A photographic tour of a well-managed farm: Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce
On August 23, 2023, a busload of farmers, researchers, agronomists and eco-ag enthusiasts arrived at Phil and Katherine Foster’s Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce in central California. The Fosters have grown a wide variety of vegetables on 250-plus acres for more than 30 years, planting and harvesting every week of the year.
This photo essay details just a small portion of everything Phil Foster showed the group. Pinnacle is an excellent example of a well-managed organic farm that has prospered for several decades.
All photos courtesy of Acres U.S.A.
We manage most of our sales ourselves. Probably 75 percent of what we grow is marketed within 100 miles of the farm. We’ve really tapped into the Bay Area. We do ten farmers markets, we do a farmstand at our other farm location every Saturday morning for people in the community, and we have a couple of refrigerated trucks and about 25 stores we deliver to, including some Whole Foods that we backdoor. We also get product into their distribution facility and another produce distributor in the San Francisco area, so we have access to a greater national wholesale market. If we have extra products, we move some to them. So, we handle almost everything ourselves.
In order to do that, we have some infrastructure — we have some cold storage on this ranch and we have cold storage on the other ranch. Right now there’s about 70 of us working on the farm. We are a pretty labor-intensive farm with fresh vegetables. The people who work on the farm are the reason the farm has been successful over the years. Efrain Contreras, who manages this ranch and knows this ranch better than I do — we’ve worked together for over 30 years. We have a number of employees who’ve been here 25-plus years. We have a lot of employees with 10 or more years experience. That is really invaluable to the farm operating well, and it just makes farming a lot more fun when you help people who are really talented and can work seamlessly from job to job. That’s been an important component of the farm.
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