Organic. Sustainable. Biodynamic. If you care about food and where it comes from, you've heard these agriculture buzzwords. Lately, the term "regenerative" has been popping up a lot more. The 28-acre Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano, a working farm that sits amid the sprawl of Orange County, has gone so far as to be certified. Founder and executive director Evan Marks joins us to explain what it means to practice regenerative farming for what might be our most literal In the Weeds segment.
Marks turned a dirt lot into an ecological oasis for children, creating workshop and field trip programs that have expanded to 28 acres. Photo by Kevin Voegtlin.
Evan Marks: The Ecology Center is located on a historic, 140-year-old farm in the heart of San Juan Capistrano, which is the heart of the region between Los Angeles and San Diego. We are a 28-acre regenerative organic farm operation. The farm is really the backdrop for building a culture that gives more than it takes. The farm grows about 200 different ingredients, fruits, vegetables, and flowers. All of them go through a village of retail and cottage industry that creates value added products, from a cafe to a fermentation lab and various pantry products to educational workshops all the way through a farm school for children. It really is a laboratory for the future and how we work together in harmony with the land and seeking harmony with one another.
I was raised in Newport Beach as a surfer. My nature was the ocean. I'm a first generation farmer and my pathway from the ocean upstream and through the watershed was backpacking with my grandfather as a teenager. I got really interested in the wilderness outside of just the oceanic one. On that journey, I learned that agriculture was the #1 impact and compromise to the health of our oceans. As an aspirational youth, I was motivated to take a stance and move the statistics in a new direction. I ended up at UC Santa Cruz and started working on the historical lineage of farms, from Alan Chadwick through Molino Creek and various other Camp Joys. I cut my teeth in the late '90s, early 2000s in the organic farm birth center of California and I haven't looked back since.
Orange County is one generation away from an agrarian community. The orange is literal, from a citrus fruit that used to fill the acres of this pretty large community. But when I showed up here in 2008, this was the only organic farm in the county. It was called South Coast Farms at the time. It's a 28-acre farm that the city bought to protect it from development. It's this beautiful, wooden, two-story, what would have been a mansion in 1878. That's the anchor — a historic farmhouse and a 28-acre farm.
Named for the Spanish word for farmer, Campesino Café was opened to bring dignity to the farming community along with building a revenue stream. Photo by Kevin Voegtlin.
Back in 2008, it was a simplified operation with just a couple ingredients grown organically for wholesale, not what you would see today. Nonetheless, the acre around the farmhouse was available, open and eager for the opportunity. So I approached the city with an idea of creating a cultural center that could demonstrate relationship to the land and to one another through workshops, field trips, demonstration gardens and various culinary programs. We just sort of jumped into it. We were breaking ground in 2008, literally a true dirt lot, which now is an ecological oasis for children. We expanded our one acre to 28 acres five years ago.
We describe our farming here as regenerative. What that really means, in a broad spectrum, is that we are in deep stewardship of the land. The farm is an ecosystem, so it has all of the healthy elements that you would find in a healthy, natural ecosystem. This is an agro ecosystem. We don't raise animals outside of our 150-chicken flock for eggs. The other important pillar is caring for the animals. Most importantly, it's caring for the farmworkers and the team that stewards the land. We pay living wages to those that are in service to the organization.
The farm has a cafe where it sells the fruits, vegetables, and flowers grown on the property alongside value-added products. Photo by Kevin Voegtlin.
The "regenerative" is an updated lexicon for how we think of the farm as an ecosystem rather than an extraction or just a simple business opportunity. This is really about how we create food production in a way that seeks harmony with the land and with the people. The regenerative organic certification has been super beneficial for us. While we're over 20 years into this lifestyle and this business practice of growing food, it helped us get clear on living wages for our farm team. It helped us get clear on measuring the organic matter in the soil, the health of the ecosystem and the direction that we want to take it. That's our core mission — that we can eat with our values. Every time we make that choice to put something in our mouths, we can choose to support farmers, we can choose to support stewardship of the land that doesn't compromise soil health and our future generations.
If people want to experience the Ecology Center the best way is to come here. We really are an ecological oasis, and we have programming throughout the week, for various ages.
We launched a cafe called Campesino, which means "farmer" in Spanish. The cafe is really about bringing dignity to our farm community, our farmers, our farm and building a revenue stream to continue to grow the capacity of our work.
My favorite dish that I think signifies the menu the best is called campesino. It's an abundant platter that celebrates the taste of the farm. We've been growing a special heirloom blue corn that we call San Juan Blue. We turn that into tamales. That's one of the features in the campesino, blue corn tamales that are filled, right now, with summer squash and a guajillo [chili pepper] puree. We grow every ingredient on the menu. Also on the campesino is a little taste of one of our featured salads. One of my favorites is our Green Goddess. It's our salad nova with a tahini herb dressing with a nice crunchy cover crop seed mix that we make. There's a whole bunch of ferments on there that come from the fermentation lab. Our heirloom beans are featured on that platter as well. We grow about four varieties of heirloom beans in fairly large quantities. They're very unique and very delicious. Then, there's a small offering of fruit, whatever is coming off the farm. That's a nice way to start the cafe experiences, get the farmers' choice. It's a farmer-driven conversation here, not a chef-driven one although we have some of my favorite chefs on our team.
The Ecology Center practices regenerative farming on 28 acres located between Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Photo by Kevin Voegtlin.