From the cab of a John Deere 8410

Ready for another day of field work

Spending long days in the cab of a John Deere 8410 belted tractor gives me a lot of alone time. When I'm not staring at the sheaths of earth left tossed up by the powerful steel disks in tow behind the tractor, I watch the rice trucks on Highway 99, which runs next to the field, or I observe the chickens, cranes and the crows as they feast on insects unearthed by cultivation. And I wonder how of all things I ended up driving a tractor on a farm in South Sutter County. It is because I spent these recent days alone on the tractor--and because Fall is the season for remembering and for contemplation of life and death-- that I have resurrected up this blog yet again.

Sutter County Mornings

I could go back years, trying to figure out how I ended up where I am, but a good starting point would be the Summer of 2009, when I began my fourth year as the Nutrition Education Site Coordinator, aka 'Garden Teacher' at Park Elementary School in Hayward, CA. Despite the relationships I had built with students and members of the school community, I was ready to move on from the job. When I first started at Park I approached the work in such an unsustainable way that I had set myself up for a burnout, and that fall, I was a smoldering remnant struggling to decide what to do next with my life. My interests have always ranged widely: I studied anthropology and archaeology in college, participated in various sorts of activism in my free time and worked for five years at the intersection of gardening and education. As the school year progressed, I had a serious back injury and felt myself worn increasingly thin. I needed to do something positive and replenishing. Some friends who had been apprentices at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz sung the praises of this program, so I looked into this, applied and was accepted. Despite my back still in recovery, I decided to enroll and spent a wonderful sixth months at the UCSC Farm and Garden. I gardened while gazing awestruck across the Monterey Bay, learned all about plants (I am a huge plant nerd), ate and cooked delicious farm fresh meals and played lots of soccer and basketball, all in the company of amazing people. Those six months flew by and when I left Santa Cruz, I felt renewed, replenished and inspired. I had no plans though, but plenty of ideas to try on: farm in my home state of Washington, start an edible landscaping company, run an educational garden program for older students...farming rice in the Sacramento Valley was not one of them, yet...

I headed to where I grew up--Pacific Northwest--where the incessant rains and growing darkness grew oppressive, then back to California. I ended up in Yolo County in January 2011, and no longer living at my parents' house in Seattle, needed a steady income so I got a part-time job tutoring kids after school in the agricultural town of Woodland. My friend Rawley connected me with a free place to live in a travel trailer on a sheep, wheat and cotton farm in the Capay Valley whose owner, Sally Fox, used to breed organic and colored cotton varieties. One rainy February day I accompanied Sally on a trip to pick up her wheat from a cleaning mill at a farm north of Sacramento. Despite the near-torrential rain that day something about the farm appealed to me, a no-nonsense kind of operation that produces staple foods like rice, beans, popcorn and wheat (some people might not think of popcorn as a staple crop, but my Uncle Marc would beg to differ--he often eats it plain for lunch). Crops like flowers, melons, hot peppers, and broccoli raab, are all wonderful and make us happy but they don't keep us full like arroz y frijoles do. And for someone with a bad back, I knew that growing staple crops involves much less stoop labor than picking strawberries or green beans, two farm tasks I hope to never perform again.

Almonds in bloom in the Capay Valley, Northern California Feb. 2011

Eventually, after becoming frustrated with working three part-time jobs, none of which I especially liked, I jumped at the chance to take a full time position in Pleasant Grove. 

View of the farm across a rice field, Sept 2011

I was hired initially at Pleasant Grove to assist rice expert Mike, who grew up on a rice farm in Louisiana before getting a PhD in Weed Sciences and Ecology with rice irrigation and research. Rice as some of you may know most often grown partially submerged in water. In California rice production, a field is first laser-leveled to achieve a perfect gradient, then a number of smaller check levees are put in, which control water flow across the field. Each check is about three inches lower than the one above it, and usually has two boxes on either end where the water flows through. In organic rice production, water management becomes more complex, but in all rice production the water is used to suppress weed growth. Rice farmers flood their fields in May, then the rice is seeded by airplane, and the water usually remains until September, about a month prior to harvest. The job of a rice irrigator is to maintain good water depth in each check in each field--this is done by adding or removing boards of various sizes from the boxes between the checks, or by changing the amount of water entering the field from the well or irrigation ditch. Occasionally one of the levees surrounds the field springs a leak, usually the result of the mischievious crawfish; the solution is to shovel like crazy, then install a plastic tarp, then shovel more dirt and hope the crawfish each back on their voraciousness.

Rice stubble in a flooded field on a neighboring farm, Nov 2011

Work progressed as such with rice irrigation and some data entry for a month; I found the work interesting though often the intense Valley heat proved challenging. Because the of the mud and water in the fields, a rice irrigator usually wears waist high rubber waders, and on days when temperatures soared the high 90s or even triple digits, my legs felt as were enclosed in portable saunas. I struggled to stay hydrated during the day and frequently gorged myself on watermelon after returning home to Sacramento. The final day of rice irrigation work was the most arduous: it involved hauling truckloads of waterlogged, slimy boards out of the fields for over 10 hours.

Field after disk-bedding

Stormy skies over the Sacramento Valley, Nov 2011

My week of tractor driving had its' challenges. On those 12 hour days spent mostly in the cab of the John Deere, breathing dusty air scented with diesel and cigarette buts, I thought about things I'd rather be doing. Hours after I turned off the engine and the GPS I still felt the rocking motion from so many hours in the tractor. On the upside, I was successful in my first ever operation of heavy equipment--I did not knock over any high voltage power lines, or destroy the tractor, the implement, myself or anyone else. I walked away from the green machine last Friday feeling much more confident about my ability to use machinery. I am certain as well that I won't be spending the next six months in that tractor, and the long workdays will end in a few weeks. For farm work especially, I've mostly had it easy, meaning few twelve hour days and only a couple weekend days spent working. In the winter months, should they want me to continue my employment, the work will resemble more of an 8 hour office job.

September Rice

One of the best things about the job at Pleasant Grove Farms is that I don't really know how I'll spend each day when I show up in the morning. Sometimes, I am mostly in the office, downloading data about the rice harvest, entering in time cards, itemizing expenses for each field or making maps from GPS data. Other days I am outside cutting 2X2 quadrats of rice by hand for research, or taking samples of popcorn and beans and testing their moisture. A lot of the tasks I do would be boring if I had to do only one of them day in day out, but because in farming everything always is in flux, so is the work, and for the most part I find it satisfying and rarely stressful. On days when my work involves interacting with the other people on the farm, I find it especially rewarding: I really like the other folks at Pleasant Grove and as the days go on it feels more like a community. Farming is an important job even if small farmers and more so, farm workers are not well compensated or well respected for their labor. And it is an honest job, producing the most essential necessities of life.

Rainbow over rice

If you've gotten this far, please leave a comment, even if it's just a 'hi'--also if you are ever in this corner of the Valley on a cold day, I will treat you a churro and a champurrado from the cart in Woodland. And if you have a blog, send me the link and I'll read it...