Author: Lindsey Pratt

Paul Muller & Dru Rivers

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Full belly farm owners

Full Belly Farm is a 400-acre certified organic farm located in the beautiful Capay Valley of Northern California, north of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area. Full Belly has been farmed using organic practices since 1985 and is certified by California Certified Organic Farmers.

The farm owners are Andrew Brait, Judith Redmond, Paul Muller, Dru Rivers, Jenna Muller, and Amon Muller. With help from about 80 employees, the farm produces an amazing diversity of vegetables, herbs, nuts, flowers, and fruits year-round. The farm also has a flock of chickens and sheep, a tribe of goats, and several cows.

Full Belly’s system includes: growing and marketing over 80 different crops; providing year-round employment for farm labor; using cover crops that fix nitrogen and provide organic matter for the soil; selling produce within a 120-mile radius of the farm; and planting habitat areas for beneficial insects and wildlife. One of the farm’s goals is to integrate farm production with longer-term environmental stewardship.

Full Belly products are marketed both wholesale and retail to restaurants, at farmers markets and through a Community Supported Agriculture project, or CSA.

Full Belly is home to many outreach activities, including educational tours, school group visits, and the much-acclaimed annual Hoes Down Harvest Festival that celebrates rural life and sustainable food production.

Temra Costa

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Temra Costa is an author and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA.

Temra Costa is a nationally recognized sustainable food and farming advocate. Her book, Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat, is the product of the 10+ years she has spent engaging eaters, farmers, and food businesses in the local food movement.

In 1998, while studying Horticulture at UW Madison, Temra joined the Center for Food Safety’s efforts to protect the integrity of organic standards when USDA was forming the National Organic Program. Upon graduation she moved to Davis, California to work with CAFF as Sacramento Valley Food Systems Coordinator. During this time, she worked to augment their Farm-to-School program and helped launch Capay Valley Grown, a place-based marketing initiative created to support and market food products from the Capay Valley. Shea also started a radio program called Local Dirt on U.C. Davis’s KDVS radio station. In 2010 she hosted another radio show with filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia on San Francisco’s Green 960 called “The Queens of Green,” that also highlighted food and farming topics and guests.

In 2004 Temra implemented the Sacramento Valley Buy Fresh Buy Local (BFBL) campaign, and in 2006 moved to Oakland to open CAFF’s first urban office. It was here that she would help launch the Bay Area BFBL campaign before becoming the program’s statewide director. During the six and a half years that Temra spent working with CAFF she was “literally surrounded by women” working to change the food system for the better, but found that their inspiring stories of success were oftentimes not told. Hence, “Farmer Jane” was written to bring the stories of exceptional changemakers to light.

Temra travels frequently to speak about sustainable food and farming at numerous conferences, events and universities throughout the year. During these travels she collects new stories and continues to highlight women in the food movement on her website, FarmerJane.org. She presently lives in Oakland with her husband where she writes and serves on the Advisory Council of City Slicker Farms. In her spare time she helps out on her family’s 40-acre subsistence farm in Sonoma County.