It’s not every day that an agribusiness receives $20 million in federal grant money to restore and regenerate farmland using climate-smart practices.
But Elevated Foods has already shown the US Department of Agriculture it’s worth the investment thanks to Steve Brazeel, the mission-driven company founder and CEO who also heads the wholesale distributor SunTerra Produce in Newport Beach.
As farmers were pummeled by the government-mandated shutdowns that obliterated half of their market during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazeel was working to identify new markets.
Those efforts included the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box program, which contracted with distributors like SunTerra to buy goods from farmers whose markets had been devastated by the pandemic and route them to food banks.
“Do you recall those long lines of cars driving through food banks and getting a box put in their trunks? We were one of the awardees of those contracts, and that really changed our whole mindset on what we could do to better our food systems,” said Brazeel, who launched Elevated Foods in 2020 to do just that.
The company was deep in its planning and fundraising stage when the USDA announced its Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program’s $2.8 billion investment. That money goes to 70 selected projects, whose proposals range from $5 to $100 million.
The $20 million awarded to Elevated Foods will go toward its efforts to incentivize growers both big and small to transition to new ways of farming for the long-term benefit of people, the planet and their own bottom lines. Strategies include supplying fresh fruit and vegetable boxes through various USDA and private programs. More recently, the company signed on to provide medically-tailored grocery boxes to Medi-Cal recipients in Orange County through CalOptima.
Elevated Foods will implement the program through its partnerships with several organizations across California, including Solutions for Urban Ag led by A.G. Kawamura, a former California secretary of food and agriculture.
Kawamura’s organization grows food for Second Harvest Food Bank at the University of California South Coast Research and Extension Center’s Harvest Solutions Farm in Irvine. Another is the California Association of Food Banks, a distribution partner based in the Bay Area.
We caught up with Brazeel to learn more about Elevated Foods and the grant opportunity. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did Elevated Foods get started?
A: One of the efforts that really set up our development in Elevated Foods was our participation in the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box program launched during the pandemic. Secondly, we found the types of questions we got from retailers were changing. Several years ago it was all about food safety, quality and price. Food safety is still No. 1, but what major retailers want now is more transparency. They want to know how you’re treating your people and protecting your natural resources. They want to know about water and fertilizer. They’ve made promises to their shareholders that they will purchase items in a more sustainable way.
How do they do that? By encouraging their growers to adopt these practices. Not only are these challenges significant, but growers are ill-equipped to adjust automatically to the new reality. Our goal is to work with them to identify the areas where they can make improvements to meet the requirements of their retailers, which then makes them the preferred vendor for produce.
Q: Are you the only company doing this?
A: The multi-billion dollar, multi-national produce companies, the names you’ve heard of — Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte, Driscoll’s — have fully developed teams on sustainable and regenerative farming, identifying more eco-friendly packaging and implementing these practices out in the field.
But if you’re a grower that’s not one of those companies, you don’t have the resources to fully deploy those practices, making you less competitive in the market. Bringing these growers together under one umbrella and utilizing top savings and shared services across that model will help make them more efficient.
Q: Can you give me some examples of climate-smart practices?
A: There is any number of tools in the toolbox that the USDA considers climate-smart and can apply to any type of fresh fruit and vegetable operation regardless of the crop. A technique you use on growing lettuce in Brawley, California, is different than an apple grower in Wenatchee, Washington, which is different than a sweet corn grower in southern Florida.
The types of practices we’re talking about promoting are more efficient water use through new technologies in drip irrigation, the usage of biological fertilizers instead of synthetic fertilizers or identifying food waste within the system.
Statistics show us that 30% of the produce we grow never leaves the field, and that’s because it doesn’t fit the precise specifications of retailers. When you go to the grocery store, apples and oranges are pretty much the same sizes. But the realities of the field are (and if you have a citrus tree in your yard or have been around a farm, you know) they don’t all come out looking the same.
Identifying that food waste and finding market outlets, as we’ve done with the Food Box program and Medically Delivered Meal Box program, and just utilizing cover crops to protect soil integrity (so that the top 6 inches don’t erode in wind and rain when the vegetable crops aren’t growing as a rotation) is part of that.
Q: Are farmers generally open to new practices?
A: Farmers are the ultimate stewards of the land because, without land, we wouldn’t have a way to live, so really the issue is not that farmers don’t agree with these practices. The issue is whether the market will bear the increased production cost while farmers learn how to adapt to these new technologies.
There’s always some trepidation around adopting new technologies until they’re proven. But I think we were chosen as recipients of the grant because of our ability to work closely with the farmer communities to ease them into this transition.
These are big moves that we’re making. We all know that collaboration and voluntary adoption of practices through incentivization is a quicker, more efficient way than trying to force growers to adapt to new technologies.
Steve Brazeel
Title: Founder and CEO
Organization: Elevated Foods. He also runs SunTerra Produce, a fresh producer grower and distributor founded in 2000 when he moved to Orange County.
Hometown: Newport Beach
His introduction to agriculture: Brazeel hails from Brawley, a small desert town at the southeastern tip of California known for farming.
Fun farming fact: All 50 states grow watermelons. “Almost every watermelon you eat in California was grown in California,” Brazeel said. “But if I took you to New Mexico, they’d be New Mexico watermelons. In Florida, they’d be Florida watermelons. It’s one of those crops that is really versatile and can grow in many regions.”