Happyday Farms: Money Talks and Good Health Walks-Right into the Cancer Ward

This is the seventh in a series of posts on Happyday Farms, the CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) located up here on Bell Springs Road, run by Casey, Amber, Lito and Courtney.

Happyday Farms: Money Talks and Good health Walks-

Right into the Cancer Ward

Happyday Farms is more than an organic garden-it is an effort to redirect the negative accumulation of energy that has resulted in the unfathomable advance of the poisonous and evil Monsanto.  Never in the history of mankind, has a population been so imminently endangered by the practices of its government, which turns a blind eye because it has been paid to do so.

Never before has the power of money played such a vile role in the decimating of a world’s food supply.  Never has a government proceeded so willingly down a destructive path than what we are seeing now with the indifference of an uncaring entity.  Money talks, and good health walks-right into the cancer ward.

With the rate of deadly cancers soaring higher every day, and the reality of the genetically modified food being hugely responsible, what will it take to make our leaders realize that money will not be able to fix the calamity which results?  What will it take to remove this permanent overcast from our horizon?

It will take thousands of small enterprises like that of Happyday Farms.  It will require tens of thousands of people willing to work sixteen hours a day, digging, sifting, adding the rich, black compost, weeding, watering, tending, monitoring, and harvesting.

I view Happyday Farms as a brave enterprise, kind of a little engine that could, so to speak.  Situated ideally along the top of a ridge, still close enough to the Pacific Ocean to benefit from its temperate effects, with a better-than-six-months long growing season, the farm represents all that is good and right about the rural landscape.

The Bell Springs area is zoned for agriculture.  If we mosey only four or five parcels up the road from Happyday Farms, we encounter Blue Rock Ranch, owned and operated by the same family for close to three-quarters of a century.  The O’Neill family, led by patriarch Robert, has been growing produce for the dinner table for close to forty years, so the concept is certainly not new.

In fact, Robert also grew a sizable vegetable garden on our one-ace plot down in suburban SoCal.  Growing food is in our blood.  One of the predominant factors propelling me and several of my siblings, to make the move from the Los Angeles Basin up to northern Mendocino County in the first place, was the desire to find a means of subsisting that did not involve a daily commute into town-or any other venue-in order to put food on the table.

In the early seventies, for Buddha’s sake, while I was overseas, my sibs and I exchanged ideas and built up a plan of action through a series of letters and cassette tapes, outlining the things we would have to accomplish before we could achieve our goals.  One was to take advantage of the California educational system, at that time one of the best in the world, so as to fortify our philosophical ideals with a little reality.

I took a series of classes in 1976, at San Jose State University, on alternative energy and lifestyle applications, which better prepared me to meet the challenges of moving to such a remote and agriculturally rich paradise.  After working in the trades on the mountain, for the first eight years I lived on Bell Springs Road, I returned to the classroom to get my California teaching credential and taught in the school district for the next sixteen years, commuting back and forth to town, six days a week.  

Now my sons, educated and returned to the mountain in the prime of their lives, have hewn out the food-producing terraces from the land and are creating and expanding on one of the most optimum professions conceivable for the geographical area, just as those who originally came up from SoCal envisioned.  Everything that we espoused as youthful, adventurous, back-to-the-landers, has come to fruition, through the efforts of the third generation.

That anything-or anyone-would attempt to impinge upon this endeavor, particularly while portraying Happyday Farms as a “negative commercial enterprise,” is inexplicable.  For anyone-for any reason-to denigrate these efforts on the part of the crew at Happyday Farms, is not only laughable, it’s ludicrous.  

No man has the right to tell another man what he may or may not do on his own twenty-acre parcel.  End of discussion.