Usually this time of year we are gearing up for our big Harvest Festival, which we’ve done for several years with the help of volunteers from Linscott School in Watsonville. The event has been a great success and fun for everyone. Unfortunately, this year our Workers’ Compensation insurance carrier has nixed the event, citing concerns that our volunteers could make claims for injury. This makes no sense to us — they are not employees and should be a concern of our liability insurance carrier not our Work Comp carrier, but our Work Comp insurance company threatened to drop our policy if we went ahead with the event.
We have never had any insurance claim arise from our Harvest Festival, but there must be a lot of claims these days from festivals and fairs. A friend of ours who volunteers her time and animals to offer pony rides at a local event was told that she needed to pay several hundred dollars for insurance coverage in order to volunteer her time this year.
Insurance issues aside, we invite you to come out to the farm for our Pumpkin Patch this Saturday! We’ve got a lovely field full of organic pumpkins for your fall holiday needs, both decorating and cooking. The Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins make wonderful pumpkin pie, the Jack o’ Lanterns are perfect for Halloween decorating, and the Cinderellas are excellent for pumpkin soup and make interesting decorations as well. My daughters and I will be there to help you find your perfect pumpkins, and the goats and cows would love it if you’d throw them some discards from the pumpkin patch (they loooove pumpkins). You can take a walk through the pear orchard, see how many varieties of birds you can spot on the slough, and check out the preparations for next year’s strawberry crop. The Pumpkin Patch will be a fundraiser for Linscott School again, so all proceeds from the sale of pumpkins and a small mini-market we’ll have set up will go to the school. Come anytime between 10 AM and 4 PM. Hope to see you there.
In other news, this past week our farm was part of a tour arranged by CalCAN (the California Climate and Agriculture Network). CalCAN makes the connection between the decisions agricultural users make on inputs, land use practices, and water use and their effects on climate change. They are trying to direct some funding from Cap and Trade agreements toward supporting positive agricultural practices. The tour group included people from California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz county (RCD), the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, UCSC researchers, Senator Bill Monning, and Assemblymembers Mark Stone and Susan Eggman. The organizers wanted to get our legislators out to the field to see firsthand what farmers are doing. UCSC researcher Carol Shennan and Joji Muramoto talked about the large research project they are doing on alternatives to methyl bromide use in strawberries. Our farm is participating in a small part of this 4-year study, on a portion of our 2015 strawberry field. Over the past three years we have planted the ½ acre plot in four different rotations of field crops, cover crops, and a final crop of broccoli this summer. The plot is now prepared for the strawberries to be planted, and next year the researchers will analyze the differences between the yields on the portions of the field that received the different treatments. The Sentinel ran a nice article about the tour on Thursday.
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