Jim Churchill, also known as The Tangerine Man, is the owner of Churchill Orchards in Ojai, CA. Jim is the man to thank for pretty much every Pixie or Paige Tangerine, Kishu Mandarin, and the lesser known Cocktail grapefruit that you have had the pleasure of tasting. This is no small contribution when you consider a time when California citrus growers had no incentive to expand beyond the Valencia orange.

Churchill Orchards was started by a family business, but it was Jim who introduced the citrus to the picture. Jim’s father first planted 37 acres of Bacon avocados. This was his idea of a retirement plan. Having grown up in rural Ojai, Jim embraced the counter-culture of the 1960s, and went off to Sacramento to work as a journalist and a community organizer (and maybe do some partying).

And then, the Bacon avocado, the family nest egg, took a hit in the marketplace. It just couldn’t compare to the Hass Avocado, still the most common avocado in America to this day. The Hass has a thicker skin, therefore easier to ship, and it is higher in fat content, making it creamier in texture. The price of the Churchill Bacon avocado crop plummeted from .60 a lb to .14 a lb in the early 70s. Jim decided to step in.

Citrus was grown all over the valley, but like so many industries, the best of the crop was exported, leaving little for the locals (remember, Farmers Markets were just starting at this time). Only farming for two years, but determined to shift the focus of Churchill Orchards away from the out of favor Bacons avocados and onto citrus, Jim, always the iconoclast, managed to find rare clippings of Pixie, Satsuma, Kishu and one whose name was unknown, so renamed after his mother-in-law, ‘Aida.’At the time, there was absolutely no existing market for these citrus, so much more intense in flavor, but against all common sense, Jim grafted and planted the Pixies and the Paige tangerine trees on his property. When the trees began to bare fruit, he himself filled up the truck and pedaled door to door.  Nothing stuck. People thought of Tangerines as a Christmas fruit, and these far superior varietals ripened a little later in the season (Feb/March), when consumers were on to the next thing.

Like so many triumphant tales of food and these days, all roads lead to Alice Waters. With her pioneering farm to table restaurant, Chex Panisse in Berkley (which Jim so casually refers to simply as Chez), it was Alice who first asked her diners to consider the farmer. She purchased some of Jim’s first citrus, naming “Churchill Orchards Pixies” on the Chez Panisse seasonal menu. If the general public didn’t crave these flavorful fruits quite yet, the Berkley crowd was ahead of that game. So Jim would continue to send a few boxes of Pixies at a time up to Nor Cal on the Greyhound Express, giving him the confidence to continue planting. He would sell within the small but burgeoning Farmers Market scene, and encourage other local farmers to branch out beyond the conventional varieties and join his camp.

Fast forward 40 years, and Jim is the representative of the Pixie Growers’ Association, selling 3 million pounds this year. I am shadowing Jim as he runs around in his van, dropping off fruit to one packing plant to be  sold to Whole Foods, over to another to go to a distributor, selling to specialty markets all over the country. We rush back to the orchard, where we scramble to gather the boxes of fruit destined for the Berkley Saturday Farmers Market, all before an end of Kishu season party in the barn. Jim will be making paella and serving a custard with the zest of Paige Tangerines to all the pickers and packers of this season’s crop.