Adobe Press, September 2004

rivenrock Gardens, fresh organic edible cactus
Adobe Press, 2004 This article came out in the Adobe Press in September 2004. Written by Kirsten Flagg.

John Dicus may not want to disclose the location of his farm, but the magic ingredient of his salsa is no secret.
"We call it Dog Drool Salsa," said Dicus, poised to take a big bite of his cactus salsa. It's named after its consistency, not its taste.

   John and Vickie Dicus eat cactus nearly every day and in every way -- raw and a la carte, barbecued with tri-tip, in their eggs, in their chili and, of course, always sans spikes.
   A person couldn't live off cactus, but you could do worse as far as nutrient value goes -- low on carbs, high on fiber and packed with vitamin C.
   And the slimy stuff dripping off the tortilla chip? It's called mucilage, and it may look gross, but it also may help manage the symptoms of diabetes and help lower cholesterol.

   But for the Dicuses, this is more than just a lifestyle; this is business.

   The couple moved all 10 acres of their land in the Nipomo foothills into cactus production in 1991. Rivenrock Gardens sells 10,000 pounds of cactus each year, but John Dicus hopes to increase that to 50,000 or 60,000. Maybe then he'll be able to quit his other job in construction.

rivenrock Gardens, skinning a cactus

   Each year, he covers more of the dips and hills of their property with cacti, creating terraces where appropriate and lining it all with the spare concrete he's rescued from the discard piles at work.

September is harvest time for the prickly pear cactus, and right now the farm is wearing its name proudly. Approaching the farm from the long, dirt road, the first thing one notices is the purple fruit shooting through broken concrete -- literally a garden sprung from broken rock.

   If you ask Dicus, "Why cactus," he'll respond, "It just makes sense." For starters, the Lompoc native grew up with a love of agriculture. Both his parents grew up on farms -- his mother in Hungary, where the ground was tilled organically for old-fashioned reasons, because there were no pesticides.

   Some of the cacti at Rivenrock were there long before the people were, and they like their location very much -- both the sandy soil and the hot sun -- which makes it easy to keep the farm organic.

"The theory of organics is the fact that you can just use raw, base production if the earth is in an unaltered form," explained Dicus.

Or, as one of his favorite tenets goes: "Don't grow anything that's not going to like where it's planted."

Even the relative unpopularity of cacti "makes sense" in the Rivenrock world. Cactus products may not be jumping off the grocery shelf, but then Dicus always did have a soft spot for the world's rejects. For example, at one of his old jobs, they called him "Roadkill" for his habit of curing and hanging the pelts of fallen roadside animals.

To discover the final enabling element of Rivenrock, you'll have to connect to the Internet, go to www.google.com and type in "edible cactus." Rivenrock.com should be one of the first sites that appears. The farm does all of its business online, which is why Dicus is able to keep its location a secret.

When Dicus planted his farm on the Web, little did he realize he was establishing the ultimate niche market. These days, his main customer base is made of tortoises -- who love the bright colors of the prickly pears -- and foreign kingdoms.

His wife, Vickie, remembers the day the sultan of Oman called with an order for two tons of cacti.

"It just seemed so strange," she said. "I mean, I just want you to know, it was unreal."

But John Dicus responded with his usual nonchalance -- "Business is business" -- and got to laying out the boxes.

Apparently, Dicus explained, Oman is trying to attract European tourists by selling itself as an exotic mecca. The cacti -- a family heirloom variety given to Vickie by a Navajo woman -- will line the royal palace. South Korea has a similar order in the works.

The farm's variety of customers may only be matched by the variety of thorny desert plants grown there, not all of them for sale. There are the edibles -- the three versions of prickly pear and nopalea grande, the kind that gets mixed in the salsa. And then there's the non edibles -- Agave americana, which grows beyond human reach before producing the base for tequila; Trichocereus, used as a hallucinogen for spiritual journeys by the Incas; and another cactus whose juices supply the poison for the tips of arrows for the hunting bushman of the Kalahari.

"It's a pretty unusual plant," Dicus said in his usual understated way.

September 24, 2004

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