Wandering around the farm with Cole is a bit like watching a Disney version of Noah’s Ark. Rather than engage in monoculture, the bane of biodiversity, he has at least two of everything, and every animal has a role to play. Pigs stimulate microbial action and aerate the cattle bedding. The 14 dogs he adopted from the pound patrol the property and keep away bears, which can do $100,000 worth of damage in a day if they decide to feast on the peaches and cherries. “They’ll sit down in the middle of the dwarf trees and they’ll just pull one out,” Cole says. “Dogs establish territory and work very effectively.”
When Cole wants a field cleared, he brings in the goats because they will eat whatever the sheep and cattle didn’t take. Several thousand leghorn chickens (the highly productive breed that supplies Sunnyside’s eggs) are carted around in MCUs, or mobile chicken units, to whichever field needs their services. I watch as they are let out of their coops and get to work, eating insects and fertilizing the field with their droppings as they go. A llama with a haircut that has earned him the nickname Mr. Elvis guards the sheep. But unlike Noah’s Ark, Sunnyside has only one llama. “If there were two, they would spend too much time with each other,” Cole says. The cattle do their work after the apples are harvested. “They go in to eat the ones that dropped and rotted. We never pick up anything.”
Cole prides himself on recruiting knowledgeable people who can quickly develop a business. He hired, in addition to his son Bill, horticulturist Brian Cramer; Michael Randolph, a meat merchandiser and chef; and Brian Russ, an expert in animal husbandry.
And his agenda extends well beyond Washington, Virginia. He wants, he says, to show that organic farming can provide jobs, nurture the earth, and save the world, all while making a profit. “The underlying market is robust, with many Americans looking for higher-quality foods,” claims Cole. That’s why he bought and streamlined Walnut Acres last year. Indeed, the moment may be right for someone like Cole, with his access to capital and his commitment to organic principles. The industry numbers bear him out: According to the Organic Trade Association, sales of organic foods are increasing by about 20 percent a year, eclipsing growth rates elsewhere in the food business.
To meet this growing demand for organic food, he is also trying to make his farm a center for information sharing. Cole has paid for his employees and outside consultants to help neighboring traditional farmers make the shift toward organic farming. Just last year, he says, 800 acres in the region were added to the rolls of organic farms because of technical assistance from Sunnyside.
That kind of investment is desperately needed. Taxpayers have invested billions in research through federally funded agricultural colleges, but nearly all of the money has gone to studies on chemical-based agriculture. According to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, only .02 percent of the acreage tilled by these colleges is devoted to research into organic agriculture.
Private resources are also scarce. A 1998 study by the same group surveyed organic farmers and found that nearly half had gross incomes from farming of less than $15,000.
The purchase of Walnut Acres, now run by Acirca, and Sunnyside has consumed about $14 million of Cole’s own funds. But, he says, Sunnyside’s sales will grow more than 300 percent this year and will double next year: The secret for farmers, he says, is to stay away from crops that become commodities, with intense competition leading to low prices, and to focus instead on products that are more unusual and thus provide healthier profit margins. With this philosophy in place, Cole predicts that Sunnyside will achieve positive cash flow by 2004, Acirca a year earlier.
People who know Cole have their own feelings about his odds for success. Not surprisingly, they all say that his money makes a big difference. “It’s the first time I’ve seen anyone make such a deliberate study of what he was going to do and then apply his wealth to achieve what other people do, step by step,” Katherine DiMatteo tells me. Steven Damato, co-owner of the organic Restaurant Nora, in Washington, D.C., who buys from Sunnyside, says, “What we need are more David Coles. We want him to show it can work.”
Cattle Call
At Sunnyside Farm, David Cole is raising a breed of cattle called Wangus. They are around one-quarter Angus and three-quarters Wagyu cattle, the breed that produces Japan’s much-admired Kobe beef, considered the most tender and flavorful in the world. They are fed an organic diet, are never given antibiotics or hormones, and are allowed to range freely.
In Japan, the treatment of Wagyu cattle is legendary. There are stories of the cattle being massaged with sake (to relieve muscle stiffness) and fed with beer (to stimulate their appetite in the summer). Calm, well-fed cattle, it is said, provide better-quality meat. Cole is devising his own ways of raising the cattle. “We wash the animals on a regular basis,” he says, “to see if the extra attention translates into better beef. They appear happy, but we won’t know the results until later this year.”
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