Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
Food is the cornerstone of my life, my focus and calling, my passion. I love every step in the process of production, helping to foster and create from the magic of the sun, seeds, and all that springs forth in abundance and growth. I love working with animals, gathering feed and managing their movements. Slaughter is difficult work, but a core part of my vocation that provides for family and community.
So much of my time goes to moving food from one place to another, harvesting it from the land I tend, gathering it from other local farms, figuring out how to get it to the people who will eat it and be nourished. I want to live in a world where everyone has access to fresh, nutrient-dense food without pesticide contamination. I want to live in a world where land is tended and shepherded into greater abundance with each passing season, where carbon is sequestered into growing plants that are used to produce food, fertilizer and animal feed.
Solar dollars rain down upon our heads yet we live in capitalist systems based on scarcity that funnel wealth to a few and deprive so many of basic necessities. I want to live in a world of increasing equitability, greater sharing of resources, more cooperation. I want to live in a world of finite growth based on renewable resources that honors the land and the working people who create value with their labor.
Of late, I’ve been confronting some hard truths about the nature of my labor and my physical limitations. Harvest is a tough time of year to deal with back pain, but I suppose that it’s part of the accumulation of time and effort that comes with being a man who labors. There is a certain inevitability of physical decline in a mortal body that I am coming to contend with, yet there are also practices and strategies for prolonging my ability to do the work I love.
Soreness is part and parcel of being a farmer, but the transition from soreness to pain is a difficult one to manage. I’m taking steps to correct my posture, to be more careful with my form as I labor, to slow down and breathe and be aware of the feelings in my body. Much of the work of farming can be dissociative, a meditative state that escapes physical discomfort in service to the effort, so I must learn to be present and aware, to honor the effort of my body by caring for it so that I can continue my work.
As our salad mix production has grown, I’ve found myself doing deep stoop labor for longer periods of time to harvest each week. I’m in a hurry because of the time crunch of harvest mornings before market, and I don’t take the time to stretch, to use proper form when I harvest. Implicit in the work has always been an acceptance of discomfort that I ignore at my peril. I’m learning the lessons of adapting new strategies, spreading out the harvest between more people or more days. Pops always says that you can do anything for a short period of time, but that the damage occurs when you overdo it and go too long at a task.
One of the things I treasure about our diversified operation is that we have so many different types of work to do. This can be a double-edged sword that wears me out, but being able to vary my tasks keeps me inspired and allows me to use different parts of my body in different ways, spreading out the workload. Each season brings harvests, which precipitates clearing beds, which are replanted with seeds of hope sown for the future.
As we enter Croptober and bring in the cannabis harvest, I prepare for the harvests of winter, sowing and replanting the beds as we clear them. The first four rounds of fall brassica are in the ground and thriving, with two more plantings to go in the next two weeks. Cabbages, cauliflower, broccoli, romanesco and brussels sprouts will make for hearty winter meals and needed market revenue for the farm during the lean months. Salad mixes, cooking greens and tender root crops are thriving in their beds, with more successions on the way as we continue to sow seeds every two to three weeks through the fall.
We’ll begin sowing cover crops this coming week, planting seeds to convert leftover nutrients into growing plants that will sequester carbon into roots that build soil and nourish the microorganic populations while preventing erosion. We’ll dig comfrey from the squash beds to make new comfrey hugels for harvesting mulch and forage for livestock. We’ll prep the beds and plant our winter garlic crop. These are the activities of fall, and I revel in them as we ready the farm for winter and the time of rest and slowdown. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!
Casey O’Neill owns and runs HappyDay Farms, a small vegetable and cannabis farm north of Laytonville. He is a long time cannabis policy advocate, and was born and raised in the Bell Springs area. The preceding has been an editorial column. The Mendocino Voice has not necessarily fact-checked or copyedited this work, and it should be interpreted as the words of the author, not necessarily reflecting the opinions of The Mendocino Voice.