Paul and Aurora laying drip tape and planting cauliflower.

Who Exactly Are Your Farmers?

These days, quite difficult to know, really, since the corporation has all but eliminated small family farmers and the majority of Americans buy their produce and meats from grocery stores. We could all name some brands, surely, but actual farmers?

I’ve met all kinds of farmers over the past thirty odd years. Elmer was the Portuguese farmer responsible for the apricots and walnuts surrounding my childhood home in Hollister and the first farmer I ever knew. He arrived every morning in an old red Ford pickup and wore the kind of greasy hats a hipster might fight for. He had dark, creased skin and died not very old at all. I never had any desire to be like Elmer.

Through farmer’s markets and CSA’s, we have become more familiar with some farmers. We at Greenhearts try and evaluate the producers with whom we do business and over the years have come to favor some more than others. A few, far from being personable and collegiate, never the less produce consistently superior products. Others you just can’t help but like and end up supporting out of personal affection. And yet others have enviable energy regimes, compost systems or positive labor practices which recommend them.

When we evaluate what we eat based on who produces it, where and when, and not solely on price, we begin to strengthen the foundation of an upside down food pyramid – a great mass precariously balanced on the shoulders of a small minority.

San Francisco Bay Area Summer CSA Available Now!

Sign up today for the Bay Area’s premium home delivery service of local, small farm organic fruits, vegetables, pasture raised free range beef, pork, lamb, chicken and eggs.

Spring Vegetables, Seasonal Fruit, Local Farms

Aurora and Paul picking carrots for the Greenhearts Family Farm CSA!

Your Personal Farmer

Want Bacon, Not Hormones, Nitrates and Anti-biotics? Try Pasture Raised Organic Bacon, Sausage, Pork Chops, Ham Hocks and Ham

Come home to a box full of local delights. Eat healthy organic food grown by farmers you know and trust!

Small family farm organic fruits, vegetables, pasture raised meats and eggs- delivered to your door!

The Greenhearts Family Farm CSA box arrives each week with a story. Sometimes it’s about what’s happening on the farm, sometimes it’s a story about our adventures in farming. This following story is set on a beautiful organic farm in the northern part of New Zealand…

Becky was an Irish wanderer, Marty a New Zealander of the finest English stock. He had bought plenty of good mixed use land, developed its agriculture and timber, divorced his first wife, a strong raw boned blonde woman with ruddy cheeks who’d borne him 2 healthy children, and married Becky 20 years his junior and a fine bread baker. Her loaves were rich and whole and perfect every time. At least they were to us. We were quite hungry.

Aurora and I were sleeping in Marty’s shanty past the creek with the other farm workers and the local roustabout, Stephen, who was a perennial visitor, the guest who never left. We were WWOOFING in New Zealand. Willing Workers On Organic Farms. We traded four hours of work for a night’s lodging and food. We stayed with Marty and Becky and their love child Rosy, barefoot explorer at 2 years of age. And we shared the soggy, wood stove heated, spidery, stale shack with Stephen and Sutoshi as well, likewise barefoot, now that I remember it. A barefoot, simple food eating space travelling WWOOFER from Japan who was lovely and idealistic and full of shit and quite sincere. He wasn’t always barefoot. He had a pair of clear jelly women’s flip flops with a plastic flower atop the toes he wore when driving the tractor or using a shovel. His feet were extremely, amusingly dirty but not filthy. He had no problem shoveling the human compost from the outhouse and building a better latrine. Barefoot crap shoveling hard working Sutoshi. He was a miracle of self abuse.

I built a new façade for Marty’s farm store. I’d mentioned I was a carpenter and he gave me a cheap-o rusted hammer and some tacks and a few odd nails and a bloody dangerous electric circular saw and permission to build. He gave us one of the greatest experiences of our lives, I’m sure. We picked orchards and fields for him and ran his little dry goods and produce store and cleaned up his shack; demonstrated the puritan American work ethic and earned our keep and didn’t think once to pass judgment on his life choices but reaped his knowledge and drank in his joy and we wanted to be farmers too to be as happy as he. Aurora was hooked, she was, on pastoral bliss. She practiced baking loaves and peeled a thousand bushels of persimmons for the dehydrator. And then one day we left. We bought Marty’s ex-wife’s Nissan Bluebird and drove it to the end of the earth and then turned around and came right home again to get started and here we are today picking a dark field on a cold and windy evening, the sun already down. Whatever possessed us, I wonder?

San Francisco Community Supported Agriculture

It takes a village… the Greenhearts CSA community is dedicated to supporting an alternative food culture, based on local organics, sustainable farming and healthy food.

Greenhearts loves its community of supporters- hey, that’s why we’re farmers, we love to feed people the best possible local organics. A new San Francisco CSA member in has started blogging about her experience receiving a share of the Greenhearts harvest. The Girl in Chucks is an inspiring blog dedicated to chronicling a young lady’s life. Greenhearts is proud to be a part of it. Her meal planning around the box is fun, and her general sense of adventure and unique perspective as she navigates this modern world is delightful.

I hope you’ll take a look and read some of her thoughtful musings.

EAT LIFE WHOLE

Eat Life Whole & Greenhearts Family Farm

An Organic Community Alliance

Greenhearts Family Farm, the San Francisco Bay Area’s best CSA delivery met inspirational dynamo Stephanie Wong of Eat Life Whole at impressario Iso Rabin’s SF Underground Market.

Stephanie was documenting the scene in her typical inimitable way and caught  on tape a conversation I was having with a SF Underground Market attendee. Interested in what she heard, she took our information and not long after Stephanie joined the Greenhearts Family Farm CSA community in a big way.

A prolific activist for healthy life choices, Stephanie’s EAT LIFE WHOLE is a movement “dedicated towards helping BUSY people discover the health they deserve.

While most dietitians dwell on calories, carbs, fats, proteins, restrictions and lists of good and bad foods, I work with my clients to find the food and lifestyle choices that best supports them.

It’s about lifelong, gradual changes that enables you to reach your current and future health goals. ”

What an impressive agenda- but if there’s anyone who can motivate and inspire, it’s this creative, inspiring, hard-working San Franciscan.

community alliance for change in the food system

That’s what being part of a community alliance for change in the food system is all about- working together for a healthier world.

Sale           2011 Pre-Pay CSA Shares

Offer expires 12/31/2010

Sign up now for a 2011 Greenhearts Family Farm CSA share. Our strong partnerships with pasture based and organic family farmers and progressive associations and commitment to sustainable farming practices means your weekly CSA share preserves and nourishes the most vital and sacred elements of our society and our planet- valuable jobs, living soils, good food, clean air and water and healthy families.

- Spring Package: 17 boxes (March 31st-July 21st) = $500 (paid in advance)

- Summer Package: 17 boxes (July 28th-November 17th) = $500 (paid in advance)

- Spring & Summer Package: 34 boxes (March 31st-November 17th) = $975 (paid in advance)

- Every Other Week Spring & Summer Package: 17 boxes = $500 (paid in advance)

Community Supported Agriculture

Sustainable Organic Agriculture – Pasture Raised Beef, Pasture Raised Chicken, Organic Eggs

Organic chicken, poultry, organic beef, organic pork, organic vegetables, organic fruit delivery, free range chicken from greenhearts family Farm!

Standing In It

For a special Valentine’s Day I took Aurora out to see some pigs. And to walk through a field of cow pies. Not to mention wade through a flock of squawking omnivorous birds. Romantic? Well, the foray into the Panoche Valley to visit the Douglas Ranch and Our Family Farm, neighbors in remote and beautiful Paicines, was plenty dreamy. Luscious green pastures, emerald hills, blue skies, and happy, healthy animals, plus hay bale buildings, a donkey, frolicking children- what could be more romantic than such a bucolic scene, at least for two farmers striving for their own version of pastoral bliss? We are working on forging a lasting partnership with these two farms to supply you with the very best in pasture raised meats and eggs. Because they are neighbors and work together, we can streamline delivery of their products to our distribution center, thereby reducing carbon costs and expenses. And all the animals on these farms work in symbiosis with the ecosystem and each other, a perfect example of a sustainable farm operation.


If you are alarmed by feedlot beef, disgusted by cage grown animals, fearful of meat packing warehouses, this is the only realistic solution. Small scale organic family farmers raising beautiful, strong animals outdoors on natural green grass. Conveniently packaged, frozen fresh, these products are unlike anything in supermarkets, even their so-called organic meats. The difference is pasture!


Our plants are thriving right now, the wet weather and mild temperatures in Half Moon Bay, even in winter, dramatically improving our winter farming production. Greenhouses have really made a difference. With your support, Aurora and I are trying out exciting new seed varieties and relentlessly forging ahead with our dream of being organic farmers, in tune with nature, at peace with our surroundings. Sure, inspecting piles of animal poop may sound like we’re a couple of romantics on a pleasure cruise, but we’re willing to do it for you. We’ve got boots.


Follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Dirt Farm Poetry


Sustainable Organic Agriculture – Pasture Raised Farming – San Francisco Bay Area farm fresh to you CSA

http://twitter.com/BayAreaFarmer

Soil, air, water… what we are and what we will become. Death on an organic farm is constant, balanced by the miracle of conception, the renewal of life, constant regeneration. When balanced, this is sustainability. It is one and the same, life and death, and though terrifying, the end of things is the chance for the beginning of others. Everybody eats- the hawks, the skunks, the snakes, the gophers, the chickens, the grasshoppers, the mosquitoes, the farmers, the spinach, the metrosexuals, the oaks, the parents, the children, the grandparents, the paramecium, the fungi.

It is a raucous party on an organic farm, the celebrants ascending and descending the ladder of life, bumping into one another, becoming one another, avoiding, mingling, procreating, fighting… and some afternoons luxuriating in the overwhelming joy of existence, years behind and ahead of us, stillness in the air, the flowing of waters, the life of the earth.


Greenhearts Family Farm is an organic, sustainable agriculture focused, San Francisco Bay Area farm fresh CSA, a home delivery of farm fresh organic blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, greens, groceries, free range beef, free range pork, free range eggs and free range chicken and poultry. We only support pasture based agriculture, sustainable livestock farming, organic agriculture, local food, permaculture, and love.