Showing state legislators around the farm
Photo by Christine La Photography
Most days on the farm it is just the two of us on the farm working, but last Thursday we had around 40 people come to the farm for a tour.
Community Alliance with Family Farmers brought a group of members of the state legislature and their staff to the farm for a tour to see first-hand what we are doing and how policies impact us.
It was a very fun cloudy and windy afternoon with a little bit of rain and after everyone left the clouds cleared up.
CAFF does a lot of work with farmers and also plays a large role in advocating for farms like ours at the statehouse with the policy work they do.
Many of the legislators voting on bills and policies are from cities and don’t have much experience with farming so it helps them when they get to visit farms that are not just massive monoculture ones.
The local representatives, Cecilia Aguiar-Curry and Christopher Cabaldon, were both in attendance co-hosting the event with us and CAFF.
We also had the Director of the Department of Conservation, Secretary of the California EPA and a board member of the State Water Board also attend the tour.
The conversation centered around supporting local food systems and how the changes taking place are affecting the resilience of it.
There are constantly many challenges affecting farms ability to grow food, some of which they have more control over, and in the last couple of years the challenges have been intensified so much that people outside of farming are more aware of them.
Agriculture is the largest economic sector in the state and without everyone working together there will be significant obstacles that will only get larger over time.
Every farmer is being affected by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act which was passed in 2014 to help protect groundwater resources for the long term. Many counties are pulling up way more water from the ground than they should and depleting the aquifer faster than it can be replenished.
Fortunately Solano County currently has sustainable groundwater and the biggest reason for that is Lake Berryessa. Farms use a large portion of the water allocated from the lake as well as the cities in the county and Travis Air Force Base.
We don’t have access to that water that is delivered through a system of canals but the farms that do are able to use it instead of drilling deep wells and depleting the aquifer.
The State Water Board has a proposal they put out that would effectively reduce the amount of water farmers and cities can use from Lake Berryessa by 75 percent. That would lead to many farms shutting up shop and their fields bare. If they continued farming they would be digging much deeper wells to water their fields and make the groundwater unsustainable.
Hopefully this proposal does not go any further with members of the water board and state legislators seeing what the effect this would have on farmers and how significantly it would reduce the resiliency of the local food system.
It has been a very weird week of weather on the farm with a little bit of rain and then sunny skies and then some more rain and windy. We’ve been getting everything we can prepped in the field and all of the spring veggies weeded as they are growing so much.
Today we are planting our next round of tomatoes along with more lettuce and some peppers, eggplant and basil. We also seeded green beans, melons and watermelons in the field with lots more summer veggies to direct seed in the coming weeks.
We are getting closer to the end of the citrus season and the trees are already starting to blossom for next winter’s harvest. Seeing so many blossoms on the trees is very exciting even if only a tiny fraction of them will turn into fruit.
