In 1983, the Joneses stood by helplessly as their farm and equipment were auctioned at a sheriff's sale. A combination of bad luck and business inexperience had brought them to what appeared to be the end of their agricultural career.
Bob Jones started farming in 1971. He and his wife, Barbara, eventually owned 75 acres of land and leased another 1,100, in addition to marketing crops for other growers in northern Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. In his second year, one of his truck drivers was held responsible for a fatal crash. Jones was sued. That was the bad luck. The case went to trial in 1981, and he was ordered to pay damages that exceeded his inadequate insurance coverage. That was inexperience. When all was said and done, the farm was heavily mortgaged and the family had no cash, at a time when interest rates were hovering at about 22 percent.
To grow a supersweet melon that a chef had seen in Japan, the farmers had to remove all but one blossom on each plant, so that all the nutrients went into one fruit. The Chef's Garden charged $65 a melon.
In line with the traditional allocations for his region, Jones divided his crop in thirds among cabbage, sweet corn, and a combination of peppers, pumpkins, and squash. In the summer of 1982, he recalls, cabbage was selling for $2.52 a crate--and it cost him $3.58 a crate to grow it and bring it to market. "We happened to have a hailstorm that year, too," he says. "We opened up the door one morning to a field of cabbage ready for harvest that just looked like coleslaw." It was the final blow. When the bank foreclosed on his property, Jones lost his land, his house, and his machinery. All that remained was a decrepit farmhouse on seven acres that he had bought for Lee a few years earlier at the foreclosure sale of another unfortunate farmer. Lee was operating a roadside farm stand there. Now all the members of the family moved into the house. "At that point, Barbara and I were ready to leave," Bob says. "Unless you've been through it, you can't understand the pressure of the bill collectors, knowing that your house is going to be sold and not being able to do anything about it. I said to Lee, 'I'll help you, but we'll have no more than five employees." In his previous business, Bob had retained a staff of 15 year-round and 150 seasonal workers.
"We had three trucks that didn't get a bid at the sheriff's sale," Lee says. "We had a truck we called the two-person truck. One person would hold on to the roof. You had to wear a raincoat inside the truck if it was raining outside." The Joneses farmed their own seven acres plus another rented hundred. Three or four times a week, the family members would leave at 2:30 in the morning to drive to the Cleveland farmers markets about an hour away to sell their crop.
At one of the markets, a persistent customer made an unusual request. Iris Bailin, the corporate chef for a Cleveland brokerage house, wanted to buy zucchini flowers, or squash blossoms. At first, Lee rebuffed her. "We knew everything about zucchini," he says. "My dad had grown it for 30 years. We thought she was crazy. Finally, I brought 'em to her. I wanted to get her off to the side so none of the other farmers would see."
That winter, Bailin and two other local chefs visited the Joneses with a list of 12 vegetables. "None of them I'd ever heard of," Bob says. "Radicchio, arugula. Here in the Midwest we didn't know about these things back then. We were conservative folks and had been through tough times and we didn't want to be sold a bill of goods. I finally said, 'Just how many farmers have you been to and asked to do this?' They said, 'Fifteen.' I said, 'We'll do it.' If everybody else is walking, we'd better run. It was partly desperation and partly looking to find our niche. We knew that conventional agriculture was never going to keep us in business." The prices helped. "French beans were $15 a pound," he says. "That kind of influenced us too."
Some of the vegetables proved difficult to grow. "There was no information, there was nobody to ask," Bob says. "I spent the winter trying to learn how to grow them, what they were supposed to look like when they were harvested." The next year, the Joneses visited the chefs of the better restaurants in Cleveland to attract new orders. "The chefs were just like us, they saw a chance to move ahead," he says. About three years after the initial approach by Bailin, Bob traveled for three weeks to northern California, where he met Alice Waters, of the restaurant Chez Panisse, and other proponents of old-fashioned varietals, the kind of vegetables that had been forgotten by large-scale growers. "This trip was part of our decision-making process," he says. "We didn't know anything about the market. Our thinking had been, 'How many trailerloads of this can I produce?' It was a commodity business."
Finally, the moment came when, at the same kitchen table where they had met with Bailin and her fellow chefs, the Jones family convened to determine the direction of their business. The company was growing, but it was bifurcated. Most of the crop was targeted for the farmers markets. Growing specialty vegetables for high-end chefs seemed like an entirely different endeavor. For Bob Jr., who had graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in horticulture, and Lee, who had studied marketing at the same school, the correct path was clear. "My dad said, 'We're jack of all and master of none," Lee recalls. "I said, 'Chefs are 2 percent of our business and 80 percent of our aggravation.' The university teaches tons per acre. Ninety-eight percent of our business was coming from farmers markets." The conversation moved around the table and every family member expressed an opinion. It was unanimous in favor of growing for farmers markets, until the last member was polled. As Lee tells it, "My dad pounded the table and said, 'No. We're going to grow for chefs."
