Dec 26, 2007

'Permaculture' crunch

Fate of sustainable farm linked to star restaurants in doubt

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer

In one corner of SMIP Ranch Produce, a three-acre organic farm nestled in the mountains above Woodside, mint, lemon verbena and rose hips grow in an herb garden fertilized with cardboard boxes.

Having fulfilled their purpose at the Village Pub in Woodside, the boxes now serve to grow the next batch of produce to be delivered to the restaurant.

Farm manager Danny Jokelson said the herb garden is one example of his "permaculture" philosophy - a condensing of "permanent agriculture."

"You're reusing everything you have, and everything you do has more than one function," he explained.

Extreme sustainability has long been the norm at the farm, which has been growing produce for the Village Pub for the last five years and since July, Spruce, a San Francisco eatery that opened this summer to critics' fanfare.

But the sustainability of the farm itself may now be in question, with Jokelson leaving at the end of the month and no replacement in sight.

"The future remains to be determined," said Dale Djerassi, who owns the land on which the farm is located. But he said plans are in the works to somehow keep it going.

"Other people have expressed interest in obtaining vegetables," Djerassi said in the vague tones of a benevolent, organic Godfather.

The farm opened five years ago under the financial support of the Bacchus Management group, which owns both the Village Pub and Spruce, on land owned by the Djerassi family. The farm's name, SMIP Ranch, stands for "Sic Manebimus In Pace," or "so we shall remain in peace," Djerassi said.

But SMIP originally stood for "Syntex Made It Possible," since Djerassi's father, Carl, an organic chemist and emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford, purchased the land after developing the first practical oral birth control pill with co-workers at the pharmaceutical company Syntex Corp. in the 1950s, according to a Web site for the ongoing artists' program Carl Djerassi founded on the land in 1979, one year after his daughter committed suicide.

In 2002, Dale Djerassi's girlfriend and restaurant industry insider, Kristi Spierling, started the farm after an apprenticeship at the University of California at Santa Cruz's agro-ecology program, Djerassi said.

He offered her the use of the land, which was vacant after the family stopped its former cattle business, and Spierling persuaded the Bacchus group, acquaintances from her work in restaurants, to underwrite the operation.

Spierling and various other farmers worked the plot for its first three years before Jokelson took over two years ago.

Jokelson, a native of Berkeley, worked at farms in Ireland and Israel before returning to Marin's Green Gulch Farm for three years and finally landing at the Woodside farm.

For the past two years he has farmed roughly 50 varieties of vegetables on the three-acre plot, growing what flourishes in the dense, clay-rich soil as well as working off a list from the restaurants of what they particularly want.

"It's a bit of a dance," he said. "I'm never certain what crops will be really productive."

Successful recent vegetables include salad greens like escarole and raddichio, cooking greens like kale, chard and broccoli rabe in the winter and tomatoes, squash, melons, beans and cucumbers in the summer. Jokelson also harvests wild herbs and plants growing nearby, which the chefs convert into delicacies such as stinging nettle ravioli.

Jokelson delivers the produce to the Village Pub in a van that runs on bio-diesel and is currently working to convert a pick-up truck to run on straight vegetable oil from the restaurants.

The deliveries are always met with ecstatic reviews from the chefs, Djerassi said.

"They love the beets," Jokelson said.

Last year, Jokelson farmed both potatoes and leeks, but both turned out to be too labor intensive to dig out by hand, since the farm has no machinery. A tractor comes several times a year to help loosen the earth, but Jokelson does all the rest of the work by hand and with between 30 and 35 hours of help per week in the summer.

"There's not really adequate equipment and labor to do the job well," he said. "I'm constantly getting my heart broken."

Djerassi agreed that managing the farm is "impossible for one person to do single-handedly."

"It's not entirely obvious yet how we will solve that problem, but we will solve it," he said.

More problematic to fix may be the farm's isolation, roughly a 30-minute drive from downtown Woodside.

"It's very lonely up here," said Jokelson, who in about six weeks will join an "intentional community" of people growing their own food in southern Oregon.

When he leaves, he hopes the farm manages to continue.

"People would like to see it happen," he said.



E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.