Our Thoughts

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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? (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

National Public Radio’s food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles was in town the other day. The radio man journeyed from our nation’s capital to the Valley to report on farm labor issues, our long-simmering immigration crisis in particular. Calling ahead to inquire if I’d speak on that delicate subject, we cut a deal — Dan would appear as my “Down on the Farm” radio guest where we’d discuss labor. I’d negotiated similar choppy waters back in October with Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies author Dr. Seth Holmes who encouraged Charles to look me up. Unfortunately, most farmers are uncomfortable talking about this issue, obviously concerned for both our businesses and employees’ wellbeing. (more…)

Fresh ideas abound at our ongoing Eco Farm Conference, as they have over now thirty-five annual organic confabs. This year’s event is all abuzz about “carbon farming”. Querying many farmers on the role carbon plays in their agricultural practice would yield blank stares or stammerings. After all, carbon is not something we buy in a sack and add to the recipe, like nitrogen or potassium. However, 2,000 attendees are this week absorbing, possibly for the first time, profound awareness that the business of all life on planet Earth, including that shepherded by agriculturalists, is essentially cycling carbon. EcoFarm presenters explain that while a relatively small portion of the “stuff of life” floats about Earth’s atmosphere, twice that amount of carbon resides in our soils, with the lion’s share deep in oceans. At any point in time, barely 1% of Earth’s total carbon store is temporarily incorporated into its living beings. I lobbied all last year that my friends Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Sebastopol’s Singing Frogs Farm be invited to demonstrate how they harvest $250,000 in organic vegetables from 2.5 acres without tilling their soil. If Thomas Jefferson held that “cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous”, why did Paul and Elizabeth renounce their birthright? They, among few, understand that our nation’s virgin soils, on average, harbored more than twice the carbon in organic matter as they do a few years after being subjected to the plow. Like bellows on a forge, tillage forces an oxygen blast into a soil’s living system, where under natural conditions this gas only diffuses slowly. Supercharged microbes respond by consuming organic matter at an accelerated pace, blowing off CO2 into the atmosphere. In fact, since agriculture’s dawn, humans’ soil plowing released more carbon into Earth’s atmosphere than had our burning of fossil fuels until 1955. With 40% of this planet’s dry land surface now managed for human food production, astute soil scientists estimate that all the miscreant, climate-disrupting carbon in our atmosphere could be sequestered in agricultural soils where it once safely rested. To forestall climate chaos, the world’s farmers would necessarily abandon an age-old tillage habit. Some actually have, few of these vegetable farmers, even fewer yet organic practitioners. Satisfy your curiosity about Paul and Elizabeth’s small, organic, tractor-less miracle, where little time is spent yanking weeds, by reading Todd Oppenheimer’s “The Drought Fighter” in a new online quarterly magazine, Craftsmanship. –Tom Willey

Craftsmanship: bit.ly/15qYbCN

Denesse and I are headed to a 35th annual EcoFarm Conference at Pacific Grove’s Asilomar this week. Many organic farmers were first awakened to complex life underfoot at that venue some twenty years ago when pioneering soil microbial ecologists Elaine Ingham and Vicki Bess made rousing presentations. However, as each strove to develop commercial, practical methods for characterizing the diversity and health of vast, largely invisible, living communities in farmers’ soils, animosity ensued. Bess, while admitting fewer than 5% of soil-dwelling species could be grown on artificial media, argued that a handful she cultured in petri dishes were indicative of the many. Ingham insisted on direct microscopic observation, even though she could not distinguish one bacterial species from another and fungi’s value could only be inferred from hyphal width. (more…)