How an Occidental nonprofit is helping save the family farm

Around the globe, nearly 70 percent of the world’s food is grown on small farms, according to surveys by the United Nation’s Farm and Agriculture Organization. Now, from California’s Coachella Valley to the dusty plains of Burkina Faso, West Africa, and the high mountain valleys of Hengduan, China, small family growers face a new crisis.

On top of rising costs, ravaging pests, economic uncertainty and social unrest, they’re trying to raise crops in an increasingly unpredictable climate.

On an 80-acre wooded reserve in west Sonoma County, a dynamic nonprofit community called Occidental Arts and Ecology Center is exploring and showcasing processes that small farmers everywhere can use to safeguard their future harvests.

One of their most exciting new projects is a new paradigm for growing essential crops such as wheat. Just four grains - wheat, rice, corn and soybeans - provide 65 percent of all the agricultural calories consumed globally.

The ingenious approach to cultivation, known as “evolutionary plant breeding,” harnesses the power of seeds, nature and diversity to make small farming more adaptable and sustainable in the face of climate change.

The risks in small farming

The farmer’s world has always turned on uncertainty. Every harvest, and even the decision of what to grow, is affected by the whims of nature. The timing of rains, the coming of insect pests and disease, late or early frosts, the fertility of the soil - all can separate a good year from a marginal year, or worse. For a growing number of small farmers, climate change is also now a tangible factor in whether harvests succeed or fail.

Around the world, scientists find that rainfall is increasingly erratic, and more intense when it does fall. In some regions, periods of heat-driven drought are more frequent, widespread and longer lasting. And because bone dry earth doesn’t absorb water well, when heavy rains do come, water sheets off, creating floods.

Cooper Freeman leads OAEC’s evolutionary wheat project, now in its third year, in collaboration with the Santa Rosa Junior College’s Shone Farm and two other local farms. According to Freeman, the question is, “how do we deal with uncertainty? Hardworking and underpaid farmers can’t afford to take big risks, and it’s getting harder and harder to predict what crop varieties will succeed season to season, and year to year.”

Using nature to aid agriculture

The modern trend in agriculture has been to create an artificial stability by widely planting just a few highly engineered designer crops, then support them with a raft of pesticides, chemical soil amendments and computerized management systems.

Nature takes another approach, Freeman said. Plants such as wheat deal with the unpredictability of weather, soil and pests by producing many seeds and, over time, evolving varieties with different traits. Some may be genetically more tolerant of heat or cold. Some will ripen earlier or later, have deep or shallow roots, tall or short stems, disease resistance and even different nutritional content.

By producing mixtures of such variations, the odds are vastly increased that some will flourish and re-seed in any given year, regardless of conditions.

Resilience from diversity

That’s the concept behind OAEC’s evolutionary breeding project. Rather than growing just one variety of wheat with a single set of traits - a monoculture - farmers plant seeds with many different traits all together in one field, at the same time. By intermixing wheat varieties with high genetic diversity, the farmers work with natural selection to pick the best for a particular region or climate or season. The diversity helps ensure at least a portion of their crop will succeed, without trying to predict from year to year what conditions they may face.

Natural selection also allows farmers to quickly and inexpensively develop their own seed mixtures that are well suited to their local microclimate, and to capture locally adapted hybrids, which they can develop into unique, stable varieties from the natural mixing on their farms. As Freeman explained, “it provides small farmers with a living, evolving seed bank.”

The original wheat varieties for OAEC’s project came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Freeman contacted the agency’s seed bank to ask for seeds with different traits.

“We were shocked,” he said. “They sent us small packets of more 2,000 varieties.”

Last year’s harvest at Shone Farm was high enough they now have a small amount of seed to share, and the project is expanding to one or two new farms this season.

West county roots

The evolutionary breeding project is one of a wide menu of OAEC activities.

The group was originally founded in the early 1990s by nine families who moved to Occidental to form an intentional community. In 1994, the OAEC nonprofit was formed; it now has an annual operating budget of about $1.3 million, and a professional staff with expertise in fields key to its missions. The 80-acre center includes expanded visitor housing, new meeting facilities, a popular plant nursery, a food garden, wildlands and a range of ongoing projects.

The center hosts visitors from around Northern California and the world who come to participate in training, workshops and retreats.

Modeled on traditional land-based communities around the world, the OAEC community is organized around natural processes that encourage resource conservation and waste reduction, while learning and practicing self-governance and social justice, community resilience and ecological sustainability. Members describe themselves as a research, demonstration, advocacy and organizing center.

And that process entails making mistakes.

“We’re a think and do tank” explains Olivia Rathbone, communications director. “We share experiences of what works, as well as what fails.”

For example, the center’s WATER Institute, co-directed by Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, is advancing and testing creative, science-based approaches for water conservation. The institute has been one of the lead actors locally in updating old plumbing codes to permit greywater use, as well as promoting watershed protection and salmon restoration.

OAEC also showcases a host of practical, community-scale solutions, from sustainably managing soil, water and food, to more effective economic and self-governance.

History of teaching

More than 20 years ago, the center launched a program in the San Francisco school district that trained teachers to introduce gardening in schools. Today the successful program provides one-week School Garden Teacher Training to 60 teachers a year, reaching thousands of K-12 students.

More than 3,000 people also visit the Occidental site each year for nursery sales, ecological literacy courses on permaculture design and policy meetings, events and tours.

“As a nonprofit organization, our operating budget is very slim,” Rathbone said. “We’re fortunate to have land and amazing partners and donors who provide some financial support, but we welcome donations and other support as well.” Workshop fees, site rentals and plant sales also provide income.

The center’s upgraded facilities are used for meetings, small training groups, and workshops for groups focused on social change and building community resilience.

And what about the “art?” As one of the original co-founders, Adam Wolpert, explained, nature provides a bounty of resources as well as a deep reservoir of beauty.

“And when we make art or engage it, we remember what it is to be human.”

For Rathbone, Freeman and the other members, the center provides a unique opportunity to “nourish the soil, go for a walk, see the forest, walk the prairies and experience the ancestral genetic memory - the great gift of being on the land.”