Peace, Love and Pie : Pie Ranch
Pie Ranch Stewardship and Fresh Offerings Satisfy Hungry Hearts and Happy Taste Buds.
“Slow for pie”
Not just their own ingredients as in their own berries, but their own ingredients down to the butter and cream from their cows and their own heritage wheat milled into flour.
While the pie is amazing and the farm itself actually looks like two slices of pie when viewed from the air, it turns out that Pie Ranch is about so much more than pie. They’re about providing support for the community, stewardship of land, understanding of food and honoring the past while creating a more sustainable future.
The farm is on one of the most scenic stretches of coastline in the country. It’s not just beautiful, though: A big part of what co-owners Nancy Vail and her husband, Jered Lawson, value about it is the proximity to urban areas. Its location makes an easy day trip from surrounding cities but is far enough away you feel like you’re in a different world. Each year, 50,000 people interact with Pie Ranch in some way, from simply stopping for a slice of pie on a road trip to coming to plant and harvest food.
Feed Your Mind and Appetite
Being focused on community, Pie Ranch teams up with local producers to also offer products like jams from Farm Chic Orchard and lip balms and salves from Steadfast Herbs. And there’s honey, soaps, salts and seasonings along with an interesting assortment of books to feed to your mind.
From the titles of some of these books, you can start to tell what it is that Pie Ranch is about beyond really good local produce: Feed the Resistance Recipes: Ideas for Getting Involved, Farming While Black, Letters to a Young Farmer, Dawn Again: Tracking the Wisdom of the Wild and Farmsteads of the California Coast.
Partners in Pie
One of their ongoing projects has been building relationships with local schools. The first school partnership was in 2005, offering an in-depth farm experience for students to experience every aspect of food production from planting to harvest. Depending on the school and the partnership level, sometimes there are overnight visits with a group of students, sometimes it’s just a one-off field trip for a classroom, but all the time there is a focus for the students to cultivate love, care and awareness for the land and food.
Jered explains it like this: “You have to experience something to know it. You have to know it to love it. And you have to love it to want to take care of it.” Pie Ranch is there to help that next generation take responsibility for the sustainability of our world.
They also have a series of apprenticeships and internships that give up-and-coming farmers an opportunity to learn and get practical experience. Apprenticeships helped spark Nancy and Jered’s own passion for sustainability and farming, having both completed the Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture at UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.
The People’s Pie
Jered and Nancy are acutely aware that they’re living and working on land that once was the long-term home to Native Americans. Close to the main entrance to the farm is the Amah Mutsun Native Garden. It’s divided into four sections: grassland foods, health plants, nuts and berries and crafting plants, and has a model of a tule hut, a traditional Native house.
In 2014, Pie Ranch partnered with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to create an ongoing relationship between tribe members and the public. The garden helps to shine light on the history of the Mutsun people and traditional foods and other cultural plants, and their efforts to share knowledge with tribe members and allies. Jered and Nancy don’t gloss over or ignore the damage caused by colonial history; their goal is to give everyone a chance to move forward.
A walk through the native garden is well worth the time to take a moment to reflect and learn.
Tour de Pie
Look for the chicken coop, it’s on wheels (!), making it easy to move the chickens to whichever part of the farm needs some extra fertilizer. Chicken poop is a great source of nitrogen and other nutrients that plants need. This helps eliminate having to use synthetic chemicals to keep the soil healthy.
If you want to take a more active role at Pie Ranch, on the third Saturday of each month there’s a workday at 1pm and a tour at 3pm. And what happens after the workday is done? A barn dance, of course! And there’s a potluck to keep you going. You don’t actually have to go to the work part of the day to come and enjoy the barn dance, though you will need to register for it online.
Held in the farm stand, the barn dance features music by County Line Pickers and square dancing. If you’ve never square danced before, don’t worry; there’s a caller there to let you know what move comes next. It’s yet another aspect of Pie Ranch that’s about community, support and love.
Peace of Pie
The Pie Ranch folks are creating a unique product with their own types of ingredients, values and passions: The work they do raises everyone up in the community, honors history while creating a better future, and promotes sustainable growth through their food, produce and people. Plus, they’ve got really good pie.
