THE SMITH FAMILY FARMS Bringing Home an East County Harvest With Style and Pizzazz
	OCTOBER 2004

by Janice Smith

My grandparents, who were named Pastors, began farming in Knightsen in the 1920s. Their first products included walnuts, tomatoes, melons, and almonds. They sold their harvests to wholesalers, who put up the produce in the enormous packing sheds that seemed to fill the town of Brentwood from end-to-end in those long-ago years.

My family lived and farmed like that for five decades.

The Fading Light of the Past
The Brentwood of my childhood was a hi-energy fun place to be. Thinking back to those days, I can close my eyes and especially recall the smells. In the springtime the orchards were so full of blossoms that the sweetness hung like perfume in the air. In the late summer when sheds were packing melons 24-hours a day, the golden scent of cantaloupes lay beneath all other odors.

I remember going to my first U-Pick at the George Nunn farm where the Sunset Sports facility is now. After all these years I still clearly recall how big the fruit was! How beautiful! Even at that young age I was filled with admiration at the great crops they had.

I am continually amazed by the development going on all around the East County. Sometimes I feel a little poignant, as well. I look at people planting flowers in front of their nice home and wonder to myself, “Do the people here realize that this used to be the Belford-Gutherie farm?” Or I might think to myself in front of another place, “The family in that house probably doesn’t know that this used to be a beautiful cherry orchard.”

I drive past Safeway and wonder, “Do people remember that the big Garin packing shed used to sit on this site?” My mom worked in that place, and my grandmother before her. Every high school kid worked summers in one of those places.

I’m not against progress in any way, except for some regret about how easily pieces of the rich history of this area seem to get swept away by the changes going on.

The old Brentwood was a great place! I wish people could go back with me in my memories and experience the area as it used to be. So many blossoms would fall off the trees that the ground looked like it was covered with snow. New residents in the area can’t imagine what the old days were like.

A Family of Farmers
My grandparents gave birth to ten offspring. Some of them turned into farmers when they grew older. My mother, in particular, got out in the fields with her folks. My father was a forest ranger until he married mom. After that, he was right out there by mom’s side and became Farmer Smith before too long.

The four of us Smith kids spent a lot of time out in the fields working beside our dad. Back in the ’60s, when I was ten and my older bother, Bill, was 17, we got the idea of starting our own place. My parents gave us some land and we went into business. We started planting and harvesting our own crops, got the bright idea of cutting out the middleman, and opened a fruit stand.

At the beginning our “fruit stand” was a somewhat simple affair, I guess, since it consisted of a tractor and wagon parked in the shade of a large pecan tree in front of my parent’s house. We simply sold our product out of the wagon.

Since the stand was in our front yard, we hung a “Honk your horn for service” sign on the tractor, which delivered us in those early days from the tedium of sitting around watching the often-empty road for customers. We could be in the fields working when we weren’t at the stand selling.

Our little homegrown business started to grow long before we had a name for it. After a decade or so we began to use the stand as a source of money for college. My parents gave us more land, we built an actual road-side fruit stand, and finally named the business Smith Family Farms.

We never intended to be farmers. I wanted to be a teacher, Ken majored in economics, Bill in Law Enforcement, and our Shirley went into International Studies. Even our mom, Betty Smith, had trained to be a professional preschool teacher.

We all eventually worked for a while in our professions, but continued running our farm and fruit stand operation during the summer months. The business grew so large it eventually drew all of us in as a full-time operation.

Now we’re open every single day from May through December.

Achieving Success and Satisfaction
Once we were all doing farm work full-time, we began to expand and to grow more crops and more varieties of crops. Now we are growing almost every kind of fruit and vegetable that our Brentwood soil and climate will support — especially tomatoes.

Running the Smith Farms operation requires an incredible amount of work. Like everything else in life, the business can be aggravating at times, but there’s a lot of satisfaction in this, as well. The best part of the job is working with family and friends. Some customers driving up to our stand have been coming here for more than two decades.

Our farm tends to be a gathering spot. Many of our customers are not just friendly people, but they are close friends.

Smith Farms is a successful endeavor because we learned from the beginning to work long hours for seven days a week. I think this kind of work ethic is difficult to acquire unless a person gets started with it early in life. Except for weddings and funerals, we don’t take a single day off for eight months.

Another reason for our success is that we learned over the years how to support quality. If something is less-than-perfect we don’t put it out — or else we sell it in an honest fashion, perhaps warning a customer, “This isn’t the sweetest today.” As a result, customers trust us.

We stand behind our products. I tell all our employees, “If someone isn’t happy, make it right. Give them another box. Do anything to help them go away satisfied.” That kind of attitude really helps business. People come to depend upon that.

Most important of all, when it comes to quality, our crops are always fresh. We’re out in the field picking things everyday. We have no cold storage or cooler box. I think we’re unique, perhaps, in that regard.

Products that go from the field straight to the shelf have a wonderful quality. It warms my heart sometimes to look over our counter. The stems are fresh in the fruit, the squash still has a shine on it.

Laughter is another important quality in our success. If we didn’t laugh and joke with each other about our problems, they would run us right into the ground. 

Farming can be satisfying at an aesthetic level. Sometimes when I get everything set up at the beginning of the day, I actually feel some regret in opening the stand. There isn’t much in this world that is perfect, but some days, before the first customer arrives, our fruit stand seems to be perfectly wonderful!

Another great part of this job lies in being able to participate in the always-astonishing miracle of growth. I love the experience of seeing the fruits and vegetables we plant develop into healthy and sometimes apparently flawless produce. I can look at a patch of tomatoes, see that the plants are healthy, with no weeds in the field, and the sight will just lift my spirit! It is so rewarding when that kind of excellence happens!

The others feel this too. Occasionally a piece of fruit will seem so beautiful, we will simply set it on the counter and admire it.

We have fun. For years we’ve had an ongoing competition in our family — trying to be the one to spot the first almond blossom, or the first tomato. “I saw the first tomato blossom today.” We laugh a lot together.

Planning to Make Things Come out Right
We really work hard to not be wasteful. We offer leftover produce at reduced prices. We feed some of our leftovers to animals. Mom is canning all the time — whatever she can get hold of.

Our most effective method of reducing waste is through careful upfront planning. Early in the spring we begin to plant things in blocks, planting small areas every week so that months later the harvest begins to develop in stages that reflect the schedule of the planting. We can have tomatoes at Christmas if we are really lucky.

My brother, Ken, is in charge of this, and he does a great job managing this cycles of planting and harvesting so that on many days there is neither too much produce nor too little. As a result, we really don’t throw too much away.

That kind of scheduling also went into the planting of our fruit trees. The trees are set so that various fruits become available at different times. Some varieties of our peaches, for example, are ripe before Memorial Day; other varieties don’t ripen until after Labor Day.  

Even before we plant anything, the Smith Farm requires a lot of planning. We begin making decisions about the next year’s crops in December. We buy seeds and begin starting seeds in the greenhouse not long after the Christmas decorations are cleared away.

We grow everything we sell, except the corn in our stand sometimes comes from Dwelley Farms. Their sweet corn is simply the best! We grow everything else ourselves, however.

Celebrating a Pumpkin Harvest
We begin in the spring to get ready for our October Pumpkin Harvest festivities. We have 20 acres planted in pumpkins and holiday corn. Our pumpkins include all varieties, from baseball size gourds to 200-pound giants. We’ve planted acres of ornamental corn and popcorn.

One holiday experience that some people look forward to is the fun of getting lost in our five-acre corn maze. This provides an annual delight for the young-at-heart of all ages. My 13-year-old son, Nick, helps me design the corn maze every year.

We have a lot of activities every fall at our Pumpkin Harvest, including live music every day, with a band playing in the gazebo on the weekends. We have hayrides, and a little petting zoo, including a corn cracking area, where the kids can actually crack corn and feed it to the chickens themselves.

The corn we use for chicken feed is the same we grow in the maze. We wait until the corn is ripe and then harvest the corn to make the pathways through the maze. That provides the corn the kids can feed the chickens. After the season is over, we harvest the rest of the maze corn and use it to feed our animals for the remainder of the year.

When we were growing up we were all involved in 4-H and the boys were FFA at Liberty High. That experience lead to the animals we have running around in our yard. Our animals are all pets. They are wonderfully friendly, and perfectly accustomed to kids coming to visit.

Our animals love the attention they get during the Pumpkin Harvest. Children who visit our farm also love the animals, of course. Some of those little children, I’m sure, will never forget the first time they touched a donkey — or fed a handful of corn to a big proud rooster!

During the fall Pumpkin Harvest days we produce a daily barn show, including musicians playing banjos, fiddles, buckets, spoons — all the things that would be used a hundred years ago to make music at a hoedown. The show is geared for children and they are encouraged to participate if they wish. The activity is designed to provide lessons about history and the old days.

We also have a mural of Mt. Diablo and a Miwok Indian display showing the dwellings they lived in. We hired an expert to show us how the Indians would have used tullies, grapevines, and willows in their ancient construction methods. My dad also read every book he could get his hands on about the subject. 

Schools come here on field trips and we give them short lessons about the area and about the life of the Miwoks who lived here before us. We like to provide a sense of the history of the area. Our family came here in the 1900s, but there were people here before us. We like to show respect for all of our history.

The day after Thanksgiving we open a Christmas tree lot, which we run until Christmas Eve. Children can visit with Santa while their folks are picking out a tree.

Pulling Together to Get the Job Done
This is a family business and we all work together to run the operation. We somehow missed the traditional farmwife thing because we are all doing the work together. We have help from everybody. My parents, who are in their 70s and 80s, still work with us every day.

Shirley does deliveries and also manages our Christmas tree lot. Kathy and Cousin Robin manage the farmers markets. Now that the Brentwood Farmers Market is open on Thursdays, we show up at six of these every week. Neighbors and friends support us during the busiest times.

Ken takes care of the scheduling and growing. Bill takes care of the farmyard, and is in charge of scheduling and conducting the fall and spring tours.

I take care of shipping, sales, and the stand itself. We do a lot of shipping to area restaurants and markets. One of the main products we ship is tomatoes, and we do this from July through November.

The survival of all the fruit stands in this area depends upon local support. I don’t know if everyone realizes how important this is. Any time you pick a peach off of a tree in one of the area’s remaining orchards or buy a tomato from one of the local stands, you are casting a vote in favor of the survival of our wonderful way of life.

We’re carrying into the future a little of the best of what Brentwood used to be in the past. Some of our most loyal customers are people who used to be farmers themselves. They remember the old days and visit us faithfully as a way of helping us hang on to the remnants of that wonderful life.

There is a wonderful sense of partnership and mutual support among all of us running the area’s fruit stands. We help each other. We don’t compete with each other. We all belong to an association, called Harvest Time in Brentwood, that does a great job with advertising.

Many people moving to Brentwood, and some who have lived here for years, are surprised to find out about all the farms and stands in the area. “We had no idea,” is a comment we hear a lot. Harvest Time helps people learn that we are here.

It feels great to be part of something that’s been so good for so long. We’re all planning to keep working at Smiths Family Farm until we drop.

I am glad that my son, Nick seems to be developing a farmer’s attitude about things and likes coming to work these days. Nick is the only grandson. I don’t try to push him into anything. It is important that he does with his life whatever he chooses to do. It would be nice, of course, if he chose to pick up the Smith Family Farm’s bucket after we drop it.

After all, my family has only been doing this for seven decades; another century or so of providing wonderful fruit and vegetables for East County appetites is a great thing to contemplate!

You can contact the Smith Family Farm at 925-625-5966, 925-625-3544, or www.smithfamilyfarm.com.