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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.