FarmsReach Blog

Transitions: Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farm

Melanie Cheng — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 20:30:13 +0000

Tom Willey onsite at his organic T&D Willey Farms, Madera, CA.

The last in our series honoring recently-retired, influential leaders in the CA sustainable agriculture movement features Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms, long-time farmer, advocate and activist in the organic sector.

Farming for 40 years, Tom actually grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and moved to the San Joaquin Valley after graduating from college with a “wild hair to become a farmer.” Initially a conventional farmer, he noticed how non-ecological methods were degrading soil quality and productivity, and in the mid-1980’s, he and his wife Denesse transitioned their farm to organic.

Over the next several decades, they produced 35-40 different organic vegetable crops year-round, which were distributed far and wide to both wholesale and consumer buyers across the state.

Denesse and Tom Willey

In 2017, Tom announced that he and Denesse “will be hanging up our spurs,” transitioning their operations to The Food Commons Fresno (TFC). TFC now continues farming the land and delivers CSA boxes and wholesale.

Well-known for his practical, inspirational speaking engagements at agricultural events, Tom also hosts a monthly radio show about food and agriculture issues on the first Friday of each month at 5pm PT on Fresno’s KFCF 88.1 FM: Down on the Farm.

Since retirement, Tom is actively involved with soil quality research and farm mentorship – and having fun traveling with family.

Please enjoy our conversation with Tom covering:

Industry Reflections
Opportunities & Advice for Smaller-Scale/Newer Farms
Responsible Relationships Between Older & Younger Farmers
Soil Management, Climate Change & AgTech
The Food Commons
Closing Remarks [to the next generation]

Below are the meaty Highlights as well as a Full Transcript of our conversation.

HIGHLIGHTS (full transcript at the bottom):

FarmsReach (FR): Since The Food Commons took over your farm, what have you been up to?

I’m a member of the Eco-Farm Conference Planning Committee, so I’ve been involved in the second Pre-conference focused on soil health and regenerative agriculture, which has been fun. Recently, I was appointed to a management committee of CCOF’s Inspection Services. And, I still do my monthly radio show.

I just returned from Europe for about a month visiting our daughter who lives in France, and doodling around other parts of Spain and Portugal.

I’m mostly focusing on having fun. A bunch of us are graduating to the geezer class, so we’re checking out, or will be checking out as time goes on. It’s a big generational handoff.

INDUSTRY REFLECTIONS

FR: What are some of your reflections on the last few decades, as a renegade organic farmer who “made it,” and who has been a role model for other farmers? 

I would probably say that the organic movement and marketplace have grown to a larger scale than I could have imagined.

Immense growth is dangerous. We have to safeguard the integrity of what organic is. We built it over 3 or 4 decades, and where organics is right now is tenuous, probably exemplified by the Amazon-Whole Foods deal. The movement has had a lot of success, but we could wind up being victims of our own success if we’re not careful. “Organic” could devolve into a rather meaningless marketing shtick.

The National Organic Program (NOP) production standards are slowly moving in the direction of monoculture and input substitutions, which is definite back-peddling.

We need to figure out how high production agriculture can coexist with natural systems without destroying or degrading them to the point where they can’t support productive agriculture. It’s a big challenge.

Major food corporations and businesses have had a lot of influence on the USDA for many years, influencing the NOP to weaken the standards, or not enforce them as rigorously. The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), an advisory board to help evolve the standards over time, is much weaker than it ever has been.

This allows more product to come on the market, which allows big retailers like Walmart, Costco and Kroger to tell people they can have organic and have it cheap.

Farming with responsible soil care and management is not a cheap production system. You can’t support those efforts with really low prices. This issue is threatening the survival of high-integrity producers. Organic dairy standards are the most diluted now in comparison to vegetables and fruit [standards].

Interestingly, the [negative] publicity that the Washington Post article gave to the [organics] integrity issue actually didn’t have much of an effect on consumer buying decisions at all.

If things keep going the way they have been, “organic” dairy might not be that much better than conventional in the future.

FR: With the prevalent acreage in America not organic, and most large organic farms mono-cropping, what do you think they could feasibly do in the near-term to farm more ecologically?

There are several feasible things they could do, but they’d probably need greater incentives. In some cases, public policy is actually working against bio-rational farming systems. It creates the persistence of monoculture and the dependence on a handful of commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat; it doesn’t encourage agro-ecological thinking.

If we could move our public policy in the right direction and incentivize the right practices, like just starting with cover-cropping, then those would be steps in the right direction. But, we’ve got an industrial system that’s got a strangle-hold on agriculture and the industrial food that’s in most supermarkets.

Accomplishing good things costs time, money and effort, and that’s why cheap food isn’t good and good food isn’t cheap. That’s an effort that we have to keep working at. And, the marriage of Whole Foods and Amazon is probably going to take us back in the other direction, which is unfortunate and sad.

FR: Can you speak more about the merger of Amazon and Whole Foods, and their apparent cutting prices and moving away from local sourcing? Or other big-box stores?

Amazon gives people infinite choice, and that’s great, so the little guy will have just as much opportunity as the big guy to get in the catalog, But, I don’t think it’s going to sort out that way.

Could Whole Foods get Amazon to move more in the “artisanal” or “small producer” direction? I’m pretty skeptical.

If you look at what Whole Foods has been doing for the last few years actually, you’ll see they’ve been dumbing down their whole buying programs, and they offer a lot fewer items in their produce departments.

They’re trying to duke it out with Walmart and Costco, and the way they’re going about that, I don’t think is very congruent with what their mission statement is.

FR: An increasing number of articles talk about the “unpromising” opportunity of starting to farm or farming as a career (e.g., the aging farming population, steep learning curve and expensive farmland). What are we to do?

Success in agriculture is very difficult, just like success in any small business enterprise is risky. It’s not impossible, and we definitely need people to do it. Otherwise, we’re going to be in a pretty serious pickle in the very near future.

You can certainly have a product that’s in demand, but you have to find out who your constituency is. When we started in 1980, times weren’t good either. It was called the Reagan Recession at the time, which was a deep recession. There was a lot of dysfunction in the economy, but dysfunction also creates opportunity. So, when things aren’t being done very well, it means you have a lot of opportunity to do something well and gain attention for it. I think we’re at another point like that.

OPPORTUNITIES & ADVICE FOR SMALLER-SCALE/NEWER FARMS

FR: Now that large farms grow organically (albeit monocrops), what are the opportunities for smaller farms that don’t have economies of scale to compete – especially when most consumers don’t know the difference?

Exactly. The lack of economies of scale for small farms is going to be a disadvantage because the big marketing and producing entities are really focusing on low unit cost of production and being able to supply the marketplace with low-cost organic products. All of this threatens the integrity of what we’re doing on the land.

I think that smaller diversified farmers are going to have to dig deeper into local food systems and convince people in their communities to support the kind of farming they do. The kind of opportunities that we had in the wholesale business probably won’t continue for modest-size farms [in the future]. I think the organic wholesale market business is probably going to be taken over by the big boys.

FR: What would your advice be for smaller, newer farms?  Would you say you’re optimistic and have faith that things will work out?

I’m optimistic, but I’m not pollyannish. Hopefully people get some experience under their belts working alongside or under experienced farmers until they have a handle on the basics.

I highly recommend being someone else’s employee for a while until you absorb quite a bit of knowledge before you have your own operation. That’s what I did. Go find a farmer you admire and work for them.

I also think new farmers need to scatter out farther geographically and serve communities that are underserved – not bunch up in the same places like Sonoma County, Santa Cruz or Nevada City. You’ll find a much more receptive audience in places that don’t have a lot of organics available to them already.

FR: Of course the issue and opportunity is being able to afford to lease or buy the land in whichever area they choose.

There are MANY parts of the country where land is a lot more affordable than here in the Gucci zones of California. Even in our San Joaquin Valley, where very few small farmers want to come because it’s not very attractive, the land is unaffordable presently. It may be more affordable in a few years when the bubble might burst, but at the moment, I wouldn’t suggest anyone buy land here either.

Tom at the Esalen Garden in Big Sur. Credit: NY Times

RESPONSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN OLDER & YOUNGER FARMERS

FR: You’ve said that “the pioneering organic farmers of my generation, here on out, have a greater responsibility to mentor and pass along knowledge and experience to a new generation of cultivators.” What are you doing in this capacity? 

I think back on my career and recall the people who were supportive and helpful for me: How much more they knew than I did and how much it meant for them to share that knowledge. I don’t know if I’d ever have been successful without those kind of people.

Everyone needs a mentor. Everyone needs someone who knows more than they do. And you need physical and neighborhood networks.

[As a mentor,] you pretty much have to go to their farm. Go at least once and spend some time there, and then you can be helpful over the phone. You’ve got to set your eyes on the place and see what they’re up to in order to be effective.

I’ve been doing some mentoring up on Soil Born Farms, another farm up in the Gold Country, and with about 15 different ex-farmworker farmers down in my area for Coke Farm, who does their marketing.

FR: While aging farmers do want to find a successor, it can be such an emotional transition. Do you think the issue of trust is a significant obstacle to farmers retiring?

Taking over another person’s operation is a very delicate and tricky business. Even if that person is in your own family or your own child, it’s still very difficult to make those kinds of transitions.

In our case, all three of our children are doing other things. They were not interested in taking over the business, so we rolled the dice with The Food Commons, which is a very, very big idea. The Food Commons is very different than the traditional means of generational transfer of a farming operation.

FR: Do you see the nonprofit organizations and UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) providing additional support to farmers like they used to?

UCCE simply doesn’t have the resources anymore. But, there are other types of organizations now, like ALBA, CLBL, CAFF. There are a lot of people who are fooling around with it, but how effective it all is in aggregate, I’m not really sure.

I would like to see the UCCE offer more resources for small farmers, but it’s just not the reality at the present moment.

Plus, now we have the internet. You can do a lot of research and get a lot of info on your own. But, there are still a lot of people out here who really need hands-on support.

Tom is helping coordinate the 2019 Eco-Farm Pre-conference on Soil Management

SOIL MANAGEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE & AGTECH

FR: In so many different articles, you talk about the soil and the future of no-till…as well as all that needs to be done. Is this your “new” calling?

One of my passions is to push forward with that agenda. As an Eco-Farm Planning Committee member, I’m trying to add more into the program — like getting more carbon into soils, boosting photosynthetic activity, cover cropping, the elimination and minimization of tillage, crop rotations, animal influences – all of this big package.

One of the most difficult aspects, and yet the potentially most rewarding, is to eliminate tillage, or to minimize. I can’t say I was very successful in doing that in my farming practice, but I know that that’s where we need to go.

There’s kind of a renaissance going on about the value of soil. It’s pretty heartening. You could put a lot of the aberrant carbon from our atmosphere into soils, and then keep it there for longer periods of time. And, by doing so, make the soils more productive. All that is exciting and encouraging. It’s gaining momentum.

FR: Who is leading the charge in CA for the “soil movement?”

Jeff Mitchell, UC Soil Researcher

Jeff Mitchell, at University of California, focuses all of his work and efforts on this issue. He’s the “pied piper” in CA for efforts in the university setting, but there are others.

Jeff is also working on a longer-term research project that’s developing new “low soil disturbance techniques,” evaluating results over a 20-year span. They’ve had success with tomato, wheat, cotton, sorghum, garbanzo beans, broccoli and corn so far.

There has been a lot of innovative work at different scales, so – as he says – progress is going to happen.

We know where we want to go, but don’t know exactly how to get there yet. The goal is to take soil management and food quality to the next level, and that definitely involves minimizing or eliminating tillage, which organic farmers actually have a tendency to do more of because it’s about our only method of controlling weeds.

We’ve learned more recently that that kind of disturbance is pretty detrimental to the complexity of soil life that we depend on for cycling nutrients. So, we’re trying to figure out how to deal with that! It’s not an easy nut to crack.

Additional notes from Jeff Mitchell:

“Beneficial cover crops are definitely under-utilized and under-appreciated in CA. Our state is pretty behind as far as reducing disturbance of soil, due to existing systems of production that have been refined over the past 90 years. These systems rely heavily on intensive tillage for high production and yield.

“Obstacles for CA in particular [to adopt less soil-disruptive methods] include:

Psychological and financial risk to change systems.
Existing production systems dependent on CA’s historical abundant water supply and irrigation, which of course is now changing.
Inaccessibility of appropriate equipment in CA for CA conditions.

“Nonetheless, there are exciting challenges and opportunities for the future. Water and fertilizer scheduling and management, combined evaluations, and new monitoring instrumentation will all be important.”

FR: With so many burgeoning AgTech companies trying to help farmers be more productive, what do you think about the biotech sector addressing the same issues of optimizing soil health (among other things)?

There’s a lot of influence of technology right now, and some of that is quite useful, like Big Data. And the ability to read genomes, and the soil micro-biome.

There are always people trying to sell farmers things, sometimes “snake oil,” for a nickel, and you’ve got to be careful where you spend your nickel, because the nickels are very hard-earned.

Many people are looking ways to make profit from scientific discoveries. They might find one organism, bacteria or fungi that does something amazing in the soil under certain conditions, and they want put it in a bottle sell it to you.

I’m not arguing for being a luddite. I’m arguing to incorporate the best science and the art of cultivation. The best science is probably imparting more knowledge than it’s giving you products to purchase.

We have to make our farming practices less disruptive to the generous process that already happens in nature.

The sad thing is that since we don’t have enough support for public research like we did 50-100 years ago. Private money is simply invested capital that needs to make more money. So they’re always trying to monetize scientific discoveries as quickly as possible. That doesn’t always pull us in the right direction for society and agriculture as a whole. That’s a big strain in our culture and economy right now.

In a time when we’re being challenged by climate change, it’s going to take a lot of collaboration – a lot of cooperation – and less focus on making a fast buck.

The natural approach is the “quiet revolution.” The other one is the “noisy revolution.” Hopefully the quiet one is picking up steam as well – and going somewhere.

FR: Speaking of climate change, how do you think CA farms will have to adjust their operations aside from being more efficient with water?

That’s why the advances in biological soil management are so important. Soils that are biologically healthy allow the infiltration of rainfall versus having it run off. The best soil management practices build up the level of soil carbon, which is sponge-like material that absorbs and holds more water.

Another big factor in these changes in climate is to have a lot of diversity in the cropping system so that you can see which crops are responding positively or negatively to the changes, and you can adjust. It’s an ongoing experiment in diversity.

FR: Do you feel like the biology-based “quiet revolution” is reaching a point where a major breakthrough is on the horizon?

Yeah, I do. It’s very exciting work.

I think it must be a team effort between a lot of farmers and the research community because there are big barriers to overcome, especially in very diverse, complex vegetable farming systems. It’s a lot easier to do no-till on row crops, grains and pasture systems than the highly diverse vegetable production model, which is fairly common to organic agriculture in California over the last 30 years or so. It’s challenging.

FR: What do you wish you had done differently on your farm?

We were super tillage-dependent. We were using a lot of compost and crop rotation for our nutrient cycle system, and we weren’t really growing cover crops.

Highly diverse cover crops and minimizing or eliminating tillage are probably the two key features we have to more deeply incorporate into organic production systems, if we want to get better performance out of our soil. Growing cover crops is less difficult than eliminating tillage.

It’s not just single or two-species cover crops like vetch and oats, but the kind of super-stimulation [from a] complex polyculture of a dozen or fifteen different species at the same time.

FR: What’s the extra effort for a farmer to learn how to grow the perfect cover crop mix?

That in itself is a challenge. The right mix in one climate, environment or bio-region is going to be different than another. And, to get all those species to express themselves successfully in that mix is a trick. When we see people try to do it, there are a lot of challenges the first couple years.

There are a few people who are doing it successfully, like Gabe Brown [of Brown’s Ranch]. He’s been working on it close to 20 years, so he’s found a lot of success by trial-and-error and learning from mistakes. Everything is location-specific!

FR: Is there one thing that you wish newer organic farmers, who aren’t familiar with the soil knowledge you’re referring to, could start doing or implement now?

Probably using good quality compost and cover cropping. Those are fundamental practices that we still should get people to use.

The Food Commons

FR: How have you been since the transition of Food Commons? What’s the status these days?

They’ve been farming pretty intensively on a third to a half of our former farm’s acres, slowly building its customer base, delivering wholesale and CSA boxes in the local area here. They’ve also recently launched a Direct Public Offering (DPO) to allow the public to invest in their current operations and future plans.

Transitioning our farm to The Food Commons was definitely preferable to having our land turn into conventional almond orchards – that’s for sure. We are very encouraged and pleased, and proud to be associated with them. 

FR: Last question: You’re a role model and mentor for many farmers of all ages and types… If you could impart just one last word of wisdom, lesson from the school of hard knocks or promise for the future, what would you want to tell them?

Don’t let yourself be deflected from the course. Persist. Keep at it.

FR: That could be interpreted in any one of many ways….

My generation thought we were going to solve all the problems for you guys, and you guys were just going to live in paradise, but we didn’t quite get it done. We’ve left a few challenges for y’all young folks to grapple with, to probably find life more interesting than if we’d accomplished everything we thought we were going to.

We wouldn’t want you to be bored living in the Garden of Eden!

Stay the course. Don’t give up.

Thank you, Tom, for taking the time to chat with us!

We close with Tom’s words from his retirement announcement: “Our young organic movement has taken some baby-steps on the path to evolve agriculture towards a more harmonious relationship with natural systems operating this planet. Forging ahead with the agricultural experiment is our only option, we all own it, no black hats or white hats. Let’s get busy doing the job.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

FarmsReach (FR): Since The Food Commons took over your farm, what have you been up to? Have you been relaxing, reading, traveling?

I’m still staying busy and getting involved with all kinds of projects, campaigns and issues.

I’m a member of the Eco-Farm Conference Planning Committee, so that’s taken a significant amount of my time and effort. I’ve also been involved in planning the second Eco-Farm Pre-conference focused on soil health and regenerative agriculture, which has been fun. Recently, I was appointed to a management committee of CCOF’s Inspection Services. And, I still do my monthly radio show.

I just returned from Europe for about a month visiting our daughter who lives in France, and doodling around other parts of Spain and Portugal. Last summer we took off on an adventure to the Oregon Coast for a couple of weeks.

I’m mostly focusing on having fun. A bunch of us are graduating to the geezer class, so we’re checking out or will be checking out as time goes on. It’s a big generational handoff.

INDUSTRY REFLECTIONS

FR: In your blog post announcing your retirement, you talk about the sustainable agriculture movement and your vision about what needs to be done. What are some of your reflections on the last few decades, as a renegade organic farmer who “made it,” and who has been a role model for other farmers? 

I would probably say that the organic movement and marketplace have grown to a larger scale than I could have imagined. It has immense popularity now, and it’s gaining a lot of attention from the industrial and conventional food system. They want to be a part of it – or maybe own it!

Immense growth is dangerous. We have to safeguard the integrity of what organic is. We built it over 3 or 4 decades, and I think that where organics is right now is tenuous, probably exemplified by the Amazon-Whole Foods deal. The movement has had a lot of success, but we could wind up being victims of our own success if we’re not careful. “Organic” could devolve into a rather meaningless marketing shtick.

The National Organic Program (NOP) production standards are slowly moving in the direction of monoculture and input substitutions, which is definite back-peddling.

We have to develop agro-ecological systems that express a greater mimicry of natural systems (nature!) in order to head toward the possibility of sustainable agriculture. We need to figure out how high production agriculture can coexist with natural systems without destroying or degrading them to the point where they can’t support productive agriculture. It’s a big challenge.

It’s a long process, and its accomplishment is pretty far away from us still. If we don’t figure it out, we might be sunk. I don’t know how much time we have to pull it off really. It’s a very immediate need.

Major food corporations and businesses have had a lot of influence on the USDA for many years. So now that they’re into organics, they’re influencing the NOP to weaken or water down the standards, or not enforce them as rigorously so it will be easier to comply with “organic production” – simple input substitution methods. Big business has also weakened the influence of the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which is an advisory board to help evolve the standards over time. The NOSB’s influence is much weaker than it ever has been.

FR: You believe the challenge/opportunity is getting more involved in monitoring how that program evolves in time?

Right. Organics now is really big business, and there’s a lot of money to be made there because the public responded so positively to supporting it. So, that’s become both a positive and a negative.

Organic standards are both weakened and less rigorously enforced. This allows more product to come on the market, which allows big retailers like Walmart, Costco and Kroger to tell people they can have organic and have it cheap.

Interestingly, the publicity that the Washington Post article gave to the integrity issue caused the organic production community to expect that it would have a negative impact on the organic marketplace, but it actually didn’t have much of an effect on consumer buying decisions at all.

If things keep going the way they have been, “organic” dairy might not be that much better than conventional in the future.

FR: With the prevalent acreage in America not organic, and most large organic farms mono-cropping and monocultures, it seems like a reach to get them to mimic more natural systems. What do you think they could feasibly adopt in the near-term to mimic nature?

There are several feasible things they could adopt, but they’d probably need greater incentives to do so. In some cases, our public policy is actually working against the adoption of bio-rational farming systems. It creates the persistence of monoculture and the dependence on a handful of commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat; and it doesn’t encourage agro-ecological thinking.

Accomplishing good things costs time, money and effort, and that’s why cheap food isn’t good and good food isn’t cheap. That’s an effort that we have to keep working at. And, I don’t know if the marriage of Whole Foods and Amazon is going to take us in that direction. I think it’s probably going to take us back in the other direction, which is unfortunate and sad.

FR: Can you speak more about the merger of Amazon and Whole Foods, and their apparent cutting prices and moving away from their local sourcing? What about other big-box stores?

Could Whole Foods get Amazon to move more in the “artisanal” or “small producer” direction? I’m pretty skeptical, but NPR wrote a piece last summer where they interviewed a bunch of farmers, who all think it’s going to be great for the little guys. They interviewed me too, but I didn’t show up in the article because I had the opposite opinion – ha! I guess they didn’t want to air that opinion.

They’re trying to get behind the mattresses to duke it out with Walmart and Costco, and the way they’re going about that, I don’t think is very congruent with what their mission statement is and who they are. Unfortunately they’re a publicly owned stock corporation, so as Mr. Mackey so succinctly put it: The “greedy bastards” that own shares in his company are forcing him to do this.

FR: An increasing number of articles talk about the “unpromising” opportunity of starting to farm or farming as a career. They note the compounded issue of the aging farming population, the steep learning curve and expensive land, regardless of farm size. What are we to do?

Ha, well farming is a pretty necessary activity! We all have to eat, and we can’t really be hunter-gatherers anymore – especially with 7 billion+ people on the planet. Most people don’t know how to grow their own food, so farmers have to continue to grow large volumes of food effectively and of high quality.

Success in agriculture is very difficult, just like success in any small business enterprise is risky. It’s not impossible, and we definitely need people to do it and be successful. Otherwise, we’re going to be in a pretty serious pickle in the very near future.

OPPORTUNITIES & ADVICE FOR SMALLER-SCALE/NEWER FARMS

FR: Now that large farms grow organically (albeit monocrops), what are your thoughts on the opportunity for newer, younger farms that don’t have economies of scale to compete – especially when most consumers don’t know the difference?

I think that smaller diversified farmers are going to have to dig deeper into local food systems and have an intimate customer base to convince people in their communities to support the kind of farming they do. The kind of opportunities that we had in the wholesale business probably won’t continue for modest-size farms [in the future]. I think the organic wholesale market business is probably going to be taken over by the big boys.

FR: What would your advice be for smaller, newer farms?  Would you say you’re optimistic and have faith that things will work out?

I’m optimistic, but I’m not pollyannish. Hopefully people are enthusiastic, and not foolish, and get some experience under their belts working alongside or under experienced farmers until they have a handle on the basics. Only after that, then find a unique angle and go after it [on their own].

In one form or another, I also think new farmers need to scatter out farther geographically and serve communities that are underserved – not bunch up in the same places like Sonoma County, Santa Cruz or Nevada City. Get out there and serve the far-flung communities of the nation. You’ll find a much more receptive audience in places that don’t have a lot of organics available to them already.

FR: Of course the issue and opportunity is being able to afford to lease or buy the land in whichever area they choose.

RESPONSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN OLDER & YOUNGER FARMERS

FR: You’ve said that you believe that “the pioneering organic farmers of my generation, here on out, have a greater responsibility to mentor and pass along knowledge and experience to a new generation of cultivators.” What are you doing in this capacity? 

I think back on my career and recall the people who were supportive and helpful for me: How much more they knew than I did and how much it meant to me for them to share that knowledge. It’s huge. I don’t know if I’d ever have been successful without those kind of people, so I’d like to serve in that capacity now.

Everyone needs a mentor. Everyone needs someone who knows more than they do. And you need physical and neighborhood networks.

I’ve been doing some mentoring up on Soil Born Farms, which is a community farm up in the Sacramento area; and I’ve been doing some mentoring at another farm up in the Gold Country. I’ve also been working with about 15 different ex-farmworker farmers down in my area, mentoring them for Coke Farm who does their marketing. I’m trying to be active in that effort.

In reality, there’s not as much demand for mentoring as I was hoping or expecting. There are about a dozen ex-farmworker organic farmers in this area that market under the Coke Farm banner, and they put me in touch with them to mentor, but I don’t hear from them very often.

Everybody gets their head buried in the sand, and just plow ahead doing what they’re doing. How often you poke your head up to see what’s going on across the wider horizon varies from person to person. I’m not working as intensively as I would like with that group. But, they’re busy doing what they’re doing. I would help if they asked for it. I don’t want to impose on them banging on their door too often, so I figured I’d just make myself available.

We had a gathering of those farmers in March, and talked about fertility and composting, etc. The Cokes and I have done a fair amount of reaching out, but it hasn’t amounted to a huge amount of activity or draw on my time yet.

They’re middle-aged, so it’s not about younger farmers not asking for help; although I’ve found a similar lack of response among the younger set as well. Strange to not use help available to them.

FR: While aging farmers do want to find a successor, it can be such an emotional transition… Do you think the issue of trust is a significant obstacle to farmers actually “letting go” to a younger farmer and retiring?

Taking over another person’s operation is a very delicate and tricky business – like walking on eggshells. Even if that person is in your own family or your own child, it’s still very difficult to make those kinds of transitions.

Taking over someone else’s business is a different process than just working with another farmer to gain knowledge to start your own. Some of my farming friends have children who are taking over their operation. Some of them seem to be doing it successfully, and some of them not.

In our case, all three of our children are doing other things. They were not interested in taking over the business, so we rolled the dice with The Food Commons, which is a very, very big idea. We don’t know how far a concept like that can go or how much success it can find. We’ll see. The Food Commons is very different than the traditional means of generational transfer of a farming operation.

FR: Do you see the nonprofit organizations and UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) providing additional support to farmers like they used to? I know you know that UCCE has lost a lot of its funding over the years.

I would like to see the UCCE offer more resources for small farmers, but it’s just not the reality at the present moment.

There are a lot of disparate organizations out there doing different things and trying to make an impact. Plus, now we have the internet, which we didn’t have 20-30 years ago. You can do a lot of research and get a lot of info on your own, which was a lot more difficult to access a few decades ago.

But, there are still a lot of people out here who really need hands-on support.

SOIL MANAGEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE & AGTECH

FR: In so many different articles, you talk about the soil and the future of no-till…as well as all that needs to be done. Is this your “new” calling?

Another one of my passions is to push forward with that kind of agenda. As an Eco-Farm Planning Committee member, I’m trying to add more into the program so that we can keep learning how to manage soils better and get the highest potential by caring for the organic matter in soils. That’s something I’m still pretty involved in.

There are a whole lot of angles too, like getting more carbon into soils, boosting photosynthetic activity, cover cropping, the elimination and minimization of tillage, crop rotations, animal influences – all of this big package.

One of the biggest, most difficult aspects, and yet the potentially most rewarding, is to eliminate tillage, or to minimize. I can’t say I was very successful in doing that in my farming practice, but I know that that’s where we need to go. That’s where we should be headed. I’m still actively engaged in trying to learn about that.

There’s kind of a renaissance going on about the awareness of the value of soil. It’s even starting to catch on in urban populations, which is very exciting to see. There’s a group called Kiss the Ground, who do some pretty cool media stuff, and they’re urban people. You can see how well they grasp the value and importance of soil and the potential of caring for it.

It’s pretty heartening to see people waking up to the potential of soil. You could put a lot of the aberrant carbon from our atmosphere into soils, and then keep it there for longer periods of time. And, by doing so, make the soils more productive. All that is exciting, and the fact that consciousness of those opportunities is really spreading, particularly among urban people, is really encouraging. It’s gaining momentum.

There are certainly nodes of individual effort and small communities of farmers across the country who are doing really good work with this. So, trying to network those who are thinking about how they can improve their soil management practices will keep moving things forward – hopefully!

FR: Who is leading the charge in CA for the “soil movement?”

The person I collaborate with very closely is Jeff Mitchell at University of California, who pretty much focuses all of his work and efforts on this issue. He’s the “pied piper” in CA for efforts in the university setting, but there are others.

We actually formed a group of organic vegetable farmers in January 2018, where each of us are doing experiments on integrating no-till systems into our farms, and then we’ll share our experiences among the group. The project is supported by Jeff Mitchell and the Regenerative Agriculture Institute at Chico State.

People are undertaking the projects now so there’s no specific timeline to share the results yet. Jeff did apply for a pretty large grant from NRCS to support the work, and we just landed that three-year funding, so things will probably get more formalized. As it is now, the farmers are doing the experimentation on their farms on whatever timeline they can manage, and then we’ll get together periodically to share results and what we’ve learned.

There has been a lot of innovative work at different scales, so – as he says – progress is going to happen.

We know where we want to go, but don’t know exactly how to get there yet. So we’re putting our heads together – in the open-source tradition of the organic community.

The goal is to take soil management and food quality to the next level, and that definitely involves minimizing or eliminating tillage, which organic farmers actually have a tendency to do more of because it’s about our only method of controlling weeds.

Additional notes from Jeff Mitchell:

“Obstacles for CA in particular [to adopt less soil-disruptive methods] include:

Psychological and financial risk to change systems.
Existing production systems dependent on CA’s historical abundant water supply and irrigation, which of course is now changing.
Inaccessibility of appropriate equipment in CA for CA conditions.

FR: With so many burgeoning AgTech companies trying to help farmers be more productive, what are your opinions about that money-backed biotech sector working to address the same issues of optimizing soil health (among other things)?

There’s a lot of influence of technology right now, and some of that is quite useful, like Big Data. And the ability to read genomes now, and the soil micro-biome. We don’t know yet how to interpret what we’re reading, but we’re able to pull data out of there on the genetic profiles of microbial systems.

There are always people trying to sell farmers things, sometimes “snake oil,” for a nickel, and you’ve got to be careful where you spend your nickel, because the nickels are very hard-earned.

On the other hand, Jeff Mitchell is trying to teach you how to create an environment in your soil in which those organisms might flourish naturally. If you’re not managing your soil well and you have that organism in a bottle, it might not find a very hospitable environment when you dump it onto your land. It might not do the work that they claim it will.

There is a lot of legitimate work going on in academia, science and technology. I’m not arguing for being a luddite. I’m arguing to incorporate the best science and the art of cultivation. The best science is probably imparting more knowledge than it’s giving you products to purchase.

There’s a lot of good that can come out of technology. We just have to learn to use it wisely. Jeff and I have had many discussions about people focusing on the bells and whistles of technology, but when you get down to it, the biology has been around on the planet for several billion years, and it’s really nature’s foundational game. There’s more to be gained by stewardship rather than by manipulation. We have to make our farming practices less disruptive to the generous process that already happens in nature.

The sad thing is that since we don’t have enough support for public research like we did 50-100 years ago, so much of the research in the universities is now supported by profit-driven private industry because the public has gotten too tight-fisted with funding.

Private money is simply invested capital that needs to make more money. So they’re always trying to monetize scientific discoveries as quickly as possible. That doesn’t always pull us in the right direction for society and agriculture as a whole. That’s a big strain in our culture and economy right now.

In a time when we’re being challenged by climate change, we need more open-sourcing; we need more sharing of knowledge across the community. If we’re going to meet the kind of challenges that we’re up against right now, it’s going to take a lot of collaboration – a lot of cooperation – and less focus on making a fast buck.

The natural approach is the “quiet revolution.” The other one is the “noisy revolution.” Hopefully the quiet one is picking up steam as well – and going somewhere.

FR: Speaking of climate change, how do you think CA farms are going to have to adjust their operations aside from obviously being more efficient with water?

I think that’s why the advances in biological soil management are so important. Soils that are biologically healthy are receptive to rainfall. They allow the infiltration of rainfall versus having it run-off. The best soil management practices build up the level of soil carbon, which is sponge-like material that absorbs and holds more water. Soils that are managed that way are going to store significantly more water in the crop’s root zone. So, you can make more effective use of the same amount of water (or lesser amounts of water) in soils that are managed that way instead of being stripped of their biology and their carbon – either from over-tillage or the use of chemicals.

The natural substance that makes soil hold more water is organic matter, 50% of which is carbon. You don’t have to buy things from industry to make your soil hold more water. You just have to manage your soil – husband it better. It’s all about management; it’s not about buying expensive inputs from industry.

All that diversity creates a lot of biological stability, but it’s a challenge for using labor in an efficient manner, so your unit costs of production in highly diverse farms are a lot higher than monoculture, so that’s what makes it difficult to compete in the marketplace where prices are being forced downwards.

We’ve got all kinds of labor issues going on right now. The cost of labor is going up. The scarcity of labor is increasing. Immense number of challenges coming from all different angles. It’s scary.

FR: Do you feel like the biology-based “quiet revolution” is reaching a point where there is a major breakthrough on the horizon?

Yeah, I do. It’s very exciting work. It’s something that I wasn’t able to achieve very much in my own farming career. I got to the point where I understood what was missing in my system. I did a few experiments that were supported by Jeff Mitchell on minimum-till vegetable production, but none of them were very successful, so I came away from my farming career with a great hunger to see this thing get to another level.

If I had another 25 years of my farming career, or maybe 10, then I could’ve pulled it off or gone much farther down the road towards where I wanted to be. But, I still have access to the farm, so we’re going to do some no-till experimentation out there starting this fall.

FR: What do you wish you had done differently on your farm?

We were super tillage-dependent. We were using a lot of compost and crop rotation for our nutrient cycle system, and we weren’t really growing cover crops. I didn’t think that was an issue for a long time, but then I finally realized that it was an issue and how we could have done much better by growing cover crops.

Highly diverse cover crops and minimizing or eliminating tillage are probably the two key features that we have to more deeply incorporate into organic production systems if we want to get better performance out of our soil. Growing cover crops is less difficult than eliminating tillage. It’s not just single or two-species cover crops like vetch and oats, but the kind of super-stimulation that a soil’s microbial community seems to get from cover crops that are as complex as a polyculture of a dozen or fifteen different species at the same time.

FR: What’s the extra effort for a farmer to learn how to grow the perfect cover crop mix?

That in itself is a challenge. The right mix in one climate, environment or bio-region is going to be different than another. And, to get all those species to express themselves successfully in that mix is a trick. It’s not easy. When we see people who try to do it, there are a lot of challenges the first couple years.

There are a few people who are doing it successfully, like Gabe Brown [of Brown’s Ranch], one of the featured presenters at Eco-Farm last year. He’s been working on it close to 20 years, so he’s found a lot of success by trial-and-error and learning from mistakes. But, he’s in North Dakota, so the kinds of things that you do, the seasonality and the species that will grow in that environment are totally different than the semi-arid climate in California with irrigation water restrictions, etc. Everything is location-specific just like in real estate!

Jeff Mitchell has been working on this with a lot of conventional producers of larger scale, row crops and dairies, so I’ve been trying to pull him into the orbit of our organic grower community.

FR: Is there one thing that you wish newer organic farmers, who aren’t familiar with all of the soil knowledge you’re referring to, could start doing or actually implement now?

Probably using good quality compost and cover cropping. Even though we think it’s such a widespread practice in organics, now that there are so many organic sack fertilizers, I’m pretty astonished at coming across certified organic farmers who don’t use cover crops or compost, and say they’re organic farmers. Those are fundamental practices that we still should get people to use. I thought everybody appreciated the value of them, but apparently not. There’s a lot of work to do out there.

That could be a good first step for all mainstream organic farms, for sure.

The Food Commons

FR: How have you been since the transition of Food Commons? What’s the status with everything these days?

They’ve been farming pretty intensively on a third to a half of our former farm’s acres, slowly building its customer base, delivering wholesale and CSA boxes in the local area here. They’re making grand plans going forward. They’ve also recently launched a Direct Public Offering (DPO) to allow the public to invest in their current operations and future plans.

They have a lot of our former employees out there on the land. They’re all doing a very good job, but they’d love to be joined by a competent manager. They are indeed looking for someone new to replace David Silveira.

David was managing The Food Commons farm part-time along with his own farm he had up around Merced, but he ended up shutting down his farm. He no longer works for Food Commons, as Capay Organic Farm took him to manage their agriculture operations.

After a year, The Food Commons team is persisting, growing and planning for the future – producing market product on our former farm. Transitioning our farm to The Food Commons was definitely preferable to having our land turn into conventional almond orchards – that’s for sure. We are very encouraged and pleased, and proud to be associated with them. 

Don’t let yourself be deflected from the course. Persist. Keep at it.

FR: That could be interpreted in any one of many ways….

We wouldn’t want you to be bored living in the Garden of Eden!

Stay the course. Don’t give up.

Transitions: Ed Thompson, former CA State Director of American Farmland Trust

Melanie Cheng — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 23:30:13 +0000

AFT’s popular No Farms No Food campaign

The second in our series of well-known leaders in the California agriculture scene who recently retired is Edward Thompson, Jr., former CA State Director of American Farmland Trust (AFT), the nation’s leading agricultural land conservation organization. He served as CA Director since 2003.

Edward Thompson, Jr.

In 1980, Ed actually helped start AFT – as its first General Counsel, and since then, he has served the organization in various capacities, including National Policy Director and Senior Vice President.

During his tenure at AFT, he was a strategic participant in nearly every aspect of farmland preservation, from negotiating real estate transactions and local land use planning to designing state conservation easement programs and drafting federal agricultural legislation. He has also held legal positions with other diverse entities, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Association of Counties.

Read on for our info-packed conversation, including:

The Climate Change-Farmland-Smart Growth connection
CA’s new Agricultural Vision
New regulations & policy
Cap-and-trade funds for the future
Promising farmland mitigation
Pros & cons of easements
Time-sensitive threats
Land grabs
The role of smaller farms in conservation
Angel investors & new innovations
Farmland access for new farmers
Where our future food will be grown, and more…

Meaty content on this very important topic… Enjoy!

SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR INTERVIEW (full transcript at the bottom):

FarmsReach: Having been with AFT since its inception, including its Farmland Information Center, the federal Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program, the Farming on the Edge report, and the concept of agricultural conservation easements, what are your overarching reflections about AFT’s growth and progress since the early 80s?

Ed Thompson: I think it is fair to say that AFT launched a movement that has engaged thousands of state and local organizations, raised billions of dollars and saved millions of acres of farmland from development.

While we can be proud of this, the nation continues to lose far more farmland than is being protected. So, there is still a lot of work to be done, particularly in promoting effective land use regulations to complement the voluntary incentive-driven conservation approaches we pioneered.

You have been a big proponent of the links between climate change, smart development and farmland. For those who aren’t familiar, can you summarize in a nutshell the most important points that all people should be aware of?

The most important point is that, acre for acre, urban development generates 50 to 70 times as much greenhouse gas emissions as agriculture. A recent university study of agricultural practices concluded that saving farmland is by far the most important thing California agriculture can do for the climate. And, the key to doing this is to develop more efficiently, meaning: consume less land for each new resident, job and dollar of economic activity. AFT has calculated that cutting farmland conversion in half by 2030 and by 75 percent by 2050, saving 700,000 acres, would have the same result as taking two million cars off the road every year.

The 2013 Farmland Conservation Conference hosted by AFT and the Napa Farm Bureau was buzzing with energy and promise. What were some of the key strategic and/or programmatic outcomes from the conference that continue today?

For one, the [Jerry] Brown Administration created the Sustainable Agricultural Land Conservation Program, the first program in the nation to use cap-and-trade climate revenue to fund farmland conservation easements. The program has raised around $40 million in the first couple years, twice what the state of California had invested in farmland conservation over the previous two decades. This, in turn, has helped revitalize the agricultural land trusts around the state.

There have also been a number of important local actions, including the renewal of urban growth boundary initiatives in Sonoma and Ventura Counties. Finally, Local Agency Formation Commissions (LAFCOs) are beginning to take a more active role in farmland protection, as was contemplated when they were first established. Their trade association has teamed with AFT to on a soon-to-be-published white paper how LAFCOs can play an even more effective role.

Agricultural conservation easements are clearly an effective way to protect farmland. Where do you see future funding for easements coming from? And, what is your response to folks like The Nature Conservancy looking deeper into alternatives to easements for the future?

With the connection between climate and farmland conservation now well-established, cap-and-trade [programs] should continue to be a fairly significant source of easement funding. But, in my view, the most important potential source of funding is farmland mitigation, which requires developers to contribute to the protection of at least an acre of land for every one they remove from agriculture.

About 15 local jurisdictions now have farmland mitigation programs, and state agencies such as the High Speed Rail Authority have agreed to mitigate farmland losses caused by their projects. If this were to become universal throughout the state, the impact would be game-changing. Do the math: If we continue to develop 40,000 acres of farmland a year, and if the mitigation fee were $10,000 per acre (which is the going rate), that would generate $400 million for agricultural conservation easements every year. No other possible source could come close.

Conservation easements have become popular because they are a very flexible tool. But they do have drawbacks, [mainly] they are expensive. Another, in terms of their effectiveness, is that they are voluntary agreements. These limitations almost assure that, at least in the short term, they can only protect a patchwork of land, leaving surrounding land unprotected as well as subjecting the protected land itself to the potential impact of nearby development.

In areas where farmland is genuinely threatened by development, these drawbacks tend to make farmland protection progress difficult. It’s like the chicken and the egg: Landowners are reluctant to commit to easements where the fate of nearby land is up in the air.

Fortunately, there is a way to counteract this by accompanying them with land use policies that prevent non-farm development in areas that are planned for agriculture. This combination of “carrots and sticks” has been the formula for success in nearly all of the local jurisdictions that have succeeded in protecting farmland and securing a future for agriculture.

Truth be told, the kind of land use policies that are needed are difficult to pass because of a fear of the loss of property values. But, a well-funded easement acquisition program can at least partially compensate for the impact of regulations. And, if California had a truly robust source of easement funding – say, a universal farmland mitigation requirement – the amount of money that easements could put in landowners’ bank accounts and pump back into the agricultural economy should make the “carrots and sticks” approach to farmland protection much more popular and effective. That’s the way it has worked elsewhere in the country.

What are you most encouraged by when it comes to farmland conservation in California? In the U.S.?

Well, certainly, the Sustainable Agricultural Land Conservation Program in California. Farmland conservation funding had been languishing for years, but now there a respectable – through still insufficient – amount of money available. Another positive development is that the new version of California Agricultural Vision explicitly includes land conservation among its four strategies for sustaining the industry.

Also, the distinct value of agriculture that remains in urbanizing areas is being recognized. So, there is a growing recognition that we need to protect the land on which it depends, which not coincidentally is the land most threatened by development.

Moreover, I think that even mainstream agriculture is beginning to realize that the small-scale farmers near cities, whom many have dismissed as unimportant, are now generating increased understanding of and sympathy for all producers. The small-scale farmers are the ambassadors, if you will, from agriculture to urban America. And, in an increasingly urban society, agriculture needs all the understanding and sympathy it can get from the 98 percent of the population that doesn’t farm.

What do you feel are the most time-sensitive threats when it comes to preserving farmland in CA?

To me, the most significant threat is the pressure exerted by climate change and water supplies on the one hand, and on the other by population growth. California will soon have a population of 50 million and, if we keep developing farmland at the current rate – consuming an acre for every 10 new residents – there will be a million and a half fewer acres of land on which to produce food for that growing population. Plus, scientific forecasts show that water supply reductions could result in the fallowing of an additional million acres of California farmland.

What are you most discouraged by with regards to farmland in California or in the U.S. for the long-term?

I guess my biggest disappointment is that the farm community in California hasn’t been more actively willing to support farmland conservation. Institutions like Farm Bureau acknowledge that agriculture can’t survive without land. But, agriculture also needs other things – water, labor, reasonable regulations – that are a higher immediate priority, whereas the biggest impact of farmland loss is farther down the road.

We all know that accessing farmland is incredibly expensive, which can prevent the next generation of farmers from being profitable and/or successful. Can you share any thoughts or ideas about providing access to the future farmers in CA or the U.S.?

It’s really several issues. One is that fewer young people who were raised on farms want to take over the family business, which leaves a vacuum to be filled by someone else. And that’s where the high cost of land comes in. Unless we want the next generation of farmers to be large corporations with little real attachment to the land or the communities in which it is located, something needs to be done to help beginning farmers afford the land.

One thing that can be done is to retire the development rights on the land with conservation easements, thus bringing down the cost. Affordability of land is, thus, another reason we need a robust funding source for easements. But when land in California goes for $20,000 and up [per acre] just for agriculture, it is still a barrier to entry. There is no shortage of young people who want to farm, but most lack the capital to invest in land, or the credit-worthiness to borrow, even if it were more affordable.

We seem to be in a period of experimentation that, hopefully, will result in the emergence of models that successfully address the key challenges wherever and in whatever combination they occur.

Farmland regulations and policy can be effective, if they exist, and especially in urban and peri-urban planning stages. What is the status of any impactful regulations that may be implemented?

One of the most important new policies of the past decade has been SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008. It established a framework under which local governments were given incentives to reconsider their growth plans, and to embrace more compact, efficient forms of development that would reduce GHG emission to target levels and, not coincidentally, conserve farmland.

Considering climate change, the steep learning curve for rural farming, and the incredible amount of investment in urban, greenhouse and hydro/aquaponic farming, where do you think the majority of our food in the future – say 50 years from now – will be grown? Who will grow it?

I wish I knew, so I could invest my children’s inheritance! My guess is that agriculture will continue to be practiced in the same places that it is today, but probably on a smaller scale and in a more intensive way. Agriculture exists where it does primarily because of the resources – soil, water and climate – that make it more productive and profitable. Technology has made it possible to farm areas that are intrinsically less favorable, but it is generally more costly to do this and it has greater environmental impacts.

Hopefully, we will retain our best land with the most reliable water, so we won’t have to rely on more marginal land or on artificial environments that are incredibly expensive. I don’t think we can afford to repeat what we did to the Los Angeles Basin and the Valley of Heart’s Delight (now known as Silicon Valley), which were still two of the most productive areas of California when I was born.

What would your advice be for other farm-focused and/or food-focused organizations to get involved in the work of AFT, farmland conservation and/or farmland access?

Everyone is looking at the same issues from a slightly different perspective. So, my advice isn’t “drop whatever you’re doing and join AFT.” But I do think everyone needs to take another look at how land relates to their specific interests.

Generally speaking, the more land we have, the better it is for farmers, the environment and the food supply. The less land we have, the greater the problems associated with having to push the land harder to feed ourselves. I think there’s a limit to which agriculture can continue to substitute capital and technology for land and labor, which is what we’ve been doing for at least a century. The negative feedback loops are just becoming too powerful, leading to more and more conflict over the very issues that today pit farmers against environmentalists, nutritionists and others who bear the costs.

If you had a magic wand in the real world we live in today, what would you make happen in CA with regards to farmland?

I think the single most impactful thing we could do is require universal mitigation of farmland conversion, with fees based on the productivity of the land and the efficiency with which it is developed. This would encourage more compact urban patterns (saving farmland that would otherwise be developed) and raise a truly significant amount of money – $3 to $4 billion over the next decade – to invest in permanent land conservation and, possibly, other things agriculture needs to prosper. It will not take a magic wand, just steadfast political will.

Now that you are a free man, how will you spend the next year, 5 years, 10 years?

Who knows what life has in store? Thus far, I have been blessed with good health, a wonderful family and a deep appreciation of nature. Hopefully, I will continue to enjoy them for a long time.

Thank you, Ed, for your insightful and educational responses! Here’s to prime farmland being dedicated to agriculture for many more decades to come.

Stay tuned for our next post in the series: Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms. If you missed the last post in the series, we interviewed Shermain Hardesty, former Director of the UC Small Farm Program and advisor/consultant for CA farmers for over 30 years.

If you know of other influential folks in the sustainable agriculture sector who have transitioned recently to a life of more freedom, and who would like to share their stories, let us know!

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH ED THOMPSON:

FarmsReach: Having been with American Farmland Trust (AFT) since its inception, including its Farmland Information Center, the federal Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program, the Farming on the Edge report, and the concept of agricultural conservation easements (wow, that’s a lot!), what are your overarching reflections about AFT’s growth and progress since the early 80s?

Can you share more about AFT’s strategic plans for the future, especially in light of the (depressing) state of the nation and diminishing environmental protections?

I would defer to my successor here in California and to AFT’s national leadership. But in my opinion, I hope they will continue to focus on game-changing policy innovations such as establishing a meaningful, statewide goal for reducing farmland conversion and requiring universal mitigation for farmland losses exceeding that goal.

The most important point is that, acre for acre, urban development generates 50 to 70 times as much greenhouse gas emissions as agriculture. A recent university study of agricultural practices concluded that saving farmland is by far the most important thing California agriculture can do for the climate. And the key to doing this is to develop more efficiently, meaning: consume less land for each new resident, job and dollar of economic activity. AFT has calculated that cutting farmland conversion in half by 2030 and by 75 percent by 2050, saving 700,000 acres, would have the same result as taking two million cars off the road every year.

Well, it’s hard to trace specific accomplishments to any conference. But a number of important things have happened since then. For one, the [Jerry] Brown Administration created the Sustainable Agricultural Land Conservation Program, the first program in the nation to use cap-and-trade climate revenue to fund farmland conservation easements. The program has raised around $40 million in the first couple years, twice what the state of California had invested in farmland conservation over the previous two decades. This, in turn, has helped revitalize the agricultural land trusts around the state.

Agricultural conservation easements are clearly an effective way to protect farmland; however they depend on land trusts somehow filling their coffers to fund the easements. Where do you see future funding for easements coming from? And, what is your response to folks like The Nature Conservancy looking deeper into alternatives to easements for the future?

About 15 local jurisdictions in California now have farmland mitigation programs, and state agencies such as the High Speed Rail Authority have agreed to mitigate farmland losses caused by their projects. But, if this practice were to become universal throughout the state, the impact would be game-changing. Do the math: If we continue to develop 40,000 acres of farmland a year, and if the mitigation fee were $10,000 per acre (which is the going rate), that would generate $400 million for agricultural conservation easements every year. No other possible source could realistically come close.

Though this seems like it would be a heavy burden for developers and prospective homeowners, the fee would amount to only $1,000 per dwelling in subdivisions of 10 units per acre. That’s only 4/10 of one percent of the average cost of the average home in the Central Valley and could be further reduced by developing at even higher densities, as most affordable housing is. Of course, this assumes developers would pass along the entire cost to homeowners to maintain their profit margins. But, even if they had to eat the entire cost themselves, I think they would have a hard time proving – not just claiming – that it would make development uneconomic.

Conservation easements have become popular because they are a very flexible tool. But they do have drawbacks, foremost among which is that they are expensive. Another, in terms of their effectiveness, is that they are voluntary agreements. These limitations almost assure that, at least in the short term, they can only protect a patchwork of land, leaving surrounding land unprotected as well as subjecting the protected land itself to the potential impact of nearby development.

In remote areas with little development pressure, neither the cost of easements nor the risk of conflicting land uses risk pose much of a problem. But in areas where farmland is genuinely threatened by development, these drawbacks tend to make farmland protection progress difficult. It’s like the chicken and the egg: Landowners are reluctant to commit to easements where the fate of nearby land is up in the air. But, the surrounding land is up for grabs because few landowners are willing to make the commitment required by easements. This explains why we don’t have more successful easement programs in California.

Fortunately, there is a way to counteract the drawbacks of easements, which is to accompany them with land use policies that effectively prevent non-farm development in areas that are planned for agriculture. This combination of “carrots and sticks” has been the formula for success in nearly all of the local jurisdictions that have truly succeeded in protecting farmland and securing a future for agriculture. That includes six California counties that together account for one-firth of the state’s annual agricultural production value: Marin, Monterey, Napa, Sonoma, Ventura and Yolo.

Truth be told, the kind of land use policies that are needed are difficult to pass largely because of the opposition of farmers and other landowners who fear the loss of property values. But let’s recognize that a well-funded easement acquisition program can at least partially compensate for the impact of regulations. And, if California had a truly robust source of easement funding – say, a universal farmland mitigation requirement – the amount of money that easements could put in landowners’ bank accounts and pump back into the agricultural economy should make the “carrots and sticks” approach to farmland protection much more popular and effective. That’s the way it has worked elsewhere in the country.

What are you most encouraged by when it comes to farmland conservation in California? In the U.S.?

Well, certainly, the Sustainable Agricultural Land Conservation Program is a breath of fresh air here in California. Farmland conservation funding had been languishing for years, but now there a respectable – through still insufficient – amount of money available. Another positive development is that the new version of California Agricultural Vision explicitly includes land conservation among its four strategies for sustaining the industry. The others relate to water, labor and regulations, so it’s encouraging that land ranks up there as a concern.

From a national perspective, I guess the most encouraging thing would be the growing local food movement. Ever since I got involved with farmland, it has been clear that there are two agricultures in America: There is the large-scale, commodity-driven agriculture that exists in the plains states and (to some extent) in places like our own Central Valley. And then there is the smaller scale agriculture that is practiced mostly in mixed-terrain areas like New England, the Great Lakes states and on parts of the California coast.

For years, the larger commercial agriculture has received most of the attention and money from the federal Farm Bill, while the smaller scale producers have been largely ignored or even disparaged as “not real agriculture.” But, now the local food movement is changing that.

Finally, the distinct value of agriculture that remains in urbanizing areas is being recognized. So, there is also a growing recognition that we need to protect the land on which it depends, which not coincidentally is the land most threatened by development.

The concept of “land grabbing” is thrown around a lot lately. How do you define it in the U.S., and to what extent is it happening in CA and the U.S?

The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) article should shed some light on land grabbing. This sounds to me like the latest variation on the big farm-small farm debate in which small farm advocates fear that larger operations, particularly if absentee owned, will undermine rural communities and harm the environment.

Farms in the U.S. have been getting bigger and fewer in number for at least a half century. It seems mostly to be a matter of larger operations being able to take better advantage of economies of scale, particularly in the use of technology. Not sure anything can be done about that in a capitalist society. Having spent time in the Midwest, I can attest firsthand to the hollowing out of rural communities as farms have consolidated. But, research I did 30 years ago (Small is Bountiful) suggested that bigger farms actually tend to employ more environmentally sound practices, most likely because they can afford to. But, that was before the organic/local movement caught fire.

What do you feel are the most time-sensitive threats when it comes to preserving farmland in CA? Development? Solar farms? The SF-LA train? Land grabbing? Drought? Other?

To me, the most significant threat is the pressure exerted by climate change and water supplies on the one hand, and on the other by population growth. California will soon have a population of 50 million and, if we keep developing farmland at the current rate – consuming an acre for every 10 new residents – there will be a million and a half fewer acres of land on which to produce food for that growing population. Plus, I have seen scientific forecasts that water supply reductions due to climate change could result in the fallowing of as much an additional million acres of California farmland.

Considering that we now have only about nine million acres of irrigated land, the loss of 2.5 million – 28% – would be devastating in a state that produces so much of the country’s fruits, nuts and vegetables. That’s why we need to preserve the very best farmland—no matter what kind of development threatens it – and assure that it has adequate water.

What are you most discouraged by with regards to farmland in California, in the U.S.? (maybe duplicative with above, or maybe some long-term thoughts?).

Then, too, there is a certain ambivalence among farmers about the land. They profess a deep love of the land, but also tend to believe that, when the time comes, for whatever reason, they should be able to sell it for development. And this view is reinforced by the uncertainty over water, etc. I get that, but the truth is that few farmers will actually have the chance to sell for development. Think about it. If, indeed, California loses another 1.5 million acres of farmland by mid-century, that’s less than one in five acres of the state’s irrigated cropland and only 3 percent of all agricultural land, including grazing land. (To be clear, the demise of 20 percent of the state’s irrigated land would be a huge blow to agriculture, even if few would be able to cash in on it.)

So, why do farm organizations defend the right of a small percentage of farmers to cash in on development – or sit idly by as it happens – when it will do nothing for the majority of farmers and will clearly hurt agriculture itself? One reason seems to be that those farmers who are in a position to take advantage of development are more active in local land use issues and have a disproportionate influence on the policy positions of farm organizations.

All that said, there are places in this country, notably the mid-Atlantic states, where the active support of Farm Bureaus and other agricultural organizations for farmland conservation has resulted in very robust programs that have generated billions of dollars for conservation easements. This has protected more than a million acres of farmland and has been invested in the farm economy to help revitalize the industry through expansion, debt retirement, innovation, generational succession and environmental improvement. Just as importantly, its commitment to conservation seems to have generated tremendous goodwill for agriculture among the general public. After all, the public paid the bill for the easements and is now invested in agriculture in a way that seems to have translated into a better understanding of its needs and sympathy for its policy positions.

This is an area where, despite its prominence, California agriculture has failed to connect the dots between its support – or lack thereof – for conservation and public support for agriculture itself. Maybe, if California farm organizations were seen to actively promote farmland conservation, they would find that the overwhelmingly urban public would be more willing to help agriculture meet its other needs. This is exactly what has happened in California localities where the farm community has supported robust farmland conservation programs.

Tough issue. And it’s really several issues. One is that fewer young people who were raised on farms want to take over the family business. There’s just too much action elsewhere and, let’s face it, farming is a tedious, dirty business. As fewer farm kids want to take over, it leaves a vacuum to be filled by someone else. And that’s where the high cost of land comes in. Unless we want the next generation of farmers to be large corporations with little real attachment to the land or the communities in which it is located, something needs to be done to help beginning farmers afford the land.

One thing that can be done is to retire the development rights on the land with conservation easements, thus bringing down the cost. Affordability of land is, thus, another reason we need a robust funding source for easements. But when land in California goes for $20,000 and up [per acre] just for agriculture, it is still a barrier to entry. Based on what I’ve seen, there is no shortage of young people who want to farm, many of them attracted by the increasing interest in small farms and direct local markets. But, most lack the capital to invest in land, or the credit-worthiness to borrow, even if it were more affordable. Quite a conundrum.

I think we need “angel investors”: individuals, philanthropies or government programs that would put up funds – or their own land – to help beginning farmers afford land, whether by purchase, lease or some other long-term arrangement. Already, there is a lot of farmland being bought up by well-off city people for second homes and investment. And many of those owners really don’t want to, let alone know how to, farm. So, it seems like a natural to come up with arrangements under which young farmers could live on and farm the land, while the owners would be relieved of the burden of managing it and taking care of it. Groups like CA FarmLink are already working on things like this. But, with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of farm property about to change hands within a generation, this kind of activity really has to be taken to scale.

We seem to be in a period of experimentation that, hopefully, will result in the emergence of models that successfully address the key challenges wherever and in whatever combination they occur.

What do you think these initiatives need to be more impactful and successful?

As I implied earlier, money – and a lot of it – is the key to success. All the rest is “plumbing.”

Of course, farmland regulations and policy can be effective, if they exist, and especially in urban and peri-urban planning stages. What is the status of any impactful new regulations that may be implemented?

One of the most important new policies of the past decade has been SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008. It recognized the link between patterns of urban development, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. And it established a framework under which local governments were given incentives to reconsider their growth plans, and to embrace more compact, efficient forms of development that would reduce GHG emission to target levels and, not coincidentally, conserve farmland. This idea was a real game-changer and could do a lot of good for the environment, the economy and agriculture.

For instance, in the San Joaquin Valley, the so-called Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) developed by each county will, if implemented, collectively reduce GHG ten percent while saving tens of thousands of acres of farmland. But, the key words are “if implemented,” that is, if the targets are reflected in actual development patterns. And, that is far from certain, given that the region’s counties have pretty much ignored similar goals to which they agreed in the San Joaquin Blueprint a few years earlier. SB 375 doesn’t seem to have the kind of teeth required to get them to honor their commitments. So, my hope is that the legislature will amend the law to strengthen it by creating real incentives and disincentives for compliance and the failure to make progress.

What are your thoughts on market-based vs policy efforts re: farmland in general?

As I suggested earlier, they are both more effective when combined in “hybrid” systems in which the strengths of one counteract the weaknesses of the other and vice versa. Market based approaches have the advantage of being voluntary, compensatory and permanent. But, they are also expensive, slow and piecemeal. Regulatory approaches counteract these weaknesses because they are quick, cheap and comprehensive. But their drawbacks (they are compulsory, non-compensatory and temporary) are the mirror image of the strengths of market systems. When you put them together, you take advantage of their respective strengths to offset their weaknesses.

I wish I knew, so I could invest my children’s inheritance! My guess is that agriculture will continue to be practiced in the same places that it is today, but probably on a smaller scale and in a more intensive way. Agriculture exists where it does primarily because of the resources – soil, water and climate – that make it more productive and profitable. Technology has made it possible to farm areas that are intrinsically less favorable, for example, the foothills rather than valley floors. But it is generally more costly to do this and it has greater environmental impacts.

What would your advice be for other farm-focused and/or food-focused organizations to get involved in the work of AFT, farmland conservation and/or farmland access?

If you had a magic wand in the real world we live in today, what would you make happen in CA with regards to farmland?

Now that you are a free man, how will you spend the next year, 5 years, 10 years?

Who knows what life has in store? Thus far, I have been blessed with good health, a wonderful family and a deep appreciation of nature. Hopefully, I will continue to enjoy them for a long time.

Transitions: Shermain Hardesty, former Director of UC Small Farm Program

Melanie Cheng — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 00:00:36 +0000

Shermain Hardesty at a pitahaya farm in San Diego.

This past year we’ve seen several respected leaders in the California sustainable farming and agriculture movement retire after many years of tireless hard work.

To honor them (and as an excuse to catch up!), we set up casual conversations with a few of them to hear their reflections on the past few decades and pontifications of the future of sustainable farming in California.

Read on for highlights and the full transcript of our chat with Shermain Hardesty, Director of the UC Small Farm Program. Last July, she retired after serving California farmers for more than 30 years, including 13 years as a Cooperative Extension Specialist.

Early in her career as an economist, she worked for the CA Rice Growers Cooperative (very different than small farms!) and consulted 10+ years for produce commissions and farms that specialized in specific types of produce.

She started tuning into small farmers around 1995, and in 2002 she became the Director of the UC Center for Cooperatives. In 2007, she became Director of the UC Small Farm Program.

Overview:

Changing needs of farmers/ranchers the past 30 years
Beginning farmers’ success: metrics, resources, diversification, collaborative models
Small farmers & food justice efforts, or not?
Role of small farmers in the future food system
Small farms & AgTech
Changes in UC Cooperative Extension over the years

Some highlights from our conversation (full transcript at the bottom):

FarmsReach: Having served farmers and ranchers for more than 30 years, how would you say the needs of the farming community have changed or stayed the same over the years?

Shermain: I’d have to say that markets are much more competitive overall than they used to be, since there’s so much more international involvement. There are so many diverse sources for each product now. On the farm, crop mixes have definitely changed in California. Things like our water resources have gotten more and more erratic, and Mother Nature’s weather patterns are more uncertain.

In production, regulations have gotten much more onerous and expensive for [smaller] farmers over the past 30 years. The per-unit cost of compliance for smaller-scale farmers is a lot higher.

The rules are well-intentioned for food safety, but I’m not convinced they are risk-based. There’s very little recognition that the way that smaller scale farmers operate and sell their product create less exposure for outbreaks. In other words, when people buy salad mix at the farmers market, they probably will eat it in the next couple of days; whereas when people buy containers of salad mix at the grocery story with their “use by” date up to 17 days later, and when the containers have been held at who-knows-what temperature at the grocery store, there are these other risks that need to be recognized. This is the ongoing fight.

It’s well-known how difficult it can be for beginning farmers to break even and sustain their farm business. What are some of the key metrics – beyond profitability – that you think all new farmers should track most closely?

Farmers have to recognize the number of hours they’re spending on different types of tasks. They also need to understand how their marketing costs (both costs and time) are different for different market channels. For example, when they’re involved with selling at farmers markets, they need to recognize hours spent preparing their crops, driving, being at the market all day, etc. They’re also usually not paying themselves a salary.

I’ve actually heard from some well-established farmers that it’s not really how efficient you are with your production practices; it’s how well you market them. How well can you tell the story? And, how well can you develop relationships with your customers. And, therefore charge as much as you can.

How essential do you think it is for small farms to diversify their offerings, whether with value-added processing, agritourism, or other revenue streams?

I think they first have to learn how to produce well, and then they can start to consider adding on other diversification products. It’s nice to have year-round cash flow, and with processed products they’re able to be in the marketplace year-round.

But, diversification isn’t appropriate or necessary for all farmers. Some don’t have the personality or whatever it takes to do it. Even a farmer who grows and sells only raw product can make it – as long as they can tell their story well enough, and if they can get a high enough price.

Which services or resources offered by UCCE do you feel more farmers and ranchers should use more?

They should take advantage of post-harvest training and ask for help from their local farm advisors about how to store and handle their products. They’d learn how to get longer-shelf-life for their products, longer selling life, and fewer rejects, especially when they’re selling wholesale. Even smaller farmers market farmers can learn how to do some pre-cooling of heir product which will make it last longer.

Advisors can give advice on how to get the best bang for their buck. Small farmers: ask your local farm advisors for more information!

Shermain with Michael Yang, UCCE Fresno County Hmong Agricultural Assistant

SAGE just published a reference on Collaborative Farming models. How do you think “organized cooperation” may become more of a reality in the near-term? How do you think farmers could cooperate more for their mutual benefit?

When you’ve got some shared farmland space, that’s a good way to get started. Equipment sharing is usually done pretty informally, but there are ways that it can be more organized.

I think collaborative models are more likely to succeed in urban areas. You also have to consider the personalities of the people involved. I remember in Salinas Valley, there was a farming coop that was trying to be organized for the immigrant farm workers, and oh…the personality conflicts! It was a no go. It’s really like a marriage of a business relationship. Easier said than done.

During the CA Farmer Educator Summit in 2016, you made a comment about the need to balance the desire to create new innovative programs for farmers with farmers’ actual, basic priorities of just making a profit. Can you speak more about that?

There’s a lot of talk about how smaller scale, local farmers should get more involved in food access challenges, and that’s where I have some concerns because they aren’t in a position to give away much food. I think food access is a very important issue, but it shouldn’t be placed on the backs of small farmers because they don’t have the financial ability to do that.

The controversial Washington Post article from last September says that “Having a food system that has multiple scales is better than having a preponderance of one scale (either large or small).” What role do you think smaller farms can play to best serve/foster a reformed food system in the years to come?

Basically, we’ve got lots of problems with our industrialized food system, and the two main factors that I have been focusing on are: 1) poor eating habits and 2) overuse of chemicals and additives in the field and in our processed foods. Overall, we have a food system rife with what economists call externalities that we’re not paying for, and yet we ARE really paying for them in the long-term with our poor health and degradation of our environment.

The smaller farmers typically are the ones with most direct access to the consumer so they could be the most influential in getting people to consider the quality [and taste] of the food or the freshness, and how consumers can learn to basically eat better.

It’s not the overall cure for our system, but hopefully it’s a meaningful piece. Even the plant breeders at UC are recognizing more now: “Oh yes, we need to look at flavor!”

And, it’s not only the plant breeders who need to focus on flavor. It’s also consumer demand, and what grocery stores demand. Back in 2014 or so, we made a presentation at the Produce Marketing Association meeting, and the whole theme for the conference was “Bring back the flavor!”

It’s such a complicated thing to get people who are raised on junk food to care about flavor and their health, let alone the environment.

Photo: Paul Reid/Washington Post

In the same article above, the author writes: “In general…sustainability…encompasses all sizes and all crops, with local and organic playing an important, but necessarily small, role.” What are your thoughts about that?

A lot of big agribusinesses in California are growing organic. We’ve got Horizon milk and a lot of major cereal companies have their organic brands. I don’t agree that organics will necessarily be a small role. For some big farmers, it’s just an evolutionary thing where they realize that if they just went two steps further, they’d be organic anyway, so might as well do it and be able to charge more. They then have the freedom to sell in the conventional or organic market.

It makes me wonder what the long-term role of the smaller farms is aside from consumer awareness as you mention above. I secretly think small farms are going to HAVE to work together to get economies of scale to make it in the short-term.

There’s something around economies of scale that has to happen. Otherwise, it’ll have to be very very high-end small niche operations. Beyond that small niche market, yes, cooperation will need to be a piece.

Yo Cal was cooperative in the Capay Valley founded around 1980. The farmers that you read about now so often, including Full Belly, got together and said “We are all driving to SF every day, this is crazy. Everyone one of us is getting up at horrible hours.” So, they organized a coop to do the deliveries, and it functioned for 10 years. They finally got big enough that they decided they didn’t need the coop anymore… They kind of outgrew themselves.

Other new farmers may need something like that now. Or, maybe that’s what Capay Valley Farm Shop could help with in some regards.

There’s a huge boom in AgTech investment and development – from farm management systems to robotics and sensors. What are your thoughts about technology development for smaller farmers, and their potential impact on small farm viability/sustainability?

I don’t think it’s really possible or affordable for smaller farms to be involved in most of that high tech equipment yet. I do know there are some mechanical harvesters being used for blueberries. It gives those farmers a huge advantage as far as costs and labor, but they have to have enough resources to acquire those kinds of harvesters in the first place. You can’t expect a small farmer to afford that kind of technology. There are barriers to entry there.

Photo: Anthill Magazine

For those who don’t know the details, can you share how funding for UC Cooperative Extension has changed over the past 30 years, and how UCCE has adjusted to these changes?

In 2002, the UCCE budget included about $63 million provided by state funds. Then, in the budget cuts shortly after that, it was slashed $12 million to $51 million. Since 2012, state support for UCCE has been cut by $30 million. So, basically in half in the last 15 years.

There have definitely been cuts in support staff. In 1990, there were 528 academics involved in UCCE. In 2007, that number dropped to 342. Then, in 2017, it dropped to 278. That’s a lot of professional personnel that has been lost.

Research stations are also now self-supporting. Now, anyone who wants to use the facilities for research and experiments has to pay more to use it. Thus, more grant money must be raised.

It was getting pretty hard the past several years, so I can imagine it’s not easy for those still there. When farm advisors get replaced, they’re usually replaced with broader assignments. For example, when our Fresno County advisor retired, and then our Tulare County advisor retired, one position was created for both, big regions. They’ve got to get real about what’s possible.. The mileage and number of farmer clientele in those major farm areas… A single advisor can’t possibly cover that entire territory very easily.

How do see UCCE evolving over the next 5 or 10 years?

I wish I could answer that question. It seems like a very challenging situation unless the state finally recognizes that Cooperative Extension is a very valuable component of agriculture, which is a very valuable component of our overall economy in California. There aren’t any solutions yet.

If you had a magic wand in the real world we live in today (I know a bit of a paradox), what would you make happen in CA with regards to small farmers?

It wouldn’t be directive. It’d have to come from the farmers themselves. Perhaps them deciding to create a coop, or whatever it is to achieve their economies of scale. Determine which crop they’re the best at growing so we don’t have 80 farms all growing the same crops.

We also tried to get coops to be able to sell at farmers markets. To be able to provide one stall with a lot of diversity without every single farmer having to grow a whole variety on their own and spend the resources and time to work the stall. Dan Best, the manager of the Sacramento farmers markets and lawyer, led the effort in 2010 as well as in prior years, but it sadly didn’t work.

It would also be great if we had a lot more available farmland for smaller farmers. I admire CA FarmLink and what they’re doing, and it seems like we need a lot more of that. We tried to connect retiring farmers with emerging farmers, but these retiring farmers don’t seem to want to connect, partially because of the price they could get as well as the effort transitioning to a new farm operator.

There are a lot of mainstream, conventional farmers around Davis, and we talk about getting them connected with the younger farmers, who are more organically-oriented. The sentiments aren’t quite aligned properly. They have different philosophies, so then they sell to some big investment company who plants trees. That’s what’s been happening around here. It’s not covered a lot in the news because it can get personal really fast.

I don’t know what the future holds.

Shermain, Margaret Collins and Kristin Reynolds at the Women in Agriculture workshop at the 2008 California Small Farm Conference. Photo: Brenda Dawson

Thank you, Shermain, for our chat! We wish you all the best in your years ahead of travel, state parks and family time…

Stay tuned for our next posts in the series: Ed Thompson of American Farmland Trust, and Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms. If you know of other influential folks in the sustainable agriculture sector who have transitioned recently to a life of more freedom, and who would like to share their stories, let us know!

Full Transcript of our chat with Shermain:

FarmsReach: First off, I thought you were retired and going to travel, visit state parks and enjoy your growing family! It seems you are still quite busy! What are your plans for the next 5 years, and which conferences are you attending?

Shermain: I’ve been working the past 45 years; I can’t just stop working! I’ll probably continue doing some volunteer consulting but I won’t be sitting in an office most days. I’ve got one project involving agritourism, where we did a survey of agritourism operators in California as well as one in Colorado, looking at the factors that make an operation successful or not. Another major project has been looking at the potential for smaller-scale farmers to be involved as ingredient-suppliers for specialty or value-added, processed products – like jams, jellies, jerkies and cheeses.

I also did an economic impact study of local food marketing for policy makers, and I’m still trying to write a paper about that, but it’s been a very difficult project. It’s hard to measure, and so it’s hard to explain without being too technical.

The conference I was at was a tea conference actually. We have a global tea initiative on [the UC Davis] campus – a really multi-disciplinary group led by a professor of Art History of China, and then there are folks from the Chemistry department who are looking at the components of what’s actually in tea, Nutrition people, myself, other Cooperative Extension academics and some Political Science people as well. We are growing some tea in California right now, very very small scale, mainly on the Central Coast.

But, there was also a planting done at the UC Kearney Experiment Station in 1965, and 14 of those plants are still around. They’re doing research on those plants now to see how they’ve evolved and survived, with very minimal care.

And then I’ve been working peripherally on a coffee production project in California, going from the Santa Barbara to San Diego coast.

Hm, the new resilient locally-grown caffeine drink?! When costs of production are so much higher in America, what’s the incentive to explore coffee in CA?

Well, it’s really meant to be for really high-end product. All of the production from this organized group of growers was bought by Blue Bottle, so their sales price is equivalent to $65/pound. It’s an extremely niche product.

Smaller scale farmers can get involved with the project, and even add on some agritourism with it. It also can help build awareness about where coffee and tea come from, since people can take for granted how much it truly costs to produce and where it predominately comes from now.

Having served farmers and ranchers for more than 30 years, how would you say the needs of the farming community have changed or stayed the same over the years?

First of all, I’d have to say that markets are much more competitive overall than they used to be, since there’s so much more international involvement. There are so many diverse sources for each product now.

On the farm, crop mixes have definitely changed in California. We barely grow any cotton anymore, and we’ve got a lot more nut crops planted. Things like our water resources have gotten more and more erratic, and Mother Nature’s weather patterns are more uncertain.

In production, regulations have gotten much more onerous and expensive for farmers over the past 30 years. And, it’s not scale-neutral. The per-unit cost of compliance for smaller-scale farmers is a lot higher. It’s a toughie.

Our challenge is how to help smaller farmers comply when new regulations are formed, and also provide input so that the regulations can be more scale-sensitive.

Farmers have to recognize the number of hours they’re spending on different types of tasks. For example, when they’re involved with selling at farmers markets, they need to recognize the many hours spent preparing their crops, driving, being at the market all day, etc. They’re also usually not paying themselves a salary, so there are many costs that aren’t being considered. They also need to understand how their marketing costs (both costs and time) are different for different market channels.

What I’ve been concerned about lately is that a lot of our smaller scale farmers are highly diversified, and it’s very difficult for them to determine what their costs are for each crop. Crop enterprise budgets are very difficult to do! The fact that they don’t have many support staff means that they probably don’t have the resources for much record-keeping. It’s been very difficult to do any real farm management analysis with smaller scale farmers. There unfortunately hasn’t been a lot of promising progress that I can see.

But, I’m on a grant review committee, and we just funded a project in Nevada evaluating record-keeping mobile apps for farmers. It’s small to start: two specialty crop growers and one livestock operation testing six different software programs to see what they can make out of them. There really hasn’t been much research done on which tools are working for farmers.

I know these tools won’t work for everyone, but hopefully they can work for at least more of them.

If smaller farmers aren’t managing what they’re spending on each crop and therefore can’t see their margins on each, do you think they can still be successful if they’re efficient in other ways?

How essential do you think it is for small farms to diversify their offerings, whether with value-added processing, agritourism, or other revenue streams?

But, diversification isn’t appropriate or necessary for all farmers. Some don’t have the personality or whatever it takes to do it. Certainly for agritourism, which can get very involved and is definitely not a one-person operation, you can’t be a sole farmer with minimal farm labor starting it up. It’s just too much.

Even a farmer who grows and sells only raw product can make it – as long as they can tell their story well enough, and if they can get a high enough price. It depends on where they are geographically. It makes a big difference, for example, if you’re in the Bay Area, where small farmers have access to a huge marketplace, it’s much more feasible. Whereas if you were try to do this in Utah or someplace more remote, it’ll be a lot harder. It’s just harder to find a lot of customers for values-based products.

Which services or resources offered by UCCE do you feel are most under-utilized by family farmers? ie What should farmers and ranchers use more?

They should take advantage of post-harvest training and ask for help from their local farm advisors: how to store and handle their products. They’d learn how to get longer-shelf-life for their products, longer selling life, and fewer rejects, especially when they’re selling wholesale. Even smaller farmers market farmers can learn how to do some pre-cooling of heir product which will make it last longer.

We actually haven’t had many farmers enroll in post-harvest training at the CA Small Farm Conference. I’m not sure why. All farms should have some type of cooling facility, and advisors can give advice on how to get the best bang for their buck.

Small farmers: ask your local farm advisors for more information!

When you’ve got some shared farmland space, that’s a good way to get started. Equipment sharing is usually done pretty informally but there are ways that it can be more organized. Although, we once tried to set up a dried-bean equipment “collective,” but everyone wanted to use the equipment at the same time.

I was also involved in a feasibility study for a new livestock processing facility in Mendocino County, and the ranchers were really interested in it, but they weren’t interested in funding it. And, there wasn’t enough government money to make it happen, so it never did.

I think collaborative models are more likely to succeed in urban areas. Not sure it could work as well in more rural places. You also have to consider the personalities of the people involved. I remember one of my first visits into the Salinas valley. There was a farming coop that was trying to be organized for the immigrant farm workers, and oh…the personality conflicts! It was a no go. It’s really like a marriage of a business relationship. Easier said than done.

Social justice for both sides of the equation. First, we’ve got to help farmers be profitable, and then we can add on these extra layers of altruism. Sometimes I talk to students on campus who’ve worked on our Student Farm, and they don’t completely understand that you first need a truly profitable operation before adding on charitable programs.

The smaller farmers typically are the ones with most direct access to the consumer so they could be the most influential in getting people to consider the quality of the food or the freshness, and how consumers can learn to basically eat better.

When you’re able to find strawberries that really taste like strawberries…they might not be bright red and shiny, but they taste wonderful. It’s those kinds of things. It’s the tomatoes. Small farmers have helped some people change their eating habits. That’s a step in the right direction.

It’s not the overall cure for our system, but hopefully it’s a meaningful piece. Even the plant breeders at UC are recognizing more now: “Oh yes, we need to look at flavor!”

And, it’s not only the plant breeders who need to focus on flavor. It’s also consumer demand, and what grocery stores demand. Back in 2014 or so, Gail Feenstra and I made a presentation at the Produce Marketing Association meeting, and the whole theme for the conference was “Bring back the flavor!”

So, reforming the food system isn’t only for the environment. It’s also getting back to the basics of food tasting good. When you eat really good-tasting fresh food, you’re not as likely to eat as much junk food.

It’s such a complicated thing to get people who are raised on junk food to care about flavor and their health, let alone the environment.

A lot of big agribusinesses in California are growing organic. We’ve got Horizon milk and a lot of major cereal companies have their organic brands. I don’t agree that organics will necessarily be a small role. Everything doesn’t have to be organic, but it certainly helps when farmers are aware of what they’re putting into the soils and onto their plants. For some big farmers, it’s just an evolutionary thing where they realize that if they just went two steps further, they’d be organic anyway, so might as well do it and be able to charge more. They then have the freedom to sell in the conventional or organic market.

With larger-scale farms switching to organics and selling local, how do think smaller farmers will [need to] evolve to remain viable in the marketplace?

That’s a toughie. I think they’re going to have to be more involved with their story, and be able build really solid relationships with their customers.

“Values-based supply chains” is a concept I’ve been working on with others across the country. Many are really trying to develop those values, where the first link in the chain – farmers – are rewarded for their practices, not just organic but for stewardship, fairness, and whatever else they’ve done which customers value and would be willing to pay a premium for.

“Values-based supply chains” used to be a common, hot topic in the farming world 5-10 years ago, but I haven’t heard it much lately. What progress has there been?

It’s been hard to document, and in fact I just got an email from somebody who asked for any kind of data I could possibly provide on it. And, unfortunately, I don’t have much to share because it’s a supply CHAIN so you’re talking about a multitude of businesses. Plus, a farmer often belongs to several of these supply chains, and so it’s incredibly hard to track the data.

I really like the concept. It’s a little harder to analyze. Actually, a lot harder.

Are there any groups or regions that are at least making headway to start showing it’s feasible and viable?

I wouldn’t say there’s any one particular region. I wish I could. The one that I think is easiest to measure so far is Organic Valley, the dairy cooperative because they work directly with the farmers; they’ve got that link right there. And, a lot of customers of Organic Valley are consumer-owned grocery cooperatives. So there you have a fairly short supply chain. I’m not involved in that one particular project, but I believe they’re currently interviewing the farmers to assess their profitability and how well they believe their values are being acknowledged and paid for.

Having worked in several aspects of the food system and supply chain myself, I find it hard to quantify the progress we’ve collectively made. There are definitely more stakeholders who are aware of and working on the issues, and yet from an infrastructure and capacity level, it’s hard for me to see how now is better than five years ago.

Aside from some smaller aspects, I would agree with you too.

There’s something around economies of scale that has to happen. Otherwise, it’ll have to be very very high-end small niche operations, like for coffee and tea as we spoke about above. Beyond that small niche market, yes, cooperation will need to be a piece.

Have you heard about a coop that existed called Yo Cal? It was in the Capay Valley founded around 1980. There is actually a short case study that Penny and I wrote about it.

What happened was the farmers that you read about now so often, including Full Belly, got together and said “We are all driving to SF every day, this is crazy. Everyone one of us is getting up at horrible hours.” So, they organized a coop to do the deliveries, and it functioned for 10 years. They finally got big enough that they decided they didn’t need the coop anymore… Dru at Full Belly was very involved in the creation of it. They kind of outgrew themselves.

Other new farmers may need something like that now. Or, maybe that’s what Capay Valley Farm Shop could help with in some regards.

I don’t think it’s really possible or affordable for smaller farms to be involved in most of that high tech equipment yet. It could work for some of the controlled environment operations, like greenhouses. I do know there are some mechanical harvesters being used for blueberries. It gives those farmers a huge advantage as far as costs and labor, but they have to have enough resources to acquire those kinds of harvesters in the first place. You can’t expect a small farmer to afford that kind of technology. There are barriers to entry there.

There was also a big mechanical harvesting project in the valley, tested on peach and nectarine trees. They gave up after a couple of years because they couldn’t get the kind of quality that they needed. The technology wasn’t there yet…

Reading your bio, I actually didn’t realize how involved you were with cooperatives! Can you share more about your work and research in that regard?

I worked for the rice marketing cooperative for 4 years, and then I was the Director of the UC Center for Cooperatives. That was just the time when Tri-Valley Growers, a well-known cooperative, went bankrupt, and there were a lot of bad feelings about coops among farmers. So, I did a study comparing the financial performance of different types of cooperatives in food sectors and compared them to non-food, “regular” shareholder-owned cooperative companies, and found that there was no different in their financial performance.

There have been efforts to create new cooperatives in other states, but in California, nothing’s really happening in major conventional agriculture except for what we call Information-Sharing Cooperatives. Farmers get together and share pricing information and how much they’re selling to their customers. They’re allowed to do that legally (i.e., not colluding) because they’re a cooperative.

It’s a way to provide some form of market power to farmers. When you’ve got a lot of farmers who are competing against each other to sell to Costco and Safeway and places like that, this is a way for them to survive.

On the smaller side of things, we’ve got food hubs, which are somewhat similar a concept, but not really with a shared ownership structure. But, in California, we already have a lot of marketing channels established already. We have some really good produce distributors, so there’s less of a need here.

What were some of the key/interesting lessons you shared with farmers and ranchers, which they were most appreciative of and hadn’t figured out on their own?

Marketing channels and being aware of your costs to participate in different ones, and how much time it really takes selling wholesale versus at farmers markets versus CSA. And, really the importance of marketing in general. You can be a great producer, but you won’t survive unless you figure out how to market effectively.

For those who don’t know the details, can you share how funding for UC Cooperative Extension has changed over the past 30 years, and how UCCE has adjusted to these changes? How has the Small Farm Program evolved since government funding ceased in 2010? How has the Small Farm Program evolved since government funding ceased in 2010?

I don’t know the full history, and actually it was really frustrating that I wasn’t able to find the data even when I searched for it online! I was able to find information on the last 15 years.

In 2002, the UCCE budget included about $63 million provided by state funds. Then, in the budget cuts shortly after that, it was slashed $12 million to $51 million. Then, I just found a quote from 2017 that said: since 2012, UCCE state support has been cut by $30 million. So, basically in half in the last 15 years.

Research stations are also now self-supporting. Now, anyone who wants to use the facilities for research and experiments have to pay more to use it. Thus, more grant money must be raised.

It turns out also that the electronic systems in the nine U. of California research stations are woefully inadequate. So now they’re really trying to raise their rates to pay for upgrades, which isn’t going over well with the researchers who need to find the funds to cover it.

How do see UCCE evolving over the next 5 or 10 years?

I wish I could answer that question. I really don’t know. It seems like a very challenging situation unless the state finally recognizes that Cooperative Extension is a very valuable component of agriculture, which is a very valuable component of our overall economy in California. There aren’t any solutions yet.

Penny Leff, who has managed many projects for the Small Farm Program, is working now with Gail Feenstra. She’s been totally funded by grant money since 2012. I have no idea how they’re gong to handle the Small Farm Program from here. We’ve asked, but we haven’t gotten a response.

With the volatile political climate, how much or little do you think policy will affect small farmers in CA (or beyond), and the food system of the future?

Policy matters. I was incredulous about what happened with the SNAP program. That’s one case where policy can really undermine some really entrepreneurial efforts. I don’t know about the food system of the future. It can be hard to stay positive. I try not to think too much about it.

If you had a magic wand in the real world we live in today (I know a bit of a paradox), what would you make happen in CA with regards to small farmers?

We also tried to get coops to be able to sell at farmers markets. To be able to provide one stall with a lot of diversity without every single farmer having to grow a whole variety on their own and spend the resources and time to work the stall. The last time we tried to get the legislation through was 2010. Dan Best, the manager of the Sacramento farmers markets and lawyer, led the effort in 2010 as well as in prior years, but it sadly didn’t work.

It would also be great if we had a lot more available farmland for smaller farmers. I admire CA FarmLink and what they’re doing, and it seems like we need a lot more of that. We tried to connect retiring farmers with emerging farmers, but these retiring farmers don’t seem to want to connect. I think it’s partially because of the price they could get as well as the effort transitioning to a new farm operator.

I don’t know what the future holds.

Inaugural CA Farmer Educator Summit: Overview & Resources

FR Admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 15:00:19 +0000

On September 9, 2016, UC SAREP and FarmsReach co-hosted the inaugural CA Farmer Education & Support Services Summit in Sacramento.

Over 30 farm education organizations of California were represented in the day-long strategic meeting. With the help of facilitators Gigantic Idea Studios, participants collectively identified priorities and key action items to improve collaboration and efficacy across the California sustainable agriculture sector. (The Summit built on outcomes from the 2015 strategy meeting co-hosted by FarmsReach and MESA.)

More online resources will be released in the coming months summarizing details of the inaugural Summit. In the meantime, below are key resources and priorities that were identified.

Sincere thanks again to Rabobank for their assistance with the Ecosystem Map and Chart, and the USDA-NIFA funded Growing Roots project for their assistance with facilitation costs. The Summit was primarily funded by the California Department of Food & Agriculture (CDFA), Specialty Crop Block Program.

Resources: Who’s Who

Directory of Organizations – including mission, programs & activities, regions served, contact information.
Ecosystem Map – where organizations are based and serve in CA.
Ecosystem Chart – types of offerings organizations provide in each program area.

Note: These are “living documents.” You can always access the latest versions in our shared Google drive.

If you would like to add your organization to the Directory, Map or Chart, please complete the Farmer Educator Network survey. UC SAREP and FarmsReach will periodically post updated versions of these resources at the links above.

New Google Group

In a Communication Survey conducted during the Summit, participants expressed a desire for a shared list-serve, so we have set up a Google group for Summit participants. Other California organizations that would like to join the conversation are welcome to request to join!

In-Person Regional Networks

The strongest need we heard – whether for program impact or collaborative fundraising – was for stronger in-person regional connections among organizations.

For those wanting to get started in your region, check out: Developing & Running a Farmer Education Network, the How-to Guide from CASFS (also stored in our shared Google drive).

Top 15 Priority Focus Areas Identified

These priorities can also be viewed in a separate 15 Priority Focus Areas document.

A) Build capacity for the collective movement.

Create a “backbone team” to coordinate strategies we together prioritize.
Broaden stakeholders governing the movement and bring NEW and minority voices to the table and/or go to them directly.
Strategically communicate/translate diverse values (and impact metrics) to funders, policy-makers and farmers themselves.

B) Build capacity for measuring collective impact.

Explore common metrics of impact that balance economic, social, cultural and political factors.
Share data collection online tools.
Establish participant-driven metrics of success.

C) Foster relationships, communication and collaboration (prevent duplication of effort & reinventing the wheel).

Coordinate more in-person regional meetings among organizations.
Continue state-wide strategy sessions, possibly: Expand FEN meeting at EcoFarm, schedule pre/post-CA Small Farm Conference meeting, and/or continue annual Summits each year.
Include funders in discussions.

D) Build capacity for organizations’ INTERNAL operations.

Get training in cultural competency and outreach.
Share organizational personnel for operations that can be done remotely (e.g., accounting, bookkeeping, etc.)
Take time to hire and train more diverse staff and boards of directors.

E) Build capacity for organizations’ EXTERNAL operations (strategic, high-impact farm education & support services).

Create more/better programs for non-English speaking farmers.
Share best practices in delivering technical assistance, especially culturally appropriate assistance.
Establish a shared online platform to connect geographically isolated farmers and to post/archive farmer training materials for CA.

Additional Priorities Identified

Identify opportunities for political advocacy and change.
Research and analyze fundamental farm viability for different farm sizes and diverse markets.
Help farmers to self-organize.
Create new programs to prepare farmers for larger-scale operations.
Identify strategies to influence large-scale operations to adopt more sustainable practices.

Collaborative Fundraising Strategies

Below is a synthesis so you can take action in your region as soon as you’re ready!

Assumes:

Engaging farmer feedback throughout the process. Ideally, farmers’ needs guide programs, which then guide where to access funding.
Funders are educated on meaningful metrics; there’s a common language and straight-talk among farmers, organizations and funders.

Suggested Steps:

Reflect honestly on your own organization’s strategy, capacity, core competencies.
Have regular in-person meetings with other regional organizations (can switch to phone later). Need for in-person, authentic relationships among organizations to build trust.
Reach out to and include complementary organizations outside of ag to fill gaps and provide professional development (e.g., economic and community development organizations, local food policy councils).
Reflect as a group about roles and core competencies. Could be done with a survey, followed by discussion. Make adjustments and re-alignments as necessary.
Divide load of researching funding opportunities via “fund-seeking team” or committee. Consider potential for more capacity grants (e.g., for shared HR, research or identifying best practices), targeting new audiences (e.g., socially disadvantaged farmers), or reaching larger/different funders or grants when applying as a group.
Co-develop the grant proposals from the start (not last minute!). Allow time for collaborative thinking. Place realistic value on service you provide.
Develop new collaborative fundraising strategies from new sources:

specific, local donors to serve specific, local farmers
commodity boards, industry groups, private sector (while not compromising values)
collaborative online/physical fundraising day or month (like Big Day of Giving)
retail stores for e-script
fundraising from farmers market shoppers
new NGO-for-profit partnerships

Many thanks to all who participated in the Summit! Stay tuned for the upcoming online resources with more details.

If your CA farmer organization hasn’t already done so, please fill out the Farmer Educator Network survey. UC SAREP and FarmsReach will periodically post updated versions of these resources at the links below.

Quick links:

Revisiting Your Agritourism Strategy for Increased Income

FR Admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 23:00:54 +0000

Hoes Down Fest – Guinda, CA

Are you one of the thousands of California farmers and ranchers who invite the public to your land to shop at your farm stand, pick their own fruit, taste wine, stay the night, learn a skill, enjoy a festival, or tour your operation?

It’s no secret that many family farms supplement their income by getting jobs off the farm or setting up agritourism programs. In fact, of the commercial farms that had positive farm income, only 77% of their total household income came from farm operations (USDA Economic Research Service).

As farmers and ranchers learn more about the diverse types of agritourism programs that fit their specific location, operation, assets or preferences, the U.S. continues to see an ongoing increase in the number and types of agritourism offerings for the general public. And, most importantly, we see an increase in the number and types of farms that are expanding their customer base and improving their bottom line.

Agritourism Lunchtime Webinars & Online Conversations

Starting May 19th, the UC Small Farm Program is hosting five, free practical webinars – designed especially for those with some type of agritourism program already set up. (Those who don’t yet have an agritourism program are still welcome! We suggest reviewing the FarmsReach Agritourism Toolkit resources first.)

Every two weeks, we’ll start with a live webinar sharing lessons about an important theme for successful agritourism programs (which will be immediately archived for convenient access). Between webinars, we’ll continue the conversation online in FarmsReach with the webinar presenters and other experts answering questions and moderating discussion so that anyone involved in California agritourism can easily share ideas, ask questions of others, and get help.

To follow the conversation online, join the new Agritourism Group in FarmsReach. Soon, all the presenters will be “on call” in the Group, ready to answer your questions before and after the webinars take place.

SCHEDULE – all webinars will be 11am-12pm PT:

Thursday May 19 – The Strategy: Identifying, Reaching & Connecting with YOUR Agritourism Customers
Presenters: Kristen Skaggs and Anna Farrell, Farrell Design Group; Al Courchesne (Farmer Al), Frog Hollow Farm.
VIEW RECORDING & PRESENTATION FILES. VIEW ADDITIONAL Q&A.
Thursday June 2 – The Invitation: Social Media, Online Booking & Website Success
Presenters: Kristin York, Sierra Business Council; Lauren Gagliano Saline, Suzie’s Farm.
VIEW RECORDING, PRESENTATION FILES & SHORT Q&A. VIEW ADDITIONAL Q&A.
Thursday June 16 – The Rules: Navigating and Negotiating Permits and Regulations
Presenters: Karen Giovannini, UCCE Sonoma County; Tom Purciel, El Dorado County Planning Department.
VIEW RECORDING & PRESENTATION FILES. VIEW Q&A.
Thursday June 30 – The Community: Powerful Promotions through Partners
Presenters: Tiffany Dozier, Yolo County Visitors Bureau; Evan Oakes, Ag Venture Tours & Consulting. VIEW RECORDING & PRESENTATION FILES.
Thursday July 14 – The Delivery: Five-Star Customer Experience
Presenters: Scottie Jones, Farm Stay U.S.; Meghan Bishop, Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm. VIEW RECORDING & PRESENTATION FILES.

Join us! Webinar registration is required, but there is no charge for the webinars. After you register, you will be emailed the link to join the webinar.

If you are not able to join the webinars, you can email us your questions at any time to have the presenters answer them in the online Conversations. And, be sure to join the new CA Agritourism group to get notified when the archived webinars are posted!

Background & More Resources

The UC Small Farm Program has been working for more than fifteen years with UC Cooperative Extension advisors and others to develop resources and connections for California agritourism operators. Their popular Agritourism Intensive workshop series have been offered in eleven different counties. The UC agritourism website hosts useful factsheets and research. Their online agritourism directory and calendar helps visitors find farms and ranches to visit. And, their monthly California Agritourism newsletter helps share news and resources for the agritourism community.

FarmsReach is hosting the new CA Agritourism group, and also offers an Agritourism Toolkit and online Conversations forum for information-sharing among the agricultural community.

Together, we hope to nurture the statewide agritourism conversation, and welcome your insights and questions!

Hitting the Books: THE Reading List from Agrarian Elders

FR Admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:30:34 +0000

Attendees of the second Agrarian Elders (& “Youngers”) Gathering in Big Sur, 2016. (Full list at bottom.)

Revised and reprinted with permission from Jim Gerritsen of Wood Prairie Family Farm.

The first Agrarian Elders Gathering was held in Big Sur two years ago. The event captured the attention of the New York Times, and talented Noel Vietor created a masterful chronicle of the wisdom and ideas shared, which spanned the following topics:

Scale And Quality: How Large Can An Organic Farm Be?
How Small Farmers Survive And Thrive In A Co-Opted Market
Finding The Sweet Spot
The Challenge Of Certifying “Organic”
Regulation: The Burden Of Getting Big
The Limits Of Corporate Funded Scientific Agriculture
Honoring Observation And Intimate Participation With Nature
Is There A Perpetual Agriculture?
The Organic Farm As Organism And Ecosystem
How Monsanto Bought 10,000 Years Of Seed-Saving Power
The Crisis Of Participation
“Too Soon Old & Too Late Smart” – The Challenge Of Retirement
Succession Strategies That Succeed
Giving The Land A Voice
Community Education – A Natural Strength Of Organic Farming

There is great conscious of the critical need to generationally pass along knowledge. Therefore, this year’s Agrarian Gathering was re-constituted to bring together a dozen of the Elders along with a dozen Youngers selected for their leadership qualities from among the next generation of organic farmers.

As preparation for this Agrarian Elders Gathering, the well-known Eliot Coleman of Four Seasons Farm on the coast of Maine, took it upon himself to create and distribute a reading list for Elders to study ahead of time.

Eliot’s collection of pertinent articles and studies is nothing short of stunning. We share with you Eliot’s treasure trove below.

Eliot Coleman’s 2016 Agrarian Elders Reading List

Note: “Some of these articles were included, not because I thought they had merit, (Nathaniel Johnson, Tamar Haspel, and Forbes are all shills for the Dark Side) but because I thought our discussions would be more focused if we were up-to-date on what the other side was saying.”
Eliot

What are we doing? Why are we organic farmers?
Motivation? Inspiration? Goal? Wider picture? Long-term expectations?
It has been said that organic farmers “are the last beacons of light, the last autonomous independent examples of human beings who have not been co-opted by the system. Organic farmers are the only force preventing the total takeover of the food system by artificial, industrial thinking.”
Campaign For Real Farming: Key Ideas for Enlightened Agriculture
Campaign for Real Farming: How Farming Can Lead the World Out of Its Current Mess
Sustainable Food Trust: How To Farm Properly

Sustainable Soil Fertility: How best to achieve it?
Mixed Farming – Livestock plus field crops, vegetable crops, fruit, etc.
Fertility Without Fertilizers – Green manures, cover crops, crop rotation?
American Society of Agronomy: Sod-based Rotations
NY Times: Farmers Put Down the Plow for More Productive Soil
USDA: Are Some Crops Synergistic to Following Crops?

Organic Fertilizers – biological? mineral? foliar? sources? Sustainability index?
The Atlantic: Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture

The Soil Microbiome – the Rhizosphere effect, no-till vs. mechanical tillage?
Wageningen Netherlands: Long-Term Organic Farming Fosters Above and Below Ground Biota
Science Magazine: The Littlest Farmhands
Sustainable Food Trust: Soil is the Stomach of the Plant

The Perpetual Farm – Soil organic matter? How sustainable are we in reality?
ACRES USA: SOS: Save our Soils!
Sustainable Food Trust: The Fungi Thing about Soil

The Future – The new realities of CRISPR and gene editing.
NY Times: Gene Drives Offer New Hope Against Disease and Crop Pests

Sustainable Pest Control: How does it work?
National Academy of Sciences: Total System Approach to Sustainable Pest Management
Elsevier: Soil Fertility Management and Insect Pests
Nature: Organic Agriculture Promotes Evenness and Natural Pest Control

Pests – What is going on when the crops are free from pests and diseases?
Trends in Plant Science: The Rhizosphere Microbiome and Plant Health
Elsevier: Colorado Potato Beetle Response to Mineral Balance
NRDC: Are Pests the Problem – or Pesticides?

Getting The Message Out. What does the public understand?
How do we communicate better what we do and its importance?
Who are the best and most effective spokespeople for alternative ag?
How do we maintain the integrity our customers have come to expect?
Is “organic” already so compromised that we need a new word?
What are the pitfalls ahead in defining “organic”?
Washington Post: Why Everyone Who Is Sure About A Food Philosophy Is Wrong
Forbes: Is Organic Agriculture ‘Affluent Narcissism’?
Cornucopia Institute: Is the Organic Label Worth Saving?
Washington Post: Are These Beautiful Lettuce & Tomatoes Really Organic?
Grist: It’s practically impossible to define GMOs

Marketing and Distribution: The economics of small farms?
Scale of production, retail or wholesale, high workload, moderate level of
income, etc. What are their effects on the viability and longevity of family farms?
Refinery 29: The End of Organic Farming Might Be Sooner Than We Thought
AlterNet: What Nobody Told Me About Small Farming: I Can’t Make a Living
Huffington Post: Despite What You’ve Heard, Small Farmers Are Doing Just Fine

About Wood Prairie Maine Certified Organic Seed Potatoes, who first published this article.
New York Times article about the first Agrarian Elders Gathering in 2014.
Summary report of the first Agrarian Elders Gathering in 2014.

Attendees of the 2016 Gathering were: (Kneeling, front row, left to right) Andrea Hazzard, Hazzard Free Farm IL; Anne Schwartz, Blue Heron Farm WA; Carly Delsignore, Tide Mill Farm ME; Anne Lazor, Butterworks Farm VT; Clara Coleman, ARC Farm ME. (Kneeling, second row) Nash Huber, Nash’s Organic Produce WA; Travis McKenzie, Grow the Future NM; Tom Willey, TD Willey Farms CA; Eliot Coleman, Four Seasons Farm ME; Kari Bernard, Green String Institute CA; Jack Lazor, Butterworks Farm VT; Andrew Still, Adaptive Seeds OR. (Standing, third row) Josh Volk, Slow Hand Farm OR; Zoe Bradbury, Valley Flora Farm OR; Jack Algiere, Stone Barns Farm NY; Dru Rivers, Full Bully Farm CA; Emily Oakley, Three Springs Farm OK; Pete Johnson, Pete’s Greens VT; Don Bustos, Santa Cruz Farm NM; Michael Ableman, Foxglove Farm BC; Frank Morton, Wild Garden Seed OR. (Standing, back row) Paul Kaiser, Singing Frogs Farm CA; Dave Murphy (Observer), Food Democracy Now! IA; Bob Cannard, Green String Farm CA; Jim Gerritsen, Wood Prairie Family Farm ME; Wood Tasch (Facilitator), Slow Money CO; Amigo Bob Cantisano, Heaven & Earth Farm CA. Missing: Barbara Damrosch, Four Seasons Farm ME; Patty Huber, Nash’s Organic Produce WA; Zach Wolf, Locusts on Hudson Farm NY.

All Things Agritourism: CA Workshops, Toolkit Resources and Q&A with HipCamp Farm Camping

Melanie Cheng — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 20:30:19 +0000

Today we’re covering everything about agritourism! ~ a new government-supported agritourism program in California, comprehensive practical resources to start and manage an agritourism operation, and an interview with the Land Manager of HipCamp, a booking platform that connects paying campers with unique places to camp (think AirBnB for camping).

Agritourism Intensive Workshops

This Fall the UC Small Farm Program received a USDA grant to support the California agritourism community through a series of educational workshops, webinars and resources. This new program is all thanks to the collaboration of UC Cooperative Extension, local community organizations, tourism professionals, and experienced agritourism operators.

Over the next few months, three different regions of California will each host a three-part series of Agritourism Intensive workshops:

Plumas County Agritourism Intensive

Dates: Tuesdays, Dec 1, 2015, Jan 12 & Feb 23, 2016
Times: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. each session (lunch provided)
Location: Mineral Building, Plumas County Fairgrounds, Quincy, CA 95971
Cost: $50 for 3-session course (only $20 for additional participants from same family or business)

Shasta County Agritourism Intensive

Dates: Wednesdays, January 6, February 10 and March 16, 2016
Times: 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. each session (lunch provided)
Location: The McConnell Foundation Lema Ranch, 800 Shasta View Drive, Redding, CA 96003
Cost: $50 for 3-session course (only $25 for additional participants from same family or business)
.

Stanislaus County Agritourism Intensive

Dates: Thursdays, Dec 10, 2015, Jan 21 & Feb 11, 2016
Times: 8:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. each session (lunch provided)
Location: Harvest Hall, Stanislaus Co. Ag. Center, 3800 Cornucopia Way, Modesto, CA 95358
Cost: $50 for 3-session course

If you miss(ed) any of the three sessions in a region, you can attend one of the other regional sessions instead, but note that the classes are regionally targeted with local agritourism operators, county planners and tourism people. But, as UC coordinator Penny Leff says, “the messages and the energy are pretty universal.”

Toolkit Resources

To complement the Agritourism Intensive workshops, or if if you are unable to attend the workshops, make sure to check out the curated resources in the FarmsReach Marketing & Sales: Agritourism Toolkit.

There you can find a short and sweet compilation of practical guides and references for planning and managing an agritourism program, as well as links to the hand-outs from the Agritourism Intensive workshop series.

Q&A with the Land Manager of HipCamp

HipCamp is somewhat like AirBnB for camping. As their site says, their “overall mission is to get more people outside and, more specifically, to inspire the next generation of people who are passionate about exploring AND protecting our lands.” Through their easy platform, people can “search, discover and book ranches, farms, vineyards, nature preserves & public sites for camping across the U.S.”

Here we talked with Jacqueline Tanzella about their cool new service and how farmers can benefit:

FarmsReach: What is Hipcamp, and what is the Land Share program all about?

Jacqueline Tanzella: Hipcamp is the most comprehensive website for finding a place to camp in the U.S. From state parks to national forests to private ranches, the possibilities are endless, and Hipcamp will help you discover those unique campsites, treehouses and pieces of land you’ve yet to see.

The Land Share program was launched in July 2015 and was designed to help private landowners earn money while providing access to campers looking to connect with land and nature on previously inaccessible land. A farmer, rancher or private landowner can list their land and easily make money by hosting campers as many or a few times a month as they’d like.

FR: Why did you see a need for Land Share?

JT: We know many farmers and landowners are looking to diversify their revenue as crop production is uncertain in the face of floods and droughts. The Land Share program empowers farmers, ranchers and landowners to earn more without a major impact to their land or large time commitment.

For the casual camper who would like to get outside this weekend or next, it can be near impossible finding a campsite as many state and national parks book up seven months in advance. Landsharing provides the camper with more opportunities to get outside, connect with nature and learn about their local economy and food sources.

FR: That sounds great for both campers and farmers. Have landowners been receptive to opening their land for camping?

JT: They absolutely are! Lots of our landowners love the idea of connecting with new people from different generations and backgrounds. They enjoy offering some hospitality and educating more people on sustainable farming practices and expounding the health benefits of the produce they grow.

We also have landowners who are more hands-off and never even see their campers. Instead they provide a guestbook, clearly mark off camping areas and no access areas. It’s really up to the landowner how much or how little interaction they want to have with campers.

FR: What kind of land gets booked most frequently? How do farmers know if their land is good for camping?

JT: Our campers are looking for everything from primitive tent campsites to domes to tipis to cottages. Most are just looking for a small, flat piece of land where they can pitch a tent. If it’s in the great outdoors, provides access to nature, and offers a unique experience a camper couldn’t get at a state park then Hipcampers will love it!

As part of our complimentary consultation services, we provide landowners with campsite layout by either coming out to visiting the land or by taking a look at Google Earth images or photos to determine the best camp set-up. We can also provide land and equipment improvement assistance.

All a farmer needs to do it let us know, and we’ll figure out a way to help!

FR: Do you have some examples of farmers that are listed on Hipcamp?

JT: We sure do! We’ve got dozens of farmers that list their land across the country from California to Texas to Wisconsin to Vermont. Here are a few of our most popular:

Oz Farm, California
Soul Food Farm, California
Sand Creek Farm, Texas
Buttermilk Falls Farm, Wisconsin
Four Springs Farm, Vermont

We’ve even helped some of our farmers by gathering volunteers to help with their harvests. This fall, we helped harvest 6,000 lbs of olives for Soul Food Farm to press into olive oil. Not only are the people in our community interested in camping outside, but they’re interested in learning about farming and not afraid to get their hands dirty!

FR: How much can a farm make in a month?

JT: Many of our landowners make hundreds, sometimes over a thousand dollars per month! That’s real money and revenue from Hipcamp that can be used for anything! Most of our landowners put the money toward paying property taxes, making barn repairs, buying new farm equipment, hiring, marketing, whatever will continue to drive their business forward.

FR: HipCamp sounds like a nice marketing tool for farms as well. Have you seen evidence of that?

JT: Absolutely! We market all our properties via email and social media to our growing list of 400,000 campers across the country. We also provide professional photography so that a listing truly represents the beauty and experience of being on that land.

Additionally, we know our campers often leave a stay having purchased pounds of produce from that farm or having signed up for the farm’s CSA box. It’s a great way for farmers to find new customers who will continue to spread the word about the farm for a long time after their stay.

FR: Are there any costs charged to the farm, or any other requirements to list a farm in HipCamp?

JT: Nope! It’s free to list on Hipcamp. We do take a small commission on bookings, and the fee is based on insurance needs and number of active sites.

We at Hipcamp and our campers adhere to the Leave No Trace principles, so the only requirement for hosting campers is access to a toilet. This could be a compostable toilet, outhouse, port-a-potty or providing access to a flush toilet.

We can help you determine what kind is best for your land and can even help with assistance in purchasing or building that toilet.

FR: What kind of insurance or property damage protection do you provide?

JT: We just launched our two-part Protection Plan to provide farmers and landowners with the peace of mind that we will support them no matter what.

Many landowners have opted to use their own commercial insurance policies, but in case you don’t have this kind of insurance, you could qualify to be covered under the Hipcamp Insurance Policy, which provides general liability insurance for up to $1 million to a landowner in the rare event a camper injures themselves on a landowner’s property. Check out this page to see if you qualify.

Additionally, we have created a Property Protection Plan that provides reimbursement for up to $10,000 in damages in the rare event a camper damages your property during their stay.

FR: How would interested farmers get started?

It’s easy! All you need to do is s tart your Land listing, and we will be in touch to review your listing over the phone and help out in any way we can before it goes live on our site.

For more posts related to Marketing & Sales, check out our earlier series:

If you have questions or words of wisdom about setting up or running agritourism programs, visit FarmsReach Conversations and post a question or comment!

If you have other great resources to share, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

CA Farmer Survey: Preliminary Results & Invitation to Participate

FR Admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 23:50:41 +0000

This post is Part 2 of 2 re: “A Year of Learning.” Also see Part 1: “Sobering, Inspiring Results from Agriculture Organization Strategy Session” posted July 29, 2015.

Thank you to everyone who has already completed the short Farmer Survey over the past several months. Below are the preliminary results.

If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please share your thoughts! Your opinion matters, and it only takes about 10 minutes. Plus, there’s one last $250 prize for respondents. (Congratulations Steve Fitch of Pocket Creek Farm for winning the first of two prizes!)

Background: On January 21st, folks from FarmsReach Community, Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA), Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL), ATTRA/National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), UC Cooperative Extension, Farmer Veteran Coalition, Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE), Rogue Farm Corps, Full Belly Farm, North Coast Opportunities (NCO), and Ag/Tech Mixing Bowl came together to design new, shared tools to more effectively serve small- and medium-scale California farmers and ranchers. The original context was educational curriculum for farmers, and MESA and FarmsReach had invited the primary organizations that offer these services in California.

Better understanding farmers needs and preferences was one of many priorities. (For more details on the convening, see Sobering, Inspiring Results from Agriculture Organization Strategy Session.)

Preliminary California farmer survey results are below:

Acreage
Sales Channels
Devices Used & Frequency
Critical Issues on the Farm & Frequency
Preferred Method to Resolve Critical Issues
Most Desired New Services
Most Promising Programs for Next Generation of Farmers
Resources Used for General Learning
Resources to Discover New Products & Technology
Critical Factors When Making A Purchase
Years Farming*
Optimism Level About Future of Own Farm*
Optimism Level About Future of Non-Industrial Family Farming*
Big Ideas for the Future of Sustainable Farming & Agriculture*

* New questions were added to the survey based on initial farmer responses. Results will be shared once we collect more data. If you already took the survey and wish to submit your responses to these new questions, you may do so here.

Farmers: We invite you to take the survey. It takes less than 15 minutes, and you could win $250!

Percentage of respondents with different farm acreage. For context, below is the USDA’s report on farm size and cropland distribution.

This USDA graph included for context only. The data has nothing to do with the CA farmer survey.

Percentage of respondents selling through each channel.

Percentage of respondents using each type of device and frequency.

Percentage of respondents’ frequency they experience critical issues in each area.

Percentage of respondents that prefer each method to resolve critical issues.

Percentage selecting each service as a “most needed” service. New version of survey includes option for general sales and marketing help in addition to a more formal sales & marketing coop.

Percentage selecting each program as a “most needed” service. Mentorship includes both “formal” and “casual” mentorship programs. Farmland Access is surprisingly low, perhaps due to position in the survey. The survey now shuffles order of options for users.

Percentage accessing “pertinent information” from each type of resource at least a few times per month.

Percentage that learn about new products or technology through each resource at least a few times per month.

Percentage of respondents claiming each factor is “Absolutely required for me to buy it” or “Usually true when I buy it”.

Farmers: What do you think? Do you have some insights or opinions to share? We invite you to take the survey. It takes less than 15 minutes, and you could win $250!

All: We welcome your feedback. You can email Melanie directly at melaniec@farmsreach.com.

Sobering, Inspiring Results from Agriculture Organization Strategy Session

Melanie Cheng — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 20:29:43 +0000

This post is Part 1 of 2 re: “A Year of Learning.” Also see Part 2: “CA Farmer Survey: Preliminary Results & Invitation to Participate” posted October 4, 2015.

On January 21st, FarmsReach Community, Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA), Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL), ATTRA/National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), UC Cooperative Extension, Farmer Veteran Coalition, Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE), Rogue Farm Corps, Full Belly Farm, North Coast Opportunities (NCO), and Ag/Tech Mixing Bowl came together to design new, shared tools to more effectively serve small- and medium-scale California farmers and ranchers. The original context was educational curriculum for farmers, and MESA and FarmsReach had invited the primary organizations that offer these services in California.

In the months that followed, I met individually with many of the folks above as well as other agriculture organization leaders to dig deeper into obstacles and opportunities in our shared sustainable agriculture ‘movement’, specifically regarding farm technical and business assistance. Realizing there is no standard language to describe this farm focus, we started using the term “Farm Education & Support Services”.

A summary of the sobering results is below. Overall, there is consensus that many fundamental components for our collective success are lacking, resulting in a disconnect among farmers, organizations, and funders; duplication of effort; lack of strategic focus in fundraising and program development; insufficient organizational capacity; few explicitly shared metrics of success; and a general feeling of “dysfunction” among various organizations.

And yet, of all the groups in the convening above, all but two expressed a willingness to work together in some form of a collective impact framework to systemically improve our effectiveness and impact. (If your agriculture organizations is interested, please contact me.)

We are planning to review the results of our co-designed Farmer Survey before deciding on next steps. So, a lot more to come. (Please do share the Farmer Survey with your networks if you haven’t already. Later, we’ll post the results for everyone here.)

Sustainable Agriculture Movement ~ “Farm Education & Support Services” Goals: Results of January Convening

From literally hundreds of ideas to Improve Connections & Collaboration, Increase Quality & Quantity of Farmer Learning, and Improve Effectiveness & Impact, five distinct categories emerged.

Within each, I’ve summarized the group’s proposed areas for improvement.

Goals: Understand Landscape of Stakeholders AND Foster Relationships, Communication & Collaboration

Need for “Ecosystem Maps”: who’s doing what where?
- Organizations, Funders, Farmers
Bridge to/from related movements
- Food Justice, Regional Food Systems, International Farmer Movements, Climate Change, Water Shortage, Sustainable Seed, Community Development, Local Economies, etc.
Help organizations differentiate themselves & not duplicate effort
Build trust & real relationships
Foster collaboration & support between large & small organizations
Improve communication style/strategy between organizations
Share resources & referrals; co-host events
Meet in-person for more collaborative strategy sessions
Learn from own/others’ mistakes & failures
Fundraise together (details below)

Goal: Build Capacity for Organizations

Help with program development (real strategy versus chase the money)
Identify appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure impact
Alleviate burden of grant-writing: manpower, actual writing process, strategy with other organizations, introductions
Raise money in general
Afford/attract more staff to execute well
Help with PR; disseminate good work being done
Learn from own/others’ mistakes & failures
Fundraise together (details below)

Goal: Build Capacity for the Movement

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for the sustainable agriculture movement as a whole (and/or the “Farm Support Services” piece of it) ~ What is our overall goal?
Need better access to quality industry data & analytics
Funders lack industry knowledge; should collaborate more
Fundraise together:
- Foster environment of collaboration instead of competition
- Explore new funding avenues outside grants
- Identify who’s received what from whom, and who is planning to apply for what
- Identify regional fundraising “hub organizations” (i.e., larger organizations appropriate to be proposal lead, coordinator, fiscal sponsor or general support)
- Improve how we present what we do to funders so core competencies and differentiators are clear
- Establish systems to ensure quality effort and output from each grant partner
Learn from own/others’ mistakes & failures

Goal: Strategic Program Development

Understand farmers’ actual problem areas
Align research with actual farm needs
Understand and improve how farms access and share information
Reduce duplication of resources/disparate resources all over the place
Need more/better resources for and connections with non-English speaking farmers
Need more/better resources on business aspect of farming
Research farms’ real-world use of and openness to technology
Research feasible pricing schemes acceptable to farmers
Want a stronger face-to-face relationship with farmers
Learn from own/others’ mistakes & failures

Off-the-Record Elephants in the Room

Finally, below is a summary of information shared with me in my one-on-one meetings with both farmers and organization directors and managers following the January convening.

Re: Leadership
- Chasing money, short-sighted, juggling projects, no focus, haphazard.
Re: Planning & Execution
- No systematic process for program quality/accuracy/completeness, deliberate/accidental exclusion of others, tragic redundancy, no continuity from educational events, programs designed FOR not WITH farmers, organizations isolated from farmers.
Re: “Farm Education & Support Services” Movement as Whole
- Culture of opportunism/competition/criticism/disloyalty, dissipated energy/impact, no meaningful metrics of actual impact, no agreement on overall vision, no unified political voice/power.
Re: Funding
- Funds go to “Fame & Friends” versus “Brains & Brawn”; funders lack industry knowledge; funders isolated from organizations AND farms; perpetuation of above.

Wow. Working in sustainable agriculture and “Farm Education & Support Services” for just 13 years, I believe our movement has made some noteworthy progress (much of which is documented in the Michigan State Center for Rural Food Systems‘ Good Food Timeline). However, there is much room for improvement as shown from the January convening results and sentiments of those in leadership positions to effect solutions.

We will be compiling and sharing the Farmer Survey results later this year. That data coupled with the information above will be an invaluable guide for what’s next…

Your Input Needed (and Great Chances to Win $250) ~ Guidance for CA Agriculture Organizations & Industry Ecosystem Maps

FR Admin — Tue, 05 May 2015 18:02:31 +0000

Terra Firma Farm, Winters CA ~ taken with Droid Turbo phone

View the preliminary results of the Farmer Survey, posted October 4th, 2015.

The current FarmsReach platform launched in 2013 with the ethos of “Driven By Community”. Now we are asking you, our active and opinionated community across CA (and beyond), what would be most valuable to YOU?

Farmer survey results will be shared with over a dozen partner organizations so that we can collectively better serve your needs.

Organization survey results are being used to create new, shared Ecosystem Maps, showing where and what we all are working on across California, and Funding Maps, showing where funding is currently available — and needed.

Please take 5-10 minutes to fill out our survey, and win one of two $250 prizes! The first prize will be chosen from the first 250 members to complete the survey. The second will be chosen from all who complete it over the next few weeks.

Farmers: click here!
Organizations: click here!

These surveys are an extension of a convening we co-hosted in January with Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA), with CAFF, Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL), ATTRA/NCAT, UC Cooperative Extension, Farmer Veteran Coalition, Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAGE), Rogue Farm Corps, Full Belly Farm, North Coast Opportunities (NCO), and Ag/Tech Mixing Bowl.

What do you find valuable in what we do now? What would you like to see offered to you in the next few years? How can we — not only FarmsReach, but also our partner organizations — better meet your needs to be more profitable and environmentally sustainable?

We know your time is limited, so we’ll be giving two $250 prizes to those who fill out the 5-10-minute survey! We’ll choose one winner from the first 250 to complete it, and the second winner from everyone else. Your chances are pretty good!

Farmers: click here!
Organizations: click here!

Our goal is to get at least half of our members to fill these out to make sure we really represent the majority, so please take a moment now (or soon!). Thank you for being an active member of FarmsReach!