The second annual Santa Barbara County Farm Day certainly isn’t going to be like the first.
About 1,000 people attended tours at 13 different locations for last year’s inaugural event in the Santa Maria Valley—this year will be the eighth Ventura County Farm Day. But farm tours aren’t really an option due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so Students for Eco-Education and Agriculture (SEEAG), which organizes the days, had to plan something a little different for the Sept. 19 event.
To continue the day’s educational focus, SEEAG founder and CEO Mary Maranville said the organization decided to produce Farm Day Features, 10-minute videos designed to give the public a look into the current issues facing farmers in the area. The features, Safety in the Field During COVID-19 and Central Coast Agriculture on a Global Stage, will premiere on Sept. 19 at santabarbaracountyfarmday.com. “We actually went out to the fields and went right to where the farmworkers are working,” Maranville said. “They have employee safety measures; they’ve had them for years. … It’s such a highly regulated industry already that during COVID they only had to make a few adjustments.”
She said many people don’t necessarily understand what’s happening on the acres and acres of fields they drive by regularly. In her years as an educator, Maranville said she’s learned a lot about what locals know and don’t know about the industry.
“People—because they eat every single day and they go into the grocery stores and get their food—they think they know about it, but they don’t,” she said. “And that’s why Farm Day is so important.”
For instance, she said, a lot of people are mystified when they hear about the number of crops and pounds of produce grown on the Central Coast. They ask, “Why are these farmers growing so much? Why are they using so much water?” she said.
“And it’s like, there are 7.2 billion people on the planet,” Maranville said. “And a lot of places can’t grow their own food. They’re shipping all over the world to feed other countries.”
Innovative Produce, which grows roughly 15 commodities across 2,000 acres of land in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, ships most of its produce throughout the U.S. and some to Japan, Canada, and Mexico. Lacy Litten, Innovative’s director of food safety and field operations manager, said their biggest crops are probably Brussels sprouts and romaine, but they also grow broccoli, cauliflower, iceberg lettuce, mini peppers, carrots, fennel, and mixed leaf lettuce (among others).
“We don’t like to put all of our eggs in one basket, let’s just put it that way,” she said with a laugh. “Diversity is important.”
Litten said that the weather is ideal for growing on the Central Coast. It’s that Mediterranean climate. Nipomo might have the most consistent temperatures and weather year round of the whole nation, she said.
“That climate is ideal for growing the specialty crops that we’re able to produce here,” she said. “Think about how much we like the weather—the crops like it too.”
Innovative Produce believes that participating in an event like Farm Day is meaningful, and Litten is featured in both of the Farm Day Features. She said that the Innovative Produce family has been in the Santa Maria area for six generations, so they’re very much a part of the community.
“It’s important for us to connect to the community as the neighbors that we truly are,” Litten said. “We love what we do, and we want to be able to share that with people who are eager to learn about it.”
As far as COVID-19 is concerned, she said, the information that Innovative and its fellow agricultural producers are receiving from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other regulatory agencies is changing rapidly with the science and research being done on the virus. But as far as they know, there isn’t a food safety issue associated with the virus.
A lot of the health and hygiene policies that producers use to keep food safe overlap with keeping workers safe as well, she said. Policies such as washing hands for 20 seconds, using new towels, disinfecting touch surfaces regularly, and coughing into elbows were already part of Innovative’s policies.
“All of those things have existed in our food safety policies for the past several years since food safety became what it is today. And so a lot of the things that the CDC was recommending have been things that we were already doing. And so it became, what more can we do?” Litten said.
They implemented a mask policy on March 17, and the executive team started meeting weekly to research regulations and create and implement new policies to keep the workers and food as safe as possible.
Litten speaks about some of those things in the Safety in the Field During COVID-19 Farm Day Feature. The opportunity to educate the community about the industry she works in and the company she works for is a way to connect people to the hands and the land that feed them.
“A lot of people see our land and our crops and our people, just driving by on the road. But very few have ever stepped foot on that,” she said. “And you go and you step into that and you have a whole different value of what that feels like.”
And that’s really what the day is meant to do, SEEAG CEO Maranville said. As someone who’s spent her whole life in agriculture and is now focused on ag education, even Maranville said she gained a new perspective talking to producers for the Farm Day Features.
Public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic has focused a lot on farmworkers and some of the safety issues they face being essential workers. One of the growers Maranville spoke with during her work on the features said that the public acts like farmworkers are different than everyone else. But they are the same. Farmworkers don’t want to get sick; they don’t want their kids to get sick. They’re scared; they’re worried; they need to be educated about safety precautions—just like everyone else.
On the other side of that though, some take it seriously and some don’t—just like everyone else. Everyone deals with COVID-19 in their own way, Maranville said.
“We’re all individuals, and we all have related to COVID in different ways,” she said.
Some people wear masks, some don’t. Some people take the virus seriously, some don’t. Some choose to social distance outside of work, some don’t. No workplace can control what workers do once they leave for the day, she said. But with farmworkers, Maranville said, it’s kind of political.
“When you hear that one of the farmworkers is sick, it’s kind of a reaction that it must be the grower’s fault,” she said. “But if you or I got sick, would they say it was our employer’s fault?”
Overall, she said, every industry is different. But because food is something that everyone has in their refrigerator—and of course, everyone depends on it for survival—the reaction to the farming industry is often visceral. But it’s because humans have an emotional connection to food.
“It’s an industry that I personally think is very misunderstood,” she said.
Editor Camillia Lanham is always down for ag education. Send comments to clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 3-10, 2020.