The Road from Field to Restaurant Runs
Through Crows Pass
Story and Photos by Candice Woo

Dave and Tina are farmers first, and have been cultivating their parcel of land in the heart of Temecula wine country for almost 19 years, but the last five of those have been spent building a successful farm-torestaurant distribution business, helping make connections between local family farms like theirs and locally and seasonally minded chefs.

On a sunny late October morning, I meet Dave in a parking lot just off I-15 in Temecula and hop into his pickup for a day of meeting the local farmers who are part of his small distribution system. As we bump along the roads winding up the lush hillside above Fallbrook to Cunningham Organics, Dave tells me about his own family’s history and how he moved to Temecula in his teens, when his parents bought 70 acres to grow grapes for local wineries. His mother, brother and his own immediate family still live in houses on the family’s current 40-acre compound. After getting an agricultural business degree at Cal Poly Pomona and spending a year traveling in New Zealand, Dave came home to do what he had always wanted to do: farm.

While working for the California Avocado Commission, he met George Cunningham. George and his wife, Gale, started their organic fruit farm some 35 years ago, and

now produce so much volume that in addition to local farmers’ markets and grocery stores, they also sell to distributors in the Bay Area and Oregon. A gentleman in every sense of the word, George became a mentor, teaching Dave how to properly build soil and exercise patience by not picking a single thing before it’s ready to harvest. A trained dowser, or “water witch,” George maintains his land with well water and also keeps bees.

The microclimate around the Cunningham farm is semi-tropical, enabling them to grow a dizzying array of fruit: citrus including Meiwa kumquats and Meyer lemons, and exotics like cherimoyas, persimmons and pomegranates. There are even a few banana trees sprinkled about. It feels more like a heavenly fruit forest than the bustling farm it is; I’m so enchanted that I wonder if they’d notice if I snuck back in and pitched a tent amidst the tangerine trees. Most bizarrely beautiful are the Buddha’s hands, multi-fingered citrus that hang heavily from their branches like strange, alien octopi. When George takes Dave and me on a short ride through their avocado grove, the perfume from one of these citrus fruit infuses the air inside the car with its powerful, almost floral, aroma.

From the Cunninghams’, we head down into the Temecula Valley towards Dave’s farm, Crows Pass, located in a prime spot just off the main wine country drag. Close to 20 years ago, the Barnes family switched from growing grapes to growing food, or what Dave calls “fruit and fungus”—cultivated wild mushrooms and Chandler strawberries, which he’s still known for; they’re considered the most delicious, and delicate, of varieties. For 14 years, Dave and his wife, Tina, sold their produce at area farmers’ markets, where they would meet local chefs shopping for themselves or their own restaurants.

Two of their most frequent customers were Michael Stebner and Jack Fisher, founding chefs from the groundbreaking farm-to-table restaurant Region, in Hillcrest. They bought so often that they asked Dave if he would start delivering directly to their restaurant. He did, and slowly word spread to the chef community. When Region regrettably shuttered, many of their chefs moved on to other kitchens and took their love of locally farmed produce, and their relationship with Crows Pass, with them. Weary from their loss of weekends, and with two young boys at home, Dave and Tina eventually quit doing farmers’ markets to focus on their growing farm-to-restaurant program.

When we get to the house, there are voicemail messages left by a few chefs, including Spencer Johnston of The Pearl, who have received an email from Dave with a list of available produce and are placing their orders for the next day’s deliveries. Dave acknowledges that market-driven chefs need to be a little more flexible with their menus than their counterparts who work with large food-service companies, but he and the other experienced farmers have plotted each season carefully, meeting before each planting to make sure that they have a complementary, and fairly comprehensive, assortment.

They harvest, or pick up, everyone’s order just before it gets packed and organized in their garage, which houses a produce cooler, working late into the night and getting up early the next morning. A farmer always has something more to do; in the driveway there’s a bucket of clam and mussel shells, collected from a recent local farm dinner at Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido, that Dave had been crushing into powder to amend his soil.

We set out on a walk through his property. In every direction I see different fields growing different produce. The sunny days and cold nights allow him to grow great-tasting apples, from Fuji, Gala and Granny Smith to a Japanese variety called Sekai Ichi. The last of the season’s squash, including Tahitian squash that looks a bit like Butternut but is even sweeter and thin-skinned, creamy-flesh Delicatas, a favorite of his sons, are still on their vines, nestled in the ground. After they’re harvested, this patch of land will be left to lie fallow for a season before being replanted. Dave stresses that good farming necessitates that you don’t overwork the land, and always put more into it than you take out, whether mulching with wood chips to help save water or adding compost to augment the soil quality.

What seems to give him the most pleasure is growing special items for chefs. We walk by a line of Shishito pepper plants done for Chef Christian Graves of Jsix, and a row of twice-planted Temecula honey onions, an experiment for Whisknladle. He’s even grown hops for Vinnie Cilurzo, now of Russian River Brewing Company, who grew up in a Temecula winemaking family; his first brewery, called the Blind Pig, was located in the Valley. Dave is most excited about his success with the Pakistani mulberry. His collection of trees produces finger-length fruit of such incomparable sweetness that they’ll surely show up in restaurants come next season.

In a sparkling clean converted shed-turned-kitchen, they also operate a growing specialty food business, making mushroom-stuffed filo packages called Mushroom Drops. Though they now use locally grown mushrooms from Mountain Meadow Mushrooms, the idea for the appetizers stemmed from Crows Pass’s farmers’ market days, when Dave came back from a rained-out market with pounds of unsold Portobello mushrooms and needed to find something to do with them. Though he’s definitely a farmer at heart, Dave also has a head for business, a head that’s filled with all kinds of ideas for future farm-related projects, including a produce stand on the property and a restaurant. The long communal table on the back porch of his home has already played host to a number of local guest chefs, who come up to cook for special benefit dinners and vintner events.

By the time we’ve made a loop of the farm, Andrea Peterson has arrived to drop off her portion of tomorrow’s deliveries. A busy grandmother, she’s run her 13-acre farm, Peterson Specialty Produce, just a few miles east of the Oceanside coast near Camp Pendleton, for 20 years. She also operates an inn on the property, the Blue Heron Farm Bed and Breakfast, and cooks meals for her guests from farm-fresh ingredients. Though she delivers her produce to some North County stores and sells at numerous farmers’ markets, she relies on Dave and Crows Pass to extend her reach into restaurants. Her eyes light up when I tell her that her justly famous baby lettuces are on the menus of the best eateries in town. Andrea, along with Crows Pass and Cunningham Organics, has always grown organically; not, as she says, solely for the health of her consumers and clients, but for the long-term health of the workers on her farm.

The next day, I meet up with Dave at Starlite, midway through his weekly Thursday rounds. He’d already delivered to Blind Lady Ale House and North Park’s Ritual Tavern and Sea Rocket Bistro, and was coming from his Gaslamp drop-offs to area restaurants including Stingaree and Quarter Kitchen. His truck is decorated with the logo of Crows Pass Farm, named for the crows that fly over the farm at sunset to roost in neighboring vineyards until daybreak, and with this quote to live by:

“Eat something good tonight.” I help unload the truck and bring in the produce for Starlite’s Chef Marguerite Grifka.

Back outside, I climb up into the truck’s cab and we’re off, on what Dave jokes will be the “grease trap and dumpster tour” of the best restaurants in town. As a frequent diner, I find it fascinating to see the restaurants from a different angle, and witness the rapport Dave has with many of the chefs, who are excited to reach into the bags and boxes for tastes of produce. We stop in at Tender Greens, whose chefs show us the new meat curing section of their walk-in refrigerator and send us off with watermelon lemonades for the road. We swing by JRDN in Pacific Beach, whose chefs save all of their kitchen’s green waste for Dave to take back to the farm; at The Fishery, Chef Paul Arias regularly donates fish waste to the same compost pile. For the rest of the day, I try to carry what I can and keep up with Dave’s pace. The hours are long and the work intense, but the Barneses try to get away for one dinner a month, so they can see how chefs honor and transform their produce and can experience the restaurants from the other side of the kitchen. At one of our final stops in La Jolla, Michelle Coulon Dessertier, we pick up mini-pies made with Andrea Peterson’s perfect raspberries.

Crows Pass recently participated in a green restaurant event in Los Angeles, to which they would like to expand their deliveries, as well as possibly to Las Vegas. When I ask Dave if any of this growth will affect his network of local San Diego farm-to-table restaurants, he explains that he, and his other farm partners, all have much more land that has yet to be planted, and those inviting acres are just waiting for a thoughtful chef ’s special requests.

Crows Pass Farm
39615 Berenda Road
Temecula, CA 92591
951-676-8099
crowspassfarm.com

Candice Woo is an award-winning food and drink writer and regular contributor to Edible San Diego. She authors a weekly food news and restaurant review column in San Diego CityBeat. Candice also she serves as education co-chair on the board of Slow Food Urban San Diego, where she helps to create food enrichment classes and events, advises student Slow Food chapters and works towards bringing better food into local schools. Candice enjoys writing about the stories behind the food on our plates, and is particularly passionate about artisan food and craft beer. To talk food, write to Candice at candicew@gmail.com.