BY RACHEL KHONG
Rich Collins
President & Farmer, California Endive Farms
Location: Rio Vista, CA
Age: 55
After thirty-plus years, Rich Collins is still, as far as he knows, the only American large-scale grower of endive (that’s “ON-deev,” not to be confused with curly “N-dive,” he will repeatedly remind you). “It’s really hard to grow, so I know why there’s not another grower,” Collins says. “Because it’s a pain in the butt. Not only is it hard to grow, but then to market: What is it? Is it “ON-deev” or “N-dive?” What do you do with it? Oh, it’s so expensive! Why is it bitter? We’ve been dealing with that for thirty years.” He shows me a photo of a smiling young woman and a younger-looking him, holding a modest box of torpedo-shaped vegetables. “That’s the very first box my wife, Shelly, and I picked on Thanksgiving Day, 1983,” Collins says. This year, he’s hoping to produce four million pounds from 250 acres of chicory seeds. If you’re eating American-grown endives, chances are Rich Collins grew them.
Endives don’t exist in nature. Back in the 1830s, probably 1831 or 1832, a farmer in Belgium forgot about chicory roots in his cellar, and they sprouted shoots in the springtime, in the dark, humid confines of his little cellar. He broke it off and tasted it, and it was bitter—all the chicories are bitter, whether radicchio or frisée; that’s an attribute of the chicory family—but it was also something fresh to eat. He discovered it by accident. Because you couldn’t go out into the forest or the fields and see, Oh, there’s endive! Because it doesn’t happen in nature. It’s just a trick on the plant.
The trick is this: chicory is a biannual plant that flowers and goes to seed its second year. So Collins has to grow the plants twice: first, he plants chicory seeds in his fields throughout northern California. After about four months, the seeds will have produced thick, torpedo-like roots underground and sprouted green leaves aboveground. At harvest time he mows the leaves off, and they become cattle feed. He’s not after the leaves, just about six inches of root and the bud at the top of the root, which is the crucial part. The roots then go into a cold-storage facility, at 32 degrees. Inside, it’s pitch black, and Collins uses a flashlight to show me around.
This is the cold-storage facility we built three years ago, and it’s probably the most efficient cold-storage room in America. We have twenty-two-inch walls, developed by a professor at Berkeley, a brilliant engineer-architect. It’s R98, which is a measure of insulation. A standard house in California is R19. A standard cold-storage building is R28. We’re R98, so it’s massively insulated. It’s a very efficient structure. The roots stay in there anywhere from one to ten months. They’re not dead, they’re not frozen, but they’re really cold, and they’re just sitting there, hibernating. When a root is in this phase, it thinks it’s right here on the coldest, darkest day of winter.
When it’s time to grow the endives, Collins pulls the roots out of cold storage, plants them in irrigated trays, and puts them in a “forcing room”—warmer, at 60 degrees, but still dark. This gives the roots the impression that it’s spring, and causes them to “wake up.” “The plant is behaving in a completely natural way,” Collins explains. “It thinks—I know plants don’t think, but—it’s spring. It’s just a big joke, really. It’s a hoax on the plant.” The plants grow over the course of three to four weeks, and that crucial bud on the top of the root grows into the endive. In the forcing room, the trays of roots are stacked high.
It might strike you as odd—it strikes a lot of people as odd—but you’re at a farm today. We’re not a processor; we’re not a manufacturer. We happen to farm inside, in complete darkness. We exercise a great deal of control—timing, temperature, water going through the trays and things—but it’s still a farm. We can have good; we can have bad. There’s some beautiful stuff coming up and some other stuff that’s wacky and wild. Because it’s a farm. We just happen to grow inside in the dark. It’s my lot in life.
I got into it completely by accident. I grew up in Sacramento, but my family’s from San Francisco. I’m fifth-generation Californian. I’m the first farmer in our family that I know of. I always wanted to be a farmer. I have no idea why. One of my earliest, earliest, earliest memories as a kid was wanting to be a farmer. I had a huge garden when I was ten.
So I farmed as a kid in Sacramento—tomatoes and corn and string beans, zucchini, all the normal stuff. Then I got a dishwashing job when I was in high school, at a French restaurant in Sacramento. It was a very eclectic restaurant: the maître d’ was Swiss, the head chef was from Uganda, there was a PhD student from the University of Michigan who was a pastry chef. And I was the dishwasher. The owner had endive one night for a VIP birthday banquet. That was the only time he ever had it in the restaurant. He knew I wanted to be a farmer. He had the endive in his hand and he said, “You know what, this is what you ought to grow!” And I said, “What is it?” He said, “This is Belgian endive. I paid four dollars a pound for it!” And I said, “Really?” And that’s how I got started. May of ’78. I was eighteen.
I had a vegetable seed supplier for my acre, an old Italian guy in Sacramento named Earl Lagomarsino. I went to him and said I want to grow this “N-dive,” so he brought out a package of seed and the picture on it was curly endive. And I looked at the package of seed and I said, “No, I want to grow this ‘N-dive’”—I’m sure I said “N-dive”—“that’s like this little white missile-shaped thingy.” And he goes, “Oh oh oh oh! Belgian ‘N-dive!’” And he took the package of seed back, and he went over to his counter and brought out one package of Belgian endive seed. So that’s how I started. He had it! In Sacramento! I planted it in my garden, a tiny little patch. I produced maybe thirty or forty roots. It was horrifically bad.
I had very minimal instructions. Information was super hard to find. I had no idea what I was doing. Zero. But I knew that it had to grow in the dark and grow a root. I was able to scare up a little information at the library. We tried that. I grew that first batch in my closet in a can full of sand. Then I tried growing it commercially in ’79, and that didn’t work.
I went to Europe in ’82, on my twenty-second birthday, and learned the growing techniques. I was an endive tourist. I went to France, Belgium, and Holland, primarily, but also Spain and Germany and Switzerland. Just visiting growers and seed companies and research institutes. I was roaming around Western Europe for ten months, working on various endive farms, visiting different endive places. I hitchhiked around, rode a bike, worked on farms here and there. It was during a transition from an old technology of growing older varieties in dirt trenches—the darkness came from soil; they buried them—to the way we grow it now. I was right in that transition. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was pretty profound in that sense, because there was a whole new system being developed: new varieties, new techniques. I saw both old and new in ’82.
Growing endive the old traditional way is probably one of the toughest jobs there is. It’s a beautiful product; it’s great quality. It’s just super, super hard to do. People were looking for an easier, more efficient way to do it, because it’s really tough work. You’re literally out on your knees in the mud in the winter. There’s still a little bit grown that way, it’s super high quality, but it does command a premium. It has to. It’s so hard to do.
I had to adapt endive to California: our soil, our climate. European endive was grown with rainfall; we have to irrigate here. It took us about ten years to learn that, because it was know-how that we were developing. The European guys had three or four generations of know-how. We started with zero, basically. And most of them in Europe said it couldn’t be done here. When I was in Europe in 1982, most all the growers said I couldn’t do it. It’s too hot in California. It’s too dry in California. It’s too far away. Blah blah blah. All these things. That’s why when I first started the farm, I called it Rebel Farms, because I was rebelling against the popular position that it couldn’t be done. I said, “To hell with you guys!” I didn’t call it Rebel Farms for too long, because once I had something to sell, I didn’t want to go to the market with “I’m Rebel Farms!”
I had committed to farming. I don’t know why. I can’t explain my train of thinking back then. I was not from a farm family. I needed something different to get into farming. Everybody said it was impossible: You can’t start farming, land’s too expensive, there’s no access, blah blah blah. So I said, “Well, I’ll grow something different.” That’s why it caught my eye. Literally I just stumbled upon it and it happened to click in my mind, and off I went. That’s my nature, I guess.
The next challenge, once he could grow it, was selling the endive. Rich grabs the hard copy of his income statement from the first four years of the farm (“This is before computers”), showing all his losses.
You can see our yields per acre and our revenues and how much money we lost. Lost $9,000 the first year, $20,000 the second year. And $12,000 the third year. Finally we made money in year number 4! We made almost $8,000. We were living large then.
My wife, luckily, had a job. She’s a nurse; she’s still an RN. We got married here in the spring of ’84, a few months after we harvested that first box. I’ve known her since I was ten. I don’t know. We were just dumb. We were naive and young and this is what we did.
I’m sure we quit four or five times and then we’d resolve to try again, or we would just keep going. I don’t know why we kept going. We talk about that now that we’re older. What were we thinking? When we tried to buy our first house, we couldn’t get a mortgage because the guy said, “What? You grow what? In the dark? And you want us to loan you money?”
It was so pathetic. It was hard. It really was pretty hard. But a little bit of stubbornness and some support from the European partners and from my wife, and we’d get glimpses of progress. And we just kept chugging along. It was an exercise in patience.
Endives are better known today than they were in the eighties, but Collins still feels it’s his responsibility to “preach the gospel of endive.” In the beginning, he and his wife would go “wherever food people congregated”—industry events and social gatherings, both formal and informal—bringing samples. “We went to so many events it just drove my wife crazy,” Collins says. Over the years, he’s talked to countless culinary students, journalists, and restaurateurs. “We still do that today,” Collins says. “We do endive bouquets at Valentine’s Day in lieu of roses. We’ve done that for, gosh, almost fifteen years. Coca-Cola still advertises, every day, after a hundred-plus years of selling crap.”
I wish the average person in the Bay Area would eat a pound a year. Everything we grow could go right into the Bay Area. That’s four salads a year. Just four nice salads a year! But we’re not there yet. It’s just not on people’s minds. It is more and more, because of the interest in food, the interest in local, the interest in diversity of new foods.
It’s much easier to get info out, there’s a much greater desire to have good information, but the problem is that people are bombarded with information. How do you stand out? But we’re just trying to provide information. If you Google “endive,” we’re one of the top results. [California Endive Farms owns endive.com.] I always get these emails about search engine optimization. Pffft.
Endive still has a bitter reputation. And it’s not that bitter. There’s a lot of stuff that’s more bitter. And those gummy worms that kids eat, or the sour apples—augh! But there’s a change taking place. I wouldn’t want to be part of a fad either—we couldn’t respond to it. You can appreciate how long it takes to grow the stuff. So if all of a sudden everybody wanted endive—we couldn’t. We’d do our best, but there’s only so much we can do. But we’re happy to build upon a market based on good information and people appreciating it. That’s what we do.
I’m not sick of it, not at all. The very first box we picked on Thanksgiving we served to Shelly’s family on Thanksgiving, ten pounds. And I’m going to braise ten pounds this Thanksgiving. I do love it still. I don’t ever get sick of it. It’s a good vegetable!
le bon oeuf 