Eco-Farm 2006 Bus Tour: Part One

I apologize for not writing sooner, but real life has been a full plate lately. I am still floating in a kind of happy bubble about my participation in last week's Eco-Farm Conference held annually at Asilomar about 40 minutes south of my house.

Last Wednesday morning, I arose at 5:00 a.m. to get ready for the day's big event: a bus tour of four farms in Santa Cruz county. Traveling with me was Cynthia Sandberg, so I was ready to rumble (with laughter—Cynthia makes me howl.)

We arrived early and milled around. I didn't see many people I knew, and didn't think about it until later that maybe Santa Cruz farmers already know the local farms, so they wouldn't want to spend $70 on a tour. We saw a beautiful young woman with two beautiful, blue-eyed little girls—one on her hip and one clinging to her skirt. The mother turned out to be a farmer from Alaska, whose husband was going to be on the bus tour.

found our way to the front seat of the third bus, which would remain our seats for the entire day. Traveling north from Monterey on Highway One, we listened to our tour guide, Richard Smith, a farm advisor with UC Extension, tell us about the topography of first the Salinas and then the Pajaro valley. We rolled past fields of strawberries and artichokes, the predominant crops in the area. The raised strawberry beds were lined with plastic: even many of the organic and sustainable farmers use plastic, as it keeps weeds down and prevents erosion of the raised beds during the winter rains. (The beds are about 16" tall, which aids the pickers.)

At shortly after 9 a.m., we turned off the highway into the village of Soquel, less than a mile from my house. To think it had taken me four hours to wake up and come back to town! All the busses turned into the big parking lot at the Seventh Day Adventist campground, across the street from Everett Family Farm. Like gangly kindergartners, we crossed the street in rows, and headed to the farmstand, where Jasmine Roohani and her new farming partner, Mike Irving, awaited us, along with Laura Everett, who owns and lives at the farm with her husband and three daughters.

Jasmine's star seems to be rising: I learned that she was on staff at Eco-Farm, and that last year, she and Kirsten had presented at the conference in a panel on being young farmers. Our tour seemed to be balanced between men and women, though most of the older members were men. (Pictured at right, Jasmine Roohani with Laura Everett, before the tour got started.)

After Jasmine spoke about what's going on at the farm now (garlic and strawwberries have been planted), she introduced Mike Irving, with whom she had participated in the UCSC Center for Agroecology's farm apprentice program. Most students stay six months, but Jasmine and Mike had remained for eighteen. A native of Massachusetts, Mike had returned to Santa Cruz only three days earlier. (That's Mike at the left.) Both Jasmine and Mike grew up in the suburbs, with gardening fathers. In Jasmine's case, the garden worked against her, as her job was to weed. With a twinkle of perverse glee in her eyes, she said how satisfying it had been to put her father to work weeding when he visited the farm last summer.

Mike had not studied agriculture in college, but had met people who'd farmed after he'd graduated. He became enthralled with the idea of working with living things and growing his own food. In five years, he said, he'd learned so much, and was excited about putting his knowledge to work at this farm.

The tour was broken up into two sections, and so some of us went below while others followed the Pied Piper of Gophers, Thomas Wittman, who is both a farmer and an expert on gopher removal. (His website is called GophersLimited.com.) And by "removal," I mean "killing them by the dozens in instant death traps." Gophers are a plague to nearly every farmer and gardener I know, and I am not in the least squeamish or tender-hearted about doing anything and everything within my power to get them the hell off our land.

Bob—a hippie, earth-loving, mellow type who has raised his voice to me exactly four times in fourteen years—almost bought a gun when he discovered a six-foot Brandywine tomato plant, chewed off at the base, sticking out of a gopher hole in the garden. Instead, we got kitties, who pay their rent in great green gobs of great greasy gopher guts. (And they are green, for the record.)

But Cynthia and I went below with the crowd who were led by Jasmine and Mike, and wonderfully assisted by the man with the portable microphone, known to one and all as Amigo. (That's him, pictured at the right.) Amigo Cantisano has been leading bus tours since their inception over a dozen years ago. He was a great host, asking pertinent and thoughtful questions over the course of the day.

Jasmine and Mike guided the group of nearly 150 down to the meadows below, where green garlic shoots pushed their way through their straw covering. I admit that, because lots of the questions that pertained to farming techniques and minutiae that went right over my head, I detached from the audio and went for the visual tour. I walked around and looked at the people and the farm. And that was when I got my first hit of the several thousand million molecules of wonder that make these events what they are.

I watched people. It's what I do. What caught my eye at a single moment was a man closely examining a handful of soil. He was running it between his fingers like a tailor feeling fabric. He showed it to the woman next to him, and they talked about the dirt. I went up and asked what he was looking for, or looking at. He explained that the dirt was obviously heavily clay, but then, streaking it onto his palm, he showed me the small ridges made from the less-apparent sand. "So we're wondering how this dirt is to irrigate, and what it's like when it's really wet and really dry. I think it probably gets really hard when it's dried out for a long time." Having this very kind of soil on our land, I can attest that it gets as hard as a rock in the summertime. (This farmer turned out to be the husband of the woman from Alaska, and told me that Juneau has five organic/sustainable farms, and a waiting list of two hundred people for the CSAs there. How great is that?)

You can see the size of the crowd here, on the right. While Jasmine and Mike talked about their plans for the farm, dozens of little conversations were happening, and notebooks were being filled with ideas and thoughts. These farmers were working, and gathering information for their own farms in the upcoming season.

Soon enough, those of us who wanted to learn all about gopher extermination headed up to the persimmon orchard on the upper terrace at the farm. The first crowd was just dispersing, and twenty or thirty of us gathered around to watch Thomas point out the gopher mounds.

Gophers are solitary animals, he said, and he also told us that right now was breeding season. A gopher can have three to five litters in one season, each bearing as many as ten pups. His traps were marked with orange flags, and in short time, Thomas was hauling up his first dead gopher. Cynthia cheered, "That's a war trophy!" I saw a couple of people looking squeamish, but a dead gopher is a good gopher.

I let Cynthia take all the notes, determined that Bob would be more victorious this year in our quest for a gopher-free garden.

It was a great mini-workshop, and the visit to the Everett Family Farm concluded.

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Back into the buses we climbed, headed north on Highway One to our second stop, Swanton Berry Farm, which I'd visited back in April. It was nice to see Jim Cochran again, looking spiffy in his crisp blue shirt.

As a farmer, Jim Cochran is so respected. His treatment of his workers, including their unionization, is well-known, as his reputation for fairness and integrity. Over the years, Jim has diversified, like most small farmers, and now is growing not only world-famous strawberries, but cauliflower, broccoli, artichokes, peas, pumpkins, blackberries, and ollalieberries. The strawberries are Chandler and Seascapes, common to the central coast.

Jim said, "People think I'm not farming in the winter, but I am thinking about those berries every day, all day, wondering if they're happy. I don't use the Farmer's Almanac, but the satellite and radar. We plan our day at 6 AM, and we revise the plan at 7:30. And at 9:00, and then again at 10:00. And when the last truck is loaded and on the road, then you can stop planning your day." Jim sells 40% of his produce directly, at the farmstand and farmers markets, and another 60% wholesale.

When I asked about the restaurants he sells to, he said, "Every single restaurant wants two flats of strawberries on Tuesday, and another four flats on Friday. ALL YEAR LONG." We laughed. He likes having a farmstand, and made certain to have educational and historic photographs on the walls, so he can orient visitors to the scope of farming.

Then Jim and Amigo led us out to "the ugliest, raggedest block of strawberries you've ever seen in your life. But I couldn't pull them out, because they're still producing. And these are the berries for the U-Pick Farm Days we have."

Again, the distinction between members of this tour and a general tour were obvious. These farmers went straight up to the raised beds, and started poking around. Out came the notebooks and digital cameras. You can see the plastic protecting the raised beds, at right, where the farmers are examining the plants and the farming techniques.

Soon enough, we wandered back to the farmstand, where a buffet lunch awaited our group, and we found seats for ourselves.

Who'd have thunk there were blueberry geeks and blueberry celebrities in the world? Well, child, I had no idea. But Cynthia and I were at the end of the table with blueberry growers, who talked about quel scandal of Madame Blueberry being seen with Ronald McDonald. Apparently McDonald's is trying to remake its image, and has hired the services of Madame Blueberry in a publicity campaign geared to make people think of McD's as a healthier place. The gossipers were wondering if it would hurt Madame B, and in the end, concluded there is no such thing as bad publicity.

After lunch, we boarded the buses for our third farm, and I will write about the rest of the tour a little later. Unlike the lunch we were served, this post is a lot to digest. (Lunch was tasty, but it completely lacked a protein course, so Cynthia and I left with thin blood sugar, still hungry.)

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In the meantime, Logan turned two on Monday! We spent the morning at Thomas Family Farm, where we saw something I've never seen before: chickens roosting about twenty or thirty feet up in a redwood tree. Oh, Logan loved it. Jerry and Jean, along with their son Josh, were all wearing boots, tromping around in the winter mud.

When I had started my blog last April, I knew I'd be seeing the seasons on different farms, and here, the flowers told the tale. Pink, yellow, and red tulips stood between the rows of the cover crops, and in one part of the apple orchard, it was pink and purple anemones. The Thomases bring cut flowers to every farmers market: their booth is always so beautiful.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion." —Abraham Lincoln

Thanks for visiting. More to come soon.