Rural Development Center
Jose J. Montenegro, Director
PO Box 5415
Salinas, Calif. 93915
(408) 758-1469 phone and fax

This national model program rests on a simple yet apparently unique concept: It begins with poverty-ridden Spanish-speaking farm workers and, through training followed by hands-on experience, turns them into independent farmers able to raise and market their own high-profit organic produce, a skilled trade that gives them dignity and is gentle to the Earth.

Located on a 112-acre farm on rich agricultural land south of Salinas, Calif., this program's roots go back to the 1970s when an agricultural cooperative was located here. After the co-op failed due to management problems, a group of local advocates contacted the Washington-based Assocation for Community Based Education (ACBE), which had been founded a few years earlier by a former associate of the cooperative, and asked its assistance in converting the farm into a training program that would give farm workers the tools they need to become successful independent farmers.

With the help of an ACBE grant, the program got up and running in 1985 with seven families, and quickly proved its success in the most basic way: Within two years, five of those families were working their own farms.

Buoyed by that early success, the program has continued and grown. Every January, a group of families (22 of them in this year's program) begins an intensive six-month training program, meeting Monday nights and Saturdays so as not to interfere with their jobs, in which they farm an experimental one-acre plot and get classroom training focusing on all aspects of family farming, from basic agricultural and organic-farming techniques to marketing to making a business plan.

At the end of that course, each family is allowed to rent 1 acre of the farm's property for $150 for one year; the second year, they may grow to 2 acres for a $250 lease payment per acre; and in the third, it's 5 acres for $350 an acre. (This compares with a going rate of $500 an acre for farmland in the region; with technical assistance and equipment at hand and a reduced rate, this could be described as an "incubator" situation for farmers-in-training.)

During this three-year period, the families are encouraged to market and sell their products for a profit; a sizable portion of the farmland is certified organic under California law, a desirable certification that facilitates marketing the produce to restaurants and gourmet shops at very favorable prices. The families are encouraged to use the proceeds of these three years to stock up on the equipment they'll need (used tractor, equipment and irrigation pipe) and a savings fund toward the purchase or lease of farm property, so they'll have the capital investment they need when they go on their own after the third year.

An estimated 300 families have gone through the program since 1985, and Montenegro estimates that 75 percent of the graduates are independent farmers now; he adds that even those who didn't choose that route have substantially "improved the dignity of their lives" because their new skills raise them above the competition in seeking quality employment on larger farms.

In addition to this basic Small Farm Education Program (SFEP), Rural Development Center has added on several related projects, aimed specifically at improving opportunities for farm women and children and building bridges to the community: