Episode 14: California Peaches and Water
“We pay attention to the water we can see, not the water we don’t see. In California, the most important things are our underground aquifers. That’s going to be the key to the future.”
david mas masumoto
A conversation with farmer and author David 'Mas' Masumoto about peaches, organic practices, soil, water, and histories in the CA Central Valley. Released April 2, 2021
guests on the show
David Mas Masumoto
David Mas Masumoto has a third-generation organic farm in Del Ray, CA where he and his daughter Nikiko produce peaches, raisin grapes, nectarines, and apricots. He is an acclaimed and ethereal author of several books about farming, rural life, peaches, and Japanese American history including Epitaph for a Peach, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Heirlooms, Letters to the Valley, Four Seasons in Five Senses, Harvest Son, Country Voices, Silent Strength, The Perfect Peach, Changing Season, A Sense of Yosemite, and A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm. Mas is a regular contributor to the Fresno Bee and the Sacramento Bee. Learn more about Mas and Masumoto Family Farms here.
TRANSCRIPT
Mallika Nocco
Can you tell us a little bit more just about your farm and how you came to farming?
David Masumoto
I was born and raised on this small farm. Our farm is in a little area called Del Rey, which is just south of Fresno. We started with 40 acres and now I've 80 acres. A little quick background. My grandparents immigrated from Japan about 100 years ago. And of course, they were foreign workers because they were poor. And back then they had alien land laws which would prevent Orientals from owning land. And it was really a racist act targeting Asians, and specifically Japanese Americans, from owning land. Our family, my parents were born in the 20s and 30s, and during the Great Depression the whole dream of the family was to get a farm. And right when they were about ready to pull out of the Depression, World War II came, of course, and the internment of Japanese Americans. I was born after that time, both my mom's side and my dad's side of the family were uprooted and imprisoned in camps in Arizona, and they spent four years behind barbed wire.
Amazingly, they gained some strength and came back, and my dad said the only way to make yourself a name in America was to the buy farm. So, he bought a farm, took a big gamble, in 1948. In the story that I understand, my grandmother told my dad — when he told her that we were buying a family farm, my grandfather was all excited and got in the car to leave the little rented shack that they're in and my grandmother was furious — you do not take chances in America, because they will take things away. And she was absolutely right. She was absolutely right. With that, but needless to say, my dad went ahead and got the farm and they started it. It was poor land; it was full of hard pan rocks. So, we spent five years clearing out hard pan one at a time. Just using literally using dynamite to blow up the rocks, load them onto a wagon, and then get rid of them. And now we have this wonderful farm.
I was born and raised here, but like a good farm kid, I couldn't wait to run away. So, I left the farm. I was the youngest. My older brother was electrical engineer who went to Caltech, my older sister became a nurse. So, she left the farm and I was the only “hope” for my parents. But I probably broke my dad's heart when I said, “I will never come back to the farm.” I ran off the Berkeley because I knew it'd be the one campus that my parents would never want to come visit me at. And they never did go to the campus.
But probably the turning point happened when I studied, I took my junior year abroad and I studied for about two years in Japan. And I think that turned me around. While I was in Japan, I returned back to the little native village that my grandmother and grandfather had come from, Kumamoto, Japan, which is in the southern part. Kumamoto, in many ways is like Fresno of California, it's a very rural area. People there are shy about saying that they're from Kumamoto, because it means you're from the countryside, they're like a country hick. And I understand that feeling. But anyway, I worked on the family farm for about six months of my time there. And learned about a different way of farming and realized that I knew nothing about how to grow rice. It was an alien crop, even though I'd eaten it my entire life. And that was one of the turning points, I decided to come back to the farm here.
And so, after Berkeley, I came back and started farming, did a little work at UC Davis, came back and started farming. And one of the thoughts I would bring back was how can we farm sustainably? I guess in a way you could say we were doing regenerative agriculture. And part of that was how do you look towards the future on a farm? Can I plan on staying on this farm for the rest of my life? So, in a fun way, I had, you know, 40, 50, 60 years to figure out how to do this. And so, I started farming, got married, had a couple kids, our daughter is partnering with me on the farm. And we're still trying to figure out ways to sustain ourselves. But we were very fortunate in that we were early adaptors of organic farming. And we rode the crest of all that and things have worked out very well on just about every level.
Mallika Nocco
When you mentioned what your grandmother said about just taking risks, it actually made me think about the water question. I mean, you've taken a lot of risks because being at the base floor of the organic farming movement, that was a big risk. I'm sure back then people hadn't figured it out yet. There weren't these guides available for how to manage pests, manage diseases organically. I was wondering if you could tell us a little about how as an organic farmer you are managing water at the scale of your whole farm, how are you dealing with allocation and surface versus groundwater?
David Masumoto
One of the good and bad things about my education was I studied sociology at Berkeley, because I thought it'd be the one major that would never bring me back to farming. Here I am farming. But it did provide two things: on the plus side, it allowed me perspective on broader issues other than just farming. And the bad side is, I didn't know what I was doing half the time. My agricultural science background is very bad. But what it did lend itself to was two things: one, the idea of always asking questions, and always wanting to learn. And the other thing, and I think that fits water today, you can't control it. Most conventional farming is all around the idea of controlling, controlling nature, controlling pests, controlling productivity, even trying to control markets, the organic market was wild and continues to be fairly uncontrolled.
Certainly, farming with all the different pests is a new chapter every year, and working with water. Because when I began farming in the 80s, it was the end of that Golden Age, where people thought we knew what water patterns were, we knew what rain patterns were. And it was this real blip. It was consistent for about 40 to 50 years. Well, that ended just when I started farming. And then drought started hitting, you had these cyclical rhythms of rainy years, good snowpacks, then drought, then they start looking at tree rings and realize, oh, we're talking about not t2-3 year droughts, they were 50-year droughts, and I'm going okay, I'm 30, that means that we are in drought. So what am I doing here. But the whole idea with water is that you understand that it's uncontrollable, that you have to just always work with it. And it's not something that works with standard economics, for example, where everything is rational, it's going to be very irrational.
Mallika Nocco
Now that we've established that water is not controllable, and it's this thing that you are trying to manage as best as you can, though it is uncontrollable, how do you go about deciding when your trees and your vines need water, and then how much water to give them?
David Masumoto
This is a good or bad thing that I do because I didn't have a strong scientific background. I never grasped everything from evapotranspiration rates and water use and all that. I went by the old school of if these trees look like they need water, and it probably came from my background as more of a cultural farmer, listening to my dad, he started explaining how “well when the trees look like this, it looks like you might need water.”
One of the things with organic farming is you pay attention to soils a lot, soils are the lifeblood of organic farming. So, I pay attention to soils more than anything else. And they tell me exactly when ground starts drying out and what can I do. The other part was early on I became very familiar with our ground, we have basically a Hanford sandy loam on most of our farm. Some people will come and say this looks like sand and it's really a lot of fine silt powder. And I have some friends who farm in the northern Sacramento County area, what's heavy clay, and I do not know how to work with clay at all. It's totally a different creature. I would call it a different beast. But the sandy loam really works well.
Even within our farm, we had that old school small blocks of tree fruit, like a two-acre block of one variety of peach, a one-acre block, but another four-acre block. So, for each one of these blocks, I've learned what the soils are underneath those trees. And if it's an early variety of mid-season, a late season, it's adapted to the soils quite well. And I learned how to work with it, especially through the inconsistencies of nature. So, we constantly do a lot of experiments, some planned and a lot unplanned, which I think makes for a good scientist.
But anyway, when these droughts hit back in the 80s in the 90s, we monitored things a lot and found out certain peach varieties, for example, tolerated the drought. The other thing that we did, which is probably unconventional, is we have old orchards. I planted one of our prize orchards when I was in high school with my dad. It's like 52 years old. And it's one of our best producing orchards. My theory is the root structure in those 50-year-old trees is massive. And I think it tolerates, especially with organic soils, swings in rain and water much better than a probably a really fast producing new variety. One way of looking at it is sort of like newer varieties are sort of like thoroughbred racehorses, you have your exact systems of drip irrigation, the exact amount of fertilizer, and you get this fantastic production. We're the opposite. We have workhorses that don't produce really well, but they produce fantastic taste. And that's what we're after. And that's what the organic market rewarded, that quality of taste. So, we will work with these workhorses who tolerate heat, they'll tolerate drought very well, as long as I keep them happy enough.
Mallika Nocco
They've done studies now, with folks like you, and we call it a having a calibrated hand. And it turns out that if you have a calibrated hand, and you're able to go out and feel the soil feel moisture, people can be just as good or better than the sensors.
David Masumoto
For us, that sense of touch is so important. And we try to pass that on to our workers, for example, and our markets are designed to reward that quality. So that sense of touch is so important. And literally, that's how we manage water too.
Mallika Nocco
Thinking about how your organic practices may have changed the way that your soils are capturing and holding water, you mentioned sponge, and actually when I teach or when I'm giving a talk, I always use that sponge analogy for soil, and I've never taken it to this organic place. But you're right in that there's certain things that you can do to make a better sponge. So, I guess I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about any particular practices? Or do you really think it's like a synergy of stuff; what has led to having such a nice sponge on your farm?
David Masumoto
Probably the biggest factor is time. Because we were sort of organic growing up, partly because pesticides were expensive, required new equipment, and we stayed small. So, when we converted to organic, it wasn't that hard and the soils, I would think, were fairly healthy then. But over the years, you just go ahead, and we do a low tillage model, we do not do a no till. I tried it, and it just doesn't work for our system. The massive amount of, you could call them weeds, I call them native grasses, which is kind of nicer, that get plowed in throughout the year is massive. Plus, of course, with the trees and vines, we shred everything we just get in and incorporate them too, and we give them time to slowly be built up. And again, we've been organic for about 40 years. And that's a long time to keep building up soils.
We've done some testing if organic matter had gone up, but I don't believe that's for us the best indicator. The best indicator is the health of the trees. The trees seem to tolerate a lot more, for example, droughts. I remember during some of these really climate change years, you're getting these huge swings in temperatures. So, it's not like just two or three days in the hundreds, we're getting 20 days in the hundreds, and some of that is 110 degrees. And I was just terrified because they often happen in the middle of summer right when we're harvesting, and I'd be terrified about that. Amazingly, and I think this has to do with the root structures, well-developed in good soils, the trees tolerated heat wonderfully. I'd be out there every day checking all the fruits — they’re gonna get overripe, they're gonna start dropping — but the ripening tended to slow down during these heat waves, which was great because my body was getting beat up during those heat waves. So, it's as if the tree said it's so hot, we're going to take the afternoon off, just relax. And the trees and the fruit tended to just accommodate that. So, we weren't getting behind. We weren't being frantic with fruit getting soft on us. They were just taking their time to tolerate this heat. And I think it had to do with these amazing root structures that were developed there and again, a 50-year-old peach tree must have massively root structures.
And we have grape vines too, that we make for raisins. And we have some vines that are 100 years old. The elaborate root structures are so important. And it's something that probably modern-day farming isn't paying much attention to, because they're usually paying much more attention to the things we can see. And water is a perfect example. We pay attention to the water we can see, not the water we don't see. And probably in California, the most important things are the underground aquifers, I think that's going to be the key to the future.
Mallika Nocco
How long could a peach tree potentially live? Are you just gonna let these old orchards continue to produce or is there some anecdotal evidence as to how long they might go or...?
David Masumoto
No idea because most old peach trees that were inside someone's backyard, it was just the backyard, they weren't looking at productivity. They were, you know, it was a very isolated case. Sometimes they cared for it, sometimes they didn't. We're over 50 years, and again, this one variety, it's the one I've written about in Epitaph for a Peach, the book, the Suncrest, it's over 50 years old, and it's still our flagship variety. It has a huge amount of productivity, the food's fantastic tasting. We have a young orchard that was planted when my daughter was born, which is 35 years old. And we call it the young orchard. Right? So, it's all relative in that sense.
The other thing too, I think, when you look at water, is what kind of timeline are you measuring things with? You know, especially in terms of business world, you're measuring in a very short timeline, a couple of years, maybe a decade. But like our daughter, we often talk about it thinking that well, maybe we're talking about water in not just a decade, but in literally generations, 20 years cycles, you know? I probably won't be here, but she'll be in her 70s and maybe passing on the farm at that point. And what's the water situation going to be there at that point? And with that kind of a timeline, I think it stretches out things and it allows you to start planning on the one hand, for the inconsistencies, and also learning how to adapt as things evolve.
Mallika Nocco
That's really interesting to just try to think that far ahead, in terms of a generation in a family, and also think that maybe your peach trees might still be around.
David Masumoto
I hope so, and then when you look at some policy questions like SGMA that's supposed to kick in, what in about 20 years? We'll see how all the politics of that work out. But then it’s a very naive way of looking at that world; in 20 years, it's going to be the haves versus have nots. Those of you who happen to have a farm in a good area are going to be very fortunate, I actually think we are very fortunate in that. And it's those water districts that don't have good water rights, and the groundwater isn't good, they're the ones that are going to really be struggling when SGMA gets kicked in you, so what's their timeline? Is it 10 years, 20 years, you could farm in those areas and I feel bad for them, but I don't know what to say.
We just happen to be in a good water area and it does make me think if we were farming in a tougher water area, what would we do? And I really don't know, because I don't know that soil type. I don't know the trees that are planted there. I don't know the management practices. I don't know what your timelines would be at that point too, if you lived there and worked on that those fields. So, in that sense, I guess another way of looking at water is it's an interesting dynamic. On the one hand, we share water, right? I don't own just the water underneath me, it's part of a larger irrigation district, a part of a larger aquifer, a part of a larger river basin. On the other hand, water is all local, and local could be as fine as what's happening underneath my well that I have. And that helps define what we were going to look like in about 20 years too.
Mallika Nocco
So, I think you touched on my question pretty well about how your relationship with water has changed in terms of time and how you see it going in the future. What advice do you have for young farmers? I feel like every time I talk to undergraduates and graduate students, so many of them are interested in becoming an organic farmer right now and there's this big movement, what advice would you have for them?
David Masumoto
One is, is plan on being very patient. And the second thing is plan on asking a lot of questions and be willing to explore different things. So, a young farmer learn about maps, and not just the maps you can see, but aquifers, because that could be just magic of how you understand what you're getting into. So, part of my advice, getting back to that or looking at a young farmer would be to be willing to learn a lot, and have some side income too. You know, have a partner that maybe has a good job, so you can have some tough years and realize that you're going to need this balance. But if you're in for the long haul, and willing to learn a lot, it can actually be pretty fun, too.
And there's this other side of me too, that I look back, and see in our in our daughters, I was very entrepreneurial, and that way of looking at ways of innovating all the time. And we've become really good friends with some people in the food world, too. That is the innovative entrepreneurial spirit that's really fun. So instead of looking at the dread of farming, with water or lack of water, it's more like, how would that work? What would happen? What would happen when you have some peach trees that are limited in water? One simple idea would be, make sure you have early season peaches. Why? Because in the late season, peaches are gonna need the extra water you may not have.
You know, that's one of the reasons why we shifted over to some early apricots. I never grew apricots growing up, found out that there's a pretty good market for good tasting apricots, so we have this one variety that it'll probably fail. But it's okay, because we harvest it probably in early May. And if you get some spring rains, we might not even need to irrigate it until post-harvest, which is a very different irrigation pattern. So those are those little innovative things you could do that no one really thinks that much about, how to accommodate and live with different things. So that ability to ask questions, learn a lot, be patient, and innovate as much as you can, that would be my advice to young farmer.
Mallika Nocco
That's wonderful. That's very inspiring, too. I like that it's like, don’t think of this as doom and gloom. Think of it as just a fantastic opportunity, and have some vision. I think the side hustle or partner with a stable job, that's very practical.
David Masumoto
It's essential to have that kind of stability. Because you're working in a world that's driven by nature, you're working in a world that's driven by especially climate change, as it continues to unfold, you're living in a world of inconsistencies with water. So, you need to have some stability in your life. And it might be a partner or somebody that you could work with that allows you to live through instability through those uneven times and learn from it.
Mallika Nocco
And on that note, we've been hit by a pandemic, right? I want to acknowledge that at the time that we're recording this, we're in the midst of what is this, the third wave of the pandemic? I think it's a third wave of the pandemic. And I just want to ask, you know, how is the pandemic impacted your day-to-day life in your business?
David Masumoto
One of the things that pandemic has shown is the value of human capital. In other words, workers. Workers are essential to what we do. And finally, I think workers are getting some of the respect. We have to want them to be healthy, they want to work, we want them to work. And it's all part of this interesting way this fragile food system works. So, on the one hand, you had the importance of workers that can't be understated. It is wonderful to actually be called an essential worker. I thought, hey, I never thought of myself that way. That was nice.
But the second thing is the pandemic exposed the delicacies in our food chain. Early on, there were all these questions about delivery systems. Well, farmers might have the milk that they are going to be raising, but couldn't be bought. The milk product was designed for food service, which was closing down, and they weren't set up and the systems weren't set up for grocery stores. And yet milk was selling out at grocery stores, so that fragility of the food chain really got exposed. And hopefully people learned a lot of lessons from that. I think that's very, very important.
But possibly the most important thing that comes out is people are paying attention to food more than ever and it partly has to do with “someone else isn't making food for them they're making food for them.” They're making food choices and I think people were beginning to pay attention to food and with that, pay attention to where food comes from. And with that I believe a new awareness about what goes into food and as for water, I think there's a moment now in that people will be very aware of issues surrounding resources like labor and water and how that affects this food chain that we're all part of. In this amazing moment we all see how things are integrated, ironically because you have this massive disruption of the system with pandemic. So, I'm very optimistic about that.
We've worked very hard in this last 8-9 months, our workers have been fantastic. Every day, especially during summer harvest, we were seeing what's going to happen next and amazingly good things happened. For example, we put some of our produce into a food distribution system where you could do it online, and the online sales were amazing. It's Good Eggs out of San Francisco. We've been working with them for years. The amazing things about Good Eggs were one: people were buying peaches online, so they weren't looking at the traditional indicators of quality which was usually size. So that intrinsic bias of going into a grocery store and thinking big fruit is going to be better than small fruit was wiped out when you bought it in a two-dimensional flat computer screen. So, these intrinsic biases that people have were slowly being eroded with this pandemic.
People were buying it and they were getting food delivered and finding out that this system could work, there's certain efficiencies even though you're paying for delivery charge and everything, but people could then buy food and sales were going and continued to go fantastic. And I hope some of these trends stay because it shifts some of the food patterns. And again, thinking about how you're using water, it's all about innovation, that's what I think the pandemic is forcing — the innovative ones out there that are adapting to these changes.
Mallika Nocco
The small peach issue is pretty interesting. I'm sure I have that bias of looking for bigger fruits and vegetables, and it's interesting to hear how just the transfer would maybe take that away.
David Masumoto
It really makes you understand what kind of implicit and intrinsic biases we carry and some of it is we just can't help it, and I know when I came back to the farm there was this huge trend that was evolving with peaches and nectarines that redder would be better. So, the nurseries got smart to develop fruit that look red, and then also shelf life, so they stayed hard and it was perfect for the grocery store chain. Not perfect to eat, but people were buying with their eyes and they wanted bigger, they wanted redder, they wanted things that were hard and firm, and our job was to try to find out if there was a market that would look the other way, that would be looking at a different way of measuring standards. It's interesting to see what does it take to grow a bigger peach? Does it take more water? And it's actually, we don't want a watery peach, we want a peach that has intense flavor. So, who knows maybe actually you could have water savings if you grow better tasting produce?
Mallika Nocco
Absolutely I gotta say this is something I'm researching. I'm working on this in tomatoes, but it'd be interesting to also think about it with peaches — this water, flavor, nutrition, and how they're all connected because it also seems that with less water comes improved flavor and also could potentially be more nutrition.
David Masumoto
Again, people, consumers, if they become more aware of these types of things, it doesn't take much for a tipping point I don't think. And this pandemic is actually showing that, right? Because people are saving money by not going out and eating so much, so as a result they have a little more disposable income for food. So, they may be exploring and buying things and realizing oh I could buy that organic stuff, I could buy that heirloom stuff. Why? Because that heirloom peach dessert that you would have bought at the restaurant for $18, probably cost you about $4 to test at home. And they're going, oh, this is great! So I think it's opening up and developing different markets for that. So, things are starting to shift in that sense. In an ironic way, the pandemic has caused a lot of structural changes, and maybe we were ready for a structural change like that to happen. Same as a drought where that happens with water, it just demands and forces you to make some changes and adjustments, and those that don't adjust are the ones that get left behind.
Mallika Nocco
Absolutely, absolutely. So, we always like to ask our guests if there's anything that you want people to know about your work, and how can we all support you?
David Masumoto
There's two ways you can support. One way is, in general, I would love to see more funding of public policy issues around weather and weather forecasting. Both short-term and long-term. Short term, the better the satellite imagery we could have, I can plan around that. And as researchers, you know long term forecasting is pretty much of a crapshoot right now. It’s sad to say, this is what a La Niña year? But what exactly does that mean? I study your maps that you scientists make, and I go, look, that line is right at, you know, at Modesto or Sacramento, and I think we're going to be okay or not, but those lines are pretty vague. So I'd love to see a lot of funding research and emphasis going to weather forecasting, which helps both farmers but also urban users too. Because if urban folks in cities can have better forecasting models, they can adjust all kinds of things in their life, not only the short term, can I go out and play golf or tennis or something? But also, long-term thinking that about what does this mean in terms of energy use, and things like that?
The second thing, and this is probably why I ended up writing, there's power in story and storytelling, and we live with stories all around us. Sometimes we know it and a lot of times we don't like our bias about big fruit, for example. We have that story that's embedded in our mind, and we just often don't listen, that what's happening. So, storytelling, I think, is really important. And I think, again, about what's the story of water? And then you go, oh, well, water, it's rainfall in the Sierra and the snow melt. Well, how about the water we can't see in the aquifers? What is that story? How do you tell that story? And that sometimes comes into questions about like mapping and graphics and illustrations, because a good story, a good map could frame how we start talking about something.