He’s the Man Who Can Make You Love Broccoli

Asign in the packing shed boasts, “Our Veggies Don’t Do Drugs.”

At the Moore Ranch in Carpinteria, a crew is weighing and boxing the vine-fresh produce that Steve Moore will deliver to Los Angeles-area doorsteps in a few hours.

“This week we don’t have enough sugar snaps for everybody,” Moore says, “so some will get broccoli.” Both, as well as the mint, baby lettuce, bowl-ready salad mix, spinach, beets, carrots and persimmons in each box are pesticide-free.

But the ranch, a 60-acre spread on former pueblo lands homesteaded by Moore’s great-grandfather soon after the Civil War, is beyond organic. It is “biodynamic.”

“The farm itself is a living entity,” Moore explains. The cows and chickens eat crops; in turn, they fertilize the fields. It’s ecologically sound and, he points out, good economics.

Good insects--all indigenous--help out, as do resident predators. Moore buys only seed, fuel for his tractors and utilities--and, much as it pains him, oxygen for gopher control. “We trap like crazy, but sometimes we have to take more of a warfare approach.”

As a member of the growing Community Supported Agriculture movement, Moore Ranch is on the cutting edge. Moore’s 220 member-households pay a yearly fee, which covers their produce and costs of keeping the farm environmentally and financially healthy. Founded in Austria in the 1920s, CSA was brought to New England in the mid-’80s and has spread to more than 450 U.S. farms.

Two days each week, Moore loads his white Mitsubishi bobtail truck and heads south. On Tuesdays, he delivers to the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and Thousand Oaks, on Fridays to Santa Monica and Malibu.

This day, we tag along to the San Fernando Valley. First stop: Burbank, where free-lance film editor Paul Murphy greets us. Murphy and his wife are site coordinators. In return for making their home the drop-off point for 15 families, their share is free.

They joined, Murphy says, to get farm-fresh produce, and because “we appreciate the way he grows.”

Heading for Pasadena, Moore explains how organic and biodynamic methods differ: Both are chemical-free, but the biodynamic farmer focuses on the health of the farm rather than on maximizing production. A “homeopathic approach,’ he calls it. To maintain healthy soil, cover crops such as clover are grown in rotation with fruits and vegetables. The cows’ pasture is rotated so they fertilize all fields. Chickens, in portable houses, move with the cows.

Helping him unload in front of the Waldorf School, where 38 Pasadena families pick up, coordinator Geri Snyder waxes poetic: “Oooh, raisins! I love raisins!”

It’s a damp, chilly afternoon. Snyder will stay until 6, working by candlelight, checking off names as members claim their boxes.

“The greatest thing,” Snyder says, “is you get these vegetables you’ve never tried before.” Kohlrabi, maybe. “We’ll look at this thing and say, ‘What is it?’ ”

For the timid--or those who know they hate broccoli--there’s a discard box at each site; members dump their rejects and retrieve those of others.

“Many of us are vegetarian,” Snyder says. (Moore is not.) “We’re getting good, clean vegetables. And you’re not just buying the produce. You’re supporting Steve’s livelihood. The whole idea is renewing of the Earth.”

“See you in two weeks,” says Moore, and we’re off to Northridge, where coordinator Eileen Wells waits. Stacking the 53 boxes in her garage, she laughs: What’s one to do with mystery vegetables? “This group makes a lot of soup.”

A woman peers into her box, sniffs mint and tosses it into the discard box. It will be claimed.

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Gertrud Kohler has been waiting for Moore. She joined two years ago, in quest of “carrots that taste like carrots, tomatoes that taste like tomatoes.”

And she likes knowing that she can visit the farm. “Some people want to come and hoe weeds,” Moore says. In return, he may allow visitors to glean leftover vegetables from harvested fields. Several times a year, he hosts family day.

Financially, a small farm is iffy. “If we had to make land payments,” he says, “I don’t think it would work out.” Annually, he grows 35 to 40 crops, employing a crew of nine. Because he “really can’t grow any more,” there’s a waiting list for shares.

Some members drop out, finding their lifestyles out of sync with the system. “It just doesn’t work out for them to come between 2 and 6 p.m. to get a box of vegetables they haven’t picked out,” Moore says.

Price, he’s found, is rarely an issue. Members get 42 shares, receiving vegetables every other week from Thanksgiving through mid-May, for a prepaid fee that works out to about $17 for each delivery. Costlier than supermarket produce, but cheaper than organic produce at that market.

The personal relationship--and the flavor--are more important to members than whether the carrots are crooked. The produce we’re delivering today was picked either yesterday or this morning.

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Moore, 49, backed into farming. Although he’d worked on the farm while growing up in nearby Ventura, he didn’t envision his future there. After earning his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of California, Davis, with a focus on ecology and environment, he taught for five years at MIT.

Then he went back to school for a master’s in psychological counseling. “In retrospect,” he says, “I was just trying to work out my own place in life.” That place turned out to be on the farm.

His father, a retired Ventura physician, inherited the farm in the ‘50s but was never a hands-on farmer; in 1981, he signed it over to Moore, his two sisters and two brothers.

At the time, 90% of their business was wholesale avocados and lemons. And 1981-’82 was “the worst year in history for the lemon and avocado markets. We just lost our shirts.”

When his brothers opted out, Moore found himself “working 100 hours a week and making $500 a month,” slowly converting to organic farming. He’d moved his wife, Jinny, a special education teacher, and daughter Julieann, now 15, into a house built in 1925 on the farm.

Then, in December, 1990, along came a big freeze. His fruit crop was wiped out for 18 months, the avocados for two years, a $250,000 hit. He had to regroup to save the farm.

He knew that vegetables grow fast. He knew, too, that “there was a community of people out there who wanted vegetables from me.”

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Dusk falls as Moore makes his last stop, on a cul-de-sac in Thousand Oaks. Coordinator Chris Allen is waiting. “I just threw some turkey into a pot,” she says.

Each delivery, she says, is “kind of like opening a Christmas package. You never know what’s going to be in there. Sometimes he sends recipes.” (In his newsletter, Harvest Notes).

Allen and her husband have raised five kids on organic food and, she says, “This is even better.” Best of all, “We’ve taken the kids up to the farm and he lets us loose in the strawberry patch. You see the whole cycle.”

Soon, area families will come to pick up their shares. Allen laughs. “It looks kind of like I do day care.”

Sometimes, Moore frets about the future of family farms, even Moore Ranch. His daughter has no interest in carrying on. And, Moore says, “I don’t have a personal goal of full-time farming when I’m 75.”

Still, he adds, “Jinny and I both imagine we’ll live out our lives on the farm.”

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.