Market Watch: Meet Greg Nauta, a real farmer

It is ironic that the original attraction of certified farmers markets, buying direct from the grower, has been so diluted by success that it’s hard to find an actual farmer at many markets these days. But if you walk through the Hollywood or Santa Monica Main Street markets and take one look at Rocky Canyon Farms’ Greg Nauta — stocky, suntanned, big hands — you can tell he’s the real deal. He’s the one who spent the previous day harvesting melons and laying irrigation tape at his farm on the Central Coast, then got up at 3:30 a.m. to drive 200 miles to sell to you.

Nauta is defiantly old school. He and his family do practically all the work on their farm themselves, raising a diversity of fruits, vegetables, animals and grains that’s almost reminiscent of the pioneer era. His market display is austere: bare plywood tables, boxes of melons and vegetables, cartons of eggs and coolers with meat. He works 15 or 16 hours a day, 365 days a year, he says.

On a visit to his farm on Monday, Nauta, 46, had to scramble to find time to step down from his red Case tractor and tell his story. He learned to work hard growing up on a dairy farm in Temecula and then majored in agriculture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. While he was there, his family suddenly sold the farm, but in 1990 he leased some land in Atascadero, between San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles, and started growing corn and pumpkins.

He and his wife, Lisa, and their three children — Colton, Casey and Carson, ages 16 to 10 — now lease nine parcels of land, totaling about 50 acres in cultivation. Although Nauta raises a limited number of crops, he deliberately farms a wide range in order to diversify his risk from competition, weather and plant diseases: He’s got lemon cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and five kinds of melons now in season; pomegranates and apples in the fall, used mostly for juice; butternut and other squash through the winter and early spring; and beef cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs. That way, when setbacks occur, like the recent loss of most of his watermelons to voracious deer, he has other crops to fall back on.

Melons, which started a few weeks ago, are Nauta’s main crop right now, particularly his fine-textured, aromatic Sweet Ambrosia cantaloupes. He also has Ogen melons, relatively small and striped, with green flesh; Sharlyn melons with pale, creamy flesh and a tropical aroma; and classic Crenshaws with tender, very juicy, light orange flesh.

Melons may be botanically and culinarily fruits, but they are cultivated more like vegetables, grown annually from starts. It’s taken Nauta years to learn the horticultural secrets, particularly irrigation techniques, to produce the sweetest melons. They’re at their peak of abundance and quality right now, in midsummer, but he plants a new crop every three weeks and will continue to offer melons into October or November, he says. Next year, however, he says he’s going to cut back on growing them because years of hefting the heavy fruits have taken a toll on his back, and visits to the chiropractor have been eating up his profits.

Nauta says he grows organically but is not currently certified. Unlike some farmers, he doesn’t mind the cost of certification, but when he did certify for a year he found the record-keeping and paperwork to be too onerous, he says.

In the shade of a large oak near his home, 12 Black Angus cattle huddle together protectively as they eye a visitor. The animals, which are 14 months old and weigh more than 1,000 pounds each, have reason for concern, since Nauta will soon transport them to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse in Creston, one of the few such facilities available to local producers. They will provide beef for his four Southern California markets (Santa Monica Wednesday and Saturday downtown, and Sunday Main Street, as well as Hollywood) and several Central Coast markets until Thanksgiving, he says. The rest of his herd graze naturally on grass on 140 acres of rangeland in Pozo, 30 miles to the southeast.

Most of Southern California’s grain comes from huge farms in the Midwest, but historically it was an important crop in California, and even today more than half a million acres of wheat are grown in the state. Hardly anyone sells grain at Southern California farmers markets, but Nauta has planted 10 acres of wheat and barley, which will be ready for harvest in about two weeks. Some may go to feed his livestock, but he will probably take some wheat, threshed whole grain ready to be ground into flour, to sell at farmers markets, he says.

Given the endless hard work and modest returns, would Nauta make the same choice to be a farmer if he were a young man? He takes a moment to ponder before replying:

“Yes, because I like being my own boss. Most important, I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity, which so few people have these days, to raise my family on a small farm and teach my boys the value of real work.”

Then it was time for him to get back to laying irrigation tape.

Tip of the week: Shaheen Zekevat will sell Persian mulberries, grown at her family’s celebrated Circle C Ranch in Lake Hughes, at the Hollywood farmers market the next two weeks. The berries come from mature trees, and she picks them herself, perfectly ripe. Get there early; last Sunday she sold out in less than an hour.

food@latimes.com