It was a fairly normal day for me last year on June 21, the longest day of the season.  I started out the day working out of our packing facility in the relative cool of the dusty, coastal town in North Baja California then that afternoon started the four hundred mile ride in my pick-up to my southernmost farm, “down in the desert”, where our tomato harvest was already in full swing.  Lupio, one of our young employees, came along to help me drive.  I wanted to get out in the fields at daybreak the next day. 

Driving out to the farm the next morning the sun rose over the silhouettes of cactus behind us, while the coyotes and jack rabbits raced back and forth over the 10 miles of sandy road after we left the pavement.  As the workers got off their busses, the chatter was all about the heat the day before.  Several had gotten sick on the way home, vomiting uncontrollably.  Others, mostly women, didn’t show up for work that morning, concerned for the smaller kids that would be left at home. 

I thought about letting everyone go home, concerned seriously for their health.  But the heat combined with the long days was ripening the tomatoes at an amazing rate.  Falling behind on the harvest would trigger early death of the plants and reduce any money we had to pay the workers, to keep them employed.

I gave the keys to my truck to Lupio, and said he would spend the day running ice and Gatorade from the closest town back to the farm, and that I would stay in the field with the crew.  I met with the workers and told them work was not mandatory, that people could take all the breaks that they needed, that we would double our harvest bonus and add two hours of overtime pay to their days work.

The day started out normal enough.  We had four different harvest crews and they would all be picking either grape or cherry tomatoes.  The plants were in full production, looking like hedges of Christmas holly – dark green with splashes of small red tomatoes.  They were mostly about six feet tall with eight feet between the rows. 

The workers would start down one side of a row with their bucket, returning to the receiving station at the end of the rows whenever it was full.  There they would dump into a stackable harvest tote.  One or two women would receive the tomatoes there, sort through them a bit, and several of the athletic young men would come around and load the totes up on the back of platform trucks and bring them to the waiting refrigerated trailer that would carry them back at the end of the day, to the packing facility that I was at the day before.

I spent my time going from crew to crew, helping whoever was falling behind in their rows, carrying buckets for the older women, making sure everyone was doing okay.  The morning banter was mostly about the upcoming presidential elections in Mexico, mixed with the normal light hearted humor that endears one to the culture here.  But by mid-day the talk was all about the heat and it became obvious that this was no normal day.

We had one thermometer on the farm that went up to 50 degrees Celcius – 122 degrees Fahrenheit.  In a lifetime of farming vegetables, and studying temperatures I had never seen anything over 119.  Even when California’s Imperial Valley, where I got the daily temperature readings from the Weather Service dating back to the 1880’s, not once ever had it hit the 120 threshold.

But that afternoon, an eerie surrealism set in that I hadn’t experienced in all my years of working in the fields.  As Lupio helped me man shade stations, and pass out cold drinks, the thermometer pegged out at 122 degrees. 

We did well on the farm that day, got a lot of tomatoes out safely.  And no one got sick.  But we lost a lot too.  Whole fields of cherry tomatoes ended up with an ominous star shaped burn mark branded where the calyx was connected to the fruit.  It looked like the heat of the plant itself, possibly through the phylum, was more than the tomato could bear.

Some others farmers in our group, another 200 miles South, lost everything.  It got to 125 and their fields totally burned up.  Four heat related deaths were reported in the small local town that day and temperatures stayed above 120 for another three days.  All records for heat were shattered that week up and down the Baja peninsula.

Just as the war in Iraq is hitting hard on our farms and rural communities, so too are we on the forefront of global warming.  Changing weather patterns and shrinking water supplies are forcing us to alter crop plans, planting schedules and growing techniques.

But we’re farmers, and farmers adapt and innovate. 

On this same farm in Baja, we are building growing houses, designed in Israel, that keep out wind, dust and harmful insects, but allow in the rain, the sun and let us farm directly in the soil, organically.  No genetically modified materials are used, but crops are planted at high density and are pruned and trained to climb upward – our tomatoes are picked on rolling ladders.  An array of beneficial insects are released and bumblebees are brought in for pollinization.  Water, our scarcest commodity, is greatly conserved, and yields skyrocket while all other inputs are reduced.  Workers are given more challenging, dignified and varied work and receive better pay and year-round employment.

It is futuristic but old as time, a blend of nature, technology and humanity. The Buy Fresh/Buy Local campaigns attack the enormous cost – ecologic and economic – of transporting food from the farm to the dinner table.

Farms Not Arms joins those that see the connection between global wars and global warming.  But even as we are hit hard by both of them we do what we always do, wake up each morning and vow to go forward.  We need to protest loudly – not one more child sent to war, not one more farm turned to pavement.  But while Green has become the new buzzword for everyone from Hollywood to Tom Friedman, our job is to find solutions.

Decades ago, during our country’s last long war, some of us swam against the tide that had been leaving America’s farms since the end of World War II.  Like the Amish and the Mennonites a century earlier this band of young people saw the move to a simpler and more natural lifestyle as the ultimate protest against a society gone mad with consumerism and militarism.

Many of us who stuck it out found our passion and our purpose in tilling the land and growing food.  For us it’s been a lifetime of learning and struggling to create for ourselves and our families a viable living doing what we love.  Farms Not Arms has become an eclectic blend of these first generation farmers along with family farmers from America’s heartland, who have also been struggling to keep their land and their livelihood that has been passed down to them, often for a century or more.

We feel that our farms - and our experiences - have some of the answers for a country searching to understand war and ecological destruction and our drift away from democracy.   We’d like to see another Back to the Land movement!  Whether its returning veterans, young people looking for alternatives to the military, or farm laborers looking to have a farm of their own, we need to replenish our farms with people who will love the land, grow our fuels, and grow our food closer to those who will eat it.

Maybe in doing so, we can help get our country back on track, with the beauty and grace of a simpler lifestyle, one that doesn’t need world conquest to feed it or the destruction of our planet to sustain it.

Michael O’Gorman farms 1660 acres of organic vegetables for an American company in Baja California, Mexico.  He has represented PeaceRoots Alliance on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice and is co-chairman of Farms Not Arms.