June 14, 2010: Global
Farming Where the Land Is Dry and the Air Is Thin
Is producing local food in the mountains possible?
West of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, coastal California is a hotbed of alternative agriculture. Eating locally is easy enough where the balmy climate affords a year-round growing season. Ironically, the same farms featured as local growers in a San Francisco market are featured in my mother’s New Jersey grocery store as “California Fresh.”
“That’s because it snows in New Jersey,” explained my ever-patient mother.
This I already knew, having grown up on the East Coast. I moved to Santa Cruz, California in 2006 to pursue a graduate degree in Agroecology. Living one block from the beach had its perks, and Santa Cruz has great food. I could buy the same head of lettuce as my mom; only mine was purchased on-farm instead of shipped 3,000 miles. But the truth of the matter is that I’m a mountain person, and any free moment I had between sampling soil and analyzing data, I was off to the Sierra Nevadas. I like rock climbing, mountaineering, and jumping into ice-cold high altitude lakes, all activities more conducive to eating energy bars than sustainably produced fresh foods.
I was beginning to feel like Jekyll and Hyde, balancing incompatible passions for agriculture and mountains. Graduate school had me severely burnt out. I was thinking of dropping out and decided to take a break from it all in the high country. Mammoth Lakes, California at 8,000 feet became my home last June. No agriculture in the Eastern Sierra, I thought. I won’t even be reminded of my research.
So when my friend Amy asked if I would play fiddle for the local farmers’ market my first week in town, I was surprised, shocked even, to see the familiar tables of tomatoes, kale, and lettuce. I can think of a few places more unlikely than Mammoth Lakes to have a farmers’ market. The moon comes to mind.
With more annual snowfall than rainfall, the landscape is dry and dusty. What little water exists is sucked south by thirsty cities like Los Angeles. The growing season is shorter than the ski season, and the economy is certainly more geared towards the ladder. The soil is rocky. The predators include deer, squirrels, rabbits, and of course bears.
“Who are these people and how are they farming out here?” I asked my Amy. She shrugged, so notebook in hand, I asked for interviews with every farmer at the market. What ensued was an adventure down dirt roads to surprisingly fertile farms. Each farm I visited had a unique story, and from nocturnal guard dogs to booze production, I had my eyes opened to a very different kind of agriculture.
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“Wind,” says Joel, “is our greatest challenge.” Joel and his wife, Kristi, farm at 6,800 feet in Mono County where they can count on 80 days of frost-free weather per year. During the winter deep snow makes skiing to the highway the only means to get to town. But during the summer a small creek and limited groundwater make farming a possibility. Joel and Kristi tried fruit trees and vegetables, but when the wind knocked the peaches right off the branches, they looked to a hardier agricultural species, animals. With a sophisticated system of solar-powered electric fences and rotating pens, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens live in peaceful co-existence on the homestead. Local consumers are thrilled to have “clean meat,” free of chemicals and a sordid factory-farm life history. Former wildlife biologists, Joel and Kristi are learning as the farm grows. They combine farming and ecological imperatives by using the goats to graze non-native weeds in the meadows and keeping animals far from bird nesting sites. With rich compost made from animal bedding, they are able to maintain a small vegetable garden for subsistence. Extra greens are brought to market in Mammoth Lakes at 8,000 feet, where vegetables grow slower than a bonsai garden and fresh chard seems like a miracle.
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Apple Hill Ranch sits in the sagebrush desert above the town of Bishop. It appears as an oasis to visitors who flock to the park-like farm to pick fruits and vegetables. Young tree branches laden with plums hang near to the ground after having been trained to grow low with ropes. With no fruit over head-high, harvesting can be done without a ladder, which is essential for a farm where every item is on the pick-your-own menu. Tomatoes, basil, squash, grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, and figs all grow within easy reach of anyone shopping the aisles of this idyllic outdoor supermarket.
Farmer Rick of Apple Hill grew up in rural Washington State during the Great Depression where he learned to live off the harvest. As an adult, he moved to the Eastern Sierra, and after years of running a gas station, he entered into the real estate world where he found himself trying to sell a degraded 20-acre parcel that had been an unofficial town dump for years. The property looked like a graveyard for old vehicles and trash, and it wouldn’t sell. Finally, driven either by an agrarian dream or just a sadistic desire for challenge, Rick and his wife, Lauralee, bought the property themselves. For two years, they lived in a trailer on the land, slowly changing the landscape by moving one boulder and rusted car at a time. Now, some 20 years later, Apple Hill Ranch is a certified organic vegetable, fruit, and egg-producing farm that residents count on for healthy food.
Adapting organic practices to the local environment was a challenge at first. Further south than Joel and Kristi, Apple Hill suffers more from hungry wild animals than from wind. Rick and Lauralee found that unconventional practices served them well. When hungry quails destroyed the harvest, they found success by leaving weeds in the fields to protect young crop seedlings. Three farm dogs patrol the premises and ward off deer at night, protecting the precious crops that draw amusement park lines at the farmer’s markets.
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Apple Hill Ranch is an inspiration for other farmers in the area. Newer farmers, like Delinda and Jeph of Banner Springs Ranch near the settlement of Benton, call Rick a mentor. At Banner Springs, water is scarcer than at Apple Hill and at 7,500 feet, the growing conditions are severe. In addition Delinda and Jeph as young farmers do not have the safety net of years of savings from a non-farm job. They have found success by protecting their lettuce and heirloom arugula from harsh sun and wind with shade structures. Using these along with seeds adapted to the cold weather they are able to extend the growing season from April to October and were the first vendors to arrive at this year’s farmer’s market. Local food stores, restaurants, and cafes beg for their fresh organic greens, and demand far exceeds production.
It is still hard for small-scale farmers to make ends meet. “We don’t externalize environmental and social costs the way some farming does. There is a huge up-front investment for us, and we have to charge more [than a conventional farm] for a head of lettuce,” says Jeph. Government loans help, but creativity and innovation are farmers’ best friends. When Delinda and Jeph started looking for a unique, perennial crop to specialize with, they looked to the natural environment for plants hardy enough to survive in the mountain ecosystem. Left behind by a legacy of moonshining miners, hops grow like weeds along the nearby waterways. Organic hops are precious to microbrewers, and domestically produced ones are hard to come by. By partnering with local brewers in the Eastern Sierra, Delinda and Jeph plan to provide the material for a new line of local wet-hop beers.
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These few brave souls of high altitude, arid land farming provide fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat to local markets, but they are not the only members of the Eastern Sierra agricultural community. Cattle dot the landscape, grazing through the sage steppe for grasses and shrubs. With landholdings much larger than the small-scale farms and gardens that supply the farmer’s markets, 120-acre plus grazing allotments are common throughout the area. Cattle live in idyllic conditions for a few years, grazing in the fresh mountain air. At the end of their lives they are sent to be fattened with grain at some of California’s most egregious feedlot operations. Grainfinishing is faster than letting cattle grow to harvestable weight on grass, but the process diminishes the healthfulness of the meat and increases the environmental impact. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), feedlots are more likely to contribute to pollution than pasture-based operations. Animal waste collects in high volumes in feedlots, leading to the potential for heavy metals, hormones, and nutrients to accumulate in the water and air at dangerous levels.
In the Eastern Sierra, ranchers could convert to pasture-based systems by adding more time to an animal’s life and slowly fattening it on grass. Beef could then be sold locally, as long as means for local slaughtering are created. A mobile slaughterhouse could solve that problem. These portable units travel from ranch to ranch and are more affordable and humane than shipping cattle for miles around the mountains. The first “mobile meat-harvesting unit” opened its doors in 2003 in Washington State, and since then ranchers from Kentucky to Oregon are reporting success with these roving slaughterhouses. Momentum is building in the Eastern Sierra for regionally produced meat, and a recent taste test revealed a consumer preference for local grass-finished beef. With consumer and producer support, local meat production may become a reality.
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After visiting the farms and ranches of the Eastern Sierra, I started to believe that local food production in unlikely places like the mountains or wintertime New Jersey was possible. I called my mother to tell her. She answered the phone with, “You’ll never believe it, but a grassfed beef ranch just opened up outside of town.”
I believed it. I also wasn’t surprised to attend a conference recently and hear a presentation from Eliot Coleman, who grows vegetables year-round in Maine. Alright, I was a little surprised, especially when I saw the pictures of his unheated greenhouses surrounded in snow.
But the truth of the matter is that creativity and innovation go a long way in agriculture. In the dry landscape of the Eastern Sierra Mountains, farmers and ranchers are growing food against the odds. And in Maine, Eliot is pulling carrots from the ground in January. That was all I really needed to see to convince me to go back to graduate school. Now I live in the mountains, study pastured poultry farms, and I’m saving up to buy some land where the air is thin and local food can still be coaxed from the ground.
