What if…

Instead of demanding chefs like Thomas Keller love us for being local or sustainable, we demanded of ourselves that we delivered the absolute best in terms of the flavor and quality of our crops? Would he love us more then?

Love is earned, not demanded.

The local food movement can demand that  all segments of the eating public conform to its notion of proper eating. Or it can earn the love of that public by being better than the alternatives in all respects.

I know which strategy I think will be more successful.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way

In a recent interview with the New York Times, French Laundry Chef Thomas Keller created a stir when he disavowed any responsibility for the direction of national food policy. Chefs, he said, are not responsible for sustaining local farmers or fixing climate change.

Not surprisingly, his comments drew a sharp rebuke in some arenas (Civil Eats, Huffington Post.)  Should they have?

His comments raise two questions. The first is whether or not chefs can be agents of change in our food system, particularly with respect to local food. Clearly they can. I’m fortunate to work with several chef and food artisan friends who are our “local local heros”… People like Tim Kilcoyne, Rachel Main, Kate Dunbar, Julia Crookston and James and Manuela Carling of Ventura Limoncello. Customers are responding to their work, other restaurateurs are following their lead, and food and farming are receiving more attention than ever. These people are leaders and they make a difference.

The second question raised by Chef Keller is whether he personally has an obligation to lead within the food movement. He says “No” and I agree with him. He has built his career around food as art, not food as activism. He is entitled to pursue his vision, as are we all. Even if I wished for his leadership, it would be a futile desire on my part. You can not assign leadership to the unwilling. Not if you expect results, anyway. In fact, I’m glad that he risked the predictable backlash by being honest about his views, rather than assuming a false mantle of leadership.

The Marines have a saying: “Lead, follow, or get out of  the way.” Chef Keller has opted to get out of the way. That’s fine. There are a lot of great people like the ones I mentioned above who can and are leading already.

Those are the people we should be talking about.

Who will win the 2030 World Series?

If I told you that I knew who was going to win the 2030 World Series, would you believe me? Or would you think I was a lunatic? Obviously, you’d think I was nuts.

But what if I was really into baseball? I mean REALLY into baseball. If I’d read everything there was to read about the game? Imagine I watched every game (somehow) and could cite batting stats for obscure players from the 1920’s. If I was a genuine expert, would you believe me then?

You’d probably take me more seriously, that’s for sure. You might even respect my knowledge and opinions. But would you think I actually had the answer? If you did, you would be the crazy one.

We recognize that no matter how well-informed the source, predictions about the future are opinions, not facts.

At least most of the time we do. But when it comes to predicting the future of something even more complex than baseball, California agriculture for example, a lot of us have a near religious devotion to “our” team. We know who we want to win. We know why we expect them to win.  That’s why the topic of farming’s future often spawns heated arguments, not real discussion leading to practical and workable solutions.

Everyone related to agriculture, conventional or organic, has their own differing concerns, priorities, and fears but we share the same basic goal: we want to be able to feed people in such a way that works for everybody involved. And if we are doing it right, we’ll all be able to keep doing the same tomorrow, next month, next decade, the next century and beyond.

Like baseball fans, we have our differences, but we are all committed to the same game. We have our opinions, preferences and hopes for the future. But we don’t know how it will turn out, because we recognize that the game changes over time.. As they say, that’s why they play the game. The only way for us to know what California agriculture is going to look in 2030 is to play it out. I’m looking forward to it.

But I’m not putting money on the Cubs.

Using every part

In culinary circles, there is a reawakening to the concept of using “every part of the animal.” Feeding people involves the consumption of resources, regardless of whether the agriculture involved is “conventional” or “organic.” So it makes perfect sense to me that we should get all that we can out of our investment of resources. Cows are not all rib-eye and tri-tip. There is a lot more that is edible that can be put to use.

This Friday night, the Sidecar Restaurant will be hosting a dinner to celebrate this concept. Chef Tim Kilcoyne will be joined by TV chefs Adrien Nieto and Derrick Prince for a five course dinner described as “comfort food with a twist.” Look for oxtail, tripe, sweetbreads and marrow incorporated American classics like beef pot-pie. I hope people will check it out! Reservation information is here.

Next month, we will get into the act at the first of this year’s Totally Local VC dinner series. (Details here!)  Our fava beans will be paired with beef cheek from Ventura County’s Watkins Ranch. To me, this seems very fitting. Just as Chef Jason Collis is using every part of the animal, we are trying to use every part of the soil. Fava beans are not typically a cash crop for us. They are grown as part of our cover crop program. We want the space between our trees to be generating biomass, creating nitrogen, improving water infiltration, and (hopefully) yielding an edible crop.

 We only have so much soil… our challenge is to make the very best use of it that we can.

Is 80 too old for social media?

If it is, don’t tell our fig tree “Harry.” He’s still spry and active, producing nearly 300 pounds of fruit last season and already looking good for this year. In large part due to social media, he has made a lot of new friends recently: Sidecar Restaurant, Petite Reve Café, The Local Café, Rabalais’ Bistro, Totally Local VC and many others! Facebook has made him the official “Rockstar Fig Tree” of Ventura County. (OK, it’s not “official”… but who’s going to challenge it?)

Given Harry’s success in the social media world, we went out and got him 500 friends. We think you’ll “like” the younger generation too. This season we will have tasting sample quantities from the nine different varieties of fig that we have added.It doesn’t stop with figs. This year we have added apples, pears, apricots and persimmons.

How do figs and social media connect? Simply put, I don’t think we would have been able to make the connections to people interested in specialty fruit without social media. Without a network of tasters, buyers and eaters, experimenting with alternative crops on a significant scale would not be economically feasible. But social media has been a great tool for reaching new people, finding new fruit, and letting people know more about what we do. We would not be doing direct, local agriculture without it.

I don’t market avocados

I will sell you any type of fruit I grow, but I will not market avocados.

 Why not?

 I love to provide my customers with the freshest, ripest fruit possible. The citrus fruits and figs we supply are picked at the peak of their flavor and put into the hands (and mouths) of our customers as fast as humanly possible. It is a bit harder to do it that way, but that is how we deliver a great product. And that is what we market. That fresh off the tree flavor is our brand.

But what about an avocado, freshly picked, right of the tree? Hard as a rock. Absolutely inedible. When is the right time to pick it? Anywhere within a several month window. An avocado needs to sit quietly for 5 days, 7 days, or more before it is creamy ripe and delicious. So if I can’t pick it at the right moment, and getting it to the customer faster doesn’t help, what does that do to our value proposition? Our competitive advantage? Completely negated when it comes to avocados.

 Don’t get me wrong… I’m happy to sell you some avocados, and you will be very happy with them. But are they a “class apart” eating experience like our Meyer lemons or “Harry’s figs?”

 Nope… And that is why I don’t market them. I won’t brag about our fruit, unless I can back it up.

PS: We will have a few Gem and Lamb Hass late season avocados available when the only competition is Chilean fruit that has spent a month on boat…  You might see me marketing those.

Prune without pity

Just finished one of the emotionally toughest jobs in the orchard… pruning young fig trees. After a year of watching them grow and celebrating every leaf and shoot, the time had come to force them into shape before they put this year’s growth in the wrong place. Every branch lopped off held the promise of new fruit, eagerly awaited by customers.

The different varietals had different habits. The Brown Turkeys tended to sprawl low to the ground, while Desert Kings go for the sky. The Black Missions required very little… they seemed to grow in the proper “wineglass” shape with little training. Some trees look great… others had to get the “do-over” prune.

Tough as it was to cut away that much growth, it still felt good. Having a proper structure for the trees will pay off in the long run. And since we don’t have cooler facilities yet, keeping our crop volume down makes sense.

Now if the cuttings I transplanted will just take root and give me new trees, this will have been a very good day.

 

National Ag Day = Free Book

In the hopes of getting more people thinking and talking about agriculture, I’m offering my ebook free on Smashwords.com for the rest of the week. Coupon code GA26F will get a free copy!

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/122129

The 1-5-50 Rule

What does it take to experiment with specialty fruit within a larger orchard operation? I like to refer to my “1-5-50 Rule.” That is shorthand for my specialty fruit providing 1% of my income, using 5% of my land, and taking 50% of my time.

So why would I do this? First of all, I offer this ”rule” with tongue firmly in cheek, but the income and acreage numbers were essentially correct at the time I first said it. As a tree farmer, I experience a big lag between when I commit acreage to a crop and when it begins to pay off. So in early 2011, it was accurate to say that 1% of our income was coming from the specialty fruit planted on 5% of our acreage. But since these trees were quite young (5 years for our block of Meyer lemons, and 80 mixed citrus varietals, and 400+ figs planted that spring) it is no surprise that income trailed acreage. In fact the Meyer lemons, despite their young age, were already outperforming their older Eureka and Lisbon cousins on a dollars per acre basis. Over time, I expect the specialty fruit to outperform, but that will not happen until they begin to reach maturity.

And the 50% of my time? Well, that was probably a bit of an exageration. But I do spend a disproporationate amount of time looking into new crops and tending to young plantings. Since I hope to be doing this for another 30 or 40 years, that seems appropriate to me. But I do look forward to the day when I can enjoy the 60-50-60 rule.

(For the record, 2012 will probably look more like 2.5-5-30.)

So what’s this weather do?

This has been a very warm, dry winter in Southern California. That’s great for the businesses down by the beach, but it makes life a little difficult those of us farming.

Lack of rainfall has longterm implications for our ground water and reservoirs. But in the immediate sense it means one thing to a farmer: irrigation. In California, we expect to irrigate much of the year, but we can usually count on a break from November to March. The scarce rainfall this year means that pumps are running, and that costs money. We’ll see $200 to $300 in extra expense per acre this year due to irrigation costs.

At the same time, this weather places stress on the trees. And when trees are stressed they take it out on the fruit. We will likely see a decrease in production, amounting to a few hundred dollars per acre from fruit being smaller than it might otherwise have been.

So the net impact of this winter for most Ventura County farmers is going to be several hundred to perhaps a thousand dollars per acre less net income. Some will be able to take that in stride, but it’s really going to hurt for some of us. Increased expenses and decreased income is never a good combination.

A lot of farmers will be watching the weather more anxiously than usual next month, because things aren’t over yet. Marhc can be unpredictable. Nice rains can save a season. We’ve had “March Miracles” before. Then again, it is also possible to have a freeze in March. With avocado trees blooming in the unseasonably warm weather, they will be particularly vulnerable to a frost that could wreck the 2013 crop, lining up a disasterous year to follow a poor one. Weather is always a risk in agriculture, but this winter has been exceptional trying.

If you have any pull with the rain people, your help would be appreciated.