Why they farmed…

The good folks over at the “Why We Farm” blog at Homegrown.org have folded their tent. I followed their progress via their blog from time to time, and had always intended to provide a commentary on their progress. But last month they reached the point where they had gone as far as they could, and are leaving farming for more rewarding pursuits. I guess I need to write that commentary now.

I want to take a moment not only to wish them luck, but recognize their passing from the scene for what it is: A very real demonstration that the barriers to entry in agriculture make it nearly impossible for people of talent and commitment to succeed without an extraordinary amount of capital behind them.

We will never have a truly stable and sustainable agricultural economy if there is no chance for capable people to make a living. Neysa and Travis, you placed yourselves in the test-tube and conducted a three year experiment on yourselves. Thank you for that dedication. I hope that everyone carrying on has learned something from you.

I know I have.

Who’s Talking About Economic Viability?

I have always felt that the notion of economic viability gets glossed over in discussions of sustainable agriculture. That is why one of the first pieces I posted to this blog was “Defining Economic Viability”. No definition? No problem. I’ll make my own.

“Economic viability means that the real returns from farming operations, relative to the farm’s asset value and labor inputs, are competitive with other small business, career, or investment alternatives.”

I might smooth this out a bit, but it is a solid, comprehensive working definition. (Refer to the earlier article to see why.) Over the three and a half years since I wrote it,  I noticed that this article always got more traffic than others. Perhaps I should have been more curious, but I hadn’t googled the definition for some time.

Until last night.

I was surprised to see that my article was the #2 hit on Google for “defining economic viability.” OK, so that is the exact title… perhaps not a fair test. But what happens if you limit the search to “economic viability”? Still high up the second page. Note that neither search was restricted to the economic viability of agriculture. It seems odd to me that such a central concept is not better defined.

The Difference That Covercrops Make

Over the last several years, I have written several times about our covercrop program. I’ve been very pleased with our results, and this morning I can share some tangible proof of the change in soil structure that we have experienced. The “moon rock” on the left was typical of the soil in our “Block A” as of 2008. Very hard, compacted adobe.  I hung on to it to for future reference. The dirt on the left came from just a few feet away, but I scooped it up with a paper cup this morning. This is the difference of several years of managing for soil structure. It took some time, gypsum, steer manure and a palette of cover crops that included mustards, oilseed radish, clovers, vetch, barley, rye, buckwheat and fava beans. But the improvement is dramatic. I feel very confident in our ability to keep this soil viable for the next century of farming in Ventura County.

Ventura Agriculture: The First Century

The second installment of my history series for TotallyLocalVC.com covers the beginnings of agriculture in Ventura County. This period saw tremendous political change, as Ventura passed from Spain to Mexico to the United States. Change in the farmscape was just as pronounced.

http://www.totallylocalvc.com/if-you-build-it-they-will-come/

Figs and a Stinkin’ Acre

August and September have been busy months. Irrigation is always critical this time of year, and we are just concluding picking and pruning the lemons. It was particularly busy in the small end of the business: With lemons delivered to Ventura Limoncello, Meyer lemons and figs to the Sidecar, and additional Meyers into “mainstream/niche” markets, September was our biggest month yet for local and specialty fruit.

The experience has encouraged us to try to branch out a little further, so too new crops will be added to the mix. Garlic and Figs.

Now, I know, I mentioned figs already, but let me explain. For the past two seasons we have sold figs to chefs and caterers, but they have all come from the big “family tree” which is 50+ years old and is presumed to be a black mission varietal. What will be new is that we will have a dozen trees of mixed varietals, including Kadota, Brown Turkey, and Desert King. We hope with some new varieties we may find some which really click with our customers, thrive in our microclimate, and fruit through a longer window.

Garlic is something we are going to try on a very, very small scale. I’ll be very happy if we have a thousand pounds of marketable garlic, and despite the title of this piece, we will be committing far less than an acre to it. But I have learned that local garlic is very hard to come by, so I’m going to give it a shot. It will be quite a change from tree crops. One thing I think is underappreciated about agriculture is the vast differences in knowledge and infrastructure to grow different kinds of crops. I try to be polite when sustainably-minded suburban friends suggest that we just grow X instead of Y, but I have a line rattling around in my brain about the difference between painting a portrait and painting a house. Like painters, not all farmers do the same thing.

Continuing in the vein of new crops, next spring should see our first harvest of Star Ruby grapefruit, Sanguinelli blood oranges, and Cara Cara navel oranges. Probably not enough for any meaningful contribution to the bottom line, but it will be great to get the chance to introduce them to our customers (and eat more than one or two.)

Sustainability and viability are always on my mind, and  these factored into the garlic and fig decisions. Citrus fruit in California is potentially threatened by the Asian Citrus Psyllid insect, which is a vector for Citrus Greening disease, or Huanglongbing virus. This has devastated much of Florida’s citrus industry, and as excited as I am about new specialty citrus varietals, I need to hedge our bets. Garlic and figs? Not affected by it. Avocados have had a rough ride the past few years, because as a subtropical fruit, the “extremes” of Southern California weather can push them to their limits. Will our weather be more extreme over the next few years, as it has been for the last three? It seems prudent to think so. Garlic and figs are well known to be capable of thriving with much higher highs and much lower lows. The fact that they have lower summertime irrigation requirements has got to help too, don’t you think?

Agribusiness and Change: Or thanking T. Rex for your Breakfast

You  know, I’ve never liked the term “agribusiness”. Business has always been a component of agriculture. Yes, it entails land stewardship, and crop science, and just good, old-fashioned hands-in-the-dirt work. But those of us who do it for a living have no reason either to feel apologetic for wanting to make a profit, or feel inferior because we don’t wear expensive suits in a glass and chrome office. “Agribusiness” is useful for vilifying corporate farming, or for making insecure farmers or businessmen feel more important. I’m not much interested in either.

What I am interested in is a return to grass roots, bottom up, entrepreneurial farming. And while I appreciate the support and enthusiasm of foodies, academics and policy wonks, what we really need are people who have an enthusiasm for this business. In the part of my life spent in Silicon Valley, I observed an ethos that changing the world and making a profit did not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, it was generally felt that making the world a better place was precisely what entitled you to significant financial rewards. (I’ll grant that some people in the Valley got a little bit drunk on this Kool-Aid, but I still like the philosophy, at least in moderation.)

This is why I was very happy to read a piece that Rob Smart posted on Civil Eats. Real change will not come externally and it will not come with a single lightning bolt from on high. Farms and small businesses will be the ones that create the models and the relationships and the innovations that will transform our present food system, just a bit at a time, until we have something much better than we have today. While I hope the pace of change will be rapid, I do believe it will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Let’s imagine the food system we want as being represented by a chicken.

Small. Adaptable. Friendly. Managable. Chickens are the embodiment of local scale. There is a reason that they are the iconic emblem of the idealized happy barnyard.

But what is the ancestor of this chicken? The fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Huge. Predatory. Not very pleasant to interact with, I would imagine. A good representation of today’s food system perhaps? I think so. How did we get from T. Rex to the Rhode Island Red?

Despite the occasional meteor or ice-age, it happened just one little innovation at a time.

Lisa Hamilton has it right

“Sustainable agriculture is founded on the principle of farmer leadership. The first step to creating a sustainable food system is restoring stewardship, that elemental relationship in which a farmer balances food production with ecological health and social well-being. That is possible only when farmers are empowered: trusted to lead, respected financially, and encouraged—indeed, allowed—to be independent and free.”

This paragraph is lifted from a letter written by Lisa Hamilton to President Obama. (Read the whole letter here.) In it, she perfectly captures what I consider to be the defining challenge of a more sustainable food system: The fact that the people who best understand it are restricted in their ability to innovate and compete. Elsewhere in her letter, she points out that the bureaucratic burdens of operating within a highly regulated framework put the small farmer at a severe disadvantage. She cites the NAIS program as a prime example of a program, that however well intended it might be, makes it difficult for the farm without a major regulatory compliance to succeed.

I understand that some of this comes with the territory with a bureaucratic system. In one of my earlier professional lives as an employee of the federal government I saw it first hand. I recall feeling that I had to choose between getting the job done, or completing all the required weekly, monthly and quarterly reports that would demonstrate exactly why I didn’t. My immediate supervisor trusted me, but unfortunately that trust could not translate back to Washington.  The bureaucrat’s surrogate for trust? Documentation. What a relief it was to leave that job for the private sector in Silicon Valley.

Part of the allure of the farmer’s market is the ability to reconnect with the farmer and experience the trust that comes from a direct, personal relationship. I’ve experienced it myself: contrary to my own prediction, at last week’s Outstanding in the Field dinner, few seemed to care whether I was organic. But they did want to know about me… they wanted that trust.

Can we maintain that trust in a food system beyond the very small and local? That remains to be seen. But I hope so. A sustainable system where farmers were trusted to do the right thing appeals to both the progressive and the libertarian components of my nature.

Worms

“I’ve been getting a lot more into earthworms lately.”

Odds are very good that only a few short years ago, this was a phrase I would never have thought to utter.  Possibly I would have thought it a sign of impending mental illness. But these days, it is the truth. These are pretty remarkable little organisms, and I find that I am having some success rearing them.

Why would I do that, you ask? Well, for starters, they are great consumers of our kitchen wastes. They break down our waste, turn it into soil, and them are released with their castings into the vegetable or rose garden. Of course, many get snatched up by our ever vigilant flock of hens, meaning some made their way (indirectly of course) to my plate this morning. When prepared in this fashion, I can heartily recommend worms for breakfast.

The other reason I’m raising them is for my “vermidrainage” project. At our Saticoy ranch, we have a compacted clay soil in our Block A, familiar by now to my handful of regular readers. We have been maintaining a cover crop to help break up the soils, and in the next couple of weeks, when we replant, we will attempt to create some natural drains in the clay pan. Basic concept is simple: Use the PTO auger to bore through the pan, then refill it with a mixture of active vermicompost, mulch, and a little of the original soil. A cap of mustard cover on top should add some deep roots, and make it easy to spot the sites. The hope is that this column of active soil will  allow water to drain, and serve as a colony for earthworms to spread through the covercrop rootsystems that surround them. Three 30 gallon barrels are serving as my hatchery. Of course a little vermicompost will go into each new tree’s hole as well.

I’m not alone in this new found interest. Friend and pathfinder Rose H-S alerted me to a blog piece from a young farmer named Devin Foote. If I was concerned for my sanity, then I am now doubly worried for Devin, since his thoughtful and detailed article suggests that he has given this much more thought than I.

Read it here.

The Question

I’m really looking forward to almost everything about tomorrow night’s Outstanding in The Field Dinner at McGrath Family Farm. Phil McGrath is our local “local-food rockstar” here in Ventura County, and it might be unsettling to have to share his spotlight, if I didn’t already know what a great guy he is. Phil, I’m pleased to be your opening act.

I always look forward to any meal with Tim Kilcoyne from Ventura’s Sidecar Restaurant, so no issue there. I’m also looking forward to the event itself, since I have read and heard about the great job the Outstanding in the Field crew does.

I said “almost everything”, because the one thing I’m not looking forward to is The Organic Question. You see, I’m not an organic certified grower, and I don’t plan to be… certainly not by tomorrow night. For a lot of local food enthusiasts, though, organic certification is considered the entry-level criteria for sustainable agriculture. Given my penchant for complexity, I don’t see the issue as being nearly that simple. But tomorrow night, I will be asked The Question, I will answer truthfully, and I will watch the flicker of disappointment wash over the face of the guest.

So here’s the long answer that I will probably not have time for tomorrow night. I don’t believe that organic certification means that much in the context of sustainability, either in economic or environmental terms. Certification is about compliance with certain standards, which have some relation to (but do not define) sustainability. I’m more interested in the philosophy that guides sustainability, and on that score I feel pretty comfortable. I embrace the organic philosophy of feeding the soil, not the plant. In other pieces I’ve outlined our use of composting, mulching and cover-cropping, so I won’t repeat them here. We have utilized beneficial insects as part of an Integrated Pest Management program for three generations. With any chemical application that I may need to make, I give a good deal of weight to potential impacts on my own soil-ecosystem, let alone the larger environment. And it is my belief that a farm managed with natural or organic processes, with an occasional chemical boost when necessary is a perfectly justifiable and sustainable proposition.

It’s really all about moderation, isn’t it? I enjoy a cold beer (or colder limoncello) occasionally, without feeling like I’m risking alcoholism. A good cheeseburger from time to time is not going to be the death of me. Now if I lived my life on nothing but Slim-Jims and cheap whiskey, then I’d have a problem.

People typically think of the food world as being bi-polar: virtuous, small, local, and organic farms on the one extreme, and greedy, global, corporate factory farms on the other. In his book, The Ominvore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan explores a third option: the so called industrial organic model. In this model a conventional mindset and retinue of cultural practices is employed using organic inputs to create food that is legally organic, but is philosophically indistinguishable from conventional farming. It is this model that has made Wal-Mart the largest retailer of organic food in the world.

I’d like to think I’m part of a fourth model: organic and small in philosophy, but open to the benefits of conventional agriculture when needed. So if a little herbicide will knock down a morning glory patch without hours of hand tool and weed- whacker work, I’ll do it. And if a little extra nitrogen helps get young trees off to a good start before winter, I’m OK with that too.

Maybe if the wine really gets flowing, I’ll get to have this conversation about the deeper aspects of sustainability. But I might have to talk with my mouth full.

A Lesson on People: Herb and Warfare

When I decided to start writing on a regular basis, I thought it would help teach me a little about my self. There is nothing like being confronted with your own words from time to time, as any politician can appreciate. I also thought the conversations it might spark would teach me a little about other people. As of 8AM Sunday morning, I can declare success in that department.

That is when my home phone rang. On the line was a very sincere sounding women thanking me for my editorial. It seems the piece I posted here as “An Open Letter to Mr. Bill Nash” had been picked up by the VC Star on the op-ed page. She was very glad that someone took Bill Nash to task for his column. I accepted her thanks, but pointed out that neither his piece nor mine was entirely serious. “Oh, I know” she continued, but “I don’t know what makes him think he can say things like that. People like him are destroying America.” By this point I was really back on my heels. I had been mentally prepared that some people might miss the joke and think me a humorless sourpuss who was being unfair to a hard-working writer. I didn’t imagine that anyone would take it seriously AND agree with my purported point of view. If not taken as satire, my piece could only have come from a very angry and unstable mind. Nonetheless, I got one Sunday morning “Amen”. Not sure where to go with the call, I tried to find a gracious but prompt exit.

As I walked among my trees checking the sprinklers later that morning, the incident gave me a lot to think about. I guess there is an audience for every kind of crazy out there. I thought I was spoofing the extreme language and remedies that we seem all too ready to embrace these days, only to find a disciple. Thankfully, I just recieved the one call, so for now it doesn’t seem like I’ve started a movement.

To sum up: (CAUTION: NO SARCASM OR IRONY INTENDED IN THIS PARAGRAPH)

Bill Nash seems like a great guy who just happens to not like cilantro (unfortunate) and believes it is overused (he may be right.) These are the serious points of his column, and everything else in it was at least partiually in jest. I do like cilantro, and am willing to give Bill 5 pounds of avocados. These are the only facts in my letter. He is not heading us to a cilantro civil war. I don’t think chefs are “notoriously irresponsible.” OK, maybe my assertion that cilantro and avocado have both benefited from California cuisine is true. But in general, this was a work of fiction.

(RESUMING NORMAL SENSE OF SATIRE)

So, my brothers and sisters in herbal arms… the battle is over, the war is won! Let us resume the eating of our pungent leafy herb in peace and good will to all, and malice toward none. Excepting of course, godless parsley growers… but that’s just common sense.