El Cerrito Prof's Bumper Crop of Info on California Farming

If El Cerrito’s goat guy has his way, you’ll be spending your next vacation neither at the mountains nor the sea, but cruising through the Central Valley looking at corn and melons, dairy cows and silage.

And you’ll love it.

Familiar figure with goats

Paul Starrs, professor of geography, author, and would-be tour adviser, is best known to his neighbors in the El Cerrito hills for his two goats, which can be spotted contentedly munching brush on the hillside behind his home.

In years past, when Starrs’ daughters (and the goats) were younger, Vlad  and Tinsel played a more visible role in town – hauling a cart filled with neighborhood kids trick-or-treating on Halloween.

Main job: geography professor, author of new book

But goats aren’t his main thing. A professor of geography at the University of Nevada (he’s in Reno four days a week), Starrs writes about farming and ranching and Mexican mining – and film noir and cowboy poetry. He also studies the oak woodlands of Spain and Portugal, and worked years ago as a ranch hand.

His latest tome – close to 500 pages, smallish print, lots of picture – is Field Guide to California Agriculture, (University of California Press, $60 hardcover, $24.95 paperback), a book he wants to see alongside your driver’s seat. His co-author is Peter Goin.

After a chatty 90-page introduction, the book gets into its meat – a crop by crop, beast by beast illustrated guide to everything grown in the state, avocados, almonds (California’s leading agricultural export), sheep (an industry on a downward spiral) and marijuana, whose “value may equal all other agricultural products combined.”

Wonder what broccoli looks like when it’s in the ground? Can’t tell a peach tree from an almond? Wish you could recognize the “lithe elegance” of a pistachio tree? Are you one of those people – Starrs says they’re legion – who gaze at a field and wonder, “What in the hell is that?”

“This book will help them answer that question,” he says – thanks in good measure to Goin, a professor of art at Nevada who shot the photos.

Intimate view of the state's farms

The book should also help people connect more deeply to farms, the land, and to farmers. As Starrs points out, only one percent of Californians work in agriculture.

Putting on his tour guide hat, he says, “When you go from Point A to Point B in California, see if you can do it by the back roads. People who are in a hurry miss a lot.”

“Be willing to stop if you see a sign for eggs for sale. Go up to the house, knock on the door.”

In California, there is plenty to see. The state grows nearly 400 different crops and, if you count timber and grazing on public land, agriculture occupies up to 70 percent of the state’s land.

“Once you are attuned,” Starrs writes, “those agriscapes offer a continuing marvel to the eyes and senses.”

“Is there a more beautiful or a more wonderful or a more welcoming place than a walnut grove that’s just been irrigated in San Joaquin County or Sacramento County, with its solid canopy?” Starrs asks. “It’s pitch black underneath, and there’s a beautiful graft line where the English walnut has been grated onto the black walnut.”

Farm-viewing etiquette

Is it OK to visit an orchard or peer over a field? Generally yes, Starrs says, “as long as you don’t come out with a basket of walnuts.”

Respect the farm and the farmer. Ask permission if workers are around, and knock on the farmhouse door if possible. Some farms, concerned about liability, may drive visitors off. “But if you’re just stopping to look at what’s going on, few people object.”

Unless, of course, the crop is marijuana.

The dark side

While researching the book, Starrs and Goin traveled between 16,000 and 18,000 miles, Starrs says and saw both the good and the bad.

There was the time Starrs and Goin came upon a field of tomatoes, with the red, ripe, delicious ones left in the field to rot while their green unripe brothers were piled into trucks for delivery to a famous burger chain that would store them till needed then use gas to turn them a sickly red.

Or the time Starrs, a lover of Gravenstein apples, came upon eight acres fallen from the trees, abandoned and unwanted, due to the “plummeting popularity of some once-prized apple varieties.”

“You felt like you were getting saturated with apple brandy, or calvados,” he says. “All the apples were on the ground and fermenting. I just felt like crying because it was going to waste.”

It’s also notable that one agri-business refused to let Starrs or Goin anywhere near the henhouse. “Not once were we permitted to visit and photograph a commercial turkey or chicken producer.” This includes the growers of “free range” birds.

Starrs notes that free range in America differs considerably from free range in Europe, where chickens are given 43 square feet to roam. In California, they get a one and a half cubic feet, Starrs says.

“I think they’re just terrified of bad press in general,” he says of the poultry producers.

Starrs is particularly fond of turkeys. “The turkey is a great bird … with a deliberation to its movements reminiscent of an unbalanced small-town mayor,” he writes. You wonder what small town mayor he had in mind.

A matter of scale

Starrs recalls driving down Interstate 5 towards San Luis Obispo passing miles of orange groves on his left, 17 miles to be exact. The entire stretch was owned by a single company. “We’re just operating at a scale that few other places in the world are capable of matching,” he says.

Yet, Starrs says, “Family farms exist in substantial quantities.”

“An awful lot of the best innovations come from small producers,” he says. “They’re the ones who tend to be entrepreneurial and experimental.”

The bigger picture, setting the record straight

More than a field guide, Starrs and Goin’s book provides a social history of farming – and eating. It debunks the myth, for example, that two-thirds of the state’s avocados are eaten as guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday. In fact, more are consumed on Cinco de Mayo.

He writes about farmland in peril, noting that in Contra Costa County, the number of farms is down 30 percent since 1987.

And he notes some of the challenges facing farming in the state – including that farmers are an aging species. The average age of a farmer, once 40, is now 60. It’s been rising inexorably for the past 35 years.

Would-be farmers, though, should have an easy time learning the ropes. UC-Berkeley remains the top school in the nation for agricultural economics, and has a good range management program, Starrs says. His wife, Lynn Huntsinger, is a professor at the university’s College of Natural Resources.

Some current farmers are also facing troubles. Some of the state’s most experienced farm workers, with decades of knowledge and skills, face deportation due to heightened immigration enforcement. “They’re scared,” he says.

It’s worthy of note that in 400 to 450 farm visits, “Only in one case did somebody come out and meet us who spoke English as his first language,” Starrs says. They were greeted by more native speakers of Punjabi than of English.

The field guide deals with other threats to California farming, ranging from the glassy-winged sharpshooter to climate change to suburbanization.

But on the whole, Starrs remains upbeat, encouraged by the growing interest in how food is produced. “People in California, in particular, are in the vanguard,” he says. “They’re concerned about where the food they eat comes from.”

Back in El Cerrito

He loves living in his corner of El Cerrito, which blends suburbia with wildlands. “This part of the El Cerrito Hills is just a pleasure,” he says. “The is spectacular. We have some pretty good habitat around here.”

The location also offers easy access to locally grown food thanks to Giovanni’s Produce, Monterey Market, and farmers markets.

He applauds the urban agriculture movement. “It’s fascinating to me that’s really coming back strong.”

Starrs won special dispensation from the city a decade ago to keep goats by arguing they’d prevent fire by controlling the brush that backs up to his house and his neighbors’. Starrs and his family live on Arlington Boulevard above a privately owned open space that abuts the Hillside Nature Area.

Vlad and Tinsel munch their way through close to five acres of grassland, helping protect a dozen houses.

On November 7, the City Council will consider an ordinance, proposed by the Environmental Quality Committee, that would make it legal to keep goats, chickens and other farm animals in town, without permits but under certain conditions. Starrs approves.

“As you can tell from the book, I believe that the domestication of animals is one of the more impressive things that we humans have done in our tenure on Earth, and it's a pity to sever animals from our everyday existence.”

 “Agriculture and suburban life can co-exist quite effectively,” he says.

 Dave Weinstein is a member of the city’s Environmental Quality Committee.