Let it Grow

Thirteen minutes from the beach, five minutes from the freeway, and nestled between housing developments, elementary schools, and various strip malls, you’ll find one of the most vibrant and ecologically diverse regenerative organic farms in the United States.

Southern California’s Ecology Center, celebrating its 15th year in operation, is located in Orange County, one of the most developed and densely populated regions in the country.While it sits smack-dab in the midst of modernity and progress, The Ecology Center embraces centuries-old indigenous principles of respecting and working with the land; regenerative organic practices have long been inextricably linked to indigenous wisdom, and continue to be adopted today by many in the agricultural community — including Evan Marks.

It was Marks’ interest in the organic food movement that inspired him to create The Ecology Center. In the late ’90s, Marks attended school at UC Santa Cruz, where he majored in agroecology. After graduating, Marks taught permaculture and ecology design, consulting on and building farms and eco villages in Central America and West Africa.

On a trip back to Southern California to visit his parents in 2008, Marks stumbled across a historic farmhouse on a small, three-quarter-acre dirt lot that’s now home to The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano. Surrounding the house were 28 acres of land, which the city leased to an organic farm operation called South Coast Farms. The city had kept the home — considered the oldest wood-frame house to be built in the area — separate from the farmed land, with the intention of perhaps converting it to a museum, visitor center, or something of the like, but at that moment, nothing was happening with it.

As his partner at The Ecology Center, Jonathan Zaidman, tells The Rooted Journal, Marks “had this lightbulb moment” and a vision for this small plot of land — which, at the time, wasn’t much to look at. “Evan wanted to know what it would look like to build an ecology center in Southern California,” Zaidman says, adding that Marks wanted to “model and demonstrate the values of” ecological design there “through hands-on learning, community events, activations, and experiences.”

It occurred to Marks that doing this kind of work in the U.S., one of the richest countries in the world — and one that, Zaidman says, is largely disconnected from our food system — could have a great impact. So, they leased the land from the city, and, between 2008 and 2018, they got to work, planting native landscapes and growing edible plants, medicinal plants, and dye plants, among other things. Soon, the blossoming Ecology Center had local schools reaching out to ask about field trips. Artists inquired about film screenings. There were farm-to-table dinners, workshops, and festivals, and a real sense of community growing. Today, The Ecology Center — which has grown to a team of 75 staffers and 500 volunteers — hosts 11 programs with a focus on education, volunteering, and more. “The Ecology Center was a seed that was planted and it just started slowly birthing itself,” Marks says. “None of this stuff happens overnight. But when you put the patterns together and the hard work and intentions — we’re counting our blessings.”

Of course, there were still challenges along the way. “The reality of agriculture is that it’s the most humbling expression of human life, and also it’s always [revealing] itself to you,” Zaidman says, speaking of the obstacles they faced, which he says included learning to steward the land, create a profitable and sustainable business, and navigate as a new nonprofit. “As cliché as it may sound,” Zaidman says, those challenges were “all opportunities.”

The organization has clearly seized those opportunities, expanding considerably in recent years. For example, when the land previously occupied by South Coast Farms became available in 2018, the city approached The Ecology Center, which subsequently took it over, successfully employing the same permaculture principles established on its existing three-quarter-acre lot. “For many months, we just observed,” Zaidman says, adding that observation is “the first principle of permaculture.” After all, a less-than-one-acre garden designed for educational purposes and a 28-acre production farm are very different. “They share similar elements from an operations and strategic standpoint, but are more different than they are alike,” Zaidman says. “We knew from the very, very beginning that in order to be sustainable, not just environmentally sustainable, but economically, this operation needed to shift its business model from wholesale, monoculture operations toward a diversified, direct-to-community farm,” he adds, speaking of the larger farm that The Ecology Center took over. “Instead of packaging in plastic and shipping to whatever grocery store you can, everything we grew we wanted to go out the front door,” he says. “To make that feasible, we needed to diversify the offering in order to meet the community. If we had a farm stand that only sold tomatoes, nobody would show up.”

Luckily, there’s more to offer at The Ecology Center’s farm stand than just tomatoes. During the pandemic, when the public began to realize the fragility of the food system — exacerbated by heightened food insecurity and shortages — interest in The Ecology Center’s locally grown, seasonal produce and goods went through the roof. Prior to 2020, The Ecology Center’s humble CSA served around 50 to 75 subscribers who came in for their weekly and biweekly boxes; in March 2020, the number of subscribers surged to 750. CSA subscriptions have tapered down since — an intentional move on The Ecology Center’s part to encourage more customers to frequent its 600-square-foot farm stand, which continues to net major revenue (sales top $4 million a year, according to Zaidman) and exposure for the organization.

Beyond the produce that The Ecology Center sells, the eco village places an emphasis on education through its creative offerings. Artists and chefs, both local and from afar, have flocked to The Ecology Center to contribute to the space. For example, Chef Aaron Zimmer of San Juan Capistrano’s La Vaquera and Alice Waters, the founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, have participated in The Ecology Center’s Community Table event, where visiting chefs create dinner experiences using produce grown on-site. Artists including Cody Hudson, Jason Woodside, and Jeff Canham have all showcased art around The Ecology Center in the form of murals, rotating gallery installations, and more. “We view artists and chefs as key collaborators in this conversation,” Zaidman says. “They are the culture holders, and we want to connect and engage with them deeply. We want to learn from them and then share our learnings.”

Shared learning is also an important part of the relationship between The Ecology Center and the Acjachemen, an indigenous people of California who called the area home for generations long before any sort of development there. Many of the methods adopted by The Ecology Center, and regenerative agriculture at large, work to honor the indigenous stewardship of the land. At The Ecology Center, board member Adelia Sandoval — a spiritual overseer and cultural director for the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians/Acjachemen Nation — helps guide the organization’s vision and intention. “We work hard to promote culture over convenience” and “values over value,” Zaidman says, which align with “many of the same long-standing beliefs of the Acjachemen people.”

As it honors the past, The Ecology Center is also looking to the future with its sights set on expansion. The farm is in the process of renovating its Campesino Café, which opened in July 2023. Campesino — which is Spanish for farmer and refers to being of the land — serves breakfast and lunch five days a week, sourcing almost every ingredient directly from the Center itself. The expansion includes plans to build an outdoor kitchen with a wood-burning pizza oven. There are also plans to construct a flower shop and geodesic “peace dome,” and to convert the existing barn on the property into a commissary focused on pantry products to be supplied to local organic farms, thanks to a grant from the USDA.

In addition, The Ecology Center is working to expand its apprenticeship program, which it began offering in 2020. Currently, the 10-month program pays farm apprentices as they learn about soil enrichment through techniques like crop rotation, as well as irrigation systems, responsible pest management, and more. The Center is looking to build on this existing model by extending the training to two years and pairing its apprentices with areas of land under development in the region, so they can learn how to run those sites more independently. The nonprofit also has its sights on growing a network of satellite farms — or what Zaidman calls “incubation centers” — modeled after The Ecology Center across the country and managed by a fleet of farmers trained by its apprenticeship program.

Speaking of their 10-year plan, Marks and Zaidman talk of the hub-and-spoke model as inspiration for the nonprofit’s future and see the eco village as the hub at the center of “dozens of new values-aligned farm operations.” Zaidman says there’s already “a great deal of demand and enthusiasm for spaces like this from some of the largest landholders in our geography.” He adds that “they want to bring these [farms] to their community, and they want to bring them to life.” However, he says, The Ecology Center’s mindset is not one of an infinite appetite for growth. “We have a vision we like to think of as ‘more farmers, more farms, more food.’ The vast majority of those, we don’t want to have our name on them,” Zaidman says of the farms, adding that they should “be culturally appropriate to their geography and also scalable from a community standpoint.” After all, as The Ecology Center’s focus has been since day one, it’s all about community.