SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
By Jonathan Kauffman
“Drought Dispatch” is an ongoing Inside Scoop series about the effect of California’s extreme drought on the food we eat.
Kate Creps, executive director for the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in Civic Center, can track the effect of the drought on her market by the empty spaces in the line of stalls. Pheng Keng is missing. No one has seen Gloria Avila, who’s been a regular since the 1980s, in months.
It could be worse: Only five or six stalls out of 55–almost exclusively small family farmers, who govern the independent market as well as display their wares at it–are absent so far, she estimates, including a few Vietnamese American and Hmong farmers from the Central Valley. The usual Wednesday-afternoon crowd, a mix of Tenderloin residents and office workers, doesn’t appear any smaller than usual.
But the mood among the farmers is wary, to say the least. Tony Cozzolino, the youngest (at 29) and newest (at several months) farmer at the Heart of the City market, slips off the plastic glove he’s been using to measure out fresh alfalfa and broccoli sprouts to shake hands. He smiles easily–Hollywood whites–but worry flickers at smile’s edge as he talks.
Tony and his wife, Stephanie, who farm in Half Moon Bay, just started selling sprouts this year to bolster the income from their two primary crops: pumpkins and Christmas trees. “We’ve already started planting stuff together more tightly to conserve water,” he says, though the strategy means disease can spread among the plants more quickly. “You can normally water for two hours twice a day, but now we’re only watering for one and a half hours once a day.”
Even that is fragile: There’s no excess water to plant a garden for personal use, and the Cozzolinos even have to think carefully about how they wash the sprouts. All of the farm’s water, after all, comes from a creek. And it’s quickly drying up. If that happens, he says, “That’s it.” He’s not sure how much to plant, and is praying for June rains.
Another empty space belongs to El Hullana of Hullana Farms, who’s been at the Civic Center market since it started in 1981. Hullana’s family has farmed in Merced since 1946, and Hullana stopped selling to wholesalers several decades ago. Instead, his melons, peppers, napa cabbage, broccoli and tomatoes go directly to farmers’ market shoppers, Chinatown produce markets and Korean American kimchi makers.
Hullana hasn’t been coming to the market because he has only been able to plant one crop this spring and summer instead of double-cropping. Not only that, he’s only planting half of his 60 acres — and currently waiting for someone to replace the pump and pipes in his well so it can reach the groundwater, whose surface is far deeper than in years past. “I’m pretty nervous right now,” he says.
Yet Hullana, who speaks on the phone after descending from his tractor to sit under a tree on the edge of his fields, doesn’t sound like nerves are paralyzing him. The drought — and his absence from the San Francisco farmers’ markets — is forcing him to do something he’s been meaning to do for years: install drip irrigation lines to deliver water directly to his plants, and not the surrounding soil and weeds.
“It will save a lot of money and a lot of labor,” he says. “It’s going to work. It has to work. I want to adapt. I don’t want to be in this situation again.”
Read more at insidescoopsf.sfgate.com.