Los Angeles area Event report
From Soil to Table: Step inside Southern California's flagship regenerative farm
Exclusive Site Visit: The Ecology Center
On Saturday, 13 June 2026, the FACC California Sustainability Committee was welcomed to The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano, a 28-acre Regenerative Organic Certified™ farm and education hub that has become one of Southern California's flagship destinations for regenerative agriculture. Guided by Engagement Manager Caitlyn McCall, our members spent half a day discovering how a working farm puts sustainability quite literally on the table, and how it inspires everyone who walks through it.
A Living Model of Regenerative Agriculture
The Ecology Center is the work of founder Evan Marks, who spent years studying agroecology and traditional and Indigenous farming systems around the world before bringing that knowledge home to California. The story of the land is itself a lesson in patience: when Marks arrived in 2008, only a single acre and a historic farmhouse were available on a property owned by the city of San Juan Capistrano. It was enough to begin. In 2019, his team took over the remaining acreage and transformed the full 28 acres into a thriving community farm. Today the site is Regenerative Organic Certified and a member of 1% for the Planet, has welcomed more than 300,000 visitors, and supports over 100 small farms and artisans within a 50-mile radius. Its work is organized around four simple pillars: Grow, Eat, Make, and Peace. Each of them came to life during our visit.
A Guided Tour of the Farm and Gardens
Caitlyn led the group through the farm and gardens, inviting us to taste along the way. What struck everyone first was the sheer abundance: the quantity and the quality of the fruits and vegetables in the rows. The route wound past the farm stand and the cluster of kitchens and food makers at the heart of the site, then by the Peace Dome, where visitors were mid-practice in a yoga session, the "Peace" pillar in action. We stepped into All Species Studio, a regenerative-textile lab on the farm whose place-based garments are colored with natural dyes, some of the hues drawn from plants such as rhubarb (the "Make" pillar), and visited the outdoor classroom where children learn directly from the land, before circling back to the original historic farmhouse that anchors it all.
From Soil to Table
The visit closed around a shared table at the on-site Campesino Café, where the farm's own produce arrived on our plates, a direct and delicious demonstration of the "soil to table" loop the Center is built to close. Over lunch, members tasted the farm's products and discussed the committee's plans for after the summer.
Why It Matters for Our Members
For our committee, the day was an initiation in the best sense: an accessible, hands-on way to understand what regenerative agriculture actually means, and a glimpse of what is genuinely possible. The Ecology Center is a flagship: a place that puts sustainability on the table, inspires the people who visit, and doubles as a beautiful setting to eat well and bring others.
It is also honest about the journey. Even an exemplary site shows that the path is iterative: some infrastructure still relies on plastic, and water stewardship in a dry region remains an open question. Far from diminishing the visit, this was a welcome reminder that sustainability is never a linear path, and a reason never to give up when building a cleaner business: you have to start somewhere.
A Place Worth Knowing
The FACC California Sustainability Committee extends its sincere thanks to Caitlyn McCall and the entire team at The Ecology Center for their warmth and generosity. Beautiful, inspiring, and well worth a visit. It is precisely the kind of immersion the committee aims to bring to its members.
Text and Photo credits: Amandine Richard.
