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April 28, 2006
Pain at the Pump
With gasoline prices well past $3 a gallon, American motorists are complaining loudly about oil company profiteering. Mass-transit ridership is up, as are sales of fuel-efficient automobiles. So, too, are hot-air emissions in Washington, as politicians make empty promises to do something about the workings of a global marketplace that's beyond their ability to influence to any meaningful degree.
But if you think it's painful to fill the 20-gallon tank on your gas-guzzling SUV, imagine the shock that's greeting farmers who rely on powerful tractors to work their fields.
I spent some time this week driving around with Edgar Terry, who grows celery, peppers, cilantro and strawberries on about 1,200 acres of mostly leased land scattered from the Oxnard Plain to Piru. His situation is fairly typical of vegetable growers in this area, who produce multiple crops each year from the same patch of ground and are in a nearly constant state of field preparation.
We drove into a field between Oxnard and Camarillo to watch it being readied to plant peppers. The seedling plants are set out in raised beds, which are created using an ingenious rig outfitted with angled blades, rollers and scrapers. The rig is big and heavy, and the blades move a lot of dirt. The rig is pulled by a powerful Challenger tractor with a 500-horsepower diesel engine.
It's an impressive piece of equipment, rumbling along on huge steel-reinforced rubber treads. The cab is tall and glass-walled, outfitted with a dust-filtering air conditioner. It has computerized controls tied into a GPS positioning system that can automatically steer the entire rig using satellite data, keeping it traveling on perfectly parallel rows across the field.
It costs about $300,000 new, although Edgar, like many farmers, leases his under a contract that also covers maintenance and repairs. Caterpillar used to make and sell the Challenger, one of the most powerful farm tractors on the market, but an outfit called AGCO bought the line. Caterpillar provides most of the components, though, and the machine is painted the trademark Caterpillar yellow.
Those components include a 16-cylinder engine that displaces 964 cubic inches. The tractor has a top speed of nearly 25 mph. It also comes equipped with a fuel thank that holds more than 300 gallons. Which is a good thing, because it burns 12 gallons an hour, according to Edgar.
At the current price for diesel fuel of roughly $3 a gallon -- and rising as fast as the price of gasoline -- that's $36 an hour, nearly three times the average pay of a tractor driver. It also means spending nearly a thousand bucks on a fill-up.
Unlike motorists, farmers operating tractors can't reduce their fuel bills by carpooling, switching to buses and trains, trading in their fuel-slurping machines for subcompact hybrids, or eliminating nonessential trips. Nor can they pass the extra cost on to consumers, since growers don't set crop prices; they take the price the retailers and wholesalers offer them.
So, when the price of diesel boosts their operating costs by several thousand dollars a month, it just comes out of their pockets.
Posted by jkrist at 01:28 PM
April 24, 2006
Saddle sore
If you think of cows as slow-witted, docile, clumsy creatures that are easily herded, well, you've never met Rich Atmore's cows. They spend most of their time wandering alone in the rugged and brushy hillsides on the outskirts of Ventura, seeing human beings only rarely. So when it comes time to round them up and bring them down to one of the corrals, they are capable of surprising feats of strategy, agility and stubbornness.
"Richard's cows, they are wild sonsabitches," is how Jorge Casian, foreman of a nearby ranch, put it.
I'd heard that gathering cattle on the Atmore ranch was challenging -- the terrain is too rough for vehicles, even all-terrain cycles, so Rich and his cowboys use horses -- but I wanted to get a feel for it myself. So, when it came time for the first gathering of the spring, I asked Rich if he'd lend me a horse so I could follow along and report from the saddle.
I'm not what you would call an experienced rider. I've been on horses before, but mostly under very controlled circumstances -- guided trail rides, brief outings on animals owned by friends. I know how to start, stop and steer, but the finer points of horsemanship are beyond me. Nevertheless, Rich was amenable, and so he saddled up the horse he lets his sons ride (Richie is 9 and George is 6, so that gives you some idea of where my riding skills rank).
"This is Wounded Knee," Rich said as he held the horse so I could mount. I was not sure whether to take the name as a good omen or bad; I still have scars from surgery five months ago to remove torn cartilage from my left knee.
Turned out it was a good omen. Wounded Knee was well-trained, calm and easy to ride. Which is a good thing, because I was soon crashing cross-country through brush taller than a man in pursuit of cows and calves that behaved more like wild mountain goats than like domesticated bovines. The heavy brush battered knees and shins, overhanging trees threatened to knock heads, lush poison oak and abundant ticks added a bit of extra fun, and hidden holes and rocks and small creeks added exciting uncertainty to the horses' footing, so there was much lurching and bouncing.
The ranch is a labyrinth of canyons and gullies eroded into the steep hills. There are a few dirt roads, but the cattle weren't eager to use them. We rode to the far end of the main canyon, climbed atop the ridge at its head, and then began working our way back along the side hills. Cows and calves were largely invisible in the tall, dense brush, but we could hear them and sometimes see them as they began moving ahead of us.
As soon as we drew within a hundred yards or so, the cows began running. But rather than head straight down the canyon toward the corral at its mouth, they kept trying to dodge us. To keep them moving in the right direction meant moving swiftly to head off each escape attempt, during which the cows often charged straight up slopes that seemed improbably vertical, or circled above us and tried to run back up the canyon. The cowboys had no choice but to follow. The cows apparently had determined that any place we wanted them to go was a place they did not want to be.
We lost a few, but eventually managed to herd most of the cattle in the canyon down to the corral. My contributions were minor, although I did manage to head off a bunch of renegade cows just before they crossed a ridge and descended into another canyon system, which would have meant another whole day of riding to gather them in. Altogether, it took six of us three hours to corral about 20 cows and calves, a rather humbling ratio of man-hours to cattle.
Afterward, while we were eating lunch and drinking cold sodas, Jorge asked me if I had much riding experience.
"Not much," I said.
"Well, you kept your ass in the saddle," he said. "That's good -- that's where it's supposed to be."
I consider that a compliment. And a week later, I can just about sit without wincing.
Posted by jkrist at 02:31 PM
April 18, 2006
Help wanted
Drive-up fruit and vegetable stands sprout like weeds at this time of year along Ventura County's highways and byways. Some are elaborate, year-round retail establishments in permanent buildings; others are ephemeral, perhaps no more than a table and sunshade next to a van or pickup truck parked on the shoulder. But they're eye-grabbing and colorful, drawing business from local residents as well as tourists. Some people stop to shop; others merely want to take pictures.
Roadside produce stands seem to me a form of folk art, blending the aesthetic qualities of fruits and vegetables with the creative products of human imagination in ways that are sometimes quirky or surprising, occasionally funny and always picturesque. Artfully arranged fruit, professionally manufactured billboards, irregular bits of cardboard bearing hand-scrawled price lists -- regardless of their level of sophistication, they're a modern-day version of one of the oldest forms of commercial food distribution: the village market days that for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years have drawn farmers to town to display and sell the products of their fields.
As part of this project, I'm assembling a photographic scrapbook of Ventura county's roadside produce stands, which I eventually will post online. I need your help to make sure I don't miss any.
I can easily find the stands along the major arteries running through Ventura County's growing regions -- Highways 126, 33, 150 and 118, and the major roads crossing the Oxnard Plain. But I don't want to miss the ones along side streets or on more remote rural lanes that I don't generally travel. So if you know of a stand in your neighborhood or one that you pass each day on your way to work -- or even if you operate a stand and just want to make sure I don't overlook you -- please e-mail me the location. Be as precise as possible, and let me know whether the stand is open daily or just on weekends. Thanks.
Posted by jkrist at 09:48 AM
The fruit that's not a fruit
The strawberry harvest is in full swing right now, as the warming weather and lengthening days of spring speed ripening. In about a month, the California Strawberry Festival will get under way in Oxnard, celebrating the sweet fruit that ranks as the county's top crop.
Except it's not a fruit. Not technically, anyway. Strawberries are peculiar plants.
As defined by botanists, a fruit is the ripened ovary of a flowering plant. The fruit itself is the fleshy or woody coating surrounding the fertilized seeds, which contain the embryos that will develop into a new generation of plants.
But the red "fruit" produced by a strawberry plant is not the ripened ovary; it is the swollen base of the flower, where the petals, stamens and pistils join together. Technically, that makes the strawberry "fruit" a vegetable.
After fertilization, the expanding strawberry carries the true fruits of the plant partially embedded in its surface. We call these seeds. They're not. What we refer to as strawberry "seeds" are actually the strawberry fruits; the true seeds are enclosed within them. The scientific term for this type of seed is an achene.
Strawberry plants are members of the same botanical family as roses, and strawberries are a lot like rose hips. They develop pretty much the same way, the main difference being that the rose hip develops a concave form that encloses the fruit of the rose flower, whereas a strawberry develops a convex shape.
A strawberry, in other words, is a rose hip turned inside out. It's not a fruit but a vegetable, and the seeds are not seeds but fruit.
None of that changes how they taste.
Posted by jkrist at 08:09 AM
April 11, 2006
The business of farming
It's a common misconception that farmers have nearly infinite flexibility to choose crops, cultivation methods and pricing strategies. I've heard this sort of thing a lot over the years, particularly from folks who are critical of the amount of water and chemicals many growers use. Tell farmers to stop doing something they regard as necessary to produce a particular crop, the argument goes, and they'll just shift to something else.
What we often tend to forget, or at least fail to fully appreciate, is that farming is not merely a lifestyle or a philanthropic undertaking. For commercial growers -- as opposed to hobbyists raising a couple acres of avocado trees or a few chickens -- it's a business. And unless farmers can make a profit growing a particular crop in a particular way, they simply won't do it.
A comment posted below raises that subject indirectly, the writer asking whether Ventura county farmers are willing to remain sufficiently committed to agriculture to forego potentially more profitable uses for their land, i.e. urban development.
It's an interesting topic, and one that I'll be exploring in future series installments. But a good introduction to the subject of farming as a business, and the many economic forces converging on local agriculture in particular, is provided by a recent report compiled for the Workforce Investment Board. Titled "The Future of Ventura County Agriculture," it offers good insight into the pressures created by rising land and labor costs, global competition and regulation. And it offers several scenarios for farming's future here, none of them particularly rosy, as rising costs and competition for market share from lower-priced foreign production squeeze the profit margins that can spell the difference between a field of strawberries and a field of tract homes.
Posted by jkrist at 09:06 AM
April 07, 2006
Welcome
Welcome to the companion blog to "Farming on the Edge," a series about Ventura County agriculture that will be published each month through the rest of the year. We'll be posting a lot of related material on our Web site, and I'll be updating this blog regularly to share with you behind-the-scenes details and other stray bits of information I collect while I'm working on the project.
First, a disclosure. I have something of a bias when it comes to farming. Or perhaps not a bias, exactly, but a definite point of view.
In a sense, "Farming on the Edge" began more than 40 years ago, when my folks moved from San Francisco to a piece of rural property in the Sonoma County wine country. I was about 5 at the time, and so I grew up amid 23 acres of orchards and vineyards. As a kid, and later as a teen-ager and young adult, I spent summers and weekends doing the kind of manual labor that it has apparently become very difficult to hire non-immigrants to do.
I picked fruit, chopped weeds, pruned trees and vines, stacked boxes, loaded trucks, dug ditches and moved irrigation pipe. On hot August days I crawled around in the dirt picking prunes; on foggy autumn mornings I risked my fingers using a sharp hook-bladed knife to cut bunches of grapes from vines buzzing with bees. I picked apples and drove tractors. I sucked dust, developed blisters and then calluses, fell off ladders and got sunburned.
And while I cannot say I loved every minute of it, I certainly enjoyed living on that ranch. It taught me about nature, and about hard work, and about the limitations placed by weather and other unpredictable forces on each year's crops. It granted me experiences that my friends from town did not share.
I also watched as what was originally a small town to the east of us grew steadily larger year by year, its expanding suburbs gradually swallowing acre after acre of land that I had known when it was covered with neat rows of grapevines, shaded by the stately canopies of fruit trees, or just green and flat and dotted by oak trees and cows. Even as a child, that bothered me, and as the city's edge drew ever nearer our land, I felt a strange sense of impending doom.
So, as an adult four decades later, I continue to empathize with people who work on the land, and who battle weather and other powerful forces to grow crops. I do not like seeing tremendously fertile ground covered with pavement. I do not feel at home in concrete landscapes. I know something about what it takes to put food on the table, and I am always amazed at how little we pay for it.
And I carry that perspective into this project. I know too well that farming is not romantic; it's hard, dirty work. I know also that it's a business, often an uncertain one. But I know also that it has its own rewards, and that magic can sometimes be found in the fields. And I would prefer that this county, the adopted home that reminds me so much of the landscape of my childhood, continues to be a place where farming thrives and is valued.
In these stories, I am not going to gloss over the problems associated with modern agriculture, which employs some of the most poorly paid labor in California, uses a gargantuan share of the state's water supply -- sometimes very unwisely -- and puts a lot of unpleasant chemicals into the environment. But I want to understand more about why farmers make the choices they do, and about the challenges they face that most of us know nothing about. When I'm done with this project, perhaps we'll all have a more realistic perception of the industry that has shaped this county and continues to dominate its landscape.
We're calling this series "Farming on the Edge." That sounds a bit gloomy at first, but I think it's appropriate because of all that the phrase encompasses -- farming on the edge of suburbia, farming pushed to the economic edge by rising costs, foreign competition and other factors, and farming on the cutting edge of technology, cultural practices and marketing strategies. These are all characteristics of Ventura County agriculture in the 21st century.
Posted by jkrist at 03:33 PM
