A Farmers Job Description Whats a Farmer do?

What’s Happening on the Farm Today?

A continuing story of farming little challenges and victories and the family that makes it happen. This is one farmer's job description.

So what a Farmer do?

-grows food (obviously)

-bookkeeper

-mechanic

-engineer

-cheap labor

-web designer

-botanist

-plant scientist

-chemist

-market analyst

-package and store product

-chief planner

-husband/wife

-father

-grandfather

November 12th, 2024

Today our farmer Brian got up about 7 am, started a fire with prunings from last year. Wood stove is how the homestead is heated and keeps the wife happy.  Over the past few weeks we have been pruning dead wood, mostly as result of a new disease making its way through almonds orchards across the world.  This latest one is courtesy of our Aussie friends, Phomopsis Canker (Phomopsis amygdali). Our Certified Crop Advisor tested the wood last year and determined this was the fungus. Its nasty, killed 2 dozen trees last year and is making its way through another 4-6 dozen. We’ll need to remove about 6 trees this year. We are hopeful that by pruning back infect parts we can save the tree.  It was an amazing determination and strange since we have no seen much in California, until now. I’m not alone and due to our efforts we are better off than most orchards.  For organic farming, even conventional to a smaller degree, there is not much we can do about disease. We do some cultural practices (plant on mounds, don’t let water sit around trunk, prune for good canopy airflow)  to control it, but that’s about it.

So after house was warming up Brian and Joshua walked the orchard and gathered dead wood prunings into logical piles, then took the tractor and picked them up for proper disposal, burning. It’s a big pile- sad. This took a few hours, broken up by period of rain and getting wet and muddy.

We also dug out a dead tree and dragged it back for burning.  We use the larger prunings to heat the house and the smoker for making smoked almonds.  Of course the chain saw needed to be sharpened a few times.

Brian filled several orders which is nice to see product moving out. Our almonds are primarily sold on the website and with the new Google search engine optimization routine, our website constantly needs attention. So, several hours we spent tinkering with the website. 

Another less-fun job, checking emails and sending some out. One thing a farmer also must do is plan ahead. Order boxes, supplies, contact suppliers for chicken manure, contact sheep buy about getting the sheep back, following up with irrigation technical rep about why my pressure compensators are leaking,… and the list goes one. Since I’m a small family farm, I rely on bigger companies to provide services like hulling and shelling, and most recently, chicken manure. They tend to not return calls, so I carefully navigate contacting them, negotiating with them but without pissing them off.

My neighbor called and needed a little help harvesting his olives. Mark is a great guy. I give him eggs, almonds, almond butter, he gives us awesome olive oil and takes care of our kitties and doggies when we escape for a few days. We only worked for about an hour but made progress getting some olives ready for squeezing, or whatever they call it. Mark has also has let me borrow equipment often. Farming is much better with great neighbors like Mark and Cynthia. So helping your neighbors out is always an important part of a farmer's job descrription.

We are getting close to selling our citrus. We don’t have much, but we sell what we don’t eat. Joshua harvested about 300 lbs of pomegranates, the satsuma and murcott mandarins are ready.

So ends this day’s story, its coming up on 7pm, and Amazon dropped of another part earlier for the constant chore repairing equipment (ya know, mechanis-its in the dob description). Parts for the mower came in, so off I go to replace a belt pulley going bad. Thank God for batteries and headlamps!!

Brian

I'm suprised she let me in the house

Nov 25th

Among other duties, Farmer Brian was a instructor today. UC Davis, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, asked Brian if he could host a class at his farm for a 2 hour field day class. The class was PLS 15 Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture. Sure enough, 7 vans full of college students arrived right on time, about 60 students. So for 2 hours Brian "lectured" the students on several aspects of organic and regenerative farming. Some of them intend on majoring in an agricultural degree, others not so much. They all took notes and used a score sheet to track different sustainability attributes that Capay Hills Orchard follows.

They were fantastic students. Very attentive and interested. I would say ay least half asked questions. Brian was joined by Becca and Joshua (youngest daughter and son). Who also answered questions.

So why do this? I belive it is every farmer's responsibility to educate our country about how their food is grown, it just doesn't magically appear at the grocery store. Its a bit more complicated than that.