This week, as the nation grapples with the worst drought in decades, the USDA added more than 218 counties to its list of natural disaster areas, bringing the total to 1,584 — more than half of all U.S. counties. Farmers in the Midwest and Great Plains have been the hardest hit, but the drought is a growing reality for farmers across the country, including California. While the secretary of agriculture won’t comment on the drought’s link to climate change, it’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and as global warming unfolds, knowledge of dryland agriculture will become increasingly valuable.

David Little of Little Organic Farm has had to adapt to water scarcity in California’s Marin and Sonoma counties, where most farmers and ranchers rely on their own reservoirs, wells, and springs, making them particularly vulnerable in years with light rainfall. Through a technique known as dry farming, Little’s potatoes and squash receive no irrigation, getting all of their water from the soil.

Mediterranean grape and olive growers have dry-farmed for thousands of years. The practice was common on the California coast from the 1800s through the early 20th century, but it became a lost art during the mid-century. Today, it is experiencing a modest resurgence along the coast, where temperate, foggy summers offer ideal conditions for dry farming grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, melons, grains, and some tree fruit.

“In the beginning, I searched out people who were known dry-farmers,” says Little, who started farming in 1995. “It seemed like no one had done it for 30 years or so.”

To find mentors, Little made the rounds at local bars, asking older farmers about their experiences. “They were very humble,” he says. “They told stories about how things were done, and I would pick up tidbits.” After years of trial and error, he now considers himself an expert.

To help people understand how dry farming works, Little often evokes the image of a wet sponge covered with cellophane. Following winter and spring rains, the farmer will cultivated and break up the soil to create a moist “sponge.” Then the top layer is compacted using a roller to form a dry crust (the “cellophane”). This three- to four-inch layer, sometimes referred to as a dust mulch, seals in water and prevents evaporation.

“It’s very challenging because you have to hold the moisture for long periods of time, and you don’t know how different crops are going to react in different areas,” Little says. Much of the land he farms is rolling hills and valleys, which present additional challenges because they hold and move groundwater differently than flat land.

Deprived of any surface irrigation, dry-farmed plants develop deep, robust roots to seek out and soak up soil moisture. Because they absorb less water than their conventionally irrigated counterparts, dry-farmed crops are characteristically smaller but more nutrient-dense and flavorful.

Dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes at Dirty Girl Farm. The leaves turn brown but the tomatoes are some of the most flavorful around. (Photo courtesy of CUESA.)

“When you water a tree, it dilutes the flavor a lot in some cases,” says Stan Devoto, who dry-farms more than 50 varieties of heirloom apples at Devoto Gardens. “Instead of having a really hard, crisp, firm texture, your apple will be two or three times the size of a dry-farmed apple, and you just don’t get the flavor.”

Devoto has been dry-farming in Sebastopol, Calif., since the 1970s. “We had no choice,” he says. “There’s just not enough water. Pretty much all the orchards are dry-farmed, with the exception of the orchards where trees are planted super close or use dwarf rootstock.”

Having wide orchard rows, which allow tree roots to spread out, is essential for dry-farming apples, as is thinning (removing much of the fruit early in its development) to ensure that each apple gets as much water as possible. In drier years (like this one), Devoto must work extra hard to control weeds, which drink water needed by thirsty trees. As the summer progresses, the ground slowly dries out, stressing out the fruits as they ripen, which helps the sugars become more concentrated.

But while water conservation and intensely flavorful crops are the clear benefits of dry farming, the major tradeoff is yield. Devoto says that apple growers in West Sonoma County, which was once home to a booming apple industry, only get about 12 tons per acre, compared to 30 to 40 tons produced by large apple farms in the state’s Central Valley.

Similarly, Joe Schirmer of Dirty Girl Produce says that his famous dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes sometimes yield only about a third of what their irrigated counterparts produce. Meanwhile, Little estimates that he gets about a quarter to a third the yield of large organic potato growers. “It it’s hard to compete with some of these big organic farms that are watering,” he says.

Without irrigation, his crops are at the mercy of seasonal rainfall and varying soil conditions from year to year. “You’re on the edge constantly, and one little thing could tip you over,” Little reflects. “We’re barely making it, really, but I believe in coastal farming. I believe we’re going to come back to it.”

While dry farming has geographic limitations, it could pave the way for more coastal agriculture and offer techniques for farmers in drier areas to farm with less water. “The coast of California used to be our main source of food in the state, until they started developing farms in the Central Valley because of all the water,” Little continues. “Now they’re running out of water.”

Devoto’s Gravenstein apples are coming into season as we speak. They may not be picture-perfect or super large, Devoto adds, “But the flavor is just phenomenal.”

All photos by Almanac Beer Co.

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

In California, a handful of local craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with farmers in the greater Bay Area to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damian Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

From the farm to the barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash.

Since last summer, Almanac has collaborated with Sebastopol Berry Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Hamada Farms, Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, and most recently, Heirloom Organic Gardens. For each of their beers, made in small batches and released seasonally, Friedman and Fagan meet with the farmer, tour their farm, and feature it prominently on the bottle’s label and Almanac’s website.

Almanac’s Jessie Friedman adds late fall plums to a batch of beer.

Like the Farmer’s Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of the area’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December with a mix of Cara cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, Heirloom Organic Gardens farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for local brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly local beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry a seal from organic certifier California Certified Organic Farmers, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100 percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with nearby Eatwell Farm and Hops-Meister, a hops farm. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and the farm has since abandoned the project.

“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

A version of this post originally appeared in the CUESA Newsletter.

Mary Davis started feeling the squeeze of city life about a year ago. She had grown up gardening and spent a stint working on an organic farm while attending grad school in Missouri. Now an architect living in San Francisco’s Mission District, she longed to reconnect with her gardening roots, but her small apartment was lacking in the dirt department. “There was no garden, no outdoors,” she says. “I really wanted a place with some soil.”

She started looking around her neighborhood and fell in love with the historic Dearborn Community Garden. But when she inquired about getting a plot, she was told there was a 22-year waiting list.

She signed up nonetheless and continued her search, adding her name to the Potrero Hill Community Garden’s list as well, which had a comparatively modest seven-year wait. Since then, Davis has moved into a house with a shared backyard garden, but she still longs for a plot of her own.

Davis’ experience is not uncommon among would-be gardeners in San Francisco. Most of the city’s community gardens have waiting lists of two years or more, according to Public Harvest, a new report by San Francisco Urban Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR). The most comprehensive report of its kind in recent years, it paints a sweeping portrait of the current urban agriculture landscape and presents a bold agenda to help San Francisco meet the demands of a burgeoning movement.

From commercial urban farms to rooftop plots and shared gardens, more than two dozen private and public urban agriculture projects have sprouted up in the city over the last four years as a result of the resurgence of interest in gardening. “We need to start looking to our public land to meet this demand,” said SPUR program manager Eli Zigas at a recent press event at Michelangelo Playground Community Garden in Nob Hill (pictured below).

Since the dissolution of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) in 2004, there have been no centralized city-funded efforts to maintain or expand urban agriculture. Residents hoping to start new projects face many bureaucratic hurdles, since public land and urban agricultural activities are managed by multiple agencies, with little coordination.

Photo by Adam Alpern.

While San Francisco Recreation & Parks oversees 35 community gardens on public land, those gardens are generally operated by volunteers, not staff. “The gardens are run by gardeners,” says Andrea Jadwin, a founding and active member of San Francisco Garden Resource Organization (SFGRO), which offers support and training for community gardeners throughout the city. “That’s good and that’s bad because some gardens aren’t very well run.” Garden managers are often inadequately prepared to deal with issues like vandalism or garden members who neglect their plots while waiting lists grow. “If there were an agency helping people run the gardens better, it’d be easy to keep them going with minimal budget,” she adds.

According to SPUR’s findings, San Francisco’s urban agriculture program is middling compared to other large cities. With an annual operating budget of $800,000, or about $6,600 per site, San Francisco spends more than New York but far less than Seattle, which invests $11,900 per site.

Taking SPUR’s findings and recommendations to heart, San Francisco Supervisor David Chiu has proposed new legislation that would create a strategic plan and a centralized program to streamline the management of urban agricultural projects, either through the city or a city-funded nonprofit.

The proposed ordinance includes a six-month audit of city-owned building rooftops that could be used for urban agriculture, the creation of a “one-stop shop” for individuals and organizations looking to engage in agricultural activities, and the establishment of garden resource centers that would provide residents with compost, seeds, and tools. By 2014, Chiu aims to develop at least 10 new urban agricultural projects on public land and reduce waiting lists for plot-based gardens to one year.

Zigas emphasizes the minimal cost of such a program for the returns it offers to the city of San Francisco, such as greening the urban landscape and reducing stormwater runoff, which in turn reduce public spending on landscaping and sewage treatment.

He also notes the benefits of urban agriculture for San Francisco residents and the food system at large, connecting city dwellers with the miracles and challenges of growing food. “I think many gardeners in San Francisco have a great appreciation for a fresh tomato because they know how hard it is to grow a tomato,” says Zigas. “There are a lot of people in the city who learn about food and how it’s produced through that process.”

Having been a member of White Crane Springs Community Garden in the Sunset for nine years, Jadwin has witnessed the benefits that such spaces offer by bringing neighbors together.

“People garden for the same reasons they go to the farmers market,” she observes. “You see your friends and neighbors. You talk about the weather and what’s in season. It not only allows people to have a broader connection to food, but it also builds community.”

In California, for instance, it’s currently a misdemeanor for home artisans to sell their goodies in the open marketplace. Case in point: Last June, Department of Public Health officials in San Francisco shut down ForageSF’s popular Underground Market, which featured mostly home producers, because its sellers were not compliant with local and state regulations.

But due to a campaign launched by the Sustainable Economies Law Center, the laws might change this year. The Oakland-based SELC recently teamed up with Los Angeles Assembly Member Mike Gatto to introduce the California Homemade Food Act,  a “cottage food” bill that would legalize the sale of certain foods produced in home kitchens.

“There are a lot of hoops to get a food business started. That’s what prompted the cottage food law campaign,” says SELC research associate and campaign coordinator Christina Oatfield. Founded in 2010 by attorneys Janelle Orsi and Jenny Kassan, the SELC provides legal research and assistance to foster local and sustainable economies and business ventures.

Currently, state law requires that any foods produced for sale be prepared in a certified kitchen or food facility using commercial-grade equipment that is inspected by the health department. For many startups, this means renting a commercial kitchen space, which costs upwards of $25 per hour or $1,500 per month — a large expenditure, particularly for hobby food producers who just want to make a bit of supplemental income. Additionally, shared kitchens are often not a practical option for producers who make specialty items such as gluten-free baked goods.

For entrepreneurs who want to open their own kitchen, the investment and risks are greater. In addition to the costs of buying or renting a brick-and-mortar space and furnishing it with commercial-grade equipment (often several times the cost of home kitchen appliances), there are other fixed expenditures, such as insurance and health department inspections. “It can easily exceed $100,000 with equipment and infrastructure work,” says Oatfield. “That’s a huge barrier to a startup entrepreneur, especially in these tough economic times.”

A growing movement

To date, more than 30 states have cottage food laws on the books, many of which have been passed in the last couple of years. Each bill is unique to the place where it is proposed. In Texas, for instance, where the battle has been especially contentious, the bill passed, but lawmakers tacked on a list of complex labeling rules. In New Jersey, a proposed bill has focused entirely on home-baked goods, while the one proposed in Illinois extends to farmers market sales, and the one that passed in Colorado made it a point to explicitly prohibit homemade products that are “infused with medical marijuana.”

Oatfield sees this trend as a response to both the economic downturn of 2008 and the surge of interest in local food over the last few years. “There’s a growing awareness among consumers about food systems issues and enthusiasm for buying local and knowing the person who made your food,” she says.

Cottage food law advocates argue that loosening the regulations for small, home-based businesses fosters growth in the local economy, while giving startups the opportunity to test their products, establish a customer base, and incubate their business before investing in commercial kitchen space. “Very often laws and regulations are written to keep large corporations in check, and they’re not scale-appropriate for small, community-based businesses or other informal activities,” says Oatfield.

For consumers and public health officials, the safety of foods produced in home kitchens has been the greatest concern, so many cottage food laws limit the products that can be sold. Under the California Homemade Food Act, cottage food operations would be allowed to prepare and sell “non-potentially hazardous” items such as dry-storage baked goods, jams, preserves, nut mixes, dried fruit, roasted coffees, honey, pickles with a pH level of 4.6 or below, and other items with low risk for supporting toxic microorganisms.

The California bill also states that home producers must register their business and follow the same sanitation, packaging, and labeling procedures that are expected of commercial kitchens, though it does not require inspections unless complaints are made. While such details may be revised in the legislative process, the SELC is working closely with the state public health department to ensure that health measures are followed while keeping the entrepreneur’s costs as low as possible.

Healthy competition

In addition to the health concerns, cottage food bills (not unlike food trucks) have created a bit of controversy among established small-scale food businesses. Some argue that home-based producers, who have fewer overhead costs, could place extra stress on fledgling business owners who have followed the letter of the law and taken on the costs and risks of starting their own kitchen.

The cottage food law being proposed in California would allow small-scale artisans to prepare and sell "non-potentially hazardous" foods in their homes. (Photo by Gregory Han.)

Others welcome the competition, opportunity, and diversity that this proposed legislation could bring to the world of small-scale food production. “I’m delighted by it,” says June Taylor, who started making artisan preserves in her home kitchen before launching her business in 1990. “The more people can vote with their dollars in a smaller-scale system, the more we don’t have to acquiesce to the industrial system, and we can create an alternative way of doing business, feeding ourselves, and challenging that system.”

Santa Cruz-based sauerkraut maker Kathryn Lukas, who launched Farmhouse Culture in 2008, agrees. “I think it’s long overdue. The fewer barriers to entry into farmers markets, the better for the consumer. I would love the diversity it would spawn. You’re going to see a real flourish of creativity and interesting new recipes. It’s a win-win for the consumer who’s brave enough to trust the relationship that he or she develops with the food artisan.”

While enthusiastic about the possibilities, Lukas also emphasizes the need for clear safety regulations. “Not everyone coming into the food business knows the basics about sanitation,” she says. Lukas recommends that food handler certification, such as ServSafe, be a requirement for all home-based food businesses. (Organizations in many states offer training for food safety certification. In the Bay Area, The Golden Gate Restaurant Association in collaboration with the Small Business Association offers training for free.)

While the California bill language does not place a limit on the volume or income of a cottage food operation, the SELC believes that the logistical constraints of doing business out of a home kitchen will be the self-regulating factor. (Several other states do have gross income ceilings. In Texas, for instance, a home producer can’t make more than $50,000 per year.) “The very nature of cottage food operations is that they’re very small-scale and neighborhood-based,” said Oatfield. “With the enthusiasm for local foods and homemade foods, I think consumers really want to be able to access this food.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the CUESA E-Letter.