A Family Tradition

Joe S. Silva was born in Livingston CA in 1916. He was raised on his family's farm where he started a small dairy in his teen years in an effort to lend his financial help to his parents. The dairy business became successful after only a couple of years. Wanting to diversify his farming business Joe began experimenting with growing sweet potatoes on the family ranch. After discovering that sweet potatoes grew well in Livingston soil, he began to grow yams and sweet potatoes for local distribution. These were among the first yams and sweet potatoes grown in California.

In 1933, at the age of 17, Joe realized that yams and sweet potatoes yielded him better profit than the dairy, so he sold the dairy and applied his full attention to farming and distributing yams and sweet potatoes. This at a time when the roads were dirt, and transportation was by horse and carriage.

In the early 1960's, Joe teamed up with Manuel Bettencourt to grow, pack, and ship primarily for local markets in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but included all of the United States and Canada. Joe also diversified his produce by adding almonds, peaches, watermelons, honey dew, and casabas.

In the early 1970's, after he finished college, Joe's son Stan, began working with Bettencourt Packing, becoming Joe's foreman in the fields and learning to run operations. In 1975, Manuel Bettencourt passed away.

Dorava Produce was founded in 1976 by Joe and Stan Silva. Joe managed the field operations while Stan assumed the responsibilities of managing the packing shed operations.

Stan's sons Ben and Aaron worked with the father and grandfather growing up and throughout high school. In the early 1990's, Ben joined the team full time and in 1996, after graduating from Cal Poly, Aaron started full time.

From 1996 to 2002 three generations of Silva's operated Doreva Produce. On April 5, 2002, Joe passed away at the age of 86.

Today, Doreva offers a full line of yams and sweet potatoes. Doreva grows garnet, red, beauegard and oriental yams as well as the hannah and golden sweets. Doreva Produce is certified free of chemicals and other harmful residues, and the organic yams and sweet potatoes are all natural. Doreva's seed program is worked very closely with UC Davis plant breeders and USDA to ensure our yams and sweet potatoes are free from any deformities, abnormalities and have good shape and color. This year we started our "greenhouse program" which we hope will bring new varities into the market and better, stronger, longer lasting potatoes.

Our success has come from hard work in the field and pride of tradition in bringing quality produce to our satisfied customers.