Theme: Paul Muller

Today’s Indian Summer Sunday was delightful here on the farm. The morning started with a slight frost and a haze drifted over the valley creating a crisp chill to the air all day long. Grape, pomegranate, pear, and walnut leaves are turning gold, reds or brown, falling to blanket the ground with a carpet of mulch.  The light frost signals that a year has turned. Crops have been harvested and stored. We have put aside an abundant harvest of winter squash, dried flowers, peaches, tomatoes, apricots, walnuts, grains, jams, sauces, oils, and seeds. In the age-old rhythm of seasons and farm, this crisp morning marks an end, the turning of fields to rest and the slow metabolism of low sun and colder days. It is so welcome here.

The prediction has been for rain to fall through the coming week, so after breakfast, household responsibilities needed attention—scrubbing the chimney of last year’s soot, and cleaning gutters. Then a couple of unfinished fields called to be planted ahead of the rain. Each year, planting cover crops and wheat with our grain drill is an enjoyable pre Thanksgiving activity that marks our slowing down. In this time we plant rain fed crops that thrive in the cold weather. We also put the farm to rest in the closing of a year. [Read more…]

It is easy to become intimidated by the challenges defined in news cycles and their focus on overwhelming problems like climate change, hunger and poverty, sowing the seeds of hopelessness. Many of these issues are framed in a way that makes us feel overpowered by their magnitude. Those in the political and business worlds often use the theatre of power to keep us in a state of incredulity, disarming the ability to act.  Global warming, for example, dwarfs any potential contribution that an individual might make and intimidates many by its magnitude.

We are in need of pathways forward that allow us to see clearly our power to instigate positive change and ethical renewal. Those contributions must be simple, satisfying, accessible, replicable actions that might inspire others to become part of large-scale action. The actions must be creative and resonate for all with a positive message. They must combine hope with action, building a new design to empower and join in rethinking parts of the design that fail to enhance health and beauty. These acts must be leavened with love and empathy.  [Read more…]

There are many threads of experience over the last few weeks that might be woven into a Beet article this morning.  Last night, the board of the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance came to the farm for a tour and dinner. Fifty folks, mostly from the midwest, were here as part of their annual board meeting in Sacramento.  We had an afternoon walk down the county road that divides the farm and talked about our approach to farming and the reasons that our farm is designed as it is. Most of the farmers were corn and soybean growers and all were tied deeply to these two crops that dominate the midwestern landscape.

A walk is the best way to talk about the farm and about our approach to soil health, insect ecology, integrating livestock, cropping patterns, diversity, economic viability and creativity.  Our evolving farm design came from the fertile minds of four partners, great employees, and increasingly now, from the contributions of our children. [Read more…]