Trudy Wischemann: Letters from Lewis Creek — spraying weeds

My clothes are washed and folded, the soiled socks, long-sleeved shirt and overalls I wore spraying weeds with a friend a few days ago. I volunteered to help because his brother, his normal spraying partner, was unavailable, and it’s much harder to do alone. But I also wanted to be there because it was the last time. They’ve sold the farm.

Their accountant said they’d be better off selling than leasing, and perhaps this is true in economic terms. The price of agricultural land right now is through the roof, despite the water crisis, despite the dominance of the giant corporations over the commodity markets. The only explanation I’ve heard that makes any sense is that there are investors out there with tons of money and no safe place to put it.

Land has always been the hedge spot, safer than gold, safer than government bonds or any other man-made economic hidey-hole. So they buy up God’s greatest gift, knowing that sooner or later we’ll give them a return on their investment.

The trees we were spraying are only 5 years old, just coming into their real fruit-bearing life. After pushing out the grove their father bought in the 1950’s and they themselves tended their whole lives bringing fruit to the packinghouse, they pondered long what variety to plant before choosing a late navel. At that time, the two largest corporations, Paramount and Sun-Pacific, had cornered the market on early navels and blasted it with tasteless fruit. Most smaller-scale citrus growers were hoping to survive by replanting with the late varieties. It made sense until the drought — and the Cuties — came.

But now these little trees make no sense at all, economically speaking. The water that has been applied to keep them alive and make a crop is worth maybe $200 an acre-foot. Right now that water can be sold on the open market for $1,800 an acre-foot, which we know because a neighbor has been doing it for a couple of years. He pumps his groundwater, pays a small fee for putting it into the Friant-Kern Canal to transport it, and doesn’t have to do a lick of work except keep his pump primed and running.

No weed spraying, no harvest, no potential packinghouse charges to pay. No labor costs, no contribution to the community’s economy, nothing. The fact that he’s pumping not just his own groundwater but also the neighbors’ has not been lost on the neighbors, but nobody knows what to do about it. Twenty-five years ago this would have been illegal, but big ag and the enviros teamed up to get the laws changed and now we’re paying the price.

Those little trees we were spraying probably will not survive the land sale. The property has two wells and abuts the Friant-Kern, which makes it prime real estate for the kind of economic activity their neighbor is engaged in. Several orange grower friends told me the new owners will most likely push the grove, those trees we planted, wrapped, sprayed and moved hoses to disk the weeds when they got too high — very shortly, it all will have been for nothing.

As I laced up my boots each morning to go out, I asked myself “Why are we doing this?”

It made no economic sense to spend money on Roundup and the other chemicals that would go into the tank for people who would never know whether the grove they bought was clean or weed-infested. At first I thought it might be a face-saving gesture, or pure relief that now, with some money coming, they could afford to spend a little on the grove. But once my muscles adjusted and I got into the rhythm of the work, I realized it was ceremonial. We were giving last rites to the relationship between these two men and their land, honoring that in the only way we knew how: tending.

We had tried to knock the weeds down a few weeks before, one of us driving while the other sprayed between the trees, aiming to kill the weeds that blocked the trees from getting the water coming out the fan jets, trading places when our spraying arm got tired. It hadn’t worked, so this time the person spraying walked, saturating the weeds one by one in a kind of hand-to-hand combat.

We did what farmers do when they work in tandem. We joked; we grew silent, letting each person think their own thoughts. We made mention of the changes we noticed in the weed population, and the different ways they died: the loss of broad-leafed malva, the increase of narrow-leafed horsetail and others whose names we did not know, a kind of unnatural selection in response to the herbicide. We paced ourselves to the density of the weeds, the roughness of the rows, and our own aging walking abilities. It became a kind of dance. By the last row, we were doing a fairly decent polka together.

During my turns with the spray wand, I found myself wishing I had gotten to know these weeds better, learned their names and the populations of insects and animals they support. Seeing a lady bug embedded in the leaves of one, I jerked the wand back, missing the plant by inches. I noticed which trees were prospering, which ones suffered from squirrel holes or impacted fan jets. I let the nut grass remain, its low-growing habit no threat to the sprinklers; the protection from desiccation it gives to the soil from the sun seemed a small price to pay for the water it drinks. Spraying like this, intimacy with the land becomes the primary reward. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Those turns with the wand also gave me a chance to identify the problem, with a partial solution. At first, mocking soldiers on the front line, I verbally abused the weeds themselves as I doused them with spray. “Take that, you Russian thistle (swoosh.) Take that, you puncturevine (swoosh.)” But then, looking down the rows to the near future, to the loss of all this, it got more personal.

“Take that, you moneychangers (swooooosh.) Take that, you extortionists of the public domain (swooooosh.) Take that, Daddy Wonderful. And here’s to your Pomegranate Princess, too (swooooooosh.) And this — this is for Bernie…(swooooooooosh).”

I got some spray on myself that way. We, the general public, the rural residents of our Valley, the readers of this paper and the bureaucrats in Fresno and Sacramento (not to mention Washington, D.C.) are not free from blame.

Our ignorance of what’s going on in this drought under cover of the fishy rhetoric spawned by the agribusiness industry can’t really be excused. Neither can our lack of gumption about crying out against this fiduciary rape.

Our grove is overdue for some tending. There are some very tall weeds blocking the water from the sprinklers. Even if it takes a hoe, it’s time to knock them down — for the good of all.

This story was originally published July 17, 2015 at 9:07 AM with the headline "Trudy Wischemann: Letters from Lewis Creek — spraying weeds."