One of the truest things my Uncle Jerry ever said was shortly after we bought our home farm back in May of 2000. “The one thing about living on a farm is that you are always surrounded by your work.” So when the notice for a fairly promising auction to be held in the west side San Joaquin Valley came in the mail one day late in the summer 2010, I was ready for an excuse to get off the farm–if even for just one day.
I have gotten some really good equipment at great prices at auctions over the years. At an auction in Salinas a number of years ago I bought a Bee-Gee scraper, and a good ring-roller. The year before in Castroville I bought a really nice off-set disc and a couple of pallets worth of tool bar clamps and cultivating knifes. I even bought our first CSA delivery truck, a 1970 Ford F350 with a twelve foot box, “arm-strong” steering, and the turning radius of an aircraft carrier, at an auction in Tulare.
What made this auction promising was that they listed a number of implements set up for 60” beds—something one rarely finds at auctions here along the coast. They also listed a huge number of 3” aluminum irrigation pipes (11,000 joints), which we could use. It didn’t hurt that it was to be held near Huron, in the west San Joaquin, and would give me an excuse to take one of my favorite roads in the state—Hwy 198.
After staying up late to rewire the lights and to re-pack the bearings on my equipment trailer—something I only take to the more promising auctions—I headed out early the next morning and was at the Hwy 198 exit off of Hwy 101 before day-break. Between San Lucas and Coalinga, this stretch of highway begins and ends in barren, low hills, covered in golden-brown stubble. As one gains altitude, shrubs and trees appear in increasing numbers until you arrive at the lovely Priest Valley—surrounded by multi-trunked grey pines and valley oaks. This is the land of pipe fences, range cattle, Aermotor windmills—some still functioning–and flocks of black and white magpies sometimes twenty or thirty strong.
When I first decided to make farming my vocation, it was a place very much like Priest Valley that I had in mind for my farm to be— remote and quiet, with fields set in a small valley, framed by trees. That was before it dawned on me that in order to make living selling vegetables there needed to be someone to buy them at least somewhat nearby. Not to mention the impracticality of having to drive an hour and a half just to get the necessary supplies, like boxes, twist ties, and tractor and irrigation parts, that we rely on to keep the farm running.
In Coalinga I stopped for a fine plate of machaca with rice and beans at the Repollito (little cabbage) restaurant. From my seat I had a good view of the Joaquin ridge to the Northeast of town, where Joaquin Murrieta, the notorious Mexican born outlaw, was supposedly gunned down in 1853. Although many suspected that the Rangers who shot him got the wrong man, that didn’t stop them from severing his head, putting it in a bottle with alcohol, and taking it on tour—charging people a dollar each to see it.
After breakfast I continued east on 198, past I-5 and into the west valley. Witnessing the scale of agriculture in the Western San Joaquin is to alter your frame of reference as to what a farm is. Mile after mile of cotton, processing tomatoes and pistachio trees. It is humbling to think that my entire farm would fit neatly into the corner of one of these fields. After less than ten seconds at 60 MPH you would be looking at it through the rearview mirror.
In time I came to a large field of romaine lettuce, looking somewhat out of place among the more traditional valley crops. Some time ago the large lettuce growers from the Salinas valley discovered that they could grow lettuce here at times when there was very little competition from other growing regions throughout the country. I once spoke with a fellow who worked for Tanamura and Antle, one of the largest vegetable growers on the planet, who told me that when the owners of that company first bought a large parcel in Huron, the price of lettuce shot up over $25.00 a case and the property paid for itself with a single crop.
The auction itself turned out to be something of a bust. As people who frequent auctions will tell you, how good an auction turns out all depends on who turns up for it. The best auctions I’ve been to are the ones that were sparsely attended. Not so good are the ones with big crowds and lots of hot-shots with deep pockets. These auctions become a sort of macho spectacle where the auctioneer skillfully plays two or more bidders against each other and the price goes higher and higher—that’s the type of auction this was. Most of the “60 inch” implements actually turned out to be 80 inch equipment that was brought over from a farm on the coast and all of the irrigation pipe went for over $40 a joint to an internet buyer (the auctioneer works out of a very tall converted camper shell on the back of a pickup truck that drives from lot to lot. It has a wireless connection allowing them to simultaneously take bids from people over the internet).
Instead of taking Hwy 198 back home, I drove through the oilfields north of Coalinga and got onto Los Gatos Creek or “Coalinga” road. This was probably the first road between King City and Coalinga and it is incredibly remote and windy. It is also where the DC3 carrying the deportees that Woody Guthrie immortalized in song went down on January 28th, 1948—my Dad’s fifteenth birthday.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”
The bodies of the twenty eight migrant workers who died in the plane crash were taken to Fresno and buried in a mass grave. It was considered one of the worst disasters in the short history of aviation up to that time.
I returned home up Hwy 25 through Hollister in time for dinner. Even though the auction didn’t turn out as I had hoped, sometimes, when the work around me gets overbearing, a change of scenery has a way of putting everything in its proper perspective.
[Note: this article was originally published in 2010.]
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