Soil Sisters
Women in Farming
Farming and agriculture are deep-rooted traditions in the Central Valley. Farms are family-owned three generations strong or more, and the crops from our particular region of California supply the entire state and beyond with fresh produce. The women of farming are more often than not the force behind the scenes. These are women who know that fields with even the most abundant of crops can fail without a successful business sense, and these are women who have farming in their veins. They have grown up with the earth between their fingers and have no desire to live any other way. As the needs for produce have changed, the Central Valley’s farming women have kept up with the times, fighting for the abundant future of San Joaquin’s agriculture industry, and the continued success of their family farms.
Both Sides of the Fence
Susan Dell’Osso, Lathrop
Susan Dell’Osso’s daily commute to work will cause most of us to hang our heads in shame at the amount of time we spend on the road.
Marked by the billboard seen off Interstate 5 by Lathrop—a larger than life caricature of the family—the Dell’Osso Family Farm, the family home, and Dell’Osso’s office, the Cambay development group, are all lined up in one neat row. A path leads from the house to an opening created in the fence, just for this purpose; all Dell’Osso has to do is be sure that she makes the switch from her work shoes to high heels, and she’s set.
It’s an interesting dichotomy, the developer and the farmer, but one that Dell’Osso is proud to share. With a master’s degree in Economics, she is constantly meshing her two interests, planning for “green” building and water-saving moisture sensors on the lawns at Cambay’s upcoming River Islands planned community in Lathrop, and facilitating a successful agritourism business to complement the Dell’Osso farming operation.
As many farmers are realizing, adding an agritourism element to their business is a way to secure a profit even in tougher crop years. “You’ve got to have that balance because you have to always make a farming operation successful,” says Dell’Osso. “You have to grow it, yes, but you have to sell it, and finance it, and in our case with the agritourism stuff, you have to market it. It’s a business that has to be run, and lots of times the business side is done by the women.”
Dell’Osso and her husband, Ron, originally created the corn maze to bring in visitors, and have since expanded the seasonal farm activities to create a Halloween event that draws close to 125,000 people in to San Joaquin County each year from all over California. Yet Dell’Osso still keeps it all in the community, no matter how large-scale the affair becomes, and organizes local charities and organizations to work the event to earn funds for their causes. She is in the rare position to work so closely with both local officials and the local farming community.
“I’ve never worked on a project where I can vote for the Mayor, and actually work with the Mayor on, let’s say, sorting pumpkins,” says Dell’Osso. “What we are doing out here at the farm is so much a part of the community. I’m a farmer, I’m in agritourism. I live here, and I love this town, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Behind the Scenes
Mary Bacchetti, Tracy
From Tracy High to her Tracy-based farming and packing operation, Mary Bacchetti hasn’t had to travel far to find happiness.
As a child she remembers telling her father that she wanted to be a farmer, and when she met husband Mark through a high school friend that turned out to be his cousin, she found the best of both worlds. At the time of their marriage, Mark was working Bert Bacchetti Farms with his dad, a farming operation that the Bacchettis have now taken to entirely new heights.
“I just always loved being out in the fields,” says Bacchetti. “Every opportunity, I would be out in the field with my dad. I loved watching [the crops] from planting to being able to eat it on the table.”
Today, the Bacchettis can proudly claim themselves as one of the first farmers to market pre-cleaned and pre-packaged produce, or “value-added produce.” Bacchetti proudly explains that Mark has always been the visionary, but that she’s done everything from setting up programs to accounting to make the ideas come to business-savvy fruition, using her accounting degree from Delta College.
“Mark used to start all these ideas and not tell me, and then I would have to go back and set up all the programs,” says Bacchetti. “Now he tells all the guys, ‘You better tell her before you start!’”
Soon after marrying, the couple started Marca Bella Farms adjacent to Mark’s dad’s land to have their own farm—Bacchetti came up with the name, meaning “beautiful label” in Italian. In 2001, Prima Bella Produce was born, also a name chosen by Bacchetti, to test the notion of selling value-added produce. “When we started, you didn’t see much produce pre-packaged. But if you’re buying loose corn, how many people have ripped the husk off of it?” Seven years later, the Bacchettis and their two children, Ryan, 25, and Alissa, 23, now market packaged, cleaned sweet-corn year-round to large grocers like Safeway.
“It’s a challenge working with your husband because work never gets left at work,” says Bacchetti. “But I learned a lot working with him, and he learned a lot from me, and I think that we’ve made these businesses really great.”
Mark’s parents worked together at the farm, her parents worked together at their farm—it’s a team that works. But don’t think that Bacchetti is spending all her time in the office. “In the early years, you did a lot of the work yourself,” says Bacchetti. “But as soon as I’d get done in the office, I’d go help Mark. There’s nowhere else like being out on the farm. You work hard all year, and you see it from start to finish—that’s what I love most.”
The Champion for Agriculture
Molly Watkins, Linden
Raised on a farm in Tracy and a member of 4-H for ten of those years, Molly Watkins has farming in her blood.
Since then, she’s taken the reigns of two of our local Farmers Markets, and she and husband Kenny, a vice-president on the California Farm Bureau, maintain a successful cattle ranch and farm, processing walnuts, tomatoes, and other grains and produce.
Watkins is also fighting a much bigger fight, that of the future of agriculture in San Joaquin. In fact, she was named by the California State Senate as 2008’s Woman of the Year in our district (each district in California is able to pick a woman for the honor) for her efforts in the agriculture industry—all that, and she’s a mother of two children under the age of 10. We asked how she does it all; she says because someone has to.
“If we don’t go to the table and tell our side of the story, we aren’t going to be heard,” she says. “Being out in front is part of the game, and sometimes it gets left out. It’s my biggest talent.”
Case in point: Watkins’ role as the “Select San Joaquin” Coordinator at the San Joaquin County Office of the Agricultural Commissioner. About four years ago, when farm laborers were hurting for work, the County Supervisor advised the office to get shoppers to buy local—if our produce makes more money, workers have more jobs. An impressive $20,000 later in grants, Watkins has initiated a successful campaign to encourage San Joaquin to shop for local produce, including in-store tastings, and posters promoting local growers. This effort has trickled down to our county’s children also; Watkins brings local produce to elementary schools for snacktime in exchange for class presentations done by the kids about our local crops, and has now started an annual agriculture education day for every third grader in the county, coined AgVenture.
This multi-tasker volunteers her time to a bevy of other agriculture organizations as well: she helps with conservation projects as part of the San Joaquin County Resource Conservation District; she has served samples of our local meat to the likes of former governor Gray Davis as part of the San Joaquin Stanislaus Cattlewomen; and as a member of the California Roundtable for the Ag Futures Alliance, the team lobbied Washington, D.C. and secured a few million extra in funds for San Joaquin County programs for farmers. In the meantime, Watkins’ son just joined 4-H himself, and she can’t wait to spend time combining her two loves, family and farming.
From Her Heart to Your Table
Gloria Sandoval, Manteca
Gloria Sandoval has no problem talking about her farming history at length, about how she started out working in the fields in the ‘60s, and how much she loves farming.
She will tell you how proud she is that all the farmers wanted her to work in their own fields, and how much they liked her work.
Sandoval still works in the fields like the early days, up at 3:30 a.m. each morning to start work at 5:30, but now she oversees up to three hundred workers in the Sandoval harvest and packing operation. “She is definitely in charge in the fields,” says son Jesse, who works closely with Sandoval in the family business. Daughter Midiam adds, “The same respect she gives to them they give back to her. My mom is very strong,” she says, with pride.
Manteca-based Sandoval, Inc. is now in its third “generation” in the Sandoval family. After patriarch Salvador Sandoval went into the farming business in 1971 with another farmer, the business was turned over to Gloria Sandoval when he passed away from cancer in 1998, and now son Jesse works alongside his mom. They harvest and pack cherries, asparagus, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, and more, and work with growers all over San Joaquin County.
Sandoval is very passionate about what she does, and explains how rewarding it is to start from the beginning and watch the crops grow, to eventually end up in homes and kitchens.
“From planting the tomatoes, and watering, and cleaning, and then growing, picking, and packing, it’s such a long range from Point A to your table, and that’s what gives me the satisfaction,” says Sandoval, in her native Spanish. “That I am providing not only for my family but for other families as well.” She has provided fresh produce to her four children in her thirty-five-year career in farming, but has also put each one through college, the first generation in the family to do so. Jesse’s agriculture expertise has led him to work as a consultant advising other farm operations, in addition to the work that he does with his mom.
Yet, Sandoval’s modesty outweighs her pride in what she does. She explains that she’s never fully had an opportunity to give a “thank you,” and she is so thankful to all the growers that she has worked with, for “allowing her to do what she loves to do.” SJM
