"They say it's not the destination, it's the journey." Ed Sills is an organic farmer growing rice, popcorn, wheat, oats, beans and almonds on the 2500-acre Pleasant Grove Farm in the Sacramento Valley of California. Starting with 45 acres of organic popcorn in 1985, which did well, Ed added more acres each year, converted more crops to organic. By 1996 the farm was exclusively organic.

"We haven't arrived at a point of perfection. We never will. Although we have gotten to profitability, we are still trying to understand how to use our various management options to improve soil fertility and control weeds, pests and disease. And we will always be able to improve on our processing, packaging, and marketing under the Pleasant Grove Farms label."

Ed graduated with a degree in forestry in 1976 from the University of California at Berkeley, and after a brief turn with the USFS as a firefighter, returned to the family farm. He quickly became dissatisfied with the productivity and profitability of the farm, and with the risks associated with using agricultural chemicals.

"To me it didn't seem to be a sustainable enterprise. Sometimes your fertilizers and chemicals would work, sometimes they wouldn't. Weather might come in and affect yield, and without top yield you don't make money. I saw all these problems increasing - growing resistance by pests and weeds, more restrictions on the chemical tools due to environmental problems."

"I had been looking at these problems over a number of years, and then the concept of sustainable agriculture appeared in mid-1980s. Researchers began to talk about soil building and farming in a way that improves our resources, in terms of our ability to grow crops, rather than reducing that ability over time."

Ed was surprised how easy some of the solutions to his problems were. When they replaced continuous rice cropping with crop rotations, one of their pest challenges - the rice water weevil - ceased to be a problem immediately. When they stopped spraying their almonds, and introduced native grasses and vetches into the orchard understory, they saw an increase in pest predators that reduced worm damage to the nuts to a level lower than when chemicals were used.

"You don't have to replace each chemical tool with an organic tool. For certain crops and problems, we have found it is possible to devise a cropping system that will take care of itself. For example, in conventional farming we had zero tolerance for weeds. In this system, we don't really care as long as the weeds are not overly competitive. It depends on the crop. With taller plants like popcorn or corn, you can live with more weeds. The general rule we keep in mind is the creation of an ecological balance. If we keep the balance in mind, we can let things take care of themselves - and we don't have to come back and remedy an (environmental) problem later."

Ed and his colleagues are continually improving their management systems through careful monitoring and research, studying the relationships of soil fertility and weed competition, as they affect yields. They perform regular soil testing, monitor weed species and growth patterns, and use yield monitors on their combines.

"There is a reason they call it organic farming. Organic matter is one of the most important factors for soil fertility. Soil quality is the foundation of a robust farming system, one that ecologically takes care of itself with minimum inputs. It increases the stability of your system, improving your ability to withstand increasingly variable weather patterns, market fluctuations, and probability of yield success. So at Pleasant Grove, we incorporate all our crop residues and grow green manure cover crops. As a result, one application of poultry manure every four years is enough to maintain healthy soil. The rest we grow here."

"When we were in conventional farming we hardly made any money, we just broke even most of the time. We would have failed without the crop subsidies. Now with organic premiums, we can look to the future and invest in the long-term productivity of our soil. With the diverse crops we do organic, we can make up for a loss on one crop and still be profitable."

Sills points out however, that "just because we are organic doesn't necessarily ensure it will be sustainable. This points out the differences between organic and sustainable agriculture. Concepts of sustainability open up a whole spectrum of additional questions about the health of the people who are working for you, and of the community you are working in. We try to incorporate those questions."

"Because we are profitable, we are able to pay people more than most other farms around. Since we don't have to worry about chemical handling, our employee safety meetings can focus more on heavy lifting and equipment safety. We are doing a good job as environmental stewards, and taking good care of the people who work for us, and we are a relatively large farm."

In 1990, Ed became a farmer advisor to the Sustainable Farming Systems Project at UC Davis (with Jim Durst and Bruce Rominger). "I have found my involvement with the researchers to be very valuable. Sometimes I can take something directly from the project such as how a cover crop performs. Other times discussing possible rotations or cultural practices for the project generates ideas that are applicable to my specific cropping system. Either way it has been exciting and worthwhile."

Ed Sills
Pleasant Grove Farm
5072 Pacific Ave.
Pleasant Grove, CA 95668
Tel: (916) 655-3486

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