Farmer 'N The Dell

Gold Oak Ranch's Newest Blogger

It is with some regret but also great happiness that I am officially handing over Gold Oak Ranch’s blog to my father, David Scheuring. It’s been a lot of fun writing about food, farming, and health news, but my work as a physician,  our family life, and of course our continued olive tree plantings demand so much time that I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like.  My Dad has graciously agreed to step in and fill the breach!

He’ll write about farming news and about his long and varied experience as a farmer in Illinois and California. I can’t wait!

In the meantime, I’ll try to “guest blog” here and there, especially about all-important olive oil.  Thanks, everyone, for reading!

Healthy Walnut Bark

Everyone loves a good mystery, except if you’re a farmer and the mystery is why your newly planted walnut trees are turning a strange color… The following account describes my father’s attempt to unravel a farming mystery:

Today Luis brought to my attention a disturbing development.  The bark of some of the new walnut trees that we recently planted is beginning to yellow.  Not a good sign.  

Yellowing Walnut Bark

The 1225 trees displaying this condition were planted several weeks ago under less than ideal soil moisture conditions, i.e. too wet.  A similar number of trees from the same nursery planted in January have sprouted and are growing satisfactorily.  Could the yellowing result from the soil conditions at the time of planting?(Why didn’t we plant all the trees in January when soil conditions were favorable?  Why did we resume planting in March before the soil had dried out sufficiently?  More about that in a later post.) 

When planting too wet, it is difficult to firm the soil around the roots without compacting the soil.  Eager to avoid compaction it is easy to leave air pockets around the roots, limiting good soil-root contact.  

But in the past we have planted satisfactorily under similar conditions.  Also, since the trees were planted we have had two substantial rains which have nicely settled the soil around the roots. 

Could the trees be displaying freeze damage suffered at the nursery before being dug? Remember those record temperatures we experienced in December?  

That seems like a reasonable possibility, but why didn’t the January-planted trees display similar symptoms?  Also suspect is the fact that the yellowing is occurring on the east side of the tree, suggesting that the damage occurred in our field since the tree orientation would not correspond to that in the nursery. 

But why the east side?   Stressed or damaged bark is very sensitive to sunburn even at low temperatures.  But sunburn usually occurs on the south and west side.  

Have sent pictures and wood samples to the nursery in overnight delivery.  Let’s see what they say.

I mentioned in the last post that we’re planting baby walnut trees with the hope of grafting soon. For the uninitiated, most commercial walnut trees in California are grafted trees; the rootstock is a different variety than the walnut producing tree grafted to it. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that walnut varieties with the best tasting, best producing walnuts don’t necessarily have the most disease-resistant roots. Grafting is a way to get the best of both worlds.

How do you pick which variety to graft? Institutions like UC Davis have been doing field experiments “crossing” different walnut varieties to come up with new better-producing varieties, like the Fordes which we are now planting. The following is my Dad’s account of his work in the evolving world of commercial walnut production. Thanks, Dad, for guest blogging!

For the past 10 years or so we have hosted field trials for new walnut varieties bred by UC Davis.   Even though most of these new crosses will eventually be abandoned for one reason or another, I find it to be an interesting enterprise, satisfying my need for new challenges.

Two years ago we set out our most ambitious field trial to date, 12 experimental varieties on 4 acres.  Some were older crosses that have proved promising enough as individual trees to merit planting in a larger block (30 to 60 trees) and some new crosses not yet field tested (3 to 4 trees).

As is common with the slow process of evaluating tree varieties, now after two years we have already decided to abandon a couple of varieties and replace them with seven new promising crosses .

The trees are still small enough to be readily grafted over to a new variety.  To do this the trunk is severed at 4 or 5 feet and scions of the new variety are inserted under the bark in a process quite logically called bark grafting.  The process itself is referred to in the trade as topworking trees.

Topworking Experimental Walnut Varieties

This is obviously a traumatic event for the young tree so the lower limbs (nurse limbs) are left, not to be removed for a couple of years until the growth above the graft is sufficient to nourish the tree and its roots.

Our foreman Jose Luis has developed a great deal of skill in grafting walnuts.  Nonetheless topworking is a slow process and Jose Luis spent most of the morning on this project.

It’s raining again, which is good for agriculture in general, but problematic for our current farming operations. The men are in the process of planting 3000 new walnut trees at the Dunbar Orchard. We’d like to get the seedling walnuts in the ground as soon as possible, because baby trees need to be grafted before the weather turns too hot. However, if you plant when soil is too wet and muddy, young walnut’s roots have a harder time extending through damp heavy soil. But waiting for drier soil carries risks, too. Grafting too late in the season can lead to poor grafting results. As always in farming, weather is both friend and foe.

Planting Walnuts Between the Rains

We’ll be grafting two varieties: Chandlers, one of the most common English Walnut varieties you purchase at grocery stores, and a newer variety from the University of California called Forde.  Chandlers are a beautiful nut, pale and delicate in appearance. The problem with Chandlers is that they take forever to come into production. If you’re lucky, you can harvest after four years. The trees don’t reach full yield for 8-9 years. That’s a long time to sit on non-income producing property (you still have to irrigate, prune, and weed!). Fordes come to maturity quicker, but they’re new and relatively untested. We’ll let you know how it goes.

The Spring rains have also slowed down harvest of one of our other crops: organic asparagus. I love Spring asparagus and always marvel how fast the spears grow. When it’s cold and rainy, though, asparagus grows slowly. We harvest once every three days. Once the rains fade and the weather warms up, the asparagus takes off, growing seven inches a day. We have to harvest daily just to keep up. As in the past, most of our organic asparagus goes to Full Belly Farm, which distributes it in their community supported agriculture boxes. If you’re a lucky subscriber, you’ll taste this year’s fantastic crop. I roasted a huge bunch last night with some of our Gold Oak Ranch olive oil, and let me tell you, we devoured the whole delicious plate!

Organic Asparagus Peeking From Damp Soil

Back in October I attended a dinner to promote Michael Pollan’s documentary, The Botany of Desire. Not surprisingly, conversation drifted away from the film and toward Pollan’s more famous work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The author graciously answered questions from the group, discussing the hazards of monoculture, the agri-industrial complex, and the ubiquity of cheap processed food. I listened quietly and was struck by a strange thought. Nearly every one at the gathering (a major donors event for KQED) seemed to agree with Pollan and talked about agriculture as though they owned the issue, while not a single farmer, around whom the whole discussion revolved, was present. It was one-sided to say the least. And that to me is at the heart of the often acrimonious food and farming debate. There is no dialogue between the ag-reform-minded, often urban, ”food” crowd and actual farmers. Instead the two poles of the farming debate spend their time “debating” with like-minded people, preaching to the converted, talking right past each other.

So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon a recent article by Los Angeles Times food columnist, Russ Parsons. Finally a nuanced look at the food and farming debate! What immediately won me over was his first point: farming is a business. It’s not altruistic. Most farmers don’t make a whole lot of money anyway. To begrudge them technological advances that might increase their income is to expect a degree of self-sacrifice that is not only unrealistic  but also unfair.

This struck home on a personal level this winter when a freeze wiped out part of our mandarin crop. As I’ve said before, there are so many things beyond control in farming: freezes, drought, market conditions. One can understand why a farmer wants to even the odds by using whatever he or she can to boost production, to try to insulate income, as much as possible, from income-killers over which there is no control. In medicine, we call such technological advances progress. In agriculture,  they’re called short-sighted or morally wrong.

Now I’m not saying I advocate the status quo, but ag reform is a tough, complex issue. And if some ground rules for dialogue, like those suggested by Parsons, are established, maybe we’ll move beyond acrimony into something more like progress.