Family Values

Three generations of the Nuss family have farmed their patch of land just outside of Lodi in a picturesque corner of the San Joaquin Valley. Nestled on the eastern edge of the verdant Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, in a region known primarily for its vineyards and orchards, Nuss Farms has been producing specialty vegetable crops on more than 1,000 acres for nearly 50 years.

Today, Dave Nuss is president of the family business, which he runs alongside his sons, Derek, vice president of farming; Tim, vice president of operations; and Tyler, vice president of strategy (though for some time Dave and Derek were at the helm of Nuss Farms, with Tim and Tyler joining later).

Under their management, the company grows a broad variety of produce. From watching other farms, Dave had seen the risk that came with committing to a single crop after years of struggling with ups and downs in the agriculture industry, subject to the whims of market forces such as labor woes, regulatory restrictions, and trade complications brought on by the arrival of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That’s why Nuss Farms produces a diversity of higher-value specialty crops — everything from garlic, basil, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, and pumpkins, to banana peppers, red and green bell peppers, jalapeños, and a hybrid of wheat and rye called triticale — with roughly 10 different crops in cultivation at any given time.

In 2018, another sea change came with the return to the family fold of sons Tim and Tyler. Both had developed their own careers outside of farming, with Tim spending about a decade in international imports and exports, and Tyler working in the world of Silicon Valley tech startups. Eager to connect more to the family business, but feeling unequipped to add value to the hard work their father and older brother were carrying out on the farm, the younger Nuss brothers started a podcast, “The Modern Acre,” to learn more about emerging trends in agriculture. Through conversations on the podcast with experts, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in agriculture, the two were exposed to a range of groundbreaking ideas — including, importantly, that of regenerative agriculture. Armed with this knowledge, Tim and Tyler approached their father about incorporating some regenerative concepts on the family farm to improve soil health — and thus its long-term productive capacity.

Described at times by his sons on their podcast as “an old-school farmer,” Dave instilled in them the value of hard work and caring for the land from a young age. Despite years of adhering to conventional farming practices, he was, to his sons’ surprise, open to their suggestions. So, in 2019, the farm began the transition toward a regenerative agriculture approach — implementing practices such as planting cover crops between harvests, integrating livestock, and reducing soil disturbance by minimizing tillage.

The challenges, it turned out, were considerable, and required several seasons of trial and error to refine.

Though regenerative farming practices had been fairly well established on other farms in the region, the Nuss family quickly realized that the methods implemented on those farms — largely vineyards and orchards — could not easily be replicated in the cultivation of vegetables.

Regenerative farming “is still pretty nascent with respect to vegetables,” Tim tells The Rooted Journal on a tour of the farm. “We just wanted to find better ways to farm, and hopefully get a head start,” he adds, in showing “that this is a viable route, so other farmers could try to move in this direction.”

Many of the central tenets of regenerative farming, as the family discovered, had been developed on farms in different climates with vastly different growing conditions. Planting cover crops between harvests, for example, is routinely touted by proponents of regenerative principles as one of the go-to practices for growers looking to improve soil health. There are many benefits to planting cover crops: By keeping a living root in the soil year-round, farmers can improve soil health and protect against erosion, control pests and disease, crowd out weeds, and increase biodiversity. These benefits, however, may have been achieved in conditions considerably different than those in temperate California. Planting cover crops on, say, a corn-growing operation in Iowa, doesn’t necessarily translate to farms growing vegetables in California’s Central Valley. “In the Midwest, you get a hard freeze that terminates the cover crops,” Tim says. “So, you don’t have to deal with this massive cover crop, and figuring out what to do with the plant residue, or how to get ready to plant a vegetable crop in such a short window before the next crop is due to be planted.”

Nuss Farms’ first attempts at incorporating regenerative practices were, as Tim describes them, learning experiences. They found the timing of planting cover crops was difficult given the farm’s already near-constant cash-crop rotation, while a foray into incorporating livestock with pasture-raised poultry quickly proved to be a nonstarter. Reducing tillage, meanwhile, was also a challenge, since it’s particularly hard to adopt in the farming of vegetables; Tim says this is because the reshaping of the soil between crops, and the formation of new beds specific to the next crop, require by necessity some disturbance (though the farm is exploring ways to reduce tillage throughout the year).

Furthermore, the operation of any farm is a complicated endeavor, with the decisions of which crops to plant where requiring a dizzying array of considerations. When Tim joined the family business full-time in late 2022, he saw this firsthand. Dave and Derek, he learned, managed an elaborate matrix of rotating crops while weighing a number of factors: the financial (which crops are doing well in the market at any given time); the agronomic (which crops will thrive in a field’s soil), and the technical, such as irrigation and infrastructure (the availability of the equipment needed to support a particular crop). Adding regenerative practices to this intricate system was a big ask.

Despite these inherent challenges, however, the family has been resolute in its efforts to embrace regenerative farming practices. They plan to try again with cover crops, this time with a winter crop when the timing will be more forgiving. They are also experimenting with nutrient management through the use of biological-based fertilizers. And in 2023, the farm received a grant from Elevated Foods through the USDA’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program to further explore the integration of regenerative principles.

The grant is already enabling Nuss Farms to experiment with additional regenerative techniques. This year, the farm is running side-by-side field experiments in nutrient management, testing whether watermelons, banana peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers fare better with the application of biological-based inputs versus traditional ones. In 2025, the Nusses hope to partner with the soil-health company MyLand, which will sample the farm’s soil and extract native live algae; the algae will then be reproduced and reapplied onto the land through the farm’s existing irrigation, thereby creating a self-contained system that uses inputs from the land itself to improve the health and nutrient balance of the soil.

“The idea of being able to produce a product on [the] farm and put it back onto the fields would be pretty cool and is very interesting to us,” Tim says. “That’s something we are able to try because of the Elevated Foods grant.”

As the Nuss family has come to find, making a lasting transition to regenerative principles that will be sustainable for years to come requires playing the long game. Some of the practices that Nuss Farms has adopted may not have an immediate payoff. They do, however, demonstrate good stewardship of the land and are indicative of the values the family brings to farming. A portion of the farm, for example, is dedicated to a conservation easement, and the family has initiated several restoration projects on-site, such as native-plant hedgerows and riparian habitats to encourage the return of native pollinators and wildlife. The results, Tim says, have been swift: He has seen the rapid resurgence of quail, turtles, deer, coyotes, and other wildlife, and was surprised one day to spot seals out on the slough and massive runs of salmon breaching in the white waters of the Delta.

Ultimately, the Nuss family brings a desire to see the land thrive for generations to come, not just as growers but also, notably, as consumers. The next generation in the family is coming up: Both Tim and Tyler have young daughters, with Tim expecting his second in the fall. They want, at heart, what’s best for the land but also what’s best for their young families.

Looking out at the riparian habitat he helped restore, Tim says he and his family “think it’s important to adopt” regenerative practices, even if there may not be a clear return on investment to all of them. The focus is instead on improving soil health in the long-term, and attracting wildlife to the farm, he adds. “By figuring out what works here, and what will give us a better result, and by being mindful about what we’re putting back into the soil, we’re moving in the right direction,” he says. “It’s what we want to do as a farm, and the message we want to send.”