This week’s beet ended up as a medley—a 3-fer…sorry for its length..
Part 1
Way back in 1981 or so, when the stirrings of Full Belly were just beginning and the notion of Organic Farming seemed a poke in the eye to all farming literati, the USA was in the midst of a farm depression. It was a tragic and serious time where farmer suicides and despair rode hand-in-hand with low commodity prices, bad farm policy, high interest rates, bankruptcy auctions, and too many economists that felt that a “shake out” of “inefficient farmers” desirable. An estimated 300,000 farms failed in the first four years of that decade.
It was when I made my decision to farm and explore options for farmers who were out of options. Organic Farming became our chosen pathway.
To find a single culprit for the failure of so many farms was near impossible, for the reasons were many: Farmers expanded their operations in good times by borrowing against their land… Low prices resulting from international trade disruption… Farmers adopting the technologies to produce more for less and then overproducing… High interest rates… Land was a commodity to be bid up by anyone who could afford it… Farm chemicals and the need to purchase inputs whose cost was beyond their control… The governmental policies that supported the idea of “get big or get out” … Or simply questioning the good virtue of family farming as an unsupportable romantic myth.
Legislation supported technologies, the farm bill supported surplus production and tried to bail out farmers while university research sought to replace people with tools that, in turn, cheapened commodity prices.
Perhaps this is the creative destruction of a capitalist economy. Indeed, many technologies have liberated farmers from some back bending tasks, thus having created abundance while lowering the prices paid for the food we eat. The bargain came at the expense of rural people and their communities. Farm failures were a tragedy that we are repeating today. As Wendell Berry wrote in his 1987 essay Preserving Wildness, “We have never known what we were doing because we never knew what we were undoing.”
I grew up witnessing the undoing. It was a part of an ongoing history of removing people from land whether it was the violent genocide of indigenous people or the ongoing deconstruction of rural places that is still happening today. Ultimately, the undoing was removing stewards, those whose heart was deeply invested in a place; whose hands shaped and were shaped by the work of producing goods and tending the land.
I have written many times about the essential relationship of people to land, and to the remarkable resilience of those who remain. In 2026, farmers are in deep trouble again.
Part 2
The Strait of Hormuz… you probably never thought that you would see a Full Belly Beet starting with something so far afield or so removed from the contents of your farm box. Yet if you are an American farmer of soybeans, wheat, corn, cotton, or other commodities – or even a farmer of almonds, walnuts, lettuce, or the many crops grown here in California – you need your fertilizer for spring planting, or diesel to power the tractors to do that planting, or predictable markets for those crops that you plan on producing. For farmers, the Strait of Hormuz is now part of your coffee shop talk- and the calculations for many are the impossibility of your economic “strait.” Most commodity crop farmers face choices about what can be grown to lose the least amount of money, and ultimately, how long can one hang on?
As much as 20% of California’s almond and walnut crop goes through the Strait, with walnuts potentially spoiling in ships as they await passage. The ripple effect of this market disruption will impact many crops and those producers for years. Additionally, about a third of the world’s fertilizers (urea, potash, ammonia, phosphates) normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz. US fertilizer prices have increased by 80% since the beginning of the war.
The implications of fuel and fertilizer disruptions are being felt worldwide. For those who have built their farming practices on the dependency of supply stability, the relatively predictable availability of your inputs at a predictable price is critical. What seemed a reasonable package of farming technologies is showing its vulnerabilities to events far from your door.
So how are we affected at Full Belly? Certainly, fuel and electricity prices are spiking, and we may see a 50% greater energy cost to do our work of planting, managing, and marketing our crops. We will absorb those costs and hope that we are seeing market prices paid beginning to reflect those increasing costs.
We did see some of this coming. For years we have been making the turn to more solar power to both run our packing shed and for pumping water on the farm, investing over the past 20 years, aiming at energy independence. We have new EV vehicles on the farm this year for harvest efficiency and crew movement.
Our fertility management focuses on what can be generated through biological processes: cover crops, compost, and crop rotations. We are increasingly focusing on the microbial processes in the soil to optimize the indigenous potential of what can be generated here on the farm. We aim to grow more robust microbial communities in our soils keyed on root diversity in our cover crop mixes, and to maximize solar harvest with green plant and root complexity. Those processes insulate us somewhat from the direct impacts of a war with Iran.
Part 3
The other day, while schlepping produce and tallying purchases at the Palo Alto Farmers’ Market, I heard a young customer refer to “that old farmer over there,” and realized that what I see in the mirror might look different to others. It is so that what I choose to chew upon may not be the standard fare for others. But, if you are reading this newsletter, it offers you an insight to what an older organic farmer may still be learning and how it ends up influencing what you are eating. We share something of a journey bound together.
This past week, this old farmer went to UC Merced to listen in on a seminar by Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge on the soil microbial/plant/carbon interconnection and its implications for the work we do here at your farm, Full Belly. She is a principal investigator at Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Carbon Institute – UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute – and was delivering the Hans Jenny lecture on soil science.
Among the many aspects of evolving research I gleaned is the deepening respect for soil functions and how to increase soil microlife, or the trillions of microbes found in a handful of soil. It has become clear that the association of plants and the sugars exuded through their roots creates a resulting bloom of microbial community feeding and being fed by those roots. 50% of soil organic matter is dead microbial life. Our job, as organic farmers, is to create the conditions to grow more of these critters. The implications are lower imported fertility, greater water use efficiency, greater capacity to harvest the micronutrients that a plant needs for its own health, and better soil capacity to withstand drought.
We see affirmation of these ideas where we have more energy being created through our practices here at Full Belly, thus needing less imported energy. There are markers of this resilience. A recent survey by UC researchers on 11 regional orchards found earthworm populations that are remarkably more robust here – nearly double what were found in 10 other orchards. Soil organic matter slowly trending up. We are cutting back on the need for imported compost by better understanding the economics of what we can foster here while keeping crop yields strong.
Organic, regenerative, or sustainable farming will require people on the land to have an intimate knowledge of weather, water, ecological potential, and limits. Land seen simply as a commodity can dismiss the people and community engendered who take care there and do real work. Those failing farms represent a multigenerational knowledge and investment in the tools to add to our collective abundance, whether conventional farmers or organic farmers. They are not easily replaced, and the operation of those farms is nuanced and not readily replaced by a package of GMO seeds, automation, or an AI application.
So, three interlocking ideas and lots of thoughts about the path we are taking. Extend your hearts to those good people caught in a bad system. We continue our work on land as a community asset, building homes for farmworkers. Consider donating to Casa Agraria and helping with this effort.
Blessings on your meals. Paul
