Happy Quail Farms
Farmer David Winsberg stands tall among a peck of prized peppers.
Photograph by Allison Shea Malone
In East Palo Alto, the sweet, earthy scent of fresh peppers has filled the air since 1980. Cultivating dozens of varieties of both sweet and hot peppers every year, Happy Quail Farms is the go-to spot for the Bay Area’s pepper needs.
The farm produces about 85 percent sweet peppers and only 15 percent other varieties, including the hottest of hot peppers. Owner David Winsberg says, “We do grow Sevinas occasionally, which were the Guinness Book record holder. They were tested originally at 300,000 Scoville units. The very hot ones I have a very limited use for. We like them in ceviches, we like them in a cortillo—which is sort of a salsa type preparation—but other than that, it is more of a macho thing to most of our clients.”
The farm’s specialty is one of their sweeter peppers. “We were the first to start growing the Pimiento de Padrón,” says Winsberg. “It’s not typically hot, but it is a bit of a roulette. There is usually one out of a dozen that is hot. We started growing it about 10 years ago, and now we supply 50 restaurants around the country. We are very small, but for that particular pepper, we are one of the largest producers in the country.”
The Padrón peppers travel from the Bay Area to southern California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Portland, and sometimes even as far as the East Coast. But another of Winsberg’s crops, a specialty Peruvian pepper, made the big time in October 2009 when 20 pounds of them were sent to Washington D.C. for a White House special event.
“The only way we survive as a small farm is to find unique varieties that we can develop a market for,” Winsberg says. “To locate new varieties, we are always looking around the world.”
Winsberg started Happy Quail Farms almost 30 years ago, in keeping with his own childhood memories of growing up on a south Florida pepper farm. “As a child I wasn’t particularly enamored with getting up early and life on the farm,” says Winsberg. “I certainly didn’t think it was a lifestyle I would want... When I first came out here I worked for other people. I finally decided that I would rather work for myself, so I found some old flower farms here to take over farming.”
Since then, Happy Quail Farms has been a family affair. Winsberg’s eldest son works on the farm when he is home from college, and his younger son helps out when he isn’t playing soccer. In addition to a few full-time employees, Winsberg says that his wife, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law end up working alongside him at various markets throughout the season. Happy Quail’s peppers are available at the Palo Alto and Menlo Park farmers’ markets, plus San Francisco Ferry Plaza’s Farmers’ Market.
The farm’s name comes from an earlier Winsberg business enterprise. “When I first came to California, I started raising quail as a hobby. I was selling eggs. I had a little motorcycle, actually it was a Vespa, and I would take them up to Chinatown and sell them up there. It was just a side business. I was managing a small store at the time and this was something I did for fun.”
David no longer raises quail, but he says the diminutive game birds accurately represent the stature of his farm. “We have five small locations in a two block area, with only two acres total to cultivate, so I see us as sort of a quail-sized farm.”
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