A Pearable for Our Times

Here is the latest of the weekly columns I write for the Ukiah Daily Journal on local food issues. It is about the Alex Thomas pear orchards and what they can show us concerning the current state of agriculture in Mendocino County.

A Pearable for Our Times

I want you to please think about the Alex Thomas Pear Orchards with me for a moment.

I arrived in Ukiah just when the Alex Thomas Pear Orchards were being auctioned on the courthouse steps. It was a strange, dramatic, saga-rific introduction to agriculture in Mendocino County. How could a productive resource be so suddenly totally abandoned? How could there be such huge disconnects and discrepancies in relation to value? What happened? What is happening?

The Alex Thomas orchards total 600 acres over three parcels in Ukiah. I only know the parcel on Perkins, West of the Starbucks, where autumn, abandonment, and an insane economic ideology have had their way with the trees. Pests and blights settled into the orchard during its three year abandonment, resulting in an abatement process wherein the orchards need destroying. Piles of uprooted pear trees, fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide, litter large fields. Their branches, trunks, and roots tangle with each other, making wild silhouettes against the sky, crying mercy until burns season begins and offering refuge to a world of insects, rodents, felines, and serpentines.

Now the orchards have been purchased and it looks like they will all be converted to vineyards. Thinking that process through cramps my brains.

Amongst other reasons, the Alex Thomas orchards went under because of the increasing difficulty of profitably growing pears in Mendocino County in the face of globalized agriculture markets. And so the county is increasingly converted to grapes, a crop that proves more lucrative in that system. But now even grapes are having a hard time in our current crisis of hypercapitalism. Around 30% of Mendocino grapes have not yet been sold this season. There is a wine glut.

So: we have grapes because it was hard to turn a profit on pears, apples, and the many other things that can grow in Mendocino County, but now the profitability of wine grapes seems increasingly uncertain.

The Alex Thomas orchards didn’t stop producing pears after that market shunned them, but they fell to the ground and rotted while people went hungry in our community. Those trees ripped out of the ground are going to go up in a pointless flaming inferno while people shiver in their houses, in need of firewood.

Is the magic of the market serving our best interests? Is it allocating our resources to efficiently produce social welfare? Does it seem prudent to keep on capitulating to the global agriculture markets, or does it see prudent to put a little more thought into cultivating, as consumers and co-producers, an agriculture that can feed the people that live here? Do we want to muster the gumption to try something different?

I’ve heard that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I’m not suggesting the end of capitalism. But I am suggesting we exercise our imaginations more and envision the future we want for agriculture in Mendocino County, and then work towards it. Some might call me idealistic or naïve. That’s fine. I’ve seen enough to know that the system is broken, and that we can either choose to let the system keep dictating Mendocino County’s agriculture, or we can get together and get creative and cultivate an agriculture in Mendocino County that balances bringing monetary wealth into the community with growing the food we need and want to be a healthy and vital people. What would that alternative system look like? Can we do it? What can we start doing now to move in that direction, towards an agriculture that feeds the community instead of only an insatiable, volatile global market?