Silicon Valley's Roots Return As "Urban Agriculture"

With the passage of AB 551, the State of California has blessed the concept and is encouraging local land use agencies to designate Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones. In this drought year especially, this is a signal that cities throughout California should be re-thinking their land use policies to foster more local food production, while reducing their dependance on industrial agriculture. In San Jose, we can leverage this new legislation to both increase our local food security and protect our local groundwater.

One of my greatest pleasures is growing my own vegetables and fruit both at home and in a nearby community garden, which holds the honor of being the first in this state permitted to use recycled water from our wasted-water treatment plant. This drought proof water source adds to a diverse water supply portfolio, which includes local surface and groundwater and three aqueducts that have dubious reliability and higher energy demands than our local supply options.


 Silicon Valley, also still known as Santa Clara Valley,  evolved from a major food production and processing economy to economies that function, in part, from the use of silicon-based microchips.



The mild Mediterranean climate and fertile soil of the valley remains above and below the engineered hardscape of nearly 400 square miles of urban development.

In addition, San Jose possesses another piece of natural capital that was essential to this valley  becoming both of these successive great economic centers: two adjacent groundwater basins capable of supplying up to 250 million gallons of water per day. The geology of the area blessed us with sand and gravel sediments that carry surface water into depths below a 200-foot cap of  fine silts, deposited in flooded wetlands over thousands of years of rising sea levels.

This geologic process  of layering sediment creates a special concern for how we use the land in the Coyote Valley. This upper region acts as a kind of a forebay for the groundwater basin in the northern part of the county, which serves the 13 cities that now comprise much of Silicon Valley.  As sediment eroded from the eastern mountain range into the valleys below, the gravels and larger materials settle out mostly at the top of the alluvial fans. These gravel deposits are often mined for aggregate for concrete and asphalt.

The high porosity of this gravel-filled narrow valley makes it extremely vulnerable to contamination from any pollutants that are discharged onto the land or into Coyote and Fisher Creeks that traverse the 10 mile length of the Coyote Valley.

Pollutants, once reaching the usually high groundwater table of the Coyote Valley, move quickly down-gradient toward the thousands of private and municipal wells serving nearly 2 million residents and workers in the urban areas to the north.





The Coyote Valley has been designated in the City of San Jose's General Plan as an urban reserve with a third of the land at the southern end designated for permanent green belt. Triggers are also described for under what conditions a transit-oriented Specific Plan would be allowed.

Under this new legislation, the City of San Jose could propose to designate this 7,000-acre Coyote Valley ALL as an Urban Agricultural Incentive Zone. Because of the potential for groundwater contamination, the area should also be restricted to organic agriculture only.

Here, it's good to mention a little wisdom from former New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman,  who also served as Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush: "Some watershed land simply must not be developed. Its natural value in buffering, storing, filtering and recharging far exceeds whatever commercial value it may hold." (Cover letter from "Protecting the Source" Trust For Public Land, copyright 1998)

This could be a plank in a mayoral candidate's platform for a creating a sustainable San Jose, addressing both food security and water quality protection. It could also be an excellent joint powers project of the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority and the Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD). 


 There are other reasons that the Coyote Valley should be preserved as permanent open space:

•     Laguna Seca should be preserved and re-established as a vernal wetland, creating habitat and reducing potential flooding in downtown San Jose

•     A wildlife corridor across Coyote Valley should be established between the Diablo and Santa Cruz ranges

•     Buffer setbacks from Coyote and Fisher Creeks should be preserved to protect the ecosystem of the riparian corridor

A Joint Powers Authority with Santa Clara Valley Water District and the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority could be formed as a financing option for the Coyote Valley acquisition. The rationale for this is based on SCVWD’s water supply goal to aggressively protect groundwater from the threat of contamination. SCVWD also has a water resources stewardship goal to promote the protection of creeks, bays and other aquatic ecosystems from threats of pollution and degradation.

This partnership would give access to existing and future State and local water bonds as a significant funding source. The current Open Space Credit, applied to subsidized commercial agricultural pumping rates of $6.5 million per year, is enough to service the debt on $65 million in revenue bonds, providing funds for acquisition of conservation easements on 6500 acres @$10,000/acre.

This may well be the biggest pollution prevention project ever funded by the District, but one that will benefit future generations with a clean, safe and reliable groundwater supply in perpetuity.

I am also campaigning to extend that previously mentioned farm water subsidy to urban community agriculture, including larger commercial ventures like Veggielution in San Jose and Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale. I’ve asked Senator Jim Beall to consider a bill to remove the “commercial” restrictions for receiving the subsidy so all community gardens in the county could receive irrigation water at the lower rate. 

 
 After all, the Valley of Heart’s Delight still exists; it’s just hidden beneath our feet.

Ferraro's Funky Farm

Grounded is a good thing for an electrical system, but also important for these "bio-machines" we live in.

How each of us stays grounded varies according to what we have access to. Everyone has the power to just slow down and find their center through meditation. Some do it while practicing vigorous exercise, high on endorphins. I ground myself usually in the very literal sense, inserting myself into the organic cyclical flow of matter entering and leaving the ground right around me.

In my post First Harvest, I described many of the plants that flow through my creek side home, from the cultivated annuals to the trees and vines we have planted by our own hands, as well as the constant delivery of new plants that come to us from the riparian ecosystem. As steward for this small piece of the watershed, I am perpetually called to remove all such organic materials as their maturing renders them food, fuel or yard waste. Of course, there is no such thing as waste, knowing everything has to go someplace, and there becomes what it will be next.

The life style of an urban farmer also often involves keeping some "live stock," domesticated animals that can also dine on some of the organic materials flowing around us. And then, we in turn, may dine upon them. Also their excrement also joins the flow, back to our vegetable gardens, producing food directly for us, with peelings and other garden growth feeding the animals.

Thirty-six years ago, we built the first chicken coop in the flood plain behind our house, and named it "Ferraro's Funky Farm." Free range chickens too often turned into dog-hunted carcasses, so we eventually hardened a 10 x40 ft. chicken run, built of galvanized chain link fencing, with a welded steel pipe arches supporting the heavy wire roofing fabric and the thatched shade organically provided by the molting bark falling from the 80 ft. eucalyptus tree growing through the middle of the structure.

This structure has normally been the habitat for up to a dozen chickens, including, temporarily, a rooster or three. Of course, it seems natural to buy chickens in lots of a dozen, since we know that not long ago, they were encased in egg shells. Our local city ordinance forbids urban farmers from keeping roosters, but as chicks, it is often the case that the sex of some of the new birds will be male. It doesn't take long for the chicken run to become the protected territory of the rooster(s) and biting and generally attacking the hand that feeds you becomes part of the experience.

Luckily, thanks to a wise woman named Emma Prusch, San Jose has a publicly-owned working farm, right off King Road, in the southeast quadrant of the 101-680-280 interchange. This space is the one of San Jose's most valuable park assets, as it provides a place for urbanites to participate in the agricultural process and be reminded of the great potential for food production that this entire valley possesses, now hidden below the veneer of asphalt, concrete and buildings. With many kinds of birds in residence at Prusch Park, it is an natural place to release our roosters rather than harvest them for our dinner table. This usually quickly provides other real roosters for our cocky residents to engage with instead of someone in our family who is trying to feed the other hens or rabbits.

While I do not relish the act of killing and cleaning the feathered animals living with us here at the Funky Farm, I find that raising rabbits for food is a far easier process for putting meat protein on the family menu. A few hours of work skinning and cleaning rabbits puts 10-12 dinners in the freezer, while the discards are buried on the creek banks and return to the nature, as they should.

Raising rabbits and chickens in the same run showed me the basis for the connection of the Easter Bunny and the Easter Egg that are central to the Christian feast, as celebrated in the USA, at least. In the spring, The chickens usually increase their egg production so much that nesting boxes are in higher demand than supply, so chickens will lay eggs almost anywhere. When rabbit hutches are open, they soon possess several eggs, and next there is the appearance that even the rabbits are producing eggs. And the Easter Rabbit-Egg myth is born. One year, I made a video of a white rabbit hopping around some Easter Eggs, which then was edited with appropriate music by my bright son, Nick.


Yesterday, my rabbit population on the Funky Farm increased dramatically, adding 15 furry critters to my pens in one day. But you're thinking: new litters, from rabbits multiplying like rabbits. That would be an inaccurate assumption. What occurred was a neighbor of my friend Frank Schiavo, named Frank Rocca, has a daughter who just turned thirteen, and no longer is interested in caring for her large population of rabbits that had grown in her yard. Her dad was happy to find a willing recipient of this rabbit population, and the possibility of getting some of the rabbits back in a more eatable form than when he delivered them to me.

Luckily, the apples are ripening in San Jose right now and our neighbor John Engel and Karen English on South14th Street had bags of apples on the ground for the taking. This should be a tasty supplement for the alfalfa pellets that were their main staple in their diet to date. Since wild plants are found only in irrigated areas at present, the amount of free food for the rabbits comes mainly from neighbors' gardens and our own during the dry summer months. The alternative is to buy alfalfa pellets at $30/cwt.

Ferraro's Funky Farm has been home to some other critters during the last 36 years. I purchased a dozen pheasants from a huge pheasant farm that used to be located along Summit Road, east of Hwy 17. I also adopted some ducks from Vasona Reservoir County Park, with the Park Rangers blessings, as the amount of duck guano had become a deterrent for park visitors' enjoyment of the lakeside amenities.

We adopted two kid goats one year in the mid 70's, but found a better place to graze them at a friend's home in the Santa Cruz Mountains until they were old enough to butcher. Another goat was purchased live from a farm in Morgan Hill and butchered and barbecued for my Grandfather's birthday in 1978. This year my daughter, Chrysalis, has a friend in Santa Rosa whose family keeps a herd of goats to eat their pastures, converting grass to goats. I was tempted to buy a pair of young goats to eat the winter's vegetative ground cover that grows during our rainfall season between November and April.

The largest living live stock to ever come to the Funky Farm were two full grown hogs we bought from our friends Doug Nelson and Judy Chambers who lived in the rugged hills of Mendocino near Andersen Valley. These hogs had been pretty wild and were hard to keep penned. Their diet was comprised of apples and acorns, both plentiful local crops. Doug finally mellowed out these pigs when he acquired and fed the pigs fermented grape skins from a local wine maker.

Doug delivered two of these special-diet pigs to us, which we penned in our carport until our custom butcher could get to San Jose to kill and process our live stock. Our pigs were quite a surprise when folks would ring our bells at the front gate and get an immediate response of a loud grunt from the porkers. On the early Saturday morning when the butcher arrived, we first discussed the legality of shooting the pigs. They had never been hired to butcher pigs in the city limits before. After deciding it would be OK, they proceeded to shoot and bleed the pigs on the compost pile and then move them to the driveway to skin, gut and cut in half with a giant meat ax, while suspended from a boom on their rig. About this time, my neighbor across the street came out to get his newspaper, but nothing in the paper was as strange as what he was seeing in our driveway that morning. The reward for all this effort was pork that had the most incredible taste I've ever eaten and the normally white meat was tinted pink, probably the result of the fermented red grape skins in their diet.

The Funky Farm is also home to about six cats, some with names and others feral, but friendly enough to cry at the door when feeding time is delayed. We did have two dogs for a time, Tipsy, a black lab with white tips on her front paws, and Sandy, a dirty white terrier that we adopted when our neighbors John and Mandy Hall moved back to Illinois after John was stricken with multiple sclerosis. John and both dogs have since passed back into the earth, but will always be missed and loved.