Staples/Slowing Down

Towards the end of last week, strong gusts of wind began to pummel the Sacramento Valle, clearing out the dense fog and the most of the leaves clinging to the trees on the farm.  The mulberries, willows, black walnuts, figs and the majestic valley oaks that dot the landscape of rice country are transforming into their skeletal winter forms.  The wind blew the thin white chaff off the corn being moved around the mill and it drifted like snow throughout the farm.  Like flakes that never melt it even settled on the dusty break table inside the machine shop.  I spent most of the past few days in the unheated shop, where I counted weeds in the rice samples I took from each field before harvest.  The work revealed striking differences in the weed populations of the fields, but grew tedious and made me realize that I wouldn't want to do this all the time, say, as a PhD student in an agriculture-related discipline.  Luckily, as the light faded over the Great Valley on Thursday, I finished counting the last strand of ricefield bullrush and now look forward to spending the next two weeks before Christmas Break analyzing yield monitor maps inside the office.  Working in the office has this major benefit: at least I won't see my breath for the first three hours of each day as I did in the shop.

I survived the gusty winds and my last day of rice weed counting thanks to the steaming bowl of albondigas soup I ate for lunch at the Pleasant Grove General Store Cafe.  The oregano-infused broth, loaded with carrots, potatoes and of course, the delicious rice and meat albondigas soothed my soul on that blustery day.  The family who runs the cafe are friendly, and I chatted with the woman who was running the grill and serving the all-male, over 50 crowd their burgers, tamales and burritos.  Maybe the fact that I was the only patron not wearing a camouflage hat and not discussing rice combines or duck hunting elicited the willingness to engage in conversation.  I appreciated the chance to interact with a member of the opposite sex during a workday, because it's a rare thing in the male dominated landscape of rice country.  After spending nearly four years teaching at an elementary school, where the staff was between 70 and 90 percent female, it's an enormous change working at the farm whose only female employee enters bills for five hours a month.  I have a lot of thoughts about how an all-male workforce impacts our farming practices, but I will save that for another time and leave the reader with this point regarding gender in agriculture.  I am very grateful to have worked with and learned from some amazing female gardeners and farmers, including Wendy Johnson, Ana Juarez, Sally Fox and Liz Milazzo, and I could list off many more female friends and colleagues who are doing groundbreaking work in the world of agriculture and food systems. 

When I first started working at Pleasant Grove Farms, I fell into a sort of macho mindset about large scale mechanized farming.  The thinking that went through my head goes something like this: those market gardens and micro farms with their arugula and zinnia flowers are nice, but it's the big operations like ours that are really feeding the world.  I embraced the idea of hundred acre fields, belted tractors and combines whose tires were wider than any bed I ever double-dug at the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden.  Filled with the arrogance of inexperience, I decided that we're doing real farming here, because of the enormous quantities of belly-filling staple crops our fields produce.  A few month later, this conceit has faded like the green in the leaves growing along the irrigation canals and I've returned to a broader, more inclusive perspective about farming and about what makes a staple crop.

Combines at rest, December 2011

My first experience with farming staple crops happened during a month long trip I took to Nicaragua three years ago.  I spent most of my time there studying Spanish at the Hijos del Maiz language school in the remote farming community of El Lagartillo.  I had a wonderful time, in which food played a big part.  The diet in Lagartillo consisted mostly of locally grown staple foods: beans, corn tortillas and a homemade farmer's cheese called cuajada.  Although I didn't spend much time farming, I helped harvest beans a couple of times in the cool of the morning.  This brief taste of the campesino life increased my respect for farmers and gave me a sense of how much labor it takes to grow the staple crops for that community.

Grinding corn into masa for tortillas, Lagartillo Nicaragua

Though the beans, tortillas and cuajada made up the bulk of the calories I consumed in Lagartillo, other staples had become an important part of the community's diet: wheat bread, potatoes and especially rice.  When I think of Latin American cuisine, beans and rice are the first dish that comes to mind.  Even though most people in Lagartillo ate a lot of gallo pinto (the Nicaraguan national dish, rice and beans), no one there grew rice.  I asked around and was told that larger, more capital intensive farms in the lowlands produce most of Nicaragua's rice.  Residents of corn and bean-growing highland communities like Lagartillo pay a much higher price per pound for rice than for locally grown staples.  Despite the cost it's clear why rice entered the local diet: it tastes good, forms a complete protein when paired with beans, and is easy to cook.  To make tortillas, corn must first be taken off the cob by hand, then boiled with cal (lime) for a few hours, then thoroughly rinsed and ground into masa, and then finally formed into tortillas and cooked on the comal.  Beans need to be cleaned then cooked for many hours on a stove, which takes a lot of time and a lot of leña (firewood).  Rice, on the contrary, arrives in the village, polished white in a plastic bag, fifteen minutes away from one's fork.

Gallo Pinto (rice and beans) Nicaragua's national dish

Rice, as many of you know, is not a food native to the New World.  It has a long and venerable history of cultivation in Asia, where it provides the foundation of at least half of humanity's diet.  In the New World, rice's connection to conquest is evident in the Cuban name for rice and beans: moros y cristianos.  The moros--Moors--are the beans (black, brown or red) and the cristianos the white rice.  This theme extends even to the Sacramento Valley, where rice has certainly conquered much of the landscape.  Land graders, equipped with laser-leveling technology, ensure that the rice fields have a perfect gradient for water flow.  A complex network of reservoirs, canals and wells ensures a steady  irrigation supply during the bone-dry summer.  During planting airplanes swoop down over the paddies to drop the seeds, and when mature, large combines with treads similar to those on tanks rumble through the rice fields.  Though it depends on a drastic transformation of the landscape, rice production in California has a beautiful side.  The presence of water in what would otherwise be a parched landscape is undeniably refreshing on blisteringly hot summer days.  The paddies of an organic rice field teem with life: herons, cranes and a multitude of other waterfowl feast on the frogs, small fish and crawdads that proliferate in the shallow water.  And the crop itself is a delicious, nutritious and highly versatile food. 

California ricefield in September

These two stories of rice illustrate the connection between history, home consumption and scale of production both in Nicaragua and closer to home.  Here in the Sacramento Valley of California, rice farming occurs at a large scale it is the only profitable way to grow a crop whose per-pound value is low when equipment is expensive and land values high.  The same applies to other crops grown at Pleasant Grove Farms: popcorn, dry beans and wheat.  The positive side of this highly mechanized agriculture is that it produces large volumes of important crops according to organic practices that are somewhat affordable, which cannot happen on smaller farms whose size and scale make the purchase of the needed equipment prohibitively expensive.  The organic production at Pleasant Grove Farms has allowed a family-owned operation to survive and grow.  At the farm, soil is viewed not as a medium in which to pump synthetic fertilizers and toxic agrochemicals, but as a vital living resource.  This attitude diminishes the amount of contaminants that enter the ecosystem and provides a healthier environment for workers and neighbors. The farm owner also takes into account the needs of the semi-skilled labor force by planning crop plantings so that the employees can have steady work for most of the year.  Many of the employees live rent-free on the farm and some of those who live off farm earn enough to attain that benchmark of American middle class life, home ownership.

Although many of the farm's labor and agricultural practices are radically different from those of the  region it cannot escape the logic of industrial agriculture in the Central Valley.  The large scale, the high level of mechanization and the use of GPS driven tractors create work that is isolating and repetitive: to create beds in a large field, I spent two twelve hour days sitting in a tractor mostly on autopilot.  These tractors and other machines guzzle an enormous quantity of diesel to cover such large territories. For humans, it is simply impossible to walk over 3,000 acres of fields, so scientific techniques like analyzing crop samples and using yield monitors to document the harvest have replaced a more intimate approach common on smaller farms.  The highly competitive nature of Central Valley agriculture with its' exhaustingly long growing season requires an incredibly rigorous schedule where 60 hour workweeks are the baseline minimum for most of the year.  Like most farms in the Valley, Pleasant Grove farms depends on an immigrant workforce so dedicated to earning money for their families that they are willing to put in these hours. 

Bean harvester at Pleasant Grove Farms

A few weeks ago, in the midst of the rice harvest, I spent a Saturday afternoon harvesting the small sweet potato patch in a backyard garden on 4th Street in Woodland (see previous posts: 'Harvest' and 'Sweet Potatoes').  This provided a much needed respite from dealing with truck tags, yield monitors and online statistics and reminded me of why I love to garden and why I became enchanted with agriculture in the first place (it was not because I love Excel Spreadsheets!).  It was wonderful to be outside on a beautiful fall afternoon, in good company, with my hands in the soil.  Although the harvest did not produce enough of those delicious orange and purple tubers to provide many meals, considering the scale that was not surprising.  In my many years as a school garden coordinator, I frequently contemplated questions of scale, and that day spent unearthing sweet potatoes brought about much reflection on the same theme.  Gardening offers much in terms of pleasurable work, community building and producing food, but it doesn't deliver the goods--the sheer volumes of rice, beans, corn, and wheat--in a way that large-scale mechanized farming does.  But are there other staple foods that smaller scale agriculture can effectively produce?

Although rice, beans, corn and wheat are important crops they are not the only ones that can be considered staples.  I would include sweet potatoes and regular potatoes--which can be very effectively produced on a small scale--in a list of staple foods, along with winter squash and root vegetables like turnips, parsnips and carrots.  What about onions and garlic?  I could live off beans and rice, but miserably so without the addition of these two alliums (hot pepper sauce falls into this category as well).  During the intense summer heat, I consumed so much watermelon that it was most certainly a staple of my diet and I invite anyone who would argue otherwise to spend a few days in the Central Valley when the thermometer hits the triple digits.  Things get even more complicated when dairy, eggs and meat are added to the list, though I would certainly argue that for environmental reasons, animal products shouldn't be as much of a staple in the American diet as they are today.  The definition of what makes a staple food is subjective, and when that definition is expanded, one can begin to include a greater diversity of agricultural arrangements in the circle of farms that produce the staple foods we need to survive and thrive.  

Both technologically advanced and subsistence farming have much to teach an aspiring farmer like myself, and I am not here to judge which one is better because they each have benefits and downsides.  The ideal agriculture in my mind draws a little from both, and this is the agriculture I hope to one day practice.  Though I'd like to stick around Pleasant Grove Farms for a while, I have no intention of becoming a career 'rice man' in the Sacramento Valley.  I appreciate the effectiveness of machinery and of technological innovations in agriculture-especially things like soil tests-but I savor the experience of digging my hands into the soil more than staring at a computer screen.  Though I understand the economies of scale that drive Pleasant Grove Farm's monoculture production, I yearn to work with a wider variety of crops and include animals in a rotation.  Crop diversity, soil health, intimacy with plants, and a more socially inclusive agriculture make for a more resilient agriculture.  Achieving this may mean starting a farm with friends, which is not possible in the present.  For now I hold onto this vision while I work at Pleasant Grove farms and learn everything I can there.  I can take advantage of the ambiguity of my current position--I am neither manager nor farm worker--to build relationships with fellow employees and find needed social interaction during break times (and maybe get some more of those boiled peanuts for snack).  I also plan to take some accounting classes this spring, because regardless of scale, accounting is an important aspect of running a farm and a good skill to know in general.