photo credit: Gold Ridge Organic Farms
Brooke Hazen of Gold Ridge Organic Farms.

With nights growing longer and cooler, the land and those making a living off of it will soon be in a much less active season. For most growers large and small, it's harvest time. KRCB News continues our ongoing series profiling Sonoma County farms.

It's not an exaggeration that last winter's abundant rainfall was cause for celebration, especially among those in agriculture. All those drought-busting atmospheric rivers, may not have impacted local farming the way you think.

"This year is about three to four weeks late,” said Brooke Hazen of Gold Ridge Organic Farms. “We're in apple season right now still, and we just are about to start our olive pressing season for customers, and then our own harvest for olives starts November 15.”

Gold Ridge Organic Farms includes 88-acres of olive and apple orchards on rolling hills along Canfield Road southwest of Sebastopol.

Hazen said all that big rain didn't translate into more fruit, bigger fruit or even higher quality. 

Timing, he suspects, played more of a role, with storms carrying into March and even April. Other than a minor uptick in scab--a pest that can blemish fruit--he says yields should be about normal this year. 

"We had an extended rain period, and what that did is it delayed the blossoming, the leafing out and the fruiting,” Hazen said. “For this year, it was kinda rare, but it was like three weeks late on apples...the olives, we're still unsure if that's going to catch up to normal, it probably will, we'll probably harvest, here at Gold Ridge, in mid-November."

Hazen said his coastal microclimate is a special one, where cool summer fog makes fruit grow more slowly, enabling him to use horticultural tricks to bring out what he says are more nuanced and refined flavors.

"The single biggest factor I have found in my 30 years of farming at this point, what determines the quality of the food we eat, is climate," Hazen said.

Now, harvests face a serious deadline, and no one knows exactly when it will fall.

"We're going to have to start anyways no matter what, in mid-November because we need a month to harvest here,” Hazen said. “Anytime after December 1 you're entering into gambling territory. Where, we can have a hard frost as early as the 5th of December. You don't know when--it's Russian Roulette. Basically, what you do is, you cross your fingers and you start harvesting early and you start picking as fast as you can, so that you can beat that early killing frost which will kill the fruits."

Once almost exclusively serving restaurants, since the pandemic caused business to evaporate, Hazen’s Gold Ridge Organic Farms has moved to sell more to local grocers, including Community Market. And FEED, a community supported agriculture venture along with direct sales to consumers.