Each morning Dick Peixoto rises before dawn to begin solving a puzzle.

Unlike a crossword or jigsaw, it’s a living business that shifts each day with the whims of Mother Nature. The ‘pieces’ include hundreds of dedicated employees, running a state-of-the-art cooling and shipping facility, and a 3,300-acre California farming operation that specializes in growing over 50 kinds of veggies year-round.

Welcome to Lakeside Organic Gardens, Peixoto’s family-owned and operated farm in Watsonville, Calif.

“On any given day at Lakeside we have about 500 different blocks of organic produce growing,” says Peixoto with matter-of-fact conviction, “and we have a plan for every single one of those blocks.”

It takes an agile leader to see those plans through to success, which is why you rarely see Peixoto (pronounced, ‘Peh-SHOTE’), in the office. Each morning after leading a strategic farming operation meeting, he’s in his truck, on his phone, and out in fields, solving problems and putting his people first.

“He has eyes on the well-being of life for his people and his community,” says Lakeside’s marketing director Drew Clowser. “He keeps a special quote in his wallet that says, ‘I believe as a businessman success goes beyond profits; it’s about creating wealth to share with my neighbors, employees, customers, and vendors.’ This is a noble motto that resembles this man’s great character. Dick takes a lot of pride in seeing his employees be able to excel and prosper in life.

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“He’s never separated himself from the people and the farm,” he adds. “He’s a prudent thinker with a big heart, and a master strategist in the field. He’s driven to figure out the complexity of growing more than 50 crops, all year-round.”

Close friends and fellow farmers say he is as down-to-earth as one can be -- a relatable everyman leading the largest family-owned and operated solely organic vegetable grower/shipper in the United States.

The Organic Grower Summit, presented by Farm Progress and Western Growers, recently announced it will honor Peixoto with its Grower-of-the-Year award, sponsored by Fendt. The award will be presented to Peixoto today, Dec. 5, as part of the keynote presentation at this year’s summit in Monterey, Calif. The event began Wednesday, Dec. 4.

“No one is more deserving of this honor than Dick,” says Lakeside Chief Operating Officer Juan Gonzalez. “He’s a visionary leader. He’s an owner, farmer, businessman, and he’s there every morning at 6 to motivate and inspire his team. His commitment to excellence inspires all of us around him.”

Related:USDA comes out swinging on organic enforcement

Deep farm roots

Peixoto’s grandfather immigrated from the Azore Islands of Portugal and began farming the Pajaro Valley in the early 1900s. Dick bought his first tractor at age 16 and started farming 40 acres on his own as a high school senior nearly 50 years ago. A son of a pesticide salesman, Peixoto got an early education on all the agrichemicals available to grow specialty crops, and he quickly mastered conventional agriculture. But by the mid-90s he had become disillusioned with the conventional approach to farming.

“It was just spray, spray, spray,” he recalls. “It's not unusual for celery to be sprayed 25 times to get it to harvest in the conventional world. We partnered with someone who had some spray guys planning a $1,100 per acre spray with 11 different preventive chemicals. We couldn’t believe it!”

He knew converting his fields to organic was a risk. And like most conventional growers, he was skeptical.

“At one point organic was more of a movement, a lot of tie-died shirts and Birkenstocks and people moving back to the land,” he jokes. “I kept looking over the fence at these organic guys and their fields were full of weeds. I was like, do these guys make money? How does that work?”

But he had faith in himself and his business skills. An idea took shape: What if you take the organic growing process and its premiums, and put it in the hands of a professional, business-focused farmer – one who didn’t wear tie-died shirts?

“I thought, if we take a lot of what we know - not so much the sprays or chemicals, but a lot of our cultural practices, cultivating and the way we prepare the ground -- and applied that to organic, we could probably become a substantial organic grower,” he says. “I said to myself, we can figure this out, and there were huge premiums to be captured.”

Taking the plunge

Over eight years he transitioned up to 150 acres annually to certified organic. A committed life-long learner, Peixoto had to ramp up his management skills. He and his employees began walking fields to learn firsthand what kinds of pest issues they faced.

“To be successful in organic you’re learning something new every day,” he says. “As the company grew, we learned together what the pests were and how to battle them. We had to re-educate ourselves. We don't want to just annihilate everything.

“In the conventional world, every time you see a bug you call for a spray, and if you don’t see a bug then you go in and spray before the bug gets there. In the organic world when we see a bug, we have to analyze what kind of bug, what kind of population, how many beneficials are there? Is there something we can do to entice the beneficials to show up at our field? Whenever you have a pest problem you will eventually see the beneficial insects move in. They will naturally come in because they are a food source, so we learn from them.

“There’s a war going on between good bugs and bad bugs every day, and we must figure out what the balance is. We want to be strategic in how we're going to attack any problem.”

He’s also a strong proponent of crop rotations. “If we screw up on crop rotations, we can definitely start diseases that we would have a hell of a time knocking out,” he says.