Viriditas Farm's role in helping to revive Sonora Heirloom Wheat

https://mailchi.mp/19737d52a634/what-can-one-person-actually-do

Or : what can one person actually do, anyway?

Since the Sonora wheat came back from the being cleaned this year I have been thinking a lot about these two plus decades of growing it here on my farm. As you may know, in 1999 I met Monica Spiller after which I invited her to grow her test and seed increase plots on my farm, as I was fascinated by her project of reviving heirloom wheat. And I was heartbroken by the absolute destruction of the textile industry in the parts of the world that bothered to clean up their dye wastes. Big brands having made the decision to export the toxic waste to lands and people who did not deserve such horrors. Leaving the mills that had supplied them with fabrics for a century or more (and who had invested in chemical waste clean up) high on loan payments and low on sales streams. It was a nightmarish time and disillusionment stalked me. I was camped out on this beautiful farm in Yolo County in a travel trailer, just trying to keep my breeding program alive. Because it was illegal to breed or grow these cottons in Arizona or the San Joaquin Valley of California where I had set up research farms only to be forced to move on twice now. Leaving me emotionally as well as financially devastated. Without sales from textile mills to pay bills, funds were tight and the decades of scarcity were just beginning. But here was Monica Spiller, a woman 20 or so years my senior who had worked as a microbiologist at a research facility a few buildings down from where I had interned raising insects for research as a high school student. Who had studied and helped sleuth out the microbes responsible for the famed San Francisco Soughdough breads no less! Monica's devotion to whole grains and sourdough is legendary, her passion and hard work ethic inspirational. Retired from lab work, she was able to devote herself to this long time project. In my memory I see her out with her hand scythe harvesting plots one by one in the 107+ F days. Then she would camp by the creek to make sure that her drive out to the farm was utilized fully; her devotion to these wheats and our environment profound. So although I did not have funds free for much of anything, it seemed, I did have this land that would benefit from a grain crop rotation. Monica had turned to the heirloom wheats in the hopes of finding varieties of wheat whose taste was inviting as a wholemeal flour. In modern milling the outermost parts of the grain is removed, rendering their flavors irrelevant. But when people returned to milling them whole, many did not appreciate their taste. Especially me, I had turned to spelt as my whole grain of choice. Monica was looking to find and increase the seeds of heirloom wheats whose flavor was inviting as a whole grain. If people actually liked the flavors of whole grains, would they seek them out and eat them more often? It sounded like a great goal to me. When I got a chance to taste the one that she had increased the most seed of, Sonora, I was smitten. I tried to help out by increasing the seed of it in the hopes that more people would grow it. For its amazing complex flavor and for what I learned to be it's potential for carbon sequestering due to it’s rather massive root system. Monica shared that she had visited the lab of a soil scientist at UC Riverside who described the roots of Sonora heirloom wheat as more akin to those of perennial grasses in size and structure. Why was this so important to me, way back in the early 2000's, you may ask. Well despite Climate Change being the hot topic of the day now, it was of course the big topic for pretty much all scientists back in my youth. Those of us “in the know” were consistently brainstorming about what to do and how to do it. It is just that we thought that 40 years or 30 years away was already crisis time. The focus of course was to prevent this disaster. As had been done so successfully with the hole in the ozone. I had hoped that my cottons could and would play a positive roll (with their more robust than regular cotton's root system- yes another plus these cottons posses, along with their general pest resilience allowing for success for the very first US based cotton growers who gave organic a try), but in just a few years we went from over 8000 acres of organic soil microbiome boosting carbon sequestering production to the 20 or so acres of it on my precious farm's breeding nursery. That was a sorrowful development. And future production was not looking promising. What could be done? What could I do? Maybe a heck of a lot of carbon sequestrating could be accomplished with the perennial like root systems of heirloom wheat. Maybe those roots (which of course is what Wes Jackson's Land Institute’s Kernza® project is about, trying to get people to plant perennial grain instead of annuals, to reduce soil erosion caused by the customary disruption of the soil for annual crop production and sequester more carbon because of the carbon stored in perennial roots) would pull a bunch of carbon out of the atmosphere. Maybe it would not be at the scale that my cottons once were produced at, but anything was better than nothing. In Mediterranean climates without summer rainfall, perennial grains are not reasonable to consider anyway. But an heirloom wheat with the root system of a perennial? Maybe it could be for us in the arid west what Kernza® was promising to be in the midwest. And it was about all that I could do anyway. Under the circumstances. Starting out with 1 acre, then 3, then 20; I began growing Sonora year after year. I bought a kitchen Wolfgang Mock stone mill- that I highly recommend - and ground lots of flour up. I heard through the grapevine that I became a bit on the obnoxious side about it, perhaps. I made cupcakes and cakes and waffles and hotcakes and biscuits and talked anyone who would listen into trying it and or growing it. I would rent a table at The Hoe’s Down Farm Festival at Full Belly Farm and demonstrate milling and kept selling the flour in those little 2 lb bags. It was one of the first things I offered on my website, when it was launched. And there were these vegan bakers in New Haven, CT who whenever my friend in the valley would go home to visit her family, would bring big bags to them in her luggage. They said that it had buttery flavors that no other wheat they had found possessed. Then I talked the Davis Food Coop into carrying the whole berries in their bulk section. But one day the buyer informed me that a customer who worked for the State of California informed them that they saw vetch seeds in the wheat, and that they believed vetch seeds as contaminants were dangerous and perhaps not allowed. Wheat, like cotton, is generally grown at much larger scale than what I was planting - in the hundreds if not thousands of acres. For producers it is a lower value field crop and massive pieces of equipment that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are used to harvest the expanses of crops. The efficiency of scale and advances in yields keeps the prices low enough to have alleviated a lot of food insecurity around the world. And the facilities that handle the cleaning of grains and preparation of the seeds are set up for tens to hundreds of tons at a time, for this reason. Not the one to ten thousand pound crops that I was producing on the three to ten acres I was growing every year now. Out of extreme generosity Ed Sills of Pleasant Grove Farms, not too far away from me- the main CCOF certified organic grain producer (they grow sunflowers, wheat, field corn, popcorn and the like) in our area had been agreeing to clean my wheat. When I asked him about the vetch seeds that were still in the cleaned wheat he said that if I wanted to get the vetch out, I needed to find another cleaner, or better yet, set up my own cleaning. I asked help from our local extension agent who took the time to educate me about all the different kinds of grain cleaning equipment as well as the size of a cleaner than would work at my scale. And then he helped me contact a manufacturer. The company making the cleaners informed me that the size of equipment that I was looking for was that normally purchased by plant breeders. And that there was an asparagus breeder in Hollister, CA who was retiring and that he might want to sell his cleaner. So, I contacted him, and ended up buying his nice midsized seed cleaning system. Which he kindly delivered, and my good neighbor Gary came with the forklift and removed from his truck. I got to learn a bit about asparagus breeding and went about setting this cleaner up. My pole barn only has a dirt floor. The cleaner required an absolutely flat surface to work correctly. The next thing I knew, I was having to pour a concrete slab to put the cleaner on. More time, more expense that I was not really able to figure out how to cover. But I wanted to supply the Davis Food Coop with this wheat. And if the vetch seed really had to be removed for them to offer it, I felt that I had to keep working on figuring this puzzle out. Finally, I had it all going, but it would take me two hours to clean 50 lbs of wheat- really clean it entirely of the vetch seeds. With lots of waste- but I could feed those screenings, as they are called, to my chickens. The Davis Food Coop would accept it at last. But what a lot of work! And it was hard to carry a five gallon bucket of wheat up to the top of the thing to pour the grain in. I really wanted this wheat to be accessible, though. I did not sell at farmer's markets, only sold wholesale and a little retail via mail order. The Davis Food Coop was the best way to allow people to have access to it. So, I stuck to it. Why was it so important to remove the vetch seeds anyway? The UC Cooperative Extension agent told me that people who were allergic to Fava beans were also allergic to vetch seeds. And vetch is the same size as the wheat, and thus normal cleaning does not remove it. Vetch is a popular cover crop on organic farms. I never even planted vetch, but the seeds are all over the place and these plants would just come up as volunteers. Eventually I found another CCOF certified organic seed cleaner who had what is called an “optical eye”. This is the kind that could remove the vetch seeds. But at a much higher cost. But still way cheaper than me spending 2 hours on cleaning 50 pounds! In time I sold the cleaning system to the great people at the Mendocino Grain Project- a group also inspired by Monica’s work. Then some of the larger organic grain growers shared that among the list of weed seeds that the USDA does not allow, vetch is not even listed! What the heck was that escapade all about then? One day, some years after all these learning curve adventures in the world of wheat cleaning, while I was delivering a batch of Sonora wheat to the Davis Food Coop I got a call from a rather famous miller in SC: Glenn Robert’s of Anson Mills. He had been reviving heirloom rice and other grains in South Carolina and wanted a good supply or Sonora for his pastry customers. He ended up buying most everything that I could grow for a few years, and used the Sonora from my farm to distribute these organic seeds to various groups and organizations in the Southwest. I feel a special connection to Sonora wheat growing now because of this. As these seeds all went through 7 or 8 of their generations right here on this farm that I tend and treasure. Because I believed in them enough to grow them even without an established market; only because I loved them. And wanted to sequester a heck of a lot of carbon. Next he got Sonora on Slow Foods Ark of Taste list. This wheat captured his heart too. Not everyone knows that all this Sonora wheat, so readily available today, from growers large and small and many of the heirloom grains that are available to us now are the result of Monica Spiller getting those 25 seeds in packets from the USDA seed bank in the early 1990’s and increasing them. Hand planting and hand harvesting with a scythe. Monica then went on to work with other farms here in the Capay Valley and this is how so many in Yolo County got started with the production of the heirloom grains. She is still active and working to get people to use whole grains : The Whole Grain Connection is her publication and organization.http://wholegrainconnection.org And yet, more than the the adventure in grain history and culture, the Sonora wheat represents something more significant within my psyche. And my vision of how to be a responsible steward of our earth, despite the significant change in the strata of my influence. The story up until that time of meeting Monica for me was rising from working within the sciences of agriculture to being a responsible and ethical business leader helping to create the foundation and initial product offerings within the organic and sustainable textile worlds. Using my knowledge and position as a entrepeneur and initial developer of the organic cotton industry in the US to help write the original textile processing standards for the Texas Department of Agriculture - headed by Jim Hightower, final regulations signed by Rick Perry. Leading by example at a global scale to create worldwide reciprocal agreements on textiles from local certifiers all the way to worldwide through cooperation with the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements - IFOAM.

But now, here I was. My exemplary business was closed down (along with every single one of the 38 visionary mills who created the organic textile industry) and I was camped out on a big farm ( that I was amazingly lucky to still have after all the losses) unable to even get financing to put a crop in. Business prospects gone with the entire collapse of the textile industry. But my commitment to being a positive force for the earth’s health remained my primary goal. So what exactly could I even do, under these more humble and humbling circumstances. I could follow the path of Monica Spiller. I could keep on keeping on. Focus on what I could do, instead of what could have been. I did actually have this farm, and a pretty cool travel trailer to sleep in. I had barns to put things in and I had my seeds and my mind and my body was still pretty strong in my mid 40’s. And just look at Monica working that hard in her late 60’s! OK, I said to myself, this is what I can do. I can keep trying with what I actually have. Keep planting my seeds, keep figuring out ways to pay for it all. And at least, on my own farm, sequester a heck of a lot of carbon. The angrier I felt about the world’s dye wastes being dumped on people unprovoked and undeserving of such distress (after so many mills had invested in the expensive and effective equipment that cleaned it all up, only to be shut down by the monstrosity of ruinous profiteering brands), the more determined I became about using the energy from those emotions to getting carbon into the soil, and in a form that would stay there. And if I could figure out a way to sequester a bunch of carbon without any crop financing, or the equipment other farms all seemed to have, well then maybe these systems would be more adaptable by the larger row crop farmers- the kind that grow the commodity crops such as wheat and cotton. The sorts of crops that represent most of the farmland in the nation. If you listen to the conversations these days about regenerative ag sequestering carbon, they depend quite heavily upon the tools developed by the organic vegetable and tree crop farmers. Cover crops and compost. All rather pricey inputs appropriate for the more valuable cropping systems that they arise from. I wanted to come up with ways that people growing these lower valued crops (cotton and wheat, for instance) could sequester carbon economically and quickly. Could I take the energy from the heartbreak of the collapsed textile industry (and my cotton's near future along with it) and use it to bury a bunch of carbon in the soils of this farm that I was and remain so incredibly fortunate to be able to tend? And harvest methods of sequestering carbon more universally adaptable to the commodity crop producers? And where did this audacious idea come from that one individual, by studying the land that they tend, could on their own research and develop methods of farming that restore life and vitality to the soil while producing a crop? Well, after all, it is the basis of the organic farming movement in the parts of the world where industrialization of agriculture was the expected direction of progress. The inspiring works of Sir Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner and Wendell Berry and many of the other founders of the biological and organic farming movements that have become actual industries today. Born from the reality that everyone in production agriculture from university professors to the ag extension people to the bankers that financed it all said that farming without the cheap soil microbiome killing synthetic fertilizers and ag chemical pesticides was impossible. That no market existed for any products produced without these aids. But the elders of my day who started the organizations that legitimized organically produced products had used their minds and muscle and any finances at their disposal to not only figure out how to grow pretty much everything without these inputs, but also created an entire system of validating the authenticity of such claims with legally binding labeling systems. Organic Certification started out with farmer led clubs, which grew into organizations and finally into non profits operating under systems reciprocated and respected across borders and into other nations. So, this multiple decade exploration of how the Sonora wheat can sequester carbon began and continues. In an other past newsletter I geeked out on the numbers, but the take home was that for every pound of product that has been produced and has actually left this farm of mine, 15 pounds of carbon has been sequestered in it’s place. That is the conversation that I think needs to be considered - what is the ratio of carbon sequestered longterm in the soil to product removed from the farm. Sometimes I think about how they theorize that prions work. One form of the protein simply touches another and the one touched shape shifts into the form of the first one. Prions are not good- they are a degraded form that in the end gum up the works to the point of malfunction. But what if, most of the time, what actually goes on is the opposite? What has been my experience is that one person inspires the next person to keep on keeping on. What if each smile and kind word of encouragement is the sort of energetic equivalent to an anti prion? How it is that so many of us keep trying despite what appears on the outside to be impossible odds? Thank you Monica Spiller for inspiring me to try a different way . Thank you- everyone of you- who buys products from me, or from my courageous customers. All of which supports my work with the cotton and the work with these other plants whose growth improve the soil on this farm that I still get to breed these cottons on. Despite it all. Thank you for those who donate, large and small. Let’s keep on being the shape shifting catalysts that restore our soil, our atmosphere and our souls.