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Amigo Bob Cantisano, a ninth-generation Californian, put his life’s work into the state’s very soil — starting, fittingly sufficient, on the primary Earth Day in 1970.
At an occasion in Berkeley, he listened to a speaker decry what pesticides launched after World War II had been doing to the atmosphere, farmworkers and meals.
His course was set. Cantisano, a Bay Area native, joined a technology of largely city youth who moved again to the land and started farming as a strategy to reform the meals trade.
“He was the godfather of California organic farming,” stated Tom Willey, a Madera farmer and an one other elder of the natural motion. “He had such knowledge and authority that he was responsible for taking organics beyond small farmers like ourselves. He was determined to remove as much toxins as he could.”
Cantisano, who battled most cancers for a number of years, died Saturday at his North San Juan farm, Heaven and Earth, which he revered as each. He was 69.
His legacy lives within the state’s wealthy panorama, from pesticide-free vineyards in Napa to rescued heirloom fruit and nut timber within the Sierra foothills. His was a mission to revolutionize farming — together with large-scale agriculture — by chopping using poisonous chemical compounds.
Alice Waters, the proprietor of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and a fellow meals activist, stated that the motion Cantisano helped create is essential to the way forward for California’s agriculture.
“It took someone rare like him to get people’s attention,” she stated. “What he inspired led to the silver lining of the better food system that we might be able to create in this state.”
Cantisano began California’s first pure meals distribution firm and its first natural farm provide firm, in addition to the state’s first — and for a few years solely — natural crop consulting company.
In 1973, he helped discovered California Certified Organic Farmers, setting natural requirements. He was additionally one of many founders of the Committee for Sustainable Agriculture, which sponsors the EcoFarm Conference. The occasion, held each January in Pacific Grove, continues to be one of the crucial influential occasions on the earth of sustainable agriculture.
Best-selling creator Michael Pollan, who writes in regards to the socio-cultural impacts of meals, stated Cantisano carried in him the sum complete of natural practices.
“Organic agriculture was not developed in a laboratory or at the university or a land grant, but willy-nilly by hundreds of pioneering farmers. He was one of those people” Pollan stated.
“But even more than that, he was the way that the knowledge any individual farmer was developing would spread to other farmers. He was a pollinating honeybee of knowledge.”
When Cantisano’s farming days started, the early natural communal farms had been referred to as radical and regarded a communist risk to California.
Later, his work bridging the divide between small, natural farms and standard, industrial agriculture generally drew the criticism of small farmers who then needed to compete with massive enterprises for the natural market share. It additionally created unlikely partnerships.
Sam Earnshaw, whose specialty is rising bio-diversity on farms, remembers accompanying Cantisano to the palatial headquarters of 1 massive Salinas enterprise. Cantisano, an unwavering aficionado of shorts, sandals and rainbow-colored tie-dye who glided by the nickname “Amigo” since his teen years, spoke to a boardroom filled with no-nonsense farm managers about natural strategies.
“They treated him with the utmost respect. He had encyclopedic knowledge. He listened to their problems. He never went in saying, ‘You’re diabolical.’ He always offered alternatives,” Earnshaw stated.
In 2003, Cantisano and his spouse, Jennifer Bliss, based the Felix Gillet Institute with companion Adam Nuber. The institute was named after the French nurseryman who first introduced the timber and vines planted at stagecoach stops and homesteads all through the California foothills within the late 1800s. The hope was that cataloguing and propagating these heirloom varieties might assist develop meals sources extra in a position to survive a hotter, drier planet than single-variety crops.
Near the tip of his life, Cantisano expressed frustration that natural farming was nonetheless solely a small slice of agriculture — at the same time as environmental threats elevated.
But he was by no means consumed by the frustration. He favored to swim in lakes and rivers and hike within the Sierra and dance.
“Amigo was about adding life, whether it was microbes in the soil or turning up the music,” Earnshaw stated.
“He always said perseverance and diligence are the key to getting things to change. And lately I’ve been thinking he was talking about more than farming.”
Bliss stated that the morning after her husband died, she was woke up by a small earthquake.
“Maybe this sounds strange,” she stated. “But it felt like the Earth was giving a send-off to a man who had worked all his life to protect it.”
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