A walk around the farm usually happens when the work day is done. The forklifts are parked, the trucks are loaded and ready for their next trip, and the crews have gone home. At other times, the office is buzzing and the fields are full of people. On a walk at dusk, the farm is quieter.
In past columns, I have written about old timers that come to visit Full Belly Farm to see how things are going. One of the visitors used to be Richard Gladney who ostensibly came to visit his barn, now and forever called “Richard’s Barn” which, when we moved here, was full of vintage cars and tractor implements, not to mention tins of chemicals and junk. Over the years, we moved Richard’s stuff, the accumulation of years of farming, out of the barn, but his visits still linger in our memories, and continued for many years despite his lacking the excuse that he was checking up on his things.
Another time, in May of last year, it was an imaginary old timer who visited, the possible driver of an old Allis Chalmers behemoth tractor that has been sitting idle under a Full Belly walnut tree since I moved to the farm 25-years ago (and for who knows how long before that.) The visitor met up with one of the farm kids and had a tour of the farm, with news of how things had changed since he parked the tractor after its last big job. [Read more…]
Many consumers and organic farmers, if challenged to describe the production principals of organic agriculture, might list practices that build soil fertility, maintain ecological balance, promote biodiversity, reduce dependence on off-farm inputs, and allow farm animals to display their natural instinctive behaviors. But in the topsy turvy world of “food safety,” every one of those organic principals is being seriously challenged at regulatory levels. Because those principals are so fundamental to the way we farm at Full Belly, you will have to forgive us if we seem to return to this subject over and over.
Paul wrote in this column last week about the proposed FDA Produce Rule. Since then I have read the FDA’s proposed “guidance” for egg producers that provide hens with access to the outdoors (in other words “pastured poultry.”) In that document, there are absurd suggestions, like providing overhead cover to the outdoor pasture so that wild birds can’t swoop in and infect the hens (or be infected) with Salmonella. In addition, this rule admonishes that “Disposable or reusable clothing should be provided for visitors, including maintenance and pest control personnel, as they come onto the farm.” The FDA clothing recommendations include “bouffant caps” to cover hair! [Read more…]
It is quieter walking around the farm on a Sunday because only a few crew members are around. Antonio is usually here the earliest, come to take care of the animals. Chickens, pigs, goats and cows – they see Antonio every day. Eddy comes a little bit later to load truck for the Monday morning run, sorting the boxes, checking lists, palletizing orders, organizing the load. Even later still, the next crop of campers arrive with their families who visit the creek, check-in with the camp counselors and leave their kids behind knowing that they are in good hands.
Our cherry tomato crew has been picking more than 200 boxes of cherry tomatoes on a daily basis for several weeks (each box has 12 baskets in it). We have a lot of varieties this year: sweet 100, sun gold, cherry roma, black cherry, green grape, blush and juliette for example. The crew is picking from several different fields and trying all the time to project for the sales team how many boxes they will be able to get out of the fields in the hot summer days to come. Although the work is intense, they are happier if our sales keep up with production. None of them want to try and sort through fruit on the vines that is overripe. One of our prettiest cherry tomato packs is the Mixed Medleys, a mixture of red, black, pink yellow and green varieties. On our walk we saw the cherry tomato sorting table where the crew sorts the tomatoes in the shade of the walnuts. [Read more…]
I participate in a national group that for the past few years has worked to develop policy and action recommendations for food and agriculture. The group includes people from various parts of the food chain, and it has been clear from the start that while there are many interesting discussions taking place, most of the participants view the practices of organic agriculture as a “niche” or “boutique” part of farming, rather than potentially game-changing solutions to the many challenges faced by the world’s increasing population. When it comes to addressing the converging and increasingly pressing challenges of hunger, poor water quality and climate change, the proponents of chemicals, monoculture and an industrialized-type approach to farming are well represented.
In part because of my participation in these discussions, I was especially interested in a recently published report about an experiment that was started all the way back in 1998, called the “Long Term Agroecological Research Experiment,” one of the longest running comparisons of organic and conventional agriculture in the U.S. In a nutshell, the study concludes that producers making the switch to organic crops not only fetch premium prices, they also build healthy soil and sequester carbon, making organic agriculture a useful strategy for dealing with climate change.
Farms come in all different shapes and sizes. Some farms are all business, geared up for production. These farms have few frills or folderol, and they’re efficient in their own way, which means their way of growing one or two crops. These farms figure they better be efficient because if they aren’t it’ll probably spell trouble down the road.
In contrast, Full Belly Farm has never been efficient at growing one or two crops because we grow one or two hundred of them, and the facts about why and how we grow so many different things don’t come in a straight line. If you start to ask questions about the crops and their byproducts, the relation of one crop to another, the use of the crop on farm or off, or the ways that the pieces of the puzzle fit together, you are likely to be found quite a while later stewing in a tangled mix of philosophy, theory and straight-from-the-fields know-how.
Can gardens transform Detroit?
I was recently in Detroit for a food and farming policy meeting. While there, our group took a field trip to meet local leaders in the urban gardening and farm to school movement. On the way, looking out the windows of the bus, we saw abandoned, decaying homes, empty factories, the shell of a once-majestic train station and vacant lots.
Multiple problems led to Detroit’s current plight: Auto industry jobs moved elsewhere, the mortgage bubble burst and property values plunged, property tax revenues fell, and the city was not well managed. Now, having lost its ability to borrow money, the city is cutting services like transportation, street lighting, street maintenance, and fire and police protection. Once the fourth largest city in the U.S. with a population of 1.85 million, the population has plunged to 700,000.
When I first heard the term “food safety” I knew that even the term itself was a problem, representing an approach to our food that calls lettuce bathed in chlorine “safe” and lettuce with a speck of dirt on it “contaminated.” Now, a few years later, years during which we have been trying to develop a reasonable Full Belly solution to the “food safety” demands, it is still easy to characterize “food safety” discussions using opposites and absolutes — industrialized, chemical-laden, sterile approaches to the food system on the one hand, and agrarian, biologically-based, ecological approaches to the food system on the other.
Family farmers knew that the discussion was going to be a difficult one when it started in earnest several years ago and they saw many of the organizations that should have been their friends melting away and coming out in favor of the chlorinated-food approach. Saying that you didn’t want to bathe your food in chlorine was held to be tantamount to saying that you wanted to kill young babies with their spinach smoothies. No one wanted to be critical of “safe food.”
In 2002 I wrote to CSA members about Richard’s Barn, the 40-foot tall redwood barn that towers over other buildings at Full Belly. It was built almost 100 years ago and was originally used to store hay for the dairy cows that once lived here. The redwood on this barn is beautiful, the kind of redwood siding that sadly, may never be seen new again by anyone on this earth.
Here’s a paragraph from the 2002 essay:
“When we first moved here, the barn was chock full of a lifetime of accumulated tools, gadgets, knick knacks, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, screws, bolts, supplies and mysteries. It all belonged to Richard, who grew up on this farm and came by fairly often to check up on us (and look in on his barn). Dru once said that Paul spent more time talking to Richard than to her. After a while, we got a lot of Richard’s belongings out of the barn and moved them down to Richard’s walnut orchard, but we still always call it ‘Richard’s Barn’.”
Saturday March 16 was a banner day at Full Belly Farm: one of the earliest days in recent years that we were able to plant our first tomatoes. A crew of 8 carefully transplanted the tomatoes from their warm safe spot in the greenhouse out into open fields. ‘Open fields’ except for the fact that the beds that the tomatoes went into were carefully covered with black plastic to warm up the soil, and also, were covered with a special cloth to protect them from cold night temperatures.
The wonderful warm, dry weather that we have been enjoying is a mixed blessing when it comes this early in the spring. The dry spell started back in the winter when it should have been raining and because it hasn’t rained in so long, we have been able to get a lot of work done very efficiently – planting, weeding, and mowing the orchards! But we’ve also got the irrigation going already, trying to get water out to all the thirsty greens and cool-weather crops.
The California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN) had a big gathering at U.C. Davis recently and asked us how we think climate change has affected Full Belly Farm. Here’s how we answered:
At Full Belly, our crop mix is very diverse – we sell fruits, nuts, vegetables and herbs pretty much every month of the year. As a result, we think and talk about weather continuously. It probably makes us a little boring! During the winter season we hope for rain because it means that we don’t have to irrigate and there will be plentiful water in the summer. In late February, when the almonds bloom, we are anxious in case bad weather makes it impossible for the insects to pollinate the almond flowers. Without their work we can have a complete almond crop failure.
While many holidays during the year pass the Farm by with barely a nod of acknowledgement from the busy fields, our farming cycles coincide well with year-end holiday traditions. The end of the year is a good time for reviewing the 12 months that we just passed through and the four seasons coming up. We are closing last year’s accounts and opening up those for the new year, both literally and figuratively.
Together we can review the crops that we liked, versus those that weren’t as well received, or didn’t work out as well as we had hoped. Plans for new building and landscaping projects seem to bubble up with new strength. Experiments for our spring fields get hatched and take root. We think about ways to build even better soil, grow even more flavorful fruit, and organize an even more harmonious and attentive work environment. We resolve that we will make this a year of no accidents at work, a year in which all the farm animals will be completely comfortable and happy, and of course a year when all the CSA boxes will hit a home run in your kitchen week after week after week!
Zero Hunger Challenge
Our refrigerator offers leftovers, several days after our Thanksgiving feast. We’re still enjoying roasted vegetables, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. But this isn’t altogether unfamiliar – our Thanksgiving feast is only different in terms of scale – the farm always provides such abundant quantities of food that it’s hard to imagine going hungry for very long.
Generalizing beyond the farm, our country is blessed with some of the best farmland in the world, and immense agricultural capacity. Thus it is startling that we have one of the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world, and one of the highest child mortality rates. We live in a wealthy, bountiful country where 1 in every 3 children are reliant on SNAP (food stamps) to purchase food.
I hope that everyone is enjoying the changing seasons that are reflected in your CSA box. The winter squash and cabbage are just what you need to warm up the cooler weather with a big pot of soup or stew. Everyone at the farm got involved last weekend in a push to prepare for the Monday/Tuesday rain this week: covering straw and hay stacks, picking ahead on some of the crops that would be damaged by rain, and getting boxes and supplies under cover.
This week we’re going to share an interesting piece of research that was reported in the summer issue of the University of California Agricultural and Resource Economics Update. It’s about the price of strawberries. Prices of produce are a complicated subject, perhaps worthy of additional discussion between CSA members and their farmers.
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