Pastures of Plenty: Organic Farming—in Living Color

The Bend-Over Factor

“My friend and neigh­bor Chet Anderson was the one who taught me about what he called the ‘bend-over fac­tor,’” Lyle Davis told Organic Connections. “Chet said, `You can bend over; you can plant beets; you can till, har­vest and bunch them and take them to mar­ket, and you can sell them for a buck to two bucks a bunch. But you can do the same things with sun­flow­ers and sell them for ten dol­lars a bunch.’”

Another rea­son for the plant­ing of flow­ers had to do with a much-sought-after bloom for wed­dings. “When my wife, Sylvia, had done cater­ing a few years back, she’d han­dled a num­ber of wed­dings and par­ties in June where peo­ple just cov­eted peonies,” Davis explained. “Peonies only bloom for three or four weeks out of the year, and they’re a really aston­ish­ingly beau­ti­ful peren­nial small-flower bush. When we bought the farm, we had this idea that besides hav­ing this lit­tle farm, our main crop could be peonies. So, much as peo­ple raise turkeys for Thanksgiving, we were going to raise peonies for the wed­ding sea­son. The com­bi­na­tion of Sylvia’s insight into peonies and Chet’s edu­cat­ing me about the bend-over fac­tor led to our grow­ing flow­ers in com­bi­na­tion with vegetables.”

Making the Farm Work

Despite the finan­cial impe­tus for grow­ing flow­ers, the love that shows in Pastures of Plenty’s pro­duce and beau­ti­ful blooms is an actual car­ing for the land that Davis and his wife fought to make eco­nom­i­cally viable. Davis didn’t do it for the money—in fact he turned his back on a much more prof­itable ven­ture, sim­ply because he didn’t like the busi­ness culture.

Davis was one of the founders of Alfalfa’s Market, one of the very first nat­ural super­mar­kets that came up in the eight­ies. This cul­tural shift was fol­lowed not long after by another. “The indus­try changed again in the early nineties when Whole Foods Market went pub­lic,” said Davis. “That was the onset of guys wan­der­ing around in suits, when nat­ural foods sud­denly started exist­ing on the edges of cor­po­rate America.”

As a highly prof­itable chain, Alfalfa’s Market finally came to the atten­tion of investors. “In 1996, there were deci­sions made to grow Alfalfa’s,” Davis related. “The idea was to sell off blocks of the com­pany to invest­ment bankers, who were kind of big in the old days of stock clubs, when every­body was mak­ing money on this and that and penny stocks. The long and short of it was that the invest­ment bankers forced a sale. Wild Oats bought us and it didn’t take me long to real­ize that that was a com­pany cul­ture I abhorred. I was just really unhappy, and more or less simul­ta­ne­ously I was fired and I quit—one of those kinds of deals.”

At that point Davis turned his atten­tion to his farm, which he had already been work­ing since 1993, and he soon real­ized that, solely as a farm, it would not prop­erly sup­port him and his wife and their four chil­dren. “For the next year I really worked the farm, and it didn’t take me long to rec­og­nize that I wasn’t going to raise four kids on a 35-acre farm,” he said. “I had to come up with some other ideas.”

The first idea was to add a cater­ing busi­ness, which Davis and part­ner John Howlett had already been doing part time. The sec­ond idea was to host farm-to-table events at the farm—which in those days had hardly been done.

“When Sylvia and I became a cou­ple in 1989, we were climb­ing Wheeler Peak in New Mexico,” Davis recounted. “On the way up we had this highly ener­gized con­ver­sa­tion about, wouldn’t it be amaz­ing to have a place we could call ‘field to table’? We didn’t even know the term farm to table. It could be a place where we’d have big gar­dens and we would grow food and cook it right on site. We would serve on beau­ti­ful wood tables, like can be seen in France and Italy, and dec­o­rate with all the flow­ers.” It was an idea that remained dor­mant until Davis decided to expand his busi­ness, when it then found its place and has since devel­oped into a highly suc­cess­ful full-service farm-to-table event facility.

Click any image to enlarge.

In the Blood

It’s not sur­pris­ing that Davis pur­sued and found his dream in Pastures of Plenty: it was in his blood. “When I was quite young, my dad had read the famous book about pes­ti­cides, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson,” he recalled. “He sub­scribed to Organic Gardening mag­a­zine back in the late fifties and six­ties, and we had a gar­den. My mom was a won­der­ful French cook, who would pre­pare meals from the gar­den and wild har­vest. Food was an impor­tant part of our grow­ing up.”

Davis went on to pur­sue great cook­ing all over the world. It was this sense of fine cui­sine that car­ried for­ward, and these inter­na­tional fla­vors have now found their way onto his menus.

For Davis, nat­ural food had never meant bor­ing food. He first made sure it was intro­duced at Alfalfa’s Market. “Early on, peo­ple were eat­ing a lot of raw tofu and weird brown rice with no fla­vor­ing,” Davis said. “I didn’t actu­ally ever get the dif­fer­ence between what I grew up call­ing gourmet food and what was being called nat­ural food, other than a lot of it kind of sucked; it didn’t taste very good and they didn’t really know how to cook it. One of the things Alfalfa’s did was blend gourmet foods and nat­ural foods.”

Bringing It All Back Home

Today, all of these ele­ments com­bine to bring a thriv­ing busi­ness to Pastures of Plenty and Big Bang Catering. CSA sub­scribers obtain the tasti­est of pro­duce. Catering cus­tomers and atten­dees of field-to-table events par­take of the same, with mouth­wa­ter­ing culi­nary cre­ations per­fectly pre­pared by Davis. And it’s all capped by the unique touch of plen­ti­ful, beau­ti­ful flowers.

From this place and through his enter­prises, Davis is sim­ply demon­strat­ing his ver­sion of life itself. “Small-scale community-based agriculture—be it the farm­ers’ mar­kets or CSAs—is just an essen­tial com­po­nent of a healthy, happy soci­ety,” Davis con­cluded. “It’s peo­ple who have that gen­uine con­nec­tion to where their food is com­ing from and believe that food has a human face to it—whether it’s know­ing your chef in your favorite restau­rant, or the guy who grew your salad greens, or play­ing with your own 50-foot-by-50-foot plot or your own lit­tle urban gar­den with a few pot­ted tomato plants. That per­sonal rela­tion­ship is just an essen­tial part of what we used to call both phys­i­cal and men­tal health.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Pastures of Plenty and Big Bang cater­ing ser­vice, visit www.bigbangcatering.com.