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North Atlantic Books, a Berkeley publisher, purchased a 27-acre farm in Gustine in the Central Valley Thursday as part of a nonprofit program combining preservation of farmland with the Berkeley Youth Alternative’s (BYA) organic-agriculture program. 

BYA is an organization incorporated in California that serves at-risk children in Berkeley and other Alameda County cities. North Atlantic will lease the farm at no cost to Richard Firme, BYA’s principal outreach farmer for the last five years. 

Firme will train young people in organic farming while providing produce for BYA’s food boxes and the public schools. He plans on having an orchard and apiary as well as a wide range of vegetables and melons. 

North Atlantic Books was founded in Vermont in 1975 and moved to the Bay Area in 1977. It was incorporated in 1980 as a nonprofit, The Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences. Its purpose was to publish books from a holistic, nonwestern standpoint in the creative arts, sciences, humanities and healing arts. 

North Atlantic has published approximately 500 titles and together with its sister imprint Frog Ltd., North Atlantic is the largest publisher in English of books on the internal martial arts aikido, t’ai chi chuan and capoeira. 

North Atlantic and Frog also collaborate on a major list of innovative books on alternative healing. 

“We have been publishing books on consciousness and cultural change for 25 years, and we feel it is crucial to put out a portion of our earnings into something that actively furthers this on the ground,” publisher Richard Grossinger said in a press release. 

“We would love to have other publishers and even other businesses join with us in this undertaking. With the help from elsewhere, the farm preservation program can be expanded, saving more land in the Central Valley from development and agribusiness, creating smaller programs elsewhere in the country, and making organic farming available to more inner-city kids at risk.”