Quite the weekend.
Yesterday, I visited Chaffin Family Orchards in Oroville, CA. I’ve been waiting for this weekend for quite a while. It’s the weekend I pick up my cow.
I know, I know. It’s not a cow. It’s a steer. Not all cattle are cows, and not all tissues are Kleenex. Let’s move on.
I somehow conned my good friend Ben into coming with and running camera for me while I toured the ranch and interviewed Chris Kerston, the rancher/media liaison/marketing chief/beef guru/tour guide/good dude who’d agreed to show us around.
Chris is my beef guy.
Chris
Chaffin Family Orchards started up a hundred years ago when Del Chaffin bought the land from UC Berkeley, which had an ag research station there. The research station grew olive trees, and those original olive trees are still there. They’re fat and gnarled and picturesque now, and still producing fruit.
Everything Chaffin grows is certified organic or beyond. They have a wide variety of fruit they produce, including the original olives, chickens, chevron (goat), eggs, nectarines, grapefruit, lemons, oranges, persimmons, pomegranates… the list goes on. I think they have a river of molten chocolate and an organic candy rainbow somewhere on the property.
Regardless, we find Chris as we’re poking around the Honor System farm stand they have set up on the property. You can drive in, pick out the stuff you’d like to buy, and drop your money into a slot on the top of a safe they have sitting out. It’s cool. They trust you.
So Chris shows us around. Turns out, they don’t raise free range, grass-fed beef just to raise free range, grass-fed beef.
They do it to raise better fruit.
Thus began my introduction into a ridiculously cool agricultural program. There are no isolated monocultures here. Every crop they raise works in tandem with everything else.
They have these ancient olive trees, which were the original basis for the ranch. They’re planted in neat rows, equidistant from each other.
Left alone, other plants will grow up between the trees. Plants like blackberry bushes, which can grow tall enough to choke out olive trees in as little as three weeks.
So growers need to mow between the trees. They put a guy on a tractor, and he knocks all the grass and shrubs back to a manageable level so they don’t overwhelm the fruit crop. This means you have to have a guy, you have to have a tractor, you have to have fuel for that tractor, and you have to pay that dude to play Hank Hill for two days a week or so. It’s a huge energy input, and it isn’t especially efficient, either economically or environmentally.
Chaffin does things differently. Rather than hire The Guy Who Mows, they bring in goats. The goats mow down the shrubbery and keep the lower six feet of the trees pruned (fruit trees need to be pruned of green shoots off the main trunk, lest their yield decline). Further, the goats fertilize the soil as they return that shrubbery to the earth as manure.
Mmmm... shrubbery.
As a result, rather than pay The Guy Who Mows, Chaffin gets an extra crop to sell. And that crop prunes and fertilizes the trees to boot, further increasing their fruit yield.
Then, when the goats have cleared out the shrubbery, the folks at Chaffin send in the cattle. The cattle eat the grass the goats have left behind, and further fertilize the soil with their manure. In addition, the cattle are another crop, further displacing The Guy Who Mows.
They're like bovine ninjas.
So I’m not just getting grass-fed beef, I’m getting the elusive and rare Forest Cattle.
And frankly, it was pretty remarkable to see a herd of eleven hundred pound steers scampering hither and yon amidst hundred year old olive trees. They really are quite nimble.
Then, three days after cattle have cropped the grass down to millimeters, the ranchers send in the chickens. Contrary to popular belief, chickens are omnivores. They’re at their best when they eat both grass and animal protein in the form of bugs. Bugs like the ones that hatch in the manure of cattle, three days after said cattle have passed through.
Ah, nature.
So the chickens come through, eat bugs, fertilize the trees (again) and lay eggs (another crop). And in what I thought was a stroke of genius, they lay the eggs in a mobile chicken coop. As Chris put it, “We don’t play Easter morning every day out here.” The chickens are imprinted with the image of their mobile chicken coop when they’re chicks.
Put another way, they think the mobile chicken coop is their Mom.
Mama...
Finally, in what I considered one of the most remarkable aspects of the system, they equip each herd of goats with a livestock guardian dog – usually a Great Pyrenees – who lives, eats, sleeps and bonds with the herd. The herd accepts the dog as one of their own, and the dog, for his part, considers himself a full-fledged goat.
I'm old, but I will break you off...
The dogs let people approach, but not coyotes, mountain lions, foxes, wolves, chupacabra, or whatever might like to take a bite out of a goat. This makes the system environmentally friendly to the point that even Hungry Carnivores In Search of Goat-Kebabs are gently rebuffed.
Coyote: “I will kill and eat you.”
Dog: “I’d prefer you didn’t.”
Coyote: “Well… okay.”
To summarize: Goats eat shrubs. Cattle eat the grass that’s left. Chickens eat the bugs and grass that results. And the dogs keep everybody safe.
Oh, and they raise several thousand acres of fruit and olives while they’re at it.
I was really impressed with the system Chaffin has set up, and Chris took the better part of an afternoon to show me around and explain the different aspects of production that a city kid like me would likely miss. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend making the trip to Oroville and checking them out.
At the end of the day, Chris sent me away with a bag of nectarines, fresh off the trees. I munched them on the way to our lodging for the evening. (We spent the night in Oroville. LA is six hours away.)
Those, my friends, were some remarkable nectarines. Sweet and soft, and among the moist poignent fruit-moments I’ve ever had. When I got home, I shared them with my toddler son. He was very impressed.
It was a good day. A beautiful organic farm, a relaxing, informative tour, and ultra-ripe nectarines as I drove to my quaint, lakeside B&B for a well-deserved night’s rest.
Wait, what? B&B? No. This is Oroville. Ben and I stayed at the Gold Country Hotel and Casino.
They’re the best hotel on earth. Why?
Their logo is a BEAR THAT EATS YOUR DREAMS.
Fear me.
