Dig, transplant, bed down, repeat. Six inch spacing, four rows per planting bed. Finish the row, water it in, keep moving. Lopez Harvest sells lettuce mix, a specialty blend of “Island Greens,” chard, microgreens, arugula, herbs, and various seasonal vegetables and specialty crops to most of the for-profit food retail and business operations on the island. Christine, the farm owner, sends out a “pick list” to all customers a week in advance, takes orders by a certain day, and harvests and delivers all orders herself. This is her answer to the question “what does it take to be a successful small-scale farmer on a small island?” She sells her surplus produce directly to retail and restaurant, finding this to be more profitable than selling at the seasonal weekly Farmer’s Market or direct to consumers. She raises additional vegetables for personal consumption, reducing her own need to purchase store-bought foods, and facilitates a meat-share program where costs and benefits from raising meat chickens are shared among participating households. These non-monetary and cooperative forms of exchange are important to the economic viability of her operations. Christine now receives additional revenue from her participation in a beginning farmer mentoring program, where she earns up to $1,000 annually for mentoring younger farmers in their first year of operation . Her farm is on shared land purchased by three couples, and was acquired with family support, a common method for overcoming high barriers to entry for farmland access . While some rows of her field are planted to commercial crops, others are in rye-vetch cover crop mix gaining fertility for next year, or mustards to deter wire worms. The cover crop is mowed down and incorporated into the beds,procona London container with some beds serving as experiments for no-till practices where she has also tried occultation techniques to germinate and kill weeds prior to transplanting. This is difficult to enact on her land due to heavy clay soils that need some disturbance to be made ready for tender transplants and is a work in progress.
Commercial crops are rotated onto previously cover cropped beds, a dance between production of plants and soil. In Christine’s mind, “good farming is good for the climate;” she adopts practices when they prove beneficial for her land, crops, soil, and business model, and it just so happens that many of these practices are anointed in academic research as climate mitigating strategies. Christine exemplifies a successful independent, woman-owned business model. She receives seasonal labor support through the LCLT intern program and through informal work trade agreements with friends and neighbors. Christine is a vocal contributor at the monthly farmer coffees, sharing what she’s learned about effective weed control strategies , and a gifted farme reducator. She collaborates with WSU San Extension on a research project to reduce wire worm pest pressure in lettuce crops and is also a collaborator on the Western SARE bio-char cocompost grant, participating in the field trial and soil/crop data collection processes. Christine recognizes the attractiveness of entering into farming cooperatively or with farm partners but struggles with the difficult proposition of supporting multiple households with limited farm revenue streams and land use restrictions. When it comes to sharing land in her current situation, she would love to be able to build and provide more farm worker housing, but is restricted from doing so by county zoning policies that prevent more than two houses from being built on a parcel designated as “farmland7.” The county zoning codes are ripe for reform, but notoriously difficult to get right in terms of regulatory verbiage that protects farmland from becoming housing developments yet allows for ample and affordable farm worker housing. Currently grappling with her own problems of farmland succession, scaling back, and transitioning her land, Christine hopes that the land can continue to be farmed, while still allowing her and her partner to extract their equity and support their own retirement. On the way to working out these details, Christine continues to get up early each morning of the summer, turn on the irrigation system and harvest high-quality vegetables, sharing her beautiful food production space and boundless stores of knowledge with those seeking it in her community.Meike Meissner and Mike McMahon moved to Lopez Island with their three children in spring 2018, after signing on to a 15-year long term affordable lease of Stonecrest Farm through LCLT.
Meike and Mike got their farming start in California, where they both worked at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. They grew their experience in the American West, participating in a rangeland internship in Montana and establishing an award-winning contract grazing operation in Colorado. Thinking holistically and with climate change in mind, Meike and Mike practice a combination of farming and conservation work. They are both trained in managed grazing through Holistic Management International, an offshoot of the Savory Institute, and believe in the value of animals as regenerative elements for degraded rangeland. Upon moving to Lopez, they have faced inevitable start-up obstacles in establishing pasture-raised heritage pigs, rotationally grazed beef cattle, chickens, and kitchen processing facility. The pasture areas have been so degraded from repeated haying that there is little nutritious forage available for their cattle operation, which they would like to be 100% grass-fed and finished, with no supplemental hay fed to their animals. Before this is possible, they must regenerate the available forage and bring back high-nutrient plant biomass on their land, through a creative, locally tailored approach to grassland ecosystem restoration. In the meantime, they are leasing other land for rotational grazing of their beef cows. Adding to the quandary is decades of selective cattle breeding in the United States to maximize high-protein feed-to-meat conversion as quickly as possible. Venturing into the field of epigenetics, Meike laments the fact that there are few cattle breeds in the U.S. particularly well suited to convert poor forage to high quality meat,cut flower transport bucket which would represent another opportunity for minimizing external inputs in the form of supplemental animal feed.Meike spoke at length about her abhorrence of using anything the comes wrapped in plastic and avoiding petroleum products in farm operations wherever possible. When it comes to removing and controlling weeds in their home garden without chemicals, tillage, or black plastic cover, there is a seeming dearth of options remaining; however, a return to natural methods and materials such as hugelkulture beds, permaculture principles, and sheet mulching with cardboard, wood chips, and tons of compost offer promising potential. Meike and Mike think in terms of returning all waste products as inputs to some other farm process. Dead weeds become organic material for building soil, inedible food items become high nutrient components of their pigs’ diet. They are on a challenging path toward land regeneration first, ideally unlocking food production and economic viability down the line.Two of the three farms highlighted in the section above acquired farmland in the first place due to wealth transfers from previous careers or family members. The value proposition of purchasing farmland and paying off debts through limited farm incomes is otherwise extremely difficult and disadvantages low income and minority groups who have been excluded from generational land and wealth accumulation. There is not yet a “social safety net” in place to enable farming as an equal-opportunity, financially viable or desirable career pathway, in terms of guaranteed income, health care, and time off to support personal well being. This is preventing the easy transition of farmland from current to new farmers and causing hesitancy among young people seeking to make an early career as a farmer in the San Juan Islands, ultimately challenging the sustainability of agriculture on the islands as a “way of life.” In order to avoid a situation where only the wealthy can afford to farm sustainably, policy mechanisms must be put in place to democratize land access.
Promoting and facilitating cooperative ownership and buy-in to farmland is something the county has yet to address effectively; it is challenging, and yet a promising action step for enabling successful farmland transition for a more diverse array of new farmers . Opportunities exist on the production side of the Lopez food system in the form of local knowledge accumulated over decades of implementing sustainable and regenerative, agroecological practices, that is ripe for sharing and transferring to new and beginning farmers through mentorship programs or the establishment of a more formalized “farmer training program” on the islands. Additionally, on the land acquisition front, the LCLT long-term affordable lease model piloted with the Stonecrest Farm purchase could lead to other transfers of farmland at low cost to new farmers . On a small island such as Lopez, there are opportunities to share and collaborate on distribution activities especially for complementary products. However, the limited number and size of markets could prohibit entry into a channel that is already dominated by one farmer or food business; therefore, diversifying and coordinating with other farmers is an opportunity to streamline distribution activities. Opportunities exist for farms growing fruit to partner with and distribute alongside farms growing vegetables, meat or dairy products, which would be expedited by access to enabling infrastructure such as a shared refrigerated truck, aggregated cold storage, and designated food delivery person to transport products from farms to customers and retail locations. Ideally a shared transport system could be optimized to reduce vehicle miles traveled for food distribution, and a transport vehicle could be a hybrid or electric model to meet local goals of carbon emissions reductions in all facets of the food system. Efforts to streamline distribution exist in the form of the proposed San Juan Island Food Hub, which would provide institutional support for aggregating and distributing farm products between islands, improving transparency between producers and food purveyors. According to a 2015 Food Hub Feasibility Study led by the Ag Guild and ARC, there is a strong desire and opportunity for a San Juan County Food Hub to provide an online platform for ordering, aggregated cold storage, and aggregated purchase opportunities that would help meet the unmet demand for local food products in restaurants, grocery stores, and other food businesses9. Most farmers currently do not have the time and capital to transport their produce to other islands but stand to benefit from accessing these additional markets.While food security is a stated goal of the project, it is unclear how increased access and affordability to low income consumers would be accomplished, other than through assumed improvements to local economic development and job creation. A specific plan for meeting the needs of low-income residents in the activities of the food hub would be a valuable improvement to the current planning process. The Lopez Farmer’s Market is an opportunity for farmers willing to participate weekly throughout the summer, as farmer participation has dwindled in recent years and there is interest in attracting more farmers to sell at the market. Finally, the close-knit Lopez community breeds the trust and interpersonal relationships that facilitate many non-monetary forms of exchange, whereby farmers can trade food products directly for other goods and services they may need from island residents, in mutually beneficial trades that create solidarity and sovereignty from financial institutions. It is challenging to establish a successful CSA distribution on Lopez, requiring farmers to think creatively about how to structure weekly shares in a way that provides products that many residents do not grow for themselves, and accounts for the shorter-term seasonal demand of summer visitors.Using data gathered from interviews and observations of current farmland operations on Lopez and referring back to Ostrom’s ten variables, it becomes clear that farmer self organization to sustain the local food system is very likely . Nevertheless, the propensity for farmers to self-organize does not guarantee that the more complex and overarching political and economic challenges will be resolved through grassroots self-organizing; farmers must integrate and collaborate with other circles of the polycentric governance structure in which they are nested to adopt necessary reforms. The ARC, for example, is a Citizen Advisory Committee tasked with advising the County Council on issues affecting the Agricultural environment comprised of 15 voting seats, at least 50% of which must be farmers.