Mariquita Farm Update/Five Senses Series

 

Hi Folks: Starr & I are excited to announce the farm’s “5 Senses” workshops that we’ll be hosting over the spring and summer; “Hearing, Tasting, Touching, Smelling, and Seeing” in our beautiful gardens. We’re thinking of it as an opportunity to turn away from the craziness of the world for a moment and return to a sense of oneself in a beautiful world. Starr has assembled a posse of friendly and skilledpractitioners to make the workshops welcoming and positive. The details are all on our website @ https://www.mariquita.com/features/5-senses-series-coming-home-to-self-bundle-of-all-5-workshops/ We hope you’ll join us for one or all of the events.

But you know me…. It’s spring and I’m in the middle of planting, so I’m often caught up in the drama of day to day issues like weeding, watering, tractors and fertilizer. Especially fertilizer. You’ll recall that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City back in 1995 using a bomb made from a mix of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel. His attack was the single most nauseating act of domestic terrorism since the Army’s massacre of the Lakota people at Wounded Knee….unless you count the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre….or the mass internment of Japanese American citizens in concentration camps during the Second World War. And the tab is still open and counting for ICE agents shooting people who peacefully protest their leadership, their mission or their tactics. For “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all,” we sure have some stuff to work out. But if we can’t or won’t learn from our past experiences in South Dakota, Oklahoma, California, and Michigan at least McVeigh’s example reminds us that conventional fertilizers can be highly explosive, and that fertilizer factories are especially vulnerable to accidents, disasters, or mischief. Which is why, when I visited my local fertilizer company earlier this spring, the “Crisis Action Plan” they had posted on the wall in their office caught my eye.

I took the liberty of removing the company’s name from the photo because I like and respect the people who work there, I need their products- or at least some of them- and I have no wish to cause any drama for them. But look! The information pages for various crises that can befall a fertilizer company have not been arranged from top to bottom alphabetically but instead according to a more existential logic. “Evacuation” comes first, obviously, because if you are working at a place that can violently explode if prompted by an electric spark, a cigarette butt, an earthquake, a lightning strike, a workplace-related live shooting incident, etc. then you’re not going to want to be flipping through a lot of pages before you run. And I love how, right after “Evacuation” comes “Media Crisis,” well ahead of “Natural Disaster,” “Medical Emergency,” “Spill and Release,” “Fire.” Priorities, priorities!” We live in a post-factual world where media agents both real and artificial are deployed to put a cyclonic spin on “information”  so that we’re all awhirl and don’t know what to think. Meanwhile, the world is blowing up, or at least our President is threatening to blow up “a whole civilization.” Which takes us to the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow stretch of sea which serves as a conduit for a spectacular amount of chemical fertilizer and fuel to flow out from the oil fields to their markets in the wider world. Hormuz is a place where fertilizer and fuel can be mixed together with missles to explosive effect! McVeigh was a poor Gulf War veteran who became embittered with the government while Donald Trump is a rich draft dodger and President who sends people like Timothy McVeigh off to die in places like the Persian Gulf, but that’s where their similarities end. So why was I buying fertilizer in a building that could blow up?

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Conventional chemical fertilizers are elaborated from petroleum and its byproducts, and especially from natural gas, which is why there is so much fertilizer being produced around the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. Fertilizer companies are just like most other companies; they want to make money and they’ll change their business practices to keep up with the times and maintain or expand their market share. All across Central California there have been farms transitioning from chemical farming into more sustainable farming practices for years now, and the big ag companies have noticed and are adapting. Many conventional fertilizer companies are hedging their bets on the future and now sell organic fertilizers that have been manufactured from composts, manures, kelps, minerals, fish, and other biological sources. I was down at my neighborhood fertilizer plant  picking up a ton of 8-5-1 “TRUE” brand pelletized compost to spread in my fields ahead of planting to supplement the added natural inputs from my cover crops. If “TRUE” sounds like a cynical name for a fertilizer brand then think for a minute about the branding for fake president’s “TRUTH SOCIAL” platform; at least TRUE brand fertilizer doesn’t pretend to be more than conveniently packaged bullshit. Anyway, here’s a “pro tip” for my fertilizer supplier; if you think that the presence of the press is a crisis then you ought not post any material that is sensitive where “the Press” could see it because in this day and age any clown with a phone and a social media account- like me- can post their version of alternative facts. Lucky me, I don’t use chemical fertilizer so I’m not experiencing the cost surge with those products, but I can’t pretend that I’m “pure.” I use plenty of diesel and those prices are through the roof. It’s a weird world out there right now….and a good time to take a step back from time to time and reflect on how much beauty there is to enjoy seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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