Standing Tall

To be published Dec. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “The Corps of Engineers just denied the permit half an hour ago” said my step-mother triumphantly in Sunday’s phone call.  She knew I’d welcome that news even though our conversations haven’t traversed the Standing Rock Sioux’s territory or the corporate pipeline that threatens it. 

           

     The bravery of those people camping out at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers in defense of their rights to their lands has had me standing taller lately.  However, to think that our government could respond appropriately at this moment of great need – in fact, the Corps of Engineers, which is not known for its interest in public input – has re-instated my belief in this system.  Suddenly I feel glad to be Uncle Sam’s daughter.

           

     It’s all about land, when it comes right down to it, how land matters ‘way more than we think.  The Standing Rock Sioux know how much land matters, as do most Native American tribes.  Despite treaties and lands reserved for their exclusive use, their history is peppered with losses of control over resources and their quality of life to the kind of thinking behind the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

           

    It’s watching others stand up for land that’s straightened my backbone, like Dave Archambault, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, who was interviewed Friday on the PBS News Hour.  Responding to the pipeline CEO’s statement that the tribe was worried about nothing, he said “If the safeguards are all there, why not put it (back to the original route) north of Bismark?”

           

     “He (the CEO) will say that it can’t go there because of the population of the community, the environmental impacts, the sacred sites that are there, the wetlands that it has to cross. These are all the same concerns that we have. It’s just that we’re a lot fewer (in population.)  And so, if there is no worry, if the safeguards are there, then relocate it to that location. That’s OK.”

               

     As he said this, his face showed nothing: no anger, no glee at beating that kind of logic at its own game, no snide-bordering-on-vindictive disgust like my face would have shown had I pulled that off.  He was remarkable, sitting there in the News Hour studio in his light blue, button-down collar shirt, no jacket, no tie, no eagle feathers in his hair or silver jewelry draped around his neck.  He was just a man speaking truth to power who had come to Washington to discuss his peoples’ concerns with the federal government, which Sunday’s news confirmed was worth the effort.

           

     The news earlier in the week that several thousand veterans would be joining the tribes at their encampment, intending to make a human wall between the land protectors and the proto-military police forces who had drenched the protestors with water cannons the week before, had confirmed the national importance of this seemingly tiny decision.  Have we not had enough of our culture’s and our government’s ignorant, arrogant demeaning treatment of native people?  The veterans’ actions say that we have.

           

     I feel that the efforts of the Standing Rock tribe and other Americans, Native and natural-born citizens both, have been a great gift to those of us who feel compelled to question the erosive aspects of “development.”  “We have every right to protest this pipeline,” Archambault said.  “We have indigenous lands, we have ancestral lands, we have treaty lands. The pipeline is 500 feet from our reservation border.… (I)t’s unfortunate that this nation continues to treat our tribe and tribal nations around this country in this manner.”

           

     Monday morning I logged on to the PBS News Hour website to follow up the Corps’ announcement.  There, in an article by Jenni Monet, was a photo of a 97-year-old woman standing in a gymnasium on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation Saturday, waiting to greet the veterans arriving in support.  First Lt. Marcela LeBeau of the Lakota tribe had served in the U.S. Army as a nurse between 1944 and 1947.  Dressed in a plum-colored, dress-length Ultrasuede raincoat, her powder-blue snow parka lying on a folding table behind her, her silver hair piled high on her head, Lt. LeBeau stood tall as she waited for the volunteer troops with a placid, peaceful smile on her face, a smile only slightly wider than the Mona Lisa’s.  Did she know then that this effort was going to work?  Or did she only know that it was the right thing to do, regardless?

    When governments and corporations do not respect the laws of the land or the people who live there, we all have every right to protest.  In fact, I believe we have an obligation.  Standing tall at Standing Rock, the veterans of wars both foreign and domestic have shown us how to reclaim our democracy. May we stand tall with them in support and spirit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann researches issues of land ethics, land use and land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  For more information on the Standing Rock efforts, go to www.pbsnewshour.org.  To contribute funds to these efforts, visit http://www.rop.org/rural-oregon-stands-standing-rock/. Thanks to rural minister/songwriter John Pitney for this recommendation.  See also Waddie Mitchell's lyrics to Juni Fisher's song "Still Here," described in this blog Feb. 11, 2015.

 

 

 

 

Seeing No One

Published Nov. 30, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


    “Seeing no one,” said our new mayor, Pam Kimball, last Tuesday night, “we’ll skip the rebuttal and move to the vote,” which came out 5:0, predictably approving the item. 

     It was a public hearing on a tax-exempt bond issue that was barely discussed and which I did not understand.  No one spoke in favor of, or against the idea, which caused Pam to lower her gavel.  In fact, no one came to the meeting even to ask a question about it.  It was just like old times.

           

     There are other familiarities. It was the last meeting of Rosaena Sanchez, who chose not to serve another term.  Despite being the elected Councilmember to receive the highest number of popular votes in at least two decades (745 to Pam’s 549, which made her third-place in 2012,) Ms. Sanchez had to acknowledge herself, thanking the citizens for what she’d learned serving on the dais.  Her sentiments were barely acknowledged by the other council members, who appeared not sad to see her go.           

     With Rosaena’s departure, starting Dec. 13^th  the Lindsay City Council will be majority appointees:  people chosen by the Council itself to fill vacancies made by those who left.  In fact, the only two elected Council members, Pam Kimball and Danny Salinas (who received only 385 votes in 2014), served multiple terms as appointees before actually facing an election.  We are back to having a hand-picked Council, insiders all.

           

     Another similarity with the past:  changing rules for public participation.  When Ed Murray was mayor, you never knew whether you’d be able to speak, even during the public comment period, or whether he’d decide that what you had to say was not pertinent to the Council’s business and cut you off with the pound of his gavel.  Asking a question during the meeting was almost impossible.  But when Ramona Padilla became mayor, I began the long process of establishing rules for public participation so that people could know what they could say when, and begin to take their rightful place in these public meetings.             

     With Ramona’s departure and Pam’s elevation to mayor, I knew we would have trouble keeping those rules in place.  Having served as mayor-pro-tem under Ed’s mayorship several times, Pam has no problem filling his shoes.  In both November meetings she quickly dispatched what little public participation could have occurred by me and my attorney regarding the third attempt to build a Dollar General store on Art and Leonor Serna’s lots near the Roundabout.           

    

     At the November 8^th meeting, Mayor Kimball tabled the agenda item rather than discuss it, without even exploring what our concerns might have been.  In the two weeks between that meeting and last Tuesday’s, we received more of the supporting documents from the Dollar General project, which only increased our concerns. We submitted these greater concerns in writing before the Nov. 22^nd meeting and prepared to discuss them with Council and Staff.

           

     Pam chose, however, to limit our participation in person to either the public comment period or during the agenda item.  She then asked Assistant City Planner Brian Spaunhurst to make the staff’s presentation of the project, and she and the other council members smilingly followed along as he painstakingly read each document from the Nov. 8^th meeting, which took at least half an hour.  Staff presentations normally take 5 minutes at most.  When it came our turn to speak, she limited each presentation to five minutes and asked that we present only new information.  These changes in the rules were clearly devised to inhibit discussion of the issues, not to flush them out.

           

     We were there to discuss the apparent problems with traffic safety and congestion thanks to the Roundabout, which appear not to have been adequately considered in the project evaluation.  Yet not one council member took the opportunity to investigate our concerns either during the meeting or afterward.  They instantly and easily rubberstamped the Dollar General project, which elated the Sernas and their realtor.  No one was embarrassed.

           

      “Nobody comes to the Lindsay City Council meetings,” editor Reggie Ellis once shouted at me when I complained about our town.  Those of us who can comprehend the business of city councils should be embarrassed about that fact, especially after the economic antics of the Townsend administration were discovered by a handful of concerned citizens who stuck their necks out and started going to those meetings.  

           

     But the real culprits are the so-called elected officials of this town, who have the responsibility of seeing that the administration operates for the benefit of its residents, not for the benefit of special interests, including individual property owners.  Seeing no one, they think they know what this community needs.  But if they do not operate the public meetings in such a way that public participation is respected and encouraged, no one is exactly who they’re going to see.  It’s on their heads.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte public participant who writes.  You can send her your traffic concerns c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.  Thanks to one of my favorite RN Market customers for reading this column and asking what I think about our new mayor.

 

Carving the Future

Published Nov. 23, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the eighth report from the Reedley Peace Center, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

           

     “My mother thought I should be the first American Pope,” Tom Willey confided to his large, warm audience Friday night.  He was explaining why she’d set foot on his farm only once during his entire career producing food from the soil, suggesting that she thought it was a waste of his fine Berkeley education.  Others might have thought the same, but it was clear to me that this thinking man and his brilliant wife Denesse of T & D Willey Farms have successfully applied themselves to one of the most intractable problems of California Agriculture:  saving the family farm.

     They’ve done it first-hand, by example and by experiment, by comprehending the difficulties and overcoming them.  They’ve also done it by understanding the culture and the sociology of small-scale farming:  the critical role family and neighbors play in making farms sustainable, as well as soils and water supplies.  They’ve done it by understanding the political forces undermining family farms, and the historical precedents of empires built on water shortage in semi-deserts dependent on irrigation.  They’ve done it by recognizing the needs of the eating public and filling them with good, nutritious food picked and packed by the hands of well-paid laborers.

    They started by leasing 20 acres east of Fresno, with Tom farming while Denesse kept the bills paid with her nursing jobs.  It was “profitless,” Tom said, until they went organic.  He was mentored by two neighbors, a Japanese farmer named George Yagi and a Black farmer named Leon Poe, who taught him the ropes.  In 1984, Denesse gave up nursing and dedicated herself to the marketing end through farmer’s markets.  In 1995 they purchased 80 acres in Madera County, gradually moving toward selling their vegetables directly to subscribers through their CSA.

     “We wanted to demonstrate that a couple could make a decent middle-class living growing people’s food,” Tom said, noting that their net income over the last 10 or 15 years varied from $60,000 to a whopping $300,000 one year.  “We’ve fed 800 families over the last 12 years,” Tom said, “which was the most rewarding, the most profitable, and the most exhausting” enterprise yet.

           

      And when this fall’s eggplant crop is done, they will be finished.  The Willey’s are retiring from farming, not failing.  “After 40 years, I’ve gotten producing mountains of vegetables out of my system,” he proclaimed.  They’re retiring with a decent income to continue their other vocational interests.  In Tom’s case, that’s writing, education and his radio work, primarily his program “Down on the Farm” on KFCF (FM 88.1).  Their CSA business has been transferred to Fresno’s Food Commons, where young people are being mentored by experienced hands like the Willey’s in developing the local food system this country needs.

     Despite their success, Tom Willey understands the forces working against sustainable, small-scale farms and food distribution systems.  The political power of agribusiness he describes as a “floodtide,” noting the current efforts by Westlands Water District to cinch their deal with the Feds as just one example. He believes that the sustainable, polycrop farm system that feeds and employs people well on the land is in deep jeopardy, as close to extinction as the Delta smelt if we do not act, become educated and politically engaged, particularly in decisions determining water distribution.

           

     His advice?  Those of you who know how to farm, find ways to mentor those young people who are trying to learn; help them find new ways for this alternative farming system to emerge and thrive.  Don’t let your knowledge die with you:  pass it on.

     For the rest of us, get involved in the political process.  Go to those “tedious, ding-dong meetings” regarding water transfers and groundwater regulation, land use planning and budgets.  Why?  “When things are really screwed up,” Tom stated, “I believe that equals great opportunity.”

     “There’s a way to do it,” he said, summing up the path they’ve carved, as well as his hope for the future.  We simply have to work together to make it happen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes.  You can send your carvings to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Pair from Pixley

Published Nov. 16, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the seventh report from the Reedley Peace Center, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

               

     Sarah Ramirez was scheduled to speak to us Friday night about good food and its role in eradicating poverty.  Sarah is a relatively new face in this old lineup of dedicated academics we’ve heard about, and we looked forward to hearing from a current practitioner in the broad field of agriculture and the common good.           

     Although she was raised in Pixley, Sarah has a Ph.D. from Stanford and an impressive array of academic experience leading up to that degree.  But what impresses us most is that she and her husband David, who also grew up in Pixley and now teaches grade school, returned to live in, and work for the betterment of their hometown and its people.

           

     As she stepped to the microphone, however, her normally sweet manner began to dissolve as her voice started to tremble and her face contort.  She wasn’t even a paragraph into her beginning before she was crying visibly.  As the director of Tulare County’s FoodLink, she said “I wanted to talk about my hope.”  But only three days after the election, the prospects of a Trump presidency and what it could mean for the people she serves had shoved those hopes down a deep hole.  Instead, she spoke a little about the despair she was feeling, then sat down on the stage and opened the mic to everyone in the room, needing to hear how others were dealing with their dashed hopes.

           

     It was a radical act for an academic, but not for a community builder.  Caught offguard, people in the audience began to open up what they thought they had packed away in order to enjoy the evening.  Most of the comments circled fear and hope, recognizing one and then choosing the other.  Sarah’s husband David read a text from a fellow teacher describing how the white children of Trump supporters were harassing the brown children of immigrant farm workers, waving and saying “Bye bye,” as if they would be deported tomorrow, and of that teacher’s heroic efforts to quash that behavior, quell the fears.

           

     “I choose to be hopeful,” he concluded carefully, noting the need for leadership right now.  “I am hopeful the new president will become the leader we need, not the man who we voted for.”   That statement, essentially a statement of faith, took the breath away of even the most faithful Mennonites in the room.           

     Eventually Sarah reclaimed her place as the evening’s speaker.  She told stories from family life that sent her dedicatedly out to get an education that might mend the social wounds she grew up with.  She spoke a little about the community garden she started on land right downtown, on the main drag in Pixley.  And she spoke a lot about food banks, their needs and limitations.  She talked about the process of obtaining the new FoodLink facility in Exeter (formerly Pinkham’s packinghouse,) about designing the teaching kitchen and developing the educational community garden there.  And she described her vivid intent to convert the entire food bank industry into one that enables healthy communities.

           

     According to Sarah, Tulare County has the highest childhood poverty in the state:  41%.  Amidst the highest food production nationally, this county has multiple opportunities to lower that number, from gleaning the waste to redistributing the wealth.  Many, many volunteer opportunities exist, and locating the new facility in Exeter, where the volunteer spirit breathes freely, may have been the smartest move Sarah, a natural community builder, has yet made.

           

     Except for marrying her childhood sweetheart.  As the evening wound down, it became even more clear how this pair from Pixley, teamed up as they are to work for the betterment of the home they hold in common, flourish from the support they give each other.  It’s an old model, but one we’ve seen the need for in the disintegrating condition of our rural towns.  May we take this story as a spark of light – of hope.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rural writer who spends a lot of time looking for hope.  You can send your hope sightings to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Mark Smith for his thoughtful conversation this week.

Love and War

Published Nov. 9, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For the past week I’ve been able to think about little else except Tuesday’s election.  This is not because I’ve been actively involved so much as that my mind has been entrained by the news coverage, as most other people’s minds have been.           

     I’ve found myself annoyed at the newscasters’ characterizations of this election as particularly ridiculous or bizarre, since I can’t remember one pleasant, non-anxiety-producing election in my whole life.  I’ve been grateful to the historians popping up at the last minute who remind us of past elections that had equally-unexpected rancor and divisiveness.

           

     The quote “All’s fair in love and war” has run through my mind all week, and I thought about adding “politics” to the list of what’s not limited by rules of fairness.  For instance, if I wrote about Bill Zigler the way Valadao’s campaign has portrayed Emilio Huerta, I’d be in court for libel right now.  We tolerate behavior in electoral campaigns – for the purpose of avoiding civil war – that we wouldn’t, or don’t tolerate otherwise.

           

     In fact, politics is both love and war.  The adoring fans of all candidates have something in common with all people in love, primarily the hopefulness that this person’s actions in their elected positions will make our lives better or at least protect something we love from the erosive actions of others.  On the other side of the coin, many people in this country correctly feel that their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been taken away or eroded by the actions or inactions of those in government.  Elections allow us to voice those feelings and draw lines in the sand, a precursor to war that we hopefully can resolve before committing bloodshed.

           

     But Sunday night while making dinner, waiting for the news to come on, I caught part of a program on veterans that brought me to a halt.  They were describing what it’s like to come home from our current wars (“military engagements” is probably a more precise term,) compared to WWII veterans’ experiences.  Then, the whole country was involved in that war.  Those at home suffered small inconveniences and delayed gratification compared to those abroad, but they were awaiting the end of the conflict with as much hopefulness as the soldiers themselves.  Homecoming meant something.

           

     Now, those veterans returning (whole and healthy or in part, damaged emotionally as well as physically) find their friends and neighbors entirely ignorant of what they’ve been through, unimpaired by the conflict their tax dollars have invisibly supported, and unengaged.  Nobody’s waiting for the end of the conflict these people have just survived; half of us don’t know where Iraq or Afghanistan is, much less Syria.  The other side of the world is just as far from us here in California as Flint, Michigan or West Virginia.  The growing insularity of our culture is mind boggling, a plague more frightening than the Zika virus or the thought of either candidate in the White House.           

    

     A statistic flashed through the tv’s speakers, almost like static:  twenty-three veterans commit suicide each day.  The voice speaking that fact re-iterated its meaning:  almost one per hour.  My brain tried to do the math:  that’s almost 700 veterans per month.  Can we even be killing that many on the battlefields?  Surely we would have heard about it if we were….

           

     Numbers are notoriously malleable, and these, which were reported in 2014 from a Department of Veterans Affairs study conducted in 2012, have been refuted (predictably.)  But the study was triggered by the sense that this country was experiencing a “suicide epidemic” among veterans new and old.  After the study’s release, the government that sent these people to war then responded legislatively, taking some of the country’s resources to address the needs of these people who had served us by putting their lives on the line, working to create programs that might blunt the knife-sharp edges of re-entry and keep a few more souls alive.

           

     That’s politics, and that’s government, folks, and that’s why it matters so much who we elect.  That’s why we suffer these assaults to our senses every election season.

     It is love and war.  Let’s be kind to each other as we proceed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is an apolitical-type who has to admit it matters once in awhile.  You can send your attempts to eradicate your election miseries to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to all our veterans for coming home as well as leaving in the first place.

My Turn at the Crank

Published Nov. 2, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the sixth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

           

     Wendell Berry, one of this nation’s treasures in the realm of sustainable farming and living, has a book called Another Turn of the Crank.  I thought of him as I prepared for my turn at the microphone in our Reedley speakers series.  His writing career took the stage just as I entered the field, a new recruit, and just as Paul Taylor prepared to exit. 

           

     My assignment Friday night was to talk about Paul and the field he carved out for so many of us.  I still remember Paul walking into his office one day with Wendell Berry’s first major work in his hands, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.  Published in 1977, that book started a new national conversation about what is wrong with our industrialized form of agriculture.  It gave my tenacious mentor great hope as his pace slowed, the end of his turn at the crank in sight.

           

     I used many four-letter words there in the First Mennonite fellowship hall:  land, town, farm, hope and love.  I probably even used “hate,” though I try to keep that word at bay.  A couple of one-syllable five-letter words were also key:  “faith,” with its partner “grace.”  Faith and grace have been major components of my work over the last twenty years, though I had to learn them on my own, since my mentors and colleagues rarely identify those factors in their writing.  Yet I see them at work in Villarejo’s stories, and MacCannell’s and Fujimoto’s, and perhaps all the stories.

           

     Where I first learned about faith in this work was in a project I joined near the end of my time at Davis called the Forum on Church and Land.  It was sponsored by the Western Small Church and Rural Life Center based in Filer, Idaho.  The Forum was a Methodist undertaking headed by a minister from Corvallis, Oregon named John Pitney.  John is a dairy kid who grew up to become a stay-at-home father, using his seminary training to take him into the dark space between most churches and what was going on in our rural areas in the 1980’s.  He developed workshops, bible studies and a body of songs to address the devastation no one noticed – except those suffering from bank foreclosures and losing their farms.

           

     John had organized these forums in other states, but right about the time of the 1990 freeze, he was called to bring these ideas to the Central Valley.  Someone gave him my name because I was working on a project called “Agriculture and the Common Good” at the time, and he gently roped me into the planning process for holding a forum here.  We called the event “Who is my Neighbor? Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling and Reconciliation.”  It was held in Fresno in Feb. 1992, and though I was agnostic when we started, during the forum I had a conversion experience. 

           

     Friday night, standing at the microphone in Reedley telling this story to the members of the Peace Center, which includes many Mennonite farmers who are interested in this subject of agriculture and the common good, I could see that the church still has a role to play in mending the breaches in neighborliness created by our industrial agriculture system.

           

     I began by telling my story about research at Berkeley and Davis, which turned toward public education when I moved to Tulare County more than twenty years ago.  Then I described some tools I thought we might use to carry on this legacy of social concern.  One of these tools is the book of writings I’ve been editing with Tulare geographer Bill Preston, a professor at CalPoly SLO.  It’s titled A Little Piece of Land:  Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California.  The book contains articles from social scientists, journalists, historians and philosophers, and includes a goodly dose of poems and short stories describing the importance of rural life to individual humans and communities, as well our national well-being. 

           

     I see a role for art in creating the awareness we need to tackle this subject, and an working toward creating a non-profit organization, New LEAF (Land Educational Arts Forum) to help support artistic endeavors in this work.  John Pitney’s songs, contained on three albums and four CD’s, offer a similar promise to encourage churches to take on this role (see www.johnpitney.org.)  And I think holding another Forum on Church and Land would be a way to introduce people into the effort.

           

     One of my favorite Pitney songs is based on a Wendell Berry poem called “To Know the Dark.”  It goes like this:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight. 

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. 

And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.”

            The next speaker in the series will be Dr. Sarah Ramirez, the director of Tulare County FoodLink, speaking on “Good Food Changes Lives.”  She will speak Nov. 11^th.  Go to  www.reedleypeacecenter.org for more information.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a recovering researcher who writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your stories on land, town, farm and faith c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Dan O’Connell for recognizing the baton.

It's the People

Published Oct. 26, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the fifth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

            Twenty-three years ago, in the first days of my residence in Lindsay, my life was interrupted by a clogged sewer line.  It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon; the next morning I was due to speak at a conference in Los Angeles and needed a shower before leaving at the very least.  I grabbed the Yellow Pages and called a plumber who came from Ivanhoe.

            We talked as we searched my new property for the non-existent clean-out valve.  Nervous, I babbled a little about my presentation the next day on this weird study that no one here in the Valley seemed to know about two nearby towns, Arvin and Dinuba.  Studied in the forties, the two towns then appeared so different from each other that any ordinary observer would have thought Arvin was smaller and poorer than Dinuba, though they were the same size in population, with the same dollar-value in farm products from their land bases.  

            Just as I was about to mention the study’s conclusions, that the different size of farms surrounding each town caused the radical differences between them, my new plumber friend says “It’s the people.  It’s the people in those towns that make the difference.  It’s the people.”

            In another time and place, I might have argued, or at least worked to show how farm size determines what people are able to accomplish.  But I heard the truth of his words in the conviction with which he said them, and they lodged in my heart.  Friday night at the Reedley Peace Center we heard from a man who has invested his entire academic career on that truth.

            Isao Fujimoto is a huge consciousness inhabiting a small body, with less to pack around than most of us, perhaps thanks to the high caloric requirements of his ceaseless mind.  I once heard him described as a hummingbird, which fits.  Only a few more silver hairs showed among his typically Japanese black ones than when I knew him in Davis, though I detected a slight frailty in his walk now from eight decades on the planet.  Still, he stood and talked for more than an hour, then answered questions until we could think of no more.

            He began his talk with the painful contradiction we live with here, that our region has the highest rates of poverty amidst the greatest agricultural abundance nationwide.  Isao then gently unfolded another, less obvious contradiction: although each wave of ethnic immigrants is put through the wringer here, welcomed only as a source of cheap farm labor and scorned until they disappear into the acculturation process, our great agricultural diversity has been built on and spurred by this ethnic/cultural diversity.  Fujimoto sees cultural diversity as a resource, as important as land and water.  He sees it as the third leg in our pyramid of abundance.

            The importance of cultural diversity became easier to see as he unfolded stories of cooperative efforts and organizations in this state, which arose to meet immigrants’ survival needs as well as to overcome constrictions placed on them by the existing power structure.  Isao learned these things first-hand in childhood, as the oldest of 13 in a farming family prohibited by state law from owning land, later as occupants of an internment camp during WWII.  His personal story makes his passion and perspective a little easier to understand, but what’s most important is that it did not keep him from seeing other groups’ distress or the structural forces behind those facts of life.  It opened him.

            Isao’s contribution has been to take that deep understanding of the importance of cultural difference and to encourage others to own it.  He advocates and enables people to join together to work for the changes we need in this society, whether that be farmers markets and food co-ops to re-unite those who work to grow our food with those who eat it, or innovators developing appropriate technology for sustainable living.  He understands that co-operative effort itself is the solution to the problems spurred by our industrial society, which holds individual effort as paramount.  He knows that getting people to work together for their own benefit and the good of all is the most radical act, one that he paid for dearly, career-wise, early on.  Now, however, his genius for helping others learn to help themselves (helping us all in the long run) is finally being recognized.

            We live in this terrible contradiction:  we produce huge agricultural abundance, but it comes with a high-poverty price tag.  The industrial structure at the root of that unhappy relationship dominates more farm land annually, seemingly unstoppable.  But people can do something about that.  It’s the people, folks; it’s us.  We’re the people.

            Next week I’ll be the speaker, describing my history with the previous speakers and how that’s led me to be a farmer of men, trying to plant seeds for that effort.  Join us.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes.  You can send her your hopes for a more sustainable future c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Fred Smeds for submitting his piece “Why Farm” for our forthcoming book, A Little Piece of Land.

The Big Picture

Published October 19, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the fourth report from the Reedley Peace Center’s Speakers Series “In the Struggle.”  Interested readers can learn more about the series by visiting www.reedleypeacecenter.org.

            In a piece I wrote for the Bee last month, I started with the fire at the Suntreat packinghouse in Lindsay, describing the loss of jobs and income for the community.  I speculated on the problems for rebuilding that plant due to the changes in crops and land ownership occurring on the land surrounding our town.  And I lamented the problems I’ve had since I came here getting city leaders to realize there’s a connection between the problems our farmers face and the economic difficulties inside the city limits.  

            Dean MacCannell was the fourth speaker featured at the Reedley Peace Center’s forum. Dean was full professor of Applied Behavioral Sciences at UCD when I moved to Davis to work with him in 1985.  For almost 10 years he had been conducting statistical studies on the relationship between farm structure and rural community development using techniques called “macrosocial accounting” developed at Cornell.  I hoped his knowledge and support would help me finish the more qualitative study I had begun at UCB under Paul Taylor’s influence.

            In different ways we both were updating Walter Goldschmidt’s seminal study of farmland ownership and community development in his comparison of two towns, Arvin in Kern County and Dinuba, here in Tulare.  That study documented the positive socio-economic contributions of smaller, owner-operated farms to the quality of rural communities, as well as the negative impacts of large-scale, absentee farm operations.  Goldschmidt published his study in late 1946, followed in 1947 by the publication of his book As You Sow, which described his first study in Wasco as well as two brief chapters on Arvin and Dinuba (although the towns were not identified by name.)  

            The book was republished in 1978 under the title As You Sow:  Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness.  It contains the full Arvin-Dinuba study as well as a chapter describing the political history of the studies, which was marked by suppression in the early years, repudiation in later years.  That story included the success of the large growers in killing the plan for a follow-up study of many communities in the San Joaquin Valley, which would have removed all doubt about the negative consequences of large-scale, absentee-owned farming operations on the development of rural towns.

            MacCannell began that study shortly after he arrived at UCD in 1975.  Telling that story in Reedley, he described the academic hindrances to that research, as well as some of the miracles that helped him avoid being stopped.  He described some of the difficulties building a data base that incorporated farm size and structure variables with social, economic and political data, and his efforts to ensure the scientific validity of the research.  

            The stories people appreciated most were about his encounters with Westlands growers.  His UC superiors had advised MacCannell that these folks had intense interest in suppressing the evidence he’d uncovered, and went to some length to shut him up.  He also mentioned the “one bad thing” he did in his entire career, which was to release a study he conducted on Westlands to the National Farmers Union, which helped preserve the acreage limitation provisions in a battle to eliminate them in 1982.   But in one of my favorite anecdotes, he told of his first field trip into the Valley when he realized that anyone could see the differences between small-farm and large-farm towns with their own eyes.

            MacCannell’s conclusions from an academic career spent swimming upstream and sharing his results with audiences mostly unfriendly to the notion of public policy supporting the small farm were these:  The science is done.  Goldschmidt’s Hypothesis has been proven correct, and those who contend otherwise are simply waging war on the truth to keep their own interests intact.  “It’s time to organize,” he said, even knowing the limitations of previous efforts to organize when we had many more small family farms than we have now.

            This Friday we’ll hear about organizing from one of the premier academic practitioners of that art:  Isao Fujimoto, also retired from UCD’s Applied Behavioral Sciences, beloved friend and advocate for the power of diversity.  Please join us at 6:30 for the potluck in the First Mennonite Church’s fellowship hall, followed at 7 pm by Isao’s empowering presentation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a researcher-in-residence who writes from her outpost in Lindsay.  You can send her your reflections on small town life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

We Can Change

Published Oct. 12, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday I flew home from work, changed my socks, grabbed the potluck plates, and jumped in the truck to haul it to Reedley for the third presentation in the Peace Center’s speakers series, ”In the Struggle.”  Don Villarejo, who formed and directed the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis where I was employed before moving to Lindsay, was scheduled to speak on the question “Can we achieve an ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just agriculture?”  I didn’t want to miss one minute of it.

           

     The truth is, anyone living here in the San Joaquin Valley with even one eye open can see that the answer is “no.”  Too much would have to change, it seems.  Too many bolts holding the current system in place would have to be loosened and removed, and there’s no guarantee that chaos would not overtake us before that new, beautiful and right thing would take hold.  Housing developments gobbling up farmland, bullet trains delivering commuters to their concreted plots, mechanization replacing workers and farmers faster than we can count – these things are already pushing the margins of the old system toward extinction.

     But there he was, eating from his plate of homemade salads and hot dishes, preparing to speak to a mixed, mostly hopeful crowd of friends and strangers, bringing a message that no one could really imagine.  Almost 80, Don’s smile and laugh are as disarming and infectious as the first time I met him.  And his 60-year story of inviting people to join him in this struggle, that stretches well beyond one lifetime, delivered this message:  we can change.

           

     He himself went through several transformations in order to become the change agent he is.  Son of a single-mother labor organizer, his childhood was spent frequently living under other people’s roofs and sets of rules.  Don’t ask me how, but he went to college anyway and graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Chicago, a big enough life change for most people.  Then, while teaching physics at UCLA, he found himself drawn into the student politics of change.  There, at one critical moment before 12 TV news station cameras, with the whole country watching and most of the university’s administration waiting to hear calming words of conventional reason,  he tossed that life aside and said “Strike!  Shut this place down!”  His mother must have known then that he was a chip off the old she-block.

     But what Don brought to the world of social change was a tremendous respect for facts and figures and the truths they represent.  In his talk he told stories of discovering the untruths told with shoddy facts and figures, and how he amassed data, over and over, to uncover the truths the old numbers belied:  the numbers and sizes of farm ownerships and operations in the state, the public subsidies and financial returns to farms in federally-supplied water districts and the family structure of most operations.  He documented the outcomes of various attempts to get laws changed governing farm labor, noting the victories within apparent defeats.  He named names of people who contributed their lives over the years, the tiny but critical roles they played at just the right moments.  By the end we could see that our view of the unchangability of our current agricultural system is obscured by fear – or, perhaps, by lack of faith.

           

     The questions people brought to the microphone afterward were mixed with awe and appreciation for what we had just learned, still sinking in.  One person thanked Don for including farmers and their unpaid family members as two categories of farm labor, his own hands showing the work of his life.  Another queried Don’s opinion on the recent state legislation increasing farm workers’ compensation, including overtime, to which he replied that it’s 70 years overdue, although he has no idea how it’s going to work out.

           
     But the last question took my breath away.  A man, a newcomer to the group, described the dilemma we face with the drought-driven explosion of deep-well pumping of groundwater, of the extraction for private purposes of a precious resource held in common, noting the lack of legal recourse.  Although Don had been standing for almost two hours, it was as if he jumped to his feet.   “We can change that,” he said firmly.  “We can change the laws.  People like us in this room, we can change that.”
           
     I give him the last word on that subject.
____________________________________________________________________
Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial change agent who lives in Lindsay, once the Olive Capitol of the World.  You can send her your thoughts on change c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.