Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin, co-owners of Jacobs Farm del Cabo, have been named 2025 Farmer of the Year by the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau.
The award is presented annually to farmer(s) who have contributed “beyond their normal farming duties to help the community.” The presentation was made during the Farm Bureau’s 108th annual meeting/dinner, held in La Selva Beach on June 19.
“The board of directors felt it was appropriate to honor Larry and Sandra because of their leadership in the community and the world over the past several decades,” said Farm Bureau President Dennis Webb.
The Farm Bureau listed these key points (among other) for Jacobs and Belin:
• Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin are committed to growing organic food and protecting the land and soils to assure that there continues to be a place to plant and grow healthy food.
• Jacobs graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he studied soil science and plant pathology.
• In the mid 1970s, Belin apprenticed on an organic farm on the coast of Maine. In the latter part of the 1970s, she worked for a nonprofit based in Guatemala developing low-cost appropriate technologies and earthen-based cook stoves.
• The two co-founded Jacobs Farm in 1980, a northern California organic farming operation specializing in culinary herbs. Currently they farm in three counties—San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara—growing culinary herbs, tomatoes and pumpkins.
• In 1985 they started working with small family farmers in southern Mexico, connecting their crops with markets in California with a vision for the exchange to become a self-sustaining development project. This grew into collaborating with growers on the Baja Peninsula, all certified organic, and became del Cabo, known for its snacking tomatoes, peppers, squashes, peas, garlic and mangos.
• In 2007 they co-founded Farm Fuel Inc. to exploit the “hot stuff in mustard” and anaerobic soil disinfection to eliminate soil diseases in high-value crops as a replacement to methyl bromide, a soil fumigant phased out under the Montreal Protocol and Clean Air Act.
• In 2013 Jacobs and Belin launched the Great African Food Company, a Tanzanian company modeled after their work in Mexico linking organic production of small-scale farmers to European and Middle Eastern markets. The company merged in 2016 with Quality Food Products, a pulse (dry edible seeds) and grain exporter.
• Jacobs and Belin were awarded the prestigious Organic Trade Association’s 2007 Organic Farming Leadership Award for “innovation in organic farming practices.”
• Jacobs and Belin received the Stewards of Sustainable Agriculture award at the Ecological Farming Association’s 2009 Eco-Farm.
