Sometime around 1986, my dad and I started taking camping vacations in the high desert of northern California. I have a striking image of Mt. Shasta in my mind from our first trip — a towering volcano, still covered in ice despite the heat of summer, rising above the baked lava rock terrain of our vantage point some 50 miles away. On another trip to the same area one or two years later, this landmark could not be seen due to all the smoke from a nearby wildfire. It was disorienting to not see familiar landmarks on the horizon. I don’t recall being alarmed or concerned for our health or safety, even though the sky was orange in all directions, including directly over head. Mostly, I remember this so vividly because at the time, and for decades after, it was a unique experience.
Not anymore. The specter of thick orange skies in summer has become reliable, so much so that I find myself anticipating and planning for it. Outside work must be done very early when the air is slightly more clear, and non-essential projects postponed until further notice to avoid the health risk of particulate pollution. Tangerine sunrises, ochre afternoons, and sienna sunsets are now hallmarks of high summer. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very much inclined to avoid outside afternoon work in July and August, but in my past farm fantasies, this time would be spent lounging by the river, napping in hammocks, and forest bathing in a deep sea of green. Instead, I sit on the couch and look out our landscape view window at the Triassic sky, half-expecting a herd of triceratops to burst out of the parched aspens pursued by a T-Rex as Baw Faw Peak belches primordial gases into their eminent doom.
We are lucky to have the option of sheltering indoors (not to mention the luxury of air conditioning — which is probably making things worse) on days like these. Right now, all over the western U.S., agricultural workers are sweating buckets, dodging COVID, and breathing smoke to produce food for us, half of which will be paid for with paper-thin margins and much of the rest will go uneaten. Finding people willing to do farm work has already been hard for a while now. With many businesses reporting difficulty in finding workers and restaurants starting to close due to supply chain issues, it would not be surprising to hear of record numbers of crops being left in fields or productive land falling out of use over the next few seasons. What will this mean for you?
For us, it looks like the shorter growing season we’ve been adapting to just got shorter. Waiting until May to plant stuff took some effort to wrap our heads around. Now it appears that anything not harvested by August can be expected to taste like smoke, fall over when the ground cracks into crevices over an inch wide and 8 inches deep, or just plain shrivel up. We can grow a lot of salad greens in the spring... and then what? Our dry farming experiments are showing some promise, but the learning curve is steep and we can only practice a few months each year. Many farms around us depend on water from the river, which I’ve noticed is running pretty low lately. Irrigating with the public water supply is very expensive and likely cannot accommodate the load currently carried by surface water sources.
It is over 100 degrees here again today*. I have a date with the unplugged hot tub, a to-do list that isn’t getting any shorter, and a lot of concerns about the future of our food.
*Written last weekend
Baw Faw Peak, barely visible on the hazy horizon.
Dry-farmed sunflowers bloom and fade quickly, but are setting good seed. The pigs love to chew on the stalks.
Fractured pasture — this ground is too wet for tractor traffic until May and hard as pavement by the end of July.
My shoe for scale, size 12.