HappyDay Farms
by Mori Natura
Amber and Casey O’Neill of HappyDay Farms in Laytonville were exhausted but satisfied when I visited them just after they had completed their fall harvest of cannabis. Situated in the rolling hills of Bell Springs, the O’Neills have been creating a regenerative farming operation from their hillside terrain since 2010, along with Casey’s folks and brother, Lito. While cannabis has always been a critical part of the farm, there’s so much more happening at HappyDay. Over the last decade, this eco-forward couple has transformed a rocky, heavy, clay-laden, steep slope into a paradise that annually provides nourishing medicine and abundant food for their local farmers markets and CSA.
As we walked the land, the adorable KuneKune heritage pigs oinked for acorns from the surrounding oak trees. A rotating flock of chickens grazed an impressively steep pasture along the driveway. Rabbits contributed poop to the compost piles near the couple’s house. And black cats hunted rodents in the garden beds between huge stands of comfrey. Amber geeked out on the inner workings of caterpillar tunnels, while Casey discussed their changing methodologies that allow them to direct sow seeds earlier than ever before while simultaneously saving time on transplanting.
Amber had four years of experience interning and apprenticing on organic diversified farming operations when she fell in love with Casey, a self-identified “dope grower.” After getting busted for cultivation in 2008, Casey took agriculture classes at College of the Redwoods. He yearned for the coursework to be more approachable for small farmers, and he remembers raising his hand regularly to ask for conversions from acre-size volumes to garden bed-size volumes. Part of the O’Neill’s mission together has been to create something small but beautiful, productive but manageable, always striving to live up to their tagline, “Great Success.”
Combining elements of several different farming methods to foster healthy, life-giving soil, the HappyDay gardens are all intercropped. Essentially, every bed is brimming with multiple kinds of plants that complement each other. Plants that grow taller, like cannabis, are intercropped with shorter plants or ground covers to effectively utilize the space. Some beds have perennial borders that fix nitrogen, while others have spaces filled in with a diverse array of medicinal herbs. Amber gifted me a bag of Phacelia seed, promising “the bees will adore it.”
The O’Neills live where they work, always adapting to meet their site-specific needs. They save seeds from heirloom varieties, put food by from their garden, and spend their days constantly tending to and learning from the land. Everything they do attempts to honor an intrinsic birthright of connectivity. “I wanna know where my food comes from,” Casey shared, gazing over his garden of winter greens. Ironically, one of the biggest struggles facing the O’Neill team is scheduling time out from working on the farm to enjoy its bounty.
In addition to running and laboring on their own farm full time, Casey spent the last several years intimately navigating the changing politics of cannabis on the local level. Casey bemoaned that, although over five million dollars in tax revenue was generated from legal cannabis in Mendocino County this year, virtually none of that money has been allocated to help create a more sustainable and equitable cannabis industry. While the O’Neills strongly support ecological practices being put into policy in theory, they both admitted that the implementation has been problematic.
HappyDay Farms became a front runner in the legalization efforts in large part because they believed the regulations had the potential to create an evolving public conversation about acceptable practices from a formerly clandestine community. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy around legal cannabis has proven to be a continued headache, as county and state legislation don’t yet match. Today, Casey feels grateful that they’re personally pulling the reins in a bit more. Their focus shifted from the legalization process back to HappyDay.
After a stint working with Flow Kana, Casey expressed how thrilled he is to be back on the farm, full time, all year. He believes that cannabis served as a “back to the land portal.” Where not everyone who has a green thumb also has an idea about how to make a sustainable business plan, cannabis provides a lucrative crop that has helped subsidize a more holistic, small farm operation. When the O’Neills talked about creating smaller, more localized models of business, their eyes lit up. Moving towards collectives of farmers with “skin in the game” and away from the “monolithic industry agriculture” that puts profit first, Casey and Amber are finding their way in an evolving market.
For the O’Neills, knowing their Northern California clientele, meeting them at the local farmers markets, and putting high quality produce into their CSA became the highest priority. To facilitate similar energetics for their cannabis, they worked with other local farmers to create a cannabis brand called “Farm Cut.” Amber exclaimed, “It’s pretty much the highlight right now.” Farm cut cannabis is bucked off the stem, the big leaves are removed and the flowers are jarred in ounce and half-ounce jars. Casey added, “The flowers remain intact, with minimal processing. That protects the medicine in the buds, going out to the consumer in the same way we store it for our own consumption.”
With the autumn crops harvested, the O’Neills will enjoy the slower pace of life to manage their time and farmstead wisely. For the last decade they have been steadily increasing the number of garden beds and feel that some prudence now may save them from overworking themselves next year. Modestly, Casey admitted that, “Regenerative agriculture is not something you achieve, it’s something you strive towards.” Enjoying their homegrown crop of cannabis while musing on becoming better farmers in the months to come, the O’Neills have achieved nothing short of Great Success!
HappyDay Farms | Laytonville, CA
happydayfarmscsa.com | (707) 354-1546
Mori Natura is a homesteading author based in Mendocino County. Her debut novel Wildfire Weeds explores the lives of Mendo’s own cannabis farmers and California’s fire ecology.
