Gina Bella Colfer is the Sustainable Solutions Agronomy Manager for Organics at Wilbur-Ellis. She serves on the CCOF Certification Services, LLC Management Committee.
From an early age, Gina Bella Colfer knew she wanted a life in agriculture. Growing up in Aptos, California, on her family’s multi-generational apple farm, she attended the Santa Cruz and Monterey county fairs every year without fail, showing horses, sheep, and steers for 4H.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s on a conventional farm, Gina didn’t hear much about organic agriculture at first. “It was still very niche,” she says. Inspired by the pest control advisor who visited her father’s farm, Gina went into work as a pest control advisor herself after graduating from Cal Poly—a career that she has been expanding for over 35 years.
“I started my career on farms that grew artichokes and leafy greens, and I saw this vicious cycle of pesticide use,” Gina recalls. “There was a lot of heavy chemistry involved: organophosphates, carbamates, pyrethroids. … We’d have a kill, but there’d be survival, and the cycle of always having to re-apply would begin again.”
Gina remembers one especially harrowing sight: “I saw this long line of earthworms in the bottom of the furrow where I’d applied herbicides, and they’d come up to the surface because the soil had gone anaerobic and they were exposed to those toxins. It was ecocide, this mass kill.” She knew she had to find a better way.
As Gina’s career in pest control progressed, she and her husband tried their hands at growing more naturally on a quarter-acre of ground they called B&GC Organics. They were certified by CCOF in 1990, growing leafy greens and tomatoes for local buyers. “It opened my eyes that we could farm organically,” she says.
After starting a family, Gina realized she wanted to dive more deeply into organic and sustainable agriculture to preserve the earth for her children.
In 2002, Gina joined Mission Organics (which later became part of Earthbound Farm) as an in-house organic Pest Control Adviser (PCA). She wore many hats, including compliance management and field food safety management, overseeing the company’s compliance with certifications, including CCOF-certified National Organic Program, GLOBALG.A.P., GFA, EFI , and more.
In her current role as Sustainable Solutions Agronomy Manager for Organics at Wilbur-Ellis, a large agricultural input company providing fertilizers, crop protection products, seeds, and more, Gina has worked to develop a strong organics program. “Wilbur-Ellis has been family owned for over 100 years, and the newest generation is seeing the writing on the wall about sustainability and organics,” she says. “They’re wanting to move with the times.”
Gina helps producers escape the pesticide cycle by carefully selecting products and companies with sustainability in mind. “You solve a lot of problems with soil health,” she says. “If you keep pulling from the bank of soil, you get to the point where your bank account is depleted. You have to put back into the soil.”
Gina educates her company’s salespeople and clients about the advantages of soil health, nutrient management, and sustainable products, seeking out companies who are reducing their carbon input and using renewable energies to make their products.
“We have to get these synthetics out of our environment,” says Gina. “They disrupt our soil microbiome, and then when we eat the plants they disrupt our gut microbiome. There are all these secondary downstream effects that not many people think about when they’re applying synthetics to the crops. It’s just mind-boggling. These chemicals are designed to kill everything, and that’s what we need to not do. We need to promote ecosystem diversity instead.”
“We’re doing it for future generations,” Gina says. “I do it for my grandchildren.”