“When we bring kids out here, one of the things I say to them is, ‘Do you know the baby carrots you eat? Those are not baby carrots. Those are carrots chopped up to look like baby carrots. You’ve been lied to your whole lives,’” Mark Tadros says as we walk through the newly planted fields of The Packhouse at Aziz Farms in Thermal. “Do you know that the average carrot travels 4,000 miles before it gets to your grocery store?” he asks. “That’s insane. These kids get to pull a real baby carrot from the ground and eat it. It is an entirely new experience for them. We encourage them to eat the green, leafy part to show it’s edible. We get the chance to empower and educate these kids. We get the chance to make them champions of not only what is produced here in the Coachella Valley but produced throughout the entire state of California and throughout the United States. They get the first-hand opportunity to understand that farms are cool and important.”
Second-generation date farmer Mark and his wife, Nicole, purchased these five acres five years ago (to add to the 17 acres dedicated to dates). He wanted to combine his skills in agriculture with his wife’s expertise as an educator and create a working farm that would not only produce clean, chemical-free produce for consumers but also act as a backdrop for events. More importantly, the space could be used as an open-air classroom so schoolchildren could make a real-life connection between the food-growing process and how food lands on the family’s dinner table.
Nicole carefully laid out the locations for the packing house, the pond (stocked with fish that create sustenance for the crops), and the fields. In a single day, up to 150 students (split into groups) could see the connection between seeds and produce packaged in a box for delivery. Mark and Nicole hosted 275 kids four years ago; they hosted 10,000 kids last year.
Newly armed with a large grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture for their farm-to-school initiative, they are ready to start work on a shaded structure with ceiling fans and purchase audiovisual equipment to realize their dream of a complete outdoor education center. “If 10% of the students who visit here go out as champions of California agriculture, then they can affect another 20 people, and those people can each educate another 10 or 20 people,” Mark says. “If that happens, then we’ve done our job.”
A young Egyptian named Tadros Tadros (“A name so nice, you have to say it twice,” Mark says), a recent graduate in horticulture and agriculture from the University of Cairo, made his way to Canada in the early 1960s. He then traveled to the United States and ended up in the Coachella Valley. He became a tennis pro at Palm Valley Country Club and worked in the kitchen when the chef quit. He met a date farmer from the eastern part of the Valley and arranged to buy boxes of fresh dates from him. He loaded them in the trunk of his car and drove to the parking lot of a Coptic Orthodox church in Los Angeles. Eventually, he saved enough money to purchase a 17-acre date farm and called it Aziz Farms.
Thanks to the family business, Mark grew up with a passion for food, which led him to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. He worked at several chef jobs, then became a corporate chef for Foster Farms in Central California. The job became monotonous, so Mark returned to the family farm to regroup. He started on the bottom rung – working in the fields, harvesting dates, packing dates, and making deliveries to the farm’s wholesaler. He studied marketing and realized that the farm could do much better by selling directly to retailers and consumers, with the right branding and sales model. His father wasn’t interested in the plan, but he had heart surgery and had to step away from the farm for a year. Mark took over and began implementing changes.
That was 15 years ago; the business continued to expand. Mark hosted a Date Harvest Festival in Coachella in 2019. He says the festival allowed him to introduce himself to a wide variety of people, including Tony Marchese, owner of Trio Restaurant in Palm Springs. Things were definitely looking up for Aziz Farms. Then, the COVID pandemic hit. Like many small business owners, Mark was suddenly faced with ruin. “People were buying frozen food and canned goods,” he recalls. “No one was buying fresh produce. I had thousands of pounds of dates and no one to sell them to.”
Mark and Marchese came up with the idea of CV Harvest Box; consumers would take out a subscription and receive delivery of a box of produce every week. Mark sourced all the food locally; though it helped him and his fellow local farmers, it didn’t solve the problem of a fortune in produce going rotten. Then, he had a light bulb moment.
Nicole worked as assistant principal at Bobby Duke Elementary School in Coachella at the time. She told her husband about handing out lunch packets, homework packets, and iPads to students who were learning remotely.
“I said, ‘Wait a second,’” Mark says. “‘How many lunch packets are you handing out? And how many students?’ It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I could get some of my dates into those lunchboxes. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of meals going out, and if I can get just three or four ounces of dates into each lunch, my dates will be gone very quickly.”
Mark reached out to Jacob Alvarez, city of Coachella assistant to the city manager, and Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez. Mark also talked to Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia. All of the men vouched for Mark and connected him with the right people. Mark pushed his idea every day, and it worked. “The nutrition director at Desert Sands Unified School District told me that I was just the right amount of annoying,” Mark says with a laugh.
It took him three months to get all the permissions he needed, which seemed lightning-fast when dealing with certain bureaucracies. But, Mark believes the people in the school districts he contacted realized from the beginning that putting locally sourced produce in lunchboxes was a win-win for both students and farmers. (His hundreds of thousands of pounds of dates were gone in 60 days.) Not long after Mark started filling lunchboxes, he got to know the nutrition director at Palm Springs Unified School District. She mentioned that her producer/supplier had approached her about produce boxes, but the price seemed steep. “I told her I did produce boxes, too, and gave her a price,” Mark says. “She said, ‘Perfect.’ She ordered 5,000 boxes and delivered them to families. Two weeks later, she ordered 10,000 boxes. Then, another district ordered 5,000 boxes. Before you know it, I’m delivering close to 20,000 boxes to multiple districts.”
Mark now works with 10 school districts, not only in the Coachella Valley but also in cities like Rialto and Los Angeles. He supplied 6,000 cases of California-grown apples to the Los Angeles Unified School District in October. Mark says he is not a wholesaler. He calls his method of gathering produce from various sources “aggregation.” “The reason why it’s different (from wholesaling) is because we’ll invest in farms we believe in,” he says. “We will stick with a very specific type and grouping of farms. I’m a farmer myself, so I will pay a fair, equitable amount to those farms and be able to identify quality, rightness, and seasonality … and [I’ll] lead these different school districts in the right direction for menu-ing different items.”
Mark’s mission comes from the realization that his calling is dwindling in this country. “Before 1940, 80% of this country was engaged in farming,” he says. “Five years ago, it was 2%. Now, it’s 1%.” He believes that one of the reasons for this precipitous decline is what he calls “the entitlement of American consumers.” He points out that a couple of generations ago, consumers could expect to find avocados or oranges in their local markets only when they were in season. Now, consumers expect to find seasonal items in supermarkets every month of the year. Furthermore, consumers also expect to pay the absolute lowest prices for their food; this is why the United States became a major importer of foods such as garlic, which is grown in China, according to Mark. He admits that he sometimes falls victim to this sense of entitlement. “But, when I see an avocado in the store that’s grown here, then I’m going to pay a dollar more for it because I know what the farmer has gone through to grow it,” he says.
At one point, when Mark was growing his produce box business, he boxed and shipped Aziz dates across the U.S. and to destinations as far away as Australia. Around that time, he consented to his wife’s suggestion that he should act as chaperone to a class of third-graders visiting an apple farm in Oak Glen. “I found myself paying $20 or $30 to grind up a bunch of apples to make a gallon of cider that I would’ve paid $3 for if I got it in a market,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is brilliant … I wonder if I could do this at our date farm?’”
Nicole is an educator and mother; the couple has two children – Carter, 9 years old, and Kennedy, 6. She pointed out that with basic safety and labor laws, Mark should not ask children to climb 10-foot-high ladders to pick dates. “I have some hair-brained ideas at times,” he admits. “But, at the end of the day, the thing that struck me was that these kids were understanding how apples were grown. They are understanding the value of these apples grown right in their own backyards.”
So, Mark and Nicole came up with the idea to educate kids about championing local produce by introducing it to their curriculum. “We were delivering to all these school districts, gaining their trust, and we said to them, ‘You know what? We have other opportunities available,’” he says. “And that’s when we started to plant this farm out here.”
Mark was determined to make the new farm a model of sustainability. He calls his method of farming on the new acreage “regenerative farming.” “Nobody really has a definition, but I’ll tell you what it means to me,” he says. “We use no chemicals and fertilizers. We use heirloom or organic seeds and we plant them in soil and we grow them with water and sunlight. We have created an ecosystem, and the ecosystem supports what is growing here. Since we don’t spray, we get plenty of pollinators – bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. What predatory insects we don’t have … we import. Last year, we transplanted 750,000 ladybugs into [our] fields. The kids love them. We don’t use fertilizers … [but] the lake in the middle of the property has fish in it … and those fish poop in the water. And the water naturally fertilizes the soil. We use a no-till system … so that the roots are not disturbed. We leave the organic waste on top. When you think about the way photosynthesis works, the plant absorbs CO2 and then releases CO2 back into the environment and leaves the carbon in the soil. If you leave carbon in soil, it leaves life in the soil.” Mark says this is just a small part of what he tries to impart to kids who visit the farm.
The steady stream of students scheduled to visit the farm this year is a little overwhelming – especially for a farmer who still needs to get his dates packed and produce boxes sent out on deliveries. Still, the satisfaction from seeing excitement and realization on the faces of young students is deeply gratifying for Mark and Nicole. It doesn’t hurt that student visits and events at The Packhouse provide another revenue stream. “I tell people the field trips and events have been paying for my farming habit,” Mark says with a laugh.
