by Paula Manalo
Now I wait for spring to thaw the ground again, and the sunny days of next season to come. Meanwhile, I imagine a little toddler running through the sparkling blue-green rows of cabbages, as if she already knows a thing or two about cultivating.
Farming in a Climate of Change
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BY GINGER SALKOWSKI
Ginger Salkowski and her friend Brian Schulz own R-evolution Gardens, an off-the-grid farm and educational center in the Nehalem Valley, on the northern coast of Oregon. The farm is devoted to helping people make the journey toward self-sufficient, sustainable living.
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“Is it time to freak out yet?” I ask myself, staring at the handful of crumpled bills that represent what’s left of my savings from the previous year.
It’s January, and that’s a lean month for farmers. The CSA money hasn’t come in yet, although I posted my annual call for new members a month earlier than I usually do. The farmers’-market money that I managed to parcel out of an envelope in my desk drawer over the last few months — for mortgage payments, gas, property taxes, phone, and Internet — is now gone. I’ve committed to taking two more acres under lease this growing season, and in my head I add up how much deer fencing, soil amendments, drip irrigation, compost, row cover, and seeds will cost this spring. The total of my projected expenses doesn’t inspire flat panic, but maybe it should, considering that my current investment capital is stuffed in my back pocket.
The way I look at it, in year three of my farming career I’m in basic training boot camp for the future. I’m a single, mid-thirties female with no money, no fossil-fueled machinery, no real training or farming background, growing food for a fifty-family CSA, selling at two local farmers’ markets, and holding educational classes on my off-the-grid land. That’s called jumping into the deep end of the pool and hoping you learn to swim really fast.
Everything about my entry into farming has been fast and unpredictable, yet nothing I’ve ever done before has felt so right and so urgently important. My working theory is: Being a crazy upstart farmer may be the best hope I have, as the climate begins to change on planet Earth.
There’s no good news about climate change. Nary a reputable scientist is left who doesn’t agree that we’re entering into a phase in which Mother Earth has some serious mood swings. Climate models show effects on a scale from devastating to catastrophic as the human love affair with fossil fuels over the last century begins to unravel. I don’t intend to convince you of the hard science. There are hundreds of books out there with all the data you need, if you can face it. I’m writing this because I’m a vegetable farmer, and anything that has to do with a change in the weather has my complete attention. The current global forecast is pretty scary stuff and something that anyone entering into the field (pun intended) needs to study up on. That said, this farmer has learned better than to argue with the weather. The question I ask now is: What can I do about it?
My first summer farming, I was tending an acre of diverse organic vegetables pretty much on my own. Every day was a whirlwind learning curve. I often woke at six in the morning and worked until after nightfall, standing alone in the field in the dark with watering hose in hand, wetting down lettuce transplants as my housemates drank beer and laughed around summer barbecue fires.
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Being a crazy upstart farmer may be the best hope I have, as the climate begins to change on planet Earth.
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One day my chickens got out of their run and into my garden. I came back from a delivery and found a flock of forty hens decimating a field of seedlings that I had painstakingly transplanted by hand just a week earlier. Already exhausted from a day of hard work, I found myself running around like a madwoman, yelling at chickens and discovering one ruined bed after another. Luckily, a friend showed up in time and we managed to lure them back into their run with a scattering of fresh feed. Once the hens were secured, I slumped next to a fifty-foot, newly planted bed of chard. Everywhere the remains of what were healthy little plants were scattered and uprooted. It was so painful to look at that I burst into tears.
I spent the next three hours crying and repairing with my friend’s help what we could of the damage. That summer, I vowed I would become a successful farmer if it killed me. It almost did, but I’m finally getting closer to understanding the meaning and terms of that success.
A successful new farmer in today’s (and tomorrow’s) climate has to have a serious package of skills. You have to be able to live with less. That means you have to be able to get extremely creative with very little money and time in order to make your season happen. You have to learn to thrive on uncertainty, seeing each new problem as a challenge that will make you a better farmer in the future. You need to be strong in body, especially in the lower back; stretching and yoga become crucial. You must be strong in mind: Can you figure out how many broccoli plants a fifty-family CSA will consume each season, and how to keep the succession plantings in rotation with thirty other crops in a small field, and, from that, know how many seeds you’ll need? And you must be strong in spirit: In times of high stress, there is grace to be found in pausing to observe the first sweet-pea blossom opening in the morning light, in savoring the taste of a carrot you sowed as a tiny seed. Farming is a spiritual act; it’s life, death, and rebirth every day, played out in millions of little scenes across the land. In this job, I feel lucky to be there to witness it all.
As I develop the skills of a wily farmer on my five acres of coastal clay, I’m becoming a new person altogether. I’m now someone with the flexibility it will take to weather the coming storm of climate changes. I’m someone who’s no longer afraid to look down the barrel of a growing season with no cash, because I trust in the community of support that I’ve built here in my little seaside villages. These folks have helped my farm grow from day one and are invested in my survival to meet their food needs.
I fear no power outages brought on by increasingly violent windstorms, because the rainwater in my creek turns a micro hydro-turbine that keeps our farm lit up in winter and solar panels keep our energy and hot water flowing in summer. Firewood cut from our own forest gives us heat. I’m someone who can grow lots of different things and in many seasons. Unlike the vast cornfields and wheat fields back home in the Midwest, my farm maximizes diversity. I try to grow everything I can in this climate and use hoop houses and low tunnels to extend the season.
Perennials such as asparagus, raspberries, and sunchokes are in the mix to make resilience to climate and weather stress even stronger. I study permaculture, biodynamics, and French intensive farming, and I try them all. Whatever produces food and makes my soil healthier, I keep; things that sound groovy in a book but drive me nuts in real life (like wheel-shaped beds) I try once and then move on.
Because of climate changes, I may have to leave my farm one day and seek out new growing territory. Farms that were once productive may become too arid, too flooded, too cold. I need a set of skills (and seeds) I can put into my backpack and move to another spot to start again. We need to face that this may be the future of farming. There is no better way to get ready than to jump in and start learning. The scrappier and more resourceful you are, the greater the degree of success you’ll have in the long run.
And remember that part earlier about it also being the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done? It is. I love every minute of my crazy job. One of the ironic results of the climate-change crisis may be that we humans will finally understand that we and our planet are interdependent, and we need to nurture that relationship. Only then will we discover that this connection is our deepest source of happiness and inner peace.
Weathering the Storms
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BY KATIE KULLA
In addition to helping run a vegetable farm with her husband and their son, Katie Kulla writes about farming for the CSA newsletter and for journals such as In Good Tilth and Growing for Market. Their farm is called Oakhill Organics, in Dayton
, Oregon.
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SPRING 2006
My husband, Casey, and I are constructing our first greenhouse. We moved to Yamhill County, Oregon, just a few weeks ago to start our own farm. Even though we worked for another farmer in a different state for two years, we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re struggling to put up a greenhouse that’s ultimately much too tall and weak for the windy site we now call our farm home. We’re on a time crunch. It’s already the end of March, and our first market is June 1.
Although the spring rain keeps falling, we have to build our greenhouse so we can start our first seeds for transplants. We work through the weather, erecting steel greenhouse legs with thunder and lightning in the background, and pulling the poly skin over our two-story-high greenhouse during the calm early morning before the day’s wind begins.
As the winds pick up, I watch my husband tie a rope around a bunch of heavy, loose poly at the open end of the greenhouse, struggling to secure the plastic to the ground. The strong gusts keep lifting the poly twenty-feet into the air and snapping it loudly. My husband kneels on the ground, attempting to hold the rope with all his strength. And that’s when I realize it: We’re going to lose. This wind is much more powerful than we are. And I want my husband to live.
“Casey!” I yell as loud as I can. “It’s not worth it! Let it go!”
Eventually, as the wind dies down a bit, we manage to tie the plastic in place temporarily. After dark, I change out of my wet and dirty farm clothes and feel disheartened listening to the continuing rain and wind outside. I wonder “Will we ever relax again?”
When we started this farm, Casey and I learned quickly that everything is harder and more complex on our own. Even though we had experience, much of what we were doing seemed like learning from scratch—the weather included. While working for someone else, we learned the intensity of working outside. We brushed snow from kale on late-fall harvest days and felt the dirt and sweat caking on our bodies during hot summer weeding sessions. But, as farmworkers — not owners — weather was mostly just a matter of physical comfort.
On our own farm, however, the weather’s vagaries determined our livelihood. Some days were seemingly perfect — mild, warm, sunny. As long as we irrigated, planted, and weeded, there was no question that we’d be harvesting crops. On other days, the weather changed our plans. Most of the time, unexpected weather was simply inconvenient: rain on spring days when we hoped to plant, for example. But weather could also swing to damaging extremes well outside the range of averages and “normal.” On our own, the stakes were infinitely higher. We had no other income — we needed our crops to grow and be marketable. We had to thoughtfully respond to the weather and make choices in order to keep the farm and our lives afloat.
SUMMER 2006
We’ve had so many heat waves this summer that I’ve lost count. At ten in the morning, I’m already sweating and realize that we’re in for another one. After lunch, the temperature has risen to well over a hundred degrees. Casey and I start the irrigation on our fall broccoli planting and stand by, watching it wilt despite the water. We turn our attention to a weedy pole-bean planting. Steam rises from the ground as we hoe around the unhappy vines. Working in the heat is making my gut ache. Nothing we can do feels productive under the blazing sun, so we leave the farm and drive to a nearby swimming hole. We wade into the water in our work clothes and walk out again dripping and refreshed, even as our plants back in the fields are struggling.
Casey and I decided to farm in northwestern Oregon because it has a famously moderate climate. The promise of moderate winters hooked us into extending our vegetable-growing season and offering a year-round CSA program. However, since we moved here in 2006, Oregon’s moderate weather has been punctuated by extreme events and record-setting on all counts — 2006 was the hottest summer on record, followed by the rainiest fall on record, followed in 2007 by the most powerful storm on record, and so on.
DECEMBER 2008
We’re in the week before our final December CSA harvest when we hear rumors of a big winter storm. Knowing we can’t harvest in sub-freezing temperatures, we pick our crops several days early, bunching greens during the few hours of thaw at midday. The day before our CSA delivery, the cooler full of bins ready to transport, snow starts falling. The next day we put chains on the tires of our box truck and drive the thirteen miles into town on icy roads.
We have met our commitment for the year, in spite of the challenges. Now we have to get through the rest of the storm and hope our overwintered crops survive for the earliest February and March harvests of the next calendar year.
That night, snow is falling again. And it falls and falls over the next week, totaling almost two feet, blanketing all the winter vegetables in the fields. Between rounds of snow, there’s ice, which creates a hard sticky crust atop the snow, preventing it from sloughing off our greenhouses, which now bow and creak under the pressure.
Eventually the snow melts and the rivers fill. The waterway on our property rises inches daily. We watch as the water creeps into our neighbor’s field and then over the bank of the creek on our land. Finally, we wake up and see that our lowest fields — beds of cabbage and other crops we hope to harvest in just a few weeks — are submerged under a clear river of flowing water.
With our anticipation of a moderate climate, the intensity of these weather events caught us unawares. Now, though, we have come to expect the unexpected. Here on our farm, extreme weather in every season is simply a fact of life. We’ll never be able to predict what form it will take, but we’re no longer surprised when the extreme arrives.
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Until the world thaws again, we won’t know that the three tons of potatoes we were storing in the ground will rot, that all but one of our cabbage varieties will melt from cold damage.
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We’ve learned to prepare. We’ve learned that greenhouses must be set in concrete in order to survive strong winds. We’ve learned to plant diverse crops so that no matter in which direction the temperatures swing, something on our farm will thrive. We’ve learned that it still makes sense to turn on the irrigation and go swimming in the river on hot afternoons. And we’ve learned to relax. After weathering extreme events season after season and continuing to meet our commitments to our customers, we’ve learned that our farm is more resilient than we imagined.
DECEMBER 2009
We’re entering another winter. We’re bundled up in multiple sweaters, hats, and thick wool socks, walking slowly through our fields past frozen kale and mustard. The temperature has dropped quickly this December, reaching recent record lows. One night the thermometer reads 6 degrees, the next night 5.8 degrees, the next it’s at 7. These are lower temperatures than many of our winter crops can survive, and we still have many harvests scheduled before spring arrives.
Until the world thaws again, we won’t know what we’ll have left. We don’t know yet that the three tons of potatoes we were storing in the ground will rot. We don’t yet know that all but one of our cabbage varieties will melt from cold damage. In fact, for the first time in three and a half years, I’m not thinking at all about how the weather may affect our crops. I’m busy working on our newest project — I’m pregnant with our first baby and in the midst of labor, walking laps around the farm to help bring on contractions. I labor through the cold snap, finally bringing our baby into the world on the third night.
A son! Casey and I rejoice at our good fortune as we count his toes and kiss his pink, glowing cheeks — new life born on one of the darkest and coldest nights of the year. When the temperature finally goes back above freezing during the day, Casey wraps our sweet baby against his chest and the three of us walk out to take stock of the cold damage. Yes, we’ve lost crops — more than we’d like. But spring will come. Spring will come.
The Basket Is Half Full
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BY TANYA TOLCHIN
With her husband, Scott Hertzberg, Tanya Tolchin runs
a small diversified vegetable, flower, and herb CSA called Jug Bay Market Garden, about twenty miles outside Washington, D.C. She has worked on farms in Connecticut, England, and Israel, and also worked for ten years as an organizer and lobbyist for the Sierra Club. Tanya blogs at On The Lettuce Edge (see page 251).
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It’s a wonder that all farmers aren’t multimillionaires. After all, we know the secrets of conjuring life from dormant seeds, of taking a single plant and transforming it into many, of turning dusty patches of weeds into beds of fresh marketable vegetables. Everyone needs to eat, a single plant can bare infinite offspring, and even forgotten perennials can bear fruit and flower. How can we possibly go wrong?
Sometimes farming feels that positive, and we need to remember these moments. Here are a few I remember from our farm. Last year, our non-irrigated potatoes grew so fast that it was actually absurd, almost cartoonlike. And an old bag of birdseed we threw on bare ground turned into hundreds of giant sunflowers. Our very first year, we had a completely accidental crop of very early beans. We planted them six weeks early, not to be clever but because, in our inexperience, we figured they were close enough to peas. The stars aligned with an unusually warm spring, and the beans were abundant and so early that we impressed the experienced farmers at our market.