Woodleaf Farm Lighthouse Beacon Shining in Rancho Los Haro

By Will Stockwin, Managing Editor

Carl Rosato (right) tours his peach orchard near Oroville with visiting peach farmers from Mexico. Photo by Sandra Nichols

The lighthouse beacon at Woodleaf Farm near Oroville shines all the way to Rancho Los Haro, Zacatecas, Mexico, where small-acreage peach farmers are beginning a shift to sustainable methods.

One of them visited Woodleaf farmer Carl Rosato on a Saturday in August to talk pruning and grafting over a nice vat of compost tea. Samuel Felix drove over for the day from Cain Vineyard near St. Helena, where he has worked for 12 years, the last six as vineyard supervisor. He was accompanied by his wife Norma, and Sandra Nichols, who has just finished her dissertation on the connection between Los Haro and the Napa Valley.

“It began in the 1950s and now there are approximately 1,000 people from Los Haro working in the Napa Valley,” Nichols said. “Some are more settled than others, but all of them send money back home.” She said according to the latest figures from national and international financial institutions, Mexican migrants are sending some $9 billion a year home from jobs in the U.S. “That’s up from $5-6 billion just 3-4 years ago,” Nichols said. “It’s become one of the most important sources of foreign exchange for Mexico and it just keeps going up.”

The research for her dissertation revealed that Felix and some others from Los Haro are using their Napa Valley earnings to subsidize their peach orchards back home. Nichols said these growers are part of an emerging new wave that is interested in learning to grow chemical-free peaches.

“In the 1970s, peach growing in the area expanded from 4,200 acres to more than 30,000 by the early 1990s,” she said. “It collapsed back to approximately 10,000 acres, following the devaluing of the peso in 1994. Growers turned to ag chemical salesmen for cultural information during the expansion boom and ended up being dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.”

She said growers like Felix can see that continuing to farm with chemicals is a losing proposition in a semi-arid region like Los Haro. “They also want to go back to sustainable and organic methods because that’s how their fathers and grandfathers farmed.” Nichols met Felix at a workshop on transitioning vineyards to sustainable methods and he said he was interested in adapting similar practices to his peach orchard back home. She suggested going to look at north state peach orchards using sustainable methods and that lead to the visit to Carl Rosato at Woodleaf Farm.

“Samuel and his wife were very impressed with Carl’s generosity and willingness to share information,” Nichols said. “What really stood out was his no-till orchard floor management and the importance of cover cropping. In Los Haro they do a lot of disking, which leads to soil erosion and serious spider mite problems related to the constant dust.”

Rosato also demonstrated tree pruning and training techniques, and fruit thinning methods that were different from those used in Los Haro. “There was so much information that it will take more than one visit to absorb it all,” Nichols said. With help from Miguel Altieri at University of California, Berkeley, Nichols has begun looking into the possibility of setting up an information exchange system similar to CAFF’s lighthouse farm network to support Felix and his neighbors at home. One idea would be to fund it with some of the money being sent back from the Napa Valley.

“I see the first stage as educational, where farmers from Los Haro would have the funding to come up here for workshops and longer visits that give them the chance to talk to American farmers on a farmer-to-farmer basis,” she said. Nichols foresees the second phase as training a farm advisor down there in sustainable methods to support the farmers’ transition efforts. Ideally the farm advisor would have computer access to information from all over the world.

“Another important component would be increasing local market outlets for the fruit,” she said. “Right now most of it goes to major urban buyers as bulk sales at the farm gate. “We’re just getting started trying to formulate all of this,” Nichols said. “Samuel and the others who’ve been making some of these visits always come away so impressed with the farmers we’re meeting because they are so open and sharing. However we put it together, that’s the kind of network we want.”