NewBiz - For one farmer, a peach and a pen reveal a life
Date: 07-Feb-03
Country: USA
Author: Samuel Fromartz
The weather has been mild in Del Rey, 20 miles south of Fresno. And Masumoto, whose newest book "Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring" (W.W. Norton) draws on life on the family farm, is busy scheduling readings and interviews.
Outside, just a few yards from his home on the 80-acre property, there are rows of organically grown peach trees.
Masumoto says, almost in passing, that the trees, which provide a livelihood for him and his family, may not have gotten the chill needed to bear their best fruit this year.
"We haven't had that harsh of a winter and a lot of the tree fruit like cold winters. They get a good sleep that way," he said by telephone. "So it's going to be hard to say how the year will turn out."
Farmers are in a perpetual dance with the weather, but it's not the only variable they face. There are the vagaries of market prices, soil quality, pests and even the pace of ripening fruit, which Masumoto says he can never precisely predict.
His multiple roles in life - as farmer, writer, father, husband and son - all play a part on the farm and in his book of descriptive essays that pays homage to the senses and the place our fruit comes from.
SOIL AND SWEAT
He writes about working in the fields, drenched in sweat, only his belt loops dry; the slight give of the flesh of a peach on the verge of ripeness; the smell of his father covered in dirt; the way soil feels in his palm as he's deciding whether irrigation is necessary.
A third-generation Japanese-American farmer, Masumoto, 48, chose to follow family tradition although the path was not always clear.
As a high school student, he told his father he would never take over the farm.
"I must have broken his heart," he says.
He went on to attend college and graduate school and even studied in Japan, but ultimately the land pulled him back.
He bought half the place in 1981 and eventually took it over. Today three generations of Masumotos live there.
The farm wasn't always organic. In the earlier years, the family misted pesticides and herbicides onto the plants by hand, even though his father had grown up in a world that didn't rely on those practices.
Masumoto decided to farm organically after his daughter wandered into a freshly sprayed field when she was only 2, and also because his father suffered from a skin ailment.
Weeding is also done the old-fashioned way. His father was going though a junk pile of farm implements and came up with a cutting tool invented by two Italian immigrant neighbors to cut low weeds. Although it had been discarded years earlier, it was still effective and a good alternative to herbicides.
ORGANIC PREMIUM?
When Masumoto began farming in the 1980s, the market for organic produce was not as developed as it is today, and he sold his fruit at lower, non-organic, prices.
"I cut my teeth on the old way of doing things, so if I get the extra (organic) premium, it's now icing on the cake," he says.
But pricing can still present problems.
This year, with overseas competition and a surplus of vines, prices fell to the level of costs for Masumoto, who also grows grapes for raisins and organic juices.
"It probably would have been better if I didn't pick a grape for raisins this year, even with some of the organic premium," he says. "I will be lucky to have made a profit."
Some neighboring farmers are pulling out their vines and letting fields go fallow because it's cheaper than taking a loss year after year.
But Masumoto - the author of three other books, "Harvest Son," "Epitaph for a Peach" and "Country Voices" - figures he'll try to ride it out.
Farming like this, he says, is like writing. If it doesn't work out one season (or in one draft) you just try again.
The point, though, is to try and figure out how to manage, plant, prune and market so you can remain open to all of the possibilities.
That's why Masumoto is working at perfecting his peaches, rather than se
