The Future of Farming
A farm in Petaluma is producing the best tasting food imaginable, all while turning the land into a climate fighting resource.
My interest in sustainable farming started with a single tangerine. I was on a field trip in Napa, California to visit a small organic farm in Petaluma run by a cantankerous genius named Bob Cannard.
If concepts like compost tea or ethical grazing have made their way into your sustainability lexicon, it is in no small part thanks to Bob. He bought the patch of land that hosts the Greenstring Farm 40 years ago, when it was a dry, carbon deficient, unloved patch of dirt that was reminiscent of many farms across the country.
Bob took us through beautiful fields of broccoli surrounded by crawling vines with purple flowers, rows of sky high leeks snuggled into yellow mustard seed, and lettuce fields where fruit trees sprung up at random. Chickens and goats roamed and grazed free through orchard trees bursting with bright orange tangerines and peach blossoms. My imagining of what food could be changed when Bob handed me one of those tough skinned fruits. I peeled back its orange shell, sending a spray of orange mist into the air with each peel, and bit into the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I can remember it even now, three years later, a euphoric and refreshing sweetness that is nearly indescribable and was unidentifiable in my previous context for what an orange can taste like.
Our current food system is broken. An estimated 821 million people are currently undernourished, 151 million children under five are stunted, 613 million women and girls aged 15 to 49 suffer from iron deficiency, and 2 billion adults are overweight or obese, according the the UN Climate Report. All of us require tools and nourishment to express our full potential. Plants and animals help give that nourishment to us, and we have an obligation to give it back to them. According to Bob Cannard, it all starts with the soil.
The transformation of Greenstring Farm is down to Bob and his business partner Fred Cline, and their commitment to developing new innovation in the field of Regenerative Agriculture.
Regenerative Agriculture is a way of farming that prioritizes growing food the way it was meant to be grown, with minimal disruption to the soil, maximum crop diversity, keeping the soil covered with a strong root system across farming land, maintaining living root in all land year round, and integrating livestock into the farming system.
In my talk with Bob Cannard, which occurred over speaker phone while he was watering beet roots, he highlighted some of the most important techniques involved in developing an enriching farming ecosystem, and how he uses them on his farm. "The soil that you're growing from has to have all the opportunities for the physical material you want to express in the crop."
Bob Cannard began adding these minerals back to his soils with his signature compost tea, a prime ingredient for which is the plant aphrodisiac - oyster shells. Bob crushes up oyster shells and feeds them to his soil, which begins a fascinating process in the soil's most microscopic levels.
Researchers in 2015 found that 3.5 billion people across the globe are at risk of calcium deficiency. The crushed oyster shells contain high levels of calcium carbonate accumulated by the oysters through their lifetimes. Bacteria in the soil consume the calcium from the shells and convert it into organic material through their waste, which allows the plants to absorb it through their roots. This process enables bacteria in the soil to enrich the plant with calcium while the plant sustains the bacteria with its sugars. It's the kind of satisfying, thoughtful, closed loop ecosystem that characterizes the regenerative techniques taken to their fullest potential at Greenstring Farm.
Bob Cannard also adds a blend of crushed granite to the oyster shells in his compost tea. He was motivated by the ancient pattern of returning to the sites of major volcanic eruptions immediately after the disaster in order to plant gardens that will be enriched by the volcanic ash.
"Volcanic ash contains all of the minerals of Mother Earth in highly, highly available forms, quickly cooled available forms, from cinder ash and fly ash. The best quick cooled stuff that comes right out of the big Mother Earth Blender in liquid form and cools very quickly so it consolidates into like to like tight bonds like you might find in granite."
Bob Cannard's commitment to enriching the soil is about more than just producing the best tasting and most nutrient dense produce, it's also about mitigating the effects of food production on the earth. According to a report by the European Environment Agency, agriculture accounts for 1/5th of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon is released into the air by overly tilled soil, nitrous oxide is a by-product of the nitrogen based fertilizers used even on organic farms, and farming livestock contributes to deforestation and methane gas emissions.
The climate is fighting back. Climate change is responsible for droughts, floods, global warming, and other unpredictable weather patterns that jeopardize our current system of food production. We are already seeing patterns of migration associated with the effects of the climate on farming, with migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras increasing massively after a series of bizarre droughts associated with climate change, as reported by the UN Climate Report. This isn't a far removed problem, it's already reaching the American Midwest - Nebraska lost $440 million in cattle due to heavy rains in 2018 as reported by Yale Climate Connections.
Unlike other climate anxiety inducing dilemmas, it isn't a hopeless wait for new innovations - there are people developing and using techniques that return nutrients back into the land, producing higher quality food and allowing the land we grow our food on to become a carbon sink. It's a fascinating field that has some of the most underrated scientific minds developing new techniques everyday. Bob is one of those minds inspiring a new generation of farmers who understand that, for the same reason that we cannot thrive in boring, unfulfilling, restrictive environments, plants can't either.
A sustainably farmed future is one where farms are not separated from human centers, but incorporated into them, where food can be produced locally and humans can take their part in shaping the land instead of visiting it on the weekends for careful hikes on marked trails. In the words of Bob Cannard, "You don't have to live on a farm [to eat sustainably], but you do have to visit one."
