Eatwell Farm News

California Humane Farming Initiative

I am supporting the California Humane Society in promoting this initiative in the November ballot. On Tuesday Jose, the Eatwell farm foreman, was interviewed for channel 19 in Sacramento. They saw how we keep our chickens pastured on alfalfa.

The initiative is very simple, it would ban crates and cages that confine animals to such an extent that they cannot move or stretch their wings.

It is my belief that if we choose to eat animal products as part of our diet then we have to take responsibility for their welfare. As a farmer I do my best to respect and allow the chickens to live as close to a natural life as possible. You can taste the difference.

Our chickens eat more and they currently are fed 100% organic feed The extra labor of taking care of them in the field also adds to the cost. Our eggs are not cheap, they reflect the real cost of an egg. Eggs produced in factory farms where the chickens are caged are cheap. You are not paying the cost associated with the cruelty, the chicken is.

Who is responsible? I believe we all are. The farmer would not produce the eggs if no one bought them. If we all knew how these eggs are produced you would most likely not buy them. As a society we have a duty to remove cruelty wherever we find it.

I urge you to support the initiative but the ultimate power you have is the dollar in your pocket. Spend it wisely.
Picture copyright Art Siegel.

A Real Farmer

I am a truck farmer and it is a very different world growing and handling a wheat crop. We are expecting a reasonable crop now we have to plan the harvest and storage of the crop.

We need about 50 tons of wheat to feed the chickens for a year. I would also like to experiment with making flour to put in our Eatwell Boxes and sell at the farmers market. To store the crop we are installing 3 feed towers. Each will hold around 20 tons and they are 20 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter. The concrete foundations have to be heavy and strong. We may have gone a little over the top by having 12 inch deep concrete with ½” rebar but better to be safe than sorry. Fernando, Roberto and Arturo poured the three pads last Saturday morning. I bought a concrete mixer that fits on the back of the tractor as it will likely prove useful around the farm for other jobs. Mixing so much concrete (14 yards) was hard work but took less time than we expected.

The feed towers will arrive in a couple of weeks when the concrete has had time to cure. I have also placed an order for an auger that will lift the wheat up to 21 feet high to fill the bins. The grain auger is made in Canada but will be shipped to us from the ‘local’ dealer in Washington State.

The combine harvester will need to dump the wheat into a trailer that will then feed into the auger. I still need to find an appropriate trailer.

Watch this space for more on my journey to becoming a real farmer.

Around the Farm

Work continues at a pace at this time of the year. Having a second large tractor has helped many times. Roberto is cultivating newly germinated peas in the foreground. Jose is picking up freshly harvested leek at the far end of the field.
The farm crew works six days a week. The chickens need care every day so Agustin covers for Nikko on Saturday, his day off. We try not to work seven days a week but sometimes it does happen. Our farm is busy 50 weeks of the year so we do not have any winter 'down time' like farmers in many other parts of the country have. We have to pace ourselves so that we do not burn out.
I hope you will agree that the farm is looking great thanks to the hard work of everyone at Eatwell.

The Back Forty... our wheat crop

Several farmers have taken an interest in the forty acres of wheat we have planted on a neighbors field. We are converting the field to organic production and for the first crop decided to grow wheat. The crop last four years was alfalfa which means that the ground was fertile and not likely to have too many weeds. Our friends Chip and Rachel who grow organic rice near Arbuckle checked it out. Chip, who is a fourth generation California farmer on the same farm, counted the rows of wheat berries on several ears. He counted 19 and pronounced a fifty sack crop. I will translate... A sack weighs 100lbs and he means fifty sacks to the acre, 5,000 lbs or 2.5 Tons on 40 acres means we are likely to harvest up to 100 tons.
We need about 50 tons for the chickens which we have to store on the farm.  On Tuesday I ordered 3  storage bins that each hold about 15 tons. We have to lay the concrete for these bins and arrange an elevator to lift the crop into the bins. This will take some work if we have to have it ready for an anticipated June 1 harvest.

Spuds

Last Saturday and Sunday were cold nights and mornings here on the farm. Jose was on frost duty Sunday night and he had to turn on the sprinkler lines at 1.30am. We only have the capacity at present to run three lines which was enough for the majority of the tomatoes and the peppers and eggplants. Luckily the potatoes came through the frost well and appear to be undamaged. Some tomatoes that were not able to be covered by the sprinkler lines do look a little unhappy but they will survive.
We expect to start harvesting potatoes at the end of May.

Preparing to Plant Lavender

Roberto has been busy on his new tractor ever since it stopped raining in late February. These beds will be planted with lavender in the next two weeks. Last year these were our strawberry beds. Over the winter the chickens eat the plants and scratched through the straw between the rows. The field should be very fertile. He has been cultivating every week to remove any weed growth. It is much better to let the beds sit for a while and remove the worst of the perennial weeds with cultivation. Next we will insert the drip lines into the beds and then plant.

Strawberries

We are picking strawberries for our boxes and the Saturday Market now. We have three varieties; seascape, Camarosa and Albion. I ordered next years plants back in November and I am glad I did as the nursery is sold out of our main varieties. Next year we will mainly grow Albion. This is a relatively new variety and has shown great promise in our hot climate. We will be shading it this summer in the hopes that we can continue picking all summer long.

Creme brulee

It must have been a bizarre site to see a farmer making creme brulee at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco last Saturday. I was asked to make something from what we grow on the farm. Eggs are an important crop at eatwell not only for the joy they bring us but for the fertility the chickens leave behind on the farm.
I have to admit that I have had a creme brulee coach, Lorraine who became my fiancee just a few weeks ago. She is a great cook. We have a deal; I grow it, she cooks it. We are both very happy.

The Fine Art of Sowing Spinach

Each week our tractor driver, Roberto, and I walk the fields. Roberto planted the above beds of spinach in February. We need to make sure that we seed the correct amount of plants in each bed. If we plant too many and they all germinate, there will not be enough nutrients from the compost in the soil for them to grow.
The seeds germinate well in the late fall, as the soil is still warm from the summer heat and the air is cold. In February the air may be warm, but the soil is still cold. This leads to lower germination rates. Roberto and I recently discussed how we need to vary the number of seeds we sow in a bed. We need to pay particular attention to how warm the soil is—even if the air is no longer cold. We have three beds of spinach that were sown in early December at our regular rate, and every one germinated. We cannot pick them, as they are too crowded and have a yellow tinge on the leaves from scrambling for the available nutrients. Every season is different and we learn more every year.

Introducing... Ricardo

Ricardo is the youngest member of the farm crew. This is his third summer on the farm. He is a valuable member of the crew who plants and picks the crops. He turns his hand to most things and this winter spent some time with Agustin (behind him in the picture) building chicken palace #4. One of the challenges of working on a farm such as ours is that there are so many different jobs, tasks and skills required. It makes it interesting for those that prefer work like this.
Ricardo is the son of Nicco who is in charge of the chickens.