From the Fields: Dick Peixoto, Santa Cruz County organic vegetable farmer

By Dick Peixoto, Santa Cruz County organic vegetable farmer

We get two crops per year up here. As crops are coming out, we’re preparing the ground for the next planting. We have about 40 different crops, and we have 27 different crews out there harvesting every day. 

There’s a serious farm labor shortage. Having enough people every day to do the harvesting is a big issue for us. Like when we came in Monday morning, we were short 57 workers because they didn’t show up for work. That happens pretty much every Monday. It’s hard to get all the harvesting done when you’re short 57 people that were going to harvest for eight hours a day. 

We had a flood last year in this area, and a lot of the diseases that were in limited fields got spread over the whole valley. The water took the diseases from one field to the next. Now we’ve got diseases where we didn’t have them. Some of the ground that we thought was clean is not so clean. We had more root diseases that we haven’t had in the past. So far, we’ve lost probably 50% of our napa cabbage to diseases. Rotation is the only tool we have for organic. We don’t put the same crop back on the contaminated ground. Depending on the crop, we usually give it three to five years of rotation. 

We also trade ground with strawberry growers. If we have a disease that affects vegetables, they’ll come and plant strawberries on our ranch because the disease we have doesn’t affect their crop, and we’ll plant on their ground because the diseases they have on strawberries don’t affect our vegetables. We work with a lot of the vegetable and berry growers to exchange the ground so we can help clean up each other’s grounds. We’ve been doing this for years. When we became organic and didn’t have the fumigants to control diseases, crop rotation became more important, and rotating vegetables with fruit is an excellent way to get the ground clean.