María Inés Catalán: Catalán Family Farm

Urban Farm DB summary

María Inés Catalán was born in Santa Teresa, Guerrero, Mexico, in 1962, immigrated to the United States in 1986, and picked broccoli and carrots in California's Salinas Valley; her father was also a migrant farm worker, while her grandfather had farmed his own land in Mexico. In 1994 she entered an organic farming training program at the Rural Development Center in Salinas (an earlier incarnation of ALBA, the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association), after which she became the first Latina migrant farm worker to own and operate a certified organic farm in California and the first Latina in the country to found a farm distributing produce through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Since 2001, Catalán and her family have run Catalán Family Farms on fifteen rented acres in Hollister, California, certified organic by CCOF in 2005, growing kale, chard, strawberries, tomatoes, corn, onions, pumpkins, chiles, and carrots for sale through the Laughing Onion CSA and farmers' markets in the Salinas, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay areas, including the Ferry Plaza Market and the Berkeley Farmers' Market. She is also an activist for food security among low-income communities, especially Latinos, having worked with the group P.O.D.E.R. in San Francisco's Mission district to deliver CSA shares, collaborated with schools, churches, and the Homeless Garden Project's CSA in Santa Cruz to deliver boxes to home-bound residents, provided CSA information in Spanish, and set up a farm stand outside the Monterey County government office on WIC pickup days. She also founded the nonprofit Pequeños Agricultores en California (PAC) to help immigrant farmers obtain organic certification and apply for grants and loans.