To Farm: a lesson in what it means

Trudy Wischemann

“I want to farm.”
I was pulling a drag line of sprinklers in an old orange grove when I heard these words coming from inside my head, but it was Judith Redmond’s voice speaking, coming back to me from a conversation early in our acquaintance, spoken over a table in a Davis coffee shop as she explained why she was leaving research to enter full-time partnership in Full Belly Farms. I didn’t truly understand them when she spoke those words the first time, but when they returned to me in the orange grove, they were crystal clear, a prism for my own longings coming into consciousness through the act of that work. “Oh, this’s what she meant,” I said to myself in reply, realizing then with certainty that I, too, want to farm.

I love irrigating, especially pulling sprinklers, and at the moment of that epiphany I was doing it to help out my friend Mike Davis, a fourth-generation Lindsay orange grower who manages groves for others, now landless himself. In the midst of summer, when there is too much work to do, the time it takes to pull sprinklers can drag him down, but for me it’s a contemplative activity that gets me out of the house and into the groves where the smell of orange duff, damp clay soil, and wet leaves centers and grounds me in my true self.

It’s been four years since Judith’s words hit home, but I remember it clearly, remember where I was in the grove when her voice came to me and can still walk back to that spot and point to it even though I’m no longer pulling sprinklers there. Luckily that grove is still standing, and so the place where that memory resides is physically intact, which is a comfort to me, sitting here at my desk writing this. I worked in other groves with that good man, however, that have been lost -- lost to changes in ownership, to inabilities to keep farming for want of money, water, unneeded tax write-offs. And the loss of those groves, in particular the loss of intimate contact with those places, still pains me these four years later.

I learned so much from working with Mike. The things he told me as we drove from place to place, turning on water, checking sprinklers, spraying weeds, planting baby trees, were critical to my learning some of what writer Barry Lopez has called the “local knowledge” of this part of the valley. One of the first things he told me was about groves his father had planted with trees he had raised from seed in a now-dismantled greenhouse behind his shop. “Some guys get physically ill when they see a grove they’ve planted pushed out by someone else,” he told me then. How can you forget a sentence like that? And how can it not pierce you, returning like a boomerang, seeing a grove he himself has tended for years laying on its side, the trees so full of oranges they look like overdecorated Christmas trees even dry, with their crisp leaves rustling like grass in the wind? With the baby trees we planted together still green, holding on despite lack of water, but doomed?

The situation for valencia oranges has become bleak, something I have learned in intimate detail since joining the Lindsay Lighthouse Farm Network breakfasts a year and a half ago. Valencias make the best orange juice in the world, but at the moment they make no money at all and sometimes bring a bill from the packinghouse to the grower instead of a check, a bill for packing that comes on top of all the other costs of production. Last year the broken market, combined with the heavy crop and the previous two years of no income from the effects of the 1998 Freeze, pushed many growers over the line, and this year we are seeing the results. Grove after grove of valencias are turning yellow, being left to die or becoming stacks of dry slash piles to be torched on permissible burn days. Some are being replanted to navels; some are being left bare to be sold, because when you calculate the money it takes for water to keep the trees alive or the money it takes to push out a grove to plant something that has a chance of making money, bare land is more valuable than blocks of valencias. At least, that’s how it looks to many growers at the moment.

Another friend of mine, Bob Puls, a fourth-generation orange grower in the LFN whose family came up from the southland in the 1950’s during the evacuation of orange growers as groves were converted to housing tracts and Disneyland, pushed out the young valencias on his mom’s place last week. He didn’t want to do it, but her death this past January has meant that the place must be sold, and he doesn’t have the money to keep the trees alive while he waits for a buyer in this flooded market. He has a small bulldozer, a D-4, that he uses in his firefighting work -- owning a fire truck, too, he doubles as the Round Valley Fire Department as well as the owner-operator of Round Valley Ranch, and carves fire lines into the foothills surrounding us in his spare time. He always has one ear tuned to the fire band on his radio for 911 calls in his area, and responds to CDF’s forest fire needs on a regular basis during fire season. But last week the D-4 was employed on his mom’s place, pushing out the 10-acre block of young valencias he had planted himself. A bigger cat will be called in to push the other 10-acre block of older valencias he and his brothers helped his dad plant when Bob was just a kid, a block of oranges he has worked in all his life.

It took him weeks to decide to do it, but after the packinghouse picked this year’s crop on the young trees, there was only a small window of time. He could either go on irrigating, beginning the cycle of cultivation of next year’s crop, or he could push the trees while the soil was still moist from the last irrigation. I learned from listening to him that if you push trees while the soil is moist and the root systems are supple, the trees come out of the ground intact with two or three properly placed blades of the bulldozer. If the trees and the soil become dry, the trees snap off either at the graft or at ground level, and then the stumps and the roots have to be grubbed out one by one, a heavily labor intensive process that takes a huge amount of time and/or money. Some bad news from the bank right as his young trees were being picked pushed him over the edge into this decision, and he swaddled up his heart, put emotional blinders on and got to work. He didn’t call me about his decision until he’d gotten halfway through, too late to back out.

But he did call me, and I went to photograph the work, in part to have this story to tell, but more so to bear witness to his loss. It was heartwrenching to watch this equally good man bulldozing his own trees, which he has known viscerally as the source of his livelihood. I had listened to his mother’s stories about family life on that place when I visited her in the nursing homes she occupied the last couple of years of her life, and I had an attachment of my own going down as well. But as I watched him methodically uprooting one tree after another and pushing them into little quads, another understanding rose to the surface, and when he climbed down from the cat for a break to talk, I brought it up to him as a question. “I may be crazy,” I said, “but I just got a sensation that this is some kind of gesture of faith.” And he said:
“I’m drawing a line in the sand. I’ll push my valencias, but that’s where it stops. They’re not getting this place for nothing. It was good enough for my dad in 1955, and it’s good enough now.”

And somehow, in saying it, we both felt better. In a little while, he climbed back on the cat and finished the job.
Three months ago, in another conversation with Bob, I was wrestling with definitions of what it means to be rural. I have come to understand my work here as a kind of rural ministry, and I have been working to get the people in my church, who are largely rural whether they think they are or not, to understand the value of and the need for this ministry. After a particularly trying Sunday, where I had failed once again to convey this quality, I was talking with Bob on the phone, looking for light. And he said “I’ll tell you what it means to be rural -- it means EVERYTHING.” I couldn’t agree more.

But to be rural is to contain a diffuse set of qualities and possibilities shared by most of humanity (although in most of us that set is submerged) - or so I think, anyway. To farm is to concentrate those qualities and possibilities into one’s body and one’s life, to apply them in a daily act of faith and trust which requires a strange, or unique, balancing act of initiative-taking and letting go, an oscillation that can occur many times through the day and which would make most people dizzy. I see that balance now as a holier way of living, much more dependent on the God of life and on neighbor, on self as neighbor and neighbor as self, than I ever could have imagined had I not gone out on a limb pulling sprinklers. In my mind now, the need for people who know how to farm is greater than ever before, not just because our food system requires it, but because our culture does, too.

One day, talking with Mike about those downed trees, sharing my grief with him, he amazed me once again. “It’s alright,” he said “that grove hasn’t made any money in a long time, and I was never allowed to do what needed to be done to make it better. That frustration is over now. By next year you’ll see a stand of oats there, waving in the wind.” He knows how I love the grasses, and I suspect he said this to make me feel better: the stumps left in the ground from the bad timing of the bulldozer work probably won’t be grubbed out in time to plant grain this fall. And then a most beautiful statement of faith appeared, a common occurrence from this man who scrapes a living out of the cracks of what’s left in the orange/olive economy here. He said, “You know, I’ve come to realize that if we can just hang on, those of us who are left are going to be really valuable in the future.” And I said to him then, and want to say to the rest of you who know how to farm, you are really valuable now. Hang on.