CropMobster headlines chronicle life on Sonoma County farms
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Rogue Chickens Sabotage Inspires Mystery Fruit Tree Sale.
Wanted: Food for Black Bacon, a Cazadero Hills Black Hog and her babies
Deal: Two Emus Available For Sale. $50.
Looking For Work: “Need some extra hands, er ... paws around the farm?”
Wanted: Three Leaves Foods CSK Wants your Uglies
The headlines at CropMobster.com offer a back fence view into the weird world of Sonoma County farms, where on an given day earnest farmers put out appeals for brewers mash and organic food waste, alerts for worm workshops and try to unload everything from surplus figs to emus.
A Craigslist for the ag set, CropMobster is where the farmer fed up with an obnoxious rooster can connect with the farmer who needs a rooster to service a flock of breeding hens. It’s a place where homely fruit unfit for the farmer’s market, can find someone to love it, or at least like it enough to can it, and where a perfectly good wheel of cheese too stinky for one woman’s kitchen can find a west county nonprofit very happy at its next meeting.
The sometimes urgent headlines telegraph the disappointments and the dreams and desperation of the farm life with a solid dose of humor.
“Hot Speed Dating Mixer for Local Farmers and Local Food Buyers” offers notification for a networking opportunity with panache.
“Hair Sheep Urgently needed to eat my fresh grass,” a Petaluma woman cries out, hedging her hopes for a free pair by saying she’d be open to goats or short-term rental.
For every sad alpaca and barn mouser in need of a home, there is a headline offering a happy ending, like the Terrace Community Garden that grows produce for The Healdsburg Food Bank. Day One: the alert goes out on CropMobster with their need for a tractor. Day Two: the appeal gets spread on “West Coast Live” radio at the SHED in Healdsburg. One hour later, a member of the radio audience calls in saying he won a new mower from a lottery at Garrett’s Ace Hardware and would donate the prize to the hunger relief garden.
“CropMobster works like “Doe-ray-me 1-2-3,” that poster declared in thanks.
Probe deeper and behind every headline is a story.
Here are a few.
ROGUE CHICKEN SABOTAGE INSPIRES MYSTERY FRUIT TREE SALE
It was disaster for Jeremy Watts when a flock of chickens laid waste to his first-year crop of young fruit trees in a single rampage.
Watts said he and his partners, hoping to start their own nursery, were allowed to use an old nursery space in the East Oakland hills in exchange for giving the owner some of their trees at the end of the year.
The fledgling nurserymen labeled every tree by type and variety with a stick label. They didn’t anticipate the owner’s chickens, who were living on the grounds, breaking free and causing trouble.
“They didn’t touch the trees, but they didn’t like our labeling system. They tore up every label except one or two,” Watts lamented.
That left them with 300 mystery trees, all bare root. They knew what kind of fruit tree it was, but not the variety, and buyers are picky about kind of pear or plum they want to plant.
Unbowed, Watts, left with 300 unidentified trees, listed a blowout sale on CropMobster and continued on with plans to move his nursery to Petaluma. He confesses that at first the chickens left him with an urge to “fire up the rotisserie” but at the end of the day he said, “ I have a forgiving heart.”
PINEAPPLE & STRAWBERRY GUAVAS AT SONOMA APERITIF WINERY
Sometimes a listing can lead to nothing, or it can result in an embarrassment of riches. So it went for Laura Hagar Rush, who makes wine-based aperitifs infused with fruit herbs and flowers. She recently put out the word that she was in search of guavas. She figured someone with a plant in their backyard would offer up a bag. But she was overwhelmed.
“One gentleman brought more pineapple guavas than i could ever use in a lifetime. Ten bulging bagfuls,” she said.
She owned up that she could only use at best, one bag, and asked if he minded if she offered the rest on CropMobster.
He gave her the OK to put out an alert. The response was immediate, that same day.
“I actually dropped some at someone’s house. They happened to live on my route home,” said Hager, who works out of a tasting room in Penngrove. One bag at a time, she managed to give them all away.
“It’s actually almost magical,” she said of the ag posting site. “I love the sharing economy.”
BREEDING AGE GROUP OF UNIQUELY COLORED GUINEA HENS
When Francesca Duval invested in a group of Guinea hens to protect her flock of chickens it seemed like a good idea at the time.
“We were trying to breed them ourselves as crop protectors. They’re also good for tick control and they have beautiful feathers they are constantly losing so you can have them for projects,” said Duval, who raises rainbow egg laying hens at her Alchemist Farm in Sebastopol.
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