Sleep, Creep, Leap
Solving the Puzzle of Perennials
by Gowan Batist
After a decade at Fortunate Farm, I still haven’t harvested fruit from trees I’ve planted here. I grew up next to the ocean on land we shared with my grandma. She grew beautiful apple trees—whose branches I would climb—plus many colors of rose bushes and rows of raspberry vines, all without deer fencing. My best memories of childhood have the smell of sweet, slightly fermented fallen fruit and the hum of bees. I always thought I would have a garden like hers when we moved onto our own farm.
There were a few ancient, hollow-trunked apple trees that still bore fruit on the farm when we arrived, but they have mostly since blown over in winter storms. There was a red plum totally taken over by its rootstock and climbed by gorse, and a pear, which in the early days never fruited due to lack of a pollinator. Not knowing what variety it was, in about 2016 I grafted several scions I got at the Boonville Seed and Scion exchange, hoping that one of them would be compatible with the main tree. The tree did make fruit after that, but a hard woody Bosc type that never ripened. We are so close to the ocean we can hear the seals and smell the salt, so maybe that isn’t surprising.
Between the two barns on our driveway stands a towering chestnut, a Chinese hybrid, which blooms heavily every spring and makes thousands of spiny burs, filled with flat, empty nuts. Legend has it that there used to be a pollinator tree, but that it cracked in half and died long before we arrived. I planted a mix of chestnut seedlings from Burnt Ridge Nursery in 2015, and the few that survived the deer are just now beginning to flower. I don’t know if they will be able to pollinate our huge tree, but I have hope.
The reasons why we didn’t plant many perennial crops like fruit trees and cane berries are these:
1) We are very close to the ocean, with salty soil and few chilling hours, meaning many fruit trees won’t do well here.
2) Our soil is very sandy until about 3-4 feet down, where it becomes an impermeable layer of Graywacke sandstone. In winter the ground is very wet, which rots tree roots. In summer, the sandy soil drains nutrients and water a bit too well. Adding organic matter buffers both of these effects, but takes time. It’s also harder to work around perennial plants when planting cover crops, grazing sheep, and spreading mulch.
3) Our farm is absolutely covered in two very aggressive non-native plants: Holcus grass, also known as velvet grass, and gorse. Many native plants I initially transplanted were lost to overshadowing by both. Plus, working around the transplants makes dealing with the gorse much more complicated and expensive.
4) The deer. For most of the farm’s history we have not had an effective deer fence. We have mostly grown crops that are deer resistant, such as dahlias and pumpkins, and accepted some loss of our kale and beets. Attempts were made. In 2015 we valiantly encircled the growing area in 10 foot t-posts and hung black plastic deer mesh. The deer responded by sprinting straight through it, leaving vertical, deer shaped slashes. We were never able to afford metal fencing, and so after also trying ultrasound devices, motion activated sprinklers, lights that flashed at night, and lines of electric fence only to watch the deer casually stroll through it all ... we gave up. Annual crops on our farm actually coexist with the deer fairly well. Our strategy is to plant enough to handle some loss, and there’s a lot of forage for them surrounding us. So as frustrating as it could sometimes be, we adapted and accepted. Fruit trees and berries were the exception to this rule. Deer would walk right past the most succulent native forage to kill our baby trees and strip our raspberry canes. We planted them, we lost them, we relented.
Initially we ordered rootstocks wholesale, and eagerly read about varieties of scions (thin branches of fruiting wood pruned off of mother trees) available for free annually at the Seed and Scion exchange. I grafted so many baby trees, and found out that I could endlessly recycle the rootstocks. If you top graft a scion into a rootstock (basically a rooted stick) you end up with a section of rootstock stick left over from above the graft. This stick would grow new roots if planted in the right conditions, enabling a new top graft the next year. I made a 10-pack of rootstocks into about 30 small apple trees in this way, before a deer ate all my rootstocks, too.
I love grafting fruit trees. In the early days of Fortunate Farm, I envisioned rows of semi-dwarf trees acting as demarcations between growing field areas—a living hedge that could block wind, bear fruit, and feed bees. I read Mark Shepherd’s book, Restoration Agriculture, and watched videos of how he transformed his former commodity crop farm into a thriving polyculture. I even met him at a conference. I attempted to follow his method of STUN: Sheer, Total, Utter Neglect. He planted trees and other perennial shrubs, gave them very little care, and then whichever ones survived he planted more of. I tried this but had no survivors. I was prepared by his book and lectures for a low success rate, but having no successes to build off of was deeply demotivating.
Eventually I started just grafting and giving away the small trees. Nothing I did to keep them alive where I lived seemed to work—wire cages got collapsed inwards by deer. Gorse and Holcus grew up through the layers of cardboard and mulch that I surrounded them with. The cool wet coastal conditions didn’t help either. It seemed that this just wasn’t the place.
As someone who is not related to the Gowan family, but whose first name was inspired by their apple orchard, I found this deeply, and a little bitterly, ironic.
In 2022, I moved into a different house on the same farm, a shuffle that better fit the needs of our family at the time. With the move came a new yard. My partner wanted fruit trees, and optimistic that being close to the house would protect them, we planted them. Deer defoliated them nightly, despite our very loud motion-activated impact sprinkler. The deer would shred the trees while simultaneously being pelted in the butt by jets of water. We built a robust deer fence around just our yard. We were able to justify the expense of fencing the smaller area since it would also keep our child out of the shared driveway. It worked.
For the first time we have lush, abundant perennial growth. We remove gorse in this protected area by hand and mow the Holcus. So far the deer haven’t figured out how to get in. We used sheep wool covered by mulch to buffer the soil around the roots. We planted apples in the lawn, elderberries in a hedge around the fence line, citrus trees in the warm sun trap against the greenhouse, kiwis and runner beans on the frame of an old chicken coop, thornless blackberries, hedges of raspberries, blueberries, currants and strawberries, and a big stand of gangly purple tree collards that look like an illustration by Dr. Suess. Better late than never, we had the beginning of something that looked like my childhood garden.
Sleep, Creep, Leap is a well-known saying in the gardening world with no definitive attribution. It refers to how a perennial plant establishes itself. The plant focuses the first year on root system development, without much to look at above ground. In the second year some above ground growth becomes more noticeable. In the third year the plant leaps, shooting ahead. Growing is not a neat algorithmic process. It doesn’t happen at an even rate, but it gallops and rests. I can see the same truth applied to our toddler, who seems to fluctuate between rapid visible periods of growth, and more internal resting and reflecting times.
In 2025, we are in our first Leap Fall on our corner of protected farm land. In the big field, the corn and beans still get grazed, the deer taking their share and leaving enough for all of us. On our one little acre, we have an incubation space for baby and perennials alike, and both are outpacing our expectations.
We chose fall-bearing, (also called everbearing) raspberries because they don’t need a trellis. Their canes stand firm and upright on their own. Instead of bearing fruit on their second year growth like June-bearing raspberries, they bear on the green growth of the first year canes. This means they can be mowed to the ground in the fall and will still fruit again the following year. I planted the raspberries according to the layout my grandma planted hers, also within sight of the ocean in Mendocino. What I didn’t remember at the time was that she planted June-bearing types. I remember the vines as fairly spindly, with a slow rate of spread, the rows planted 6’ apart. Each fall she would clip the last year’s canes and we would haul them to the brushy compost piles at the edge of the orchard, where the land sloped down towards the headlands to the beach. Then we gently trained the green new growth onto the trellis. It was all very orderly.
Either our sheep wool and compost are a more nutritious bed than she gave her canes or the fall-bearing varieties are built differently. We planted our rows 6’ apart and now there are no rows, only a green thicket as impenetrable as a dense jungle of bamboo, in which our toddler likes to pretend to be a tiger. My grandma said she grew berries so “I’ll never lose you kids”—because we would always be found picking them. With our berries, losing the toddler is a very real possibility. We’re going to have to reconsider our bed spacing this winter, but I’m loving the wild profusion, the absolute lack of efficiency of it all, the luxury that is a human scale rather than a commercial endeavor, and our kiddo, stained with juice from head to foot, in the middle of it all. It’s hard to reconcile the tiny dormant twigs we planted a few years ago with all this verdant growth. The canes are thicker than my pointer finger and stand straight and tall, higher than my head. It seems a little implausible how much our kid has grown in the same amount of time, too.
The elderberries’ umbels, wider than my head and cream yellow, coat me in pollen when I stop to breathe them in. The elderberries we planted from 3” plugs are now taller than I am, reaching their lacy compound leaves almost to the top of the fence, and our little bare root apples are spreading and widening their branches.
I used to think I couldn’t have this here, but the truth was that I just couldn’t have this everywhere. We had to pick one sheltered spot, smaller and closer to home. We had to put the upfront expense and effort into real fencing, deep mulching, and drip watering. The results have been overwhelming, and we’re eating berries. If I’d tried to do less in my twenties, I’d probably have more done now. This farm has been a particularly strict teacher in some ways, and I’ve been a particularly slow student, but some of the lessons are finally paying off.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.
Thorny Neighbors
The Bane and the Benefits of Gorse
by Gowan Batist
Settlers came to the Mendocino Coast in the late 1800s. They grazed cattle and razed forests and drove away and murdered Native inhabitants on a scale that I still can’t fully imagine, even with as much of my life as I’ve spent studying it. With those settlers arrived seeds of gorse—stowed away in a bale of hay, or in a bag of grain, or perhaps even brought to the New World intentionally, given its cultural importance in the farming communities of the British Isles.
Caspar, where I live, became a bustling boom town of thousands. There was a railroad trestle in the woods behind our farm, and where there was once noise and motion, now there are only crowded sword ferns and the closely spaced fir trees that sprang up after deforestation. The boom turned into a bust, as they always do. The mills closed by the late 1930s, the loading docks collapsed and eroded, and the multitudes ebbed away to other booms. Left behind were a few stragglers, who were later joined by a wave of Back to the Land settlers in the 1970s.
In the midst of all this tumult, gorse was doing what it does best—growing rapidly and propagating itself wildly. If you’re not familiar, gorse is the punk rock older brother of Scotch broom. It has similar golden pea flowers, but where Scotch and French broom have long thin branches with shiny or fuzzy leaves respectively, gorse has thorns. An understatement, honestly—gorse is riddled with incredibly sharp, long, dense thorns.
Caspar is the center of what is considered a serious gorse infestation. Our farm has been involved in gorse remediation for ten years, on our own land and in surrounding landscapes. Gorse is difficult to control for many reasons, but a central challenge is its ability to adapt to almost any condition. Gorse can grow like a vine up into a tree, like a ground cover where it’s mowed (I’ve seen seeds and flowers on 3” tall plants), and into an impenetrable hedge 14’ high where it has sun and water.
It is also a very dense hard wood full of volatile oils, and as such burns incredibly hot. It can explode with heat in a fire (while also releasing explosion-propelled seeds), and the roots can burn underground. There have been several gorse fires in Caspar, both intentional and unintentional, but the fields that burned didn’t stay fallow long. Gorse seeds are fire-adapted, and they germinate quickly and well after a fire. Gorse is also allelopathic, meaning it releases chemicals that inhibit the germination and growth of other plants. Ground that has grown gorse will produce only yellow, stunted blades of grass if it produces anything, even after the gorse is all ripped out.
The traditional European culture of gorse management did not take root here. In fact, gorse is so successful in our coastal climate because it is so similar to where it originated, but it lacks any of the evolved ecological checks and balances one typically finds in a native ecosystem. Ironically, many of the strategies we use to control gorse, like mowing and burning, are also used in the UK to conserve and expand patches of gorse. Gorse sends up long, straight sprouts when the base is cut, making it suitable for coppicing. Hedges were traditionally laid with gorse this way—a branch would be partially cut through, then twisted and pinned diagonally near the ground. This process of leaning branches would be repeated around the area where a fence was wanted, and in the next few seasons, the sprouts that grow straight up would lattice weave between these diagonal posts, and then fill in with spikes.
Gorse can be a hard neighbor to live with, prone to fires, aggressively taking up space and pushing out native plants, and drawing blood from any who bump into it. (Only the brave and foolish wear sandals in Caspar.) The prickly nature of gorse has led to multiple and sustained efforts to eradicate it. The documents created by the County, State, National Resource Conservation Service, and citizens themselves, tend to be very martial—”a war on gorse” is the general idea, with the stated intention of “eradication.”
The problem with these eradication projects is that, one or two seasons after the grant money is gone, the gorse is back. People have spent their lives mowing and spraying and burning and pulling, and there have been very few permanent successes. Gorse is the kind of opportunistic plant that just loves living with humans in the disturbed soil we tend to create with our roads and houses and gardens, and most of the attention we give it just encourages it. I was once shown an example of successful gorse eradication. The result was a flat field, with 2” high grass—nothing else grew, no native shrubs or trees, no tussocky native bunch grasses. In fact, it’s highly likely the grass in the field was itself not a native. There was no gorse there, but there was also no biodiversity.
The herbicides used to control gorse are problematic bordering on horrifying. One of the herbicides is cited in ongoing litigation about the cancer it causes. Another has been linked to horrific birth defects in mammals. Persistent toxicity to bees, including ground dwelling native bees, is also of extreme concern, as well as the risk of toxins accumulating in larger mammals, including the humans and dogs who use hiking trails. We have never and will never use herbicide on the gorse on our farm, and State Parks have gone out of their way to avoid it, but I know it was sprayed on this land in the past.
A fellow farmer once told me that if we never did anything to manage the gorse, in one thousand years we would have a biodiverse and thriving native landscape. I think that’s likely accurate, as the gorse eventually thins itself out because it is a nitrogen-fixing legume that enriches the soil past the point that it thrives in it. However, in the process of letting evolution balance itself out, many native species that I love would likely be lost, and I would also be long dead. So if I’m unwilling to pave Caspar to get rid of the gorse, and also unwilling to let it have the farm... what are my options?
Over the last ten years, I have come to embrace a kind of messy conservation that believes that if a field is 10% gorse, but also has vibrant native plants growing and native animals thriving, then that’s good enough for me. The consequences of total removal are unacceptable—too much else would be destroyed in the process. Preventing the gorse from dominating everything will have to be enough.
We’ve accomplished this mainly by encouraging dense growth of grasses, and with planned grazing. We looked at how gorse is contained and managed where it actually comes from, and mulching, covering, and grazing are the preferred methods. Our sheep love to eat it, and once they’ve stripped the plants, we can more easily cut the stalks down. Gorse actually dies in dense pasture, especially pasture mixes including legumes. Most of those mixes aren’t native either, but after a few years of heavy cover cropping, native grasses can be introduced, and often just come in on their own.
Fields that were a total blanket of gorse are now full of native plants—the red threads and ridged leaves of potentilla, the feathery bushes of elderberry, the crawling wild strawberry, and tall graceful blue wild rye. Many of these I planted, but they are now showing up everywhere, moved around by animals. Yes, we still have gorse, but under a particularly dense patch there must have been hiding ancient seeds, because we now have a patch of a beautiful red coastal lily, which a biologist informed me is extremely rare. Now that they have come back, I can’t just mow the gorse without hitting them as well, so we carefully time grazing for when the lilies are beneath the ground, and we cut back the bigger gorse plants if they are getting too pushy.
In the process of learning to live with gorse, I found deep cultural mystery and magic, and practical utility. In Irish mythology, gorse wood is sacred to the sun god Lugh, and was the first wood used to start a ceremonial fire. Gorse was burned at transhumance festivals twice per year, when herds were driven up to highlands for the summer and then brought home for the winter. The flocks were run through the smoke for purification. There is some science behind this—gorse is anthelmintic, meaning it kills worms that infect livestock. A diet of chopped gorse is not only high in protein (gorse is in the same family as alfalfa), but also protective for animals in close quarters during the cold time of year.
So many uses have been found for this difficult plant. Gorse, being dense, fast growing, and burning at a high temperature, was often used to fire commercial bread ovens. Gorse branches thatched granaries because the thorns kept rodents from burrowing in after grain. Gorse flowers make a beautiful yellow dye (we’ve tried it on our wool), and some people make tea and mead with the flowers. Gorse stems have bast fiber, especially the long thin sprouts that come up after the main stalk is cut. An artist friend of mine cut these, soaked them in water, extracted the fibers, and made paper with them. Another friend, a natural builder from the UK, followed the same process on a larger scale and, with the addition of some earth elements, created a natural plaster wall out of gorse. My mother’s office is a cozy nest entirely finished in polished gorse fibers.
And not least, the amount of gorse on a field was a factor in determining its value, because it was used in so many ways. In a real sense, it was the gold of the pastoral communities that relied on it.
Then it came here, and it has acted poorly. Gorse has driven out native plants and animals, made land inaccessible to humans, caused dangerous episodes when it burns and explodes, and generally taken up too much space. What a metaphor for the settler experience. I want to live in a biodiverse landscape where the speckled trumpets of red lilies can bloom, the wildlife is safe from herbicidal harm, and the coastal prairie grasses are free of the grey, tick-infested thatch of neglect—a landscape of dynamic change.
The gorse could offer a mirror to some of us, should we choose to look in it. How much do we need to step back to make room for others to live? What does environmental justice look like without any party needing to be eradicated? What systems of cultural accountability does this landscape need in order for everyone to live here in peace?
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.
The Humble Radish
Commercially Nonviable, Yet Eminently Practical
by Gowan Batist
In the early spring the rain comes in heavy battering waves. On the coast it was hard to tell where the sea ended and our salty wind-whipped garden began. In the spring, the last of the garlic is sprouting, the potatoes are shriveled, the winter squash is diminishing, and the jars are leaving the cupboard. A handful of beans and some bones thrown in a pot with dried herbs is a regular dinner.
Then comes the radish. They add a fresh crunch to a winter diet that can otherwise be very homogeneous in color and texture. The first radishes taste of rain and crunchy sulfur burn, a nose-crinkling sensation and a rush of hydration on the tongue. Pulled out of the ground, they’re often decorated around the shoulders with the round shallow bite marks of snails, who slide across the garden in the early spring, their shining trails of slime disappearing into the general wet.
When I worked as a farm hand up north during college summers, I harvested radishes in the early mornings. The rows were 500 feet long, stretching so far the end would be invisible in the dim morning light and mist of the Pacific Northwest, imbuing a mythic, almost Sisyphean sense of futility to the work. Those radishes were not decorated with the round white marks of snails that made the red globes look like spotted cartoon mushrooms, but instead with the mica flecks of iron phosphate, an organic approved substance that repels and kills the kind of soft bodied creatures that mar the radishes. The flecks looked like gold glitter, but felt like tiny shards of glass if they made their way into my gloves.
The radishes can’t have been worth the cost of the amendment. The old man who owned the farm, operated by his son and grandson, ruled the farmstand with a grip that allowed no space for current market realities, costs of doing business, comparisons with peers, or the evidence of a balance sheet. He believed that people came to a farm stand for a deal, and expected to pay much less for produce than the grocery store. In a way he came from the same school of thought as my grandparents, who treated home-raised food as essentially free, and anything purchased as a luxury item. He lacked, however, my grandfather’s enthusiasm for every new agricultural development I brought to his attention, his favorite being the solar electric fence. This old man believed that wisdom was dispensed from the past to the future via a one-way valve, and treated any attempt at flow reversal as a plumbing emergency.
When I worked on his farm in 2011, a bunch of radishes from who-knows-where were sold for $1.20 at the Safeway near my bus stop. He sold them at farmstand for $0.30 per bunch, and tolerated no imperfect red globes, no cracks, no yellow clinging cotyledons. Radishes are one of the only crops other than baby greens that grow fast enough that they might still have those first emerging leaves clinging to them, but we sprayed them away with a high powered hose, under his fastidious gaze.
Harvesting the radishes was brutal work. Down on the ground, with wet knees that every pebble ground into, we would scoop a bunch per hand, alternating hands as we went down the row. I only had a moment to glance at every handful and flick away any split, tiny, or misshapen radishes before a band went around them and they were tossed into a crate. Once the truck was filled with crates they would be driven up the muddy lanes to the farmstand, which perched along a busy road on the outskirts of the city, and aggressively sprayed down. Inevitably this process would damage some leaves, which unlike the roots bruise easily and don’t store well. Any bunches with wilted leaves at the end of a busy farm stand day would be tossed, each gesture a firm rebuke, into a compost bucket by the old farmer, increasing the feeling of futility the next morning spent racing the sun to harvest more.
Those experiences were part of the mental classification system I developed for evaluating crops. A crop that only yields one harvest per planting, that you have to kneel all the way down on the ground to harvest, that is vulnerable to both weeds and pests, that doesn’t hold up well in a retail display, AND sells for a low market price ... ranks bottom tier across the board. This position of dishonor is occupied by the humble radish.
After experiencing all the physical pain and domestic strife a radish was capable of causing, and the small amount of money they were able to make, when I left that job and moved home to the Mendocino coast, I was sure I wouldn’t grow radishes. I didn’t stick to that plan for very long.
Radishes, for all their commercial faults at scale, are incredible for the small garden, and especially for the farm to school experience. I was managing Noyo Food Forest in my first years back in Mendocino, and I knew that radishes were a crop that a student could see, from seed to harvest, within the scope of a lesson plan. I could also be sure the cafeteria would always take the radishes for their salads. In that new context, radishes made sense, and I forgave them their downsides and embraced their peppery potential.
It wasn’t always smooth. I once spent fifteen minutes deliberately showing a volunteer the difference between the fat lobed radish leaves and the lacier, more hirsute wild radish weeds, and with a solemn nod she agreed she could “weed the radishes.” When I returned from a group of students, she sure had. All the baby radishes, no bigger than dimes, lay in a pile on the ground, carefully differentiated from everything that wasn’t a radish, which remained in the ground.
Radishes are a cold season crop, but here on the coast, that’s all year. I soon overproduced them, and, inspired by my mother, learned to drag them through soft butter, sprinkle them with the coarse sea salt we made ourselves, and pop them whole into my mouth. Another brainwave she had was roasting them whole with a little honey. The sugars caramelized and softened in the oven, the spice mellowed to a warm interesting note that separated the radish from a roast turnip, to which it was otherwise identical.
My favorite way to eat radishes is pickled, with sliced carrots, onions, and jalapeños, a combination I was turned on to by the taco trucks I visited in college. I have jars of this mix, homemade from our garden and the MendoLake Food Hub farmers, in my pantry right now. Their fresh, spicy, and acidic crunch is the perfect complement to a rich dish that needs the levity. I like to go bite-for-bite between a burrito and the pickled veggies.
I’ve grown well over a dozen varieties over the years, and my favorites are still the humble cherry belle, a plain red variety that stays sweet and resists pithiness, and purple plum, a beautifully shaped and colorful radish (more lavender than plum, really) with unusually strong leaves and a mellow flavor.
In the pasture, I’ve also come to embrace the virtues of radishes. We’ve grown daikon radish three feet long as part of a multi-stage process of managing invasive species. After gorse removal, the ground is exposed and unstable and needs a cover crop to muscle out the aggressive weedy species. The more diverse the mix, the better it is. We plant a mix that includes grasses for carbon, legumes for nitrogen and pollinators, and daikons for their amazing ability to add organic material to the soil. When the sheep graze the cover crop mix, they bite the radishes off at ground level, leaving round white dots the size of a golf ball speckled all around the ground, their surfaces grooved with the marks of their teeth. Post grazing, it looks like an untidy driving range. Once the sheep move on, the root left below ground rots and breaks down, and the space it once occupied provides valuable aeration.
It is a truth of capitalism that some of the plants that seem the most eager to work with us, and produce the most generously, end up being valued the least. Without the market as a factor, everyone would revere a plant that gives and gives and gives, but if you’ve ever sold zucchini in August, you know that practical utility rarely translates into financial windfalls. These crops will keep you alive, though, and will reward the beginner, the distracted parent, the disabled gardener, the gardener with little space, and the parents guiding their child’s clumsy fingers to press their first seeds into the soil.
All of that generosity and reliability gets overlooked in an economic environment that values the rare and unobtainable. The zucchini, the potato, and the humble radish are never going to be status symbols. They don’t offer us prestige, just a little thing called survival. Only what keeps body and soul together. Just the stuff of life. As someone who has run a vegetable farm ostensibly for profit, these “easy” crops weren’t at the top of my list. But in the first year of our child’s life, exhausted and physically reeling and adrift as we were, even the likes of us could make potato and kale soup from our garden. We could grill zucchini, and we could make an arugula salad. Radishes are still easy when life isn’t.
As a laborer, I resented radishes; as a business owner, I disparaged their profit margin; but as an eater coming out of a long winter of soft, starchy stored food, I have pulled their glowing roots into the low light, washed them in the rain that gathered in my palm, and crushed them between my teeth as a sign that spring really is here. As a teacher, I have watched children experience their short life cycle with wonder, and as a parent, I will soon accompany my own child on that journey.
As long as it matters that people need to eat, profitable or not, radishes will matter. Their cheerful roots popping up out of the ground, begging to hop into your crate only to nip your tongue, will always embody to me the dynamic complexity of spring on the north coast.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.
Radish photo by Daiga Ellaby courtesy of Unsplash.
Shepherding Life: The Surreal Nature of Lambing Season
by Gowan Batist
People who frequently use the phrase “it’s always darkest before the dawn” probably sleep in. It’s not darkest before dawn at all. Daylight slowly seeps in around the edges of the core of the night like a melting ice cube, sliding gradually across the sky propelled by its own liquefaction. The process of lightening, here on the foggy coast, is so subtle it’s not always discernible as a singular event. Morning comes like a drawing back of layer after layer of sheer scarves that reveal the form beneath so slowly, and distract and beguile with each movement so completely, that the moment of gazing on the naked day is anticlimactic. There is always a belated clicking off of your headlamp a while after you’ve stopped using it.
What it is, is coldest before the dawn. Even as the black turns to blue and the edges of trees begin to pull themselves free of their backdrop, a deep chill settles into the brightening land. Like the last slow icy breath night takes before relaxing back into the hollows of trees and holes of shrews until the sun sets again.
This deep exhalation of cold is where we enter this morning’s story. I was walking tightly, with my shoulders up and my hands deep in my pockets, along the blue strip of road, watching the trees emerge from the uniform dark and feeling the night’s final breath on my face. As I approached the barn, no dogs were waiting for me at the gate, which means someone was lambing.
I had been worried about the small Moorit ewe, #21-847. I never breed yearlings, and she was so small. It is industry standard to breed on the first heat, but I have never endorsed that. Animals bred young usually never fully express their potential weight and conformation, their wool suffers, and so do their lambs. As I watched her get rounder and rounder over the days she spent inside the clearspan building, as rain slammed against its curved roof, an ominous little ball of yarn started to wind around in my head, with each turn up the lane gaining more yardage and weight.
This morning, in the sharp LED eye of my headlamp, I saw her vulva glistening with a thick strand of cervical mucus. I felt my bones resettle my weight, my solar plexus pause, my body responding to labor with automatic aware relaxation. It’s rare for an ewe to lamb in the dawn or dusk hours, the peak hunting time of large carnivores. They generally lamb either in the middle of the darkest part of the night, or in the middle of the afternoon. 2am and 2pm are their favorites, so this was a bit of a surprise, but not too much. Not for a first timer who might have had an extended first stage.
I watched, not moving any closer, aware that my eyes are the same orientation as the large predators that walk in the dim morning, and that she was likely feeling vulnerable. To be looked at with both eyes at once is rude for a sheep, but it’s the gaze of urgency for shepherds like us, the wolves and lions and primates. I try to be thoughtful about how I use it, so it was a point above her left shoulder that I was looking at when I saw a pink and rough surface swelling out of her vulva. The fleeing dark pressed me, and I breathed sharply out of my rhythm, startling the ewes close to me. I have never had a prolapse in my flock, but this yearling I had gotten from another farmer was going to be the first one.
The next 24 hours are hard to look at for me—they remind me of the stack of plastic projector screens that would sit on the teacher’s desk. Each scene makes sense when set on the light table and directed at the wall, but on top of each other, the lines stitch together into an impassable hedge. When I lift the last day and night up to the light as one stack, there’s nothing I can read there.
I know I spent a lot of it lying on my side, with some close and sturdy people who came in and out to help. I now know what it feels like to press an entire internal organ back into a body, the resistance and yielding tissue over flexing muscles and abrupt hard bones. The little ewe’s cervix had not dilated. She was pushing against a brick wall, and having no other way to make progress, she had pushed herself inside out. With the direction of a terse mobile vet over the phone, I found the tight ring of the cervix that feels like cartilage, like a chicken neck buried in a bread pudding, some dark fairytale dish. Opening that hard ring would bring on labor within twelve hours. In that time, I had to return her internal organs to their natural habitat several times.
The vet came after her working rounds and used a portable ultrasound on her taut abdomen. There was a stormy sky of cloudy shapes on the screen, which she identified as gestational sacs. In that swirl and swish of internal cumulus, there was only one fluttering bird. One heartbeat. Several sacs.
There are many points in a farmer’s career when all you can do is commit to having an awful experience. Your boots are full of rain, but the order must be filled before the truck comes. The calf you struggled to intubate aspirated, and spilled all your effort and their inhaled amniotic fluid all over the barn floor, but it’s still time to get up and go to work, or explain to the students, or be the wall for your crew to hurl their disappointments and frustrations against, because they need to shatter them dramatically, and need that to be witnessed. It’s the paperwork that can’t be put off, the cramp that you can’t stop to stretch out, the imperfect options that have to be endured because the resources to create perfection are out of reach.
I settled into that space, and into the back of my truck, next to the barn for the night.
At 3am, nothing was happening. At 4am, two lambs were fully born and the third was on its way. My hand braced against her hip, giving her counter pressure and holding the edge of her vulva, making a ring with my finger and thumb that acted both to hold back and to open for the slick little head. Three lambs. All alive. The ewe, now named Anya by my friend, is intact, all her organs on the right side of daylight, and feeding her babies. The last indignity I hoped to ever do to her was inserting the large pink tablet of antibiotic bolus. I felt it slip down the vaginal canal and drop into the open space of the vestibule and vowed it would be the last object to take that road. She will never breed again, she will live here with her daughters and eat grass. She has done enough to continue sheephood upon the earth, and I have done enough to manipulate her cervix for one lifetime.
Ironically, a side effect of a cervix that does not willingly dilate is that time does. What is technically still just one day feels like an endless reshuffling of those projector pages. It all feels endless and out of order and unreadable. The facts are that I didn’t know how this would end when I wrote the first half. I predicted a shovel, but the tool I had in my hands when the saga concluded was a soft towel.
We have not yet reached the halfway point of lambing season.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist following sheep around the skeleton of a boom town. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed with a baby on her back, propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or meal prepping baby food with local bulk food via the MendoLake Food Hub.
Fleeces and Pieces: A Map in Time
by Gowan Batist
The steel blue of Iris the sheep’s hip is revealed as shears pass across her, peeling the matted, dull, iron-tinged gray of her fleece away, a process uncannily like taking a grinder to rusted metal and leaving ridged circles of brightness behind with each swipe. I’m shearing her while we are out on a grazing contract. Mobile flocks, contained by solar-energized electric mesh fences, roam all around this county, reducing fire danger, clearing dense brush, increasing biodiversity, and adding fertility. For a few seasons our flock, primarily headquartered at Fortunate Farm, has participated in this trend.
It’s 85°, and I’m sweating beneath my tool belt, bits of wool clinging to my bare legs. The afternoon air is heavy and slow before the nightly down-canyon wind, and long after the morning chill. We are out in a field called Eagle Flat, because it contains two golden eagle nest trees. The flock is currently penned in the shade of a live oak, beside a pond and surrounded by the purple eyes of lupin. We are in an earthen baking dish that will soon be unendurable, but today is just warm. This ranch primarily serves as a bird sanctuary, and our mission is to reduce the invasive annual grasses, both to give the native perennial grasses a stronger start to the year, and also to improve habitat for burrowing owls, who prefer short grass.
The shears my cousin Wu gave me are wedged against the heel of my hand, and Iris is idly lipping at my side as I lean across her. She has enthusiastically played her part in the grazing project.
I remember the day she was born, stuck in a bad presentation with her head out of the ewe’s body but her legs trapped back behind her. Normally lambs found in this position are dead of asphyxiation, but when I found them in the icy rain, Chego the Great Pyrenees was curled protectively around the laboring ewe, anxiously licking the lamb’s half born face. He had cleared her nose and mouth enough to keep her alive. On that day, my friends rushed to help. We lay in the mud and the rain, mute with effort trying to reach her front knees so we could untangle her and also hold the poor ewe. Chego vibrated with worry over us like our own personal white rain cloud. Finally Iris slid into the world on a tide of blood.
In many traumatic births, the ewe will reject her lamb. No matter how strong the primal love, trauma can block the chemicals we need in order to feel it. The black Icelandic ewe who carried Iris tried to kill her repeatedly, resulting in Iris coming into the house as a bottle baby. We fed her in turns as she hopped confidently around us, slept in our laps, and ate our books right off the shelves. She was voted onto the Board of Directors of FlockWorks, a local nonprofit, after attending a meeting clad in a diaper with our good friend Clara, who had taken a day shift feeding her while I worked. That spring, when I seeded flats in the greenhouse, it was with a lamb and a border collie laying by my feet on the warm straw.
I sheared her first fleece with my cousin and felted it into a hat for my friend Erin’s soon-to-be-born baby, by combing the fibers out and forming them around the most convenient mold I had—a small round pumpkin we grew that year. The hat was soft and warm and lavender gray, and when my friend’s son was born, it fit his little head perfectly. For a moment, anyway.
With the next fleece the following season, I made something for myself, a woven cowl that kept my neck warm and fit under my canvas coat. I packed it away with winter clothes right before COVID, and before my stepdad’s illness intensified. A pandemic and wave of deaths followed, and I have no idea what happened, but I have never found that box again.
By the third fleece, we were hoping that the COVID situation would change and we would be able to host kids again for shearing lessons on the farm. As a bottle baby, Iris will stand for shearing without restraint of any kind, perfect for teaching. I put off shearing her, hoping we would be able to have a class, and her fleece felted on her back a bit. It was still usable, but that season I mostly felted small objects with it, like a small beaded bag for Ruthie, and regretted losing most of it. That winter my stepdad died, and then our friend died weeks later. Ruthie of Headwaters Grazing came and took the flock to a vineyard grazing contract to give me a grace period without sheep responsibilities to take care of my family. Vineyard grazing is a fantastic way to cycle carbon and make fat lambs on rich cover crops, and the flock did well there.
The sheep came back, having gotten into some poison oak, so for the first time someone else sheared Iris, a shearer friend who swore she was immune to poison oak. I used that fleece to mulch a small tree, and for ages when I would pass and see bits of it beneath the carpet of new grass I would think about that lost season, in which I was carried by my community and felt both grateful and desperately adrift without the anchor of my flock.
The following fall, I sheared her in a field at dusk on a different grazing contract, this one on the coast on land that formerly housed a railroad, used to haul redwoods to shipping docks. The grass was tall and blonde and hid occasional large rusty pieces of metal from the industrial past of the area. (The railroad is not the only former industrial site we’ve grazed; a few years prior we grazed on a land trust in Gualala on the site of the mill where my great-great-grandfather worked, died, and was buried. Not much was left of the mill itself but chunks of concrete and thick metal cables rusting into the soil. I visited his grave between sheep chore rounds.) In a photo my friend Amalia took, the fall of Iris’s fleece mirrors the fall of my hair as we lean towards each other like a double helix, always turning towards a shared center point. It was a cool plum colored evening with high streaky clouds and dry late season grass.
As I sheared Iris in the prickly heat, I thought longingly of that cool coastal grazing contract. Sometimes the rewards of shearing are abundant and the day is gloomy and intimate and perfect, and sometimes it’s hot and sticky and full of thorns. Iris will make two fleeces per year as long as she lives, maybe as long as fifteen years. This won’t be our hardest one, and our best thus far will be surpassed by some that are ahead.
Last summer I sheared Iris with interns from Oz farm who joined us to learn. Iris stood and wagged her tail, wiggling the blanket of fleece that I had rolled down as Hunter and I sheared. I was pregnant, and my belly rested across Iris’s back when I bent over her to follow the fleece down her thigh. That fleece was washed and combed by my friends Sarah and Kat at Mendocino Wool and Fiber. I spun it into yarn while I waited to go into labor. Amalia made that labor yarn into a warm hat to bring our newborn home in, and a fuzzy vest and booties that our baby is just growing into now. With the remaining combed roving, I sat and worked with felting needles while our baby slept, using the gray to create clouds behind a dark crooked oak tree made from Carlotta’s dark brown fiber. I spun endless yarn on my large Ashford wheel while our baby nursed in my lap. I also spun her fleece on the beach with a tiny drop spindle, watching my partners surf with the baby in a wrap on my chest, the little spindle whizzing near my knees as the thread grew longer, before being hauled back up to start again.
As a shepherd, hand shearer, and fiber artist, the fleeces and the pieces made from them become a map in time: of the fields we were in, the weather of the season, the people we worked with. They are an atlas of a disappearing world, charting the paths of relationships that take our species back in time at least ten thousand years, to times sheep were shaved with knapped stone razors, and even further back to a time when fleece was plucked from the communal scratching posts the wild flocks rubbed their winter coats off onto.
This is all great in the abstract, but today I still have to finish this hot and difficult job. I cut the fleece from her tail, across her back and down to the sides of her belly, and up to her neck. As I worked and she calmly stood, occasionally nibbling me with her velvet lips, the fleece fell down her sides and expanded under its own weight, growing far larger in area than the surface of the skin it was previously anchored to. The fleece is clean and soft and luminous where it touches her body, dull and full of dust on the outside. When I finished her neck and mighty mane—the longest and softest part of the fleece—I gently pulled the fleece away from where it was still connected by the invisible barbs of wool fibers to the fleece still attached to the skin. Having freed it, I bundled it, inside out, into a shiny package, unctuous with lanolin, and tossed it onto the wool sorting area on the other side of the fence.
There are far more thorns in it than I hoped. Maybe I can save something from it, maybe it will all mulch a baby oak tree. In spring of 2020, before things really got bad, when we still thought this would blow over in a few weeks, we did spring shearing on a different section of the same ranch, on a similar spring grazing contract, in an area where riparian restoration was taking place. We took the belly and leg cuts unfit to process for yarn and mulched the baby trees with them, wetting the soil and then the wool. The loose bits at the edges were quickly snatched by nesting birds, and we saw some of the birds flying into the nest boxes we had recently installed, trailing streamers of fiber.
Later that season, 80% of the ranch burned. The trees mulched with wool, which does not burn, survived the fire. The wool mulch held in moisture, it kept back grasses that could overshadow the trees, and it gave each of them a personal fire blanket. When the black paint of ash ran across the tan canvas of the fall, some of the only green left was those few little oak leaves.
Today I am here with my shears greasy, sliding across the blisters on my hand. I am alone with this animal whose first breaths I witnessed, the same pointer finger that’s rubbed raw today was once just barely hooked under her tiny knee and popped her loose into life.
Lifting Iris’s hard, compact little feet, I trim them mostly out of a sense of completion, not because she really needs it. In the absence of the rocks they evolved to leap and climb over, the hoof will keep growing past the point of utility and become dysfunctional, sometimes leading to lameness.
I have to insist that she’s done being sheared, because she would like me to keep going even after she has been relieved of her entire fleece. Iris presses her oily shorn body against my leg, lips at my shoes, and wags her tail when I scratch her. I find myself idly snipping areas that don’t really need to be touched up, just to stay in this space a bit longer. I have 14 more sheep to shear; I have work waiting at home.
Iris is self-congratulatory in her plumpness and her shine, her tail flicking when I scratch between her shoulder blades, her head arching up reproachfully when I stop. Chego comes over to us, sniffing over the haircut I gave to his baby, who is now his size. One of her first days in the pasture with the flock, I came to check on her and didn’t see her anywhere. My blood went cold. A million animals can snatch and run with a motherless lamb. Searching, I noticed that Chego hadn’t gotten up to greet me. I walked over to where he lay and found Iris, Chego’s bushy tail covering her where she lay against his side, her head thrown back, sound asleep.
She was a slim scrap of fluff and knobby legs then; she is a broad and sleek tank of a sheep now. Chego is still Chego, he was born one hundred years old and yet somehow hasn’t aged a day. I wonder if they notice the changes in me the way I mark the ones in them like the high tide lines of my life, defining each year by fleeces, commemorating it by their quality and weight—the years we made fine art, the years we made utilitarian warmth, and the years we could make nothing but a shelter against the fire.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Nesting for Winter and Ready for What’s Next
by Gowan Batist
On the Mendocino Coast, the first rains land in the brown thatch, which sends up tendrils of grass and little round buttons of dicot cotyledons. The ground softens and swells, drinking in the moisture. We plant rounds of radishes, peas, and sweet greens like it was March all over again. It rarely ever frosts here, and the years it does, it’s always a surprise to see it crawling across the low spots in the garden. More common is the orange slime molds that travel the damp substrate, covering surprising ground from evening to morning like ambulatory dog vomit. They may not be lovely, but they are brilliant. A famous study in Japan found that slime molds navigate efficiently between spots of nutrients laid out across a floor in the pattern of train station stops (more efficiently, in many cases, than the true municipal system does). They won’t hurt your plants and they only eat decomposing matter, so show them some respect and just say hello if they visit your garden.
Mendocino is an incredibly diverse place, in large part due to the quick changes in ecotones—from the ocean straight up into the hills and valleys. The coastal prairie soil—really just sand invested with millennia of organic matter—grows straight, effortless carrots, but water and nutrients fall through it like a rock through the air. This quickly gives way to polarized sandstone, a highly acidic compressed soil streaked in red and white and shocking yellow. This unusual soil grows pygmy trees, a phenomenon seen almost nowhere on this earth but here, a narrow ecological band with unique and fascinating implications for all the species living in it. Unfortunately, that is where our coastal county dump site is located.
Further up the geologic staircase, we have clay soil made acidic by eons of deep leaf fall. Dark foamy streams full of tannins and protein from that forest litter decomposition give rise to place names like Whiskey Springs. The redwood and fir forests have most of their organic matter in the trees above ground, but the clay soil is dense, the particles so tiny compared to sand and minute compared to organic matter. Those who farm in clay soil often love it—it hangs on to water and compost beautifully. (It also hangs on to everything else, as anyone who has tried to use hand tools in wet clay soil has likely experienced.)
Coming up above the ridge on Highway 20, the layers of green hills fade away into the fog or the smoke, depending on the time of the year. We come into the oak savannah, which is at its mildest and sweetest in the winter. The grasslands are so productive and beautiful in the winter and spring that it’s impossible not to fall in love with them. But they are harsh and flammable in the summer and fall. Up on the ridges and down in the valley, the cold gets more intense. We even have snow, which feels like a novelty to me in spite of the disruptions it can cause, like it did last year on Highways 20 and 253. We stopped and were unable to resist throwing snowballs at the top of the hill on 20, feeling silly when much of the country was under feet of snow.
Exactly what winter looks like to us depends on which of our diverse ecotypes we reside in, but I hope for all of us this coming one is particularly gentle and restful. When I was growing up in Gualala, winter meant road closures due to river flooding, candle light, and the whole family piling into our house because we had propane for heating water and cooking. Those memories are good ones as a kid excited for the board games and stories to come out around the wood stove. Now, looking at them through a parent’s eyes, I can see that there was some extra stress and work that never registered for me.
For grazers and coastal farmers, winter isn’t necessarily the deep slow time that it is in other parts of the country. Lambing is starting for a lot of us, a time of cold hands, frosty breath in headlamps during night checks, and the slip and slide into life of so many four legged little creatures. Lambing is a time of increased vigilance for predator coexistence, as the animals are at their most vulnerable, and the predators are often heavily pregnant and hungry themselves. It’s a good time to bring flocks into barns at night, install scare devices like Foxlights and Gadflies, and pay closer attention to ourwild neighbors and their movements.
Living in a twelve-month growing season has mixed blessings. I have spoken to Midwestern farm hands who all go on seasonal unemployment in the winter and travel, write, make music, and generally get a real and significant break. I have thought of them wistfully while harvesting kale in rubber coveralls that fit like a bucket (you know the ones) with chilled prune fingers. On the other hand, making a winter soup with stored roots and fresh greens while the rain pounds outside and the fire crackles is its own kind of luxury. There is a commitment to the seasonal nature of food, and the solidarity between us and our local customers. We are still farming when both the tourists and the restaurant orders have thinned out.
I have to admit that, at Fortunate Farm’s vegetable production height, winter farming was always an act of community service operated at a loss. The Persephone Period, a time when daylight hours are very short, is a time when plant growth slows to almost nothing. In order to have a winter harvest, a lot of planting has to happen far in advance, in the warm fall, or your starts will just sit there in the waterlogged and chilly soil, stalled out for weeks at a time. This planting happens at peak fall exhaustion and sometimes might even conflict with field harvest plans—if a crop goes in a little late, it could bleed into the planting window for the next one. When we did it, our goal was mostly to keep our workers employed and keep fresh food in front of our customers, and to keep our local network strong, especially during the first year of the pandemic.
I can’t say it was a great business decision. We came into spring tired, worn out from doing twice as much work for a quarter of the income, and broke from paying the same costs for less return. Most farms lose money in the spring when everything needs to be purchased and all the work frontloaded, and we don’t start making it back until late spring or early summer. Some of the most financially successful farms I know jumpstart their seasons with business operating loans, taken out and paid back in the same year, that their strong track records allow them to qualify for. This means they don’t have to limp through lean months. Some of these loans are available from non-profit organizations set up to support farmers, like California FarmLink.
This winter, I will not be farming. The sheep will be out grazing, ignoring the shelter we make sure they have access to, aware of their roots in Iceland and Finland and dismissive of my worries about the cold and damp. My partner’s three goats will be hiding in a warm dry bedded stall, imperiously demanding room service. Some kale will stand leggy and thick stalked in our little backyard garden. Xa Kako Dile: is an indigenous women-led and -directed non-profit which will be growing at Fortunate Farm and will operate the farm stand onsite as long into the cold season as makes sense for them, in collaboration with our adjacent neighbor farms. Our family will be around the wood stove, surrounded by wool in every form—from the pelts that cover our couch cushions, to the textiles we wear—still faintly scented of lanolin when we come in from the rain, to the blankets our baby wiggles across, to the ribbons of roving processed from our flockby Mendocino Wool and Fiber, spinning into yarn through my fingers as the cherry wood wheel turns in time with my treading feet. My elderly border collie loves to lay just close enough to the pedals that they gently graze his head as he sleeps. He’s turned my cottage yarn industry into an automated dog petting machine. Our baby loved the motion of spinning wool, even from the inside of my body. Their little kicks and stretches would quiet right down every time I sat at the wheel, moving us both in the small but surprisingly muscular movements required to turn the wheel.
Spinning is deeply seasonal for a lot of us. I usually never spin in the summer and fall; pregnancy was an extenuating circumstance for me. Most of the shepherds I know save all their spinning up for the long steamy afternoons indoors, a habitat we don’t spend a lot of time in most of the year. A friend warned me that, while her baby loved watching her spinning from a safe distance when he was in the immobile grub phase, as soon as he got the ability to crawl, it became a bit of a liability. The turning parts of the wheel look so smooth and inviting, but are in fact not safe to stick a baby fist into. I have been duly warned, and will take that as it comes. But for now, spinning is the grounding act that connects the outside life walking across fields with my flock, with the inside cozy nesting space we’re making as we incubate the fourth trimester of becoming a new family. The wool still carries all those memories. I feel so blessed by the gift of baby blankets made at our local mill by my friend Kat who works there and does their weaving. The complexity and beauty of what they can make on their looms is astounding, and recently they introduced hats as well, of tight knit, good local wool that will shed the rain and keep you warm even in the snow.
Celebrating local cycles in agriculture should always include textiles, and alongside kale and bins of stored potatoes, the queen of winter is wool. If you haven’t made it to the Mendocino Wool and Fiber, Inc. storefront, get yourself over there to Ukiah and see what magic they’re spinning and weaving. Many local grazers, like Headwaters Grazing and Full Circle Wool among others, keep us safe from fire in the summer and safe from cold in the winter, all through the everyday alchemy of a sheep—grass grown from atmospheric carbon, converted into bacteria cultivated in their magical rumens, and grown on their backs as the soft blanket of wool.
We plan to spend this winter all wrapped up, feeding ourselves from summer and fall stored bounty and winter’s resilient offerings of greens and mushrooms, swathed in wool. This year of local eating is coming full circle, back to the chilly short days it started with. This time, though, there is a new family member with us, whom all the farmers in the county have nourished, through me, all year. In the spirit of deep wintering, and denning with our little one, this will also be my last “Farmer’s Voice” for a while. I have loved sharing this journey with all of you through the pages of this magazine, and I hope to come back and visit some time. But there are other talented writers among the farmers and ranchers of this county. It’s their turn to speak up, and it’s our turn to tuck in.
Have a blessed and safe winter y’all, and remember to check out MendoLake Food Hub for your bulk orders for those big holiday meals.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Embracing Autumn While Growing More Than Crops
by Gowan Batist
In the fall, our freezer’s mouths open like baby birds, and we stuff them as diligently as the sparrows raising their hatchlings in the spring. The pantry shelves also gape at us hungrily, and we line up canning jars into its maw like rows of gleaming teeth.
Food is as simple as possible, and prepared on a large scale. No more slicing and dicing—tomatoes go whole into the broiler to roast and then unceremoniously into the blender. Cucumbers fly through the mandolin, and peppers and eggplants blister in rows on the grill. Last fall, 2022, I was living in a perpetual steam bath, stuffing the pantry with jars of salsa and carefully measuring the acidity on each jar of tomatoes in the tropical kitchen late into the night, while the vines in the pumpkin fields passed the tipping point from a thick verdant jungle to a withered brown tracery.
When the pumpkins and winter squash are finally ready, they throw their robe of green to the ground as dramatically as a burlesque dancer, and suddenly stand revealed in all their gleaming roundness. The tomato vines follow suit, leaching all the very last moisture into the final fruits. I can’t bend over to lift any of them, and my muscle memory wonders where the truckloads of crates are, where the familiar back strain has gone. Not for me this season. I won’t be shearing sheep either—somehow sitting out that step of the fall dance feels the most surreal. Thankfully, I have good friends who are shearers, and a partner who went to shearing school in Ukiah specifically to prepare for this moment. The sheep will be divested of their gleaming fleeces in the golden light of the season, as always, and are in good hands.
There is an urgency in the bodily awareness that we are losing the sun, the days slipping away into the winter. So we catch as much of it as we can, in the vibrancy and color of the seasonal abundance before our environment gives way to the more muted tones of brassica greens, mushrooms, and bins of potatoes. We clutch at color to save for the gray days.
This fall, I’m honestly not sure how much more canning I’m going to get done. I am growing exactly one pumpkin this year, the highest maintenance crop I have ever tended, and I’m carrying this rapidly ripening fruit under my ribs. I no longer fit comfortably in the narrow gallery of our kitchen, and lifting a steaming rack of sterilized jars over my pregnant belly leaves me exhausted.
Even so, all local food preservation is a love letter to the future. The food we store away this season will be especially helpful in the sleep-deprived state of newborn care. I think of us stumbling to the freezer between baby feedings, and I want to make sure there’s something good there to reach for, as a gift to whoever we will be when that moment comes. I can feel our baby kicking while I work, and let them know this is for them, too, to make it easier to spend more time with them and less time cooking.
I’m not planning on doing much this winter except baby care, so everything I want to make this fall is simple and utilitarian. Less fancy sauces and pickles than last fall, more tomato soup base, pre-cooked stuffed peppers, and trays of shepherd’s pie that we can take out of the freezer and place directly into the oven. The gorgeous rainbow of deep ruby and stormy sky blue and swirling purple corn will be made into bags of tamales for quick meals … as soon as I can bear to stop looking at them and grind them up into masa.
The infrastructure of local food is critical to the functioning of our community. The small-scale resources and tools that allow an actual agricultural economy to function had mostly disappeared by the time my farming career began, replaced with the kind of global trade infrastructure that took pears grown in Argentina, packed them in Thailand, and sold them in Idaho. Over the last ten years, I have seen them come back in the form of community resources like the MendoLake Food Hub, the Mendocino Wool Mill, and the Good Farm Fund, among others. It’s not lost on me that many of these projects are the work of an overlapping cast of characters.
The discussions we share on the next stages have focused on combining resources for access to commercial kitchens for value-adding, navigating cottage food laws, and exploring solutions to the large gaps still remaining, like the accessibility of certified slaughter facilities for legal meat sales. While major infrastructure gains have been made in many areas, we have lost significant ground in others not directly connected with growing food, but still essential to our ability to function as a thriving intergenerational agricultural community. Farmers as a demographic across the country are aging rapidly, and many farming communities have inadequate medical care for them. The number of farmers in their twenties are increasing, but falling off sharply in their thirties. A large reason for this is the opposite side of the life cycle challenges facing our elders—lack of prenatal care and safe childbirth options in our rural communities.
When the decision was made to close Labor and Deliveryin Fort Bragg, I was among many community members who spoke out against this—and against the equally disturbing fact that it is also now impossible to obtain a surgical abortion in Mendocino County. I didn’t know at the time that I would end up pregnant myself, navigating how to survive and thrive in our current situation as a remote community which does not have the ability to deliver a baby within an hour and a half of where we live. The dream of giving birth at home, surrounded by our canning jars and piles of pumpkins, was dashed by the hospital closure. Licensed midwives must be able to transfer to a hospital within a certain distance. Not having one available, we can’t give birth at home with a midwife either. Bloom Waterbirth Center in Ukiah is one of the few options for a freestanding birth center that is able to care for us, though we must pay out of pocket for their service and also traverse Highway 20, in labor, during fire season, to reach them. As a freestanding Birth Center, Bloom can only take the lowest risk families. If our baby is breech, or if I have warning signs of preeclampsia, or a condition like placenta previa, my only option covered by insurance is in Santa Rosa, almost three hours from our home, much of the drive without cell phone service.
When this decision was made, it was openly discussed that people in labor—and their babies—will inevitably be harmed by the closure, and that some of them may die. I sat in those meetings and heard the doctors’ dire warnings. The list of families impacted includes us, and our baby that is currently happily kicking me in the ribs will face their first hurdle of rural living just by coming into the world. For a lot of the far reaches of the county, this issue isn’t new. My mother went into labor with me in Gualala, which to this day has little more than an infrequently staffed rural clinic, and she drove down the coast through Jenner to Santa Rosa in labor with me in the early hours of the morning, after first changing a tire. She described dodging skunks and deer on the road in the thick fog that rolls in during the summer on that stretch of coast. I told her it sounded incredibly stressful, especially with no cell phones, but she said that she actually loved the drive and has great memories of the peacefulness of the ocean glimpsed around each hairpin turn. “Until heavy labor kicked in around Guerneville, that is. That’s when it stopped being fun.”
Usually when faced with these infrastructure gaps, I feel really confident that we can just do it ourselves. Form a co-op, write a grant, have someone donate some barn space to a committee meeting. However, it turns out that moving turnips efficiently around the county is a little different than birthing babies, and I have to admit that I’m entirely out of my element here somehow, despite the hundreds of lamb births I’ve seen.
It has felt destabilizing, filling these jars and stacking these freezers while knowing we may not be close to home when this baby comes, and might not have the ability to feed ourselves the way we would like during this most vulnerable and intense time. However … there's more than one way for our community to handle things. We have a little camper, and I have friends near Ukiah and near Santa Rosa with farms and ranches on which to park it. We may take this show on the road and stay somewhere closer to medical care when our due date gets close. While I would love to be home at Fortunate Farm, chances are I will still go into labor on a farm, either in Mendocino or in Sonoma County.
As always, when the larger infrastructure of this country, state, and county doesn’t have us, we have each other, and that’s a whole lot. In the meantime, we have the work of fall to do. The produce is the best of the year, and there’s so much of it. Order it in boxes, harvest it in crates, prepare it as simply as possible, eat it, share it, save it. Winter is on the way.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Summertime, and the Living Is Busy
Growing More Than Crops
by Gowan Batist
Spring crops are being harvested at the break of dawn, and fall crops are going in the ground. The beaches are territory ceded to the tourists for the time being, and the nights are short and precious.
The canner starts to rumble as we put away pickles and the first salsa. It will build in intensity, a propane dragon on the damp fall porch, until the frost drives it into hibernation. But for now the kitchen work is limited to an occasional batch on a warm evening.
This is the time, ten years ago, that Eat Mendocino started to feel less like a survival project and more like a fun exploration of the bounty that exists in this county. We are blessed with a diversity of growing conditions here—the coastal fog keeps greens sweet and abundant and roots tender, while the inland heat starts to crank out peppers and tomatoes. We can really have it all here, and that starts to feel not just obvious, but luxurious in the summer. Meals no longer mean raiding the pantry for jars or the freezer for packages, but consist of the smallest possible amount of effort, sparing the time for the field. We eat fresh-made herbed cheese scooped up on chopped spears of cucumber, carrot, zucchini, and fresh snap peas. Tilting on the balance point of summer solstice, we are taking very little out of the pantry and putting very little into it, but living happily hand-to-mouth in the garden.
The process of getting to this moment in time has not been easy. I have to admit that I initially felt some smugness, looking at the rows of glass jars like jewels in the pantry, the four chest freezers, the security of stocked bins of dry goods, and the unbelievable luxury of the MendoLake Food Hub delivering local produce to our door. I thought that this spring and early summer would be easier, and it has been in the sense of abundance of food stores … we wouldn’t have made it otherwise.
Ten years ago I loved food with all my heart, and I believed in it. My problem was logistics and storage, the amount of calories saved, the budget to buy food, and the space to grow it for myself, on top of the program I was managing. This year, I have had a well stocked larder, but I hated the sight and smell of food for months. This was especially hard at the crucial stage of mid-spring, when the new produce had barely come in and the storage produce was on its last legs, with long tendrils of green sprouts emerging from the onions in the bin, as if they were making a break for it.
The first crop I ever grew, and likely the last I ever will, is winter squash and pumpkins. They represent beauty and abundance and security to me. They are wild flowering vines in summer, impossible to see through in their density, until they suddenly swoon dramatically with the changing season, dropping their green robe to the ground and revealing the fruit in all their glory, glowing orange against the gray ground, brighter than the low sun. That is several months in the future from now. We are still in the thick of the green jungle, in the place of verdant wild promise, but not fulfillment. Nothing is certain yet, nothing is ripe except pollen for the bees. I’m in the same way as the pumpkins—due in October.
Being pregnant during Eat Mendocino has presented some distinct challenges. Instead of diligently cooking for the family every day like I had planned, the first part of this year left me at times unable to even open the fridge without running for the bathroom. I had nausea and food aversions so intense that I resented the fact that I had to eat to live. Most of what I forced myself to swallow wouldn’t stay down, and it wasn’t even clear how much good it was doing me. I would have lived on sunlight like a plant or filtered plankton like a coral if I could have—I longed to stop thinking, seeing, touching, smelling, or tasting food. I cried when I had to eat more than once.
That’s a bit of a conundrum when my creative, social, and professional framework for this year was tied to food as the center of life. I became pretty severely hypoglycemic by 10 weeks. My hands and feet were always cold, I shook, and I was miserable with an unstoppable cycle of nausea. My midwife sternly but gently told me what I had to do. The cure for what was ailing me was to eat, preferably protein, every hour.
This seemed like an impossible, tortuous task. The meals we make require preparation. We don’t have snacks. We don’t even have a microwave. I struggled. My body was telling me two diametrically opposed things at the same time—that every food, no matter how much my conscious mind knew I loved it, was disgusting and unsafe, and also that I urgently had to eat. The advice given to people in my situation was ridiculously inapplicable: Keep saltines next to my bed? My neighbors, Cam and Megan, made me crackers with Mendocino Grain Project wheat, our salt, and Leu’s rendered goat fat. Carry around string cheese? Clara and Noah made me little round pucks of salty chevre. Eat nuts? I’m allergic to walnuts, some of the only nuts available in Mendocino County. We bought a bag of almonds while traveling through Yolo County, and whispered a little apology to their aquifer. The nuts really do help. We found some workable solutions, and through it all, my partners Morgan and Hunter were there, feeding me patiently, picking up my chores, tending to the things I was finding increasingly difficult to do, and loving me.
Projects like Eat Mendocino tend to draw some criticism for not perfectly encapsulating whatever a given person’s perception of food culture should be. It seems easier for a lot of people, whatever the issue at hand is, to critique how someone else attempts to solve a problem or explore a concept. Ten years ago I was in my early twenties, and I wanted to explore what existed in this county and see how far I could push myself. I had no idea that there was a double whammy waiting for me—people eager to put me on a pedestal and then try to knock me off it, sometimes in the same breath. People expected me to be a perfect ideal of whatever they thought a Mendocino farmer should be, yet many were eager to ferret out the ways I wasn’t. I responded to this scrutiny by sticking perfectly in all ways, at all times, to the letter of the law—if I couldn’t eat only from Mendocino County, down to the salt and oils, I would just fast. I was strong and could do that. This didn’t stop the criticism; the vocal minority just moved the goalposts. Instead of calling me a hypocrite for lacking perfection in my diet, people called me a hypocrite because I drove a car. Or used shampoo. Or didn’t eat coconut oil, which they interpreted as shaming vegans. I hadn’t committed to anything other than what I said I would do— explore Mendocino’s food scene by putting my body on the line. I hadn’t said I would become a neo-peasant. I hadn’t said I would go off-grid. I never told anyone else what to eat or not eat. I hadn’t said I would embody purity in any way, according to anyone’s else’s standard. I committed to one thing, and I did it with all my heart and might, and sometimes the “what-abouts” still followed me around.
What I learned from that experience is that there are two ways to deal with the inevitability of human frailty in the public eye. One is to be absolutely brutally committed at all costs, and still face a certain amount of sneering from the sidelines. The other way is just to own the imperfection of our humanity. This project is important to me, but so is surviving and having a healthy pregnancy. I’m taking prenatal supplements. I’m going to drink the disgusting glucose beverages they make you chug before a series of blood tests for gestational diabetes. I’m eating cottage cheese from Sonoma County. If we had a Mendocino dairy I could easily get it from, I would, but we do not. That in itself is data. After nearly passing out at an event from low blood sugar, my partners brought me a bagel from the potluck table, and I ate it. I have no regrets. I’ll do it again if I need to. I have experienced what commitment on that extreme level feels like, and I don’t regret doing that either, but it’s a new decade, with new priorities. The first one of which is our baby.
Coming to the understanding that I would flex the commitments I’d made when it was necessary for me to do so gave my midwife a huge sense of relief, and gave me a new capacity for gratitude. Coming out of survival mode, I can focus on appreciating what we are doing—growing a new part of this community, from the land and the hands of all our neighbors. I have praised the Golden Rule Garden every day of this year for their decision to grow ginger last season. Our store of honey ginger syrup is used in hot water for tea and in ginger ale made with fizzy water from our carbonator. I bless them every time I sip it. We took the leftover ginger pulp from the syrup production, dehydrated it, and cut it into little chunks, which made all-Mendocino ginger chews. They have kept me alive some days.
My friend Ana let us pick lemons from her place in Ukiah. Added to water to make it more palatable, they have kept me hydrated. Ruthie was incredibly generous with her time, her expertise, and her butcher shop, which has kept us in bone broth, keeping nutrients flowing when we were exhausted. My neighbors have fed us and helped us with chores. The land has grown the nettles and raspberry leaf that are the important tonic teas for pregnancy, and the sea has made salt with water and time.
Summer is the time of busy abundance, but not yet the fulfillment of harvest. It is a time of action and celebration and physical energy, but a time of risk as well. We are doing the work that we hope will yield a positive result for the winter, but we can’t know the outcome yet. There are long months of uncertainty and struggle ahead, as well as doctor’s appointments and screenings, before we bring the harvest home. Every step along the way is a privilege and a celebration. Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Caffeine Cravings, Burnt Beans, and Anonymous Mushrooms
The Early Days of Eat Mendocino
by Gowan Batist
In Spring 2013, I was hungry and cold. We had just embarked on Eat Mendocino—a commitment to solely subsist from food grown in Mendocino County for one calendar year. I was 24, a young farm manager. I had radically underestimated how much stored food is needed to make it through the short, hard working days of spring before serious calories start coming out of the ground. Our spring crops of delicate arugula and curling garlic scapes are delicious, but not filling. This spring, I look back on myself with exasperation and fondness. It gets easier, it gets better, and it never has to be that hard. If you’re struggling through spring too, this is for you. As we repeat the project, you’re welcome to follow along with Eat Mendocino 2023, and learn with me which different mistakes I make this time around.
The redwood duff was soft under our feet, muting our steps below the way the fog muted everything above. The woods were soft and cool and dim, the slim redwood trunks left behind by generations of logging concealing and revealing themselves in the fog like fairies leading us deeper into the gloaming. It was everything a peaceful early spring evening on the Mendocino coast should be.
We were miserable. “There’s nothing here but the same little trumpet ones we saw back there,” one of us huffed out, our words carried on puffs of visible mist. My head was shot through by an arc of pain with each beat of my pulse, and everything was infuriating. The tiny clusters of orange and tan mushrooms seemed to mock us in their little winking groups, like a clique we weren’t being invited to join.
I had been a coffee drinker since I was in middle school. I grew up in the kind of shops and barns and garages that always had a tepid pot of burnt coffee with a film floating across its surface. I was generally the one who would bring a thermos of better coffee to share with the crews up north, where harvest work started at 5am to get ahead of the sun. I didn’t realize the level of my dependence on coffee for the simple reason that I had never been without it. I didn’t consider myself addicted to air, either. I didn’t drink alcohol unless I was in a social situation that expected it, and then not much. I thought I had a very moderate relationship to substances and it would be easy to let coffee go.
I intended to taper myself off slowly. I was pretty sure that was what I was doing, actually, even as the objective facts of the situation were otherwise. I tapered myself off of coffee so successfully that the evening of December 31st 2012, I was chugging the remains of a French press to get it out of my house before the day was officially over.
This is why, in the first week of the project, when Sarah and I went foraging for mushrooms in the misty woods, I did it with a full body withdrawal that was so horrendous, so gut-churning, so migraine-inducing, that the mere thought of coffee would turn my stomach for a decade to come. I stumbled, sweaty and miserable, through the dimming woods.
For Sarah, the days before the project were mostly about subtraction in the kitchen. She pulled the contents of her pantry, except for the ingredients she already had which were entirely local, and gave them to friends and family. For me, the preparation was months of addition to the pantry. I had been drying beans and vegetables from my garden, freezing summer produce and meat, and breeding goats in preparation for dairy five months ahead of time. I thought I had done a fairly good job, not having a real understanding of just how many calories it takes to sustain human life, especially while doing hard labor in the cold. I didn’t have the equipment or space to use a water bath canner, but I had done a lot with what I had. As I looked at my row of mason jars containing dried onion and tomatoes and a mix of beans, I felt ready.
In anticipation of the project starting, I went to the thrift store and did some dedicated kitchen shopping, including a crockpot. I had one in my garage shop, so I cringed at buying another, but as I used my shop crockpot to keep a boric acid solution hot to use for deoxidizing metal after heating it with a torch … I decided to get a dedicated crockpot for human food.
The night before the project started, I finished off the French press of coffee and put together my local ingredients in my new human food crockpot. Beans, dried onions (a worrying amount of my saved store of onions went into just that one pot, but I brushed that thought off), fresh winter vegetables like turnips and collards, and a bit of my precious frozen stock all went into the pot. I put it on low, and went to bed, feeling clever and secure in the thought that I was already a day ahead of the plan and would have a meal to share with Sarah the next day without us having to cook.
I woke up to the physical need for coffee and the smell of burning.
On this thrift store crockpot, apparently all points on the dial set it to “high.” The stew, whose ingredients I had carefully grown and stored, was a brown lump in the bottom of the pot, peeling away from the sides in flaking, leathery strips. It smelled noxious in that way that only overcooked beans can and was filling the kitchen with smoke. With a disgusted and despairing groan, I took the entire crockpot off the counter and into the yard, my huge sleepy dog trailing after me in confusion, plunked it on the grass, and ran the hose into it. I resolved not to tell Sarah anything about the monstrosity I had created or the meal we had both lost. Bucket, my honey-eyed and gargoyle-faced mastiff, sniffed it dubiously and backed away.
I hung the hose up and leaned against my tiny porch railing. I sighed and automatically reached for my coffee cup. It wasn’t there. “Well friend,” I addressed my solemn dog, “we’re off to a great start.”
Ironically, for people who lived within the constant sight and smell and sound of the ocean, so loud in the winter crashing against the high carved cliffs, we were soon out of salt. We had relied on the knowledge that there was a local salt company that made salt from the simple process of sea water plus time on drying screens. We anticipated being able to buy it in bulk. When a family member of the company had a tragic illness, the salt disappeared from the store. The season to gather salt from the flats is in late summer, and we did not yet know how to make it. Neither is winter the best time in terms of salinity of the ocean or safety of gathering. Cabbage soup without salt is a Siberian labor camp-level culinary experience. The textural homogeneity of a diet largely consisting of bland soup left me searching for anything with crunch and color.
I had never liked growing radishes. They’re prone to slug damage and they turn over in a bed very fast. And on the big farm in Oregon, I had spent long weary mornings, with the sun just beginning to pick out the corners of the buckets and the trucks, pulling handfuls of them out of the cold mud, twisting a tie around their always breaking leaves, brushing off the organic iron phosphate pellets the soil was covered with as well as any obvious worms, and tossing them into a bucket. In my mind, radishes are the worst kind of crop—a single harvest of the entire plant, requiring the harvester to crouch all the way on the ground, prone to damage, sensitive to weeds, and with a low sales price. In my new context, their redness and their sweet spicy crunch was miraculous. I didn’t use the iron phosphate pellets, so their globes, often twisted from crowded planting by kids, were pocked by small round scoops from the mouths of snails. I didn’t care. I was ravenous for anything that wasn’t soup.
With the short daylight hours, my hens weren’t laying much. A typical breakfast in those first weeks was a single egg, boiled for lack of oil to fry it, a swig of leftover soup, a cup of hot water with a sprig of mint, and ceaseless rain, all I could swallow for free as it ran across my face. Water, coming up from the ground and down from the sky, was all we had a lot of.
A spiral of self-reinforcing hunger set in, where the less I ate, the less I felt free to use the food stores I had saved the year before. I had a massive chest freezer sitting in the barn at the school program that I had crammed with local food, but it felt terrifying to dip into the reserves. We should have. We lost the freezer in February to a drunk driver hitting a power pole nearby and shorting out the electricity. We crammed what we could save into two tiny apartment freezers, and felt the scarcity even more keenly. I was frustrated and embarrassed. I thought I was ready. I didn’t want people to know how unready I was, which means I didn’t ask for help.
The fog and driving rain and monotony of short farm days felt like being out of time, disconnected from a community, existing only in a private state of lack. That was the opposite of what I wanted from this project. Meanwhile I was still having to do chores twice daily to care for animals that were not currently feeding me. Goats that were not giving milk still needed bedding, clean water, and hay, and chickens not laying eggs needed the same. My already short days were bracketed by these tasks.
This culinary boredom and shocking reduction in our daily calories pushed us into the woods to look for mushrooms. Mendocino County is rich in mushrooms, but their most abundant season is fall, not spring. The topographical variation in the county is immense. The land rises up from the ocean and passes through a myriad of biomes that are incredibly distinct from each other. In one short hike on the Ecological Staircase, a person can pass from the beach, through coastal prairie, deep fir forest, and up into pygmy scrub, an exceptionally rare ecosystem known nowhere else on earth where extremely acidic podalized sandstone grows twisted, acid loving plants like dwarf pine trees, towering rhododendrons, and thick huckleberries. This unique ecosystem, full of precious insights, already damaged by nearby logging, is of course also the home of our landfill, but there are many areas where edible mushrooms that love the acidic duff are abundant.
For weeks after work, with the short days already falling into darkness, we would head to the woods. We were looking for chanterelles, golden and black, hedgehogs, and maybe a precious last bolete in a grassy area under a pine tree, but the trails were popular and there weren’t many mushrooms out, except one type. It was everywhere, sprouting up with little orange trumpets topped with brown furling caps. They looked similar in form to a black chanterelle, but different enough in color and texture that I was sure they couldn’t be related. These mushrooms seemed to volunteer for our efforts, showing up everywhere we looked like kids raising their hands for a teacher, begging to be called on.
It took several days—in which we thoroughly came to resent these little mushrooms—to identify them, and when we did, I laughed. All around us, literally everywhere, were yellowfoot, also called winter chanterelle, a perfectly edible but not widely fetishized member of the family we had been looking for the entire time. They were so abundant that, had we the baskets and daylight, we could have harvested our weight just with the mushrooms within sight of the spot we stood.
Mushrooms are not plants, neither are they animals. They are something else, of which the mushrooms we see are only the fruiting bodies. When I was a kid, it was explained to me like an apple tree under the ground, whose apples popped up to the surface leaving the rest below. I found this image scary, envisioning the mushroom as literally resembling an underground apple tree—a gnarled, cephalopodic subterranean creature slinking and coiling mysteriously under the forest. It could grab me and pull me down into the soft humic darkness. Arguably the biggest living organism is a single mushroom that covers thousands of acres in Oregon. The mysteries of the fungi were vast and only just beginning to be revealed to me in part, but I know two things clearly from experience. Mushrooms contain a serious amount of protein, and I also know that they have a sense of humor.
Finding a glut of mushrooms reminded us that abundance was possible. We broke out of our stupor and reached out to the community. An elderly farmer, John, who was close to retirement and had mentored many of us, including teaching me to harvest ducks the previous year, had a few sacks of potatoes in his shed. They were second quality, going slightly soft, but they were rosy and full of calories. He gave us three bags, 150 pounds, and we ate them between us over the next two months. Skimmed chicken fat from stock made roasted potatoes possible, which felt like life itself. The next huge development, near the end of the spring, was dairy. Our friends in Boonville had a milk share with their cows. We signed up, and the combination of milk, potatoes, cabbage, and collards, with salt from the ocean water we gathered in perilous bottles, kept us alive like it had my Celtic ancestors. The freefall on the scale slowed, and then stopped. I will never, ever underestimate again in my life the power of potatoes and dairy for storing the solar energy of the previous year and passing it along, or forget the lesson that abundance is here in this place, as long as we learn enough to recognize it and are humble enough to accept it.
Farmer John has passed on now, but Farmer Kevin, a member of our collective in Caspar, as well as Brian in Covelo, have filled our 2023 pantry with potatoes. Mushrooms of all descriptions, including the one who frustrated us with its abundance until we learned we could eat it, yellowfoot, are packing jar after jar on our shelves. A decade of hard-won lessons are going into this reprise, and the pantry is stuffed, but I doubt it’ll be easy—the county agricultural landscape has changed and so have I. Join us on our social media and my Patreon for ongoing updates … including meals we cook in our new and improved, less flammable crockpot!
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Eat Mendocino Revisited
Ten Years Later, a New Take on an Old Challenge
by Gowan Batist
In Fall 2012, before Fortunate Farm was born, I was managing a farm-to-school program on the coast. (Noyo Food Forest is still going strong, bringing education and local food to teens and the wider community.)
I was preoccupied with the issues that I saw with the gentrification of local food, and its growing inaccessibility, versus the ethic that I had grown up being taught by my grandparents. Children of the Great Depression, they would literally buy bags of dented cans and roll the botulism dice, while growing, foraging, and fishing the most amazing local food. I was raised on a mix of the worst industrial discards and the best fresh homegrown produce. But back then, what both staples had in common was that they were affordable.
I was watching local food become fashionable, and therefore inaccessible. I knew that my vision of local food in Mendocino County was not a puff of microgreens on a salad served to a tourist. I loved the artistry and appreciated the financial importance of such products, but I wanted our local food to stick to our ribs, too.
I had always known that the homesteader ideal of self sufficiency was colonial propaganda, and that agricultural communities have always, when they have been anything, been deeply interdependent. I had been away from my home for years going to college, returning in 2011 to farm. I remembered the tight knit farming community of my youth, but I didn’t know the new faces and systems.
I was young and full of hubris and determination, and I decided that I would find where the safety net was by throwing myself into it. I wanted to understand with my body what we as an agricultural community could do, and what I could do with my relatively abundant free time and very low budget. I decided to spend a calendar year, January to January, eating and drinking only from the foodshed of Mendocino County. Oils, grains, spices, sweeteners—everything. This meant giving up coffee. The resultant coffee hangover was so bad that I have never gone back to it. My point was not to scold anyone about their own diets, or even to promote local food necessarily, but to offer myself as an experiment and a canary in our collective mine. I wanted to celebrate our strengths and truly feel our shortcomings, uninsulated by the anonymous food I would otherwise buy to fill the gap.
Eat Mendocino was given its name by my friend Sarah. I was picking up her lemon tree from her chilly Mendocino deck so it could spend the winter in my greenhouse. She asked if I was still going to do my local food project. I said yeah, I was. She casually decided to join me. That decision, made as we heaved her potted lemon tree into the back of my ’95 Dodge Dakota, has largely defined the last decade of my life.
In Fall 2012, I was stocking my pantry and freezer. I was picking the last clinging tomatoes on the brown vines and splitting them in half for my dehydrator, the old Excalibur that I’m still using now. I was canning in a water bath canner in the shade house at the farm, because it wouldn’t fit on my tiny home stove and took up too much kitchen territory in my shared rental.
I am doing all the things that I’ve been doing since 2012, now, in Fall 2022. Yesterday we packed a dozen quarts of tomatoes away, the days before two dozen of salsa, the weeks before pickles, and gallons of pressed cider and leaching acorns are sitting in my cooler. Sarah’s old lemon tree is alive and well, its lemon juice and zest are tucked on a shelf in my big freezer.
I always knew that I wanted to repeat the project ten years later. The change in the county’s agricultural infrastructure in the last decade has been immense. We have had many new farms open and some close. We have lost beloved elders, and beginners have become mentors. We have tools and resources that I did not have when I prepared for this project ten years ago. We now have Sarah’s project, the non-profit Good Farm Fund, which she was inspired to co-create to build capacity for local farmers after her experience with Eat Mendocino. We have a greatly expanded Farmers Market Association, with EBT matching funds. We have the School of Adaptive Agriculture, our own local wool mill, and very significantly to me, we have the MendoLake Food Hub. The Hub is a non-profit that aggregates distribution for local food through a website, strategically placed coolers, and a truck route. They have been essential during the pandemic for getting food to people who need it and have expanded to home delivery and the general public rather than solely being available for sales to institutions like restaurants and grocery stores. We have sent probably tens of thousands of pounds of food and flowers all over the county and beyond, even as far as San Francisco, via the Hub network over the years.
Our farm on the coast hosts one of the distribution nodes for the Hub. This is just a big cooler, but what forms around it is the capacity-building that makes farming work for many of us. Twice per week, trucks pick up and drop off in the cooler. Farmer friends bring their products, restaurant owners pull up to pick up, and many, many vehicles are kept off the road by consolidating the transportation of the best of the coast farms to inland, and the best of the inland farms to the coast. Our farm stand serves as a coastal retail site for the collaborative nature of this project; we are proud to offer our partner farms’ peppers and melons alongside our cool climate crops. I love getting to say hi to farmer and restaurateur friends coming and going from our place to pick up and drop off.
What this has meant for me in the last season is seeing boxes, filled by my friends’ hands with the words “Eat Mendocino” written across them, showing up in the node. Ten years ago this time, I had to seek everything out, and we drove hundreds of miles in search of ways to fill the jars in the pantries beyond what I could set aside for myself on the small farm I was tending. Now it gets delivered to my farm, which is a good thing. I have more responsibilities than I did in my early twenties, less free time, and gas is much more expensive—but a bunch of kale is still $3. The fact that I consider the practical implications of my big philosophical leaps of faith now is also evidence that I’m ten years older.
As I prepare, I’m not replacing my non-local pantry items when they run out, I’ve weaned myself off of caffeinated tea, and I’m double-stocking my kitchen, body, and mind. The work that is solely subsisting off of local food that needs to be gathered, harvested, prepared, stored, fermented and dried, frozen and thawed, and plucked and cooked is immense. I have a community around me that helps lift the load and offers their expertise and loaned equipment, unpicked apple trees, and grandma recipes.
Doing a project like this now is fundamentally different than it was ten years ago in a social sense. Demographically, farmers in their twenties have been rising in recent years, but in their thirties they sharply fall off. There are many reasons for this. An abusive system of agriculture nationally that pits idealistic small farmers against the low commodity prices made possible by oppression of workers and corporate subsidies on industrial farms is one very good reason. Many of us start as interns who deeply believe and are willing to work for little or nothing and sleep anywhere, but who, after hopping from farm to farm as an intern without any possibilities for longer term better paying work, become disillusioned. Many of us get injured, or need dental work, or have one major disaster like a county fine for a hoop house, or a broken tractor, or a fire, or just fall in love and realize they would like to work less than 80 hours per week while caring for children.
I’m now in my thirties and I’m part of this trend, to an extent. The pandemic’s financial impact on our farm requires off-farm income; on-going complications from old injuries in my hands make repetitive tasks like planting, weeding, harvesting, and bunching impossible for long stretches of time; and elder care responsibilities mean that I am farming less now than I ever have before in my career. “Just” two acres of mixed pumpkins, squash, flowers, and my sheep flock. There are many other exciting things happening at Fortunate Farm, but not managed by me.
The first seeds I planted on this farm, which we purchased in 2013, during the year I first did Eat Mendocino, were a blue Hubbard type pumpkin called Sweet Homestead. They were recommended by the old farmer who had lived here before us. This year’s pumpkins are curing in the field now and were the first seeds I planted this season, too. That’s unusual. Typically there would be a whole round of cold season greens and roots. The first season I was still farming at Noyo Food Forest, and was just getting started in our farming at Fortunate and needed to plant something simple and sturdy that could stand having my attention split. This season I was caring for my mother and needed to plant something simple and sturdy, too. The crops we turn to when times are hard and when times are full and hectic are the ones that mean the most to me. They have our backs when we need it, in celebration and in grief.
Only some of the folks who started farming in Mendocino around the same time I did are still farming now, and I see in them the combination of grit, luck, smarts, and resources that it takes to make that long haul. I feel every day of my ten years since Fall 2012, most of them spent doing hard labor. When we were young, we wrote some big checks with our hopes and dreams that we have cashed with our sore bodies and our lost sleep. I made some big, audacious statements about the world I wanted to see this time ten years ago, at 24. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was a kid with just enough information and skills to get into trouble with.
I am not the same person that I was then, but I made a big, ridiculous promise publicly to do this local food project, and I made that promise come true. I also said I would do it again in ten years, when I had my own farm. I am now going to make that come true, too. Preserving local food now, in the peak of the fall season, is a love letter to the future days that are short and cold. Fulfilling oaths made when I was younger is a love letter to the past and the days that were new and full.
If you’d like to follow along, Eat Mendocino will be active on social media, and I’ll be sharing exclusive writing on my Patreon: patreon.com/GowanBatist.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.
Living with Lions
Predators are Essential for Ecosystems in Balance
by Gowan Batist
I was awake at 5am, feeding thin sticks into my newly kindled fire, when my phone pinged. My neighbor was asking for help. A mountain lion had attacked their goats, and they wanted to know if I could bring my medical bag. I headed out the door and walked through the blue predawn to their goat pen, a tidy low corral made of pallets lashed together. The lion had reached through the slats and injured two baby goats, both of which were bawling loudly into the otherwise still morning. They had seen the lion hurry away into the brush when they ran out to respond to the goat’s cries. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that the mountain lion hadn’t actually left the area. As my neighbor cradled the injured baby goat, a loud aggrieved feline complaint came from the direction of the nearby creek bed.
I swung my flashlight around and caught the reflective discs of the lion’s eyes, huge and staring directly at me, the source of the annoying light. I stepped in front of my friend, who smelled of blood and whose arms were emitting the sounds of a small injured animal. The lion was so close. Too close. A mountain lion who does not have the room to feel safe turning their back to run will often present a confrontational front, and this juvenile was no exception. They were making all the displays of an angry house cat, but on a large scale. What we should have done was slowly increase our distance while shouting and throwing things. However, with our backs against the corral, and the lion’s back against the bank of a creek bed, nobody had space to move for a long several moments in which I was bathed in the purest rush of adrenaline euphoria I have ever felt.
My neighbor’s partner had gone to the house for supplies and heard our calls, so brought a horn with them when they returned. As they approached the standoff, we decided to try to haze the lion off. My neighbor blew their horn abruptly, shockingly loud in the still morning, and I shrieked like the primate I am and stomp-clapped in the crouching lion’s direction. The cat evaporated, flashing up the bank so fast that I was left with a retinal after-image of a tail as long as me and a rack of ribs streaking into a tan blur. I’ve carried a small marine air horn ever since. It was $15 and fits in my pocket, and I suggest you get one too.
This could be a story about how a plucky neighborhood of farmers defended themselves from a marauding beast, except for one detail. That starving teenaged lion was likely taking a chance on a goat pen because their mother had been shot by someone further up the road a while back, which we had heard about through the grapevine. Lions stay with their families for up to two years and are not able to hunt successfully enough to survive for quite a while even after they attain their full size. This lion’s desperation was likely created by human actions.
When my grandfather was growing up in Mendocino County, times were so hard here that the entire landscape had been stripped by desperate people. The Great Depression, following a World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, had collapsed the economy. There were few if any deer left to shoot, and the livestock they had were zealously guarded by a totally unregulated extermination war on all native carnivores, including mountain lions. My great-grandmother sent him out, as a young child, with a shotgun. He would shoot songbirds and blue jays, which his mother would boil for broth, straining out the tiny bones. When skunks got into their chicken coop, it was such a tragedy that they resorted to trapping the skunks themselves, keeping them in the now-vacant coop until their winter pelts grew in, when they were skinned and their pelts—white stripes disguised by black dye, as counterfeit mink—sent to San Francisco to be sold to the rich, on a small boat also carrying moonshine. This happened within living memory, and apex predators are slower to recover than smaller animals. It may feel like there are more sightings of lions now than we had growing up, but recovery is not the same as invasion.
I share this family and local history to give ecological context that’s specific to this county’s recent history, but mountain lions have lived alongside humans on this landscape for tens of thousands of years. Since colonization they have suffered greatly, but are still here. We must learn to live with them, because exterminating them has already been tried and has failed. In California, from 1907 to 1963, mountain lions were classified as a “bountied predator,” and a record of 12,462 lions were killed for bounty in that time, more than any other state. After the bounty system ended, hunting was allowed until a moratorium from 1972 to 1986, after which point Proposition 117, California Wildlife Protection Act, officially banned hunting of mountain lions in 1990. In 2013, Senate Bill 132 became law, which protects lions in populated areas and only allows lethal removal in the case that a lion is posing an imminent threat to human life—aggressive behavior that is not due to the presence of first responders.
In the years since then, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has added additional protections to endangered populations in Southern California and has implemented F&G Code 4801.5, which allows CDFW to partner with entities to implement non-lethal procedures on mountain lions, including rescue and rehabilitation. All of these policies may mean a recovery of mountain lion populations to closer to what they were before the wholesale extermination policies at the turn of the century, but even with new protections, there are many issues preventing a full recovery.
Panthera, a global big cat advocacy organization, estimates that the 2020 wildfire season alone negatively impacted at least 15% of California’s total lion population. Plowed fields, highways, and housing developments isolate populations from each other, causing genetic bottlenecks. Perhaps most insidiously, they are sickened by rodenticides and the mercury which drifts off the ocean in the fog from international oil and gas drilling. This mercury, according to researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz, hyper-accumulates in lichen favored by deer, and then further concentrates in the bodies of lions who primarily eat deer. All these factors mean that mountain lions in Mendocino County, while enjoying more legal protections than they ever have before, still face myriad challenges.
What does this mean for those of us who make a living farming and ranching? First of all, we need to know and follow the law. It is not legal to shoot a mountain lion on sight on your ranch, even if it is near your livestock, nor is it legal to shoot a lion on sight anywhere else. However, that does not mean you should allow a lion to pick off your chickens or goats! It’s unsafe for everyone involved, including the lions, to learn to predate livestock. Permits must be obtained to haze, shoot, or trap a lion, and if you use lethal force to defend yourself or your animals in the heat of an imminent threat, it must be immediately followed by a phone call to CDFW, which can grant a permit verbally and then follow up. There are potentially dire legal consequences for not following these laws, and social consequences to our neighbors and operations from the disturbance to the lion population as well.
Ecosystems are not arithmetic structures. If you have ten lions and shoot one, you do not necessarily end up with nine lions. What you have is a reeling social structure that may actually result in more lion conflicts than you had previously, as new migrating lions seek to fill the vacated space, and/or desperate orphans take the risk of coming close to humans and their pets and livestock. We are safest when our communities are all stable, human and wildlife. It is better to learn to live with the big cats we have than to keep their social network in a constant state of chaos by lethally removing lions.
I see living in a functioning ecosystem as a sign of success of my operation, and I hope other farmers can learn to see it that way too. A 2006 study by Ripple and Beschta shows that mountain lion presence increases diversity at every trophic level, from beetles to amphibians to streambed plant diversity, due to their impacts on ungulate populations. A 2016 study by lead author Sophie Gilbert estimates that the savings in dollars and human lives by returning mountain lions to the parts of the Eastern U.S. where they’ve been extirpated could be immense, preventing 21,400 human injuries, 155 fatalities, and $2.13 billion in avoided costs from deer vehicle strikes over a 30 year roll-out period. The study also points out that the return of mountain lions to South Dakota prevents collision costs with deer on such a large scale that they save the state $1.1 million annually. South Dakota has 886,667 people, while California has 39,185,605. Restoring the lion population in California would save money and lives at a scale proportional to our vastly larger population, every year. It seems appropriate that some of those savings could be applied to making coexistence work for everyone, but I’m just a farmer, I don’t make state budgets. These numbers illustrate that, while conflicts we have with mountain lions are serious and sometimes costly, we are still better off with them than without them.
Mountain lions are large and powerful animals who can be dangerous but most of the time avoid us at all costs. A Santa Cruz Puma Project study in 2017 showed that they will even leave their cached kill sites when recordings are played of human voices versus control sounds. Their avoidance of humans means that many of us have gotten away with leaving small ruminants unprotected for years before something happens. When a depredation does occur, it’s shocking, scary, and sad, and can feel violating. The fact that depredations are rare doesn’t mean that we should roll the dice with our animal’s lives, leave them unprotected, and then take lethal action when a native carnivore eventually takes advantage. No one wins in that scenario. Proactive tools are safer, less traumatic, and more effective than reactive ones.
A 2013 study from CDFW shows that only about 25% of autopsied mountain lions, killed with depredation permits, had stomach contents matching the animals they were accused of eating. This means that either the livestock was not killed by a cat at all, or that the wrong cat was trapped. Trapping as a tool is imprecise, can backfire due to the consequences of social chaos for the surviving local lions, and should be saved for the absolute worst case scenarios, not be a regular tool of agricultural businesses. Mendocino County no longer has a contract with USDA Wildlife Services for trapping.
Depredation permits can still be obtained via the appropriate channels in emergencies, but the paradigm is shifting, and as shepherds we have to shift too. A USDA-APHIS study done in CA in 2014 and 2015 shows that losses of cattle to any predator represent 1.1% of unintentional deaths for mature cattle and 5.8% of calves, with only 20% of beef ranchers using any form of non-lethal management tools. The same study reports that 19% of unintentional sheep deaths and 45.3% of lamb deaths were from predation in the same years, with only 58% of sheep ranchers using any form of non-lethal management tools. Adopting tools like livestock guardian dogs, whose efficacy ranges from 93% to 98% across several studies in different regions, seems like the obvious step. Since implementing tools including electric fence, guardian dogs, and flashing solar Foxlights, I haven’t had a depredation in several years.
Learning to live alongside wildlife is our only long-term solution, and given how large their ranges are, will always be a community project. The last time I wrote about coexistence for a local paper, I got hate mail and harassing phone calls. This is clearly a very emotional issue for many people. I understand how sad it is to lose animals, and I have been face to face with the consequences of a neighbor shooting a mother mountain lion—which was her starving cub hissing in my face. This has become such an important issue to me personally that I have recently begun to work with the Mountain Lion Foundation as their Coexistence Coordinator, where I gather and share research and tools for homesteaders and ranchers. Project Coyote has also offered to help support Mendocino folks who are struggling with conflicts. There will soon be a non-lethal exclusion service up and running in the county as well, and I’m excited to learn more about that project as it develops.
I strongly believe that there is a way forward that protects the safety and viability of our farms and ranches and families, as well as that of wildlife. We may never reach a goal of zero depredations, any more than we reach a goal of zero tractor accidents or zero wildfires. We live and work in a dangerous and complex world, which makes it all the more essential to approach our work with proactive, holistic safety in mind. We can do more than deter desperate native carnivores from causing trouble; we can foster ecological health that enables stable thriving populations to live without needing to scrounge from our tables. Any farm or ranch that strives for sustainability, regeneration, or to be climate beneficial must include the native ecosystem we live and work in. Practically and ethically, the only way forward is together.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs. Her writing can be found at https://www.patreon.com/GowanBatist.
Honor Stands
Thoughts on Honesty and Need
by Gowan Batist
I was first introduced to Honor Stands in France, on a narrow lane across from a heavy clay field in which a draft horse was patiently pulling a drag harrow. To an American, even a small-town West Coast kid like me, it was radical to see a drawer of change laid out on a table, containing quite a few Euros, and the farm’s offerings totally open to the passerby. I loved shopping at them and wanted to have one of our own at Fortunate Farm when I came home. In the early days, we only opened the stand on weekends, and we staffed the tables laid out in our barn. This was mostly because we didn’t have a system set up for self-checkout yet, and because my folks loved the chance to see our customers, which they didn’t get to do during the week like I did.
When Covid hit, we converted the farm stand to fully self-serve, established a hand-washing sink and extra safety procedures, and bought gallons of produce-safe surface sanitizer to spray down all the counters and surfaces every evening. We heard from many customers that the stand was an essential part of their food security—as the stand was open air it felt safe, and it couldn’t be disrupted by global shortages as easily.
Throughout the pandemic, new farm stands have popped up like mushrooms. I’ve heard of several new ones just this week, and I hope that, like me, the other farmers around the community find that they are a valuable addition to their business and useful for their customers.
The individual farm stand is much like a farmer’s market booth, except that it may be unstaffed. These stands give you a window into that particular farm’s ethos, aesthetic, and growing practices. A collective farm stand, like the one we run with our neighbors at Fortunate Farm, and the one recently opened at Ridgewood Ranch, combines the offerings of multiple farmers and pastoralists into a single stand. This greatly reduces the labor of each individual farmer or rancher and forms a dynamic and interesting whole out of the smaller selection of products each of them does best, and creates a more convenient experience for the shopper.
If a farm stand is something you’re considering adding to your farm, make sure you know the relevant rules regarding your zoning and business permits, which will vary based on where you live (unincorporated county vs city limits) and your type of business. One of the necessary expenses we incurred was installing a wheelchair accessible porta-potty and hand washing station near the stand.
The single most common question I am asked about our farm stand is about theft, and what, if any, security measures we have in place. I’m mostly asked this by customers, but by farmers as well. That question is one of many in agriculture that seems like a small thread, but when you pull on it, it unravels the entire tapestry of how the person asked sees the world and their role in it.
Last summer I was sitting in the shade of our olive trees with a friend, catching up about life from ten feet away. (You can do things like sit under a tree while vending is happening when you have a self-serve farm stand.) I was raw from multiple deaths in our family in short succession, and the many ways the pandemic was punishing our business. We were sharing our stories of loss and survival when someone popped out of the farm stand, walked over, and asked if I worked here. I said I did. She said that she forgot her wallet but wrote down what she took and would Venmo or PayPal us from town. I said that was fine, thanked her for coming by, and went back to my chat. My friend asked if I worried that I had just been scammed.
When we first opened an honor farm stand, I joined a few online groups of farmers discussing them, and this question came up over and over again there, too.
In fall of 2013, our Federal Ag loan was stalled in the middle of our escrow process, threatening to wreck the sale. It cost us over $100,000 for a commercial bridge loan to save the farm before we even got there. The reason? Some Republicans had refused to approve the Federal budget, which included the USDA loan program we were participating in, as a stunt over Planned Parenthood. That was a political scam.
Last year, someone fraudulently applied for a Federal Covid relief loan in our business name, for $65,000. This happened at a time when Covid was absolutely taking a wrecking ball to my family. It was in the immediate aftermath of the loss of my dad, the loss of my crew member's mom a few weeks following him, while my partner's dad was in the ICU, and while my aunt's family had just lost loved ones. We had to scramble to respond, do a FOIA request, explain to the IRS that they would not be getting $65,000 from us, etc. Seeing the paper trail of the person in Stockton who put us through this stress at that vulnerable time is probably the closest I have come to actually seeing red. That was a financial scam.
The very expensive medical supplies that auto-shipped to my folks’ house had to be canceled after my dad’s death. To order more or change your prescription, there's an automated system. To cancel, you have to speak to a person. So my grieving mom sat on hold for six hours waiting to talk to someone, being automatically hung up on after every hour. If you've experienced the loss of a spouse, you know it's not a time when your phone line is generally free for hours. Every day that she tried and failed, a credit card was getting charged for expensive supplies for a person who no longer needed them. That was a corporate scam.
People needing food are not in any of these categories, even in the regrettable circumstances that they do lie or cause harm to our business. Human beings feeding their bodies can never be the same as the above instances, because the human body, unlike capitalism, has limits and will stop when its needs are met. That said, I would prefer people to be honest and simply ask for food. It makes our accounting easier, and we could then share local resource information with them.
When we opened our farm, our entire start-up fund for the season had been drained by the aforementioned emergency loan. An anonymous person left $2,000 in cash on the seat of my unlocked truck, with a note saying it was from some older homesteading women who wanted our farm to succeed. In their honor, we have given a free farm subscription CSA to a family every year since. We are regular donors to all kinds of food aid in the county. Giving food away is something that we owe the community for the privilege of being held up by them when we are in need, like we have been lately. When my mom was hospitalized this spring, we were snowed under by casseroles. Nothing we have ever given or had taken has come close to what we’ve received.
People probably steal from our farm stand sometimes, as they do from all stores. We've never had a massive theft like someone running off with the (admittedly pretty heavy) beautiful cash box my uncle made, and we also have to consider the cost savings of not paying staff time for someone to sit at the stand. Overall, people are generous, and I know some folks overpay. There is also an amazing local man who gives us several hundred dollars annually to offset some of the costs of our food donations. He is the perfect example of using your privilege, and your extra cushion of dollars, to go straight to direct private relief for people, and we are grateful.
To be honest, outright theft bothers me a lot less than people who I see come into the stand, grab a few things without adding the price up, throw a bill in the till and leave. I do want people who can afford it to honestly pay for the cost of our labor and overhead, and when and if they can, pay it forward too. I notice the discrepancy between people asking about theft vs people asking about casual lack of correct checkout, when I think the latter actually amounts to a higher loss. This is reflected all throughout our society—there is hyper-criticism of poor individuals, and little focus on the negligence of more affluent people. We live in an exploitative system from the stolen land we grow food on to the way our taxes are spent and our loved ones extorted by for-profit medical care. I would like to see us be more suspicious of corporate subsidy scams that steal our tax dollars than we are of our neighbors. Don’t let other struggling human beings be the stand-in for the systemic challenges we are all under pressure from.
As a farm community, we are abundant and generous. On the coast, The Botanical Gardens farm donates thousands of pounds of produce to the Food Bank every year. Meals on Wheels utilizes fresh local produce from the Senior Center garden and donations from farmers. Caring Kitchen delivers healthy local meals to cancer patients, and Action Network provides direct food aid to families. I know there are many more inland I’m less aware of. As a community, we bring our donations together to fund programs like the Good Farm Fund, which do the most practical thing possible–directly grant funds that small farms need to be more resilient to food security for our community.
Farm stands are part of the food landscape of our county now, possibly more than they ever have been. It can feel like a radical change to step out from behind the table as a farmer and head back out to the field while customers come and go. I encourage you to try it, both as a farmer and a customer. What if we lived like we all radically trusted each other? What more would we become capable of, if we lived that experiment long enough to make it true?
Gowan Batist is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs. Her writing can be found at https://www.patreon.com/GowanBatist
We Can’t Go Back
Thoughts on What We’ve Lost
by Gowan Batist
Gathering around the table with the whole farm crew and associated family is the mitochondria–the power generation organelle of the cell that is Fortunate Farm. We used to gather at least once per week in jostling, steamy, convivial chaos that felt disorganized in the moment. But seen from a distance of two years of pandemic, it was actually a beautiful balance, the way any patch of stars look randomly strewn, but when seen far enough back, the whole galaxy has a graceful and balanced spiral.
I miss the shuffle–grabbing extra chairs from the barn, keeping track of five different food allergies and diets, windows steaming over from pots on the stove, damp boots at the door, and everyone's laughter. I knew all our laughs so well that I could place each crew member at the table with my eyes closed.
I miss being able to hover quietly on the edge of the big mob, part of but not engaged in it. I have hearing loss and lose track of conversations in a crowded room, and had a tendency to leave my own sentences trailing off into the auditory static. I experienced the collective as one general hum.
I miss how anyone who showed up got swept in, how some people had a knack for picking just the right time, how immediately people became family–both by being handed dishes full of food and dishes they could wash.
I miss commiserating with everyone bravely laboring under the exquisite burden that is my mom's Very Nourishing Cooking.
I miss our dinners after farmers market, when we would put on the Iron & Wine radio station and cook a bit from all our friends’ market stalls, and it was like the energy of the whole long day on our feet lasted long enough to culminate in a sense of camaraderie with the larger farming community, rendered visible in our bowls.
I miss having a physical language for inexpressible bonds. Just come in, we don't need to say a thing, enough is already said in the jostle and gesture.
To be honest, on our farm those dinners had already slipped away before the pandemic, because as much as he loved them, my dad couldn't handle the noise and stimulation as his illness got worse. The dinners mellowed, thinned, and eventually halted entirely before the announcement of social distancing.
I thought at first that moving into the old farm house my parents used to live in would be like a passing of the torch, that I would become the host of the party, and my folks would visit when my dad felt well enough but would be able to slip away gracefully. That they would preside as honored elders but hand off the responsibility to our generation to keep the table going. I was proud of the transition.
Well, I moved into their house, and they moved into a smaller cottage down the farm lane, but my stewardship of this community turned out to be quite different. Instead of hosting the groaning dinner table and the weekend breakfasts, I took their big epic party table down, because I couldn’t live with it sitting there empty. When my mom and I tugged on opposite ends of the old table and took out the leaves, moving its diminished form into in her new place, there was an air of solemn ceremony about it. Like folding up a flag.
This house feels too big for me alone, but too small to hold the echoes of everyone who should be here.
It's already too late for us to comfort our sadness about our long time apart by saying we are sacrificing time together now so that we'll all be there when we gather next. We won't all be. We lost loved ones these last two years. Those losses will always be there, there will always be a void in their shape.
Now that it’s been two years of pandemic, we are faced with adjustment beyond emergency, short-term measures. We have been able to pull together massive support for food aid and recovery, but we have also lost farms and farmers to the economic consequences of this pandemic. On our farm, the recovery measures actually became weaponized against us when someone fraudulently applied for and received government aid in our business name, forcing us to fight with the IRS and file identity theft reports–all while burying my dad.
We are trying to build a new paradigm, while still recovering from the fatigue and loneliness and anxiety of what came before. To me, COVID has felt like a series of constantly shifting goalposts that prevent me from adequately measuring and conserving my energy. While I am still panting and gasping at the finish line, I realize the finish line of the sprint has become the starting line for a marathon. It’s unclear how many shifts still lie ahead. The biggest outbreak of the pandemic in my home on the Mendocino Coast is happening right now.
Our new generation of interns and young farmers are having a very different experience from my own at their age, and, though it was a short time ago, the way things were feels like a different era. The centrality of communal meals on our farm was echoed in the larger farm community. I learned and grew so much as a young farmer in Guild meetings at the Grange in Willits in my early twenties, eating potluck dishes and talking shop, and at gatherings at Ridgewood Ranch with huge dinners in the kitchen and farmers from all over the county and beyond, crowded together sharing a communal meal and building a community. I’ve seen business and romantic partnerships bloom at those events, as well as successful political actions and deep understanding between people with different perspectives and approaches.
The Good Farm Fund picnic held at Barra on October 12, 2021, shows how nimble this community is. It wasn’t like the mob scenes of the past, but I looked around and saw the usual suspects, and some new faces. I saw the alchemy of our farms coming together in a to-go box instead of a plate, but the magic was still there.
We can't put the lightning back in the bottle. It will never be what it was again. There is no going back to normal, because we are not all here, and even those of us who are still here are not who we were before. I have faith in our farming community to regenerate, to be resilient, to do what we always have done and grow flowers out of compost.
The future of the farming community will be different after this is over, but it will still be us. I don’t know when we will gather freely and easily as a farm crew, let alone a farming community, again. Whatever the world looks like when that day comes, there will be a table with a place at it, or just a corner to perch wherever you fit.
Until then, stay safe.
Gowan Batist is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs. Her writing can be found at https://www.patreon.com/GowanBatist