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4. Farm Foundation's Meet Your Farmer Podcast with A.G. Kawamura
17 Plays30 days ago
Farm Foundation’s Meet Your Farmer podcast featured A.G. Kawamura in season 1, episode 4.
A.G. is a third-generation farmer in Southern California and operates Orange County Produce with his brother. He served as California Secretary of Agriculture from 2003 to 2010. He is founding chair of Solutions for Urban Agriculture, which grows produce for area food banks. And he is involved in many other organizations, including as founding co-chair of Solutions from the Land, and with Farm Foundation as a Roundtable Fellow since 2011, and currently serving on the Farm Foundation Board of Directors. He also serves on the board of Western Growers.
In this episode, A.G. discusses what it means to be a landless farmer, his work to solve food insecurity, and some of the dynamics of the fresh produce industry that are not widely known.
Music: "Country Roads" by Sergii Pavkin from Pixabay
Reach us at communication@farmfoundation.org.
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Transcript
Introduction to Meet Your Farmer Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Meet Your Farmer, Farm Foundation's new podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Mijan. If you don't know a Farm Foundation, we're a nonprofit located in the Chicago area working to promote understanding at the intersections of agriculture and society. We've been accelerating solutions for agriculture since the 1930s.
00:00:27
Speaker
and we're excited to launch our very first podcast. The goal of this podcast is to help you get to know just a little bit more about the American farmers who are producing the food, fuel, and fiber we all use every day.
Introducing A.G. Kawamura
00:00:43
Speaker
I am very excited to welcome A.G. Kawamura onto the show. A.G. is a third generation farmer in Southern California and operates Orange County Produce with his brother,
00:00:56
Speaker
AG served as California Secretary of Agriculture from 2003 to 2010. He is founding chair of Solutions for Urban Agriculture, which grows produce for area food banks. And he is involved in many other organizations, including as founding co-chair of Solutions from the Land and with Farm Foundation as a Roundtable Fellow since 2011 and currently serving on the Farm Foundation Board of Directors He also serves on the board of Western Growers. Agee, welcome to Meet Your Farmer. Thank you, Naomi. So as I said in the intro, this is a podcast trying to get folks to know a little bit more about their
Family History and Urban Farming
00:01:39
Speaker
farmers. So ah with your family being involved in family farming, I'm assuming you grew up on a farm, but did you?
00:01:48
Speaker
No, actually, I did not. we've we're ah fruit We're a fruit and vegetable grower. We call it fresh produce. And we're um I could say we're a farmer in an urban area as well as an urban farmer. Years ago when I i'm i was born in 1956, so when we moved into Orange County in 58 down here just near Disneyland area,
00:02:13
Speaker
In California, um it was a very rural ah as part of the state at at the time the Orange County was one of the top I think one of the top five producing counties, at least in the top 10 producing counties in the United States in term of ah product value. And of course we had citrus and all kinds of vegetables and a lot of open ground here. Since that time, the urbanization has advanced tremendously and now we really are an urban farmer. We have been a landless farmer for over 37 years, interestingly. And we are have an interesting model where we've learned
00:02:51
Speaker
because there were so many developers and so much open land to work with that we had a chance to learn how to be, i we call it land managers with an edible landscape theme. So we grow on all kinds of different properties ah from vacant lots all the way up to large military bases under the power lines, University of California property, University of Cal State property, University of Properties. we have learned to be an asset to land ah to the landowners in the area because ah open ground in in an area like Orange County means you have weed abatement, you have rodents and other varmints that are there, and challenges for invasive species and endangered species as well. so
00:03:38
Speaker
We've just learned to manage these properties in a scale, let's say about 1,000 acres, 600 to 1,000 acres every year, depending on the year, um growing fruits and vegetables, usually double cropping each year with the crops that grow well in the winter and the crops, the summer crops that grow well in the summer.
Irrigated Farming in Arid Climates
00:03:57
Speaker
And we're not close enough to the ocean that we're really ah not affected by the extreme heat that you hear about.
00:04:04
Speaker
You know, it might be 110, 120 degrees, just 30 miles away from us. But over here, we'll be in the high 90s, low 100s on those really hot days. So we we we have a different kind of agriculture. The most important difference, I think, is we're irrigated agriculture because we are in an arid climate. So everything we grow, yeah we use irrigation, whether that's drip tape, whether that's sprinklers. um We don't do furrow irrigation anymore, but it's still um part of why why we can do well in this area. We turn the water on and off as we need it, and it's a ah precision kind of agriculture, not hoping for rain-fed blessings from the know from the skies. So what does it mean when at the beginning when you said that you're landless?
Landless Farming and Its Challenges
00:04:50
Speaker
um For the many years where we were farming on not only our our own properties here in Orange County, that we would find that there's always property to lease. And I think that's the model for so many farmers and ranchers around ah around the country, around the world. that you you You hope to have a home ranch. ah You hope to have ah your own properties. But when you have properties that you can lease um and do that as as a partnership with the landowner,
00:05:18
Speaker
To be landless means that you don't own the land, but you have land that you can farm on. ah The jeopardy of that is when that land is ready to be developed, or if some higher value crop comes in and it might displace you, you will get that unfortunate call from a landowner and who says the landlord, and they'll say, thanks for being on our property, but you need to get off.
00:05:40
Speaker
and move over for whatever the next use of that property is. But that's what I mean by St. Landless is we've learned for last 30, like I say, 37 years to be able to grow ah at a specific size. We're not small, but we're not big either. But for our county, where we're at ample size and we sell basically into the commercial chain store business.
00:06:07
Speaker
Thank you for that.
A.G.'s Journey Back to Farming
00:06:08
Speaker
So I still wanna go back, back to the, so you've but you've been doing this for decades, you've been farming for decades, but as I was looking into your background, um you went to undergrad at least for Spanish Lit, if I if i got that right. um So that made me wonder, did you always know you wanted to be a farmer or what was that path like?
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, you asked if I had grown up on a farm. And no, I did not. I grew up in a actually ah off farm. But because we farmed in different parcels around the region, um it's just ah when we came into Orange County, that's that's the decision my father and my mother made to be a little away from the ranch.
00:06:52
Speaker
um And it was at that time then, I think I became ah ah by by accident a beekeeper when I was 14 years old, 13, 14 years old and continued to do that. So that was my first real on-farm experience. And then I was raised where we would be on the farm, but because we were shippers as well in in California, we call it grower shippers.
00:07:17
Speaker
Our shipping company, we we worked with multiple growers and handled their produce and sold their produce under a single label. Our original labor label label was called the Western Chief Label. Going back to 1946 is when we started that company right after World War II. And my grandparents are all from Japan, um and my my both of my parents were born in Los Angeles. But the World War II was obviously an interruption in in our our farm business.
00:07:47
Speaker
um But when we cranked up again, my grandparent my grandfather and my father cranked up again in 1946. We continued with that model of being a grower shipper all those years. So a lot of my time was not spent on the farm, but it was actually spent in the packing shed.
00:08:03
Speaker
And in fact, when I came back from college, I i started in the packing shed ah ah for with ah with a brief stint on a vineyard just prior to getting there. ah But I actually was an Ag Econ major at UC Davis for the better part of a a year or two. And I realized that I thought I might be a writer.
00:08:22
Speaker
and transferred to Cal Berkeley, thinking that I would pursue a writing career. And um that major, I was a comparative literature major with English, Spanish, and French as my minors. And so I was really fortunate to have already learned how to speak Spanish well, learned to read and write it well. And that ended up being one of the most valuable things I could have ever brought with me back to the Ag sector. Our entire Ag force is mostly Spanish speaking.
00:08:50
Speaker
and When I was late in my senior year, actually, I thought I might join the Peace Corps or do something along those lines because I really was concerned about the the challenges of global food insecurity and thought I might pursue at least being involved in that. and Of course, that came with a realization that we already have a farming company and if you're ever going to end world hunger, it's going to be done through agriculture. and I remember late in my senior senior year asking my dad if he had a spot for me on the farm that I could come back to. and and When I came back, I never was more happy than to get back on the farm.
00:09:31
Speaker
and pursue that part of a career which started in doing sales and then eventually went to the growing side. And part of the reason I got to the go to the growing side was because I did speak Spanish. Even though I didn't have the agronomy background or the ag engineering background, um I had a pretty steep learning curve on how to how to learn about farming. Was your dad surprised? He was.
00:09:54
Speaker
he he didn't He didn't expect my brothers younger than me, but yeah I don't think he expected either of us to necessarily go in the business. But sure enough, we both ended up there and and it's been a just the most rewarding kind of career.
00:10:10
Speaker
It doesn't mean that it's easy. In fact, it's always challenging and i can I've got a violin I can play all day long about how tough things are for farmers, especially in California right now. Maybe I shouldn't say especially California, but California really does make it hard to farm um in terms of the regulatory burden, the tax burdens, the ah just different challenges that other growing areas necessarily don't have to face. Our cost of production a lot of times are significantly higher here, whether it's the wages, whether it's the cost of water, um all those different things add up and whens it makes it hard to be ah competitive if you're the high cost producer of a crop. And even though it might be great quality,
00:10:54
Speaker
um And that's where you're hopefully your marketing side of your business ah helps make you that much stronger as a company when you can do your own marketing and your own growing. you know At least you have a little bit more of your future in your own hands that way. And we've we've been fortunate to be that way.
00:11:11
Speaker
Before we get too far away from it, I wanted to pick up on the point about ah your focus on and your concern with hunger and and
Awareness of Global Food Insecurity
00:11:21
Speaker
ending hunger. what What was it that since college that you've been focused on this?
00:11:27
Speaker
I just remember that during college I actually got myself into a little situation where i I had to borrow some money I didn't want to call my folks and so I bought some money from some friends um to deal with a housing issue and as I paid that back I remember basically learning to live on a very small amount of money per day about a buck a day, learn how to cook a lot because I always did like cooking, but you'd make a big old soup or stew and you know, feed on that for a couple of days. But I literally was a hungry starving college student and I ended up getting a job interestingly in a Japanese restaurant because
00:12:02
Speaker
I think I applied to all the Asian restaurants in the area to see if I could get a job and help ah earn some dollars. And I started out washing dishes. But um I remember you know when you're washing dishes, a lot of food comes in there and there's a lot of food. So I note knew that I could get ah plenty of food at at a restaurant, both when you sit down for dinner afterwards at at the closing of the restaurant with the rest of the staff and all the way throughout. so ah It became maybe an a real-life observation that if you're hungry all day long, um you know you're in a different state of mind because you're you're thinking about the hunger. And it just became really clear that if you have they see these significant populations on the planet that day after day don't know where their food is next meal's coming from. You're you're not you're not really in a state of living anymore. You're in a state of survival.
00:12:58
Speaker
And that became really clear for me that the difference ah between abundance and scarcity then is driven by so many different aspects. But certainly one of the most frustrating things is for us in agriculture, um I do believe we have the capacity to feed everybody on the planet, but we don't necessarily have the will to get that done. And so that's become part of a driving force for me is to so think long and hard about at least within our own area, within our own region, within our own companies. And then talking about policy around a country, a state or a world is we we really have to find that imagination and and the will
00:13:35
Speaker
to correct this the situation where we have hunger anywhere, we really shouldn't, um because it's it's it's a kind of negligence, especially for young kids and infants and young people. where If they're getting an incomplete meal day after day, why would that be any different than me starving one of my plants or a farm animal? And they'll never reach their full potential.
00:13:59
Speaker
um once you miss out day after day on a proper fertilizer program, if you will, or a feeding program. And we just kind of don't think about it as ah as a world, as a nation, as as as a region, that we have ah really significant food insecurity, obviously so extreme in some places where You have people dying so extreme in other places where you just have ah challenges with cognitive development that's not taking place because they're getting a lousy meal. Now, they might be having plenty of calories, but that goes back to a different thing about what are you eating. um We're fortunate that we create we grow nutrient-dense foods, foods and vegetables, and more and more people are paying attention to that lately, which is a really important thing. And that's how we got involved right now locally growing
00:14:47
Speaker
a pretty significant amount of fruits and vegetables for the food bank on an incredibly innovative collaboration that's been really fun to be a part of. We're fourth starting our fourth year of harvesting about an acre a week, about delivering about 40,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables to the food bank, mostly planted, weeded and harvested by volunteers from the community.
Community Collaboration in Agriculture
00:15:11
Speaker
and So it's it's ah it's a ma it's a really great paradigm shift in understanding that you know those most in need might actually get some of the best diet you can imagine. Yeah. So so talk more about what what are you growing?
00:15:28
Speaker
Well, we're finishing up our summer plantings right now of ah zucchini, yellow squash, ah bell peppers, watermelons, honeydews, a few jalapenos, to throw that in there. um but was A little bit of tomatoes has ah as just a small amount there. And then we'll shift into our winter crops of cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli, a little broccolini. And the reason we, and and then we have before that, we'll have some winter squash.
00:15:57
Speaker
some butternut squash, acorn squash, spaghetti squash. But these are all at value volumes where the food bank was able to mention to us, the one we work closest with on this one project, that they can handle about 40,000 pounds or 80, 50, 80, 500 pound bins.
00:16:20
Speaker
So the the food bank let us know that they can, through on a weekly basis, they run through about 80, 500 pound bins of fresh produce. And if we could produce that here in their backyard, that would be great. And so we said immediately, well, I know that.
00:16:35
Speaker
because I'm a ah vegetable grower that cabbage is about 40,000 pounds an acre is how much you get. Celery is a little bit heavier, 50 or 60,000 pounds. If you produce really good crop of watermelon, that's maybe 70, 80,000 pounds of watermelon ah per acre. And so you start to do the math and we were trying to get the price of the produce down between 20 and 30 cents a pound.
00:16:59
Speaker
but in the cost of production. And if we could get it to that number, the food bank had dollars to be able to buy that produce and and utilize it. um We also realized, because we didn't have necessarily the right kind of cooling facilities, we don't have a hydro cool to take the heat out of the product once we harvest. and we We chose crops that are a little bit more hardy. um A good example, we tried to grow some celery. It was beautiful celery, but they didn't have the right cooling hydrocool to get the temperature and the heat out of it, so it went pretty limp. And what was beautiful celery became something that was hard for them to even give away, even though it was still edible. But these are the kind of things we learn about with the food banks.
00:17:43
Speaker
in trying to understand can we supply a very consistent steady supply of staple vegetables that can go into the diet of their clients and of course we can is the answer to that and We've done it now. This is going into our fourth year. We keep on modifying it. Now we're looking into ah some other, ah what you would you call it, an augmentation to the program where we can grow actually some of the crops that you wouldn't think what you'd find in a food bank, but we certainly reason you wouldn't find it because they're too expensive for people to buy. But let's say it's something like ph fennel or something like eggplants or something like
00:18:28
Speaker
um I don't know, kohlrabi, different veggies and different kinds of fruits. We're looking at avocados and citrus to be able to end some stone fruit eventually to bring on in. and And the more that we can make a cornucopia of copia of ah of ah products available through a standard farm model, but it's a little different because we we have a tremendous amount of volunteers.
00:18:54
Speaker
in our community that are willing to step up and help with the farm process. um So the best way to describe that is we live in Southern California. There's about 20 million people that live within an hour and a half of our farm here.
00:19:10
Speaker
And i'm farming the the farm that we're doing this project on is the University of California has a research station right here in our backyard here in Irvine, California. It's about a 200 plus acre facility, but we've kind of occupied about 25, 30 acres of it and are growing, like I say, close to an acre um ah a week. So almost 52 acres worth of plantings.
00:19:34
Speaker
each year here and and just ah making that available with the help of these um enormous amount of volunteers. Now the volunteers might come ah from corporations, you know, yeah as you walk, drive a road and you see people with their yellow vests on cleaning up trash on the side of the road, many corporations ask their, allow their their employees to have a work day doing community service and they get paid from by the,
00:20:03
Speaker
by the company, right, to go and do some community service, our project is a perfect fit for that. So we'll get large corporations come out sometimes by the busload and or large are corporations coming out by just the van and suddenly you've got the on a given day 20 volunteers or on a given day you'll have 200 volunteers.
00:20:26
Speaker
And in the past, we used to use ah have a gleaning program that we used and on a given weekend. I know i remember we've had 1,000 volunteers out, and they're kind of like locusts at that point. you know they kind of but Anything that looks that edible, they'll pick up out of the ground.
00:20:42
Speaker
But it's it's kind of just really looking at how the community can be a part of ah the solutions coming out of urban agriculture, let alone um solutions coming out of large scale stuff as well. It's a remarkable time to kind of rethink and maybe COVID helped us the most.
Volunteers in Farming Operations
00:21:02
Speaker
because so many of the volunteers that the food bank had ah going into their warehouse regularly, daily, they had thousands of volunteers that suddenly were not able to go in because of the masking requirements. And as we were talking one day, they were bemoaning the the food bank was bemoaning the fact that they wish they could get more fruits and vegetables because there were so many more people showing up at the food bank because they were out of out of work. And then at the same time, they said, but we've got all these volunteers. There's nothing them for them to do.
00:21:32
Speaker
And that's when we started to brainstorm and say, well, you know what, we've got, we can do a lot of things if you have that many volunteers. And for those of us in the fresh produce industry, the number one cost generally is labor. Labor usually is 40, 50, 50%, sometimes 60% of the cost of of a product is the labor, the box, the transportation, the cooling, the cost of growing it is not so high.
00:21:59
Speaker
And so I grow green beans, for example, and we were hand picking green beans up to about three years ago, but the cost of hand picking labor is so high here in California, I can't compete with Mexico. So we quit hand picking and we went to a machine and even with the machine, we have a hard time competing, but the green beans are really cheap to grow. They're just really expensive to pick and handle and sort and put into a box and they don't give you a whole lot of pounds per acre.
00:22:25
Speaker
But there's still people love them. And so today, for example, I mean, tomorrow, for example, we're going to have a group of 50, 60 people come and pick some green beans for the food bank. And it's a part of a project where we understand that the cost is a higher for the food bank. So we have our solutions for urban ag nonprofit.
00:22:44
Speaker
SFUA.org is our website um where we realize that we can augment with the food bank the cost of these products and get those higher cost veggies or fruits into the food bank through through this partnership. Got it.
00:23:04
Speaker
So that partnership helps that cost to get down back down to where the food bank, it works for the food bank as well. And we get tremendous help from our industry too, so the people that supply drip tape or fertilizer or crop tools, ah crop protection tools, the people that supply implements, this let's say hose and shovels, the people that supply um um Just the different inputs that we need, seeds and transplants, those are some of our most expensive costs, obviously. oh It's wonderful to get that kind of support from the industry when they know that this these projects are not so big, but they have a lot of impact. And a lot of times we're we're able to say that we have money, so don't don't you know we just would love to have a nice discount, if you will. yeah We're not asking you to give us the products.
00:23:57
Speaker
But if you want to give to them, we're happy to receive them. Fair enough, and I'm sure lots of people are happy to to partner. So just to be clear, is everything that you produce going to food banks, or do you also produce for the general market? Well, on this project, specifically here at the University of California's South Coast Research and Extension Center, um and we call it the SCREC, nice acronym.
00:24:24
Speaker
um everything we produce here. The food bank actually owns the crop here. I'm just the farmer of record. So, and we've, in our company, we've dragged a few retired farmers out ah out of out of retirement to come and help. I'm not retired yet, I probably should be, but um in our other operations, we we we we are farming and doing some other contract growing for um ah one of the larger companies that grows carrots, for example, we're growing some carrots for the first time in almost 50 years in our county, carrots have come back.
00:24:59
Speaker
we grow Currently, have ah I'm growing some pumpkins for a really successful agro-tourism friends company. So we're getting into Halloween and and that's one of their good money makers. But we have a good capacity to grow things and we continue to do just that. We are moving away.
00:25:20
Speaker
ah currently from growing things that have the inherent risk of of the marketplace. we do We are in the strawberry business in it through a different company, and that has been one of the most the biggest backbone, I guess, of who we are currently. It continues to be part of a strawberry company. that were um i now we're We used to be the only owners of the shipping side of it. Now we're minority owners of it. It's called Gem Pack.
00:25:50
Speaker
but we We are ah watching in California and and the west side west coast from Washington all the way down. We're just just watching a tremendous shift in how do you stay in business in the fresh produce industry. It's it's been ah not not It's fun to watch how tough it is to see the family farms really starting to either have to, you have to get big or you have to get small and regional and local ah to an extent to be able to make things work. If you're kind of in the middle, I think that's one of the toughest places to be right now because the overhead costs are just so tremendous. And so everybody's evolving and looking for different ways to take their expertise and put it into play.
00:26:40
Speaker
um in a crot with a crop that can you know keep you from losing money. um And it used to be in our produce industry, we loved it because you're always hoping you could hit a home run with a ah short market, especially out of our area down here in Southern California. And those days are kind of long gone. Now we just hope we can get on base every every season and and not strike out. And the strawberry industry has been a good example of one of those kind of industries that You get two back-to-back years of hor horrendous, of really good rain, if you will, record rain. But rain and strawberries don't go well together unless you're you're just in their planting stage. So the amount of lost crop because of torrential rains these last two years has been pretty tough on the industry.
00:27:26
Speaker
And I think everybody is trying to continue to reassess if this is the new norm, and this is how we talk about climate and in agriculture, is it's changing climate patterns that can cause all kinds of problems. so As we always say, unpredictable weather means unpredictable harvests. It's always been that way. It's never going to be different. And you hopefully you don't get caught flat-footed with really horrible weather events.
00:27:52
Speaker
And sometimes they dodge you. Sometimes they do. They don't. We had the first hurricane in 70 years here in Orange County last year. Right. Hurricane Hillary. And it's funny. A friend of mine who just passed away at 99 years old remembers the last time we had a hurricane in our county because he was there, which is so kind of amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I had forgotten about that one.
00:28:20
Speaker
um You started talking about the evolution, um and i that was something I wanted to ask you about. since Since you've started farming, what is kind of one of the more notable ways that things have changed or that you've changed how you approach farming?
Farming Technology Advancements
00:28:37
Speaker
I think you could always say precision agriculture has always been the hallmark of any successful farms, you don't wanna over irrigate, you don't wanna under irrigate, you don't wanna over fertilize, but you certainly don't wanna under fertilize, right?
00:28:54
Speaker
and you wanna try and do things as with as much precision as you can. I think the huge, um I would call it a cascade of new technologies, new methods in a single lifetime is something I can surely point to. um We used to furrow irrigate. We used to actually, i remember I remember the first large animal I ever petted as a maybe three or four year old was a mule. That was in a barn on one of our ranches from and a mule team.
00:29:24
Speaker
That was a plow team that was actually used for farm work before the tractors showed up, right? So I'm like I said, I'm 68 years old and to think that just before I was born, there was, you know, basically a lot of guys didn't have tractors in Southern California.
00:29:42
Speaker
This is, is there's that's a lot of change to have happen in the course of a lifetime. um And yet when drip irrigation came along, it it helped us replace our sprinklers and the sprinklers had replaced our furrow irrigation. So now that we are on using drip irrigation, we've been experimenting on and off with hydroponics, we've aeroponics, we've experimented with above ground.
00:30:07
Speaker
above-ground production. um There's just new technologies coming out all the time, and we we we're fortunate that because we're down here. if People like to ah see if we want to do a trial of this or that, and so that continues to take place. Some of the huge, I think,
00:30:26
Speaker
Most significant changes that don't really get a lot of attention is the breeding programs that have been able to give us our different seeds and varieties, our cultivars. um It was just the other day, two years ago, it was 118 degrees out here in in Orange County, a I'd never seen before in my lifetime.
00:30:48
Speaker
ah We had a crop of green crops of green beans, consistent with the continuous plantings of green beans that we harvested week after week after week down here. If that same heat had come 30 years earlier, we would have lost 100% of all the young beans.
00:31:04
Speaker
But because of these new varieties that we have, we lost maybe 30, 40%, or 10, even 20%, depending on some areas where the beans were pretty well set. these The different breeding ah then opportunities that have made plants tougher for heat tolerance, for ah salinity tolerance, for different kinds of stress.
00:31:27
Speaker
um ah those are the kinds of advances that have helped us stay in business and have yields that we've seen in our life that are 100% higher than 30, 40 years ago on some of these crops. And that's a big number. you know So one thing you'd get 10, 20, 30, 40%, but if you can show that that you've increased your yields by over 100% compared to 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago. That tells you a lot of what kind of advances we're looking at. And then saving your crop from pests. I just lost actually a little little little planting of a green beans. I'd like to say it's because we were not paying attention as much as we should have. And it's rare when we lose anything to insect pests these days, because we have wonderful tools to use. and I've grown both both conventional and organic.
00:32:21
Speaker
um And they're both you know systems that we have that create different ways of looking at what you're trying to accomplish. For me, because I don't own the ground, it's harder to be an organic grower when you can only be on a piece of ground sometimes knowing you're gonna walk away ah when someone wants to develop it. So that's a challenge for that kind of a farmer like me who doesn't own the ground.
00:32:47
Speaker
But I will also say that the marketplace for organic for us has changed so much um that instead of those really high prices that we used to get, we compete directly with Baja California here out of Southern California, same season, same general climate pattern. We're only 90 miles away, so we're in the same general Southern California region as like Baja California.
00:33:11
Speaker
and the amount of organic product for example that comes in, it it makes the market not as tight as it used to be or as hot as it used to be. And so as those prices come down, um suddenly the prices you need to be able to break even because we're the higher cost producer, ah those those dollars aren't there. The best example is on highly perishable labor intensive crops, we're paying let's say 20 bucks an hour right now in Southern California, actually a little bit more than that. And ah in Mexico, just a hundred miles away, they're paying $20 a day.
00:33:48
Speaker
Oh, wow. and For the same crops. So you you can do the math on that. Now, they might have the same water costs. They might have the same fertilizer costs. They might have even higher diesel costs. But when your labor is the most important cost you have,
00:34:03
Speaker
how do you compete with that? And so a lot of the guys have picked up and gone into Mexico out of our Imperial Coachella Valley here in Southern Cal. We used to have 27,000 acres of, there was 27,000 acres of table grapes just 15 years ago. to this year Now there's less than 2000, I think. So where did they go? Well, they just picked up and moved, tore the vines out and moved, it's it's the same Sonoran desert.
00:34:32
Speaker
but then now they're in Mexico um harvesting and doing what they do with a better cost structure to be able to be more competitive and stay in business. So these are the kind of challenges I think all the farmers face. You can be a really good grower and you just still can't stay in business because you can't compete unless your marketing ah is so such that it allows you to be competitive.
00:34:57
Speaker
um Or you find some way to innovate, or you find some niche, or you find you know some unique products that you can grow better than anybody else. These are all the kinds of things that you hope will carry you through. And the produce industry ah is a really under under under, I guess you'd call it under reported industry ah for the general public. they They seem to understand corn and wheat and rice, soy. But they don't the the two things they don't understand well, the public does not understand well, is what a huge gamble it is for the guys that are dependent on the right amount of rain when they're it's rain-fed, they don't irrigate.
00:35:39
Speaker
Whereas here we are, you know irrigating, turning water on and off. just It's so different, the different kinds of agriculture in our country, in our world, um that it's it's nice to we be able to have a chance to describe describe it here with you. It's great to learn about it. what One observation really quickly. i I remember saying that we saw almost 100% increase in yield on some crops. The only way you get 100% increase in yield is you were doing horribly to begin with.
00:36:09
Speaker
In other words, you're pretty shitty at farming whatever the crop was to begin with and then you've figured it out and that now you got better yields and you got closer to the top of the potential of where your yield should be. and But the other side of that is there are ah there are cultivars on fruiting crops that just yield so much more than they did 20, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. There's that breeding. So there's two different ways you become you see significant increases in yield is that you just become a better farmer and recognize that you've pushed for the potential of the plant better. And part of that can come then from great cul of great breeding that just gives you a a better
00:36:55
Speaker
plant that will give you more fruit or more product or grow more ah robustly or or different things like that. Does that make sense? so went it was It was for us to go and increase significantly as we learn how to be better farmers over over the years, a lot of times just watching your neighbors.
00:37:16
Speaker
and looking over the fence line and realizing they're doing a hell of lot a better job. And then asking at the coffee shop, well, you know would you share with us why why how you're what are you doing? And in our county, was it was always wonderful. Farmers were always, always willing to help each other do better.
00:37:34
Speaker
We were all kind of us against the rest of the rest of the state, the rest of the world, right? And I think that sometimes is the is true still in so many counties where the coffee shop is where you learned, that's where I learned an awful lot about farming, because I didn't have that background coming out of college. And even if you have that back, ah but a college background doesn't mean you're good, doesn't it mean that ah
00:38:01
Speaker
that you know how to farm, right? we we We get to work with a lot of kids that come out of college and they they they're smart, they're intelligent, but they have no farm background, no farm experience. And you realize that if you, and I made this mistake once of handing over an entire little program to some kids that just got out of college um thinking, and and they could talk, ah they could show you a great diagram on a computer. And at the time computers were still new, so we were pretty impressed. But the truth is they could,
00:38:32
Speaker
barely hook up a disc to a tractor and figure out how to make it work. you know it's so it's It's a little bit of everything you you try and improve every year. Yeah. yeah and that um Actually, in the conversation that I had with Klaus, he was talking about the new farmers coming in that i kind of I forget how he called it, but non-traditional farmers, ah farmers coming into the industry for the first time. And and you can learn a lot, but we had ah a brief discussion about what what do you miss by not having grown up? um You know, all that stuff that you just absorb by kind of growing up in that and but in the farming environment and little things that you just pick up um by osmosis. ah I think the final verdict was they catch up, but there's a bit of school of hard knocks for a little for a little moment there.
00:39:21
Speaker
I couldn't agree more. um So my last question, so you're a third generation farmer. um What would you want your great grandchildren to know about you as a farmer?
00:39:36
Speaker
ah it's not and It used to be ah an audacious stream, but not anymore because I think because of COVID, in my mind, I've realized that probably one of the easiest of the sustainable development goals that the United Nations has of the sustainable development goals is to end hunger, on have an end of hunger on the planet.
00:40:00
Speaker
And the third actually has to do with ah nutrition and and healthy lives. But um I think since COVID, I realized that probably the easiest thing to accomplish on this list of 17 goals really is ah is to be able to hit end hunger. And I would like to say that in our generation, my before I pass away sometime in the future here,
00:40:20
Speaker
at I'd like to see the day that that we the the world is able to announce that we've had a day, a week, 40 days, 40 nights where nobody was hungry because we we made it happen. I mentioned it earlier, we certainly have the capacity to make that happen. We've had that capacity over almost for almost 50 years, ah since actually even longer since the end of the World War II and Korean War, that where logistically it's it is possible to certainly feed everybody on the planet all the time.
Vision for Ending Global Hunger
00:40:53
Speaker
Knowing that is why don't we do it becomes the next question, or how can we do it more efficiently? Well, there's all kinds of efficient ways to get it done.
00:41:02
Speaker
we're we're showing ah that there's, even in an urban area, you can feed a ton of people. um And the the idea that ending hunger is is has ah has a value, um there's so many values that are can be accomplished once we do that. In terms of, like ah earlier, we were talking about cognitive development, we were talking about developmental issues with young kids that don't have a good diet. But I would love to think that grand,
00:41:31
Speaker
grand kid would say, yeah, it was in those years ah that they figured out that that's probably the not right to think that we we went with what went this long, this many decades. ah we we always like to i you've heard me You've heard the term, we don't like the idea of think tank anymore. We want to be a do tank. And this idea that how many more studies globally do we need? How many more millions of dollars do we pour into studies to talk about hunger?
00:42:02
Speaker
and talk about food insecurity and act as if it's something you know that's, I don't know, it's like a sickness ah in a way. you know it's All we need to know is if people ah day after day after day don't have access access to food, and that's why we learned about food deserts during COVID. We learned about food insecurity for seniors. We learned about poor dietary choices and that constantly plays out in the and you know the and the food wars that are out there. But the the simple thing is, guess what? Why don't we make something
00:42:38
Speaker
a concentrated effort to just end hunger on the planet. The minute you do that, I think the potential for a cascade of other accomplishments follows right behind that because um for the for the world to be able to do something like that, it tells you that we've kind of turned a page and said, yeah, that century that is behind us had a lot of misery in it, but let's just move into a world of abundance. And that's where the solutions from the land concept comes is that we don't want to be in a world of scarcity because we know where that leads. We want to create abundance. And that's where we recognize that the agriculture has such an important role to play.
00:43:19
Speaker
and That was excellent. Eiji, thank you so much. This has been such a fascinating and wonderful conversation. Thanks Naomi. And thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Meet Your Farmer podcast from Farm Foundation. Be sure to check out the other episodes in this season. If you have recommendations for farmers we should have on the show or have any other feedback, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.
00:43:45
Speaker
If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share the podcast with your network. Farm Foundation is all about creating trust and understanding at the intersections of agriculture and society. You can learn more about our work at farmfoundation dot.org. Until next time.