David C. Cole doesn’t exactly fit the mellow stereotype of an organic farmer. It’s hard, when I first meet him, to accept that this high-intensity multimillionaire has been flourishing in the worlds of both high technology and free-range poultry. It’s equally difficult to believe that Cole, who could pass as a suburbanite out for a day’s antiquing, embodies the first major change to hit organic farming in two decades. Call it the greening of the organic movement. Greening with money, that is. Lots of it.
The time when “organic” meant “alternative” is fast disappearing in this country. With federal guidelines for use of the term now established, agribusiness companies are moving into the field. Cleaving to the letter of the law, they are intent on widening and taking over a market that has traditionally been the province of smaller farmers interested in reforming the very way agriculture is conducted.
Some people in the “organic community” consider Cole, the AOL mogul turned organic farmer, part of this effort to co-opt organics and to turn a movement into nothing more than a marketing tool. But it may just be that Cole represents the “third way.” A strange amalgam of venture capitalist and committed environmentalist, he doesn’t think big is bad. He believes that organic farming can go mainstream without abandoning its original principles. Or at least that’s what he says.
Cole talks the talk on organic food. He cares about biodiversity, and he knows the damage that monocropping does to the earth. He was on the board of the Nature Conservancy for more than a decade. He makes his breakfast omelets with organic eggs and soy cheese.
But in other important ways, Cole is nothing like the organic farmers who have been toiling away on small plots of land for the past few decades. For one, he is very rich, with money made in the communications and publishing businesses. When he wanted to become a farmer, he bought a family farm in Virginia and sank millions of dollars into rehabilitating it and planting hundreds of varieties of new fruits and vegetables.
Unlike many rich farmers, however, who have turned to the natural world after subduing the unnatural one, Cole is no hobbyist. He is a capitalist in the most conventional sense. He takes risks, he has capital to put behind his vision, and he is not sentimental: If something isn’t making money or isn’t efficient, he won’t keep it going.
So, after establishing his new farm, he wanted to acquire a vehicle for expansion into packaged organic goods. In 1999, he bought a majority interest in Walnut Acres, a venerable family business in Penns Creek, Pennsylvania, that was one of the nation’s best-known purveyors of organic foods.
In the beginning, there was talk of Cole’s company forming a partnership with the founding family, but that didn’t work out. Finding that the existing operation didn’t suit his needs, Cole bought the rest of the company a year later, then basically closed it, keeping only the brand name.
He shut the factory because it struck him as antiquated and too remote, and he threw out nearly all of the company’s 1,500 products (many of which were not organic). Now, the brand name, Walnut Acres, is the cornerstone for his new company, Acirca. The plan is to develop organic products for supermarket distribution, and to that end he has attracted venture capital.
Gutting Walnut Acres entailed laying off about 100 people, which had a big impact on a small town. None of the previous owners or top executives are allowed to talk about Cole; because of an agreement they signed when he invested, they risk lawsuits if they say anything about what happened at the company. But in organic circles, Cole is known as a man who trashed a struggling but beloved company, a pioneer in the nation’s organic foods business.
“It is something people are talking about inside the industry,” says Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association. “It puts him a little on the outside. He has not engaged himself.”
Cole is the kind of guy who makes your head spin because of the apparent contradictions in his worldview. He talks about wanting to create jobs for indigenous people in their native spheres, and yet he put people out of work in a small rural town with few other industries. He talks about wanting to create a vital center for organic farming at his farm in Virginia, and yet his actions led to the destruction of just such a place in Penns Creek. And his entire foray into the world of organic farming began because he was a vegetarian who had just had his first taste of beef in more than ten years.
Cole had been invited to the annual dinner given by The Herbfarm restaurant, outside of Seattle. One course was Kobe beef. Tempted by the smell, he took a bite and was immediately smitten with its flavor and texture. He also recognized an unexploited market niche. That night, he swore he would develop this Japanese delicacy for the American consumer.
The production of specialty meat might seem as out of place in the organic movement as venture capital, but the decision to produce Kobe beef was a catalyst for Cole’s 1995 purchase of Sunnyside Farm, a 425-acre property in Washington, Virginia, a village in the Blue Ridge Mountains that is known mainly for its fine restaurant, The Inn at Little Washington. Cole added 125 acres to the farm, installed his eldest son, Bill, also a former AOL executive, as the day-to-day manager, and began growing organic produce on a grand scale, as well as raising a 700-head herd of beef cattle. Although everything Sunnyside produces is important, it may be Cole’s beef that sets him apart from the competition.
People say, ‘I hear you’re doing a lot of secret things over there,’ and I say, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you,’” Cole says, laughing at his trickster side. Dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, he is showing me around the hilly terrain of Sunnyside Farm, which, when he purchased it, was a distressed landscape, its soil depleted of nutrients by chemicals and monocultural practices.
He re-created the farm and got organic certification in just three years, a very expensive proposition. He removed thousands of old, sick trees and in their place put in new plants. He developed an irrigation system of ponds, wells, and water capture channels. Currently, the farm sells eggs, pork, beef, 50 varieties of tomatoes, 12 of eggplants, 25 of sweet peppers, 20 of hot peppers, 17 of potatoes, and 20 of lettuce, along with apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries, many of them heirloom varieties. And it continues to expand; last year, 5,000 peach and cherry trees were planted. The farm’s produce is sold at its market in the village and the farmers market at Dupont Circle, in Washington, D.C., as well as to restaurants and to some Fresh Fields stores.
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.”