Paul at the Palo Alto Farmers Market
For the past 42 or so years, Saturday mornings have been market mornings. Early on, when Dru and I were just getting the farm started, we rented 12 acres of good land near Woodland – just west of Sacramento -12 acres from a family of retiring Filipino farmers. We were committed to organic production from the start, borrowed $10,000 to buy our first tractor, and looked for a crop that could clearly be grown in a way that customers would taste a difference. One of our first crops on the journey to growing a farm was Silver Queen sweet corn.
42 years ago, there were but a smattering of farmers markets around the state. To sell fresh-picked sweet corn directly to cash paying customers was a whole new world of farming that seemingly had been forgotten. We heard of a new market in Palo Alto. It was just starting and was far enough away from our other fledgling farmer friends to not compete with them at closer markets. We were committed to the Palo Alto market from the start. A Saturday morning fixture, rain or shine. The 140-mile drive split the distance to Dru’s Mom’s house in San Jose so that a visit and a helping hand at the market seemed a “two-fer.”
We started those early Saturday mornings in June, July, August and September by 3am, heading to the corn field- maybe an acre or so planted 12 times over to ripen in successive weeks. There in the dark, we begin picking. Dru and I would don headlamps, wipe away pollen, wet sticky dust, dew, spider webs and sharp corn leaves and fill a small Chevy LUV pickup with Silver Queen corn. At that time, we had our first child, Amon. When we finished harvesting, we would change a diaper and then head down the highway to Palo Alto. We arrived two hours later, streaked in dirt and pollen and then sold, with all sincerity, the best corn that anyone there had ever tasted. A two-hour drive would reap a reward of maybe $800 cash. We felt as though we were walking our pathway to self-reliance.
By 1984, we made the move to rented land in Guinda. It was a largely derelict farm; 100 acres of dying almond trees, a ramshackle house, and lots of potential. One hundred acres of a lot of work to pursue a dream of a financially viable farm. This was the early to mid 80’s when agriculture in general was in the throes of a deep and devastating national farm depression. It was the time we chose to start, swimming against a tide of farm failures and choosing to try without the tools of pesticides and synthetic fertility, being lambasted for choosing organic farming, and committing our family and partnership to being completely overwhelmed for years.
The first market then became a second (Marin), and then a third (Berkeley), so that we had three days a week when we could sell organic vegetables direct to real people. They would become both our patrons and our friends.
That 100 acres is the place where we have put down roots and where we decided to re-think what a farm might be- honoring health and diversity and growing direct-to-market fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, flowers, animals, and eggs. For 42 years we have attempted to make this farm a place to take our stand and create the elements of a saner farming world.
The markets grew as the farm grew, but Saturday mornings remained constant. The LUV blew an engine and was replaced with a flatbed Ford truck. Used equipment was purchased, welded, repaired, cut up and made to work at a fraction of the cost of new. The farm selections grew from corn. We added tomatoes, cukes, zukes and flowers in the summer, lettuce and greens for the colder season, and crops that we can store and sell in the cold winter months. We also grew four rambunctious kids and developed an equally rambunctious partnership of four.
That Ford flatbed truck was a single cab, which we filled on Saturday mornings with two adults and four kids- no car seats then. We stacked our produce on the back, tied things down, and filled the front with kids underfoot and across laps to get to the farmers market by 6am. We fed many a family with our crops, growing their kids as we grew ours. Dru’s mom Lois became a mainstay at the Saturday market- many thinking that the farm was hers and that we were her minions.
Piece by piece, we grew the farm, repaired the house, added partners, planted, picked, packed, repaired buildings, went to a lot of meetings, started a CSA, worked with great crew members, and created a robust community of new organic farmers. From just a few organic farmers in the Capay Valley in 1984, there are now more than 50. Those many farms are a robust community of self-reliant characters, kids, workers, and successful businesses.
So this past Saturday, as I hopped in the front of the refrigerated truck and drove the 140 miles to the Palo Alto Market, there was time to reflect. The ethical trajectory of the farm was built on principles of health, service, enduring biological truths, doing no harm, and community. As I crossed the Bay Bridge and entered the landscape of signs, concrete, and glass, the message of the power of AI was splashed on nearly every billboard. They asserted the undeniable destiny of this technology and its promise of a better world, one that is faster, multiplying information and putting information together in the guise of intelligence. More as better.
I was struck by the notion that our farm has been built on a very different and often undervalued intelligence- of biological systems, in patterns of relationships, in verifiable flavors that seduce and satisfy, in the songs of birds with whom we share this home, in dynamic ecosystems connected to other ecosystems. Nothing artificial about it.
We as farmers are as deeply connected to this place as the majestic oaks, flowering cover crops, or soil critters, billions of them working in right relationship with plants here. We are seeking to be in right relationship with those many life forms and elements. Our farm diversity reveals new beauty and homecoming as we add pieces. We add vitex, milkweed, and salvia along field edges and monarch butterflies find us. Year-round flowers harken a myriad of bees, wasps, and winged helpers who work for us. They are waiting for us to call them home with attention to and care for their needs.
If diversity is not part of a farm design, a farmer would never know the creatures waiting to reveal themselves. The singular focus on a crop, or artificial intelligence, or bare soil as efficient, misses so much richness because of sterile monocultural thinking.
Those biological systems, eons in the making, are networks of connections, awareness, intelligence, and patterns. There is so much mystery, subtlety, and delight in what is revealed when the design of a farm recognizes that to “do no harm” as an ethical value is appreciated by all life. We can rethink what cultural values we choose to focus upon, and a richness becomes manifest.
So, 140 miles of thinking and reflecting, by someone from our farm nearly every Saturday morning. Quite a journey sharing our work, our food, our thoughts, and our lives with so many of you all. We are learning that as a culture, as Wendell Berry has written, “we don’t know what we are doing because we don’t know what we are undoing.” There are elements of life that will outlive our hubris and misdirection- choose health, community, love, good food, living systems and diversity and bend with that beautiful incredible arc of verifiable intelligence.
Blessings on your meals.
Paul Muller
The Palo Alto Market team on a recent Saturday – Maureen, Kouki, Chiho, Ella, Dahlia, Charlie, Rye, and David
