Valley farmer known for top organic produce

The farmer who has groupies gets up at 4:30 each morning, goes to bed at 11 each night and answers his phone during all other hours because people need him. His phone is clipped to the elastic suspenders he wears always, because a belt doesn’t do the job anymore and something has to keep his denim where it belongs.

He is tall, with thick gray hair, apple cheeks and a slight stoop from decades spent hunched over rows of cabbage and cauliflower, his hands plunged into dirt. He is 66, except when he talks about growing things, and then he is a boy of 7 – eyes bright with wonder, face filled with joy.

Bob McClendon feeds people, and the people he feeds are grateful, and of the many lives he has lived, this is the one he loves.

He grows organic citrus and vegetables on a 25-acre triangle smack in the middle of the West Valley suburbs – stalwart fields squeezed among tract homes, a baseball stadium and the Arrowhead mall.

He supplies watermelon radishes and microgreens to 37 of Arizona’s fussiest chefs: Kevin Binkley, Chris Bianco and Nobuo Fukuda among them. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, McClendon piles two refrigerated trucks with flats of Meyer lemons and just-cut asparagus and hauls it all to farmers markets, where the self-named groupies descend.

Some 1,400 people take home McClendon’s Select produce each week, starry-eyed over oranges that drip with sweet juice and tomatoes that taste like the sun.

Customers bring him coffee and pastry and his favorite Neiman Marcus chocolate-chip cookies, so as to properly express their devotion.

He’s met with a chorus: “Good morning, Bob. We love you, Bob. Good to see you, Bob. How should I cook this cauliflower, Bob?”

Mostly, though, he says he hears this: “Thank you, Bob, for what you do.”

What he’s doing, really, is reminding them of things modern Americans tend to forget: that carrots are sweet, and broccoli delicious, and food comes from a person who grows it with his hands.

Dig in

“You have to taste this,” he says one morning on his farm, biting into a pink grapefruit, and then a Ruby Red, delighting in the delicate shades between them.

Next, he hops into his golf cart for a quick ride through the fields, his cellphone tucked beneath his chin. Somewhere, a chef needs apples.

He wheels by the new asparagus crop, admires the Romanesco cauliflower ready for harvest. His wheels crunch through piles of broken green-onion tops. The farm smells like ranch dressing.

He stops to watch his new spading machine churn up a neat row of deep-brown soil, then hops out of the cart because he wants to get his hands in the soft dirt.

“You have to smell this,” he says with shining eyes, holding out a handful. The soil is fragrant with minerals and rain, carrots and beets. “This is where it all starts.”

For Bob, it began when he was 7. His grandmother showed him a trick: If you put two squash seeds between wet paper towels and set them on a plate in the windowsill, something magical happens.

“I looked at them every day,” he says. “And then when something started to happen, I looked at them a couple times a day.”

Right then, in that kitchen in south Tucson where he grew up, he says, McClendon fell hard for “the miracle of life.”

Later, there was college, there was marriage, there was a son named Sean.

There were two decades spent as a pharmacist at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, where McClendon was the director of pharmacy. There were businesses on the side, too: medical technology, an iron-furniture company, a snowmobile dealership and even build-your-own log homes. McClendon raised livestock, raced horses, guided hot-air balloons through the sky.

But always, he had a garden.

Grapefruit for sale

He and his wife, Marsha, bought their 25-acre Peoria plot in 1975, and Bob began to plant: first citrus trees and a 1-acre backyard garden, and every year, just a little something more. Soon, a little was a lot. He brought baskets of citrus to work, gave honey to the neighbors, plied his produce upon any agreeable soul.

Twenty-five years later, Marsha told Bob that there was just too much, and sent him off to the Town and Country farmers market in Phoenix to offer his hobby for sale.

“We had a couple tables and some citrus and honey,” Bob says.

One morning, Chris Bianco happened by. He bought some things. He came back and bought more. He sent other chefs to Bob’s table.

Meanwhile, in American popular culture, “organic” and “farmers market” became code for something urbane and smart. Organic-food sales increased from about $7 billion nationally in 2000 to $25 billion by 2010, according to the Nutrition Business Journal