Live Earth Farm Nwsltr 2008

Greetings from Farmer Tom
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I’m glad no one had a camera handy to catch me last week in what I would in hindsight call an act of entertaining foolishness. As I was riding my bike past the apricot orchard I spotted this young deer munching away on the trees' succulent branches. I don't know what triggered it, but I jumped off the bike and started chasing it as if driven by some primitive hunting instinct. The furry antlered young buck stood still for a moment, as though astonished by my behavior, then bounded away effortlessly; meanwhile I stumbled over a dirt clod and fell to the ground. Sitting there under an apricot tree I had to laugh at myself. My only thought at that moment had been to stop this ‘uninvited guest’ from munching on our crops. All tolerance – thoughts of coexistence or deeper sense of interdependence – had just evaporated. My ‘generosity’ in terms of sharing the bounty of our fields with other beings had reached the saturation point. Earlier I’d noticed that gophers had been particularly busy eating entire rows of developing tomato plants; meanwhile on the other side of the strawberry patch our goats had been escaping through some hole in their fence and munching on the young trees we planted just this spring, as well as stripping leaves off the first succulent raspberry shoots.

Fundamentally I consider myself to be someone who strives to farm in an environment where cultivated fields can exist side by side with areas of wilderness. I enjoy being able to step from the more controlled and production-oriented farm fields into the wilder haunts of the woods. Most of our fields are bordered either by woodlands (oak or redwood), riparian habitats (along the banks of small ponds and seasonal streams), or thick hedgerows filled with a diversity of native vegetation. Many species, both vertebrate and invertebrate, have evolved in these wilder habitats and consider them home, so it is hard at times to distinguish who is pest and who is guest. If we turn the table for a moment and that deer had its say, I probably wouldn't stand much of a chance in an argument over who is guest and who is pest. I am the recent arrival – raised in Latin America by European parents, a city kid turned farmer – so when it comes to who has the seniority claim on this piece of land I am by far more invasive than native.

Weeds are the exception, the one place where I make no excuse for losing my mostly peaceable and coexistent nature as an organic farmer. Controlling the wilderness of weeds that compete with our crops sometimes seems like a hopeless task. No organic control practice seems ‘controlling’ enough. Just last week I had to throw in the towel, when a spring sown crop of carrots were so thick with weeds that it took eight of us an hour to harvest 60 bunches. We gave up and plowed them under. Remember just two weeks ago when I talked about how timing is everything when it comes to weeding? Well between the frost then the heat wave then the fire, this planting of carrots did not get weeded at the correct moment. Weeding reminds me of Sisyphus, the Greek mythic figure that endlessly attempts to push a rock uphill. In the clarity of hindsight I should have either planted these carrots where the soil wasn't so heavy, or waited to plant them until after having removed the first flush of weeds.

If walking into the wilder corners of the farm doesn't help me shed my MacGregor-like worry though (about protecting every crop we grow from some sort of pest or disease), then spending time with the many children visiting us every week does. Their joyous, spontaneous and creative interaction with the farm never fails to shine a more playful perspective on that hopeless image of Sisyphus. It reminds me of the Buddhist teaching about how everything changes all the time, and that I must embrace the fact that farming is one of stewardship and not ownership of the earth.

- Tom
children on the farm