produce growers in five core areas: food safety, labor, water, business development, and health/nutrition. In addition to his involvement in CFVGA, Sakata also advocates for farmers through his involvement on local boards such as Colorado’s Water Quality Control Commission, Colorado Ag Water Alliance, Colorado Water Congress, Interbasin Compact Committee, Adams County Farm Bureau and Colorado Farm Bureau. He regularly travels to Washington, DC, with Western Growers and other ag organizations to share his experience as a farmer with legislators. “When it comes to topics that directly affect farmers like water or immigration reform, if we aren’t involved and not voicing our needs, who knows what else we would be losing. We need to be at the table, not on the table.” A.G. Kawamura: Eradicating Hunger Through Urban Farming As a progressive urban farmer who has dedicated his life to ending hunger, A.G. Kawamura believes that domestic food security is more than a national movement; it is a common- sense philosophy. Kawamura, an owner/partner of Orange County Produce, has a lifetime of experience working within the shrinking rural and urban boundaries of Southern California and has made it a goal to discover and implement innovative methods to address food insecurity through urban agriculture. This includes working with edible landscapes to experiment with different ways of production, as well as farming on undeveloped land such as parking lots, rooftops, open space under power lines, and between runways on an abandoned military base. “People talk about being an urban farmer as if it’s something completely different than being a rural farmer, but the truth is that both are dealing with taking the land and transforming it so it can produce product for you,” said Kawamura in a recent Western Growers Instagram Takeover. “The biggest difference between urban and rural is that you have to look for your pockets of land in an urban area because there’s not a lot of it left.” In 2011, Kawamura founded Solutions for Urban Agriculture, a nonprofit that strategically repurposes urban properties for the sustainable production of farm products—all in an effort to recover food to help those in need and ensure food security. Solutions for Urban Agriculture offers educational programming for creative management of resources and implements innovative projects that bolster resiliency within the food system. Through his nonprofit and farm, he is engaged in building a Farm and Food Lab at the OC Great Park in Irvine, Calif., to promote food production in urban settings. Average citizens can visit the Farm and Food Lab to learn how to transform their backyard (or even front porch!) into a cornucopia of fruit and vegetable production. “The opportunity to farm in an urban area exists all over the planet and not just here in Orange County,” said Kawamura. “We’ve been able to show that there are a lot of properties that are going to stay open and available if there is a willing landowner and, more importantly, a willing farmer that might want to put it into play.” Vic Smith: Championing Technology to Create Advancement JVSmith Companies President/CEO Vic Smith has a long track record as an advocate for innovation and technology within the specialty crop industry. As an early adopter of agtech, Smith has pushed agriculture to embrace technology as a solution to the industry’s most pressing issues, such as food safety and labor.
A.G. Kawamura transforms unconventional urban areas into regions rich with fresh produce.
He played an integral role in the launch of Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology in 2015 and today continues to support the center as a sponsor. He was among the first to invest in technological solutions coming out of the center and is currently working with several startups to help bring their ideas to market. In fact, Smith now sits on the board of one of the inaugural startups to join the center, iFoodDecisionSciences, where he helps guide the advancement of technology to enhance food safety. Smith was also tapped to participate in the Produce Traceability Initiative to further advocate for supply chain-wide adoption of electronic traceability. In addition to promoting the use of data to improve traceability and farming operations, Smith is a champion of robotics as a solution for the industry’s labor problems. He has worked with the University of Arizona to develop autonomous equipment to help with planting and thinning of vegetable crops and continues to promote automation in the desert growing regions. Ellen Brokaw: Campaigning to Improve the Lives of Farm Workers Ellen Brokaw, president of Brokaw Ranch Company and a prominent member of Ventura County’s agricultural community, has long been an inspirational leader in the campaign to improve the lives of farm workers and their families. She was a founding member of the Ag Futures Alliance Ventura County which, in 2002, produced a report on the dire need for farm worker housing. Two years later, she helped
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JULY | AUGUST 2020
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