Hi All! My name is Ben Culver and I am the newest intern at the farm. The other interns and I have started our own project and I’d like to share with you guys what we’re getting into!
We are starting a little market garden behind the mechanical shop, where some of past interns have also done projects. Right now we have twelve 100-feet by 2.5-feet beds prepared with various different treatments. Six of our twelve beds are largely inspired by [Read more…]
When I was younger I left my pet beta fish on a windowsill and came home to find it a blackened crisp in steaming water. That very day my older sister made me sign a contract, finger print and signature included, in which I agreed, “I will never own a pet or a living thing ever again.”
Then fast forward 11 years, forget about the fish pet story for just a moment. I became 21 and I read a book that captivated me. The book delved into the enchanting nature of baking bread. It seemed truly magical. From a gooey mixture of flour, water, salt, and air you would encounter something completely transformational. The fair skinned dough rises in the oven, gradually growing into a beautifully browned nourishing loaf of bread. It was a sort of magic I couldn’t resist being involved in, and so began my process of baking the ultimate sourdough bread. However, the catch about Sourdough is that the baking doesn’t happen until two weeks in. First you begin by starting a starter, and I had no idea what a starter was. I was blind but willing as I followed Chad Robertson (author of Tartine Bread) and Martha Stewart in their recipes for a heavenly loaf of Country Bread. [Read more…]
Do the farmers in our country reflect the astonishing cultural diversity of our country? What do you think? Well, every Census cycle gives us a deep look into who is farming our food domestically, and more than 86% of those farm operators are men. More than 92% of the country’s 2.1 million farmers are non-Hispanic whites. In addition, in 2012, the average farmer was 58.3 years old, up from 57.1 years in 2007. The trends point to an undeniable truth about who is growing our food – an aging white male-dominated demographic. This leads me to ask, as a young white twenty year old woman, who is our next generation of farmers?
I hope that our next generation of farmers and rural landowners reflect the diversity of this country and our US census is starting to show trends reflecting the reality of my dreams for the future. The total number of farmers in the United States fell by 95,000 since the 2007 Census of Agriculture, but at the same time, the total number of minority farmers grew – nearly 97,000 of them checked a race box other than “white” on their census forms. That’s a 6.9% increase from 2007. The population of Asian farmers grew by 21.9%, the fastest rate of any minority group, up from 11,214 in 2007 to 13,699 in 2012. More than one-third of Asian farmers are located here in California. In addition, California ranks third in the nation for Hispanic farmers. [Read more…]
In April of 2015, a professor asked me what I planned to do after college. I replied, “I’m going to do farm work.” She paused and then smiled, “So you’re going to give your brain a break for a little while?”
My professor meant no malice by her comment. Rather, her comment reflects a societal misunderstanding of farming. According to this misunderstanding, farm work is a purely physical occupation. It is not intellectually creative work. Innovation in farming comes from the outside, from geneticists and engineers, not from farmers. Therefore, one can contrast farm work with “brain” work, which occurs in white-collar offices and is reserved, predominantly, for people with a college education. The latter is considered intellectual; the former is not.
I graduated the following month. The timeworn ritual of college graduation, with speeches, awards, and obscure Latin calligraphy, gives students the impression that they know something. They certainly do—I deeply value my education—but it took me little time at Full Belly to realize precisely how little I know and how misled it is to apply the adjective “intellectual” exclusively to white-collar work. [Read more…]
We have been enjoying rain and the forecast for unsettled weather has created a marked difference to the start of this fall rainy season compared to the past 5 years when there was no fall rainy season. We have surpassed 3 inches here, creating a hue of soft green emerging from the straw-yellow hills. All edges have come alive as warm temperatures double plant growth in a great start to Fall.
Fall work includes tomato fields to clean up, cover crops to plant, hoeing and cultivation of our greens and winter crops, hard squash in the fields to be picked up, pruning, early grasses to till in ahead of November grain planting, and repairs to equipment that is limping toward the year-end finish line.
This rain is a blessing that requires a bit of adjustment on our part. The more that it rains, the more the calculus changes. Little or no rain means that we adjust with pumped water, providing the moisture needed to grow crops. A lot of rain creates muddy fields where the crops that we harvest are carried to the edges. Picking slows down, tractors stop and raingear-clad crews carry 5 lbs of mud on each boot. [Read more…]
The peak of summer is almost here! It was super-hot all of last week, over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day, and we had so many cherry tomatoes, melons, green beans, and sunflowers, to pick… So last week I spent a lot of time bunching sunflowers, picking cherry tomatoes and truck loading. In terms of truck loading, during the summer we struggle to get everything into our trucks. The pallets of tomatoes and melons are very tall and heavy so it’s hard to move them and our beautiful flowers take lots of space because we can’t stack them. Needless to say, working all day under the crazy hot sun is very hard. However, after work, you can find the best melon ever, which encourages us to go to the next day.
This kind of summer work reminds me of my first summer at Full Belly Farm. I arrived here end of May, 2015 and started working as one of the interns. I’m Shohei Shimizu, from Aichi Prefecture in Japan. I’m still a student of Hokkaido University because I took 2 years off after I finished sophomore year. At that university, I studied Agricultural Economics. When I was looking for some interesting books in the library to kill time before the next class, I happened to find a book about CSA. That’s why I’m here, in Guinda California. [Read more…]
Seasonal Reflection
Here in the Capay Valley, the days are short and the shadows long. With the cooler weather and long awaited winter rains, the dust has turned to mud and the golden hills have turned a soft green. The coyotes are out roaming the hills, the creek is running swiftly and the bright ornaments of winter decorate the citrus orchards. [Read more…]
On Sunday night we all went down to the creek to watch the lunar eclipse. It was the perfect end to all of the farm cleaning that was done that day to prepare for the Hoes Down Harvest Festival this coming Saturday.
I have two weeks left in my internship. I arrived on the farm a year ago Sunday, and was initiated into the Full Belly life through the craziness that is the week before Hoes Down. When I look back on my time here, I am amazed to see what I have learned and accomplished.
I learned how to work in a greenhouse and plant the seeds that became the transplants which grew into all of this summer’s melons and tomatoes. I sat on the sled on the back of a tractor and transplanted acres of asparagus and winter greens. I learned how to harvest and pack watermelon daikon and sun gold cherry tomatoes, among other varieties of produce, for restaurant orders and CSA boxes. I was taught how to pack those orders onto pallets and load them onto delivery trucks, and then I got up at 3:00 AM the next morning to sell those vegetables at the Farmers Market. [Read more…]
When I arrived at Full Belly back in the heat of July, the farm was well into its tomato season. As a wide-eyed city dweller with zero previous farm experience, coming on as an intern at the height of tomato season was a whirlwind introduction to how hard every person here works to create the beautiful produce that we see in our CSA boxes every week. My very first hours of work on the farm were spent harvesting Sun Gold cherry tomatoes. Several hours after that I was folding tomato boxes for packing and distribution. A few weeks later I was learning the names of forty plus varieties of heirloom and cherry tomatoes so I could help identify them for customers at the Marin farmer’s market. By the end of the summer, we were squeezing buckets worth of tomato seeds to be saved for the very plants that we now see in our fields!
Over the last few months, it has been incredible to watch those seeds become over 45,000 plants in our greenhouses. And in the past week, we have steadily been transplanting ALL of those tomatoes in preparation for another summer season! Time flies when you’re having fun farming! One of the most delightful moments that we as interns have in our yearlong internship is witnessing the full circle of farm life, like these new tomato plants. Can’t wait for caprese salad again! [Read more…]
As I look back on my first two weeks as an intern at Full Belly Farm, I find it hard to believe that I have only been here for that long. I have already had the amazing opportunity to learn, experience and do so much that it feels like I have been here for much longer.
I applied to be an intern because I wanted to learn about all aspects of organic farming and from day one here, I have been able to jump from project to project to see how many different parts come together to make Full Belly Farm.
I worked in the packing shed with Joaquina, the shop manager, where I helped pack and put together CSA boxes and orders for stores. I learned how to correctly wash and bunch greens and root vegetables like rainbow chard, dino kale, Tokyo turnips and watermelon daikon, and I sorted through giant bins of harvested garlic and onions to find the best looking ones to be sold. [Read more…]
Taking Stock
The day I left New York was rainy and cold. I put on my winter coat and set out to live in a place I had never been and to work at a task I had never done. When I arrived at Full Belly Farm in April as the newest intern I was overwhelmed by the scale of production and by the busyness that swirled around me. But it did not take long for me to feel at home.
The sense of community and belonging on the farm took me aback, as I was welcomed in with open arms by people willing to teach and eager to help me settle in. From the very first I began seeing, learning, and experiencing new things. Each day seems to offer a new challenge, and every person on the farm is a wellspring of information and experience that I have only just begun to get a glimpse of. [Read more…]
Meet Hideo “Tommy” Tomitaka!
We are so lucky to have amazing groups of youthful interns come to our farm each year. They spend their time learning about all aspects of the farm, from animal care and rotational grazing techniques, to planting, to harvesting, and even a little bit of marketing. We have been participating in a program called the Japanese Agricultural Training Program for several years now. Our interns from Japan stay with us for just over a year, and we miss them so much when they leave! This week we will say goodbye to Hideo “Tommy” Tomitaka, who has been an excellent part of the team for the past year. The following is a short interview with him about his experience:
Jenna: What were your expectations about Full Belly Farm before you arrived?
Tomi: I didn’t have very much information about Full Belly before I arrived, but I did know that it has been doing a great job in organic farming and its CSA program for many years. I expected to learn lots about how to successfully farm organically and how to manage a farm. [Read more…]
Lambing Season
To all of you who have chosen to be Full Belly Farm CSA members, I imagine that at least part of that decision resulted from you thinking that our farm is somehow more just or fair than most other farms. However, if I asked you “What is justice?” I imagine very few people would be able to readily answer that question. And how can we say that Full Belly is more just, if we don’t even know what we are talking about?
I don’t have the answers to any of life’s biggest questions for you (at least not this week), but the farm has provided an excellent space for thinking about these questions in brand new contexts for me. One of my projects in particular, bottle-feeding our bummer lambs, has brought up a multitude of moral questions for me. For those of you who don’t know, bummer lambs are what we call the lambs that the mother ewes reject. I have bottle fed our 9 bummer lambs, 3 times a day for several weeks, which has given me a lot of time to think about the project. Here are some of the questions I have been wrestling with: [Read more…]
There is a significant amount of sand hiding in the cuff of my pants, or rather there was. It is now a lone little dune on the floor of my yurt after I unfolded the cuff while unpacking my bags from the annual Eco-farm conference held every year in Pacific Grove. I was wearing these pants during a rain dance we did on the beach. At the end of the conference a number of us attendees gathered in front of the ocean to ask for rain. Please. Drought being the great equalizer, we dancers came from all different backgrounds; farmers, scientists, sustainable food advocates, farm educators, random passersby, and many others. Dance with us if you can, or sing, or just clap, but please focus on gentle penetrating rain, on the squishy feeling of mud between your toes, on the smell of wet soil, on jumping in a creek on a hot day, on full rivers that allow salmon to race upstream, on whatever brings to mind the feeling of moisture. Wet, juicy thoughts as we reminded ourselves throughout the dancing.
The workshops available to the eager minds at this conference ranged in topics from irrigation basics to setting up a local food commons. There were discussions on dry farming, how to handle live stock in ways that keep them happy and stress free, and regenerative farming to encourage healthy salmon runs. It was an inspiring amount of information, but for me the most compelling part was the recognized need to farm from a more holistic approach, an undercurrent reminding us to learn and work with the ecology of the farm environment that we are working in to produce good food, and the often unintentional positive side effects that those healthy farm environments have on the larger community. [Read more…]
At the recent Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, I was bouncing back and forth between the displays of melons when I was distracted from the many, many different varieties by a woman talking to a group of children, all probably around 7-8 years old. She was holding a melon that looked cantaloupe-esque, heavily netted, with a faint orangey glow, but instead of a round orb this one grew a little bulb on one end, a cantaloupe crossed with a brioche pastry! It was innocently labeled “Sleeping Beauty.”
Hi there, CSA members, let me introduce myself. My name is Tristan and I am the new intern here at Full Belly Farm. I have been here already for a whole three weeks. I came from the Monterey Bay area, having lived there for the past couple years. My experience with farming up until now has been minimal, and having just arrived to this new and welcoming place, I am reminded of what a farm is. A farm is far from “simple”. Even though I believe simplicity is what makes farming such a valuable pursuit – growing food in order for people to nourish themselves – a farm is very complex. It is an ecosystem by its own right. I have worked on two farms before this, and I can safely say that farming is unlike many jobs I have had due to its inherent nature. It combines work with living in such a way that it creates something unique and different from any other farm. Although each farm is producing food of some sort, it is also producing a culture, and a reflection of the space in which it is situated. It is a uniquely beautiful entity, a farm, no matter how big or small. And Full Belly is no exception.
Each year, new energy arrives at Full Belly Farm in the form on our apprentices. They arrive when we need them the most – in the early part of May when we are bracing ourselves for the onslaught of summer, in September when the summer rush has left us tired and cranky, or in January when we are rested and need to be reenergized. This year, we have been blessed with a tremendously talented group of apprentices: Ingrid, Tyler, Becca, Jordan, and Tristan. They join the ranks of over 300 apprentices who have been a part of Full Belly Farm over the past 28 years. As one of the ‘farm kids,’ it is always fun to think back on the many apprentices who have left their mark on Full Belly – and to see where they are today.
Jack Hedin and Jenni McHugh were at Full Belly in the early 1990’s. I remember them as the best kind of storytellers, animated and creative. They spent hours telling my siblings and I stories of adventure, and I vividly remember Jack reading my older brother Amon and I the entire Lord of the Rings series. Jack and Jenni are now farming in Minnesota, creating their own adventure story. They farm a beautiful piece of land in the small town of Rushford with their three growing boys and every so often we hear tales of their great successes and challenges. Their farm, Featherstone Farm, has been hit with floods and droughts but continues to inspire a new generation of farmers.
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