FIELD NOTES
Cultivating the Future An Ojai Biodynamic Farm Comes of Age
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BY LESLIE BAEHR | PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE PLOMARITY
hen Reynolds Fleming and his family bought a 20-acre orchard in Ojai’s East End, few knew a potential “citrus apocalypse“ (so called by the Los Angeles Times) was quietly spreading throughout Southern California. Though he hadn’t worked in citrus before, the undertaking seemed an ideal combination of his aptitudes for science, design, innovation and environmentalism. Fleming didn’t just want to do farming. He wanted to understand it, to quantify it, to make it better and eventually to teach it. “[I was] really interested in Buckminster Fuller, in Frank Lloyd Wright—the kind of people who were doing what people had always done, but with an ecological sensitivity,” he says.
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spring 2020
When Reynolds arrived at their new 120-year-old property in 2015 (along with his sister Severine, a farmer-activist who helped found the operation), much of the soil was poor, the ecosystems lacked biodiversity, and the trees were dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. To achieve his goals, Reynolds would need to grow more than just food. He needed to grow a prototype, something that could demonstrate how “the imperatives of an agricultural system” could be realigned with those of “the natural systems that envelope it.” He needed an organic biodynamic farm. Put crudely, biodynamic farming ups the ante on organic, transforming the land from a mere orchard to more of an ecosystem (or self-sustaining “organism,” as biodynamic certifying agency
Edible Ojai & Ventura County
