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

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.