Wisdom of the Last Farmer by David Mas Masumoto

Author:David Mas Masumoto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hardpan is the official rock of our farm. I don’t believe I will ever free myself from its burdens.

A compressed layer of clay that behaves more like a rock than dirt, hardpan is a rather dull tan chunk of parched earth that looks like all life has been squeezed out of it. It lacks the nobility of granite or the texture of flagstone. Hiding a few feet beneath the surface, hardpan shocks unsuspecting farmers, gardeners, or builders who, trying to work the land, suddenly discover that shovels are worthless, pickaxes and sledgehammers more appropriate, and backhoes and dynamite the best.

Hardpan fields look like the surface of Mars, barren, red, arid, and empty—a landscape without spirit. (Imagine, sending a satellite or Rover mission 36 million miles into space only to discover hardpan.)

A layer of soil cemented by almost insoluble materials, hardpan is a rock that breaks farmers. The hardpan of the Central Valley was forming during the time of the dinosaurs, a hundred million years ago, when the land that would eventually become California was at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The collision of tectonic plates eventually pushed up a two-mile deep trench in that ocean floor to become the Central Valley. Our good loamy soil comes from the erosion of the mountains and volcanoes around us over millions of years after the valley’s rise. Our hardpan dates back, though, to the hellish conditions of the land’s first creation. Its violent birth was a preview to how, millions of years later, farmers would rage against it and bring their own explosive force to break it apart.

Dad was an expert on hardpan; he spent years clearing our fields of it. Our land was initially cheap because of its hardpan discount. No one had wanted it. Half of the land was filled with a fine Hanford sandy loam, where vigorous grapevines and sweet peaches and plums thrived. The other half was barren and open. Dad had made a choice: clearing this farm of hardpan would establish him. Otherwise he would have to keep renting, possibly one day saving enough to buy good land—if things worked out, if prices remained good, if the weather cooperated. Hardpan held the key to making a farm and building a family legacy. Dad didn’t want to leave it up to fate; he wanted to work for himself.

He quickly named part of the farm “the hill,” a slight rise on the horizon, perhaps only five to ten feet higher than the rest of the farm. But “the hill” hid a mountain of stone, a shallow layer of hardpan enclosing the virgin earth into which vines or an orchard could be planted and take root.

Dad spent two years clearing “the hill” of hardpan, in between farming the vineyard and orchard. A bulldozer came in to rip the soil open, and afterward a sea of rocks seemed to float in the earth like icebergs; tens of thousands of chunks. He dragged, carried, and heaved them onto wagons and truck beds, hauling tons away, claiming this land as his own.

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