Posted on September 14, 2008 | Category: Writing
Originally published in Brink Magazine, 2008-2009
Bob Cannard coaxes perfection out of his farm by allowing a little bad behavior
The day I visited Bob Cannard’s farm in the Sonoma Valley, I nearly drove right by. The road had climbed steadily up from the cul-de-sacs, the wineries and the golf course of Glen Ellen, toward the blue-green ridge of the Sonoma foothills. I had passed the neighbor’s neatly trimmed vineyards and entered a domain of green meadows blooming with wildflowers and lush forests of redwood, bay, oak and madrone. One field, scattered with olive trees and tall patches of oats and rose clover, might have been part of a farm, or might have been a long-abandoned orchard. I wasn’t quite sure. I finally realized I’d arrived at a working farm when I passed a rickety barn stacked with shovels, rakes and hoes, and stopped in front of a little blue and white farm house.
I got out and took a deep breath of sweet air. This was it, the Shangri-la of locavores, the farm that started it all. Every week, vans from Chez Panisse come up this drive to pick up the food Cannard grows on these 30 unkempt acres. Since 1984, when Alice Waters’ father discovered Bob Cannard, the famous Berkeley restaurant has relied on him to provide the freshest produce for its famously local and seasonal bill of fare. He supplies about half their fruits and vegetables, and is one of a handful of farmers billed on the menu. More than just a celebrity restaurateur, Waters has become an apostle for local, sustainable agriculture. And Waters isn’t alone. Nationwide, eating locally has taken off as the latest cause of the environmentally minded, with writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan making the case for growing your own food or supporting local farmers. Through it all, as the favorite of gourmet chefs, Cannard’s farm has remained the gold standard of just how delicious local, sustainable food can be.
Cannard on his farm.
Russell Moore, a former chef and produce buyer at Chez Panisse, recalls when he and Waters first began working with Cannard. “What struck me about Bob was this guy was absolutely connected to the earth that he was taking care of,” Moore said. “He just seemed to do everything right.” Moore said Cannard’s crop wizardry is unparalleled. “Bob’s produce is the best. No one can grow arugula like him, or lettuce, carrots, fennel, cardoons. I could live off the food on Bob’s farm all year round and be completely content.” Wandering near Cannard’s house, I found what looked like a neglected garden. An arugula crop had gone to flower near rows of young lettuce heads glowing green in the sun, interspersed with weeds. A lopsided fig tree was covered with still unripe figs, and a jumble of mint grew in between strawberry plants. The fava beans with their long, swollen pods had invaded the vineyard and young mandarin starts were flowering in pots near the front porch, perfuming the air with the scent of citrus blossoms. How could this place, which felt more like an unruly nature preserve than a farm, be the source of so much culinary inspiration? Soon Cannard, 55, appeared, wearing a blue plaid shirt and scuffed work boots. Grey hair framed a ruddy, expressive face and bright blue eyes. It soon became apparent that his attitude about farming was as unconventional as his fields. “I don’t like to work. I’m not interested in making money,” he said. “I want to make love to nature.”
Nature, it seems, loves him back. Cannard’s 30 acres produce over 200 different crops, enough fruit and vegetables for about 350 meals per day, he estimates. The harvest includes a mixed orchard of persimmon, pomegranate, cherry and quince trees; fruits of the earth, such as favas, squash, radishes, carrots, turnips, strawberries and raspberries; and assorted greens, including frisée, radiccio, arugula and mustard. Cannard’s idiosyncratic approach to sustainable farming is not a matter of following certain rules, or simply avoiding forbidden pesticides and fertilizers. It’s an entire worldview. Cannard, along with a group of other likeminded farmers, eschews the term “organic” because he feels many organic farmers have the same adversarial attitude toward nature that conventional farmers do. They just use “natural” instead of chemical remedies to eliminate pests. “Why do you want to kill bugs?” Cannard asked. “You’ve got to look at why you have that adversity in the first place.” He tells a story of an eggplant crop that was attacked by insects one year. He took it as a sign that the soil was deficient and applied raw crushed rock, which adds mineral content. Ten days later he saw a total turnaround: The bugs disappeared as soon as the plants were strong enough to fight them off. “There’s no such thing as a pest within the structure of nature,” he said.
Cannard embraces the chaos and the conflict of natural processes, allowing plants to grow side by side with weeds, allowing bugs and birds and various pests to do their part in creating a healthy ecosystem. He claims his plants are stronger and sweeter for having competed with weeds and survived natural enemies, rather than living in fields scrubbed clean of pests. “Who would not prefer a life of choice?” Cannard said. If you’re doing things right as a farmer, according to Cannard, your farm starts taking care of itself. As he gets older, Cannard imagines a day when he would “just harvest what grows on its own.” But if Cannard takes a libertarian view of his plants, he takes a nurturing attitude toward his soil, which he tends as carefully as if he were raising dirt, not vegetables. The day I was there, Cannard took a group of guests for a tour of his farm. We peered into what looked like a barrel of dirt. It was, in fact, a particular flavor of compost he was curing. He reached in and pulled out a decomposing stalk. A rich, chocolatey humus was developing in the inner marrow of this dead bone of a plant. In the potato field he picked up a couple of rocks from the many that were littering the rows. He scraped one with a pocket knife and it shed a few shaley flakes. While another farmer would dig out all these stones, Cannard leaves them there, as the ultimate slow-release fertilizer. He also adds mineral content by spreading powdered rock and oyster shells on his fields.
Cannard does not worry about yield in the conventional sense. “Instead of making the farm bigger, you make it more nutritionally intensive,” he said. In the cardoon patch, he squatted down next to a robust silvery green plant, its arrow-shaped leaves spreading in all directions. He dug his fingers into the matted mess of dried-up weeds at the base of the plant, showing us how thick the cover was. While most farmers, even organic ones, kill weeds to leave more nutrition available to crops, Cannard lets them grow, die and rot in the field. He does the same thing with a good portion of his crops. “When a crop dies of its own volition, it dies in contentment, so you incorporate contentment into the soil as well as organic matter,” Cannard told us.
The tour ended at the stomach of Cannard’s farm, a weedy pasture where he keeps his compost tea-brewing rig. Compost tea is an organic fertilizer used by certain organic and biodynamic farmers to increase the levels of healthy bacteria in the soil. The brewer looked like a giant’s pickle barrel, connected by tubes to several watering troughs and sinks. It smelled like rot.
With his silvery hair flying in the breeze, Cannard took a bucket of fish emulsion and a few handfuls of compost and stirred them into a frothy primordial soup. Tinkering with some rickety wiring, he turned the power on, shooting a rush of bubbles into this mix. Cannard uses everything that’s dead and rotten for the potion, including road kill, kitchen scraps, oak leaves, dead bugs, crab shells and eggshells. This produces a crop of bacteria and microorganisms, “the digestive forces of soil,” which he will spray on his fields to break down minerals and make them available for plants.
Digestion, whether in the soil, or in a human, seems to be the heart of it all, or, better put, the gut of it. “I realized for me, the avenue toward influencing the consciousness of humanity is not through the word but through the digestion,” Cannard said. Deep down, it seems, Cannard believes vegetables can change the world. When he talks, he sounds by turns like a farmer, a Zen master and a radical, and he has his own unique vocabulary for declaring his views. “If we were to grow our food, instead of in adversity with nature, but in nurturement with nature, we would grow full food and our great-grandchildren could shed the smallness of our nature,” he said. “If we grow our food in adversity, we’re going to grow a whole bush of warmongers.”
Over lunch at his farmhouse, his guests had the opportunity to literally digest Cannard’s philosophy and practice. Three long picnic tables were spread with flowered tablecloths in the dappled shade of a rattan canopy. The late afternoon sunlight illuminated a row of young peach trees and the lettuce patch shone in emerald, garnet and pale green hues.
Cannard’s wife, Charlene, a former Chez Panisse cook, had pre pared a feast from the farm’s bounty. To whet the palette, she served homemade olives and pickles, tempura of green garlic cloves and Meyer lemon, and fava bean puree with crusty bread. For main dishes there was asparagus with roasted fennel confit and soft cooked eggs; tender meatballs stewed in last summer’s golden tomatoes; fresh sardines wrapped in grape leaves and roasted red peppers; and herbed frittata with a buttery crust. We finished off with smooth slices of fuerte avocados with shaved radishes, and a salad of young mixed lettuces. We toasted Cannard and Charlene with biodynamic wines from nearby Coturri vineyards and for dessert took turns hand-cranking a batch of feathery-light vanilla ice cream.
After we ate, I found a solitary moment and walked over to the herb garden. There were bushes of flowering rosemary and sage, redolent in the sunshine. I noticed bumble bees suckling, head first in the sage flowers, and a ruby-throated hummingbird hovering nearby. I felt an unfamiliar craving rise within me. I longed somehow to connect with all this life force around me.
I had always thought of growing plants as forced labor, frustrating, sweaty work, a losing battle against weeds, bugs and poor soil. A struggle with nature. Now I was suddenly itching to start a garden. I bent over and grabbed a handful of the moist soil. I never knew dirt could smell sweet, but it did, clean and mineral-like, with undertones of carrot and straw.
It occurred to me that I must be feeling one of mankind’s most basic instincts: the urge to cultivate, to grasp from the earth a free feast of living food, replete with all the sweetness and vitality that nature has packaged in plants. I wanted to find a corner of my backyard in Oakland and lay down a thick layer of rich soil. I wanted seeds. I wanted baby radishes, and sweet peas, and micro greens of my very own. I was ready to go. Cannard had made it look so easy.
Yet, several months after I had left the farm, I still hadn’t found the time to live out my primal urge. I had bought a bag of dark compost-rich soil. And I had the seed packets, French radishes, arugula and spinach. But they lay unopened on my counter top, gathering dust. I bought a pot of strawberry plants, only to see them die after I spent a particularly hot weekend away. The only thing I had managed to plant, in a burst of horticultural effort, were some yellow pansies.
Week by week, as I walked past the little patch of dirt next to my front steps, often carrying bags of store-bought groceries —shipped no doubt from the Central Valley, or Oregon, or Mexico —I mourned my unfulfilled agrarian dreams.
Then one day, something miraculous happened. A small pair of matching fuzzy leaves poked their heads up from the dirt. And then they branched and branched again, and in a week I had what appeared to be a thriving volunteer tomato. Narrow yellow five-pointed blossoms popped out. The tangy scent of tomato stems reached my nose, and every day the plant grew bigger, its green stalks reaching out over the cracked sidewalk.
I might never be able to coax plants to their full vitality like Bob Cannard. But Nature had taken it upon herself to remind me just how easy growing food can be.
» Filed Under Writing
July 31st, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Carmel-
I enjoyed the story and have linked to it from my blog. On our family farm in Western Indiana (Ernie Pyle was born in a home about 1/4 mile from the east side of our farm), we have at least 20 acres that has never been cultivated. This article gave me some ideas. Thanks for the story.
Matt
(I.U. Business School 1981)