Embracing Autumn While Growing More Than Crops
by Gowan Batist
In the fall, our freezer’s mouths open like baby birds, and we stuff them as diligently as the sparrows raising their hatchlings in the spring. The pantry shelves also gape at us hungrily, and we line up canning jars into its maw like rows of gleaming teeth.
Food is as simple as possible, and prepared on a large scale. No more slicing and dicing—tomatoes go whole into the broiler to roast and then unceremoniously into the blender. Cucumbers fly through the mandolin, and peppers and eggplants blister in rows on the grill. Last fall, 2022, I was living in a perpetual steam bath, stuffing the pantry with jars of salsa and carefully measuring the acidity on each jar of tomatoes in the tropical kitchen late into the night, while the vines in the pumpkin fields passed the tipping point from a thick verdant jungle to a withered brown tracery.
When the pumpkins and winter squash are finally ready, they throw their robe of green to the ground as dramatically as a burlesque dancer, and suddenly stand revealed in all their gleaming roundness. The tomato vines follow suit, leaching all the very last moisture into the final fruits. I can’t bend over to lift any of them, and my muscle memory wonders where the truckloads of crates are, where the familiar back strain has gone. Not for me this season. I won’t be shearing sheep either—somehow sitting out that step of the fall dance feels the most surreal. Thankfully, I have good friends who are shearers, and a partner who went to shearing school in Ukiah specifically to prepare for this moment. The sheep will be divested of their gleaming fleeces in the golden light of the season, as always, and are in good hands.
There is an urgency in the bodily awareness that we are losing the sun, the days slipping away into the winter. So we catch as much of it as we can, in the vibrancy and color of the seasonal abundance before our environment gives way to the more muted tones of brassica greens, mushrooms, and bins of potatoes. We clutch at color to save for the gray days.
This fall, I’m honestly not sure how much more canning I’m going to get done. I am growing exactly one pumpkin this year, the highest maintenance crop I have ever tended, and I’m carrying this rapidly ripening fruit under my ribs. I no longer fit comfortably in the narrow gallery of our kitchen, and lifting a steaming rack of sterilized jars over my pregnant belly leaves me exhausted.
Even so, all local food preservation is a love letter to the future. The food we store away this season will be especially helpful in the sleep-deprived state of newborn care. I think of us stumbling to the freezer between baby feedings, and I want to make sure there’s something good there to reach for, as a gift to whoever we will be when that moment comes. I can feel our baby kicking while I work, and let them know this is for them, too, to make it easier to spend more time with them and less time cooking.
I’m not planning on doing much this winter except baby care, so everything I want to make this fall is simple and utilitarian. Less fancy sauces and pickles than last fall, more tomato soup base, pre-cooked stuffed peppers, and trays of shepherd’s pie that we can take out of the freezer and place directly into the oven. The gorgeous rainbow of deep ruby and stormy sky blue and swirling purple corn will be made into bags of tamales for quick meals … as soon as I can bear to stop looking at them and grind them up into masa.
The infrastructure of local food is critical to the functioning of our community. The small-scale resources and tools that allow an actual agricultural economy to function had mostly disappeared by the time my farming career began, replaced with the kind of global trade infrastructure that took pears grown in Argentina, packed them in Thailand, and sold them in Idaho. Over the last ten years, I have seen them come back in the form of community resources like the MendoLake Food Hub, the Mendocino Wool Mill, and the Good Farm Fund, among others. It’s not lost on me that many of these projects are the work of an overlapping cast of characters.
The discussions we share on the next stages have focused on combining resources for access to commercial kitchens for value-adding, navigating cottage food laws, and exploring solutions to the large gaps still remaining, like the accessibility of certified slaughter facilities for legal meat sales. While major infrastructure gains have been made in many areas, we have lost significant ground in others not directly connected with growing food, but still essential to our ability to function as a thriving intergenerational agricultural community. Farmers as a demographic across the country are aging rapidly, and many farming communities have inadequate medical care for them. The number of farmers in their twenties are increasing, but falling off sharply in their thirties. A large reason for this is the opposite side of the life cycle challenges facing our elders—lack of prenatal care and safe childbirth options in our rural communities.
When the decision was made to close Labor and Deliveryin Fort Bragg, I was among many community members who spoke out against this—and against the equally disturbing fact that it is also now impossible to obtain a surgical abortion in Mendocino County. I didn’t know at the time that I would end up pregnant myself, navigating how to survive and thrive in our current situation as a remote community which does not have the ability to deliver a baby within an hour and a half of where we live. The dream of giving birth at home, surrounded by our canning jars and piles of pumpkins, was dashed by the hospital closure. Licensed midwives must be able to transfer to a hospital within a certain distance. Not having one available, we can’t give birth at home with a midwife either. Bloom Waterbirth Center in Ukiah is one of the few options for a freestanding birth center that is able to care for us, though we must pay out of pocket for their service and also traverse Highway 20, in labor, during fire season, to reach them. As a freestanding Birth Center, Bloom can only take the lowest risk families. If our baby is breech, or if I have warning signs of preeclampsia, or a condition like placenta previa, my only option covered by insurance is in Santa Rosa, almost three hours from our home, much of the drive without cell phone service.
When this decision was made, it was openly discussed that people in labor—and their babies—will inevitably be harmed by the closure, and that some of them may die. I sat in those meetings and heard the doctors’ dire warnings. The list of families impacted includes us, and our baby that is currently happily kicking me in the ribs will face their first hurdle of rural living just by coming into the world. For a lot of the far reaches of the county, this issue isn’t new. My mother went into labor with me in Gualala, which to this day has little more than an infrequently staffed rural clinic, and she drove down the coast through Jenner to Santa Rosa in labor with me in the early hours of the morning, after first changing a tire. She described dodging skunks and deer on the road in the thick fog that rolls in during the summer on that stretch of coast. I told her it sounded incredibly stressful, especially with no cell phones, but she said that she actually loved the drive and has great memories of the peacefulness of the ocean glimpsed around each hairpin turn. “Until heavy labor kicked in around Guerneville, that is. That’s when it stopped being fun.”
Usually when faced with these infrastructure gaps, I feel really confident that we can just do it ourselves. Form a co-op, write a grant, have someone donate some barn space to a committee meeting. However, it turns out that moving turnips efficiently around the county is a little different than birthing babies, and I have to admit that I’m entirely out of my element here somehow, despite the hundreds of lamb births I’ve seen.
It has felt destabilizing, filling these jars and stacking these freezers while knowing we may not be close to home when this baby comes, and might not have the ability to feed ourselves the way we would like during this most vulnerable and intense time. However … there's more than one way for our community to handle things. We have a little camper, and I have friends near Ukiah and near Santa Rosa with farms and ranches on which to park it. We may take this show on the road and stay somewhere closer to medical care when our due date gets close. While I would love to be home at Fortunate Farm, chances are I will still go into labor on a farm, either in Mendocino or in Sonoma County.
As always, when the larger infrastructure of this country, state, and county doesn’t have us, we have each other, and that’s a whole lot. In the meantime, we have the work of fall to do. The produce is the best of the year, and there’s so much of it. Order it in boxes, harvest it in crates, prepare it as simply as possible, eat it, share it, save it. Winter is on the way.
Gowan Batist of Fortunate Farm is a Post-Industrial Pastoralist working towards regeneration on landscapes her ancestors devastated. She is seldom seen, but sometimes glimpsed out in the fog or the oak savanna propagating native plants, spinning wool, hand shearing sheep, or sprawling on the ground with dogs.