Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
convertible, he can't stop talking about the things that please him about the land, whether
it's the lineage of an odd fruit tree or the red-tailed hawks and great horned owls that live
in the eucalyptus island at the center of his property.
Kelly came to farming almost by accident. He was working as a carpenter, looking for
a farmhouse to fix up and sell, when he first found the property. But, he says, once he
stepped on the land, he couldn't leave. He bought the farm in 1972 and since then has ad-
ded another fifteen acres. He lives in a two-story house he built over his packing shed.
"A very smart man told me the most expensive part of any structure is the roof, so you
ought to get as many floors under it as you can," Kelly says. Practicality obviously wasn't
the only reason, though. Sitting on one of his decks, perched high above the surrounding
countryside, you have a bird's-eye view of hundreds of acres of nearby orchards, most of
them big commercial operations he calls factory farms.
Kelly stops the car to snag a low-hanging white peach off a tree limb. It's so sweet it
almost tastes like a sugar cube. "Wow, we've got to test that one," he says and slams back
to his packing shed to pick up his refractometer - a device that measures sugar content. It's
the same tool winemakers use to tell when grapes are ripe enough to make great wine. This
particular peach maxes the meter at 23 percent. (California well-matured fruit averages 11
to 12 percent. Anything over 18 percent, peach marketer Jon Rowley says, "almost goes
beyond the human threshold for pleasure.") Kelly looks pleased and tells about a peach he
once tested that measured 30 percent.
By comparison with their neighbors, Kelly's and Lange's orchards look downright
scruffy. The trees seem to be smaller and the weeds taller. That's fine with them. Big
healthy trees don't necessarily produce the best fruit, they say. Sounding like high-end
winegrowers, they say that they want to stress their trees to concentrate the flavor in the
fruit. Lange points out the lush green foliage of his neighbor's commercially farmed trees.
"That's really beautiful," he says, "but you can only get that by using a lot of nitrogen, and
that makes his fruit taste sour."
Indeed, there's little that can be more stressful than trying to grow fruit in the fine sand
that makes up most of their farms. The soil is so nutrient-poor that Kelly jokes that he's
almost farming hydroponically. That is one reason - in addition to sheer contrariness - that
neither Kelly nor Lange is certified organic (although both use only minimal amounts of
chemicals and only when absolutely necessary). Stressed to the edge of survival, these
trees need all the help they can get. From time to time and in carefully measured doses,
fertilizers are fed in minute quantities. Watering is treated almost as an art form, with
water being applied abstemiously following a carefully worked-out, highly regimented
