A Case for a "Local" Baja Mexico: Del Cabo

Somewhere among the images Thanksgiving denotes, with its turkey or tofurkey, it’s cranberries, stuffing, pumpkins, indulged appetites, and family and friends, is the dinner table. It’s there with the centerpieces, settings, the food on it and the people around it. Acknowledged or not, the dinner table is pivotal to simple meals and feasts, including this, our American celebration of thanks. It is a place of exchange, warmth, community, and change.

It is an essential center for discussion about the food sitting on it, for Larry Jacobs, farmer and co-director of the Del Cabo project, a co-op spanning 3,600 acres in the Baja, Mexico region and some 400 farming families. In and out of phone and email conversations, I presented Larry with my own nudging thoughts on what “buying local” really means by asking him: “Why is it important, we (Goodness Greeness) import non-seasonal, imported products like Del Cabo’s?” He begins his answer at the dinner table: “This question is pertinent to dinner table discussions happening all across our country and Europe. ‘Local’ is not just where our food comes from but implies how we as a society define land use in our neighborhoods. My personal opinion is we need diverse landscape around us, like a farm needs diversity in what it grows, to be healthy.”

The answer to why we—Goodness Greeness—import pallets upon pallets of Del Cabo’s mouth-boggling organic cherry tomato varieties throughout the winter months is obvious. It spans across all the years we have been in business, to the very first days we opened our garage doors. It’s a long-standing relationship. Of course, the taste of these tomatoes is dependably outstanding. And there’s much more. Simply, Del Cabo is sustainably reversing the flow of immigration through sustainable agriculture.

Illustrating the social viability of Del Cabo, Larry writes:

“I like to tell the story of the Espinoza family. They struggled for years. Their children grew up and went ‘north’ because there were no economic opportunities in their community. Two years after we began working with them, their ‘boys’ left Los Angeles, where they were working in construction and returned to help their parents on the farm. Today, they each have their own families. The parents are grandparents. Cousins and nieces and nephews have all joined the business. Each family averages over $35,000 per year. They make more money growing food organically as part of Del Cabo than they did working illegally in Los Angeles.”

The social and economic benefits of a full-scale organic farm training and cooperative program in Baja Mexico is easy to grasp compared to the feat of understanding how Del Cabo tomatoes could be considered an important product for those of us who sustainably and locally shop. “There’s a complexity to it,” Larry says, adding with a chuckle, “And I don’t have a Republican one sound-bite for you.”

Recent “Buy Local” campaigns have arisen in response to an environmental accounting system called ecological footprinting or footprinting. Footprinting approximates the amount of ecologically productive land and sea area required to sustain a population, manufacture a product, or undertake certain activities. Land and sea areas are accounted through the use of energy and renewable (but limited) resources. In Del Cabo’s case, fossil fuel is one of the resources being spent to bring them to our Goodness Greeness warehouse. The further a product has traveled, the larger it’s footprint and the less area available to support our growing populations. ‘Sustainability’ or sustainable actions—like buying local products—aims to shrink current ecological footprints and so sustain the environment in which our population grows. 

Footprint calculations include how the product is made. Instead of depleting resources like water and soil, organic agriculture preserves them. Overall, its footprint is smaller than conventional farming practices whose chemicals have polluted these systems. Couple organics with small-scale production and you have an even smaller footprint. This describes the Del Cabo project: Small family farms, no more than two or five acres.

The farms are diverse too, which means their land includes a variety of crops that support a variety of ecosystems: Besides several tomato varieties, they grow zucchini, mango, Jalapeno peppers, cucumbers, green beans, corn, sorghum, and herbs like sage and basil—to name just a few. Diversity is a key model when Larry outlines the importance of importing their sustainably-grown produce. It creates a diverse local market. “It’s not healthy to homogenize our world,” he says, “Look at the farm as an example. Farms are not healthy when one cultivar grows. The same reasoning applies to the world.”

Bringing in non-local organic tomatoes like Del Cabo’s is like rotating crops on a farm. The Midwest does not support tomatoes in the winter like they can be in Baja Mexico, a dry, sunny climate at the peak of its season. “Different places are better for producing certain foods,” Larry writes, “And these places will continue to be important sources for those foods.” Some foods, like coffee, bananas—and tomatoes during the winter—are “foods we enjoy eating,” he continues, “And of course you can choose not to eat those foods but that isn’t for everybody.” When presented with the option to choose fairly traded products that are supporting rural communities, enabling members to place their children through school or bring them back home, buy a computer and connect with the rest of the world, a strict definition of “local” seems simplistic. There is a sociological footprint to consider too.

If Del Cabo sold their products locally, within a one hundred mile radius of production, Larry says the number of families involved would shrink. “Many growers would be forced to abandon their farms and find work in the city…or in USA,” he writes.

Since the mid-80’s, Del Cabo gradually grew to 300 farmers in 2004. This year, they have expanded to 400 in response to heightened demand for organic food and response from the Mexican government. They asked Del Cabo to extend their training and support to economically impoverished communities. “Today there are close to 100 families in these two communities alone who are learning to grow food organically and be part of Del Cabo,” he writes.

Not only are the coordination and resources Del Cabo offers becoming more and more popular, they are some of the best in organic agriculture. Dr. Kanti Rawal, a well-known tomato breeder who converted to organics after working on the genetically engineered Flavr-Savr tomato, directs Del Cabo’s plant breeding program, an important aspect of the project because it is geared for young people to teach them classical breeding techniques that are quickly being forgotten.

There are many reasons why Del Cabo can be considered a local farm. It holds in check ways we tend toward homogenizing something as beneficial and diverse as local markets. “The benefits of extended local practices to other areas of the globe brings a richness to the table and diversity to the pallet,” says Larry toward the end of our conversation, “Whereby the return and money paid for the food gets back to the grower in a fair wage.”

Del Cabo is something to bring to your dinner table, to either taste it or talk it out. And whether it will suit every pallet is not the question. It’s whether there’s a place at the table for a local global. For those of us at Goodness Greeness, the answer’s obvious.

Mercedee Renz, Goodness Greeness

For more information on Del Cabo, two other resources are highly recommended: The Rhodale Institute’s New Farm article on Del Cabo from 2004 and an article by Diana Friedman, dated 1989.