A Personal Update, with Reflections on Farming
Where I am & what to expect this summer
The geographical locus of my transient lifestyle has moved a few hundred miles. A couple-three weeks ago, my house-sitting gig in northern California came to an end and I traveled down to Sonoma County, where I’ll be spending the summer helping out on an organic farm near Guerneville run by some friends of mine. Santa Rosa is the closest city that people may have heard of. The farm is about 2 ½ hours north of San Francisco. If you’re in the area, or will be traveling through the region this summer, drop me a line, and maybe we can meet up! Camping here for a few days is also a possibility, though you’ll definitely get lassoed into helping out in the field if you do.
This farm is a rather unique place. The property is one of sixty-four 40-acre parcels organized into a home-owners’ association. Not an HOA like the suburban ones that tell you what color you can paint your house and that will fine you for not cutting your lawn short enough. This one is for maintaining the roads (which are private), fire prevention and other such practical sundries. Residents of these parcels call the whole place “The Ranch.”
The history of this arrangement has its roots in the original Back-to-the-Land movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and there are still residents here from those times. So it’s a bit of an island preserving another era, before so much of Sonoma became dominated by bourgeois wineries. The old hippie vibe here is as palpable as the scent of incense in a head shop. I’ve been hearing some fascinating stories from back in the day. It really was a very different world then than the one we live in now, especially in terms of opportunity for young people. Forty acres went for $7000 back then!
This farm is a market farm, growing produce for area farmers’ markets and local customers on the Ranch. One of my best friends in the world, Mary, has lived here for a few years, but has been visiting for decades, as her cousin (now deceased) was one of the two married owners. His husband is still alive and runs the place now, though he’s in his late ‘70s. Another farmer, also in his late ‘70s, partners on the market growing. Mary invited me to come help this summer, since some younger people would be beneficial to keep things going. At almost 55, I am certainly not young, lol, but these things are relative. It’s not a paid position, but I don’t have to pay rent or utilities and I’ve been given a few beds to grow my own vegetables, as well as having access to the farm’s produce that isn’t bound for market. (I hope to support myself otherwise through odd jobs around the Ranch, a hopeful resumption of the online work I was doing last year, and this Substack—please consider subscribing!—and have also applied for SNAP benefits. Ironic, I know, for a farmer to be on food stamps, but that’s the world we live in.)
The Ranch is in the Coast Range, which is a series of steep ridges with Redwood, Madrone and Tan Oak woodland interspersed with meadows of grass and wildflowers. Historically, the area was inhabited by Pomo tribes, and in this corner, by the Kashaya People. Settler-colonialists heartlessly logged the region and then turned it over to ranching. In places that the forest has since regrown, it is often dense—too dense—due to fire suppression, including the suppression of traditional indigenous burning. Some of these forests are now being thinned to reduce fire danger. (The contentious subject of the relative roles of fuels vs. weather/climate in contemporary wildfires is a topic for another day.) I witnessed one of these projects underway nearby, where they were removing mostly Oaks in favor of Redwood and Madrone. I couldn’t help but to think about the fact that many indigenous fire-tending practices in California were reversed in their focus, being practiced to encourage Oaks because acorns were a valuable food source. But a) I don’t know the history of this specific area and b) even if that wasn’t traditional here, isn’t it worth considering?
Brodiaea, an indigenous First Food, can be found in clearings and forest edges. I pointed the plant out to a long-time landowner here who recognized it, but didn’t know its history or use. Most people thirty or forty or fifty years ago weren’t aware of such things, so I get it, but I feel like a resurgent back-to-the-land movement, if it were to happen today with a new generation of young people, would probably be seeking out such plants and connections from the get go. That’s one way that times have been changing for the better: an increased awareness of indigenous culture in general and First Foods in particular.
The ocean is less than five miles away as the crow flies, but is almost a half an hour drive due to the narrow, curvy roads. I rarely top 25 mph much of the way, though locals go faster. Sometimes the coast’s fog bank can be seen on the western horizon as a long grey smudge with a white top, resembling a distant, snow-capped mountain range. Other days it flows inland and blankets the area with chill air. Despite this close proximity to the sea, summer temps can get hot, hotter than used to be as is the case in so many other places these days.
Market farming isn’t my thing personally, though I’m happy to help out with it here since they’re friends and that’s what they’re dong. And I just enjoy working with plants and getting to know them better. I tried market farming for a couple years when I was urban farming in Portland in the mid 2000s, but I switched over to CSA (community-supported agriculture) because the income was more predictable and because I could develop personal relationships with customers who were open to accepting relaxed standards of presentation (like greens with holes—since they’re still healthy and delicious—and root veggies that were not scrubbed clean—because they stay fresh longer that way). Also, CSA gave me easy opportunities to break out of a purely monetary model and embrace barter and other non-capitalist arrangements. (For the whole story, see my book, Adventures in Urban Bike Farming, available as a digital download or an autographed paperback.)
My interest in agriculture—such as it is—is in re-localizing our food system. Why? Many reasons, among them to reduce energy usage related to transportation, to create regional autonomy freed from corporate control, and of course to provide diets that are healthier and tastier. Currently, we are collectively dependent on a massive, inefficient monster that pollutes the soil, water and air; that murders wildlife and destroys their habitat; that robs us of meaningful relationships with land and food production; and that delivers products that are unhealthy or even toxic. Agriculture as currently practiced (at large scale and for profit) is arguably the most environmentally destructive human activity on earth in terms of acreage affected. Even the oceans are tainted, as seen by the dead zones where rivers empty into the sea.
When I qualify my interest in agriculture as “such that it is,” I mean that I believe the endeavor was a wrong turn for our species. Check out my book, The Failures of Farming and the Necessity of Wildtending, if you want a detailed treatment of that topic. (Paid subscribers to this Substack receive a free digital download when they sign up.) The short version is that the Neolithic Revolution led directly to significant harms in three broad categories: individual health, cultural arrangements and the environment. That is, when we switched from gathering/hunting to farming, our personal health suffered (farmwork is harder on the body, and the diet was less varied), our societies became patriarchal and stratified (with innovations like slavery, money and private property) and we began dominating nature rather than living in reciprocity (through deforestation, hydrologic alteration, habitat decimation, the invention of “weeds” (and in our time, “invasives”), etc.).
Of course we rely on farming now as it is and can’t just drop it this season. But I would like to see a conscious transition away from it, from both its practices and its basis in dominance. This would both entail and help drive cultural changes away from the over-consumption and waste that marks our civilized society. I envision a simpler existence where people would be happier because life wouldn’t be so stressful and difficult. Young people especially are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo, and I will stoke those fires of discontent as I can, and support their efforts as they try to break it up. We are far overdue for a radical realignment in all aspects of society. I’m a Gen X’er and I’d love to see the boomers hand over the reins to the Millennials and Gen Z, skipping my cohort entirely because too many of my peers are still true-believers in the establishment and we’ll just get in the way. I also encourage said Millennials and Gen Z’ers to just take the reins from Gen X’ers as they see fit.
I call myself a “plant advocate” and so farmwork sometimes feels akin to that of a prison abolitionist who advocates for the well-being and release of people in jails. Of course, with a small operation like this one, the story is very different from the vast monocultures of the Midwest or California’s Central Valley, or Oregon’s Willamette Valley (to name three that I’m familiar with and have written about). If all agriculture existed at this scale, the severity of the issues would be greatly reduced in terms of environmental effects. As a first step, dismantling the Big Ag machine into small pieces like this is absolutely essential.
Other factors need to be integrated simultaneously, such as reintroducing wild foods into our diets and our systems, and—again, I emphasize—phasing out the conceit of “dominion over all living things” that we inherited from the Bronze Age. Some might categorize such activities under the heading of “rewilding” and for more on that I recommend “What is a Subsistence Economy and What Makes Them So Resilient,” the latest episode of Peter Michael Bauer’s “Rewilding Podcast” in which he interviews Dr. Helga Vierich.
Are these big goals? Yeah, for sure. But the problems we’ve made for ourselves by disconnecting our culture from nature are literally existential. If we don’t change, we will face catastrophe and perhaps extinction, which will bring down a lot of more-than-human creatures with us too, a fate they don’t deserve. I refuse to say that it is “unrealistic” to propose changes that are necessary for our own survival and that of our planetary kin. Indeed, what’s truly unrealistic is continuing to live as we currently are.
On a final note to my readers: I tend to write less in the summer because I spend most of my time outside doing outdoorsy things. But because I’ve gained so many new readers to this Substack, I will post at least one piece per week (and one paywalled piece per month for financial subscribers). To accomplish this, I will sometimes be pulling something “out of the vault” from my last decade-plus of writing. These will be fresh for new followers and a blast from the past for long-time readers.
Thanks so much for reading, and a reminder that I recently upped benefits for paid subscribers, such as digital downloads of my books. Details are here.
While you're there, you might consider visiting the Luther Burbank Garden in Santa Rosa, if you haven't already. I have only visited the garden because the museum is closed in winter months. The garden alone made the visit worthwhile, but the museum is probably even more interesting. This time of year there would probably be some great pics in the garden. There is also a lovely walk along the river and some nice parks.
Thanks for the update, I like knowing what you are up to. Your piece on how much pollution the U.S. military creates/is responsible for is still one of the most powerful articles I read this year.