Many wonder what it takes to be a successful farmer in today’s ever changing agriculture industry. Lewis Johnson is a third generation farmer. His love of the land, practical experience, courage, and determination has grown his olive company from a small farm into a lucrative olive oil business.
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Anarely Flores has farming in her DNA. Her grandfather was a farmer in Mexico, and when her family visited him during the summer as a child, she would be put to work. But she didn’t like farm work and her mother is employed in agriculture so she decided at an early age that she would go in a different direction.
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The Duivenvoorden Farm began when Marc Duivenvoorden’s parents emigrated from Holland and started a dairy in Cottonwood, CA. It was a conventional dairy for 30 years. After the elder Duivenvoorden passed away Marc kept the dairy going. In 2004 Marc and his son Seth were milking 60–80 cows a day and selling their milk to a creamery, but after the 2008 economic downturn they made the decision to do something different. Seth, who majored in animal science at Chico State and worked at the university’s organic dairy, puts it this way, “Friends were asking us about raw milk. We were looking for new ideas, how we could survive in a different way. We researched herd share programs and used the help of the Farmer to Consumer Legal Defense Fund to establish a Herd Share Program. That’s when we started making changes. We grew our business by word of mouth.”
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Growing up in Susanville, in far northeastern California, Cal Zamora had always been exposed to agriculture. His parents had raised chickens and vegetables and had a small orchard. But it wasn’t until he was a Marine deployed to Iraq in 2007 that he really knew that he had farming in his blood. “The soil is so salinated there that the Iraqis can’t produce much food,” he recalled recently. “They have to import most of it. Seeing that really instilled in me the need for good stewardship of the land, and that experience was probably my biggest inspiration.”
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