EcoFarm Insight: Reflection, Observation & Irrigation

Feb 26, 2025

By Patrick Murphy, Program Manager

I had the opportunity to attend EcoFarm’s 45th Anniversary conference this year and had a wonderful time. My colleagues and I attended a variety of presentations and participated in a number of wonderful discussions with people from around California who work on similar projects related to urban agriculture, local food, and creating connections in their community.

There were a number of wonderful presentations that affirmed going back to basics like water retention, soil health, building up organic matter and biological activity, as well as taking your time to plan each project.

Again and again I heard from folks working in agriculture, education, farms and gardens that they had the most success when they took their time to reflect and observe before acting. Taking deliberate and well-paced steps to mulch, to build up organic matter in the soil, to increase water infiltration, and to develop rich and biologically active soil were the most impactful things they did. They stressed the importance of avoiding jumping into an idea that sounds good but is untested — the sheer force of nature is too powerful to work against.

Some key recommendations:

  • Take your time when you’re planning, and revisit a site multiple times before beginning work, with and without your plans.
  • Install a flow gauge and Schrader valves (similar to bicycle tire valves) in your irrigation system, and use a pressure gauge to check your system for leaks and issues.
  • Heat stress can make plants more prone to pest issues.

Here is a breakdown of some of the presentations:

Regenerative Landscaper Erik Ohlsen gave a talk about the importance of getting to know a site. He said that to truly understand a location, you should be visiting it in the rain, at night and early morning, and you should always check and recheck your plans with the reality of what is on the ground. Ohlsen also stressed the number of career opportunities which exist in landscape design.

Cameron McDonald from Santa Cruz Resource Conservation District spoke about the importance of monitoring water systems using flow gauges and pressure gauges. McDonald spoke about how farmers (and homeowners) can balance design, operations and maintenance, and irrigation scheduling to maximize yield, conserve resources, minimize nutrient loss, ensure uniform crops, and reduce fuel costs.

The mantra was “You can’t know what you don’t measure” — measuring flow rates is essential, and tools like flow meters for home gardeners, or telemetry systems, data loggers, and remote data collection for large-scale operations provide an enormous amount of information. SRCD has a number of common recommendations they offer to improve efficiency on farms, (1) use pressure regulators (these $13 units have saved Sustainable Solano hours of work), (2) fix leaks, (3) add spaghetti lines to direct the flow of water and (4) opt for oval-shaped hoses to reduce accidental kinks.

McDonald reiterated the standard recommended pressures are 0-30 PSI for drip irrigation and 100 PSI for sprinklers. Proper pressure management is critical for uniform water application; use a hand pressure gauge and Schrader valves to check your systems pressure, use one hand gauge to check the whole system to ensure consistent calibration. Elevation changes also impact pressure — every 2.3 feet elevation changes PSI by 1 PSI (increasing PSI when descending down, decreasing PSI when going uphill). Be mindful of the water hammer effect, a rapid change of pressure caused by quickly turning on/off valves, and look for unexplained pressure loss. Everyone should be flushing their irrigation system more often (once per year at least) and install or use soil moisture sensors for better field or lawn management. By implementing these strategies, farmers and homeowners can optimize irrigation systems for efficiency, cost savings, and irrigation uniformity.

Bill Snyder gave a presentation on a study he and his graduate students conducted on whitefly infestations attacking squash crops. In a 2016-2017 drought, potato whitefly infestation exploded. They had a theory regarding bidirectional stress on cotton plants, where the larva of the whiteflies were born and developed. Cotton plants under extreme heat stress are unable to fight off white fly infections, while populations of bugs and animals which traditionally consume these insects are also decimated by heat stress and overuse of broad spectrum pesticides. Snyder and his team found correlation between these extreme droughts and high volumes of insecticide use (per acre). In a natural experiment using center-irrigated fields and increased mulching practices, the Georgia team feels confident that the combinations of heat stress on plants and insects were a driving cause in the rise of whitefly populations. Learn more about his research here.

Sustainable Solano would like to thank the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Solano County Public Health and CHIP (the Child Health and Improvement Plan) for their support to attend the 45th EcoFarm Conference. Their support allowed us to learn so much about the state of urban agriculture, local food, and what other folks in our state, community and nation are working on. Thank you to the presenters and all the friends we made along the way.

The Vision for a SuSol Education Center

Oct 26, 2023

By Sustainable Solano

Sustainable Solano has had a vision for a while now: To have an office space that serves as a place of education around the many things we teach about, such as sustainable landscaping, water capture and reuse; cooking with seasonal, sustainable local food; and building community resilience.

We have been lucky to spend the past few years in our office at the Global Center for Success on Mare Island. This office space puts us near nonprofit partner organizations and the beauty of the Vallejo People’s Garden and the Pollinator Pathway garden we installed with them and Solano RCD in front of the building. But as our team has grown in number, we find there are limitations in a one-room office, both for our team members’ needs as well as ways we would like to interact with all of you in the community.

And so we are returning to that original vision.

We would love to find a safe and beautiful place where we can create and exhibit the solutions we’ve been teaching and demonstrating for nearly 25 years. These may include a permaculture garden or farm, sustainable water techniques, solar energy and maybe even chickens. There could be a commercial kitchen space for teaching classes and preparing food (or the potential to add such a space). We also need a shared workspace and a place to gather around a table for large team or partner meetings, and an area to house tools and equipment, promotional materials and office files. The property would need to be zoned to allow for office space and would need to be able to support visitors coming to the site for meetings, classes and demonstrations.

We’ve seen creative and innovative ways individuals, organizations and cities have supported such projects. In Berkeley, the Ecology Center runs EcoHouse, which was founded in 1999 when a group of individuals “collectively purchased and transformed a small, dilapidated North Berkeley home into a demonstration house and garden.” In American Canyon, the city offered up an old public works yard to be transformed into the Napa River Ecology Center in partnership with the American Canyon Community Parks Foundation. Santa Cruz Permaculture now stewards a 26-acre farm under a 30-year lease as part of its operations.

We’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions for supporting this vision! Reach out to us at info@sustainablesolano.org

Even with this active vision for an education center, Sustainable Solano is committed to continuing hands-on sustainable landscaping and resilience-building workshops, cooking classes, and internships within Solano communities, because these are the very heart of our work. Our goal is to bring neighbors together in ways that help them connect with each other, the Earth, and themselves.

SuSol Seeks to Engage Indigenous Voices in Our Work

May 22, 2023

By Sustainable Solano

Sustainable Solano works with local communities here in Solano County and honors the lands that we are lucky to do that work on. As this land originally belongs to the Patwin, Miwok, Karkin, Muwekma, Confederated Villages of Lisjan, and Ohlone peoples, these indigenous communities continue to hold and steward this land as they have for time immemorial. We thank the original peoples of this land with the utmost gratitude for their stewardship of this beautiful Earth and their resistance to its destruction past, present, and future. Because it is our mission to nurture initiatives for the good of the whole, we recognize that true equity arises when we intentionally engage and empower communities who historically have been mistreated by the systems in place.

It is our intention to get our resources into communities that are not regularly afforded access to these resources, but we have realized that we have not been making enough effort to invite indigenous people to the table. As an organization we seek to counter the harm these systems perpetuate with action, one way being through opening up our platform to directly uplift indigenous voices.

We are actively looking to engage with more indigenous community members in our work. SuSol team members have been in communication with representatives from local tribal communities, and we want to see how we can support the identified desires of indigenous groups and individuals in ways that intersect with our mission.

As a part of many of our programs, we are always seeking people to teach classes to the wider community. This is paid work, where we look to bring people together in gardens and beyond to learn more about permaculture, sustainability, resilience, waterwise gardening, farm-to-table cooking, and connecting with love for and solidarity with our Mother Earth. We acknowledge that we have a responsibility to make these jobs especially accessible to indigenous communities, whose knowledge is the foundation for so many permaculture practices and ways of connecting with the Earth, our non-human relations and each other.

This is a starting point for working together. If you are an indigenous community member and are interested in partnering with us, please contact info@sustainablesolano.org 

Our goal is to open up a space to share your knowledge, foster community connections, and to come together to support increasing access to land. We wish to uplift our communities by prioritizing connections based on equity and decentralization, while learning together how to live in harmony with our neighbors of all species.

Regenerative Agriculture: Health for the Land & People

May 16, 2022

By Sustainable Solano

Event speakers (from left) Harald Hoven, Michael Wedgley and Rose Curley (fourth from left), speak with Scott Dodson, Elena Karoulina and Priscilla Yeaney at the Pleasants Valley demonstration site

“Regenerative Agriculture.” It’s a buzzword, but just what does it mean?

Rose Curley asked this question of about 30 people gathered for the regenerative agriculture event that was part of the Solano Local Food System Alliance‘s quarterly meeting. The event brought together three speakers to cover different sustainable agricultural practices. Rose is a GrizzlyCorps fellow with Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) in the organization’s Ecological Farming Program.

The crowd did its best to answer the question. Regenerative agriculture is ancestral traditions, self-sustaining, biodiversity, organic, no waste, healing, no till, place-based, nutrient-dense, abundant, soil-building, interdependence … the list had more than 25 suggestions.

The range of answers “speaks to how broad this term is,” Rose said. “You see it on farms, the produce section of large grocery stores, and tacked onto restaurant menus.”

Rose then went over some of the basics of regenerative agriculture and its intention to return health to the land while growing nutrient-dense food and building overall resilience for farmers and our communities. She brought a chunk of soil from the farm where she works to talk about the makeup of healthy soil and maximizing biodiversity above and below ground, and some cover crops that cover and nourish the soil. Regenerative agriculture asks for an emphasis on a more holistic approach to farming, but that can be gained through a variety of practices, she said. (On the topic of nutrient-dense foods, she said you can learn more about how healthy soil creates healthy food by reading some of the research that has been done at Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol.)

One of the most important parts of the conversation around water and soil health and conserving natural resources is the wealth of knowledge that farmers can offer to each other to build resilience, she said. This support is particularly important because of the barriers to farming in a regenerative manner: the higher financial investment needed, the time it takes to see returns and improved health in the system, and social and cultural barriers.

The conversation pulled in much of the audience, with observations offered about how the term “organic” has lost its meaning, the use of hydroponic growing that doesn’t use or return anything to the soil, how to better promote and support growers using regenerative practices, and the idea of making Pleasants Valley a demonstration corridor for different regenerative approaches to build more public interest and understanding.

The event was held at the farm site of Pleasant Valley School, with the seating and presentation area carefully arranged and decorated with spring flowers and sporting a table of Solano-grown food for the attendees (and eyed appraisingly by the three resident donkeys). Sustainable Solano is creating a demonstration permaculture site on the property in partnership with Pleasant Valley School, which will also pursue a biodynamic garden on site in accordance with Waldorf educational principles. The event had speakers on both approaches to the landscape.

This is a new scale of project for Sustainable Solano, which has not worked on a farm property before, noted our executive director, Elena Karoulina. The hope is to plant the seeds through the foundation of the permaculture site so that the school community can continue to grow it in scope and vision over the years.

Property owner Shea McGuire said the hope is to instill stewardship in the Pleasant Valley School students, giving them an understanding that they are part of the ecosystem and to “keep the noise of the world out of childhood.” Elena and Shea signed the partnership agreement for the demonstration project at the beginning of the meeting. We invite you to join us for a public planting day on Saturday, May 28, to create the foundation for this permaculture site.

Solano Gardens Program Manager Michael Wedgley, who is designing the demonstration permaculture site on the farm, spoke about permaculture. Permaculture is a way to grow plants in a harmonious way with nature, guided by principles that can be applied to everything from a landscape to how an organization is run. Recognizing the relationships of everything in the system, including the relationships of the plants to one another, is vital to the design, he said.

Michael addressed questions and conversation around a good introductory permaculture book (Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway), taking fire into account when designing in a fire zone, and the dangers of introducing non-native species to an area.

Harald Hoven, a retired biodynamic farmer who still consults regularly on the practice, talked about the history of biodynamic farming as it arose nearly 100 years ago. A main focus of biodynamic agriculture is building vitality into the system that then translates into the food we receive from the system – vitality that is often lost in today’s agricultural practices. Biodynamics also focuses on relationships, with plants and livestock kept in balance on the site to yield land fertility. Sometimes, things have to be brought onto the site, such as manure or compost, to build that fertility, but ideally everything comes from the land itself, he said.

Just as we are always developing and becoming something new, so the land grows and develops with our help and guidance, Harald said. Gradually, it all works toward the greater health of the land.

From all of the talks and conversation it was clear that these different approaches have the same objective: health, both for the land and for people who consume what that land yields.

Our next big event, Bounty of the County at the Solano County Fair on June 18 will recognize that yield through the produce of Solano family farms. You also can learn more about the Solano Local Food System Alliance at the event. Alliance members will be there to hear about your vision for local food and your commitment to supporting the local food system. Another opportunity is at the Alliance’s quarterly meetings, which are always open to the public. The next one on Aug. 4 will focus on ways to buy local food, from purchasing directly from Solano farmers to Cultivate Community Food Co-op and other retail locations.

Pleasants Valley Demonstration Permaculture Site Installation

Join us on Saturday, May 28, to learn about sustainable landscape design and help install a demonstration site based on permaculture principles at a Pleasants Valley farm!

Learn more and register here