Thursday, March 19, 2009

rantings of a wwoofer

I’ve been working the past week at yael Bernier’s place in Sonoma County and it’s been so amazing, definitely my best farm experience so far in my travels. I feel very included here, feel at home. Yael even told me she doesn’t like wwoofers who act like guests, feel at home!

What kind of work have I done? Weeding, Preparing beds for crops by rototilling, adding compost and feather meal(don’t ask!), then seeding, transplanting(moving seedlings into bigger containers, and planting. What have I seeded and planted and weeded? Chard, peas, lettuces, radicchio, turnips, carrots.. I’m eating very well, though I had too may beans the last two days and I’m not the most fun person to be around right now.

The berniers are a really funky family. Paul comes from a family of engineers, tinkerers, and he has a shop on the property full of all sorts of tools and equipment and some of the machines he uses in the grapes with his tractor are homemade. His son took a recumbent bicycle and put an electric motor and batteries in it and I’m gonna take it out for a spin in the next couple of days. Cool huh?

Tonight, after dinner, I went with the berniers to the Dry creek Valley Association annual dinner, where besides talking about buerucratic paper woerk kind of stuff, local area residents were discussing water. The local governments are trtying to build a system that would give wine growers in the area sewage water for irrigation so they can take the fresh water for something else, probably more developments. So it was interesting to see people getting involved with whats going on with their local regional resources. Water is a complicated subject. It’s not something that can be easily solved, because it’s not something that is just local. Fresh water is always moving, traveling downhill. What the people do with water upstream effects the people downstream. I would love to see rivers and streams flowing with water, teeming with life. But It sounds like more and more rivers are being dammed or tapped almost entirely for human uses.

Lots of people have wells and pumps on their properties, and I can tell that more often, people will have to deal with the fact that their wells won’t pull up water because water tables will have dropped past the wells. What it comes down to is ridiculous consumption of fresh water.

Biggest offenders: Agriculture, Industry, Home Use. I’m on an organic farm but even here I see row crops with no mulch on them. This is an indicator that farmers don’t care about conserving water, with prices so low why conserve? I think that the cost of water should be raised. I don’t know if there are other people out there who think the same way, but as long as it’s ridiculously cheap nobody gives a crap. But they do give a crap, into their toilets which they flush down with perfectly good drinking water, same stuff that comes out of the tapm, same stuff that’s been filtered and had fluouride added to it. Drinking water and poop. That makes sense to you? I am a proponent of compost toilets, They don’t use any water, and produce great compost which can be used to grow more food, thus closing the food cycle. Some people are grossed out by the idea of pooping and the poop not disappearing magicly down a drain. I’m grossed out by the system most homes have nowadays.

I'll be headed next week to Oz Farm. My friend Naomi, worked there for a few months a couple of years ago and had a blast, so i'm gonna work there and hopefully have a good time doing it.

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