The Seeds of Change

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The California poppies have yet to unfurl their petals, rolled up tight against the morning chill as 10 of us gather around a brick-paved circle at Soil Born Farms in Rancho Cordova, rubbing our hands together and hopping foot to foot. For an hour, we stretch and reach, performing a series of vigorous sun salutations until our blood is flowing and the day has begun.

As yoga class ends, the poppies have all sighed open under the warming sun, and the farm—open to the public from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays—is already filling with human activity: Athleisure-clad parents push strollers, while toddlers in colorful Hanna Andersson rompers careen around raised beds brimming with herbs and bunches of red and green chard. Couples walk hand in hand beside rows of native trees, accompanied by darting hummingbirds, trilling warblers and the occasional colorful garter snake. Old friends catch up over brunch at Phoebe’s Tea & Snack Bar, the outdoor cafe named after the farm’s first cow, herself named in honor of East Sacramento’s Phoebe A. Hearst Elementary School after its students raised money to buy her. Meanwhile local seniors, arriving with walking sticks or on bikes (the American River Parkway runs by the farm), fill their cooler bags with produce from the farmstand and rustic organic bread and local oil, vinegar and honey from Milly’s Mercantile, named after Soil Born’s first pig and housed in a rustic-chic shack, the kind you’d find in Napa.

Every one of these visitors wears the same expression: a look of pure, relaxed, in-the-moment joy. Even Soil Born’s co-director, Janet Whalen Zeller, is beaming as she finds me at Phoebe’s, where I’m savoring a bowl of asparagus soup and a salad of greens still aglow from the sun that grew them. Zeller, stopping for a brief hello on a busy day, is carrying a bag of presents for a children’s birthday party, which she’ll swoop by on her way to a celebration of life—the party is for a staffer’s 5-year-old twins, and the remembrance event is for the beloved late husband of a board member. As Soil Born’s other co-director, Shawn Harrison, will tell me later, these types of whole-life-cycle moments are part of the farm’s human “ecosystem.”

Soil Born founders and directors Janet Zeller and Shawn Harrison, photographed at their Rancho Cordova farm on May 24, share a passion for better living through agricultural innovation.

Zeller slips me a delicious fruit cobbler bar made from farm-grown plums, then dashes off to continue her farm-family rounds. Walking back to my car, past the smiling faces of the farm’s guests, my spirits are wafting 10 feet above the ground. After performing all those sun salutations, inhaling all those healthy terpenes emanating from the biomass all around me, and consuming that vibrant dose of phytonutrients, I feel like the healthiest version of me. I’m familiar with this feeling, but in solitude on a hiking trail—it’s a feeling I’ve previously discovered only after staging a deliberate escape from society, away from the city and the madding crowd.

Here on one of California’s largest urban farms, 55 acres in busy Rancho Cordova—there is, astonishingly, a mini mall with a Planet Fitness and a Starbucks just a mile from here—I see the way city life could be, as Sacramento urbanites from all walks of life meet and mingle in harmony with nature and each other. As the famous Japanese philosopher-farmer Masanobu Fukuoka wrote in his 1975 manifesto, The One-Straw Revolution, “The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” That idealized, holistic vision of agrarian self-actualization is what Soil Born Farms—our region’s grand experiment in nonprofit urban agriculture currently celebrating its 25th anniversary—is all about.

I am not alone in these observations. In 2023, California’s first family—Gavin Newsom, Jennifer Siebel Newsom and their four children—spent Earth Day in denim and work gloves, pitching in to clean up the farm’s creek bed in order to highlight one of Siebel Newsom’s passion projects, the state’s Farm to School program, before sitting down to a meal curated by celebrity chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame who founded The Edible Schoolyard Project, which promotes nutrition education through measures like building school vegetable gardens. “I almost cried,” recalls Waters. “That kind of effort from the community is so valuable to our farmers. They need all of our support. People who take care of the land and are about nourishment and beauty are so important for our future. I really believe that.”

First partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom (third from left)—pictured with Gov. Gavin Newsom (far right), Chez Panisse chef-owner Alice Waters (second from left) and fellow attendees—hosted an Earth Day celebration at the farm in 2023. (Photo by Chase Daley, courtesy of Soil Born Farms and the First Partner’s Office)

That schoolyards and farm yards go hand in hand is also Siebel Newsom’s conviction. “It is inspiring to see Soil Born help build a more sustainable food system that is focused on the health of people and the planet,” says Siebel Newsom in an email. “What I love about this work too is the experiential learning component—through its Growing Together [School Garden] Initiative, Soil Born Farms is helping our youth get outdoors, cultivate a love of healthy foods, and become the next generation of environmental stewards.”

To her point, nearly half the state’s schoolchildren now have access to farm-grown foods in their school lunches, and around 40,000 of them are fed by Soil Born, either from the farm itself or the dozen school farms established under its tutelage. “I hope they can show the rest of the nation that as California goes, so goes the nation,” she adds.

Many small, independent farms are generational enterprises, young people inheriting the trade from their elders. But Soil Born Farms didn’t originate in the traditional way. It was started by two idealistic young men in their 20s, Shawn Harrison and Marco Franciosa (shortly to be joined by Zeller), who approached the project with the same spirit and swagger that young people in the 1960s and ’70s might have displayed when starting a rock band. They were setting out to be revolutionaries, to change the world with their creativity and optimism.

In 1997, Harrison met Franciosa during a graduate apprenticeship program at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems. The two became friends, bonding over a shared and growing passion for the art and science of revolutionary farming practices.

When Harrison, who was born in Rancho Cordova and raised in Carmichael, returned to the region to enroll in UC Davis’ master’s program in international agricultural development, he looked around and saw the opportunity to put what he had learned into practice locally and enlisted Franciosa’s partnership.

“Big picture, we wanted to put the concept of a health-promoting food system front and center, for our urban spaces in particular,” Harrison says. “That should be one of the biggest conversations that we’re having: How do we continue to feed ourselves in a sustainable way, and be good stewards of that ecosystem over time?”

The answer that came to them was, “Let’s put a farm in the city.”

Starting an organic farm in the middle of a metro area was a deliberately bold statement. At the time, many people’s idea of environmental activism was pinned to controversial radicals like Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, and while Harrison pointedly eschews those early radical voices’ sometimes destructive methods of protest, he appreciated the urgency of environmental action. “There was a little bit of that warrior energy,” Harrison says of the spirit behind the farm’s launch, “like, ‘Let’s do this differently, and do it unapologetically.’ ”

Harrison and Franciosa began looking for the perfect plot of land, and in 1999, they found a vacant 3-acre lot on Hurley Way in Arden-Arcade, wedged between a school and a retirement home, that looked perfect for a world-changing experiment in urban agriculture—education was already a mission, so proximity to a school seemed fated. They slipped a handwritten note into the property owner’s mailbox, offering to pay her in “free vegetables” if she’d let them farm the land. Incredibly, the owner agreed, and the pair started their new farm in 2000, signing a lease for $1 per year—plus the gratis produce. At the time, regional agriculture was mostly on an “agribusiness” scale, and largely for export. No one had used the word “locavore.”

The two upstarts called their new enterprise Soil Born Farm, and Franciosa penned a theme song. “Born from the soil and raised with love,” goes the catchy first verse, sung to a hippie-ish guitar strum. “I wear a big hat but don’t wear no gloves. … Soil Born is where it’s at.”

Teenagers pick purple kohlrabi in May 2025. The farm serves as both a field-trip destination and a youth job training program, aiming to instill appreciation for the soil in future farmers and future eaters alike.

Winters-based organic walnut farmer Craig McNamara remembers meeting Harrison in the years leading up to Soil Born’s creation, just as he was working to launch his own nonprofit, the Center for Land Based Learning, whose own mission is “to inspire, educate, and cultivate future generations of farmers, agricultural leaders and natural resource stewards.”

“I was so excited that I had a fellow traveler committed to this endeavor,” McNamara says. “We both embraced farming as a career early on in our lives. I think we both saw the need to engage the greater community, to help guide it towards a goal of sustainability, organics, and now regenerative agriculture. Shawn and his team are the apex of all that.”

“Shawn was an early adopter of farm-to-fork, really helping, as the restaurateurs have done, to make Sacramento the farm-to-fork capital of the nation,” McNamara continues, pointing out that while agriculture has always been the heartbeat of our region, “it went largely unrecognized, and now it’s front and center—and Shawn is a leader of that movement.”

READ MORE: A Winters Tale – Craig McNamara and the Center for Land Based Learning

Another person who immediately appreciated Harrison and Franciosa’s early-adopter passion was Janet Whalen Zeller, who met the pair two years into the project, when they took a meeting at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op to explore partnering up for events and community programs—they were already well regarded in the local dining scene, providing fruits and vegetables to places like Mulvaney’s B&L and the now Michelin-starred restaurant The Kitchen.

Zeller, then the co-op’s marketing and education manager, remembers that first meeting vividly. “There was something magical between the three of us I can’t even really explain,” she says. The two parties did decide to collaborate, the start of a long and fruitful partnership that led to the co-op carrying Soil Born’s produce and holding events at the farm. Meanwhile, right after that first meeting, Zeller started dropping by Soil Born after work every week. “We found out early on that each of us carried this same vision, just different parts of it,” she says. In a 2015 StoryCorps oral history recording of Harrison and Zeller interviewing each other, they declared themselves not just business partners but “best friends,” and remain so to this day.

They originally bonded over a shared history of childhood asthma and allergies that led each to see food as medicine, but Zeller’s healing journey was especially intense. At 19, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Even though she was a go-getter, managing a restaurant already, “all my joints were swollen. I could barely hold a hair dryer.” Her doctor told her she should prepare for ending up in a wheelchair in a few years. The news sent her in quite the opposite direction. “I just quit going to the doctors,” she says, “and I started researching. I found a couple books on arthritis related to diet and lifestyle. I immediately gave up white flour, white sugar and alcohol—and I slowly started getting better. That set me off on a healing journey as far as food.” Today she doubts the accuracy of that original diagnosis, but not the efficacy of her bootstrapped approach to taking charge of her own health, which led to her job at the co-op.

One day at a farm conference in 1993—Zeller used to represent the co-op at events, making presentations on topics like “Going All Organic in Your Produce Department”—she slipped into the back row of a panel discussion where Alice Waters was talking about the beginnings of what would soon become The Edible Schoolyard Project, whose aim is to teach schools to grow healthy produce to nourish young brains and bodies. “Alice was talking, and I remember sitting there and feeling tears,” Zeller says, “Not sad tears, but coming up from my feet all the way up into my heart. And I just started bawling like a baby—I couldn’t stop. I was so embarrassed.” Zeller came away determined to help bring more school gardens to Sacramento—there were only a handful in town at the time. That’s why she was so drawn to Soil Born’s mission to tackle both health and education.

Little did she know that decades later, she’d be hosting Waters at Soil Born Farms—and on that occasion, Waters would also find herself moved in turn, not realizing that she helped inspire this virtuous cycle of giving. It’s a process that can only be described as organic.

An aerial view of Soil Born Farms shows the historic property’s ideal location, nestled along the American River in Rancho Cordova. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes)

Zeller brought her skills in marketing and outreach to the mix and a passion for the health aspects of organic farming. Meanwhile, Franciosa wore the farmer’s hat (literally and figuratively) day in and day out, and Harrison held up the environmental consciousness pillar, in addition to farming, teaching classes and leading tours, which he still does.

All those synergistic skills came together magically in 2003 as Soil Born hosted what is considered the region’s first annual farm-to-fork event, the Autumn Equinox, with chef customers like Randall Selland and The Waterboy’s Rick Mahan contributing nibbles. It was in some ways a precursor to the annual Tower Bridge Dinner that now anchors the yearly Farm-to-Fork Festival.

A year later, Soil Born became a registered nonprofit organization, and it soon became clear that the operation was outgrowing its Arden-Arcade footprint. “It had all the ingredients of a really dynamic farm and education center,” Harrison says, “but it was only 3 acres, and it was on land that was privately owned. So we started looking for a place that could be our heartbeat.” 

Volunteers plant sunflowers in the spring, learning regenerative agricultural practices they’ll take home to their own farms and gardens across the region.

Serendipitously, the group learned that Sacramento County was trying to decide what to do with a historic property it owned in Rancho Cordova, the American River Ranch. Consisting of 300 total acres along the American, this land had once been farmed by the Nisenan tribe for thousands of years and was whittled down over time, with some acreage going to River Bend Park (formerly Goethe Park), some to create Hagan Community Park, some to bike paths leading to the Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail. As an agricultural property, the land had most recently operated as a leased pear farm, but by the time it came to Soil Born’s attention, it lay fallow and unused.

Striking a temporary deal at first, Soil Born added an “s” to its name, becoming Soil Born Farms—for almost a decade, it continued to operate the smaller farm on Hurley Way as well—and began farming a 55-acre parcel at American River Ranch in 2007, while negotiating a lease that would allow it to operate in virtual perpetuity. Their zeitgeist timing was excellent.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan first offered up this now-famous advice in a 2007 New York Times Magazine  essay, the same year little Soil Born Farms planted its first seeds at American River Ranch. 

Interest in organics and urban farming was by then on the rise. Harrison’s good friend Patrick Mulvaney, chef-owner of midtown’s Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant Mulvaney’s B&L, remembers some of the first conversations between local chefs, farmers and civic leaders. One such discussion took place at a picnic table at American River Ranch not long after Soil Born settled into its new home. He recalls sitting with Harrison, John Bays (then soon-to-be executive chef for the Sacramento City Unified School District and future co-owner of The Red Rabbit Kitchen & Bar) and Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy (who was at the time about to join the Sacramento County Unified School District Board of Education) brainstorming the future. “We said, ‘We are agriculture, we are food. How do we make the world see what we’re doing? How do we get buy-in?’ ” Mulvaney says. “Now, 20 years in, everybody is paying attention.”

Colorful rustic signage abounds at every turn, encouraging discovery and reflection among both kids and adults.

“It’s the whole approach to community involvement, community programming, the outreach to kids and people of need in low-income areas,” adds Paragary Restaurant Group partner and executive chef Kurt Spataro—who is the Soil Born Farms board president and another founding father of the local farm-to-fork movement. “The whole thing has synergy. That is what farm-to-fork is supposed to be about.” For her part, Alice Waters says of Soil Born, “They understand about making their food available in farmers’ markets and [inviting people] to come to their farm, because you go to a farm and you see what the ingredients taste like and how hard people are working.”

And having a property like American River Ranch has meant that Soil Born is able to fully fulfill their mission. “Because of its scale, scope, permanency and unique location, the scope of our organization has grown,” Harrison says. But while the scope has grown, that mission has remained remarkably consistent. “At one point, we were just trying to figure out, ‘How do we get $1,000 to get a greenhouse?’ ” Zeller says. “Now it’s more like, ‘How do we get $1 million to employ 20 teens and do all our programs?’ It’s the same, just bigger stakes.”

Today, Soil Born Farms feeds thousands of schoolchildren, providing up to 1,000 heads of lettuce to the Sacramento Unified School District’s salad bars per week. The organization’s Growing Together program provides teacher training, curriculum and even seedlings to help schools set up gardens—today there are 12 and counting. Meanwhile the on-site Roots & Wings program offers farm field trips, summer day camps and after-school programs. And, Harrison says, many small farms under 50 acres in the region today use Soil Born’s methods—in large part because the farmers learned them working at the farms as interns.

Franciosa left amicably in 2009 to start a family farm in Oregon, having realized his happiness lay more in farming itself than modeling farming for others. Two years later, Zeller—who had been pulling double duty at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op and Soil Born—retired from the co-op to focus fully on the farm.

Board member Maxine Barish-Wreden, former medical director of Sutter Health’s Institute for Health & Healing, sums up the Soil Born ripple effect neatly. “Remember that quote by Margaret Mead?” she asks. I do. The world-renowned cultural anthropologist had said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

“I think that’s true,” Dr. Barish-Wreden continues. “So never doubt the impact of a small group of people planting seeds and starting a movement in a city. This is not going to come from industry. It’s not going to come from the government. People have to wake up and say, ‘Type 2 diabetes is largely preventable. Maybe it would help if I took control of what comes into my house and what goes into my mouth.’ ”

Thinking back to the bright-eyed teens who served me at Phoebe’s cafe, I can’t help but think that they’re the living embodiment of the miracle that is Soil Born Farms—young people whose first job could easily have involved working the drive-thru at a fast-food joint. Instead, they probably had soil under their fingernails in grade school, and now here they are breathing the fresh farm air while serving whole, healthy foods to smiling families.

In planning for the teen employment program at Phoebe’s, Zeller was inspired by the movie Like Water for Chocolate, in which food magically takes on the emotions of the cook. “The people working in the kitchen love what they do, and they put their love into the food,” she says. “We try to impart that to the teens working there.” Even kids who arrive for work never having eaten a plate of freshly picked vegetables seem to come around. “Gradually they’re tasting them, and then they’re buying them on their break and wanting to take stuff home for their families,” she adds.

Chef Gina Marraccini (right) teaches Joey Campos how to plate a farm-to-fork dish in the kitchen of Phoebe’s cafe, which is mostly staffed by high school students.

Twenty-five years into what promises to be a multigenerational project, Soil Born—which will celebrate its milestone anniversary with a fundraising party at the farm on Sept. 20—has become part of the collective memory for a new generation of Sacramentans, those who learned of it on a fourth-grade field trip. “In Philadelphia, you go to the Liberty Bell,” Mulvaney says. “In Sacramento, you go to Soil Born Farms.”

On a Tuesday in April 2025, the farm in Rancho Cordova is bustling with volunteers and staff, plaid sleeves rolled past elbows, straw hats shielding faces from the spring sun. Harrison, now 53 with salt-and-pepper hair and the posture of someone who has never for a single day sat slumped over a desk, is leading me on a quick tour of the grounds as we wander past berms planted in the organic, regenerative “no-till” method the farm promulgates, where cover crops are allowed to grow, die and compost in situ, enriching the soil far better than ag’s conventional techniques.

“Everything you see was given over to invasive weeds,” he explains. “It was ecologically broken. The soil was not biologically active. The historic creek had been cemented over and filled with shopping carts and graffiti.” Harrison is firmly rooted in this land. At one point in the tour, he pauses and gestures across the American River, pointing out the secret swimming hole he frequented as a boy growing up in Carmichael. “That was my sacred spot,” he says. “So the deep connection with this place, it feels inevitable.”

He guides me toward the acres being cultivated as a demonstration garden and to yield vegetables. “We are not using chemical fertilizers or pesticides or herbicides to control things, we’re trying to actually enliven the ecology of the place, so that there are all these birds and insects,” he says. Habitat is deliberately set aside nearby for aphid-eaters like ladybugs and praying mantis.

Four-year-old Everly Bang-Knudsen, with her mother Alyssa, stops and smells the spring flowers at Soil Born Farms.

We wander past acres of vegetables planted in neat, irrigated rows, and then follow a winding path into a wilder-looking part of the farm, where a newly planted “forest ecosystem” has grown chest-high with thick native greenery and abundant wildflowers. While the thicket appears chaotic, the shrubs, oak saplings and other flora here are carefully designed to provide nesting for the bluebirds and swallows that feast on insects and small rodents. While a conventional farm might deal with gophers by scattering poison, Soil Born simply creates an inviting environment for their natural predators, hawks and owls.

The farm had domestic animals early on in its life, Harrison says, but in 2018, he decided to hit pause in order to get a fresh start and do it bigger and better. To that end, Soil Born’s first new-construction building is an animal barn pavilion, which broke ground in June and is slated to open in March 2026. It will be operated in partnership with Cordova High School’s Agriculture Academy. “The kids will essentially run that pavilion,” Harrison says. “They’ll be able to bring animals off pasture, work with them in the pens, train them, and take them to the State Fair.”

In renderings by Sacramento-based Ellis Architects—whose projects have included renovating the original Paragary’s and co-designing the new midtown music venue Channel 24—the new 3,000-square-foot animal barn pavilion looks daring and modern, with a living roof punctuated by skylights that undulates like the terrain surrounding it. Yet at the same time, the design also feels like something farmers from a thousand years ago would recognize as a barn, with low stone walls, beds and troughs of rough-hewn wood, and simple, functional fencing. It’s quietly timeless and innovative, a description that could apply to Soil Born Farms in general.

A rendering of Soil Born Farms’ new animal barn, which is set to open next spring, shows the use of timeless materials like stone and wood to create a teaching facility that will be run by Cordova High School students. (Rendering by Ellis Architects)

Students will do the rearing and tending, kind of a modern, city-slicker version of the wholesome 4H tradition in which farm kids learn animal husbandry. “The next area that’s going to lift up the future leaders of our community will be this animal program,” Harrison says. “They’ll be getting real, tangible, hands-on skills working with animals, learning about animal integration into the ecosystem, and understanding that. Whether they become farmers or not is irrelevant. If you’re building a truly regenerative farm, animals are an integral component of managing the soil ecosystem, so the intention was there all along, and we’ve been building the animal education ecosystem behind the scenes.”

Phase two of the expansion project, to break ground in 2027 and also designed by Ellis Architects, will be a sleek new farm stand, which will potentially replace the charmingly ramshackle Milly’s Mercantile and Phoebe’s cafe, currently housed in repurposed farm buildings, with a structure designed to function as a permanent, daily retail space—Milly’s, for instance, is set up and broken down every Saturday like a stall at a farmers’ market. Ten years from now, Harrison hopes to see at least a hundred teens employed at the farm in animal husbandry, food production and culinary arts.

If that seems like a long-time horizon, consider that those oak tree saplings we just saw won’t yield acorns for at least another decade, but Harrison fully expects to live—and work—the rest of his days on the farm, where he and his wife Amber have lived since renovating the caretaker’s house in 2015, raising two daughters, now grown and away at college. Coincidentally, Amber had grown up a stone’s throw away in Rancho Cordova—her brothers had even worked as farmhands here when it operated as a pear orchard.

It’s not all poppies, yoga and croissants at Soil Born Farms—there’s a lot of hardcore, hands-in-the-dirt instruction for anyone who cares to engage. On a weekday evening, a dozen amateur gardeners turn up to learn about drip irrigation from education manager Shannon Hardwicke. The class starts with a lecture—Hardwicke has a fully assembled and labeled irrigation system on display, and talks through the various components and scenarios for their use, then leads us on a tour to see examples in action, from raised beds to row crops. At the end, we get to pick up tools and tubing and play with push connectors. I’ve never been a gardener, but I can see that it’s a lot more fun and creative than my abjectly benighted view of crawling around on my hands and knees pulling weeds would make it seem. And I’m clearly the only total neophyte here, to judge by the sophistication of the questions.

The animal barn pavilion’s design includes a viewing platform and climate-friendly features like a living roof for natural cooling. (Rendering by Ellis Architects)

I remember something Harrison said on one of his monthly public regenerative agriculture farm tours, specific to our “ecologically broken” backyards. “Most of the yards in Sacramento are basically full of shrubs that have no habitat value at all, no ecological role to play,” he said. “I’m accentuating this point, because even if you only have a small garden for these types of native plants, it starts to create the ecosystem that will lead to supporting more and more diversity of life.”

Restaurateurs. Grocers. Schoolchildren. Farmers. Gardeners. Soil Born Farms has touched so many people in Sacramento that it’s become part of the city’s cultural DNA, but its reach is even greater, with delegations of agriculturists from countries like Germany, the Czech Republic and South Korea scheduling farm tours in hopes of taking home a few seeds of change for their own urban gardens. 

Meanwhile, Soil Born Farms carries on, season after season, at the speed of life. “We’ve made big moves in 25 years,” Harrison says. “And we’re just getting going.”