Opinion Writer
“I talked by phone on Thursday with Garrett Mussi as he was driving around 1,000 acres in California’s San Joaquin Valley where he grows organic corn, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic and almonds using environmentally friendly methods. He spoke about being a good steward of the rich soil. He described using drip irrigation to conserve water and cover crops to add nitrogen to the soil and compost to enrich it.
Learning to farm in an organic way “has been a good experience,” he told me. “It definitely has its challenges, but farming overall is a challenge. I enjoy it. Always learning something new.”
Mussi doesn’t own any of the acres he tends so carefully. He is a tenant farmer. The owner of the land is Farmland L.P., an investment fund that buys farmland and readies it for certification as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture: using pesticides sparingly, and only the least harmful kinds; minimizing erosion; sequestering carbon in the soil; rotating crops regularly and providing habitats for butterflies, bees and other pollinators. Some organic farmers use lady bugs to eat aphids and owls to eat rodents.
What we have here is finance meeting farming and doing good, not evil.”
InconvenientNews.Net 