Epitaph for a Peach Page 2

My fields have become a crazy quilt of cover crops, a wild blend of patterns, some intended, some a product of nature’s whims. The different plants grow to different heights and in different patterns, creating a living appliqué. The casual passerby might not notice my art. From the roadside, it often looks like irregular growth, bald spots, breaks in uniformity. But the farmer walking his fields can feel the changing landscape beneath his boots, he can sense the temperature changes with the different densities of growth and smell the pollen of blooming clover or vetch or wildflowers. He appreciates the precarious character of nature. As if running your fingers over a finely crafted quilt, you can feel pattern upon pattern. Just as a quilter may stitch together emotions with each piece of fabric, I weave the texture of life into my farm.

  Wildflowers

  I plant wildflowers because they look pretty and because my wife, Marcy, likes them. Marcy believes farms should be green the year round. She was raised on a goat dairy where they grew alfalfa most of the year. She met each spring and summer day with a view of lush green growth. Now she wants our farm to be green all the time. She wants to see things growing in the fields even in winter. She longs to look out her kitchen window and see life. During the winter most of the farms in our valley lie dormant. Even in spring while the grapes push new buds, the rest of the landscape lies barren, stripped of weeds and life. Not ours.

  In 1984 the market for peaches and grapes collapsed. Farms all over the San Joaquin Valley lost money, which often resulted in the birth of “the new farm wife,” not a worker in the fields but a main source of income from off the farm.

  Since Marcy and I married, the IRS has classified me as a farmer only half the time. For the other years, Marcy’s off-the-farm income has been higher than mine and the farm revenue has been relegated to “other income” status. One result: in order to keep farming I had to please my banker, in this case my wife. Hence the wildflowers.

  I visited other farms with lush green stands of cover crops, long slender stalks of rye or barley shimmering in the spring breeze, waves of grain growing dense and high. Farmers walk through the seas of green, plants often waist high, and hold up their arms as if fording a river. A biologist friend and I watched one farmer show us his fields and proudly speak of his newfound belief in the magic of cover crops. Later my friend whispered, “I guess it’s hard to change a lifetime of farming.”

  I asked what he meant.

  He answered, “That farmer has a fantastic stand of rye and barley. But he still thinks of simplistic monocropping. He needs to think of complexity and diversity.”

  My friend further explained that adding a cover crop helps soils regain organic matter. It also provides habitat for insect life. But like those of the proud farmer, my first cover crops also lacked diversity. I still grew them the same way I farmed the rest of my fields: one crop, one method, one goal. My farm lacked the chaos of diverse plant life. It was easy to see; my fields lacked blooming flowers.

  Our farm changed a decade ago, with lousy prices and a realization that if the land wasn’t going to make money, I might as well try to enjoy not making money. At the same time I better make life pleasing to those who are earning an income.

  Once, out of desperation, Marcy bought some flowers from Kmart and stuck them on the grapevine berms. Without daily watering, they began to wilt until I began to hand water each one. For a few weeks they continued blooming and I cursed each time I had to carry a coffee can of water for them. There had to be a better way to grow flowers in the fields.

  Soon afterward a friend gave me some wildflower seeds and I tossed in a handful with my cover crops. In California we’ve experienced periods—sometimes several years—of prolonged drought, and with the lack of consistent winter rains, my cover crops did not grow well, but the wildflowers bloomed magnificently. Marcy and I watched their sequence of bloom, the poppies first, then lupine, bachelor buttons, and daisies. She was happy, I was content, and the farm began to look better.

  Now each year I scatter new seeds, the wildflowers reseed, and we watch the fields repaint themselves. The wildflowers have little to do with better prices for grapes, raisins, or peaches, but they start each year with beauty.

  THE WILDFLOWERS ARE always the first plants to bloom. I sense a race for survival as they germinate and flower quickly, sprinting to procreate before the harsh, desertlike valley conditions doom a family of poppies or lupines. They also are the first to attract insects.

  “Flowers open up a new world of life,” said my biologist friend. “Anything blooming attracts life from miles and miles. The pollens and nectar act like huge welcome signs.”

  My wildflowers are early-season welcome mats for insects riding air currents, journeying into the valley from their winter homes, often in the nearby foothills. My farm sits along their tradewinds, a beckoning landfall in the barren, lifeless desert landscape. I imagine these insects to be like explorers, setting forth and sailing into the sea of vineyards and orchards. My wildflowers are sirens luring these sailors to safe and friendly islands.

  After years of drought everyone has finally become concerned over the use of water. At last we’re treating water as a limited resource. Nothing knows this better than the wildflowers.

  Wildflowers like the California poppy continue an ancient struggle to maintain a niche in the arid ecology of the San Joaquin Valley. I’ve talked with allergy specialists who claim that some plants actually create extra pollen in drought years. With a lack of rain, germination, pollination, and seed production must take place within a limited window of opportunity, and I have noticed that my wildflowers seem to produce more pollens with cycles of drought.

  How does this fit with my farming? I’m not sure. I water my farm artificially, so I don’t think my vines or trees really feel the drought. But in the last few years, there hasn’t been a bumper crop of grapes, and old-timers claim it’s the vines reacting to a reduction of irrigation water.

  Which brings me to the realization that my vines and trees and irrigation practices are abnormal to the region. There are no natural survival mechanisms triggered on my farm. Everything I do is manipulation. I can’t expect a miraculous, truly natural farming system to automatically replace my old system. Wildflowers won’t just grow when I start farming naturally. Likewise, my farm won’t “naturally” solve its problems without my intervention.

  When human beings first began to take care of a plant food source, instead of simply foraging and gathering, when a clan started tending its first berry patch, when farming was born, so was the manipulation of nature. Farmers all manipulate nature, some more than others. And some practices are more destructive than others. I may believe I can fool mother nature, but it’s more as if she lets me get away with a few things. She’ll naturally take care of her wildflowers and let me struggle with growing peaches and grapes in a desert.

  THE YOUNG MAN had a bunch of wildflowers in his hand when I drove up. Golden poppies ringed his bouquet, lavender lupines stood erect in the center, with wild baby’s breath and black-eyed Susans filling the rest. Next to his car were a box and some paper files. He proudly showed me his collection. He had just divided a dozen types of wildflowers and pressed them for his semester assignment.

  “Your professor should be impressed. He’ll think you hiked miles in the foothills for such a diverse collection,” I said.

  “I was lucky to find all of them here,” he answered.

  He wrapped his bouquet in newspaper, then began to gather the rest of his material. Even as he rolled down his car window to say goodbye, I kept waiting for him to say something about all the flowers he took from my vineyard. He waved and drove down the road, a probable A on his semester project sitting in the box next to him.

  I stood motionless, dumbfounded and stunned. Didn’t that boy wander through my fields? Didn’t he know this land belonged to someone? Didn’t he know someone planted and tended these lush cover crops? Didn’t he just steal a hoard of flowers from my farm?

  I tal
ked with Marcy about my anger. She listened and then laughed.

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” she said. “The boy’s class assignment was to gather a wildflower collection, and he did just that…. Remember, he found a field of ‘wi-ii-ld’ flowers.”

  ONE DAY MY neighbor asked me about my natural farming. For years he’s driven by every day and watched my cover crops and “wild” farming methods. He asked about the wildflowers first.

  “They’re pretty,” I commented.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding, “Ann”—his wife—“keeps reminding me.”

  “It’s taken awhile but they’ve finally established themselves,” I said.

  “You got them scattered all over.”

  “It’s been awhile since I planted them.”

  “Wait.” He perked up. “You mean you planted them?”

  “Oh, yeah. It wasn’t too hard. The seed was expensive, about twenty-five dollars a pound, but you get tens of thousands of seeds for that price.”

  He wasn’t listening to my numbers. “You actually planted them?” he repeated.

  “I broadcast them by hand, here and there.”

  “You mean, they didn’t just start growing?”

  I paused, unsure about his question. “Well, they took awhile to get established, the drought probably slowed them down.” We both paused, and I sensed we were talking about two different things.

  He turned as we heard Ann drive up the road. She pulled over and told me how pretty the wildflowers were.

  “Thanks. I’ll try planting some over near your driveway.”

  “You mean you plant them?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Oh.” She smiled and repeated how much she liked passing them each day and drove off.

  I repeated the conversation with Marcy that evening and she helped me clarify it. “They think the wildflowers just started growing once you began to farm naturally.”

  “They don’t really believe that,” I growled.

  “Sure. Think about it. Natural farming and wildflowers, they’re supposed to go together.”

  “You mean someone thinks that just because you start farming naturally, all the wonderful wildflowers automatically and magically grow, as if they’ve been dormant all these years just waiting for the day you stop using herbicides or chemicals? That day comes and magically the flowers appear?”

  Marcy nodded her head, smiled, and said, “Well, didn’t they?”

  chapter two

  workers of the land

  Morning Porches

  From our porch I can survey the farm.

  In front of our house live the oldest living creatures in the area, eighty-five-year-old grapevines with gnarled and twisted trunks, still producing tons of grapes despite their age. As the morning sun warms the air, the shoots of those old vines stretch to bathe new leaves in the light of day.

  The dew sparkles in the early glow and I make plans. My list includes farmwork, family schedules, and things I hope to think about during the day. Farmwork provides many opportunities for contemplation, escapes from the tedious physical pace. I do my best thinking while shoveling weeds or driving a tractor.

  I gaze at the fields and see the fragile vine shoots of early spring growth. They wave gently as if to remind me that they will soon require water. The peach blossoms are falling, the delicate pink petals dried and withered. Farmers call this period when the birth of the peach becomes visible “fruit set.” Within weeks the peaches will double and triple in size and require hand thinning. I look to the west and monitor an advancing Pacific storm. Rain would save an irrigation but also create an ideal environment for mildew on my grapes and brown rot spores on my peaches.

  From the porch I survey the years of work that contributed to the landscape before me. I scan the rise in the land to the southwest, an area that was once a small hill. Dad leveled the knoll but only after a year of removing hardpan rocks from the ground, stone after stone, load after load. Now there stands a healthy vineyard.

  I recall the old red barn. The farmer before us had a small dairy and stored hay in that barn. But our forklift couldn’t fit beneath the rafters, so Dad and I replaced it a few years ago with a new fourteen-foot-high pole shed. (I saved the cement slab that was once the floor of the milking parlor. Later I buried chunks of that concrete beneath the footings of my new porch addition.)

  I can see my Sun Crest peaches. Every year more and more branches die from old age and wood borers. When I cut them out, the trees look funny, like a five-year-old’s smile that’s missing some teeth. I wonder if a new generation of healthy shoots will replace the lost wood.

  My early morning view from the porch helps place me, a daily reminder of where I am. As I finish my cup of coffee and my plans for the day, I think of my family’s past, the history of this valley, and the stories about these vineyards and orchards. In the process of exploring the landscape I discover a little bit more of who I am.

  One Hundred Years of Farming

  I’m a third-generation Japanese American farmer but am quite sure my lineage in agriculture dates back centuries. The Masumotos are from a solid peasant stock out of Kumamoto, Japan, rice farmers with not even a hint of samurai blood.

  My grandparents journeyed from Japan to farm in California. They spoke Japanese instead of English or Spanish or German. They were Buddhists instead of Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. They came in 1898 and 1917 instead of the late 1700s or early 1800s. They sailed east instead of west, yet their voyage was similar to those of hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who crossed an ocean to the land of opportunity.

  I farm the land my father and mother farmed, land where my grandparents probably labored as farm workers. My family is typical of the majority of farm families in California. We come from foreign soils to settle and work lands that have a relatively short history of cultivation. I know well the family who owned our farm before the Masumotos and can talk to some of the first pioneer farmers in the area. Agriculture in California is only a hundred years old.

  Being only a hundred has its advantages. There is little history about how things were done. Even the old-timers were renegades of sorts. That’s why they settled here, leaving some other place, pulling up roots, replanting themselves. They broke old traditions to establish new ones in California.

  If there is any tradition in California, it is a tradition of innovational change. Our agriculture is founded on change, it grew and prospered with change, and it is banking on staying on the cutting edge. It is a precarious position. I can’t very often say, “What worked for my father and his father will work for me.” It’s more like, “What worked a few years ago may still work today…but don’t plan on its working tomorrow.” I never met a farmer who wasn’t trying something new to make work easier or to improve his land. All of which doesn’t bode well for old-fashioned peaches.

  During my college years at Berkeley, I’d occasionally visit home, finding comfort in the stability of life on the farm. Orchards and vineyards appeared the same, the farm seemed to remain just as I had left it. I was wrong, though, blinded by the naive perspective of the visitor.

  In the last century, change in American agriculture was like a revolution, toppling old structures with new technologies, creating new products, new markets, and new farms. These forces pulled farmers along, some of us kicking and screaming, but innovation became the buzzword for success and survival.

  My peaches are part of that cycle of change. They are part of a tradition on our farm, they hold meaning for my family. But the pressures for progress challenge that meaning. Am I overly sentimental about these peaches? How long do I cling to old definitions of quality? Does old also imply obsolete? I feel like an immigrant: the ways of the old country pull at me, while the opportunities of a new land beckon. My peaches are like the traditions of the homeland—you don’t simply leave them behind, you carry them with you like historical baggage.
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br />   We farmers in California celebrate our one hundredth birthday. Like generations before me, I continue to dream about the old and the new, living and working in a rich culture of tradition and change. Perhaps my questions are not that different from the ones my grandparents asked when they pursued a new life on the edge of a continent.

  Squatting with Farmworkers

  I cannot farm without farmworkers. My peaches and grapes demand an army of seasonal help. Throughout my farm’s history wave after wave of laborers have journeyed here; different people from different lands have worked these fields.

  I sometimes picture my farm as a battlefield with troops of people struggling with nature in a hundred-year war. Germans, Italians, Chinese and Japanese, Armenians, Filipinos, and Mexicans—their voices have sounded over this farm, their families have walked these rows. I picture them with hats pulled below their eyebrows casting a dark shadow on their faces. Over the decades their uniforms look alike: old pale shirts relegated to the fields, odd assortments of pants, some baggy and torn, others snug with faded colors from countless washings. Their skin is dark from the sun. Few are heavy or overweight, for field work is merciless on the unfit. They share a ghostly look, part of the hidden world of farm laborers who have brought nourishment to the nation’s tables for generations.

  I visit a nearby country cemetery and read the names on the headstones: Green, Brisco, Filgas, Bagdasarian, Silvas, Carrillo; some stones with Chinese characters scratched in cement and others with no name, only a number—8-14. I imagine these people in the fields, filled with hope and arriving with strong backs. They worked for low wages and helped create a green oasis in this desert landscape. My grandparents were part of the Japanese wave of immigrants at the beginning of this century. Now the majority of farm laborers are from Mexico or are Mexican Americans.

  Some farmworkers are employed full time and earn good wages. Most arrive with the spring work and summer harvests; then, as the leaves turn autumn colors, they become invisible again. The work is hard and the wages low but these folks need jobs.