Mas Masumoto is an organic farmer and author of 14 books including Epitaph for a Peach, the story of how an old heirloom peach had fallen out of favor in the marketplace and forced Mas to make some difficult decisions.
He now farms in partnership with his daughter Nikiko, a 3rd generation Central Valley farmer, growing organic peaches, raisin grapes, nectarines and apricots on 80 acres. As a college student at UC Berkeley, Masamoto had absolutely no interest in following in his father’s footsteps as a farmer until, in search of his family roots, he worked on a relative’s rice farm in Japan. That experience reinforced his identity as a Japanese American and kindled a desire to return to his family farm in Del Rey, California.
Mas Masamoto’s writing awards include a Commonwealth Club Silver medal, Julia Child Cookbook award, the James Clavell Literacy Award and a finalist in the James Beard Foundation awards. Wisdom of the Last Farmer was honored as “Best Environmental Writing in 2009” by the National Resources Defense Council. In 2013, President Obama appointed Masumoto to the National Council on the Arts, the board for the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest book Secret Harvests, is a finalist in The National Book Critics Award.
Masumoto was interviewed by Bioneers’ Arty Mangan at the EcoFarm Conference
ARTY MANGAN: When you were younger you worked on a rice farm in Japan.
MAS MASUMOTO: I went as an exchange student from Berkeley to Tokyo. I was there for a number of months. In America, Roots was being shown on TV, so I wanted to go back to my roots, which was a small village in southern Japan, Takamura, outside of Kumamoto. I ended up spending six months of my student exchange working on the rice farm of my relatives. It was just marvelous to live in the farmhouse that my grandmother was raised in and had left 80 years earlier and never come back to.
Growing up, I ate rice every day, but I had no idea how it was grown. The experience made me realize that I’m not Japanese, I’m Japanese-American. And that made me contemplate going back to the farm in America.
ARTY: Another part of your family history was their relocation to internment camps. Like most Japanese at the time, your family was forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in internment camps during World War II for no other reason than they were of Japanese descent.
MAS: My parents – who had been born in America as American citizens – and my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were suddenly interned in August of 1942. They were uprooted, evacuated, and went to the prison camp in Gila River, Arizona, and spent four to five years there.
At the time they were farm workers and were ready to buy farmland after going through the Great Depression. They had a number of brothers and sons that were going to farm together. Then the war came, internment came, and it dashed all those hopes. They lost everything they had except for what they could carry with them.
People from different communities were sent to different camps. People in southern Fresno, Selma and Parlier went to one camp, Gila River. Those in Fresno went to Jerome, Arkansas. I think it was the government’s wild thought that if we divide these people up, they won’t unify. At Gila River, Arizona, which is south of Phoenix, there were a number of people from LA who were totally lost in an open, rural, desert area.
At least my folks were used to the 100-degree weather of the Central Valley. There were a lot of farmers in the internment camp who wanted to do something, so they started raising crops. One community raised corn and sent it to the other 10 relocation camps to feed them. They fed the other relocation camps from what they grew in Gila River. Just wild.
ARTY: I’ve been to the Gila reservation. There’s a monument to the Japanese people who were incarcerated there. The tribal council protested locating the camps on their lands, but were overruled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
After the war, your family was released and somehow your father was able to buy land and ultimately plant an orchard of Sun Crest peaches, which have been listed in Slow Foods’ Ark of Taste, a catalogue of distinctive foods at risk. You wrote that the ripening of the Sun Crest peach is an indication that summer has arrived. And yet, you almost had the orchard eliminated.
MAS: Sun Crest is a peach I grew up with, I planted these trees as a teenager with my dad who planted much faster than I did. I was a young teenager at that time wanting to get off the farm; I hated what I was doing. My rows weren’t straight because I was impatient, and I thought who cares about this.
Now, 50, 60 years later, I live with that crooked row because I was an impatient teenager who couldn’t wait to finish the work. As I said, I grew up with this peach, and it was the peach that sent me to college; the profits from the sales of Sun Crest allowed me to go to UC Berkeley.
And ironically, it was actually the peach that brought me back to the farm. I loved the flavor and understood a different way of farming that wasn’t about industrial farming. It was about being close to nature and family.
ARTY: But a time came when the market shifted and you had you had some challenges selling Sun Crest peaches.
MAS: Oh absolutely. When we planted in 1968, it was a pretty good peach. We ended up planting the mother of Sun Crest, which is Gold Dust, because the flavor is so good. Gold Dust, great flavor, but a little small. Sun Crest, was bred to be bigger, and it was a wonderful peach through the ‘60s and ‘70s, but when I came back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the market wanted a peach that’s redder and has a longer shelf life. Sun Crest has superior flavor, but no one wanted it.
Our broker told us that he had 2,000 24-pound boxes of our Sun Crest peaches with no buyer. And I said, “Well, what do you think we should do?” He said, “If I were you, I would dump all the fruit out, because we can reuse the box.” “No! We’re not going to do that. Sell it!” So he sold the 24-pound boxes of Sun Crest peach for something like 50 cents a box. We lost our shirts. People were telling us, “You’ve got to get rid of that variety.”
My dad said, “I don’t know what we should do. You decide. You’re farming now.” My neighbor was also growing Sun Crest peaches and decided to have a bulldozer take out his orchard. I knew that we should do the same, but I was really torn. My wife, Marcy, said, “Yes, It has wonderful flavor, but we just lost thousands and thousands of dollars with no hope in the future.”
When the bulldozer came to our farm, I waved him down and told him to take my neighbors orchard out first. When he came back after he bulldozed my neighbor’s orchard, I told him that I changed my mind and am going to keep the orchard a little longer. And that was my early naïve commitment to keep the Sun Crest Orchard. I had no idea how we were going to solve the problem of finding a market.
ARTY: How did you solve it?
MAS: After that I started looking into farming organically and thinking maybe there’d be some hope. Then I wrote an essay called “Epitaph for a Peach.” I was able to get in touch with the editor of the LA Times who said, “This is a brilliant piece.” They ran it and syndicated it. Back then, newspapers syndicated articles across the nation. That was a turning point. I got about 20 letters from people from places like Ohio and North Carolina who read the article telling me to keep the peach. The letters were addressed to Masumoto, Peach Grower in Del Rey, California. Our community is so small that I got all the letters.
My wife Marcy was working off the farm to help stabilize us with off-farm income. I told her that I received 20 letters saying that we should keep this peach. We had just lost $20,000, but I got 20 letters. She looked at me, and said, “I guess I have to keep my job, huh?” And I said, “Yeah, you do.” That was the beginning of finding a home for our peaches.
ARTY: So you started to farm organically and things changed for you?
Mas: When we started farming organically, one of the big changes was to think of working with nature in a different frame. I remember thinking early-on that the whole premise of industrial agriculture is trying to foolishly control nature and that we’re going to go a different route and work with nature.
When I talked about that to neighbors they said, “What are you talking about, working with nature?” My reply was, “In the end, nature tells us what we can do.” And ironically today, climate change is hitting people so hard that they now realize that we don’t control nature. Climate change, as a force, is nature working above us, and we have to learn how to work with it.
ARTY: Absolutely. In 2009 you wrote the book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer; why did you choose that title?
MAS: It was at a time when I was looking literally at the mortality of my dad. I grew up with him. He was a farmer, but not a storyteller. He told very few stories. Instead, he acted out his stories the way he lived his life.
I worked with him side-by-side; there was wisdom in his actions, how he shoveled the weeds, how he would prune a tree. All that was his wisdom. That’s the wisdom of elders, the wisdom of our ancestors that I live with today. And because of their wisdom, I’m able to do what I do today.
My dad taught me how to prune trees, and what he didn’t say, but what I deciphered in every act that he did, was that he was able to see the future. Because when you prune a tree, a peach tree for example, you have to imagine the summer. You’re pruning in the winter, so you have to be able to see the summer light and heat coming in, and how they will affect the ripening. You have to see the future. And he had a vision that great pruners have of being able to see the future.
As I get better at farming, I think of the old adage, “You become like your parents.” Now, I can actually have a longer timeline. I might say to my daughter: “These branches will take four or five years to mature.” And my daughter goes: “How do you see that, Dad?” And I try to explain that I can just feel it. It’s a very different way of farming. When I say see the future, it’s through the senses that one can feel the future.
ARTY: You have an increasingly rare opportunity which is having a succession of the farm to the next generation. How do the three generations connect? What’s the arc between your father, Takashi “Joe,” you, and your daughter Nikiko?
MAS: No one’s ever asked me that. Ironically, it’s in stories, but not necessarily verbal stories. As I said, my dad wasn’t a verbal storyteller. I write a lot, and I can get in great conversations, but I don’t sit around and shoot the breeze very well. I don’t do that. Close friends, maybe, but I don’t that much. I tell stories through writing.
It’s the storyline that connects us. Our daughter, Nikiko, who’s partnering on the farm now, has begun to realize that she’s writing the next chapter of the story of the farm, literally by making some decisions like: Do we keep this vineyard? Do we start looking more closely at some environmental issues? Should we grow native plants on the farm? She’s adding her chapter. So, it’s the storyline that connects, but it’s not necessary a verbal, oral tradition that’s being passed down from one generation to another, at least on our farm. In our family, it didn’t work that way.
ARTY: You work closely now with Nikiko. I’m going to assume there’s a gradual handing over of responsibility to her. How do you two make decisions? What is the process of the succession?
MAS: It’s funny. You read about estate planning. They say you should have family planning meetings. We never did. My dad and I never had these family planning meetings, so I don’t have them either.
It’s almost, bizarrely, through osmosis, when we’re talking to each other, listening to each other, and then picking up on a few key things, and then watching each other. She’s watched me grow older, and even though I’m still very healthy, Nikiko knows that I have slowed down doing some things. She knows that at certain times, my knees are getting bad, so she says, “Maybe we need to rethink how we shape the orchards and prune the trees.”
So, we made a plan about lowering all the trees, so we can use smaller ladders. And it actually works on many different levels. There’s a reason why that metaphor of “low-hanging fruit” sticks because it’s much more efficient. Higher productivity, easier, and if we lower the trees correctly, they get more sunlight so that the fruit ripens properly, so when you combine all that, it’s a story that’s now being passed down through this phrase of low-hanging fruit.
And that’s how stories get changed, at least in our family. It’s passed down through a simple phrase like that that becomes actualized in the work that we do.
You should see our orchards. I am stunned at how high some of the trees have grown. They’re like 12 to 14 feet, so you realize our 10-foot ladders probably aren’t good enough, and our 12-foot ladders, especially as I age, are too heavy for me, so we’ve shifted to 8-foot ladders.
And another shift, we have more women working on our farm, and they’re better because they’re better at selecting quality. Eight-foot ladders are magical for them versus a 10-foot, which is heavier to maneuver. The 8-foot ladders work great. They increase productivity from an economic standpoint, but you also get better quality both from the sunlight coming in and from being able to be selective by having that woman’s touch that knows which fruit is ripe and which ones need another three or four days to ripen, whereas, a lot of the men just pick indiscriminately. Men are trained to pick fast. It’s about efficiency, not about quality. I decided to go with the quality. And it’s working.
ARTY: Some of your trees are over 50 years old. How are they adapting to the new way of being pruned?
MAS: We started this process years ago. The first year was a shock to the tree because we pruned a lot of top growth. I thought, ‘Did we kill the tree? Did we hurt it?’ No, it just took a little while for the lower growth to come out. It takes about three to five-years for them to adapt and now they look spectacular. You can tell they’re happy.
I wish I could be topped at my age so I could grow new limbs and grow new arteries and veins and have my body respond the way the trees are.
ARTY: It’s amazing how resilient fruit trees are.
MAS: Absolutely. And the wild thing is no one, no agricultural professional, consultant, or researcher could tell you how to prune 50-year-old peach trees because no one keeps them that long.
We have 100-year-old grape vines that we weren’t sure we should keep, but I ultimately decided to keep them. I brought a researcher out a few weeks ago and asked him how to prune 100-year-old grape vines. He said, “I have to tell you, my first response is you should get rid of this block.” And I said “No, we’re not, so how do you prune it?”
The vines are Thompson seedless grapes for raisins. Usually, when you prune them, you leave five to six long canes that are maybe three to four feet long. The researcher told me about some farmers in Argentina who are pruning the vines with short canes almost like a bush because some of the most flavorful grapes are on the canes near the trunk, but they’re not very prolific. They tend to be smaller bunches with smaller berries, which works well for the wine industry. But the raisin industry wants big bunches and bigger berries grow further on the cane. I decided to grow for flavor.
I’ve been growing these grapes for 60, 70 years, and I never thought about the flavor of the grapes for raisins. So, we’re going to try this new way to prune and see what happens.
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