Cleaning and Millet Project event

Grain Lung reporting here. Between the milling and cleaning, my lungs are stuffed to the max with particulates. Respirators helped a bit, but these small particles are inescapable.

After milling on Friday, I spent the weekend at Open Field Farm cleaning all my grains. There's a two screen cleaner that essentially shakes grain through two perforated screens to separate the wheat from unwanted material.

The top screen, called the "Scalper", lets grain fall through the holes and the large things surf on top and fall into a tray that spills out one side. The bottom screen has holes too small for grain to fit through, but allows small objects like mustard seeds to go through while the grains fall into another area to be collected in a bin. A fan blows across the second screen to push out light matter that made it through the scalper. So, you have 3 elements of separation: one of big things, one for small things, one for light things. This works assuming that what you don't want is the same size and weight as the wheat.

That wasn't the case for me. Mustard was the same size as red fife and so I was losing red fife with one screen, gaining mustard with another. Lots of screen changing, wind shifting, and reruns. I'm thinking of starting a mustard business.

Mustard seed and grains caught in screen

After five hours of this, I had to hit the road for the Millet Project event at UC Berkeley's Gill Tract in Albany, CA. I'm so glad I went! A bunch of my friends showed up in support and I tried many millet-based edibles, including millet beer. And it was heartening to see that many people are interested in seed diversification. Many people talked to me about my farm and want to support my efforts to grow Southeast Asian crops. A couple took a photo of the farm name, Ca Phao Farm, because they love Vietnamese plants. Can't wait to have even more next year. Great work, Millet team!

Japanese Millet

Pearl Millet

Fall is Here

Wispy clouds creeped up from the horizon, covering the edges of the starry sky on my late night walk. The first high cirrus clouds came in today.

This is the time to transition from field work to storing for the winter. The harvest is in and it's time to clean and process the bounty of summer. I'm enjoying the last melons and beginning to preserve tomatoes, peaches, and those bright spots so rare in the winter.

For grains, this means it's time to make grains into flour, and flour into bread. I'm back at milling, thanks Cindy and Doug at the Healdsburg SHED.

I'm milling their grains and my own crop. You'll see that it's a similar mill I worked at the one at the Mendocino Grain Project. Good ol' Osti Roller.

I also sent off my grains to some bakers, Mark Stambler, Joseph Abrakjian, and Dave Miller, to test out my stuff. Mark baked with the Triple IV and said that it's sweeter than his usual Triple IV source. Joseph said that he liked the way the Sonora and Red Fife loaves turned out and they're tasty. I got this from Dave Miller today:

This is of the Red Fife and Sonora blend. I wish I could try it! They said that it had a great smell and feel, but they haven't eaten it yet. I'll let you know what they say.

The Dream of the 1890s

This past week I cleaned sixteen pounds of grain by hand. It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I’m all for parsimonious use of machines, but I couldn’t get to a seed cleaner in the past few weeks what with all the smoke, evacuations, and now the grape harvest tying everyone up. So it was back to the hand for me.

How does one hand clean grain? With many buckets and wishes for wind. We transferred grains from one 5 gallon bucket to another so that the wind carried away big pieces of straw. Then, we sifted through fine sieves. And my fine fingers picked through the rest.

The finished product was wrapped up in brown paper packages tied up with strings because it’s one of someone’s favorite things. I brought the packages to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas as an offering during the Ullambana ceremony.

Food is central to Ullambana. It is the day to feed hungry ghosts. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, ancestors of the lower realm visit the living on the fifteenth night of the seventh month. No one gets to eat in the lower realm, as retribution for their wrongful deeds in life. The tradition to feed hungry ghosts originated with the story of Mục Kiền Liên, who wanted to spare his mother who was in the lower realm, with a narrow throat and big belly that couldn’t be sated, because she was greedy. Buddha designated this day as one where all hungry ghosts could come eat, so we offer food on this day. Good thing I’m a farmer!

The Vietnamese Buddhist tradition extends the story in two ways: generosity and filial affection. All the hungry are fed, particularly the homeless. And it is also Mother’s Day, wherein express appreciation for motherhood’s selfless acts. Those whose mothers still live wear a red rose over our hearts, those with mothers who’ve passed wear a white rose.

I often go to a Vietnamese temple on Ullambana, or what we call Le Vu Lan in Vietnamese, but not this year. I didn’t get to don a red rose, but I could feign her closeness by having a long phone conversation instead. Thank goodness for telecommunications!

… Especially after all the low-tech grain cleaning and subsequent conversation to mill at the SHED. I felt like a figment of the past or a parody of the present.

on top of mt. smokey

It's fire season again and this is what it looks like on the farm. There's a strong argument forwarded by geographers, ecologists, and other land management specialists that we should thin trees and let small, contained fires clear underbrush so that we don't have these massive, dangerous, and difficult to control fires. Some say that we shouldn't save the few remote houses in the wilderness. As a regional reporter told me, "There are people trying to escape society and the government, they don't pay taxes and complain about state intervention, but when a fire comes along they expect the government to come in and save their home, putting thousands of firefighters' lives in danger." If firefighters weren't trying to avoid those homes, they could allow for the fires to make a straight line that's easier to access and contain.

Aside from forest management and residents, we also have this drought. Plants are drying up and make for great kindling. While I sit in this inescapable smoke, coughing, wheezing, tearing up, I wonder if dry farming is enough to spare us from being set ablaze. I don't irrigate because I want the aquifers to be available for the plants and animals that help maintain an ecology that won't burn us up. I'm just 5 acres. But what if everyone else didn't irrigate? What if they also didn't turn up the soil that releases greenhouse gases? What if they didn't use fertilizers made from converting and burning fossil fuels? What if we in Mendocino didn't import 98% of our food and lowered greenhouse gas emissions? I wonder if that would spare us from slow asphyxiation.

All you can do is listen to Dead Flag Blues. https://vimeo.com/30795337

Onwards!

I’ve grown out of mourning the loss of the grains and of feeling dissed. Ultimately, it’s expected for some crops to be lost during harvest and the grain harvester didn’t have any ill will and simply made a mistake. We’re all learning and hopefully we can do it together.

This year was a toughie. On top of the tribulations of starting a new farm, business, and set of relationships, this year was the driest in California’s recorded history. That’s hard for dry farming — relying only on rainfall for water. I’m trying to farm in a way that doesn’t strain our resources, but that means there’s going to be a strain on crops and lower yields than the kind of agriculture that takes water away from everyone and everything else only to let it evaporate. But I want to leave water for my neighbors, of human, animal, and plant kind. There’s so little to go around nowadays.

I want to minimize importing nutrients. When we import, the greenhouse gases emitted increase the problems we’re trying to mitigate. But producing nutrients locally takes time. I’m starting with the straw left my the grains. On that I’ll layer wood chips and grape pumice from nearby farms and vineyards. The mycelium from the grape pumice will help decompose the wood chips. Without rain, it may take years, but this is an important foundation. We must be patient if we want to eat and to grow food without adding to the problems that leave us parched and hungry.