Carol Ann Sayle Interview, Part 2 of 2

TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEWEE: Carol Ann Sayle (CAS) INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW) DATE: June 17, 1999 LOCATION: Boggy Creek Farm; Austin, Texas TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson REELS: 2001 and 2002

DT: We're filming right now inside a farmhouse that was built during the 1840s. And I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about what we've learned from how farmers cultivated the land 150 years ago and what we've done differently over the years and where things stand now?

CAS: Well in our research, we have learned a little bit about what they did and even for their reasons to come to Texas. The family, the James and Elizabeth Smith family, came here in 1838 from North Carolina.

They were tobacco, cotton, corn and wheat farmers there. And they saw the opportunity with many hundreds of other farmers to come to new territory, new land. And one of the reasons they wanted to come was because the land in North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee was technically worn out.

The farmers didn't practice much in the way of crop rotation there. At at the time when they started farming, land was plentiful. And you you exhausted the land, you just moved to another patch. So they saw Texas as a great big new opportunity for new fertile ground that had not ever been farmed. So they came here and in 1839 they bought this this out lot, this property, along with three others and that comprised a 50 acre farm.

We're just where we're sitting right now, we're one mile north of the Colorado River and so we're actually in the Colorado River bottom, the valley. And a few blocks north, the hills begin and you lose this great topsoil. But down here, we have true sandy loam soil and, of course, it was constructed over the millennium by the flooding of the Boggy Creek which is across the street from us and the Colorado River itself.

And it's true sandy loam, it's a pH of about 7. And it's wonderful soil. They came here and they grew the same crops that they grew in North Carolina, tobacco, wheat, cotton and corn, basically.

And they kept cattle and hogs and did did some of that, little little bit of ranching. They also had hundreds of acres to the east. We're not sure yet what they did with that land but we know that they did farm this pretty intensively.

Newspapers at the time remarked upon the great yields they were getting here, like 29 bushels of wheat per acre which was back then without hybridization, without without powerful fertilizers, was good but this was new ground. So we have learned from reading old letters from John Franklin Smith, the son, to trying to get his cousin to come here and find a good man, that one of the reasons that the people came was because the soil was worn out in the south.

And so we thought well, that means that we've got to do things differently. We don't have another amount of land to move onto. We've got to take care of this land. We've got to nurture it, nurture the soil as well as the crops because we can't just flip over to the next 50 acres. We've got 5 acres here and that's it.

So, for that reason, we practice a lot of crop rotation. We won't plant the same crop succeeding that crop for at least a year, sometimes longer. We grow a lot of different varieties here so it's rather complex but we always remember somehow that we did we had broccoli or brassica, like collards collards or cabbage or brussels sprouts in one place and we don't plant that the next season there. We always move over a little bit.

DT: What's the point of rotating crops?

DT: If you could tell a little bit more about crop rotation, what the point is to that?

CAS: Okay. Well, a certain crop has different requirements, from the soil, from the season, and everything, certain diseases that are pertinent to it and nutrient necessities. So if you grow broccoli in one spot and you turn around and put broccoli right back in there, if there was a disease beginning with the first broccoli crop, it's really going to be thrilled that you planted broccoli again and it'll take hold and really run wild.

Same thing for insect pests. If the harlequin bugs were just beginning to get your first broccoli crop and you turn around and put another broccoli crop right in behind it, they're going to eat it up before it even has a chance to to grow. So for for that reason, you would want to rotate. You would want to put something that is very dissimilar to broccoli, like lettuce. Lettuce is a great one because it has very few pests. The harlequin bugs don't care for lettuce so you would follow broccoli with a lettuce perhaps. The roots aren't as deep. It needs different things. It takes less room, or whatever, many reasons but you always want to follow an unlike crop follow with an unlike crop.

If we've got okra in one spot, we're not going to put okra there the next season. But mainly it's because of diseases and pests that you want to rotate, and nutrients. Certain plants take certain things from the soil. If you follow with the same crop, it's going to deplete that nutrient and soil, but if you have something else that's totally different, it will use different things from the soil so that you don't tire your soil out. It's more of a balanced you're going to deplete it but it's more balanced.

And then you'll feed it with compost or a cover crop after those and then everything will be restored, hopefully, to the harmony that the next crop needs. But the the early settlers, I don't think they quite understood that. They they were there to get the most out the soil they could.

Now now they they may have used manure. We don't really too much about what they used. They they had cattle so they may have put the cattle manure back on the fields. And they did they were growing different types of crop. Tobacco and corn have different requirements. Wheat and cotton and so forth, have different requirements. So there was a certain rotation but they did have the luxury of having a lot of land so they could still move onto the next piece when things were looking bad.

But they came here and they flourished. They were wealthy people by any standard. This house is built of cypress. It's a Greek revival house. The siding outside is cypress. Of course, it's square nails. The roof was shingles. They were handhand-made on the spot. We found part of an old shingle shaping tool that would cut the shingles from the from a log. They had an outdoor kitchen because, in Texas, it's hot in the summer and so you don't want a fireplace stove or a fireplace used as a stove to heat up the house.

And there's the danger of fire. If you have an open fire burning all the time, you have more danger of fire in the house. So they built this house, it's by Austin standards at the time, it was very luxurious. Most of the houses in the Austin area in the 1840's were log cabins or single single walled plank construction. And this house is double walled. It was lath and plaster inside. Had had two chimneys, has two chimneys, four fireplaces. Wide boards for the floor boards and an outside kitchen.

They also had a house in Bastrop. They were people of means. Had a house in Bastrop, two lots there and he was a founder of Montopolis which is a community just right across the river from here. And his partners and he wanted it to be the capitol of Texas but the favor swung to Austin.

Austin itself, the city, was just 2 ½ miles to the west of up the river, up the Colorado from here. And so everything was perking along great for the Smiths in 1840's. They had 19 slaves and did a big business selling their goods in the city. There were about 400 farmers in Austin in that time. Very few lawyers, incidentally, just a few, but a lot of farmers. That was the main occupation. There were printers. There were doctors.

The person who bought the French legation in the early 40's was Dr. Joseph Robertson. He was the family doctor for this for the Smith family. They did have slaves. We're not sure exactly where the slave cabins were. We do know the names of the slaves and, ironically, what their economic value was from old papers that we've researched.

But in 1845, Mr. Smith was mortally wounded from a gunshot wound probably in the stomach, delivered to him by his overseer. We don't know anything more about that except that the family had to pay to have Mr. Baker prosecuted and we don't know anything more about him at that point. But James Smith died after 4 days and he left no written will.

So he had a deathbed will. It was witnessed by Ann Burleson and C.L. Wing and the Dr. Robertson. And in this will, this deathbed will, he gave 400 acres to his eldest son who was his son by a prior marriage and this caused a great deal of concern because the widow said that he shouldn't have gotten that 400 acres and a couple of slaves, incidentally also.

So they had a little bit of a lawsuit going on for the next few years. And because there was no written will, they had to have estate sales out here. And so all of that stuff is in the files.

We researched and found his original original probate package and it was the was the death the 78th death to be probated in Travis County. So all of that's in the archives with the Austin History Center and the Austin the Barker Center at UT.

And when we were researching at the Barker Center, we discovered the letters written by John Franklin Smith and a daughter, Elizabeth Smith not Elizabeth oh Mary Elizabeth, Mary Elizabeth Smith, yes. And they were writing to this cousin that lived in Tennessee begging her to come. And they were begging her to leave the worn out states and come find a good man here because all the good men were here because of the good farmland.

So all of this is there and they told about their life here. About how James told John Franklin told about riding behind his dad going to Austin and they were surprised by Indians. 'Cause its 2 ½ miles to Austin and the Indians were still kind of angry that the settlers had taken Barton Springs and taken over the Colorado River and taken over the big hill where the French legation is and all these other places that they used to frequent.

And so they were attacking and James and John Franklin made it home and he he said that the house here was like a fortress. It had a barricade built around it of cedar posts for Indian attack. But he said they never lost any animals and they didn't ever were never injured themselves. But he wrote about this in a letter to his cousin trying to encourage her to come. And one would think, why in the world would she want to. It sounded like a dangerous place.

But after the death of James, things changed for the family. They still farmed here but they had to move into the town because she had she had just she just delivered a baby eight months after his death. And so they moved into town and ironically stayed in the same house that the French Ambassador, de Saligny, had stayed. And that was where they had the famous pig war in downtown Austin which which is one of the famous pieces of early Austin history.

There was a man named Bullock who had a hotel at 6th and Congress and he was upset but he was he kept pigs and de Saligny was upset because he had a dog trap dog trot house, a log cabin type and the pigs were just running through it all the time. And a pig was killed and Bullock was upset and so they were trying to get the French Ambassador thrown out of Austin and letters were written to the Secretary of State about it and all this.

And Elizabeth happened to live in this house after all this happened. She also owned a complete city block near the capitol, block 119. So she she inherited a lot of stuff and and she had three daughters, one son and then James by the prior marriage had a two sons. One of which went on to become a judge. And after that, the various children tried to farm here.

Of course, the Civil War interrupted and John Franklin served in the army. He was stationed in Galveston and he wrote letters to the to the cousin from Galveston describing how it was in Galveston during those times.

And then after the war, he came back and tried to farm here and wrote about how hard it was because he had now no laborers. He had he didn't have enough equipment, he didn't have enough mules. And so we we hear a little bit about how it was during the hard times following the war when the the money was worthless and foreign power was in the office and so forth.

But then finally, Elizabeth was nearing the the end of her life. She died at about the age of 65. And she gave the property this this homestead to her daughter, Mary Elizabeth who had married James Matthew's son and then she passed it to her son, Eric Matthews, in about 1885. And then he sold it to somebody else shortly afterwards. I guess he didn't want to farm.

And it went through a couple of owners until the Spence family bought it. And they bought it in 1902 and they farmed it or else rented it out until about 1935 or so and the daughter, Bertha Spence Linscomb(?) bought it. She and her husband and they ran cattle.

We have an old photo of them out to the side of the house with with their cows. And they kept it pretty much intact and probably it it started being reduced in size in about the 1850 1950's. And then it was different parcels were sold sold off.

The Gold Valley Elementary School sits on part of the land. The railroad track cuts across part of the land. And now subdivision is all around it and there's house lots and houses and paving and concrete everywhere and no more farming.

But during the century, especially in the up to about the 50's, this was all truck farming over here. There are little wells all over the place, little 25 foot hand dug wells tapping into the aquifer or the river bottom water that's right under ground about 20 feet. So it's perfect, good soil, deep soil, perfect acidity and plenty of water.

And they say that the first commercial spinach came out of this area and was shipped northward. They washed it in the springs up at Oak Springs. Now, of course, those springs don't run anymore but, at that time, it was good, cool water and they washed the spinach and packed it into railroad cars and sent it out north. And, even today, we grow excellent spinach here. It's one of our premiere crops. The flavor is nutty and just full of life and unlike any spinach you'll ever find in a grocery store.

DT: Can you talk a little bit about how your role as farmers have sort of diverged from the conventional farming? I guess at one time most people farmed like the Smiths, or like you do. But in the intervening years there's a whole sort of industrial agriculture that has come up, and can you sort of explain a little bit how your practice is different from theirs?

CAS: Well the Smiths, of course, farmed with mules. And they had plenty of labor. It was costly labor, in a sense, because all everything costs. But they we farm more like them I'd say except and Larry has threatened to get a mule because he's he's driven mules before and he's they know right where to step. They're just excellent for plowing and such. But it's it's difficult being a small farmer because the the economy of scale is not there. You can't have the giant tractors. You don't have the giant piece of land.

A conventional farmer generally is not going to make it in this day and age unless he's got about 500 acres or more because then he can't compete either. A lot of the agriculture is sifting to shifting to other countries where labor is very cheap.

For instance, the minimum wage in Mexico is about $5.00 a day. And we pay our folks more than that per hour. And so it's hard even for the conventional farmers in the in the United States to compete with that because their labor is very costly. But tend they tend to be more not necessarily farmers, more manufacturers or they're driving big machines and they're growing two or three crops at the most and hundreds and hundreds of acres of those crops.

And the image is rarely that they ever step onto the land. Their shadow is not cast on the land unless they had to get down to fix the tractor for some reason. They're high above it in air conditioned cabs with CD's playing and and all that and and so they say that the best fertilizer for a garden is a farmer's shadow and that's that all you're getting there is a big machine shadow.

But they're having to worry about commodity markets and the price of wholesale price for things and it's cents per bushel and it's it's tough. And they've got such a heavy equipment load. These tractors can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the big ones. And all of the machinery they use. Nothing is by hand. All the cultivation is by machine, the transplanting, the harvesting, the culling, the disking, everything's by machine.

And, of course, if you're using machines, if you can afford the interest payments and all that, it is cheaper than labor the hand labor to do that on such a large scale. So that's one reason the food is so cheap in the market place for the for the retail customer because they are using machinery instead of people. And they the the problem is though that they are farming on credit.

They're going and making the big bank loan and they're bearing all that the risk of paying that back if things don't work, of course, they also have crop insurance if things don't work that they can collect on. But it it really never gets them totally out of the hole. They're still going from year to year and hoping that next year they'll make a killing and pay all that back and everything will be right with the world.

Our our answer to that is we can't afford those big machines and they would be ridiculous on this small plot anyway and the big machines are not good for the land. They're very extremely heavy. They compact the soil. They destroy the soil life and that's contrary to our whole philosophy of protecting the soil.

So instead of taking out big bank loans we we bought our little tractor that we use infrequently. We bought it for cash 'cause our philosophy is, to be a small farmer, you better not have any debt, none at all. We don't ever go to the bank and borrow money. We may not be able to pay it back.

Our answer though to our our our safety net is to grow so many different varieties of crops that if some of them fail, some of them will make. The big farmer, if he farms only corn and he loses the crop to hail or whatever, that's it. That's it. Crop insurance is going to cover his cost but that's it. He'll have to borrow money the next year and and do it again.

But we grow so many things that this way if we lose our endive, well, we don't have endive this season, you know, that's just the way it is. Everybody will get over it and we'll have radicchio instead. Or escarole or lettuce or something else like that. And it seems like it all just kind of evens out. I mean, we wouldn't know what to do if everything made. You know, we would just be it would be too much. So we do we have the diversity. That's our our safety net. And we tend the crops and we don't get in debt.

We tend the crops by hand mostly with hoes and small tillers and and shovels and pitchforks and stuff like that and no debt. Everything's when we got into this, when we found this land in 1992, we thought well, we can farm here. We already had our other farm but it was 75 miles away, not close to markets and we thought well, this is near the market. Maybe the market will come to us or we can go quickly to the grocery store to deliver the goods without it wilting on the way.

And so we we thought well, we've got probably enough savings to live very simply for two years without earning a dime. And we'll just do this. It'll be an experiment. If it doesn't work, we'll have to go get a job. We'll have a nice place to live but we'll have to get a job. So that's what we did.

And within six months, the farm was paying its own way. Now we weren't making any money but the farm, all of the seed costs, all the machinery repair, everything that we needed to do what we were doing was paying its own way. And we started very small. We started with probably an area about 200 feet long by probably 100 feet wide, very small.

And the first the first spring that we had a crop was the spring of '93 and we grew a lot of lettuce and we were selling it to Whole Foods. Heads of lettuce, beautiful lettuce. We would rush it down there real fast. Within an hour of picking it, it would be washed and we'd rush it down there and then we'd we'd go back, they'd put it in the cooler, we'd go back the next day and it wouldn't be out.

And we'd go back the next day, it wouldn't be out. And finally we said to one of the produce guys, hey hey, you know, we we killed ourselves to get this lettuce down to the store within an hour of picking and three days later it's not out on the floor. What's the deal? Did you sell it in five minutes or is it what happened?

He said, well hey, I tell you what, you know, we got all this California lettuce here that's traveled many a mile and it's several weeks old and if we put your lettuce out next to this lettuce, we'll have to throw this California lettuce away because the comparison is too intense. It's too great a contrast.

So we got to wait till yours gets a little age on it and we got to wait until we've gotten rid of a lot of that stuff and then we'll put yours out. And so they did and it didn't look quite as good as when we brought it in. But we learned a big lesson that that's that's the kind of delay even local produce can have when it goes wholesale into a grocery store. And it was it was kind of a a sobering thought to us. We picked a little bit less quickly after that.

DT: Well, speaking of Whole Foods and your experience with them, Austin has been incredible for alternative grocery stores now from Wheatsville, an old co-op here, to Whole Foods, I guess is one of the nation's largest now for whole natural foods. Can you tell what your experience has been with the growth of these alternative grocery stores?

CAS: Sure, well we started selling to Whole Foods in 1993 when they had their first little store over on Lamar and we've had generally wonderful experience selling to them because they are a a big proponent of local agriculture and especially organic. So, by and large, the experience has been very good.

There are several angles to that. I mean, we've had some problems like the lettuce and one one time a few years back, I was taking Japanese eggplant and now I realize that this produce guy really didn't know too much about what he was doing but he he would go through my box of Japanese eggplant and feel every one as if he was searching for one that was soft or something.

I was getting a little annoyed, you know, he was just standing there, not saying anything, feeling every eggplant. And I'm thinking well this is my integrity on the line here. You know, this stuff has just been picked. I don't know what you're searching for but it's not rotten. But, I mean, I got over that, you know, but it kind of insulted me a little bit. But everything generally is very good.

They're they're very responsive. They'll call us up when they need something which is which is nice because you it's hard to just guess. Of course, they're so close to us, they're just a six or seven minute drive that we're in there all the time checking on our stuff and maybe pulling something that doesn't look too good after a few days or whatever. But, as they've grown, we've grown and we've sold a lot of produce to them over the years.

Wheatsville [Co-op] we sold to for about one year but there was another farmer in Dripping Springs that we were good friends with and they were selling a lot to Wheatsville and we were selling mainly to Whole Foods and another little grocery store called Fresh Plus, over on West Lynn. And Fresh Plus and Wheatsville were about the same type of market as far as what volume they could handle. So we kind of made a gentleman agreement between the between us two farmers that they would handle Wheatsville and we would handle Fresh Plus because we were growing the same stuff. We were growing what grows here. And so it would be butting our heads together unnecessarily.

So that's kind of what we did and then when Central Market came online, they said we'll we'll take Central Market, y'all stay with Whole Foods. We said, that sounds great to us because we're kind we're the kind that once we've been brought to the dance, we'll leave with the same partner, you know. We just wanted to stick with what we already knew. We already made our relationships and they were ready to go and forge a new one with Central Market. So we we've done that through the years and we've we've pretty well stayed with Fresh Plus and Whole Foods on the grocery stores.

There is, however, for a small farmer, the situation or the question of whether to sell retail or wholesale. The big farmers all sell wholesale, less than wholesale. I mean, you hear them hear them getting thirteen cents a bushel for something in the grocery store that's going to be two dollars a pound and you just can't imagine, how can they even make it. And, of course, it's because it's such great volume.

Well a little farmer can't do that, can't play that game. And a little farmer, especially a little organic farmer, where the labor is so expensive because so much of it is manual labor, to weed and so forth, really can't afford to sell wholesale.

Only when we have great depth in something like right now we have tons of tomatoes so we're selling tomatoes wholesale to to Whole Foods. And we have a lot of potatoes so the potatoes are going there but if we just have a little bit of something, we always save that for our farm stand, our customers that come here to the farm, who make the trek over here to the east side of town. We save the best for them or anything that's in short supply is saved for them and only if we have a great depth or great quantity do we take it wholesale. Because, at some point, growing and selling wholesale, you're breaking even.

I mean, it's just a way to get rid of the produce and, of course, we consider also a form of promotion because Whole Foods will put our name on the sign and people want our produce in there because they've been out the farm but maybe they can't come out here so they want the the convenience of picking it up in the grocery store.

So Whole Foods will put that it's grown by us and maybe even have a few photos of the farm there and and even, at times, will have maps to the farm so people can come out and see the see the farm and buy it really fresh. And they're willing to do that because it's it's good for them, it's good PR for them. It shows very physically that they support local agriculture and it's good for us because then people will eventually come out here and buy from us at a higher price than what we would get from the store. And that makes it all possible.

The customers that come out here, over and over they tell us, thank you for growing this food for them. And it really touches us. But our we feel equally grateful to them that they come out and get it and pay a big price for it and never complain about the price, incidentally. I think that the people that come out here realize, they're educated types, they realize that it's fresh and it's organic and it really shouldn't be the same price that produce in any grocery store is, even produce in Whole Foods which is known to have high prices.

DT: I think that last explanation that you gave touches on a whole other issue about local agriculture and what it means to sustainable agriculture in general. Can you touch on that?

CAS: Well, you know, you can easily go to grocery store and buy all the food that you ever would want. It's available year round. If you want figs, I mean, they're year around. If you want cherries, if you want squash year round, it's there. Now it may have come two thousand miles or it may have come six thousand miles. I mean, they're getting apples from New Zealand.

Even Central Market had eggs from New Zealand. They were seven dollars and something per six but it was the idea of eating eggs that were laid in New Zealand, I guess. I don't know how old they were but, you know, they couldn't have been that fresh. But so much of our food does come, especially from Mexico and further south and it's cheap because, as we said, the wages there are real cheap, the land is cheap and everything just cheap.

The point of eating this food or the the bad thing about eating this food is you don't know what's been sprayed on it. Even even so-called organic agriculture in another country, may or may not be what you're used to or what you think organic agriculture should be. It's hard for for the over oversight people to monitor that. They do have inspections but it's usually just once a year.

Lot a lot can happen that other 364 days of the year to that land. A lot of the people in foreign countries can't read English. All the fertilizers and and amendments are coming generally from up here and they're in English and they can't read English and sometimes can't read Spanish. So and they're the ones putting it on. So we don't know what's happening on the crops down there.

But aside from incidental poisoning of the food supply, there's the problem that the food is is aged. They harvest it one week and it spends time in a warehouse down there, it gets on a train or a or a truck and spends a week in transport. It goes to a distributor. It it languishes there for maybe two or three days until the distributor sells it to the store. It goes to the grocery store. Maybe it stays overnight at least in the cooler, maybe two or three days because they've got to move some other produce out first. And then finally, it's on the shelf.

And Mrs. Jones comes along and thinks that this wilted chard is the way it should be. This is the way it looks. So she buys it, takes it home and feeds it to her family and everybody thinks oh, we're getting our five vegetables a day. Well why are we so tired? Why don't we have any energy?

Well, we need some supplements then and so we have this great, huge, burgeoning market of supplements, vitamins, power drinks, all kinds of potions and liquids and pills to take to give us the vim and vigor that we should be getting from our food. And why is that? Its organic produce that she bought. Why isn't she getting it? Because it's old, it's dead and it should have been buried a long time ago. But instead it's in the grocery store and everybody's eating it.

Now the remedy for that is to buy locally, to buy from farmers that live in your environment, that grow the produce in land that is near you and maybe it only travels an hour or two at most to get to the store. Lot of the stores will permit farmers to come directly to the store and sell it to the back door instead of selling it to a distributor first where it will languish. And so, generally, produce in the grocery store, if you're lucky you can get there on the day it was delivered and if you're lucky that they had time to put it out, that's going to be the freshest a lot of people will get.

Of course, better than that, would be to go to a farmer's market where the produce was probably picked within 24 hours and taken care of or to a farm stand where it may have been picked that morning or the day before. And that way you're getting food that still has nutrition in it and some life in it, some life force. And I think that you'll find that people that eat totally local, take very few vitamins.

We haven't I've had maybe 15 vitamin pills in my life and, knock on wood, I'm feeling okay. We have lots of energy and are very rarely sick. So I don't know if that's a testament or not but, of course, we eat stuff right out of the field and it may be an hour from the field at the most. So maybe there's a jump there too.

But I think that it's good to have producing farms in an area for many reasons. There's the conservation of the land, especially if they're organic farmers and have their their head pointed right where they want to nurture the soil. That's that's only good for future generations because no one can read the future. No one knows what's going to happen to the food supply in the future.

All this Y2K stuff, they say it may shut down the trucks and what not and the the old produce may not be able to to get here so without a good local produce system, then what are what are people going to eat?

Of course, it's very important to have a backyard garden too. That's that's even the best. But most people are in concrete buildings all the time and not able to tend a garden which in and it does require a lot of time to grow food. Lot of time, lot of energy and lot of dealing with the insects and heat and discomfort. So most people won't do that and maybe they'll grow tomatoes, that'll be bout it.

But its very important, I think, to nurture a an agricultural community around every city. Just just in case just in case some big thing happens or the food supply coming in is tainted for some reason. It's just important to have that back up and plus it takes care of the land.

In in Texas, we have kind of a different mindset, historically. The the land most of the land in Texas is used for the cattle industry. About 70% of it, in some estimates, is devoted to either grazing or raising feed for cattle or feed lots. And when this happens, you have a a huge degradation of the soil because the hooves of the cattle are small and their body weight is pretty heavy and and you have a lot of compaction of the soil and and typically over grazing and stuff like that that depletes the soil.

It would be nice if we could get a little more variety in Texas, a little more vegetable, little bit more vegetables. I mean, if we just got away with devoting 10% of that 70% of the land to vegetables, we could practically feed the entire United States, just out of that amount of land because you can grow a lot of vegetables in the acre that it would take to support a cow. So, you know, it would be nice to kind of change the trend from cattle so much to vegetables in Texas especially. Cause we do have a year round growing season.

DT: Can you talk a little bit about where you think trends are going? I understand that organic agriculture is growing by 20% a year. Where do you think these changes will take us?

CAS: Well I think as more and more people are being educated, that the demand will be there. We have folks coming up all the time wanting to do "what we're doing". Well they only see us on market day usually and they think we're standing around talking to people and having a great time which is true. Maybe patting an eggplant or something. But it's interesting when they come out when we're all hot and sweaty and they tell us we want to do what you're doing. And we think, oh, you're serious then.

And but there is a lot of interest. Different organizations like Texas Organic Growers Association are putting the word out, trying to educate people and trying to encourage people who who want to farm.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is under new leadership this year, Susan Cohns and she has met with organic growers and everyone so far has been pretty impressed. She's bringing us in under the umbrella of Texas agriculture. Whereas for the last few years, we've been kind of stuck in a closet and ignored. Which was good, we thought that was good because at least our program wasn't axed.

Cause all of our certification here in Texas goes through the Department of Agriculture. We have a coordinator and inspectors who come out at least once a year and walk the land and sample the soil and sample the tissues of the plants and run through labs and see if we've got anything bad on it. It's not so much an adversary role that they play. If they turn up something in our tissue sample then we work together to try to find out what it is. What is the problem? Where did it come from? Is it some some something off the farm or whatever it might be.

So far, we've been clean every year. No problem but, you know, it's always possible that something can come in even from something falling out of the sky. You just don't know. Air pollution, water pollution, a big flood or something brings a bunch of oil in on your farm. Who knows.

So but their their main deal is to try to foster organic agriculture and to help the farmers to do it because it's not an easy type of farming to to do. But if there was a serious problem, they would shut down our certification. If there was something that exceeded their, basically kind of their 5% rule, because they realize there's air pollution, there's exhaust and what not around farms, but if something does violate that, then that produce is no longer certified and so we would have to sell it as transitional which is a lower premium but at least it lets the people, the customer, know that it's not certified organic anymore.

And it's it's not a hard process to become certified organic. But your your land has to be clean and generally they like a history of of the land of what's been done to it in the past, past 8 or 10 years. And then they do the testing. And if your history shows that there was nothing, no chemical farming on it, and if the tests come up clean, then it's pretty much automatic that you'll you're certified organic. So it's not a it's not impossible to to do. If the land's been fallow for twenty years, well then you're probably a shoe in unless you yourself have been using chemicals.

DT: Maybe you can talk a little bit about the scale of farming and what that means to the gardener or commercial farmer or the niche farmer.

CAS: Right. Well we are a niche farmer. Some people call us a fresh produce garden, fresh market gardener or a market gardener and a airplane gardener.

DT: We were talking about the scale of agriculture. Could you treat some of that too?

CAS: Well, you know, a lot of gardeners come up here to the farm farm stand and ask us about problems with this and that. They've all got gardens and and one thing we've noticed is they'll come up and say, well what you do about vine bores on your squash? And we say, well we don't do anything about it. Oh you don't. Well, you know, when you've got 500 squash plants, if you get 6 of them eaten up with vine bores, you just don't worry about it. You just kick them off to the side and go on. But they've got six squash plants and so if they've got 6 vine bores, they don't have any squash.

And so there's the that's the clearest difference in what we're doing and what they're doing. They only have a few plants and, of course, they have, you know, if they're really tending it, they have no weeds. Everything is just perfect because there's not much to do once you've done a 10 x 10 garden, it's pretty quick work.

Of course, the same thing goes to the huge commercial grower. They've got maybe 5000 squash plants so if they've got six vine bores, they worry even less than we do. But it's just the same things are involved in a sense, starting the seed and the transplanting and the mulching and the care and the watering and all that. It's all the same no matter what size you're growing on. It's just when you have devastation enter I think is the biggest difference because what what would really wipe them out doesn't affect us too much and it's just nothing to a big giant grower. See what else would there be?

DT: I understand that y'all grow upwards of 70 different crops during the course of the year and that's different from the typical conventional farmer who might raise 3 to 4 during the year. Can you explain a little bit about why you do that?

CAS: Well, first of all, it's it's kind of difficult to grow such diversity because every plant has a different requirement. And so, I mean, if you're just putting in 500 acres of corn, you clean it all off, you get the seed drill hooked up to the tractor and you go. And you plant the same seed on all 500 acres and that's it. Then you go home, put your feet up and watch the satellite TV and worry about your bank loan.

But here, we're putting in generally in a any given market, we have maybe 15 different crops that we're harvesting. So we're we're talking about 15 different treatments at any given time during the year and this may change every couple of months. So it's a little more difficult in the planning and just organizing the seeds and ordering the seeds and just planning the the season is more difficult because it's complex.

But we do feel like it gives us protection. Like, for instance, last year, if all we had was tomatoes in the ground last year, we wouldn't be here this year or else we'd have to go get a bank loan because the heat was such. It was a record heat wave last summer and the hottest summer in 150 years, they say. Even the Smiths hadn't had a as hot a summer as we'd had. And the tomato it was too hot for the tomatoes to set fruit. Whenever you get temperatures in the 80's at night, a tomato will not set fruit.

We had 1500 plants in at the other farm for our fall crop and they bloomed three times, luxuriant blooms, covered with yellow flowers and not one tomato off of 1500 plants. So we had no tomatoes for the fall farm stand. And people were saying, no tomatoes. Oh I came over here, I wanted tomatoes. You usually have tomatoes in September and October, no tomatoes. At the same time, all the gardeners were coming up and saying, I can't get any tomatoes. Well, we'd say it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself. It's the weather. It's the heat. They won't set. So you're blameless.

This year, by contrast, of course, is a bumper crop year. Tons of tomatoes. The gardeners are bragging about their tomatoes. They're delirious they're so happy they've got tomatoes. But it's nothing they did differently. They did not do one thing better this year than last year. It's just simply the weather.

So we don't grow just tomatoes because you can't count on that. We grow as many things as we can for that reason and also partly selfishly because we eat totally out of the farm. And we want variety in our diet. We don't want to just eat tomatoes. We want the sorrel and the basil to go with them. We want the onions and the potatoes, the squash and the eggplant. The cucumbers, the lambs quarters, the herbs. We want all that stuff along with the tomatoes.

And the people who come to the farm to buy their produce, they want variety too. Not necessarily do they demand to have broccoli when there's when it shouldn't be any broccoli. But they want the variety, the bounty of of each season. They want to stuff themselves with that, huge volumes of it. And then when it's over and they're sick of it, the new palate comes out, the new crops, the brascos, the greens, all that stuff of fall that they're looking forward to.

And so over the year, they will get a true variety in their diet. They're not just eating bell peppers all year long and they're not just eating cardboard tomatoes when they shouldn't be eating tomatoes. So that's why we grow such a diverse amount of of produce, is for ourselves and for the people who come here and to ward off disaster. And there's chickens.

DT: Can you look in your crystal ball and think of this as a message for the future and give some sort of comment about what you think is important coming up for the new generations?

CAS: Well, I think that personally I I believe strongly that people should be independent. That, I mean, we've been self employed most of our life and I guess that's part of that. But I don't think people should rely on bank loans to get them over the hard spots, I mean, unless it's absolutely necessary, a mortgage or something but I think people should be independent and independence begins with the food. That is the one thing that we all have to have, food. We don't even really need water if we're growing enough watery vegetables. We can drink our water through our food.

So I think that everyone should know how to grow a plant. Everyone should know how to grow a tomato or head of lettuce. And if they know that, not that they have to do it, but if they know that and can pass it on to their children and to their grandchildren, we have a security there that is not possible any other way.

I mean, you see starving people all over the place, you see Africa where the the land has turned to desert. I don't know if that's just nature or if it's something man did or whatever. You see crops being introduced into a place like Africa that that should have existed on amaranth which used to grow wild there and it was used as they would grind it into flour, they would use the leaves in their soups and then the the Western world introduced corn because they could sell corn seed over there. And now they're relying on corn. Then we get the drought. Amaranth will do very well in a drought, corn won't. Now people are starving.

So I think that if we'd let people learn how to grow food and grow the foods that are appropriate to their environment and appropriate to the season and give them that knowledge, that they'll have the protection they need to exist as a species. And if we teach them the organic method of conserving the soil, of loving the soil and thinking strictly of the health of the soil and not worrying about anything else, then we will conserve the soil for future generations. And take care of the land so that they too can grow their own food and survive as a species.

DT: You painted for years, oils and you produced prints that you sold and now you're a farmer. Can you talk about the connection that you see between art and farming and nature?

CAS: Well I painted I painted for about twenty years. I've always drawn every since I was a child. I filled notebooks full of horses and and people and did just anything I would see, I would draw it. And I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to be a commercial artist because I really didn't understand what real artists did, not that commercial artists aren't but that's what I thought you did to make a living.

And my father who worked in the Air Force and had they had commercial artists on staff, knew how poorly paid they were and he told me that no, they're a dime a dozen. Just you can't do that. So I got a degree in English and Spanish and taught school for three years. And then I quit to have my second child and started painting because I'm kind of active person. I just didn't want to sit around being pregnant.

So I began painting and soon I was teaching painting and I was in galleries and did limited edition prints and had a really wonderful career going in art. And then I kind of got bored. After twenty years, I was really kind of bored. I always painted nature scenes though, animals or birds or landscapes and even the still lifes I did usually had a flower in them or something alive or something that used to be alive, even like a butterfly. Sounds kind of morbid but dead butterflies feature were featured in a lot of my still life paintings.

Well anyway, I painted for for twenty years and and basically painted nature and oddly a lot of it was out of my imagination because it was kind of difficult to go out on site and paint in the way I did. I did oils and they're hard to transport and flies will get into them and dust and everything. So I would take a few pictures but generally I would sit in front of a blank canvas and conjure up a landscape and so it was slightly romanticized. And, you know, figurative or whatever and then I got into birds.

I did some traveling in Guatemala and did a series on the Guatemalan Indians. They had beautiful Huipils, the embroidered clothes they wore. And I was fairly successful, thank goodness, selling all this stuff but then just kind of got tired of doing the same thing. And when when you're in art, if you paint a certain way and you suddenly change radically, your customers get very upset because generally they liked what you did and they're not going to like what you're about to do.

So I thought well, you know, we had this opportunity to start farming because we'd always wanted to do that and so we started doing that. And farming is all encompassing. So was art. I mean, when I painted, I painted all day long, every day. It was total immersion and farming is the same way. Total immersion, there's always something to do and the the best similarity though, I think, between the two well there's several, one is just the sheer beauty of everything that you're working with. The flowers and the the leaves of the plants themselves. Like the okra leaves, I mean, if I were painting now, I would paint okra. The leaves are just fabulous. If I were painting now, I would paint the flowers. I would paint baskets of tomatoes, all of that stuff.

It would just it would just be there's so much out there to paint. In fact, we have art schools that come out here periodically and we we let them sit around the farm and they paint and they do the chickens and everything and I paint pictures of Tubby, the cat. I mean, there's just so much. He's had his picture painted by some of the artists.

And so there's there's the beauty of in art that you're trying to find and convey and the beauty at a farm that you're trying to encourage because a beautiful plant is a healthy plant. And if it's healthy, it's nutritious. So we want our vegetables to be beautiful.

And then the other thing about art and farming is the the customer. The customer, the person who bought my paintings or merely looked at them shared such a a gratitude almost with me that they appreciated that I was doing this and that was kind of novel because I had never had that. Not too many people came up when I was a school teacher and told me they appreciated me teaching. Now they do twenty years later but not at the time. They're kind of sick, they have to go. But, in art, they they would show me so much love in the process of buying a painting or commissioning it or whatever.

And on the farm, at the farm stand, it's the same thing. They come out and they pet Tubby first and then they tell me things like, thank you for growing this food. And it's just such a refreshing thing. Larry says when he was doing real estate, he said nobody ever thanked him for selling them a house. I mean, they just thought, well how much money is he making on this, you know, golly. We spent money. He made money. But here they don't they don't talk about crass things like that. It's just thank you for growing this food and thank you for nurturing us.

And that's just, I mean, this is not about money. We want enough money from the produce to be able to continue doing this because we love it but it's really about nourishing people and feeling good about what we do and hoping that we are making strong bodies so that they can deal with the demons in their life and go on to do great things. And that's that's basically our purpose.

DT: Thank you. And I can say that we're very grateful for you spending this time with us. End of reel 2002 End of interview with Carol Ann Sayle