DOWN on the FARM
with Tom Willey
Farther Afield
Organic farming, as currently practiced, just isn’t enough
Eliot Coleman and Fred Kirschenmann are deservedly regarded as the two living “philosopher kings” of our modern organic movement. Eliot borrowed heavily from the wisdom and practice of early nineteenth-century advocates of agricultural “improvement”, distant ancestors of our modern organic farming movement, and Europe’s intensive market gardeners who once fed cities like Paris, to create the exemplary farm he’s operated since 1968 on Maine’s rocky shores. It’s ironic that Coleman holds out and instructs from that now remote agricultural outpost, where forest has erased much of post-colonial agricultural history, from 1700s ‘stump farming’ days to domination of American potato production until the 1950s. Maine lost out when agricultural “improvers”, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, lost vociferous debates on the floors of Congress over corralling American populations east of the Appalachians, where they would necessarily develop proper soil husbandry skills to survive, versus unleashing them upon unexploited virgin soils “out West”. We are familiar with the outcome of that story. Soil scientist David Montgomery, author of Dirt and Growing a Revolution, argues that “humans have been mining soils to feed ourselves for 12,000 years.”
Prior to the industrial revolution and Justus von Liebig’s unlocking chemical secrets of plant nutrition, all that soil mining, or “de-generating” as Eliot puts it, took place utilizing organic farming methods. Environmental historian Angus Wright, in Nature’s Matrix argues [Read more…]
Archuleta’s rational soil health evangelism (2014)
“Big Hugh” adopted theatrical antics of legend before congress while dramatizing America’s soil erosion crisis throughout Roosevelt’s era. Soil Conservation Service founder Dr. Hugh Hammond Bennett spread a thick bath towel across one committee table over which he dumped a half-pitcher of water in demonstrating how well-covered, well-managed land could absorb heavy, washing rains. The chief then sloshed the remainder over a smooth tabletop, representing bare eroded land, [Read more…]
Pay it Forward
Back in November, we laid another mentor from my early farming career to rest. Neophyte farmers often rivet sole attention on growing crops, only worrying about where and to whom they’ll sell produce when a harvest mountain overwhelms them. Distinguishing ourselves as marketers much sooner than we did as producers, Denesse and I cut our direct sales teeth at Arnett-Smith’s twice-weekly open air market behind Fresno’s old Chamber of Commerce building, over which Florence Smith reigned supreme. Her Arkansas Arnett clan had lit out for California at century’s turn, [Read more…]
Dec. 2, 2015
Although I hardly know one end of a cow from another, Western Organic Dairy Producers Alliance (WODPA) invited me to deliver the keynote at their recent 10th Annual Conference and Trade Show in Corvallis, Oregon. Amongst a parade of tradesmen visiting the podium to hawk wares “indispensable” to any successful dairy farmer, came one waving a large square of what appeared to be AstroTurf. I sat dumbstruck as FodderWorks’ vendor rep claimed smart California dairy operators circumvent our mega-drought by growing pasture grass indoors. My first thought — “What sort of rubes does this guy take dairy farmers for?” — was followed by a recollection that Mario Daccarett, who milks sheep in Chowchilla, had invited me out to see some wacky pasture growing machine he was experimenting with over a year ago. Sure enough, visiting the FodderWorks booth, I learned Mario’s Golden Valley Farm is one of their star adopters. Familiarity with sprouted wheat grass found in every neighborhood health food store [Read more…]
Nov. 13, 2015
Sibella Kraus’ sights are set on protecting the last seven-thousand-acre remnant of the ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight’ for open space and urban-edge agriculture. Known as the Santa Clara or Silicone Valley today, its 450 square miles of mild climate, well-drained fertile soils and artesian water once hosted the world’s largest tree fruit production region, delighting hearts with apricots and cherries. Some 98% of the Valley’s expanse now lies beneath San Jose’s pavement or sprouts Apples, the computer kind, on sprawling high-technology electronics research and manufacturing campuses. Lest you think Kraus’ notion of restoring its last few thousand unpaved acres to agrarian glory completely fanciful, first consider this remarkable woman’s track record of accomplishment in her San Francisco Bay Area’s local, organic and specialty crop food movements over three decades plus. Sibella and I [Read more…]
Welcome News
It was welcome news to read in today’s (10-29-15) Fresno Bee that momentum builds to employ winter-fallowed farmlands, including dormant orchards and vineyards for Valley aquifer recharge should anticipated El Nino flood flows materialize. My well and pump man Hollis Priest was on the farm last week tuning us up when I asked him what sort of water table declines he was observing over this irrigation season. Hollis reports the Clovis area remains stable, while other communities, like Raisin City, have experienced drops of greater than 50 feet. In our case, we’ll commission an official Pump Test soon, but our well’s yield decline, from 800 gallons per minute down to 650 GPM, over this summer indicates Madera’s water table has suffered significantly. Warmer than average high temperatures this fall have [Read more…]
“Beyond Organic” or “Instead of Organic”?
In May of this year, a group of five Certified Organic fruit and vegetable farmers, whose combined careers represent 147 years’ experience in biological agriculture, approached the nation’s largest USDA National Organic Program (NOP) certifier, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), for help in defending our Certified Organic label’s value in a volatile marketplace.
This appeal was prompted by the nation’s iconic retailer of Certified Organic produce, Whole Foods Market (WFM), recent rollout of their proprietary fruit, vegetable and flower “Responsibly Grown” rating system in its 400 stores. The stated purpose of this initiative, examining and rating Conventional and Certified Organic WFM produce suppliers on parameters of soil health, pesticide use, food safety, labor practices, greenhouse gases, water conservation, waste reduction and [Read more…]
13 May, 2015
I suffer a weakness for accumulating the written word, and to read it all during this waning lifetime is my ambition. My library’s most treasured volume is the large-format, visually stunning 1979 cartographic masterpiece The California Water Atlas, commissioned by Governor Brown’s previous administration during the 1976-1977 drought to enhance knowledge of our state’s hydraulic complexity. A brilliant mind behind that epic publication’s execution popped out of the woodwork last week. Project Director and Editor William L. Kahrl’s May 1st CSUF presentation to Friends of the Madden Library was provocatively titled: “Death in the Almond Orchard”. In an authoritative air, white- bearded Sebastian Cabot look-alike Kahrl lectured on principal differences between California’s then and now, and the adequacy of a water system whose infrastructure remains essentially unchanged. The Golden State’s nearly doubled [Read more…]
7 May, 2015
No air of anticipation, only resignation, imbued some 200 farmers attending Madera Irrigation District’s 2015 “Grower Meeting” last week as general manager Tommy Greci announced zero water will flow to our thirsty crops for a second consecutive year. Newly elected MID director and long-time Madera farmer Dave Loquaci delivered the day’s knockout punch: “The water use we are historically accustomed to in Madera Co. will never return, nothing will again be the same as it was before”. Australia National Water Commission member Jane Doolan, presenting recently to a Public Policy Institute of California audience, suggested a similar realization keyed revolutionary public policy response to her nation’s dozen-year Millennium Drought that commenced in 1997. [Read more…]
30 April, 2015
Journalists of every stripe, in search of drought stories, have crawled this valley over several years in numbers reminiscent of Egypt’s Biblical locust plague. Farming friends and I have been dogged by the major TV network trio, New York Times reporters, plus
German, French and Norwegian film crews. If all voyeurs had brought an acre-foot of water each as tribute, we might have broken this epic dry spell. California’s inscrutable plumbing works, arguably the world’s most sophisticated, combining snow pack, river systems, reservoirs, canals and groundwater basins under myriad jurisdictions is difficult enough for local experts to get heads around. Senior and junior water rights, riparian vs. appropriative, pre and post-1914 entitlements, are a bewildering muddle for unlucky journalists sent here for a few days. [Read more…]
23 April, 2015
A most rewarding experience of my forty-year farming career has been associations with Thomas Jefferson’s “cultivators of the earth”, whom he esteemed as our country’s “most independent, most virtuous, most valuable citizens”. Amongst those, none are more precious than the handful of old-timers by whom I was mentored and befriended. I gaze on a photograph, occupying a prominent place in our home, of John and Hazel Sordi with Denesse and me at our 25th wedding anniversary celebration. That same year, 2005, our inseparable Sordi farming neighbors celebrated their 75th! John’s immigrant parents worked off New World passages, advanced by late-19th-century cattle barons Miller & Lux, by performing two years employment on ranches hereabouts, as did many fellow Italian expatriates. [Read more…]
16 April, 2015
Emma Marris’ Rambunctious Garden argues our modern environmental movement’s raison d’etre, nature’s preservation in a pristine, prehuman state, is misguided. We Homo sapiens have been mucking about this planet for some 250,000 years now, leaving few spaces without our footprints. Science is accumulating evidence that suggests South America’s “wild” Amazon Basin has been sculpted by human management for well beyond 1,000 years. Mayan and some Asian tropical rainforests also prove to be long- ago human agricultural polycultures gone feral, further challenging a “myth of the pristine”. Where misguided preservationists won an upper hand, our own benignly neglected Sierra Nevada slopes, brush choked and densely forested, suffer monumental conflagrations. [Read more…]
15th April, 2015
Emma Marris’ Rambunctious Garden argues our modern environmental movement’s raison d’etre, nature’s preservation in a pristine, prehuman state, is misguided. We Homo sapiens have been mucking about this planet for some 250,000 years now, leaving few spaces without our footprints. Science is accumulating evidence that suggests South America’s “wild” Amazon Basin has been sculpted by human management for well beyond 1,000 years. Mayan and some Asian tropical rainforests also prove to be longago human agricultural polycultures gone feral, further challenging a “myth of the pristine”. Where misguided preservationists won an upper hand, our own benignly neglected Sierra Nevada slopes, brush choked and densely forested, suffer monumental conflagrations. [Read more…]
9 April, 2015
Bewildered over how to farm twenty sandy, rented acres east of Fresno’s Gallo winery in 1981, I recalled my former Newhall Land and Farming Co. superintendent Les “El Pescuezon” Travis’s experience. “I drove the neighborhood each morning, spying on farmers who appeared to know what they were doing”, recounted Les, who sought refuge as a tiller of soil following WWII military service. Providentially, where my Olive Ave. dead-ended into Fancher Creek, I discovered a pair of long-experienced market gardeners on opposite corners. On the north side, Japanese-American George Yagi meticulously tended vegetables on five acres of benched land, while across the way, African American Leon Poe cultivated fifteen creekside acres of same. [Read more…]
2 April, 2015
Back in 1979, Denesse and I married and purchased our first home in Dos Palos, a sleepy, off the beaten path little farm town. It didn’t appear much transformed on a return visit last Saturday in company of author Mark Arax and photographer Ernest Lowe after long absence. Black gumbo clay soils characterize the vicinity and a shallow water table can turn “floating” homes into fun house rides. Our back yard’s ground cracked wide enough to swallow Chihuahuas. Thirty-five years ago, successfully farmed crops were two, cotton and rice. I field-managed Rinks Sano’s thousand-acre Westland Water District farm some miles south over unpaved Fairfax Ave. and further west of Firebaugh. [Read more…]
26 March, 2015
What sort of inquiry might defuse controversy over whether compost-loving organic farmers like the Kaisers and Willeys are indeed “worst nitrate polluters” or responsible soil nutrient managers? Conclusive proof is only evidenced by employing a lysimeter. What’s that? Think underground, open-topped terrarium, buried beneath a farm soil’s growing crop. Researchers install lysimeters as catchment systems to intercept rain or irrigation water percolating through plant root zones towards an aquifer. That liquid is easily drawn off and accurately analyzed for nitrate and other soluble nutrients threatening water quality. So, has anyone utilized lysimeters to compare composted crop systems to those chemically fertilized? [Read more…]
19 March, 2015
Nitrogen is one exceedingly mysterious constituent of our big bang universe. Earth’s most abundant pure element, life-essential backbone of DNA / RNA blueprints, amino acids and proteins, paradoxically makes itself scarce. Air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, but an inert gaseous form that cannot be woven into life’s lattice work. Only after an immensely powerful attraction between twin nitrogen atoms is cloven at great energy expense does this element become reactive with unlike chemical elements for blending into life’s soup. Since time immemorial, until just a century ago, such molecule splitting was the exclusive domain of lightning and specialized soil bacteria. Over those eons, stingy nature ordered its dynamic duo to convert or ‘fix’ into life-available form barely one percent of Earth’s atmospheric nitrogen. [Read more…]
12 March, 2015
Plants speak the language of fragrance. Rosemary Nachtigall became fluent in that tongue and over three decades interpreted it for thousands of visitors, from Earth’s every corner, at the Squaw Valley Herb Gardens she and husband Tim Friesen created just outside Kings Canyon National Park. Her towering, sequoia-like presence was felled several weeks ago by a malady whose name she refused to utter or permit anyone to speak in her presence. Rosemary was born into Reedley’s 1948 close-knit, sheltering, Mennonite farm community, during an era when families could yet modestly thrive in middle class circumstance on 20 acres of Thompson Seedless raisin grapes, or in the Nachtigalls’ case, a few Santa Rosa Plums for good measure. [Read more…]
5 March, 2015
Only an improbable “March Miracle” replay can now rescue San Joaquin Valley cities and farms from a calamitous fourth year of drought. I had our farm’s deep well pump tested recently, fully expecting to measure a water level decline of 30 feet after Madera’s unprecedented summer of bone-dry canals. When the technician announced a 10-foot drop and 200 gallons per minute (GPM) flow loss, I counted T&D Willey Farms lucky. Days later, I rumbled north in company of less fortunate drought victims on a bus caravan to Sacramento where our State Water Resources Control Board considered a petition to allow modest increases in amounts of water pumped south from the Delta’s winter storm flows. [Read more…]
19 February, 2015
Our annual Great Central Valley “Bee-in” is underway. This “Gathering of the Tribes”, some 24 billion Apis mellifera from all North America, won’t be lounging about in Golden Gate Park. Worker bee legions are here to pollinate the vastness of California almonds, now approaching one million acres. With each orchard acre displaying up to 10 million attractive, pollen-laden blooms, Apis visitors will indeed be characteristically busy. However, a monotonous almond blossom diet does not a healthy bee make, any more than we humans thrive on bread alone. It’s increasingly clear that current average 30% overwinter colony losses, double what was considered normal just a few years back, derives in significant part from diminished bee pasture, natural environments where floral diversity provides foraging Apis a broad range of immune-boosting nutrients. [Read more…]