What’s next in 2020? For farmers, the question is irrelevant

Given the pandemic, heat, and wildfires (not to mention social and political unrest), I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how it’s affecting operations at Spinaca. Unfortunately, my answer is hardly unique: the challenges are legitimate, with real-time impacts on how we plant, harvest, and distribute food to our customers. 

But as farmers, we’ve seen it all. We understand, in a very deep way, just how fragile the system is. Our lives have risen and fallen on the whims of nature and mankind for millenia. We have lots of practice at facing the unknown. 

A day in the life of a California field worker

Think about our employees, for example. With COVID restrictions, they’ve had to wear extra coverage at work and deal with social distancing. In their personal lives, they’ve had to contend with distance learning for their children. And then, in Monterey, San Benito and Santa Clara Counties, they’ve had to think about wildfires. Many have been threatened with evacuation. And at work, they’ve had to double up on coverage due to smoke — all of it during a 30-degree uptick in heat, sustained over the course of several days.

Under these conditions, with such a significant shakeup in routine, and reduction in quality of life and quality of the work environment, how can anyone maintain any semblance of a home life?  The safety and health of our employees are very real considerations of ours right now. We’re doing everything we can to save our crops, employees and customers—on top of what it already takes to run a farm. 

Built for upheaval

Think about all the ways we lose crop over the course of the year. Whether it’s insects, pests, drought, labor scarcity, or recession: however it manifests, it’s a loss to the farm and it’s always unique. As far as the fires and smoke are concerned, it was a logistical challenge for workers to get transportation to the field through the fires’ potential path, all while taking care of their families. But the crop in the field was more affected by the heat and ash as opposed to the actual flames of the fire.

Plants are very similar in their tolerance to heat as humans are. When a seed is planted in 100-degree F weather, if the temperature rises 10 degrees during its production cycle, it can tolerate it because it was born in heat. But if, like ours, they were planted in 78-degree F weather and the temperature raises to 110 degrees F and stays there for a couple of days, they fry. As a human, if you’re accustomed to 75-degree F weather and you’re suddenly in the middle of a field with no sunscreen, you’re going to fry, too. Pouring the water on doesn’t help at this point; you can only use so much to combat the effects of heat before you start to do damage.

Just keep planting

What’s next? Turns out, it doesn’t really matter. We have to push through and continue to do the work we’ve chosen to do. Yes, the fires, smoke, heat and ash are horrific; the last thing I intend to do is minimize the severity of the damage and destruction they’ve caused. But in the case of farming, it’s just one more in a constant stream of changes and challenges that we deal with on the farm.

This, of all years, could be the one in which we see pigs fly, hell freeze over, or Sharknado — who knows? But you can bet your bottom dollar that no matter what gets thrown our way, we’ll keep planting, just like we always have.