The Quiet Season Isn’t Quiet

The Quiet Season Isn’t Quiet

While the fields look quiet, our farmers are planting beans, vetch, and next summer’s flavors.

As the days shorten and the first real rains arrive, the fields around the Bay look quieter. There are fewer rows of berries and more greens, apples, and roots. If you drove past, you might think the farmers were catching their breath.

They aren’t. Late fall and winter is some of the most important work of the year, and much of it happens below the surface. This is the season when our partner farms put back what the last harvest took out. Along the way, you’ll hear a few farming terms, so we’ll explain each one.

Why Bare Soil Is a Problem

California’s rain comes in winter. On bare ground, raindrops break up the soil’s crumbly structure, and fall and winter storms can slowly carry away topsoil and the nutrients in it. That’s called erosion, and it’s one of the biggest threats to a farm’s long-term health. The fix is simple to say and takes real planning to do: don’t leave the ground bare.

Cover Crops: A Green Blanket

The most common answer is a cover crop. This is a plant grown not to be eaten but to protect and feed the soil, so it’s sown in fall, grown through winter, and cut down in spring. Farmers usually plant a mix of two types. Legumes, like bell beans, vetch, and peas, can pull nitrogen from the air with help from bacteria living on their roots. Nitrogen is a nutrient every crop needs, so legumes act like a free fertilizer. Grains, like oats, barley, and rye, grow thick, fibrous roots that loosen the soil and add organic matter. Organic matter is the decaying plant material that soil organisms feed on, and it helps the soil hold water and nutrients.

Around Monterey Bay, UC Santa Cruz’s farm program advises sowing cover crops from mid-October to early December and cutting them between March and May. Our farms put this into practice in their own ways. Full Belly Farm, in the Capay Valley, plants a cover crop after every harvest, and its winter mix is typically oats or rye with vetch. In spring, the crew typically mows it, adds compost, and works it into the soil to prepare beds for summer cash crops.

At Live Earth Farm in Watsonville, the winter fields become what the farm calls “lush green carpets,” which get mowed and tilled back in come spring. Fifth Crow Farm in Pescadero plants both winter and summer cover crops. The land was farmed non-organically before 2008. A USDA profile says cover crop mixes, planned with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, raised its organic matter from about 1 percent to 3 to 4 percent in under a decade.

Compost and Mulch

If cover crops are a blanket, compost is a meal. It’s what you get when plant scraps and manure break down into dark, crumbly, nutrient-rich material, and spreading it on a field feeds the life in the soil. Full Belly applies compost at every new planting. Fifth Crow used a Zero Foodprint grant to spread compost and plant more cover crops.

Mulch is a protective layer laid on top of the soil, such as straw or chopped plants. It shields the ground from pounding rain, holds in moisture, and keeps weeds down, and as it breaks down it adds organic matter. While Full Belly usually works cover crops into the soil, they also use reduced-tillage methods for certain crops by rolling (flattening) or flail-mowing (chopping) the winter cover crop and leaving it on the ground as a thick mulch to plant directly into. Live Earth uses composting and mulching among its soil-building tools, and Oya Organics in Hollister mulches too. You can try this at home, since UC Santa Cruz’s garden team says a heavy layer of straw protects garden beds from winter rain.

Tillage: Handle With Care

Tillage means turning over the soil with tractor implements to prepare a seedbed and bury weeds. It works, but heavy, repeated tillage can damage the soil’s structure and disturb life underground. Reduced tillage means doing less of it, or doing it more gently, which leaves the soil mostly intact. Fifth Crow has invested in tractor implements that reduce tillage, and Oya uses minimal tillage. Yadira Mendiola, who grows our Albion and 089 strawberries, is working to use less machinery at Rancho Corralitos in Watsonville.

Crop Rotation: Never the Same Thing Twice

Crop rotation means planting something different in a field each season instead of the same crop year after year. Javier Zamora of JSM Organics explains why: plant the same thing in the same place, and diseases that live in the soil build up. His answer is to move crops between plant families, since related crops tend to share the same pests and diseases. Many non-organic farms instead fumigate, injecting chemicals that sterilize the soil, but that also kills the beneficial microbes. At JSM, Javier rotates and doesn’t fumigate. Rodriguez Brothers Ranch added broccoli and cauliflower to its rotation to keep its soil healthy and its harvest diverse.

Hedgerows and Waterways: Permanent Helpers

Some conservation work stays in place year-round. A hedgerow is a row of native shrubs, trees, and flowers planted along a field’s edge. It gives beneficial insects and birds a home, blocks wind, and helps hold soil in place. Live Earth has planted native hedgerows around its fields, and Fifth Crow added them with help from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Fifth Crow also built grassed waterways, which are channels planted with grass that carry heavy runoff across a field without carving gullies into it.

Animals at Work

Livestock can be part of the soil-building crew. Sheep graze cover crops at Full Belly, which turns plants into manure and spreads nutrients across the field. At Fifth Crow, hens live in mobile coops that get moved around, so they spread fertility, eat weeds and pests, and break up disease cycles as they go.

What Winter Builds

The next time you bite into a summer strawberry or a sweet, crisp apple, remember that its flavor started months earlier, in the cold and rain, with a farmer sowing beans in a bare field. Soil takes years to build and only one bad season to lose, and winter is when the patient work gets done.

Did You Know?

The nitrogen in a bell bean cover crop is made in tiny knobby growths on its roots. Dig one up and look closely: the nodules are often pink inside.

Want to dig deeper?

  • Fred Magdoff and Harold Van Es, Building Soils for Better Crops.

  • The UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program’s Cover Crops Database, with farm-by-farm profiles including Full Belly.

  • The Center for Agroecology at UC Santa Cruz, where Fifth Crow’s founders and Live Earth’s Tom and Constance Broz trained.

  • Our Gazette pieces on regenerative agriculture and Rancho Corralitos.

Sources

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