As climate change continues to affect California, local farmers are moving toward sustainable practices to help the environment.
The Farmers Convergence at Ridgewood Ranch near Willits held a Climate Change session on Tuesday featuring local farmers Adam Gaska, Gowan Batist and Paul Kaiser, who talked about the benefits and challenges of trying to run farms that address climate change.
Adam Gaska owns Mendocino Meats in Redwood Valley and does all he can to be sustainable and climate-friendly. He recycles and diverts water into ponds so it can be saved for future droughts and grows local food to reduce the farm’s carbon footprint.
However, the Redwood Valley fire in October burned 1,950 acres of Mendocino Meats’ 2,000-acre ranch. He lost most of his rangeland but was able to save the buildings, animals, vineyards and orchards.
As more farms try to be climate sustainable, they must also deal with increased frequencies of natural disasters that have hit California and Mendocino County in recent years.
Composting also remains a big issue for farmers trying to reduce their carbon footprint. Gowan Batist is part of Fortunate Farms on the Mendocino Coast and deals with composting regulations as part of her job.
She says that the governmental compost regulations make it difficult for farmers to do something local and unique with composting.
As part of the California Compost Coalition, she talks with government agencies like the Department of Fish and Wildlife about how composting can be improved.
Local and state government regulations restrict what farms can do with compost. As a result, Fortunate Farms doesn’t put any food waste or manure in their compost so they can be part of the unregulated bracket.
Various government agencies have different rules that are contradictory and confusing to farmers. The regulations differ on how much compost you are allowed to have, what constitutes compost, temperature and documentation. If you want to use manure or food waste, the temperature the compost needs to be at increases.
“You kind of have to pick a set of regulations and follow them to the best of your abilities and just document everything,” Batist said.
People looking to compost also find it difficult to set up local community composting sites.
Cold Creek Compost in Potter Valley is the only commercial composting facility in Mendocino County. Large companies like Republic Services in Sonoma County handle most of the municipal composting in the area.
Batist says that the large companies are sold composting territories and enter agreements with waste management companies to protect those territories and their access to compost. “Anything that goes into your green waste bin belongs to them, according to these agreements, and I bet no one asked you about,” Batist said.
Paul Kaiser runs Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol and makes most of his money selling vegetables to Farmers Markets and through Community-Supported Agriculture. He believes that farmers and the community need to do more local composting instead of sending it to large companies in other counties.
Waste from farms is often lost in landfills and enters the atmosphere as methane gas and greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the municipal compost goes toward landscape trees and planter boxes on sidewalks in cities when it is used. Although it is agriculture-related, none of the compost used goes back to the original farms and communities.
“We have an absolute civilization imperative to be recycling these nutrients,” Kaiser said.
