One side of my family came to California in the 1880’s and farmed, eventually citrus, in the Corona area. Grandfather was a pioneer in Imperial Valley. I went to Stanford and UC Davis and studied economics and wine grapes (viticulture). I came to the central coast to grow wine grapes. I got distracted. It was probably for the best. It took years to find the best varieties and production methods to be commercially viable. Our family had a change to buy a historic ranch in the Lompoc Valley that was owned by Union Sugar since the 1920’s. I moved in 1974 to Lompoc after we bought the ranch and married Trish. I do not in vest in wine other than my modest cellar.

I have a wife, Trish. Our son, Barry, lives in Berlin with his family. My daughter, Monica, lives in Boston with her family.

My artichoke history. In the 70’s, an Italian gave some seeds to a Vince Rubatsky in New Jersey. He gave them to someone in California. They sent it to Joe Principe of the USDA. He took the seed and did some crosses with other material. My brother, Rusty, got some seed from him. He grew it and bred it. He had the first commercial artichoke crop from seed and the first artichoke patent. Later, I grew them on the coast in Lompoc (5 miles from the ocean, 1 hour north of Santa Barbara). They had a purplish color. I called it the artichoke with the purple blush (not blemish, but an enhancement.) After a while, we partnered with Dole Vegetables from Salinas in a new organization, Big Heart Seed. The have a website bigheartseed.com.

Around 2000, I was contacted by a French breeder, Medhat Chahbandar. He had 5 varieties that I licensed and patented. They were from his work in southern France. I then started growing and promoting perennial artichokes. I joined Beachside Produce. They started marketing the perennials. I contacted a leading artichoke breeder in Italy, Papalini. We developed a new red, Sangria.

We (Baroda Farms) found some new types, made some crosses and developed a few new varieties. I built a tissue culture laboratory to propagated high quality vegetative plants.

Red artichokes. Heavy sigh. They are the standard in most of Italy. They are a tough sale in the US. One problem is that the varieties from Italy are smaller than the American tastes or what they are used to. Some of the reds introduced in the USA were inferior, and that did not help. Some reds would lose the bright red in the long days of summer. They were easy to sell directly at farmers markets. Frieda’s did a fine job of selling them, but that connection did not survive my semi-retirement. That was not their fault.

Let me tell you another story. You may skip this paragraph. I won a contest that included business class tickets to Europe and several air freight containers. I had an Italian working for me. He went to a large northern Italian grocery chain purchasing. He showed them our Italian type and some of our large green artichokes. They loved the green ones, but would not even consider them because they were not red. To see if our artichokes worked there, the test was to send them to the restaurants in Rome (?). We did that and that did not work well. I think there was a better way, but exporting artichokes was going to be difficult, risky, and expensive. As an experiment, it failed, and I did not do any follow up.

More trivia (also skippable) I was elected cheerleader in Brawley High as a write-in. Much later in life, I was elected to the water board on a write-in, the only such victory in county history. I served in the Air Force and Army. I discovered a computer error that negated all of Lompoc’s water right and got it corrected. I sued the City of Lompoc and Santa Barbara over water and lost. I ran a computer service that had free international email before the internet. We used voice modems over phone lines. I had four 1,200 baud modems. I learned assembly language and Algol at Stanford. I wrote several computer programs, including a cooler dispatch program in Foxbase and an email translator in C. My first home computer had 8K bytes of memory. My hobbies include golf and photography. I was president of our local Rotary and grower shipper. I have been on artichoke and celery boards. I own a 1926 Jordan Playboy (no relation to Ned Jordan of Jordan Motors).