Did you ever manage to see The Biggest Little Farm? It’s a lovely movie, filled with beautiful photography and the picturesque processes of building an organic farm in the Southern California foothills. It covers seven years in the life of this particular farm and documents its failures and successes. I loved the film, and have recommended it to many people.
But just the other day, I received the monthly newsletter from Ruby Blume of the Institute for Urban Homesteading; it gave me a different view of the movie. A little history - Ruby was instrumental in starting the urban farm movement in Oakland, and helping others to learn how to grow food, preserve it, keep small livestock and bees, and craft items for the home. In the last few years, urban farming in Oakland and Berkeley has become almost de rigueur, and Ruby herself moved to Oregon a couple of years ago to farm a larger property and raise sheep. The Institute still offers classes, but it’s not nearly the clearinghouse it was before, for many reasons (you can learn on YouTube, there are lots of places that teach this stuff now, Ruby is no longer in the area and rather out of touch with what the ‘scene’ has become), but during its heyday it was a great source of knowledge and information. I still get Ruby’s newsletter because I like to read about what she’s accomplishing on a larger scale in Oregon (and allow myself to dream of something similar), and her most recent newsletter had a paragraph that I felt I should share here, with Ruby’s permission (which she kindly granted). Since I’ve been doing a lot of lecturing at Merritt, and giving a lot of farm tours here on the property, I have a lot of new readers who may have a fairly idealistic view of the whole process. The Biggest Little Farm was a very romantic view of farming, and I certainly don’t want to give anyone a false impression of what farming is truly like. Hence, I’ve copied Ruby’s paragraph here, so that you can get a more realistic picture. (Full disclosure - we’ve been part of the Institute’s Urban Farm Tour in the past, and have taken many classes with Ruby.)
“When I was working on the farm tour, I gathered with the featured farmers and several told me about the recent movie The Biggest Little Farm. “You will LOVE it,” they said. I had my doubts, but one rainy night in December I watched it with my farm partner. We could barely make it through the film. I understand that most people will find this movie inspiring and uplifting, but for me it was infuriatingly idealistic, leaving so many gaps in the story of what farming actually requires. “We had some generous funders.” No doubt. The property alone cost $11M. You read right. Eleven Million Dollars. This is more than 20 times what I had to invest. And how much additional capital did it require to construct barns, sheds, corrals and coops, buy a stable of shiny new farm machines (30-50K each), install miles of fences and irrigation lines, reconstruct a pond, rip out 55 acres of mature orchard, completely terrace and keyline those same acres and plant thousands of fruit trees? How did they pay for the farm, the labor, the commercial scale worm composting and compost tea systems, the livestock and guardian dogs? How long did it take to get marketable crops and what did they live on and pay their farm workers until then? Could they have made it happen without their Hollywood investors? They did not show the backbreaking daily work required or demonstrate that permaculture/biodynamic farming is economically sustainable. We did some math and came up with a conservative estimate of $20 million dollars for their project. What couldn’t any of us do with that much cash in hand? While I agree with the core message of the movie (SOIL is LIFE! ), there is a reason most farmers work on an industrial level: the farmer has to make a living. Farm reality is that we cannot just do whatever we want and farm decisions are almost always dictated by the limitations of budget. Most small-scale farmers also work off the farm in order to pay for the farm. So while it is great that they are now selling 55,000 pounds of fruit a year and employing 60 workers, we greatly doubt they could have done this without that big start-up nut, or that they could pay back that money of they had to. Here on Ferry Road, we struggle to pay our basic bills and to afford the materials to improve our infrastructure. We do not have the luxury of purchasing a single tractor or hiring a single farm hand, let alone a stable of each. We are lucky to be able to defray some of the cost of our farming with what we produce. I am not angry or jealous of the gap. I love the agrarian life, the critters, the manure, the clean air, the quiet nights and the gorgeous food we produce for ourselves with some extra to share. But what I would LOVE to see is a film that promotes organic/holistic farming with a realistic budget and practical solutions for mid-to-low income folks who would like to return to the land. Now THAT would be inspiring.”
We have two new additions at Poppy Corners. One is this bird feeder, attached underneath the chicken coop roof. One of the things I dislike about bird feeders is that the fallen seeds sprout and become a mess to dig up. Attaching it in the chicken run means that the chickens clean up any fallen seed, which solves that problem.
But the bird feeder is solving a bigger problem. Here’s what’s been happening: In the past few months, I’ve noticed that anywhere I’ve put seeds in the North Garden, nothing grows. Well that’s not exactly true. In beds where there is row cover (agribon), the seeds germinate fine and grow fine, except along the edges of the beds where the agribon blows in the wind. Likewise, anywhere uncovered, no germination. Then I started noticing flocks of birds in my beds and borders, eating the seeds. This is something they’ve never done before. Any pea seed I planted, dug up and eaten by birds. Any flower seed, likewise eaten. No plants on the ends of the covered beds where the agribon doesn’t quite cover - seeds eaten. The birds are eating all the seeds. Only in the North Garden where the chicken coop is. So I thought and I thought and I thought - why are birds eating everything, only this year? Why not other years?
Then it hit me. In September, our next-door neighbors (who’ve lived here since the neighborhood was built in the late 40’s) suddenly moved into a retirement home in the Sierra foothills. These neighbors had seven or eight birdfeeders in their yard, just on the other side of the fence, in the big Japanese pine. She also used to put out peanuts for the squirrels and jays. But since she’s been gone, the feeders have been empty. No one has moved in yet, and the caretakers of the house haven’t noticed (or don’t care about) the feeders. All these birds, who for generations had eaten well in Wes and Lavelle’s yard, now had no food. In winter. And I just finally cut down the last of the seed pods on my property. So of course they are eating anything they can find! They are simply desperate for food! I reasoned that if we provide them with that food, they’ll maybe stop eating all my seeds that I want to grow up into big plants. It’s worth a shot anyway!
image credit: Stark Bros
The second new thing is a mulberry tree. In November, I chopped down our old, diseased peach tree with my trusty hatchet and saw. We moved the greenhouse into that space, and then Tom put in a tall post on which to hang our sun sail and some outdoor lights, and then I planted a Pakistan mulberry tree near there. Peaches require a lot of inputs to grow and thrive; mulberries do not. Peaches also require a lot of water; mulberries do not. A Pakistan mulberry specifically is well-suited to heat and drought. Here is the blurb about it on Stark Bros: “An exotic variety with outstanding durability. This vigorous and productive tree yields large and firm, oblong fruit. These ruby red-purple mulberries have sweet, raspberry-like flavor with low acidity that is good for fresh eating or making cobblers. As a bonus, the fruit juice does not stain! Developed in Islamabad, Pakistan, it is very tolerant of heat, humidity, sun, droughts and poor soil. Disease-resistant. Matures to be 30-40' tall. Ripens April through mid-summer. Self-pollinating. Morus alba x M. rubra” I will not let it grow THAT tall, I will keep it under 8 feet, so that picking the fruit is easy. Also, there will be so much of it that I will not miss any of the birds take their share. We’re excited to have another kind of fruit on the homestead, though we will miss our peach tree.