King of Organic Grapes

STEVEN PAVICH: path to organic farming unfolds like a chapter in a late nineteenth-century dime novel. The son of a Croatian coal miner, Pavich traveled alone to California as a teenager, arriving in 1932 with $5 in his pocket.

He got his first taste of farming in the late 1930s, when he managed a 40-acre apricot orchard while attending Modesto Junior College. It was about this time he became friends with Steve Pandol, a prominent Delano grape grower, who often traveled to the coast to purchase fresh fish.

In 1953, when Pavich literally could no longer look at the ocean without becoming seasick, he gave up fishing, intending to take a job in a tuna processing plant in Long Beach. On his way there he stopped in Delano, where Steve Pandol’s son Matt took him out to see the old, 130-acre “rock-pile vineyard” near Richgrove. On the spot, Pavich decided to purchase it, investing his entire life’s savings in the down payment.

A latecomer to the table grape business, Pavich lost half his crop in a 1954 heat wave. With help from Matt Pandol he rapidly learned the fundamentals of growing table grapes, expanded his acreage, paid off his debts, added cold storage consisting of three boxcars hooked together, and conducted his own marketing.

In the early 1970s, when soil and production problems struck his vineyards, Pavich brought his eldest son, Steve jr., into the business. Over the next 20 years they developed a program of gradually eliminating commercial fertilizers and pesticides and substituting organic farming techniques in their places. The senior Pavich said his pioneering work was as difficult as putting together a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle whose top half is noting but clear blue sky.

At the time of his death in December 1988, Pavich’s organic farming operation encompassed over 1,200 acres of vineyards in Arizona and California. With Steve Jr. handling the farming operations and the youngest son, Tom, and his wife, Tanya, managing the marketing and finances, Pavich Farms (which also includes organically grown produce, fruit, and even cotton) has become a truly family-run business.

The revolutionary impact of Pavich’s daring experiment is now being felt. Having seen that it is possible to farm commercially on a large scale using organic methods, dozens of big-name growers have developed experimental blocks of organically grown grapes.  Today in San Joaquin Valley’s table grape growing districts, there are more tons of compost being produced, and more acres of organic grapes being grown, than anywhere else in the world. California table grape growers are in the vanguard of organic techniques, thanks largely to the pioneering work of a Croatian immigrant grape grower named Steve Pavich.

California Farmer May 6, 1989