Orange County Produce

Orange County Produce

by | Dec 19, 2021

Orange County Produce

A.G. Kawamura, Orange County Produce. Credit: A.G. Kawamura

“

I would say that our weather is both “predictably unpredictable” or “predictably predictable.” We’re generally dry from April all the way until December. We’ll get a few storms every now and then, a kind of monsoon that comes up the coast in the fall, but generally we have some of the most predictable weather anywhere on the planet. In my experience, nothing’s changed that much.

A.G. Kawamura

Orange County Produce

Website: https://ocproduce.com

Southwest Region | Irvine, CA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 1000 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Urban soils restoration, precision mgt., growers’ network.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Conversations in Agriculture – A.G. Kawamura

Opinion: A 21st Century solution to delivering nutritious food for those in need 

Food is a privilege…not a right | AG Kawamura 

Commercial farming…in your subdivision? 

 

When A.G. Kawamura heads out each morning to check on his crops, his route is an unusual one for a vegetable grower. He drives into residential developments, onto military bases and through city parks, schools and abandoned orange groves to get to his fields. His family didn’t set out to be urban farmers, but they started farming early enough and stayed in business long enough that the city eventually grew out to reach them. “We are definitely urban producers or farmers in an urban area,” A.G. says. “It was a rural area when we started farming here. The city came to us and then it surrounded us. We’ve just never left.”

A.G.’s grandparents came to southern California from Japan around the turn of the last century and made their living in the agriculture of their new home. They did whatever work they could find in those early days, one set of grandparents picking and packing oranges, sharecropping and landscaping, and another grandparent starting a small fertilizer and farm supply company. After the Kawamura families were released from an Arizona internment camp in 1945, they returned home to the Los Angeles area to rebuild their lives. Over a decade later, the family moved farm operations to Orange County, growing and shipping produce in the area, which was well-known at the time for growing oranges, walnuts, tomatoes, lima beans, asparagus, along with other vegetable and horticulture crops.

As the area population grew, rising costs and skyrocketing real estate prices forced many Orange County growers to sell out. Those that remained continued to grow on ground leased from several large private landowners and military bases. “We don’t own any of the ground we farm on here in the county,” A.G. explains, “and that’s a challenge because we rent ground from the utilities, from a school district, from cities and counties, from the military and from private developers. We will farm any vacant lot that’s over four or five acres. If I can see the weeds are growing well, and I can see that there’s a fire hydrant or recycled water connection nearby, then we look at those as viable places to farm.”

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Humble Hands Harvest

Humble Hands Harvest

by | Dec 19, 2021

Humble Hands Harvest

Hannah Breckbill and Emily Fagan, Humble Hands Harvest. Credit: Cory Eull

“

I actually thrive in change and that’s really good for adapting to the unexpected. Emily is a very diligent and very forward-thinking planner. She thinks of worst-case scenarios and she plans for them. So those two personalities together are able to deal with whatever is coming in different ways. When one of us is struggling, the other one usually has it covered. – Hannah Breckbill

Hannah Breckbill & Emily Fagan

Humble Hands Harvest

Website: https://humblehandsharvest.com

Midwest Region | Decorah, IA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 22 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Cooperative land access, worker-owned farm, no-till raised beds.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Humble Hands Harvest – Growing Our Future

Cooperative Land Access & the Commons

Queering the Economics of Farming | Hannah Breckbill  

In Good Tilth Perspectives – Hannah Breckbill

Unconventional approach to vegetable farming 

 

Humble Hands Harvest is a worker-owned cooperative farm growing organic vegetables, organic grass-fed and finished lamb and pastured pork on 22 acres in northeast Iowa near Decorah. Hannah Breckbill is founder and co-owner of the farm with her second cousin Emily Fagan. Over the last decade, Hannah has worked to cultivate the resources, skills and experience needed to own and manage a successful farm business through participation in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings and Journeyperson programs and the Practical Farmers of Iowa’s Savings Incentives Program. Along the way, she innovated a new cooperative model of farm ownership that cultivates the resilience of community-based food and farming.

After graduating from college with a degree in mathematics, Hannah was drawn to farming because it offered an opportunity to combine her passion for social activism with her love of the land. After working for other vegetable farmers in her first three growing seasons, Hannah established Humble Hands Harvest in 2013 and continued to farm on leased land in several locations in the Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa. Hannah celebrates the experiences of each new season and location — both good and bad — as important steps towards her goal of establishing a permanent farming enterprise. “I’ve grown a lot through running my own farm business,” says Hannah, “but in order to really begin caring for the land, really investing in soil building and perennial crops, I needed a permanent place. The question was, how will I attain that?”

In 2014, Hannah participated in a cooperative purchase of a farm near Decorah that was initially motivated to protect the land from development. As a shareholder in the farm, Hannah successfully encouraged the owners to shift their goal from farmland protection to farmland access. In doing so, she found the answer to her question. Using her own savings, a family loan and matching funds earned through the LSP’s Journeyman’s Program, Hannah purchased eight acres of the farm in 2016. A year later, Emily joined Humble Hands Harvest as a co-owner. Since then, Hannah and Emily have worked together to raise the funds needed to develop vegetable and livestock operations on the farm through events like a farm-raising party and a Go Fund Me campaign.

Today, Hannah and Emily produce diversified vegetables, lamb and pork using mostly hand labor on about two acres of cultivated ground and 20 acres of pasture. Vegetable production infrastructure on the farm includes a well, a drip irrigation system, a deer fence, a moveable high tunnel, a greenhouse, a cooler and a pole building that includes a packhouse and storage. They own a small tractor they use to cultivate ground for cropping and to mow pastures and headlands, manage a small flock of sheep to produce grass-finished lamb and finish about ten feeder pigs each year on pasture. Hannah and Emily direct market their vegetables and meat cuts at twice-weekly farmers markets in Decorah and through on-farm sales of lamb and pork halves and wholes.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Acorn Community

Acorn Community

by | Dec 18, 2021

Acorn Community

Ira Wallace and Mary Berry, Acorn Community. Credit: Acorn Community

“

We’ve had more crop failures in the last few years due to heavy rains and flooding than we’ve had in all of the last 20. It’s the biggest thing we hear from our growers and it’s the biggest pain here at Acorn as well. Many of our growers have had complete crop failures from flooding in two out of the last three years. – Ira Wallace

Ira Wallace & Mary Berry

Acorn Community & Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Website: https://www.southernexposure.com/acorn-community-farm/

Southeast Region | Mineral, VA

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 50 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add protected space, no-till raised beds, growers’ network.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange 

Ira Wallace & Mary from Acorn & Souther Exposure

Ira Wallace on Farming in Community 

The Acorn Community is an egalitarian, income-sharing, farm-based community located in south central Virginia near the town of Mineral. The community’s 20 members collectively own 72 acres of farmland, woodlands and wetlands including 50 certified organic acres that produce food for the community and vegetable seeds for the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the community’s nationally-recognized cooperative seed business.

All Acorn community members work part-time on the farm and in the seed business. Ira Wallace has coordinated seed production and processing at Southern Exposure for about 27 years. Mary Berry joined the community in 2018. She works with Southern Exposure’s customers and co-manages seed and food production for the community. She has about three years of growing experience.

Southern Exposure direct markets more than 800 varieties of vegetable, flower, herb, grain and cover crop seeds produced at Acorn and by a network of more than 70 small and mid-scale farmers located mostly in the Southeast. The company’s co-owners also produce educational materials and support a diversity of programs to further the company’s mission to democratize the seed supply, promote organic agriculture and gardens, and preserve the genetic heritage and diversity of southern food and farming. “Our marketing strategy is more about education,” Ira explains. “Over the years, rather than have a lot of ads, we write stories, and blogs, and white papers, and work with other organizations to educate people, with the aim that, as people learn more about organics and heirloom plants, they will try our seeds and become customers.”

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Abanitu Organics

Abanitu Organics

by | Dec 18, 2021

Abanitu Organics

C. Bernard Obie, Abinatu Organgics. Credit: marleymarles

“

I can say that for us, the main ingredient is being connected to the Earth and the forces, angelic and otherwise, that govern the growth of plants. We will accept what nature gives us and we’ll be grateful. We’ll do our part to try to keep it in balance and healthy. I think in the long term, that’s really all we can do as Mother Nature will have the first and the last word about our existence here.

C. Bernard Obie

Abanitu Organics

Website: https://www.abanituorganics.com

Southeast Region | Roxboro, NC

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 12 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add no-till raised beds/heat tolerant crops, shift growing season.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Obie preaches the importance of organic foods at Durham Farmers’ Market 

Farm Legacy and Estate Planning: Strategies for Risk, Resilience, and Culture 

Abanitu Organics

C. Bernard Obie, known as “Obie” to his family and friends, grows certified organic vegetables, fruits and herbs on his family farm in north central North Carolina near Roxboro. Obie founded Abanitu Organics on the land that has nourished his family since his great grandmother, Ms. Lucy Obie, purchased the farm in 1906. Lucy’s son, John, was a widely respected farmer in the area. Obie’s father, Bernard, continued the family’s farming legacy, even as all of his siblings left the farm for city jobs. “His was a really pivotal decision,” says Obie, referring to his father’s decision to become a farmer, “because he could have very well done the same thing. For a lot of folks, that’s the time when the connection to the land was broken.”

Obie’s earliest memories include helping out with farm chores along with his six brothers and sisters. “I call Person County ‘the land that time forgot for a while,’” says Obie, “because we were still doing things in the 1950s the way folks had done them a generation earlier. We did not have a tractor, we still ploughed with mules. Our cash crop was flue-cured tobacco. We kept hogs and chickens, had a milk cow and grew corn and wheat for our own food and to feed our animals. That’s how we came up.” Most of the farm’s produce was for family use, but the tobacco and hogs were sold for cash income. Obie values the unique perspective on life gained by growing up on his family’s farmstead.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

The Happy Berry

The Happy Berry

by | Dec 15, 2021

The Happy Berry

Walker Miller, The Happy Berry. Credit: The Happy Berry

“

I knew that frost was the biggest risk going into this. It’s still the biggest risk, and it has gotten worse. In the 80s, we would typically start frost protection in April. Now we start as early as the first week of March, so we’re also at risk for a longer period of time, because we still can get a freeze through to the end of April.

Walker Miller

The Happy Berry

Website: http://www.thehappyberry.com

Southeast Region | Six Mile, SC

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 22 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Add frost protection, add cover crops, drop sensitive species, shift to frost and disease tolerant cultivars, interplant shade trees, shift to less sensitive species.

Other Resilience Stories About This Farm

Fill Your Fridge With Fresh U-Pick Or Pre-Picked Fruit From The Happy Berry

Big Smiles and Blueberries Running Down Their Cheeks at The Happy Berry

When Walker Miller was looking to start a fruit farm, he knew that one of the biggest risks he would have to navigate would be late spring frost. He also knew that kudzu could help him find some frost-protected land, because kudzu flourished in the warmer places in the mountains of South Carolina. He was looking for the perfect place to grow fruit, a place just above the colder bottom land as his first line of defense against late spring frosts.

Forty-two years ago, Walker found what he was looking for. “We have mountains to the north and west of the farm,” Walker explains, “with Lake Keowee in between, and a ring of hills around the farm. When the cold air slides off the mountains into the Keowee River valley and settles on Lake Keowee, the warmer air on the surface of the lake is pushed up and over our farm.” And so Walker and his wife Ann got started bringing new life to an old worn-out cotton hill farm, farming at night and on weekends when they weren’t busy with their day jobs working in agricultural research and extension at Clemson University. Until her death in 2021, Ann and Walker managed the farm with the help of their daughters, Betty Ann and Zoe, a few seasonal workers and volunteers.

The Happy Berry Farm produces blackberries, blueberries, seedless grapes, muscadines, seedless muscadines, figs, persimmons and pussy willows, plus a number of minor crops such as mulberries, olives, chestnuts, and tea.1 The farm totals about 22 acres of steeply sloped, highly eroded and erodible land that was farmed for cotton starting in the early 1800s and then abandoned from about 1930 until Walker and Ann purchased the farm. Market production is focused on about 14 acres, with about three acres in infrastructure support land, parking, driveways and buildings. “From the get go, marketing the farm was a key part of our plan,” Walker says. “We wanted to focus on the pick-your-own market with wholesale as a secondary, so finding a location that was surrounded by five medium-sized towns and one major metropolis was ideal.”

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.