Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column are not those expressed by The Mendocino Voice.
As 2026 begins, I’m experiencing a mix of feelings. I’m excited for the year to come, and I feel deep gratitude for family and community, for the land, for the farm. I’m grateful to live where I do, and I’m grateful for the ways that we’re supported in our farming efforts. Grant programs have made an incredible difference in our ability to do what we do, leveling up our efforts to produce good food for people we love. And yet, I’m also feeling deep frustration with the way my country behaves in the world. I’m tired of us being the bully and killing people over oil.
Everything is connected to everything on both macro and micro levels. More intense winter storms make farming harder, while limited social safety nets make it more difficult for people to survive. Money spent on military and wars means less money for other social programs as we dump resources into a war machine while people go hungry. I denounce the military action in Venezuela as another in a long line of morally bankrupt examples of U.S. imperialism to prop up the petrodollar.
When we look at the history of US military interventions in other countries there is a clear pattern of helping to build wealth for elites and corporations while traumatizing and damaging civilian populations. We spend money on wars so that weapons contractors can make more weapons, so that lobbyists can pay more money to candidates so that the rich get richer. Why are we manufacturing consent for fighting over oil instead of putting those resources towards renewable energy? It’s all connected; fossil fuel use makes winter storms and summer heat waves worse, which makes life harder.
I applaud the many worldwide efforts towards creating better renewable energy options; the solar upgrade we installed this year has changed our lives, and I think about how far the technology has come in recent years. We should be putting our national resources and efforts towards renewable energy, not towards fighting imperialist wars to prop up oil company profits.
Winter farming gets harder when big storms roll through. The heavy winds blew the covers off of all of the low tunnels, and heavy rains splatter dirt and mud onto the tender leaves of the salad mixes. Tightening the covers and adding extra sandbags only goes so far, and it’s the big nighttime winds that do the trick, slowly inching fingers of air under the cloths, which act like sails, gradually loosening until off they go.
I was pretty demoralized yesterday morning when I saw that all of the tunnel covers had blown off, but it helped me make the decision to order the low-cat conversion kit for the EMT conduit low tunnel hoops. The kit comes with metal loops that screw onto each hoop so that they’re at ground level on both sides once the hoop is driven into the ground. Ropes attach to the loop and go over the top of the cover to the other side of the hoop so that each hoop has a rope tie down holding the cover. This is similar to the rope system that holds the plastic down on our larger hoophouses, and I’m confident that it will help in the long term with our winter farming game.
We’ll be back at market this week after a winter break that has been glorious. This morning I’ll walk the gardens and assess storm damage to figure out what crops are saleable; I’ll make a pick list and plan out what will go in the first CSA shares of 2026. We marketed and filled CSA bags for 50 weeks in 2025, and now with the turning of the calendar we’re back to week one. I get a kick out of the counting, each week a notation of crops harvested, a tally in my life as a farmer.
I’m excited for the year to come, to get better at my craft. I finally put together my new wheel hoe and am stoked to use it to clear beds of salad mix without the stoop labor of hand pulling each plant. My goal is to use the 12” oscillating hoe to cut the roots just below the soil surface, with three passes for the 30” beds. Then I can rake the biomass into piles and put it into totes to feed to the rabbits, chickens, pigs and sheep. This type of nutrient cycling is a core part of our farm operation, utilizing waste from one part of the farm to support and enrich other parts both in terms of the quality of animal lives and soil health/fertility.
I’m excited to sow seeds and tend to plants so that we can harvest good food for people to eat. Knowing that our produce arrives in kitchens all around our community is a driving force in my life. The direct relationships make me want to do the best work I can to bring the highest quality and freshest produce to our friends and neighbors. I love being connected in community, sharing the journey and experiencing that sense of interrelationship. I try to keep my focus on positive and uplifting feedback loops as an antidote to my frustrations about geopolitics. As always, much love and great success to you in your journey!
This article barely touched the surface of the Agriculture contradiction in the US. Agriculture has everything from corn to red diesel subsides which are both major players in the fossil fuel industry. Not to mention the monoculture practices which aren’t too friendly to environmental sustainability. The types of reforms needed for AG to reduce fossil fuel consumption dependency direct and indirect will require a whole different style of farming. I gander most US farmers are not keen to accept reforms especially if the way they currently farm is mostly built on subsidies to survive. Farmers aren’t the most open minded group as we can see they voted for this agent orange candidate who has taken the whole country for a spin. Perhaps this is the beginning of the change when most farmers go bankrupt and leaves the playing field to a new kind of farmer.
One way to reduce the power of huge agribusiness is to support local farmers and have our backyard kitchen gardens. Shop at produce stands and farmers markets. It’s surprising howuch you can grow with a few pots.
Keep in mind most farms are small family farms(under 350k income) in the US. Very few farms are large scale (over 1 million income). The few large scale farms produce nearly 50% of all food production in the US per USDA. It’s not that we need more small farms to reduce fossil fuels. We need to subsidize new farming methods like warehouse farming and more diversified crop rotation. Perhaps building farming warehouses in or near cities would be a good start.
Oh those were the days! Recall fully 20% of Americans lived on farms during the Great Depression and grew their own food. If we could just return to that? No more “petrodollars” for cars just to drive to work; we could ride horses instead. We could save water by digging a hole and having an outhouse. We could save electricity by having windmills pump our water out of the ground, at least when the wind blows. We all could live without the excess and abundance, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,” as the saying went back then. If only. What would it take?
Meanwhile Venezuelan’s that were forced into exile have been dancing in the streets all around the world.