of the plant that are pervaded by the plant's love life. The bee sucks its nourishment, which it makes into honey from the parts of the plant that are steeped in love life. And the bee, if you could express it this way, brings love life from the flowers into the beehive...The [bees] have indeed carried into the hive that which lives in the flowers. The living element of this thriving, germinating love that is spread out over the flowers is also contained in the honey the bees make."

Rudolf Steiner 'The Bees' 1923

PUBLISHER TERRY GARRETT JANEEN MURRAY info@madelocal.coop EDITOR GRETCHEN GILES gretchen@madelocal.coop DESIGN RANCH7 CREATIVE ranch7.com

5 DEFINING STORIES

What words don’t tell us.

Many minds make MADE LOCAL, but we are particularly indebted to photographer Michael Woolsey for his great work with our terrific subjects.

Even the photo-shy love how Michael captures them. Us, too.

8 LOCAVORTEX

Voices of the drought.

10 EAT

IngredIents: • 6 egg whites • 1 cup raw or regular rolled oats • 1 cup cottage cheese • 6 raw almonds • 1 tsp. fresh grated lemon zest

• 1/4 cup lemon juice • 1/4 cup Dutch blue poppy seeds • 1/4 tsp. pure almond extract • 1 to 2 Tbsp. butter or coconut oil

dIreCtIOns: Blend all ingredients together in a blender or food processor. Let batter sit for 10 min. to thicken. Melt butter or coconut oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Working in batches, pour ¼-cup scoops of batter onto skillet and cook a few min. per side until pancakes are slightly browned and cooked through. serVIng sUggestIOns: Delicious with fresh berries or berry puree.

YIeLds: 8 pancakes tHAnKs tO: Mia Tarduno, Savory Spice Shop—Boulder, CO employee

L O C A L LY

O W N E D

Downtown Santa RoSa 317 D Street . Santa roSa, Ca 95404 Mon-Sat: 10 am-6 pm, Sun: 11:30am-5pm (707) 284-1310 . SantaroSa@SavorySpiCeShop.CoM Sonoma maRket Place 201 WeSt napa St. . SonoMa, Ca 95476 Mon-Sat: 10 am-6pm, Sun: 11am-4pm (707) 284-1310 . SantaroSa@SavorySpiCeShop.CoM F r e S h

In local stores and West End Farmer's Market Sundays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

G r o u n D . h a n D

C r a F t e D

16

CivilEats: Ag stories by ag experts.

18

Lexicon: Words, Words, Words.

22 DRINK

FIND US LOCALLY @ Andy’s Produce Market Pacific Markets Community Markets Sonoma Market Glen Ellen Village Market Molsberry Market Shelton’s Natural Foods Oakville Grocery Big John’s Market

26

100 Percent: Aiming to be the country’s first sustainable wine region.

30 GROW

Spiritual radical farming.

35

Granges raise farmers.

38 END BIT

Growing money.

Made Local Magazine is a free product of Sustaining Technologies, LLC, publisher for Sonoma County GO LOCAL Cooperative. 12,000 copies produced bimonthly. Limit one free copy per person.

Copyright 2014, Sustaining Technologies, LLC. Reproduction of the content in whole or part of this magazine requires written permission by the publisher.

707.888.6105 info@madelocal.coop madelocal.coop

Spirits run high.

APRICOT & ALMOND CHERRY & COCOA NIB CASHEW & COCONUT SIX SEED SENSATION HONEY & HAZELNUT

THANKS JAKE BAYLESS

Sonoma County GO LOCAL Cooperative 555 Fifth St., Suite 300N Santa Rosa, CA 95401

PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

Healthy eating inspirations.

Sharpest Cut: Great producers, wonderful purveyors, no processors.

The butcher’s lament.

PHOTOGRAPHY MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY michaelbwoolsey.com

Not a Drop Voices of the Drought “Personally,” says Erin Axelrod, “I am peeing outside every chance I get. I’m not flushing my toilet. Anytime I take a bath, I keep the water in the bath and use a bucket to pull water out to flush.”

She continues her list. “I keep a pot in my kitchen sink, I don’t let any water go down the drain, and I use that to water the plants. I try to do one-pot cooking, and if I steam broccoli, for example, I keep the water and use it to make my rice.”

Facing the drought might be easier for Axelrod than for the rest of us, given her work with the burgeoning permaculture industry and her long alliance with Daily Acts, the Petaluma-based organization devoted to conserving all of our resources. But the drought, of course, reaches further than home and hearth.

“I’ve been really interested to learn how the drought is affecting local farmers and how they’ll be changing their practices,” Axelrod says. “I’ve seen that more people are moving in to dry farming.”

Adam Davidoff of West County’s New Family Farm is already dry farming, mostly tomatoes and potatoes. “There are different interpretations as to what ‘dry farming’ means,” he says. “There’s no textbook definition. The definition as I understand it is to not water the crops, but to use practices that encourage the plant to live and thrive in conditions without irrigation.”

8

Unfortunately, Davidoff—like most farmers— has already ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of seeds for spring planting, a decision he had to make before it became clear that we were in the driest year since California began keeping records in the 1860s.

Krista Lindley, the watershed coordinator of the Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District, helps farmers like Davidoff prepare for drought year-round. “Rather than drawing water out of the creek or shallow wells in the summer,” she says, “we work with farmers to collect their water in the winter and store it, so that there’s less competition between the fish and the farmer, so it’s a win-win for everybody. There’s a benefit to the farmer in terms of water security. If there’s not water in the creek in the summer, there’s no benefit for them anyhow.”

Lindley’s organization is also being very proactive in helping farmers with rain catchment systems, helping to establish them on places like Redwood Hill Farm, a goat dairy, and Bloomfield Farms, where the long barns prove to be excellent sluices for rainwater.

“These farms feed people,” she says. “There’s a real tangible benefit to their water security.”

But establishing rain catchment systems can be expensive and therefore not a terrific solution for ordinary householders. Santa Rosabased master landscaper Robert Kourik has found that gray water, if used cautiously, makes a better fit economically.

Kourik says that drip irrigation is the best solution in trying to keep plants alive during a drought. His specialty is bare root trees, and with bare root season upon us, even he’s not certain it makes sense to plant this year. But if you must, he says, even two minutes a day of drip irrigation should keep the tree alive until next winter. Placement is the important point.

“You can cut your usage back by 70 percent if you put the water at the right place, not near the trunk, and use a lot of mulch,” Kourik says.

He also suggests building moats around your plants to keep what little water they receive from spreading away from where you need it.

Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District scientist John Green is nearly as concerned what happens when we do get rain as when we don’t. “Storm water is a big issue,” he says, “because you have a lot of water that’s running off, and those have big impacts ecologically on the physical habitat of the streams. By paving over or changing the land uses on our landscape, we’re causing erosion and less of that water is going into the ground.”

“Changing land use” could be code for “planting vineyards,” and the winery industry is keenly aware of that. Corey Beck, general manager and director of winemaking for Francis Ford Coppola Winery and its sister property, Rubicon Estate, reports that these wineries have taken a proactive stance on water use reduction, practicing “fish-friendly” farming and funneling all waste water into what he terms “a very large reactor” that cleans it before using it to irrigate. “It’s about being creative and looking for ways to utilize and eliminate waste,” he says.

A year-round landscaper with a thriving business when the 1976 drought parched California, Robert Kourik actually had to change professions for a while. His services were no longer in demand. He’s definitely wary of the coming year and our growing—or shrinking—prospects.

“Drip irrigation doesn’t use that much water,” he says thoughtfully. “But it’s still water.”

Article resources: scwa.ca.gov

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EAT LOCAL

Rian Rinn and Jenine Alexander

EAT LOCAL

L

ying on a marble table at the front of the room, a body is draped with a clean white cloth, a slim hacksaw placed nearby. An aproned man with a thick metal chain around his waist approaches the body and removes the cloth with a flourish. The audience gasps in pleasure at the sight. The body is split in half lengthwise, clean and hairless. With a grin, the man removes a knife from the collection of them chained to his thigh and begins to cut.

SHARP EDGED

Welcome to butchery as performance art. On this particular night, the man, Rian Rinn, is performing an increasingly popular form of entertainment: Cutting up half a hog for a group of wine-drinking foodies while chefs wait in an adjacent kitchen, ready to turn the freshly trimmed meat into dinner.

A new group of butchers open shop just

Rinn banters as he cuts, making school-yard jokes about boning knives and answering questions from the audience about how the pig was raised, what breed it is, and how it was slaughtered. He could probably break this 150-or-so pound half-hog down in 10 minutes if no one was watching, but with an audience and all of the banter— particularly as the wine takes effect and the questions become sillier—this is a 90-minute effort.

as the County

PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

closes down

His partner, Jenine Alexander, stands ready to assist. A petite woman with big earrings in a pristine apron, she takes the meat from Rinn and ferries it back to the kitchen. She packages other cuts in white paper to sell to audience members who might also want a T-shirt advertising their new project, the Sonoma County Meat Company.

Because, while the couple’s Wyeth Acres farm is in Healdsburg, their passion is currently being

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M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

renovated in Santa Rosa as a former Roseland tire store is swiftly being turned into one of the county’s fastest-growing new trends: The local butcher shop.

Rinn and Alexander are among a group of young people who are staking a claim in cutting and purveying local meats. Lisa Modica and Molly Best are amid opening Thistle, their Petaluma butcher store. Adam Parks just opened his Victorian Farmstead outlet in the new Community Market at Sebastopol’s Barlow marketplace. And Pete Seghesio, the wine scion, is building the Healdsburg Meat Co. to serve downtown with charcuterie and butcher store items on the corner where the old post office once stood.

Meat, you might say, is smokin’. All it needs is someone to slaughter it.

O

n a different day, Rian Rinn is found staring somewhat mournfully at a hole in the ground. A man stands next to Rinn rapidly explaining that this is a plumbing problem and of course it’s going to be expensive. Everything’s expensive when renovating an old building, but preparing to open a butcher shop contains an entirely different set of pricey problems, most of them posed by the good folks at the USDA. It’s Alexander’s job to handle the federal agency as the couple prepares to open shop, a chore necessary, difficult, and sometimes funny. She’s begun keeping USDA’s most obfuscating directives listed on a blog. “Breakfasts (Containing Meat),” reads one, “The product must contain at least 15 percent cooked meat or poultry or meat or poultry food product based on the total net weight of breakfast.”

But the chuckles are few when it comes to recent USDA action.

vol. 1, issue 2 | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | M A D E L O C A L . C O O P

In January, the agency shut down Petaluma’s Rancho Feeding Corp. after the processor allegedly released some 40,000 pounds of uninspected meat. In February, it closed Rancho again, this time recalling 8.7 million pounds of meat processed at the facility, some of it over a year ago. USDA officials this time claimed that the recalled meat was “diseased and unsound.” USDA did not return calls from this publication.

Why this much meat had gone “uninspected” when the USDA maintains an office onsite at Rancho remains a mystery.

How 8.7 million pounds of “diseased and unsound” product could have just slipped past inspectors’ eyes over the course of a year makes no sense.

Rinn and Alexander used to have a mobile chicken-slaughtering rig.

By law, they couldn’t touch the rig or the animal themselves when they brought it out to a property.

But they could stand alongside the customer and coach him or her through using it to process homegrown poultry. That became unsatisfying pretty quickly.

This is an increasing conundrum for Sonoma County: We have some of the best ranchland in California, an abundance of producers, and no place closer than Stockton to slaughter chickens per USDA regulation, just Rancho to process larger animals certifiably, and one extremely busy mobile butcher, John Taylor, to service the rest. The former poultry slaughterhouse in Fulton is now an artist’s collective; the old abbatoir at Duchamp Winery is now a gallery. With Rancho closed for an indeterminate period of time, the closest certified facility is in Modesto.

It’s one of those awful ironies that as we resolve to eat better CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

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EAT LOCAL

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

meat, and eat local meat, and as a raft of new folks rush in to produce and provide it, processors have never been scarcer.

Naturally, this is where things get pricey. Adam Parks of the Victorian Farmstead used to slaughter his own chickens for sale until the county caught up with him. He was able to strike a deal with them to allow him to continue until his space at the Barlow became available. His pastured chickens now retail for $7 a pound, making a relatively small bird ring up at a hefty $25 per.

Speaking rapid-fire, Parks lists off the costs, making it clear why local meat can be damnably expensive: distance.

“It costs me $3.50 a pound to raise them,” Parks says of his chickens, “and right now we’re harvesting 200 birds a week, on average. We go to Stockton [for processing], so I’ve got five hours of my time invested driving there and back, and let’s call that $10 an hour, which is ridiculous, and $100 in gas. We have 75 cents a bird just on fuel and transportation. Then the processor is charging $2 a bird to slaughter and more to package.” All in all, Parks estimates he makes about $1 a pound on his chickens, so that $25 bird you just purchased nets him and his family about $3.

Rinn concurs. “The last meat plant built in Sonoma County was built 60 years ago. There’s a study says there’s a huge lack of food processing in this county,” he says.

“One of the reasons why meat costs so much is that it’s got to be driven halfway across the state. Farmers are taking on a big old expense.

Come on. There’s no reason for that. We can do it all here.”

So why do Parks and Rinn and Modica and Best and Seghesio 12

want to be in this business? Love, necessity, and idealism, of course.

Rinn, 34, is a trained chef who worked at Spain’s El Bulli, the famed temple of foam and essence and palette. He’s also cooked at San Francisco’s Nopa and the Fifth Floor, but says that he always wanted to be “that guy,” the one with the knife in the corner. So he gave up restaurant work and went to cut at Willowside Meats where he started their very successful

“The last meat plant built in Sonoma County was built 60 years ago. There’s a huge lack of food processing in this county.”

- RIAN RINN

CSA program and eventually became head butcher. He tried to buy the place, but the deal fell apart. He moved to Golden Gate Meats, which supplies most of the “boxed” meat we buy from grocery stores but also is USDAcertified and can do custom butchery from local sources. And then, he could no longer resist the lure of his own place.

“The butcher shop is kind of a gossip place, traditionally,” he says. “It’s a good life, man! You get up early in the morning, you work with your body, you have the afternoon to yourself, you talk to people. If you like food and you like meat, it’s the way to go.”

Parks, who is in his 40s, came to it from a different route. Raised on an 800-acre ranch in Tomales, he duly went to Cal Poly to study ag and then did nothing with it, eventually running the Canadian PGA Tour (“it’s like running the Jamaican Bobsled Team” he now jokes). And then in came the recession and out went everything that he and his wife had achieved, house and cars included.

Fortunately, his grandfather had purchased the old five-acre Christmas tree farm in Sebastopol where Victorian Farmstead got its start. Fortunately, there was an empty house on the property where Parks and his wife could bring their children. He bought some chickens and pigs just to feed the family and began thinking about what to do next. Local butchery seemed a viable option.

“It’s my belief that when the economy tanked, people took what they had left and went into hiding and weren’t spending any money,” Parks says. “When they started to spend again, they changed what they spent their disposable income on. And it wasn’t a new car; it was, ‘let’s spend twice as much on what we’re feeding our family and make sure it’s good food.’”

So he took the gamble on local and sustainable. He chuckles: “Every couple of weeks, there’s a news story that Foster Farms has cockroaches or something, and my percentage goes up.”

L

isa Modica and Molly Best are different from Parks and Rinn in that they are not themselves professional butchers. Their Thistle Meats has three butchers on staff— one a specialist in cutting, the other in charcuterie, and a third with a chef background who can make Thistle an encompassing CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

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EAT LOCAL

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12

experience for customers who would like to just visit one shop before making dinner.

Best used to raise sheep, mostly in an effort to grow her own milk for cheese and thus avoid taking frozen shipments of the stuff from Wisconsin. That led her to butcher lambs out of necessity.

“When you raise sheep, you end up with lots of boys and you end up eating the boys,” she says simply.

Young mothers with four children under the age of eight between them, Modica and Best were looking to start a business, any business. Modica was finishing an MBA and had been trained to consider that anything they hit upon had to be “a genuinely good, authentic idea that engages the community,” she says. “That moved pretty quickly into a butcher store idea and, as soon as we hit on that, we never looked back.”

14

Given Best’s background in ranching and cheese-making, finding area producers has not been a problem for the two. But nature is a different story.

“I think that what’s going to be challenging is dealing with the drought and how that affects our producers and cost,” Best says.

“Stemple Creek and McGruder ranches are big enough and have enough infrastructure to deal with the drought. But how do we support the really small farmers? That’s a challenge but it’s really important to us, so we’re trying to figure that out.”

Modica adds, “One of the true challenges is engaging the community to realize what the true cost of the meat is. We will do everything we can not to price anything too high, but those prices reflect what the farmer has had to do—it’s the full cost that’s represented. It’s an education and it’s a deeper look into your

food and where it comes from.

I hope that people will embrace the educational component.”

CSA programs can reduce costs by encouraging customers to invest in the operation. But high prices caused by lack of processors remains top-of-mind.

Rinn says, “I get frustrated when people start turning up the gas on prices. Everyone needs to be involved in this, not just the people who can afford it, because they’re not the majority. The majority of people are those who can’t afford it, and they probably need it more than those who can. By putting in the infrastructure to process it here, we can keep that price down.”

Anyone want to start a slaughterhouse?

Article resources: sonomacountymeatco.com thistlemeats.com vicfarmmeats.com

M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

EAT LOCAL

SHORT TAKE

P

epsi One won’t kill you, as long as you don’t drink an entire can. “Natural flavors” are genetically engineered.

Some 5.1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied to U.S. crops each year, a direct health threat to the estimated 2.4 million farmworkers who tend them.

These and other stats emanate from the work of the Penngrove-based writer and editor Naomi Starkman. The editor in chief of CivilEats.com, a website devoted to telling the stories behind our food, often written by the people who grow it, Starkman is a trained attorney whose motto is, “My tool is communication, but my goal is legislative change.” Thank goodness for that.

Serving over 100,000 individual viewers a month, CivilEats has been a labor of love for Starkman and managing editor Paula Crossfield since they established it in 2009. Neither has ever been paid until their recent Kickstarter campaign netted enough funds to actually hire a new and full-time managing editor (Crossfield is transitioning to editor at large) and grant Starkman a small slice of what she should earn. And would earn, had she stayed at her professional communications positions at the New Yorker magazine or Newsweek. But while she enjoyed the prestige and challenges big city magazine work provided, it didn’t satisfy her soul. Of course Alice Waters had a part to play.

Starkman remembers meeting Waters at a 2004 dinner hosted by the New Yorker. She had been interested in farming and agricultural politics for a long time, but didn’t know how to literally break into the field. She screwed up her courage and asked Waters for advice on getting started.

Waters told her about World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Starkman almost immediately quit her job and escaped the New York winter to WWOOF on a farm here in Eureka.

Then to Central America to intern on farms in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. She was bitten hard.

Article resources: civileats.com fern.org

16

Starkman had gone to law school intending to be an international human rights lawyer but, for the first time in her life, found herself trying something that she wasn’t actually good at.

“I didn’t have the aptitude for it,” she says.

“When I graduated, I knew I didn’t want to practice law, but there was a job opening in San Francisco on the newly formed Ethics Commission. My business card read, ‘WhistleBlower Educator.’”

And to some extent, that’s been her job title ever since. In 2007, a former editor recruited her to Consumer Reports, where she is still a contributor with an emphasis on nonprofits and sustainability. When Slow Food Nation hosted its international convivia in San Francisco in 2008, she came on as communication director. “That was a big watershed moment,” she says.

In fact, it’s when all of her “weird skills” found a way to coalesce, using communication to drive legislation.

“CivilEats is a funky combination—I like to call it a community-supported blog,” Starkman says.

“It came about because there was no communal voice for the food movement. It grew out of the Slow Food Nation blog and became beloved because it’s always been a place for everybody. I spend a lot of time working with people who are not traditionally writers so that they can have a platform. It’s about sharing and creating what we see as the food movement.”

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Meanwhile, Starkman also threw her peripatetic energy into co-founding and consulting for the Food and Environment Reporting Network website, an investigative effort driven by professional journalists that is often hailed as ag’s Pro Publica.

“We were seeing an incredible dearth of reporting in the traditional beat of agriculture,” she says. “I was interested in finding new ways to support the future of food reporting.”

Returning to New York, Starkman did magazine work part time so that she was free enough to intern at Dan Barber’s Stone Barns Center, the land that supports his iconic Blue Hill restaurants. After seven months, she left New York again, this time to work at an organic farm near Olympic, WA.

Starkman still farms, tending a small place outside of Petaluma with her partner. Staying away from the land, it seems, is not an option.

“And then I was like: What am I doing?”

Starkman says. “I have all of these weird skills.”

She allows herself a short laugh.

“I find that farmers are the most credible voices of the agriculture industry,” she says. “And I don’t think that there’s anything harder than being a farmer.”

“Talk about a faith-based profession!”

M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

Fresh Produce & Natural Foods 1691 Gravenstein Hwy. North, Sebastopol

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PHOTO: COURTESY DOUGLAS GAYETON

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605 Fourth Street Santa Rosa, CA 707-579-1459 kindredhandcrafts.com

ou know you’ve arrived at the rural Petaluma ranch Douglas Gayeton shares with his wife, Laura HowardGayeton, because you can literally see the writing on the walls. The ranch walls. Gayeton, 53, is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose unique “information art” includes a heavy dose of his own handwriting.

He’s adorned the farm’s outbuildings with quotes from agricultural innovators, glorious swoops of white paint on red buildings that succinctly illuminate.

Taken from an interview with Washington state Cherokee forager Running Squirrel, the quote resonates with Gayeton as a swift explanation of sustainability.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 21 18

M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

Your Local Financial Partner

L

ook at enough of Gayeton’s photographs and his looping, legible script not only becomes as familiar as that of a loved one, you soon can’t image enjoying the images without his words.

Words mean a lot to Gayeton. And they should mean a lot to all of us, particularly the ones we bandy about all the time, perhaps not truly understanding their meaning.

When Carlos and Sylvia found the perfect hospitality property in Sonoma County, their Realtor recommended Redwood Credit Union (RCU) for their financing.

This language confusion became a delicious challenge to the Gayetons, who launched their “Lexicon of Sustainability” video and art project in 2009 to provide some answers. With KQED as the local affiliate, look for Lexicon videos to provide interstitial programming content to PBS this spring and well into the summer.

Ranging in length from two to six minutes, these shorts are humorous, smart, gorgeous to view, and most of all, educational.

In a sneaky kind of way.

They partnered with RCU to finance the property and made their dream come true.

Produced by Laura and written and directed by Douglas, the videos use animation, music, and interviews to tell the true story behind our words. Planned to be in three parts—Food and Farming, Water, and Energy—the project aims to expose faulty nomenclature while reaching with truths about the most basic components of modern life.

- Carlos & Sylvia Owners, Applewood Inn Members since 2009

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One of the beauties of this first Food and Farming phase of the Lexicon effort is how it honestly shows how even farmers, let alone non-farmers, don’t always know what their language denotes.

Truth be told, most non-producers haven’t the slightest clue what words like “organic,” “sustainable,” or even “local” really mean.

Take the term “cage free,” please.

Driven by hearts as much as wallets, consumers immediately fell upon the term when it was introduced to describe a more expensive but perhaps more humane method of chicken and egg production. “Free range” is

another term that prompts hearts as well as wallets. Sounds like a lovely life, doesn’t it? Not so fast.

Produced in 2012, the Gayeton’s “Story of an Egg” looks these terms and finds that there’s not much there there. Focused on Soul Food Farm’s Alexis Koefoed and David Evans of Marin Sun Farms, the film quietly explicates the linguistic evils of clever marketing.

Koefoed admits that she was initially fond of the idea of “freerange” chickens and their “cagefree” eggs. She imagined sunshine and grass and little pecking beaks taking fat worms from the ground.

“It only took a little research to learn that it didn’t mean much,” she tells the camera.

Evans adds, “Cage free just refers to an environment that they’re not in.” In fact, it doesn’t refer to the actual environment, in which a chicken might be with 5,000 other animals on a barn floor so mired in excrement their feet never touch the ground—but indeed, not in a cage.

“Marketing confuses these words,” Koefoed says. “We want to hold onto the authenticity of words and take them back from the big corporations.”

As the film comes to a close, the narrator reminds, “Your words can change the world.”

The phrase “change the world” is not too grand a flourish to attach to what the Gayetons are trying to do. In fact, Douglas hopes to prompt a new kind of Marshall Plan, a modern one in which the U.S. doesn’t rebuild Germany—it rebuilds its agricultural system. To that end, he has convened a who’s who of food movement leaders, including such as Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, to identify the key players in the agriculture space and learn from them to better construct what Gayeton calls “local food hubs” in each community.

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They’re taking the same approach to the upcoming Water and Energy spokes of their project, using the freshest voices in those areas to glean knowledge and effect change.

A writer and documentary filmmaker by trade, Douglas’ 2009 book Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town showcased his original use of photo collage overlaid with handwritten text. Telling the story of the Slow Food Movement, which originated in Italy, Slow quickly found a rabid audience. A former advertising executive with a deep background in the film industry, wife Laura founded Laloo’s, the goat milk ice cream brand that has a retail outlet in downtown Petaluma. While launching Laloo’s put the couple in touch with area farmers, their needs and frustrations, and helped to birth the series, they decided to sell the business last year, allowing them to work full time on Lexicon. They also have a new book, Local, due out this summer.

One of the unique aspects of the “Lexicon of Sustainability” is that it’s crowd-sourced, with the Gayetons encouraging Americans across the nation to take part by hosting pop-up exhibits of Douglas’ photographs in their communities.

Some 500-and-counting shows have been mounted with the Gayetons giving free access to the images, as well as funding to have them framed, to anyone who chooses to participate. The only restrictions are that individuals not actually be professional art curators and that they agree to host five pop-up exhibits in unusual and fully accessible spots in their community. This way, the Gayetons reason, regular folks might be startled into action.

Isn’t there a word for that?

Article resources: lexiconofsustainability.com

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DRINK LOCAL

DRINK LOCAL

Y

FIRE+

WATER Wine and beer make room for a new boom in spirit distillation

ou could be smelling one of any number of things,” Adam Spiegel says matterof-factly as we quite literally sniff about the 750 square feet that currently comprises the heart of his 1512 Spirits distillery in Rohnert Park. Rye grain, steam, malt—who knows what’s in the air at this particular moment.

Sonoma County residents are used to our agricultural odors, whether they be the tang of cows and pigs and sheep, the sweet rot of harvest, or the sharp scent of beer on the boil. Increasingly added to our olfactory slate is the smell of grain toasted and mashed to make local whiskey, gin, vodka, and rye.

Spiegel, 29, is among a new group of entrepreneurs who find satisfaction not in the mug or the flute but by the ounce.

1512 Spirits (soon to be renamed Sonoma County Spirits) joins the Still Water Distillery in Petaluma, Spirit Works in Sebastopol, and Lemoncello in Sonoma—among others—that are based here in Northern California’s wine country but making something distinctly more robust.

Adam Spiegel

Spiegel’s journey began in 2008 with a hair cut, the old-fashioned kind that includes a hot shave with a straight razor, at the 1512 Barbershop in San Francisco. Once in the chair with proprietor Sal Cimino, the two men got to talking.

PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

“We built a friendship,” Spiegel says, “and, over time, we started talking about his passion, which is making spirits. I learned very quickly that his grandfather had taught him how to make certain things—and he was making grappa on Potrero Hill. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and I just fell in love with the idea and the nostalgia of it all.”

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The two men soon went into business together, making rye whiskey. “I was looking to actually produce a product,” Spiegel says. “I thought that to do something with your hands that you can control from start to finish is an amazing thing. Nowadays, you don’t see a lot of people who are doing that.”

By 2010, Spiegel was working full time in their small Rohnert Park space to build the company; Cimino worked part-time while maintaining his barbershop. Eventually, the strain became too much and Spiegel bought Cimino out.

Spiegel is a serial entrepreneur who ran a successful business catering to college students while he himself was in college. He started another one just out of school that didn’t do so well.

“The thing is, every time you try things, you learn,” he says.

“A lot. And now I’ve gotten to a point where I can wake up in the morning and actually love what I do. I worked in financial sales before I got into working at this full-time. I think that the financial crisis really taught me something, which is that there is more to life than going to work and doing something you hate just for the check. Why do that? Now I wake up every single morning renewed and excited about the day.”

Good thing, because this is a sevenday-a-week gig. Spiegel and his two employees are expanding their distillery to a larger space they’re rehabbing around the corner from their current spot, a production facility with one room for the mash, another for the distilling, and hopes for a tasting room now that California state law allows distillers to charge for tastings.

“This was always a dream that Sal and I had a long time ago,

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to be able to reduce mashes in a separate facility than you distill in,” Spiegel says. “When you’re tripping over that many cords and pumps, it’s not safe. Also, you want to be able to do separate processes in separate spaces. It’s like to each man or woman their own trade.”

Spiegel sources his rye grain from Canada, where it is plentiful, using about 3,000 pounds a month to create around 400 gallons of rye.

He uses old-fashioned alembic copper stills, the kind brought to Europe by the Moors in the 1100s to purify their water. European monks took one look at those stills and wisely thought, cognac. He and Cimino built the fire boxes that the stills sit atop; Spiegel and his father-in-law-to-be built the barrel shelves. This is a handmade business, but there’s no doubt that it’s a going operation.

Priced at around $60 a bottle, 1512 Spirits can be seen as pricey, but perhaps not so much when you consider what goes into making each bottle.

“I’m kind of a purist,” Spiegel says.

“I try not to draw flavors other than malted rye, unmalted rye, yeast, and water. Those are my flavors.

When I put it in wood, it’s new-char American oak. That’s it. My goal is not to modify it once I have my pure spirit. This is nature. I’m not trying to speed up the process.”

T

imo and Ashby Marshall of Spirit Works Distillery, open in the new Sebastopol Barlow complex, are in no hurry, either. The Marshalls met working as sailors and deckhands on boats and settled in San Francisco for access to the ports. But day-tripping to West County changed everything.

“We fell in love with the place and wanted to retire here, to grow old,” CONTINUED ON PAGE 24

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DRINK LOCAL

ARTISANALWINES CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23

Timo says. “We started looking for a way to make that happen.”

Timo’s family had made sloe gin for generations in England and the couple thought to produce the botanicals for the stuff here and sell it to distilleries. Then they discovered that almost no one in the U.S. makes their gin pure, from scratch.

“Most will buy alcohol and manipulate it into another form,” Timo says. “The more we started looking into it, the more we realized that the distilling side was something that really excited us.

The idea of growing the botanicals became less appealing and, once we committed fully to the distillation, it was obvious that we should see what we could achieve with it.”

What they’ve achieved is a large, gleaming facility with four full-time employees who produce a wheat-based gin that can be used as a vodka early in the process and made sloe with additional ingredients. They source their wheat from a farm near Sacramento because they had so much trouble finding non-GMO corn, a more traditional base grain.

“There are times when the still isn’t running and we have to make as much use of our still as we can,” Timo says. “We can make a rye whiskey and very traditional West Coast-style whiskey and a brandy.

There’s a slight diversification, but our focus is and will remain gin.”

“We have a list of requirements that our raw materials fall under,” he says. “The most important ingredient is the quality of the raw product.”

“My goal as a small business owner is to make a product that I can stand behind that I made with the help of my incredible employees,” Spiegel says. “It’s through that partnership that we grow. I’m not worried about competition. I welcome them, because frankly, the more of us there are, the better.

The Marshalls add coriander, cardamom, angelica, and hibiscus to their tank, hand-zesting lemon and orange into the brew on the days they distill. And because they’ve got the large, gleaming place, they need to keep it busy.

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The sudden boom in microdistilleries doesn’t seem to phase the folks who created the boom.

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“My goal is not to modify it once I have my pure spirit. This is nature. I’m not trying to speed up the process.”

- ADAM SPIEGEL

Article resources: 1512spirits.com spiritworksdistillery.com stillwaterspirits.com hellosonoma.com 24

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Letters of Intent

Sonoma County aims to be the first 100 percent sustainable wine region in the U.S.

O

K, here’s a word that sounds good: Sustainability. But what does it mean? Even the dictionary is of little use: “The property of being sustainable.” All right, let’s go to the root. Sustainable: “Able to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” Anyone want to look up “certain”? Certainly not.

But sustainability is exactly the state that the Sonoma County Winegrowers (SCW) aims to achieve within the next five years. The goal is for our county to be the first 100 percent “sustainable” wine region in the U.S. under the standards and practices set out by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program (SWP).

And here’s what the SWP says: “At present, there is no legal term or official category for ‘sustainable wine.’” Oy vey.

What becomes clearer as the muddy semantics fade is that the goal is not only good for people, it’s good for business. A promotional plan conceived in tandem with the Sonoma County Vintners and the Sonoma County Tourism Board, SCW will have Sonoma County be known—and actually truly become—the first 100 percent sustainable winegrowing and winemaking region in the nation. Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, commented in the SCW press release, “It’s a unique branding position and I wish them great success.”

Success is already at hand, of course, with wine pouring $13.4 billion into the economy in 2012, some $200 million of that

hitting home in industry philanthropy.

But the goal of sustainability in grape production and the vintner’s art is multipart; it’s more than just money. A dictionary isn’t needed to understand that it involves ecological stewardship, says SCW president Karissa Krause.

“Natural resources are critical,” Krauss says. “Water management, soil analysis, being energy efficient, pest management, erosion control, using the least amount of resources to have a successful crop.”

But, Krauss stresses, like the Food Action Plan, there must be a strong focus on social equity and taking good care of people.

“There are a lot of programs that don’t talk about the people piece and that’s huge when you’re thinking about farming and agriculture,” Krauss says. “It’s really about ensuring that the people who work for you are safe, have the right training and the ability to keep learning, and have some mobility in the organization, whether that means starting as a picker with the opportunity to work up to foreman or starting as a cellar rat and working your way up to winemaker.”

The project has a five-year arc and is based on self-reported assessments that are overseen by SWP as an independent third party. “That’s a really important part,” Krauss says, “to have that validation, so it’s not just us saying that everything’s great.”

SWP established its sustainability project in 2002, but it wasn’t until Krauss became SCW president last year that the agency really

considered it. Krauss had only been on the job for a few weeks when board member Duff Bevill urged her to study its implementation.

“He said, so many of our growers have been sustainable for years, how do we take it to the next level?” she says. “He threw out this challenge and I put him off for four or five days because I wasn’t sure how to respond. It seemed daunting at first. But the marketplace is asking for it and the more we considered it, the more it seemed like something we should be doing.”

She adds, “Consumers really care about how products, food and beverage, are produced—and how they’re farmed is really an important part of that.”

Free workshops and webinars are already offered for wine grape growers to use as educational tools as they begin moving toward certification. Including winemakers into the process will start next year, and Krauss anticipates hiring a sustainability expert whose sole job it is to help growers and vintners make the transition.

“The program looks for continuous improvement,” Krauss says. “Every year, we want to put out a sustainability scorecard that would have the number of assessments and where we are in those assessment codes. The following year, our goal is to improve on that.

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“I don’t care where we start,” she says firmly. “I care about where we end up.”

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Article resources: sustainablewinegrowing.org 26

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G Meet farmer Oscar Orozco Garcia, radical spiritual libertarian To prepare to have his photo taken after an interview, farmer Oscar Orozco Garcia runs through the rain to his truck and grabs a serape, a corked drinking gourd, and a homemade axe with a handle he carved from an oak branch. A tall, handsome man, he doesn’t allow PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

himself a smile as he stands under a tree in a Roseland shopping strip outside of a Starbucks.

He simply glows.

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arcia has just spent the better part of two hours telling a stranger how he came from a small village outside of Guadalajara with no electricity or running water, trained to become a priest, repeatedly sneaked into the U.S. illegally before getting his papers, and ended up as a mentor for the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers program at Shone Farm. A lot of his story has to do with reverence; none of it is concerned with fear.

Garcia, 52, entered the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers program, funded by a grant through the Sonoma County UCCE, when it started in 2011. He was in the first class of some 30 people who were granted admission to learn under the aegis of volunteer mentors.

But Garcia didn’t need to learn how to farm. He had grown up farming as, he says, do most people he knows from Mexico. What he needed was to gain technological skills. He already had a farm, the Cielo Azul collective that he started five years ago on a patch of land owned by a local church at the corner of Occidental and Fulton roads in Santa Rosa. Funded in part from a grant from St. Joseph’s Health System, Cielo Azul is worked by four or five families, depending on who has the time and energy that year to do the labor.

Some of the food is sold and some is donated to the Redwood Empire Food Bank, but the majority of it is kept by the families who till the plots. Farm markets and CSAs hold little appeal for Garcia, who is dismissive of the paperwork and the run-arounds such programs can involve. Who has the time? He certainly doesn’t. As a result of his training with the Beginning Farmers and Ranches program, he now works for Shone Farm three days a week while running his own

business from his truck, which is adorned with a sign simply saying, “How Can I Help You?” Things run deep for Garcia, and small irritants don’t sit well.

Perhaps he is too radical to have become a priest. But he’s probably not a communist, which is what the local cardinal deemed him when he kicked him out of seminary school some 20 years ago.

“I really had a vocation to be a priest,” Garcia says. “I was just following what they taught us.

Liberation theology and liberation philosophy, working to change the lives of people so that they can have power. If you talk about God and you don’t talk about changing the lives of people, man, you’re not helping them.”

The fact that the dismissing cardinal was murdered the next year by a drug cartel doesn’t particularly delight Garcia; the fact that Pope Francis shares his theological philosophy certainly does.

Garcia’s spirituality may also be too large for just one church— even one as large as the Catholic Church. Take his definition of “organic,” for example.

“We always think about organic vegetables or fruit. No. Living is organic,” Garcia says. “We have to come back to that.

It’s very spiritual. Organic is everything. It’s the world.”

He laughs. “Americans pay attention only to the food. But for me, it’s everything together. When you go to the field and your brain is hooked up on the organic way, your life is already changed. The way that you act, the way that you feel, the way that you are with other people—it’s organic. Your life has got to be organic first. Some people grow organic vegetables, but they keep their life the other

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way. If you’re really organic, and you go to the store and they want to put your food in a plastic bag, you say, ‘Keep your bag. I will take my food with my hands.’”

After being forced from the seminary, Garcia didn’t know what to do. His family and community were horrified at his loss and blamed him. “I felt like there was no place for me,” he says. He had always wanted to visit the U.S., mostly because it affects life in Mexico so deeply. He wanted to know the beast. “I felt like the United States was an unhealthy influence on the life of the people, and I didn’t like it,” he says. “I thought, to fully understand my people, I had to go there.”

He hired a coyote and crossed illegally.

Wasn’t that scary? He grins. “I liked it! It was very fun!” In fact, he liked it so much that he sneaked back over four more times during the ensuing two decades. “I liked it,” he repeats. “Because it’s life.”

Garcia was doing farm work in the Central Valley when the recession hit. His marriage fell apart and he lost his house. He decided to move north, landing in San Rafael, where he joined other day laborers on corners hoping to be picked up for work. And don’t fool yourself that it’s just itinerant Mexicans crowding those corners.

“You can find doctors there,” Garcia asserts. “You can find teachers there. Even in the United States, when people have trouble with work, you can find citizens of the United States looking for a job there. Everybody was on the corner.

Not just Latino people. Some people cry. Some people kill themselves.

And some people say, ‘This is life.’”

Garcia has clearly chosen the latter. Befriending a contractor CONTINUED ON PAGE 33

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‘It’s very spiritual.

Organic is everything.

It’s the world.’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

who picked him up for day work and eventually offered him a room in his home to live, Garcia moved up to Santa Rosa five years ago.

Here, he became involved with the Fulton Day Labor Center, soon becoming a jobs coordinator. Through that, he learned of the St. Joseph grant, obtained access to the Cielo Azul lot, entered the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers program, and we’ve come full circle.

Garcia is now a legally documented resident, but don’t expect any hosannas.

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PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

“I do have papers, but I don’t like it,” he says. “I had a better life before I had papers. When you have a Social Security number, they’re going to hit you harder for money and won’t allow you to do anything.

You’re not a person, you’re a number. I am Oscar!

When I didn’t have a Social Security number, I didn’t have any problems. My only problem was being sent back to Mexico. And I was like, ‘Hey! A free vacation!’”

He chuckles. “I love it.

It is life.”

Article resources: ucanr.edu/sites/BFRSOCO 33

PHOTO: MICHAEL B. WOOLSEY

Nearly 150 years old, the Grange movement is just getting started

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M A D E L O C A L . C O O P | M A R /A P R 2 0 14 | vol. 1, issue 2

he Sebastopol Grange sits on a neglected section of Highway 12 surrounded by not a whole lot. The Laguna de Santa Rosa, of course. An auction house. A consignment Western shop. A gas station. It’s just a building by the side of the road that barely registers when you whiz past on the way to and from West County.

State Grange that he was able to get a contact for the local hall. He went to a few meetings.

He got excited. And that’s the thing about Jaffe: when he gets excited, other people tend to, also.

At least, that’s how Lawrence Jaffe used to see it. Just a spot alongside the road that he drove by when commuting to and from his law practice. Until one day almost five years ago, when he noticed that the building had been tagged by graffiti and that not much had been done about it. On another commute, he saw an elderly man trying to fix the vandalism. But the paint was the wrong color and the ladder wasn’t tall enough. The guy could use a hand.

The Grange movement began just after the Civil War primarily as a way to help farmers who were being unfairly treated by the railroads.

The brainchild of Oliver Hudson Kelley, who was sent by the newly created Department of Agriculture to survey farming conditions in the South after the war, the National Grange was established in 1867. By 1872, there were 1,000 of these fraternal organizations brimming with members throughout the U.S. Just as quickly as they rose, Granges dropped to just over 1,200 members by 1876. Today, California has 200 Granges with over 12,000 members. And, perhaps not surprisingly, that number is steadily once again on the rise.

So Jaffe tried to get in touch with the Grange to offer some help. Having been a farmer himself for 10 years, he had sympathy for the effort.

But he couldn’t raise a soul. It wasn’t until he reached out to the president of the California

What excited Jaffe perhaps most about the Grange is what it means not only to Sebastopol, but what the history of the grange means to America.

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Jaffe, the Sebastopol Grange’s current vice president, and Gary Abreim, its treasurer as well as treasurer for the California State Grange, recently demystified some of the charter’s history and intent.

“Ever since the Grange’s founding, it has emphasized civic participation and civic virtue,” Jaffe says. “And if these values had been dying ever since this country was founded, they would have been dead 100 years ago.

There are always times when those values are important, and after the Great Recession hit, I really sensed that there was a huge upswing in people wanting to participate and wanting to understand that we must give back in the community, and we must come together to do that. Grange Halls have a structure, and they were gifted to us by the farmers of the past.”

Abreim adds, “One of the core values of the Grange from the beginning was family farmers. Farmers helping farmers, asking each other, ‘What are CONTINUED ON PAGE 37

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At just $33 a year, membership is cheap. There were some 100 people belonging to the Sebastopol hall when Jaffe joined; today, there are about 170 members, and they’re a much younger crowd, with the rapidly-growing Young Farmer’s Guild using the space for its monthly meetings. In the last four years, members have entirely revamped the hall, redoing everything from the paint to the toilets to make it a more pleasant place to visit. Because visiting is a huge part of Grange life.

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Jaffe and Abreim credit national Granges for successfully fighting for rural mail delivery and rural electrification, women’s suffrage and the direct election of senators. Recently, they say, Granges supported the legalization of hemp and continue to fight against fracking and the planting of GMO crops, and for the implementation of rural broadband and rural road paving. Locally, an effort is underway to help emerging farmers get access to that most elusive, and expensive, resource: land.

“There is a tremendous amount of land in Sonoma County not devoted to grapes that can be used for agriculture,” Jaffe says. “We are working on a plan. It’s my understanding that the Open Space District is being encouraged to find a way to open up some of their land, appropriate parcels, to young farmers. We’re building these access pieces. By coming together and being visible, we’re pointing out that it’s important.”

Abreim envisions the Sebastopol Grange, with its wealth of land on and surrounding the property, as being a showcase for what’s possible in Sonoma County, including a demonstration permaculture garden and acres of local wheat, “So that when people drive by,” he says, “they really know what we’re up to.”

Come to think of it, the Sebastopol Grange doesn’t seem so much like just a building by the side of the road any more.

Gaia’s Garden

1899 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa gaiasgardenonline.com | 544.2491 Voted the Best Vegetarian Restaurant in Sonoma County for the last 3 years!

Come and enjoy food, music, and art in a tranquil setting.

SANTA ROSA MAIN BRANCH:

5O1 COLLEGE AVENUE 7O7-546-6OOO

F I N D O U T M O R E AT

comfirstcu.org

Article resources: sebastopolgrange.org Meetings are the last Tuesday of every month.

PHOTO: CC 2.0 BRUCE FINGERHOOD

Your Community First Credit Union debit card is also a Super GO LOCAL Rewards Card.

La Vera Pizza • JoJo Sushi • Savory Spice Shop Pearson & Co. • Community Market BBQ Smokehouse • Sizzling Tandoor Sonoma Chocolatiers & Infusions Teahouse Lulu & Hill Espresso Bar • Cotati Coffee Corner Guayakí Yerba Maté Café • Sazón Peruvian Cuisine Ancient Oak Cellars • Frozen Art Gourmet Ice Cream Sub Zero Ice Cream & Yogurt

you in need of?’ We are a membership organization that fosters participation. This is your venue, your workshop to grow projects and services for our community. You don’t see that in too many other places. That’s the core of the Grange.”

“Granges were created to bring farmers together for socializing because it’s hard to get off the farm,” Jaffe says. “A woman could get married, go to the farm, and get stuck there forever. Socializing and educating—how do you get the best corn, the biggest pigs, what seeds are you using?—and learning about politics: coordinated purchasing, understanding what legislation is about.”

Show your support for local establishments when you dine or grocery shop and save a little every trip. It adds up to a whole lot of savings every year.

Rewards Card accepted here . . .

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For those uneducated in the arcane world of economics, understanding how our purchasing behavior impacts the local economy can be like visiting well, an arcane world.

Prices, we know. We live and breathe them. But value is not so straightforward. If we only make purchasing decisions based on lowest price, we may miss out on real value.

Sonoma County GO LOCAL Cooperative’s mission is to get as many people as possible to grasp the importance and power of personal purchasing choices.

With food, that comes down to two choices: 1. To buy food that is grown or produced nearby from a locally owned retailer or restaurant, or; 2. To buy food grown and produced outside our region from a nationally owned chain grocer.

What difference does it make? A big difference.

Sonoma State University economics professor Dr. Robert Eyler did an analysis of this in 2011. He found that spending $100 on locally grown produce and locally made goods at a local independent grocery store, farm market, or CSA generates $121 for the area economy.

The money circulates more cycles because all the folks making the transactions are local.

That same $100 purchase at a non-locally owned store for goods and produce not grown or created nearby generates just $60 locally. Your money leaves our community in order to pay folks who provided the goods and own the store but live elsewhere.

Turns out, we really can grow our own money—as long as it stays close to the tree.

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