Are Our Medjool Dates Organic? An Honest Answer From the Farm

People search for organic Medjool dates from the Coachella Valley, land on our farm, and deserve a straight answer. So here it is, with nothing massaged:

No — our dates are not certified organic, and we will never use that word for them while they aren’t. Here is exactly how we grow instead, so you can judge the fruit on what we actually do.

We grow these. Golden Zahidi Dates — Nutty, Less Sweet, Never Sticky | California Farm-Direct from our family farm in Sky Valley, California — from $15/lb, shipping included. See them →

How we actually grow

No sprays. We don’t apply pesticides to our palms. The grove sits isolated in Sky Valley, at the quiet northern edge of the Coachella Valley, with desert around it rather than other farms’ drift.

Compost-built soil, clean feedstock only. Our soil program is compost we control the inputs on — and no biosolids, ever. We wrote the whole soil story here: It Starts With the Ground.

One ingredient. The fruit is whole raw dates — no added sugar, syrup, oil, glaze, sulphites or preservatives. The ingredient list on every container is one word long.

Why we’re not certified

Certification is a paperwork-and-fees system built for operations much bigger than ours. For a small family farm, the annual cost and administration buy a label — not a change in how we farm, because we already don’t spray. We’d rather put that money into the grove and tell you plainly what we do. That’s a trade-off, honestly stated: if the certificate itself is what your kitchen or store requires, we’re not your farm — yet. If what you actually want is fruit grown without sprays by people who’ll answer any question about their practices, call us: (760) 501-1845.

What “organic” does and doesn’t tell you about dates

Dates are among the lowest-spray crops in American agriculture even conventionally — the desert does much of the protecting. What the label can’t tell you is freshness, handling or grade: certified fruit can still sit shelf-dried in a warehouse for months. Farm-direct answers the questions the label doesn’t: picked this season, cold-stored on the farm, whole with the pit in, packed to order.

Written by Jason Shopshear, who grows Medjool, Zahidi and Barhi dates at Desert Sun Dates in Sky Valley, California, and thinks the word “organic” belongs only on fruit that carries the certificate.