Nature doesn't care about geometry. Measuring the earth's surface is a human activity-one practiced most notoriously these days in California by developers. Before the seamless complex of housing tracts, shopping malls, and office parks began to spread beyond the historic urban boundaries, it was the farmers who laid their arbitrary grid over the landscape.

As they drew their rows and rectangles across California's fertile Central Valley, the farmers of the 19th and 20th centuries were heeding the charge to "feed the world." Some who came in the 1930s were fleeing the Dust Bowl of the Midwest, where once-productive farmland had became barren due to careless farming practices. Those tragic images remained in the minds of Albert and Frances Lundberg as they discovered rich soil over hardpan clay at Richvale in the Sacramento Valley-the perfect medium for growing rice. The Lundbergs vowed to work their land in a manner that would also preserve it, and they passed that ethic on to their sons, Eldon, Wendell, Harlan, and Homer Lundberg.

Seventy years later, the third and fourth generations of Lundbergs continue to build on Albert's sustainable practices. Lundberg Family Farms is seen as the pioneer of organic rice farming practices in the U.S. and a market leader in the natural and organic industry. Today, California produces 25 percent of all U.S. table rice, but most of that continues to be conventionally farmed commodity rice. Lundberg's production is entirely organic or Eco-Farmed (non-organic, but farmed with ecologically sound practices).

When you buy brown rice (and brown rice products) in the United States, they are very likely to be from Lundberg Family Farms. Albert Lundberg's grandson, Grant Lundberg, who is now the company's CEO, says that they are seeing a marked increase in demand for their products, and it is coming from new market sectors. He recounts how Bay Area hippies discovered Lundberg brown rice in the 1960s, driving up to the farm in their VW bugs to buy 50-pound bags to sell at their co-ops. "Nobody used the terms 'organic' or 'sustainable' back then, but they wanted rice grown by those methods," he says, "and that was what we had been doing all along."

As I arrive in Richvale for a June visit, I find that Nature has offered up a fine day for my tour of the Lundberg fields and production facilities. My guides are Kevin Parrish, the company's Safety Manager and Board Secretary, and Janet Souza, Marketing Manager. We drive along the grid of roadways into the rice paddies, where I notice the curving geometry of the earthen levies, and learn that these elegant serpentine designs follow the contours of the land, creating shallow terraces that trap the precious water briefly as it flows from mountain to river. The seeding of the fields, which is done from small aircraft, has been completed only recently, and the sprouting rice appears as a vibrant green haze over the shimmering blue background of the flooded fields.

While contemplating the beauty of the rice fields, I learn of the various ways that Nature works to undo the order of the farmers' geometric exercises-rodents dig holes through the levies-crayfish build foot-high mounds that jam up the harvester. An organic rice farmer can chase down the crayfish and boil them up for a crawdad feast, however, the rodents are left for the owls to devour, and the owls are encouraged through the placement of owl boxes at the corners of every field.

"The biggest challenge to organic farming is weed control," says Parrish, explaining that an organic rice field will always look ragged because of the weeds. "You're suspicious when you see an 'organic' field that doesn't have weeds." Instead of resorting to the huge arsenal of chemical weed deterrents used routinely by conventional farmers, organic rice growers use a complex of methods, such as rotating crops, fallowing fields, and alternately flooding and draining the fields to kill one weed type or another during the growing season. The big innovation in recent years is the implementation of a global position system (GPS) to pinpoint planting, watering, and weeding. GPS also aids in the ongoing process of leveling the fields so the water flows properly.

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Once the rice has gained the upper hand on the weeds, it grows up plush and colorful. By mid-summer, each paddy will take on a color unique to the variety of rice that has been sown there. Among the varieties that Lundberg sends to market are California basmati, jasmine, and Arborio; a red rice called Golden Rose, black Japonica, aromatic Wahani, Akitakomachi (which is used for sushi), wild rice, sweet brown rice, and the long and short grain varieties of brown rice that Lundberg has long been known for.
After harvest, conventional rice farmers routinely burn down the rice stubble. This effectively sterilizes the soil of any infestation, but burning destroys the nutrients retained when the stubble is left in the field to compost. "Lundberg has never burned," says Parrish. "We turn the stubble under-it creates a perfect habitat for waterfowl."

The Sacramento Valley is on the Pacific Flyway, and in Winter, the sky here is thick with ducks, geese, cranes, egrets, herons, pheasants, rails, and swans. The birds work the stubble for the grains that have been left behind, and in the process, they add a very effective layer of organic fertilizer with their droppings. I see now how Nature can be a willing participant in the farmers' work, even if she remains uninterested in the geometry.

The Lundbergs have been paying her back for her gift by saving the eggs of the ducks that nest in the Winter cover crop of vetch. The duck usually are laying at the same time that the fields are being readied for Spring planting, so volunteers from the farms join the District 10 Wild Egg Salvage Program to flush out the ducks and collect the eggs for transport to an incubation facility. Once the eggs are hatched, the ducklings are nurtured and released back into the wild, with a success rate equal to what Nature is able to accomplish by her own means. Meanwhile, the mother ducks usually nest again the same season, laying another clutch or two of eggs.

As I'm leaving for home, I have the pleasure of meeting Homer and Eldon Lundberg, the youngest and the eldest of "the old guys," as Albert Lundberg's sons call themselves. All four brothers are retired, but they still make themselves useful around the farms, even as the third generation of Lundbergs has taken the helm and the fourth-generation is entering local agriculture programs. They tell me that continued family ownership is part of the sustainability equation, but that there is no pressure on younger Lundbergs to join up.

It is great to find that interest in farming remains strong, and to see the market for organic and sustainable products continuing to grow. But look around-the new geometry of the Sacramento Valley is not that of the farmers.

Three years ago, seven acres of multi-colored produce-forty-two colors, according to Suzanne Ashworth-arrested Jim Mills as he drove down Old River Road in West Sacramento. Buyer for Produce Express and familiar with monocultured produce in the fields, Jim was astounded by the multi-color plot in the Sacramento River bottom. He pulled onto the Peabody Farm, met Suzanne Peabody Ashworth, third generation of Peabody farmers on the site, and Del Rio Botanical was born.

The display of color represents Del Rio Botanical and Suzanne Ashworth. Some 3000 different specimen plants grow in the seven acre display garden and sixty-five acres of organic production. This production supports what Suzanne and Jim Mills have designated Restaurant Supported Agriculture (RSA), whereby her acreage provides unusual, local produce to Sacramento area restaurants.

Such farming should keep a person busy enough, but Suzanne's contributions extend to many fields beyond this. She is RSA produce grower and supplier, yes, but also provider for a group of Community Supported Agriculture subscribers, author, seed saver and supplier, and educator to chefs, servers, and students in the culinary scene.

THE FIELD OF PRODUCE

When she starts talking, encyclopedic knowledge floods forth. What Jeff Main of Good Humus Farm refers to as "an extraordinary and unique combination of research and development detail work as well as practical application" immediately makes itself known when she points to a group of thornless nopales. Developed by Luther Burbank, the famed nineteenth century horticulturist, Suzanne says, these unprickly pears save preparers the task of cutting or scrubbing off the thorny spines on the more common variety of nopal. Because of this variety's sweetness, Suzanne recommends slicing the young pads raw for salad.

A mini-tour covers a small area just around her house. She walks the gardens, pointing to edible flowers, calendula, pansies and violets, roses, even day lilies, the petals of all of which she tosses into her mix of salad greens.

"Last year, all the chefs wanted roses," she says. Now, for something different, she also offers day lilies. She plucks a yellow day lily, tears off a petal and extends it for a taste. The texture is crisp, like lettuce leaves right from the ground, and it tastes a bit of the lily's sweet early morning scent. Nice.
The area around the house provides hints of the sort of practicality Suzanne relishes. The old tile pool and spa converted to underground packing area. Goat pens hold Alpine and Nubian goats, which, when they aren't out weeding, provide milk for kitchen cheese-making. Quail pens hold Cortunix quail and show off the potential for quail eggs benedict, created by Patrick Mulvaney, the caterer of Sacramento's Culinary Specialists and owner of Mulvaney's B & L restaurant. Horseradish leaves on tall stalks invite Suzanne to contrast them with the horseradish root: "Imagine the leaf rolled and chopped, then mixed with sour cream. Very different from that white stuff that's served with beef." She offers a taste. The tongue recognizes the sharp heat of horseradish, but more gentle than the heat of the root, and the eye is surprised at that taste from green leaves.
Suzanne gestures more generally. "Every plant here," she explains, "is used at least three times: fresh, for seed, and for some other purpose: insect forage, cover crop to supply nitrogen to the soil, dried." She has an uncanny sense of multi-use, of combinations, evident as she speaks of the chocolate peppermint and serving tea from its leaves to accompany a rich chocolate torte, and everywhere is the proof.

At an elderberry bush, she brings up elderflower fritters, a 17th century specialty, and demonstrates dipping the flower, stem attached, into fritter batter. Like elderflower tea, the fritters have the delicacy of their lacy flower clusters. She mentions a chef in Lodi, whose kitchen specializes in wild boar. He contracts for most of her elderberries, which he uses in a marinade. At this acidic, purple stage, the berries both tenderize the meat with their acidity and impart a hint of color into it.

THE FIELD OF RSA

The chef learned of her elderberries during an annual event she offers, "Chef's Day at the Ranch." An effort, with Produce Express, at connecting with local chefs through her RSA program, the event brings together chefs, tours them through her farm, and includes a meal in the red barn. It's only partly Suzanne's show-also, the day networks chefs with other chefs and with Suzanne, all learning from each other, as she learned of the elderberry marinade. Patrick Mulvaney says, "We get to see what's coming out of the ground. It was the first time I saw sesame growing. And Suzanne puts five or six tables of chefs in the bed barn, hay bales surrounding us. We get to chat and ask other chefs what they are up to."

Suzanne Ashworth's liaison with Produce Express and the RSA notion it spawned allow her, in Mulvaney's words, "to extend into the community of chefs" in a reciprocal relationship. He might tell her he'll need plenty of basil in August, and she'll plant it. She'll also bring him unexpected products, one time olives, which she had cured from trees on her property and which his restaurant then offered from small bowls at the bar, or another time, a crate of boysenberries, which he used to create a boysenberry sorbet. She'll advocate hat he use Bolivian coriander, a cilantro-like herb, and thus introduces him to new herbs and produce.

THE FIELD OF CSA

Suzanne's Community Sponsored Agriculture subscribers also get educated. Her CSA, she says, is not for everyone. It's a gourmet CSA, with boxes distributed far but few-as far away as San Mateo and to self-selected families. The boxes generally bring nine varieties of produce, often the same kinds of unusual produce offered chefs and also produce she grows in too small quantity to be provided the restaurants.

Boxes might include greens like tatsoi, more nutritious and, considered by some, more flavorful than bok choy, and heirloom winter squashes like Mardi Gras, delicate, winter melon, or her butternut squash, a true heirloom, not a hybrid, and more flavorful, not just cloyingly sweet like those butternuts more commonly used in soups. They might contain chiltepin, a little Mexican chili, considered by some to be the original wild chili from which all other varieties derive. In season, boxes also contain some of her 33 varieties of cherry tomatoes and other fruits like kumquats, mandarins, Fuyu and Hayachia persimmons, jujubes, umeboshi plums. Each box also includes an herb of the month and an herb tea, with advice on whether to drink it for relaxation or for energy.

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Newsletters accompanying the monthly subscription boxes make clear her expertise as saveuse and cook. They suggest, for the children, peanut butter sandwiched between thin slices of persimmon. They present a recipe for lemon basil pesto and follow it with a second recipe for tomato napoleons, a layering of thinly sliced tomatoes with thin, grilled slices of eggplant or squash, the pesto spread between. They advocate the use of large Armenian cucumbers in cucumber soup, rather than small, since "for flavor, the bigger the better. It is the small ones that concentrate the cucurbitacins that are bitter . . . one instance where baby is not better-it is worse"-just one example of that conceptual and practical mix that peppers her communications and makes her so valuable to farmers, chefs, and consumers, all.

THE FIELD OF HEIRLOOMS

Suzanne's value also communicates in her passion for unusual, heirloom vegetables-for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this issue of Edible Sacramento. She is author of Seed to Seed, now in a second, expanded version, a comprehensive guide often reviewed as "invaluable," one which Jeff Main characterizes as "really, really useful," not just for seed saving but also for advice on planting and on how long to save seeds. All of the species of plants she grows are open-pollinated, and in her house she has drawers and drawers of rows and rows of jars and jars of seeds and more seeds, often for several varieties of the same species, as with her 33 varieties of cherry tomatoes, saved to continue the viable offspring open-pollination produces. Hers is a vocation born of committed philosophy and rationale: Patrick Mulvaney mentioned that, when visitors to her farm taste the watermelon grown there, she passes buckets, and they spit the seeds into buckets for saving.

Suzanne bridges the distance between the tasters and the seeds. "Lots of people love food," she says, "but not everyone is committed" to the political philosophy behind preserving heirloom plants. She acknowledges her "teacher perspective," born of her earlier work in special education. She meets people where they are, and together they move along.

FIELDS OF EMPOWERMENT

The Del Rio Botanical website offers a window to such empowerment. J. Eduardo Valenzuela operates Del Rio Botanical's operation in Mexico, through the Sinoloa, Mexico, distribution point for indigenous vegetable and flower seeds. Once part of the Peabody ranch staff, he uses techniques for seed production and hand pollination he studied working there with Suzanne. Like Eduardo, the year-round staff at Del Rio Botanical all hail from Guatemala and Mexico. The thumbnail portraits of them on the website present them as familia with indispensable talents. Of Lucila Munoz, responsible for seed cleaning and produce quality, the website proclaims, "It is not wise to argue with Dona Lucila over quality issues."

Suzanne and the other staff all don uniforms to prepare meals in the farm kitchen or at Tazzina's Bistro in Woodland and Spataro's in Sacramento. Suzanne has remodeled her mother's kitchen so that they can prepare feasts and serve them at the long tables that jut down the dining room, also remodeled to extend off the kitchen. There, Suzanne and the staff might serve those who bid for and won a day at the ranch in a local charity auction. At Tazzina's Bistro and Spataro's, Suzanne and staff prepare and serve the wait staff some Del Rio Botanical produce offered on the menus. The restaurants' wait staff can then provide restaurant customers the gastronomic link between farm and plate.

As with chefs, CSA subscribers, visitors to the ranch, and restaurant wait staff, Suzanne willingly passes her knowledge to local culinary students, in programs both at American River College and at Sacramento's Institute of Technology. She offers a whole course in culinary and medicinal herbs or a single lecture on open pollination titled "Sex in the Fields." The title of the lecture confirms her good humored approach.

A PREFERENCE FOR THE FIELD

Jeff Main speaks of Suzanne Ashworth's forceful and dynamic personality-they've been friends for over 30 years, and she is singularly responsible for Good Humus's initial entre into CSAs years ago. Yes, there are that force and dynamism, palpable in both speech and action. One recent morning a call from a Sacramento chef sent her scurrying to gather him another box of salad greens, and she raced through her flowers plucking rose, calendula, and lily petals to scatter on top of the greens.

And there is also a surety born of knowledge and deep commitment, evident everywhere, not just when she talks about her produce, but also when she talks about farming. Solar panels power the pumps she uses to irrigate, and they make her certain that 24-hour irrigation is unnecessary. Seed to seed, it's a seamless process, yet rooted in faith, nurtured by hard work, broadcast in her many community connections. Suzanne probably prefers just to manifest that faith. Edible Sacramento, she says, should really do an article on 80-year-old Ray Chan, who grows winter melon in five or six rows of her organic fields and who seeks the heft of a melon that will place him in the book of records. But her field of many colors and her many fields of expertise draw us to her.

For information on Del Rio Botanical, including Suzanne's work with Produce Express and RSAs, her CSA, vegetable and gourd seed from both West Sacramento and Mexico, and the classes, tours and presentations Suzanne offers, see www.delriobotanical.com.

By the time asparagus and artichokes are out of season in the Sacramento area, we are looking forward to tomatoes, which isn't surprising since they are Yolo County's leading agricultural commodity, with a 2004 total value at $86,111,000. Sacramento County weighed in at $5,388,000 in 2004, and Solano and Sutter Counties have pretty good acreages too. The Sacramento Valley floor has been a major production area for tomatoes for decades. Processing tomatoes, that is. Drive almost any direction on almost any road around Yolo County and you'll see acres and acres of tomato plants, and by late July you'll be sharing the road with rumbling tomato trucks, each hauling 25 tons of tomatoes to local processing plants.

But, up until 15 or so years ago, while the rich soil of the Sacramento Valley was producing hundreds of thousands of tons of tomatoes a year, they were primarily paste or canner types, destined for processing. The consumer, however, was starved for good-tasting fresh tomatoes, the kind that some people could remember from their childhood, tomatoes that had an acidic tang, were juicy, and, well, had some actual flavor. People bemoaned the loss of flavor and shook their heads in incomprehension when, in the middle of summer, local supermarkets touted tomatoes on the vine, produced in distant greenhouses. Why couldn't we buy a decent tomato? Why couldn't we buy the kind of tomato that was meant for slicing into a salad with fresh mozzarella and basil, drizzled with olive oil, the kind of salad you can get in every mom and pop trattoria in Italy, a tomato that was meant for stacking into a bacon and tomato sandwich, its juice soaking into the toast when you bit into it?

Those tomatoes had to be possible.

Then, one organic farmer, farming on a few acres along Putah Creek in Yolo County, surrounded by vast fields of processing tomatoes and corn, began growing heirloom tomatoes, tomatoes full of old-fashioned flavor. Stuart Dixon, one of the pioneer tomato farmers, started gathering heirloom tomato seeds, planting them to see how they performed in his microclimate and how they tasted. Then he selected and saved the seeds for the ones that performed and tasted the best.

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He personally took his heirloom tomatoes by the boxful to the kitchen doors of San Francisco Bay Area restaurants, urging the chefs to try his lumpy yellow Marvel Stripe, the misshapen Mortgage Lifter, and the fat Green Grape cherry tomatoes. He sold his heirloom tomatoes at farmers' markets and to wholesalers. The tomato revolution was underway, and soon small farmers and eventually larger ones, all over the Sacramento Valley, our area, were experimenting with growing dozens of different varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

In the early days of the revolution there were virtually no seeds of heirloom tomatoes commercially available for farmers to purchase. Instead, they acquired seeds of unusual tomato varieties through seed saver exchanges, from customers, friends, and chefs who brought them back from their travels.

Times have changed. Today, thanks to the hard work of the pioneering tomato farmers and seed savers, we can find an abundance of locally -grown heirloom tomatoes at our farmers' markets and now even in some supermarkets, in shades of pink, red, purple, green, yellow, orange, and even white. They might be ribbed, green-shouldered, lumpy, or have a bulbous end. Some weigh a pound or more, others are just bite-sized, and, their flavors range from highly acidic, like Black Krim, to the mild, low-acid, Yellow Pear.

Home gardeners now can buy seed packets of Brandywine Tomatoes, White Wonder, and Green Zebra, among the more than one hundred varieties now available commercially. Heirlooms have become so popular now that Burpee's even did a special heirloom seed catalog in 2001, with heirloom tomatoes on the cover and a dozen featured in the catalog. Farmers can buy heirloom tomato seed by the pound, and no longer need to collect and save the seeds from year to year. However, some of our Sacramento and Yolo County heirloom tomato farmers still save seed, selecting their own strains of the heirloom favorites. The tradition of saving seeds and passing them on continues and we are all the happier for it. No more cardboard tomatoes from greenhouses for our summer salads.