Theme: water

News from the Farm | May 20, 2024

May 20, 2024

Notes from Under Ground

Underneath the soil that grows our food, in the rocks and sediment, there are vast stores of groundwater, sometimes connected with creeks and rivers, often critical for survival of deep-rooted trees and plants. In a rainy year, groundwater levels go up as rain percolates down into storage. In a dry year groundwater levels trend down as farmers and cities pump it out. This is a very simplified description of something that hydrologists spend a lot of time measuring and thinking about.

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News from the Farm | March 20, 2023

March 20, 2023

Today (Monday) is the first day of Spring. As Carly wrote last week, so far, 2023 has been a year of more cold days, grey skies, freezing nights, wind, hail, snow, and, of course, lots of rain. Just in the last two weeks we’ve had at least seven inches of rain, and we got 1.5 inches between late Monday night and early afternoon Tuesday. Water levels in Cache Creek rose dramatically, a combination of runoff and a water release from the Clear Lake Reservoir, and there was a lot of standing water around the farm, especially on roads and in the furrows between rows (where we drive tractors and walk when weeding/harvesting), really highlighting how differently compacted and uncompacted soils handle water. Within 24 hours, the creek levels had gone down and almost all of the standing water had been absorbed. It was quite a dramatic change!  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | January 16, 2023

January 16, 2023

We appreciate everyone checking in to see how we’re doing. We’ve gotten a lot of water, 16 inches since January 1, and some strong winds, but we’re doing fine. Our crew was able to get to and from work without incident and we finished up early each day to get everyone home where they could take off their rain gear and boots and dry out and warm up. Shorter days does mean less pay, but that’s better than no work, as was the case at some other farms. The delivery drivers were able to safely navigate the roads and drop off produce and CSA orders, and our three farmers market teams had safe, successful, though not dry, days. There are some very soggy areas of the farm, and little rivers and waterfalls all around the Capay Valley that normally aren’t there, but no damage here. There were many flooded roads in Yolo County and some temporary closures on Highway 16, and plenty of people taking advantage of the sandbag supplies at the local fire stations. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | September 12, 2022

September 12, 2022

Saturday night’s moon was a remarkable fuzzy peach orb. It was a beautiful harvest moon, breaking through the suspended dust of a long valley summer hanging in the stale air. A full red/orange beacon, ushering in the ending of a long 2022 summer, rising though the haze of the Mosquito fire, and signaling the change to fall. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | July 25, 2022

July 25, 2022

We are heading into our 3rd week of triple digit temperatures here on the farm. High heat creates stress on everything and everyone. Plants and animals need more water, and we humans do too as we remain in the fields to do our work. We emphasize frequent water consumption, more breaks, monitoring for heat stress (in yourself and team members), and we try to be done earlier in the day. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | April 4, 2022

April 4, 2022

Cache Creek – photo credit Ben Lindheim

Now that it’s April, we can officially say that we didn’t have a “Miracle March” to provide the precipitation that we needed after the historically dry January and February. We got about half an inch on Monday, which is certainly better than nothing. It was refreshing and was enough to pause some of our tractor work for a few days, but by the end of the week, the farm was once again humming with the sound of tractors – transplanting, mowing, cultivating, prepping beds. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | October 25, 2021

October 25, 2021

The news from Full Belly Farm is: RAIN. Between Thursday night and Monday morning, we got about 7 inches of rain, with 6 inches coming between Saturday afternoon and Sunday night.  That is a lot of rain to receive all at once and is more than we received last winter and spring. Right now (Monday morning) there’s some water in the creek, muddy roads and lots of puddles everywhere, but most of the standing water in the fields and orchards has already started to sink it. Still, it’ll be a while before we can get tractors out into the fields; we don’t want to get them stuck or compact our soil. There was a lot of frenetic work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday last week to finish the walnut harvest, sow cover crops, transplant onions, flowers and almost 20,000 anemone and ranunculus corms, and everything else that needed to happen before it rained and it seemed like that was time well spent!

Creek, by Anna Brait

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News From the Farm | August 16, 2021

August 16, 2021

   

The 11 scarecrows of Full Belly are working hard to scare away birds from our table grapes.  —  

Sometimes at the farmers market people ask if our tomatoes are dry farmed.  No, they aren’t.  Dry farming is a method of growing crops so that they develop deep roots that can access subsurface water instead of relying on irrigation. This summer, temperatures well over 100º have been fairly common and nighttime temperatures have lingered on the hot side as well.  Sometimes when it feels like an oven outside,  I imagine that the plants are basically baking out in the field, a situation not conducive to dry farming techniques. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 25, 2019

March 25, 2019

Open Farm Day is Saturday April 6th ––

We would be so happy if our CSA members were able to come and visit us on April 6th for a day to walk around the farm, visit our newborn lambs, picnic on the grass and taste the delicious pizza that we bake in our wood-fired pizza oven. The farm is open for visitors from 10:30 to 3:30.  Please leave your dogs (except for service dogs of course) at home.  The farm owners are looking forward to meeting you! [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 4, 2019

March 4, 2019

At a time like this, when the weather is in the news, Californians may have a hard time holding their own in a weather conversation with the rest of the country.  I was talking to a friend who lives in Okoboji, Iowa and they have been shoveling snow for the entire month of February.  I think she said that they have 2 feet of snow on the ground at the moment.  They would love it if they had temperatures in the 40s and 50s like we do here… [Read more…]

News From the Farm | July 16, 2018

July 16, 2018

Years ago I had the opportunity to learn something about farming in California’s Central Valley, specifically, a little bit about water politics and policy. I was poking around in Water Districts and County government offices of Kern, Fresno and Kings counties, looking at documents that allowed me to map farm land ownership, and overlay that with data about who was actually farming the land.  Many times the farmer is not the owner of the farm land and a number of large “operating” companies manage large tracts of land in the Central Valley.

The location of farms in California is described in many official documents, using townships (a 6-mile square) and sections (1-square mile or 640-acres), a logical surveying system created in 1785 when the US government was dividing up and selling off land where tribes of American Indians had lived for centuries. Most of California’s Mexican Land Grants weren’t easily described by the rectangular system, but it’s use continues today. This system of surveying land was supposedly first proposed by Thomas Jefferson and associated with his philosophy of the ‘family farmer’ as the rightful settler of the young country. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | June 18, 2018

June 18, 2018

Water that is safe to drink, straight from the kitchen tap is more of a luxury than we realize — There are many places around the world where access to safe drinking water is either non-existent, or only available for a high price.  When Californians visit Mexico, we all grab the bottled water and if we stay with friends or go to restaurants, we hesitate before eating fresh vegetables in case they might have been washed with dirty water.  

But wait! Did you know that 6 million of your fellow Californians are also forced to drink out of plastic bottles?  Not because they prefer the taste, but because the water in their communities is in violation of health standards.  Most of the problem water is in the Central Valley and Central Coast regions, where the State Water Resources Control Board says that contaminated water is “ubiquitous”.  These are highly productive agricultural regions and also happen to be the home of 80% of California’s 1.8 million adult cows… [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 20, 2017

February 20, 2017

Rain in buckets; a raging tumultuous Cache Creek; soggy broccoli that is beginning to crown rot; soaked, matted sheep; croplands that fill, drain and fill again; saturated fields gasping for air; slogging vegetables picked and packed out of long muddy furrows; wiping saturated soil off of every carrot picked; rain this Monday morning with 2-3 inches more predicted this week… We are in the middle of a ‘100 year event’ with repeated atmospheric rivers overhead ending a 7-year drought in California.

Folks have been inquiring about how we are doing here on the farm and for the most part we are doing fine. Cache Creek, our unstable neighbor to the east has been churning with more water trucking by than we’ve seen in recent memory. It is a brown torrent contributing to a deepening inland sea that is swamping the Sacramento River basin. The Yolo Causeway, protecting Sacramento from flooding, is running full with the water and sediment collected from thousands of tributaries that are running brown and swift.  The farmland underneath this sea benefits from much of the silt and clay that is passing our farm in Cache Creek. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | January 23, 2017

January 23, 2017

The sun has broken through this Sunday afternoon after a powerful storm blasted through the valley at about 3:00 this morning. We have had our world soaked and saturated with rainfall that started around the first of the year and has scarcely let up. Cache Creek, the river that we use for summer irrigation and swimming, will peak today at 14,000 cubic feet per second. The high this year has been 25,000 cubic feet per second—a raging brown torrent.  To date compared to last year, Clear Lake and Indian Valley Reservoir have 175,000 acre-feet of increased water storage. This is water that will be saved and released for summer irrigation. 

The farm is high, yet hardly dry, and looking forward to a few days of sunshine. We have a full crew that has been slogging boxes out of the fields. They work rain or shine—mostly in rain this month. Our stalwart crew has been picking carrots or potatoes in flat-out downpours and need some time to wring out. So far this year we have been Wringing in 2017! [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 29, 2016

February 29, 2016

“If we want farmers to help us produce clean water and clean air and quality soil and recreational areas that all of us can enjoy, farmers can produce all those things, but we have to create both the market system and the public policies to be serious about those things with farmers and to provide them with the kinds of incentives and compensations that enable them to be able to produce those services.” This thought was expressed by Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in 2004. But truth be told, developing the public policies that yield results has proved difficult, for example in the case of pollutants in surface and groundwater – things like pesticides and nitrates from fertilizers  – that are used by farmers, flow off of their fields in storms or irrigation runoff, and end up in drinking water. Why have decades of federal and state programs to address this problem never hit the mark?

The state and federal governments have tried various regulatory approaches – one current California version is called the Irrigated Lands Program, with 6 million acres of California farmland and 40,000 growers enrolled. Vast amounts of money (much of it in payments to the program by farmers) have been spent testing water all over the state, with mountains of data piling up over the years to show that chemicals used on agricultural fields are still finding their way into our water supply.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | January 18, 2016

January 18, 2016

The gentle rains of the past two weeks soaked deeply and filled the soil of our farm as if it were a 400-acre vessel. The soil itself is probably the most under-appreciated reservoir in the water cycle. We often think of water in terms of ‘blue water’, or stored water – rivers, reservoirs, groundwater or lakes that can be tapped for irrigation and drinking through California’s long dry summers.

The under-appreciated part of the water cycle is sometimes called the ‘green water cycle’ of infiltration, evaporation, transpiration, plant-water efficiency, and the micro cycle of water that is dew or fog capture by growing plants and trees covering the soil surface.

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News From the Farm | April 20, 2015

April 20, 2015

We have had a number of inquiries about the water situation and it seems time for a Beet article on water and California’s ongoing drought. There have also been questions about whether one can eat almonds without guilt, when many are pointing fingers at new plantings of permanent crops like almonds as a clear example of what seems to be wrong with the investments being made in farming and the water needed to support that farming.

There is little that is easy or clear when it comes to the debate about water in California. The issue is complex, affects all of us and requires that we begin to plan for both times of abundance and cycles of scarcity. Indeed it will be our response to the common issue of scarcity that will require wisdom, restraint and clear thinking as to how the over-promised resource gets divided and allocated among divergent interests. It is not easy to look at water without entering into the complexities of weather patterns, climate changes, year to year fluctuations, indigenous water resources, cropping patterns and historical use. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | February 9, 2015

February 9, 2015

As if breaking a spell cast on the land, rain came and the farm breathed a sigh of welcome.  The driest January on record for the region is now past and the sobering reality of three consecutive years of warm temperatures and little to no rain and low Sierra snowpack should be reason for the farm community to consider the practices they employ and develop comprehensive strategies for the long term.

The impacts of the last few years touch many parts of our farm. Our fruit trees are short on the chilling hours that they require for healthy bloom and fruit set. Things are blooming early – by more than 2 weeks – which may mean more susceptibility to frost later in the spring. Winter rains are needed to replenish our wells. When the small side creeks that border the farm flow even for a few short days, we can measure a rise in well water levels as the ground acts as a reservoir for the beneficial winter rains. [Read more…]

News from the Farm | June 2, 2014

June 2, 2014

Summer Transitions

There are periods of the season when we get caught between the ending of one crop cycle and the beginning of another. The end of May and beginning of June is perennially one of these times. We are in the middle of transitioning from spring to summer as we find interesting crops with which to fill your boxes. 

Bound by weather and temperature, the slowly disappearing hard C crops –kalecollardscabbagecarrotschard – make their exit from your boxes along with lettuce, other greens and leafy veggies. These will return next October. I think that most of us are about ready to not be missing these veggies and are looking forward to tomatoes, melons and fruits – the full expression of summer.  [Read more…]

News from the Farm | May 26, 2014

May 26, 2014

Farmers all over California are weighing their summer water options.  Some, for example, on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, will fallow all of their land for lack of water.  Others (like Full Belly) have access to groundwater, and will irrigate only higher value crops, and choose to grow less in certain fields or reduce water use later in the season.   

In declaring a drought emergency, Governor Brown called out the likely connection between the drought and climate change.  I recently asked a friend if the farmers in his neighborhood talked about the drought in those terms and he replied that while they may or may not think about the impact of climate change, what they worry about more is the impact of regulations that will be imposed on agriculture in the name of addressing climate change! [Read more…]

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