A Farmers Tale

This is the news letter from a local farmer. He runs a mixed vegetable organic farm, with some goats. Folks buy a “farm share” and get their share of the farm produce. Every year, there is a Summer Solstice celebration at the farm. I was invited to it a couple of times (though I’m not a ‘member’) as I was “sharing the share” of my neighbors. Love the place. Love the people. Great produce. And the farmer, Tom, really knows his stuff.

More about Tom, Constance, and the farm:

http://www.liveearthfarm.net/aboutus.aspx

You have to be especially “good at it” to make full productivity without resorting to any “aw shit” chemical crutch when something gets broken… It can be done, but takes a much more detailed understanding. And some specialized equipment. So he has a propane powered ‘weed burner’ rather than a chemical weed kill, for example.

So what has this last “Spring” been like “down on the farm”?

This is from Live Earth Farm: Farmer Tom in Watsonville for this week:

One for the Record Books
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There is always one for the record books, and Saturday’s Strawberry U-Pick surely qualified. It was pouring as Elisa and I readied for our usual morning-in-the-field together, and I gaped incredulously at the rain gauge which showed that 1 inch of rain had fallen overnight. This is June. I was in complete denial, and proceeded to set up a tent near the strawberry patch. The furrows had standing water — in some areas, ankle deep. The strawberry patch, which was intentionally left unpicked, was loaded with sweet, ripe strawberries, rain rinsed, all screaming to be picked. The rain on Saturday morning didn’t let up; it just kept intensifying. Nobody in their right mind, I thought, will want to come and pick in this weather.

I took advantage of the moment to assess the fields, in full rain gear. Trudging through the mud, I couldn’t help but feel a little concerned about the prospects of having a normal growing season. Never, in June, have I experienced the drainage ditches flowing with water. Having storm systems coming our way this late in the season is unusual and throws off the timing of a lot of our field tasks. We do our best to stay on schedule, to plant crops in succession in order to ensure a steady harvest, but this year Mother Nature is calling all the shots. Thursday and Friday, in addition to harvesting and packing the shares and preparing for the weekend markets, we worked feverishly to do in 2 days what normally would have been spread out over 7-10 days. Over 60,000 seedlings of leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes and peppers had to be planted and beets, sugar snap peas, spring onions, spinach, green beans, and radishes had to be field sown. The timing of these plantings is preceded by other important field tasks such as mowing, plowing, bedding, fertilizing, weeding, cultivating… and all are linked and affected by the amount of rain that just passed through.

What if this cool, wet weather continues? Has climate change now really set in? Are predictable weather patterns along this unique and sheltered Central Coast microclimate a thing of the past? Will we just have to adopt new farming practices to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable climate? With all these thoughts running through my head I made my rounds in order to put together the coming week’s work schedule and harvest plan. Fortunately the raspberries and blackberries, typically very sensitive to rain, are still only in the beginning stages of ripeness; the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are mostly sizing up but not yet flowering; the green beans are still a few weeks away from developing harvestable pods, and as long as we keep the basil and cucumbers under blankets of row cover they may still mature in a timely manner. With the Summer Solstice just around the corner, I am hopeful that the weather may finally turn dry and warm. It would be a blessing, too, if the typically cool overcast summer days ahead are delayed to give our heat-loving summer crops a little boost.

Back to the u-pick. Well the rain just kept falling, with no break in sight. The dark clouds kept pouring in from the coast, yet to my great surprise the first cars pulled in at 10 o’clock sharp and out came eager pickers ready to be the first in the field. Dressed for the occasion in full raingear, everyone was ready, mostly ignoring my cautious remarks about the poor conditions and the wet berries. It only took one sampling of a freshly picked strawberry, and all the seemingly adverse conditions — slippery mud, water drenched shoes and clothes, and nonstop rain — became just minor inconveniences as buckets, baskets and trays got filled up with red luscious strawberries. We even rescued a mom whose van got stuck in the mud on our neighbor’s farm, just in time so she could still pick her share of strawberries before returning home. As I occasionally checked in with the pickers, my earlier worries got all but erased with enthusiastic remarks about how much fun this was. One member said, “I am in heaven, picking in the fields, eating fresh sweet strawberries while the kids are having a blast playing in the rain and mud.” Another member savoring a strawberry exclaimed, “These are the best berries I ever tasted, bar none,” as he carried a full bucket out of the field.

I didnt keep count of how many people showed up, but in the six hours from 10am to 4pm, during which it never stopped raining, the entire dedicated block of berries was picked clean. Nothing stirs a deeper sense of satisfaction and delight than seeing and hearing people express the pleasure triggered from eating and being surrounded by tasty, healthy food. It is what keeps me inspired, especially on an unusually wet day in June! So thanks to all who came this last Saturday, and I encourage everyone to take this opportunity to mark your calendars and join us at our upcoming Summer Solstice celebration, on June 18th — our biggest farm community event of the year. Especially if you missed the tractor ride and farm tour last weekend, or couldn’t make it for the u-pick. We’ll have the strawberry patch open again for another scaled-down picking event. Hope to see many of you here on the farm, under sunnier skies!!

– Tom

Now read between the lines of that a little bit. Tom was able to make some decent production, but only by being adaptable in the face of a major “rain surprise”. He is used to being adaptable, as that is part of how you get full equivalent productivity out of an organic operation (as compared to a chemical one). More labor. More detailed understanding. And much more “flex”.

But what happens to the chemical farm with an agribusiness owner who has a fixed schedule of what to plant when and when to apply what? And only one crop? I grew up in such an area. While some farmers do watch the weather and adjust, there were others, most often the remotely managed AgriBusiness ops, that had a fixed spray schedule and fixed calendar based plant and harvest. Works OK in places with high predictability, not so well when things are wobbly. Cuts the skilled labor needed by quite a bit (as the “farm manager” doesn’t need to think much and you can use folks less skilled at actual farming) but at the cost of a bit of yield in ‘strange years’. Those are the operations who will suffer the most as they learn (again) how to adapt.

There has been a large increase in such operations in the last 50 years of “warm, stable, good times”. I can only hope they learn to be fast in their feet in a hurry now that the PDO has swapped back to “more variable”. For me, I’m having oscillations from near 100 F to down about 70 F as the Rossby waves are now deeper in the Jet Stream. Just like it was back in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s about a 2 week “wobble”, but was enough to screw up my radishes and make them bolt. (Also had me fooled into planting some beans early, that then suffered in a return to cold, and never quite recovered from the cold shock).

So this isn’t just some hypothetical worry. I’ve run into the effects in my own garden. Learning that MY schedule was a bit out of touch and that MY sense of “well, turned warm, plant beans” needed tuning up for “But it will wobble back to really cold again in 2 weeks”. We need, collectively, to unlearn the last 30 years of farming / gardening habits and relearn those of 60 to 31 years ago, during the last cold PDO phase.

But this isn’t just a PDO flip. We’ve also had the sun go very very quiet. If this is a Grand Minimum, we may need to relearn some farming and gardening habits from the Dalton Minimum era as well. More potatoes (mine did great this year), less grains and tomatoes…

In Conclusion

That, in a nutshell, is why I trust farmers more than “Climate Scientists”. I grew up in farm country, and the local farmers would typically listen to the weather reports, but often call “Bull Shit” on one of them. The best farmers had grey hair and 50+ years on the farm. They knew the weather cycles from memory (sometimes memory of a long ago cycle as a child on the farm). So they listened to the “weatherman”, then made up their own mind.

And adjusted.

Farmer Tom came here from France, IIRC, and is not that old. He has not lived through the 1960’s weather in that area. But he is flexible enough to adapt as he observes it change. A little time talking to a friend over the fence about what it was like back in 1955-1975 would likely be helpful. So time farmers spend talking is not just idle chatter… I expect that, pretty quickly, the “mix” from the farm will shift to what works best in a colder, wetter, more variable weather pattern. Like it was before, and is again.

All over the world right now, Farmers are doing just that. Be they in China dealing with drought and floods; or in Ireland dealing with cold and wet; or even in California, dealing with a 2 week temperature “wobble” from a drifting Jet Stream. They will seek out the Grey Heads and talk a bit. And someone will say “I remember when it was like this back in ’55 and we had to swap to more potatoes. Couldn’t grow a decent eggplant if I tried, then.” And so the “institutional memory” will spread to the younger guys. The only ones who won’t hear it are the ones in Business Suits in The City looking at their farm spread sheets and planting schedules and wondering if their Farm Manager needs replacing…

I went to an Ag College. Many of the folks in the AgriBusiness track came from farms. We can only hope that enough of the management in the agribusiness operations have some kind of real farm roots, and will get an earful from “Granddad” when they go home for Christmas and complain about the weather cutting their bonus…

Yes, IMHO, Real Farmers ™ live on the land and have dirt under their fingernails. It helps if they have a long memory or a good fence to lean on while talking to the old guy next door…

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