Sample AHO Farmer Bios

David and Michelle Silviera of Rancho Piccolo: A Small Farm with a “Grande Visione”

If David Silviera wasn’t busy farming over almost 60 acres of organic vegetables, he’d be busy in the kitchen finding new ways to cook them. 

“Some of the best times that I’ve had have been in the kitchen, with uncles and cousins all enjoying a meal, cooking, experimenting with new foods, different recipes and enjoying each others company,” David said. 

Such is the entertainment value of eating well.

Most recently, David has worked his way through phases of Indian, Italian and Mediterranean dishes. It’s possible that at this very moment he’s whipping up his kids’ new favorite, pho soup, an asian dish made with rice noodles, razor thin slices of beef, covered in broth and generously topped with fresh greens. 

That’s one job perk of being an organic vegetable farmer, in season greens are easy to come by. Not to mention the front porch’s far reaching view of the rows of tomatoes, beets, radishes, parsnips and newly planted strawberries. Back behind the house you can stop and smell the basil and get a nice long look at row upon row of leaf lettuce, green beans and broccoli, to name a few. 

David got an early start in vegetable farming on the islands of Azores, Portugal where his father still runs beef cattle. He moved to the Central Valley to work with his uncle’s dairy business after high school. While David and his brother were in school in Portugal, they were charged with the job of growing and selling vegetables to the island’s small grocers and produce stands. 

“While all the other kids went straight to school and were messing around, we had to go distribute vegetables,” David remembered. “We hated it.” 

Of course, it’s obvious now that the work ethic David gained in his early days of farming and his lifelong experience in growing produce have proven very useful. Especially over the last six years since David and his wife Michelle started their own farm, a dream that had been with him basically forever, he said. Michelle married into the farm life and now represents it well. 

David, Michelle and their two sons Antonio, 9, and Joseph, 10, live on their 60 acre farm, Rancho Piccolo, a name meaning “small farm” in Italian. The name doubles as an homage to the original landowner’s skill with the nimble musical instrument. 

The Silviera family have brought a lot of life to Rancho Piccolo. The land had been patiently waiting for years before they came along to farm it because the landowner was holding off for a farmer committed to working the land organically. 

“It’s been organic since day one,” David said of the ranch. “We farm organically because we believe it is the correct way to farm. It’s the best way to take care of your family and your neighbors and your friends and the earth.”

David says he draws from both his formal education in crop science and from the knowledge he’s gained from his experiences growing produce in his daily decision making on the farm. 

To be a specialist in each variety he has growing on the ranch would be impossible. Over the course of the year Rancho Piccolo churns out over 70 different varieties of organic vegetables. So, when trying something completely new, networking with neighbors and getting tips from other growers is an important part of his continued education in finding methods that work. 

The more varieties Rancho Piccolo grows, the more diversity off farm customers can see in the produce available to them. That translates to sources of richer and more complete nutrition available to feed local families. 

That’s something that David finds very satisfying. 

“I feel like I was called to feed people. To see that happen, to put a seed in the ground and put the faith and work into what you’re doing, and then end up with something that will feed a family - it’s very satisfying to me. I enjoy that,” he said.  

David and Michelle are feeding your family with their contribution of tomatoes, leaf lettuce, green beans, turnips, beets, radishes and daikon to the AHO subscription boxes. 

Bob and Karen Steinacher of Maywood Farms: A Garage Band Style Start to Farming Flavorful Figs

 Bob and Karen Steinacher of Maywood Farms are the farmers responsible for the oohs and ahhs inspired by the little green baskets of organic figs in your AHO subscription boxes each fall. And while it’s not exactly true to say that theirs is the story of a couple crazy kids from the city moving to the country to grow organic fruit, that’s what it might have looked like to Bob’s olive farming neighbors when he got started with figs in 1981.

“People thought I was crazy when I came here and decided to grow figs,” Bob said, admitting, “This is a very unusual operation.”  

And it’s fitting that it would be. A fig after all is a very unusual fruit.

 Both Bob and Karen came to farming from non-farm backgrounds. They met a few seasons into Bob’s fledgling farming career while Karen was studying construction management at Chico State and were married in 1986.  Though she hadn’t expected life on a farm, Karen’s degree and work experience in construction management was perfect training for a working farm and she continues to run the crews and manage production.

Maywood Farms is the northernmost fig producing operation in the nation. The closest commercial fig orchard in California is more than 200 miles to the south, so the Steinacher’s trees are exposed to weather conditions and cold temperatures fig orchards at lower latitudes don’t have to worry about. In addition to sticking out among the acres and acres of old age olive trees growing near Corning, the fig trees lining the rolling hills on the Steinacher’s ranch battle against wind, frost, and tough hardpan soil, seeming to prove that complexity and depth do indeed come from struggle.

“One of the reasons our fruit has a dense really intense flavor is that the soil is so poor, the trees struggle. I don’t know if they’re suffering, if they’re trying to reproduce—trying to propagate the next generation, so maybe they put more sugar in the fruit? Whatever it is, we do get a real intense sugar in our figs,” Bob theorized on a walk through the rows of Black Mission trees.

Bob attributes his interest in farming to the time spent working with his father at his childhood home in the Bay Area on his family’s one-acre hobby apricot orchard, picking and drying apricots. After high school he went on to study entomology at U.C. Davis and spent a few summers researching cotton pests, an experience that further confirmed to him that he wanted to the man in the field growing the food, not the researcher.

 His crash course introduction to all levels of farm experience happened all at once.  “I worked for a year at a high school in Shafter and ran the high school farm. I learned what it was like to take care of animals, row crops, pasture, and permanent crops. It was a fabulous opportunity for me and they were trying to rebuild the high school farm so we were developing a vineyard, they had an small almond orchard started, we had sheep, pigs, and steer, so I learned all about that.”

And after all that, Bob started his dream job. A soil analysis on his newly purchased ranch in 1981 lead him to plant his first fig trees, effectively putting down roots and seeding a legacy that will last into the coming generations. Properly cared for fig trees after all, will continue to produce fruit for just as long.

Getting off to a kind of undiscovered rockstar start, the first years of harvest he packed the figs by hand in his garage. And since the beginning, Bob has grown all of the farm’s fig trees in his own on farm nursery. Today, fig are still packed onsite at Maywood, but are now the Steinachers have a packing shed and a cold storage to handle the volume picked each season. As the first in his family to farm, Bob’s solutions to the unique challenges his location affords are often out of the box.

One such example are the wind machines he put in a few years ago. Figs are damaged by frost at 32 degrees, not uncommon for colder spring days in Northern California, so he put in wind machines, like the citrus growers further south.  No one around him was doing it, but that never stopped him before.  They’ve helped with frost and have also given badger-and-gopher-hunting hawks and owls a nice view of the fields below.  

In 1990 Bob and Karen heard the call to organics and eight years later they had their entire ranch certified organic so their two kids, Erik and Deena, grew up as the children of organic farmers. Deena, now a young adult, has been intending on getting into the family business herself since she was about ten years old. She’ll end up caring for trees her Dad planted before she was born.

The Steinacher’s organic Black Mission and Kadota figs are in the AHO subscription boxes in late summer and early fall.