Can California Correct Coffee?

One Goleta Farmer’s Fight to Make the Bean Business Better for All

By Matt Kettmann | November 4, 2021

When Jay Ruskey the farmer started talking like Jay Ruskey the tech entrepreneur one morning last June, I started wondering whether he’d put something else in my coffee. He’d just brewed us a batch from beans grown at his farm, Good Land Organics, where I was expecting to get a brief update on how he was still managing to eke out an existence in the exotic fruit trade. Ruskey had just launched a new series of farm tours, which I assumed was the latest part of his continued preaching about the wonders of California-grown coffee to an audience afraid of its high cost.

But then he’s saying things like “Series A funding” and “genome sequencing” and “vertical integration” and casually mentioning that now more than 70 farms across Southern California are growing beans to fuel his growing company, Frinj Coffee. I got a little jittery, and not just from the coffee.

Ruskey, I quickly realized, was no longer just a small-time organic farmer exploring obscure fruits like caviar lime, lychee, and longan up a dead-end road on the western edge of Goleta. He was inventing an entirely new California industry, completely from scratch, and one that ultimately aims to add resilience to agriculture in a changing climate and challenge coffee’s status quo, which may be the most exploitive commodity market on the planet. And he’s doing it all at light speed.