Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
A few years after starting his orchard, Anderson went to the
“Ecofarm” Conference, where he heard about organic farming principles
in vegetable crop production from instructors based at the (then named)
Agroecology Program at UC Santa Cruz. He said to himself “That will
surely fit an almond orchard.” He began experimenting with leguminous
cover crops and enhancing the ecological activity in his orchard. He
drew from his study of ecology and the general principles of organic
farming to guide his orchard management, relying on a diversity of
organisms (cover crops, beneficial insects) to provide fertility and pest
control instead of chemical technologies. At the end of the 1980s, he
compared financial records with his brother and they discovered that
Glen's costs were lower and profits were greater than his brother's
conventional, chemical-intensive operation. If this were true, why were
so many almond growers using so many chemicals?
Together the brothers approached their local UC Cooperative
Extension Farm Advisor (a publicly funded extensionist), Lonnie
Hendricks, about conducting a whole farm comparison study. Anderson
and Hendricks both knew the director of the Sustainable Agricul-
ture Research and Education Program (SAREP, located near the
UC Davis campus), who readily agreed to fund the study. Anderson
recalls:
At first [Hendricks] wondered “What the heck are these guys bringing to me?
They're a little bit, especially the younger brother, they're odd.” But as we did
that, I really threw myself into it. I was very, very interested and excited about
the possibility of doing this. And after the first year, Lonnie began to bring peo-
ple around to say “Just a minute. Take a look at this.” And of course, his
colleagues said “You've got to be out of your mind, Lonnie. You're comparing
just two orchards. I mean, that's not sound science. Anything can happen in that
circumstance. Where's your replication?”
Hendricks had grown up on a pear orchard and had witnessed the chem-
ical revolution. His father had used traditional practices such as cover
crops and mineral oils, but Hendricks also recalls his family wearing gas
masks as a farmhand sprayed parathion out of a tractor's exhaust pipe.
They watched birds die as a result, and his father grew skeptical of pes-
ticides. As a new Farm Advisor in the early 1960s, Hendricks read
Silent
Spring
, and he felt it “made sense,” although the work did not appeal to
many of his Cooperative Extension colleagues. He expressed his opinion
when asked, but didn't want to rock the boat too much.
