Beyond Good or Bad: Rethinking Farm Practices in Context
Lessons from California Fields on the Complexity of Agricultural Sustainability.
September 25, 2025
ROBBE VERHOFSTE, SENIOR PROGRAMS MANAGER
Walking through the endless rows of tomatoes in Central California with Leading Harvest felt like walking on the moon. Each step sent up plumes of dust, and beads of sweat fell into the soil like tiny asteroids. My sweat left miniature craters in the dirt. It was hot. I was hot. We were standing in an ancient, drained lakebed, surrounded by a uniform maze of vibrant tomato plants, green and thriving, dotted with bright red fruit.
It felt paradoxical: such lush growth on such a blistering day, in such an arid place. Water here is scarce, though never absent, sometimes “just enough.” That very scarcity exposes cracks in the way people think about agriculture.
If you’re reading this, odds are you live in a city. City life is engineered to feel predictable, almost mechanical. Your alarm rings, and you wake up. A wilting houseplant perks up when watered. Put up a bird feeder, and the birds arrive. You go to work, and you get paid. Honk at traffic, and the cars move. Ants in the kitchen? Call an exterminator, problem solved.
Life in that context appears uniform, orderly, and linear, action followed by predictable reaction. Yet even in cities, context can break the pattern. What if your phone dies and the alarm never rings? What if your houseplant is a cactus, and water kills it? What if feeding birds spreads an outbreak of avian flu?
Life does not operate like a pinball machine. It is an endless, unpredictable experiment that requires patience and listening. Still, in the rush of urban living, it’s no surprise that many people expect the entire world, even agriculture, to work like a set of mechanical problems with neat solutions.
If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone ask, “Is this practice regenerative?” or “Is this practice sustainable?” I’d own my dream farm by now. Those questions miss the point. Cover crops, tillage, water use, these have become obsessions, especially for people who may have never farmed. And the assumptions about their universal benefit, though well-meaning, often prove counterproductive.
We’ve all seen the before-and-after images: bare fields on the left, lush cover crops on the right. We’re told the green side is always better, more soil health, more carbon, more biodiversity. Therefore, cover crops should be planted everywhere.
But if we take a step back, the contradictions appear.
One farmer in the California Central Valley told me bluntly: “Look, no one here disagrees that cover crops are good. In wet years, they help soak up excess water. But most years, our problem is the opposite, we don’t have enough water. Tomatoes thrive in this climate, but I don’t have the water to irrigate hem. Normally I plant 800 acres of tomatoes; this year, 200 sit empty.”
And yet, he explained, consumer and corporate demands say he must plant cover crops to be considered “sustainable.” But cover crops also need water, water he must ration carefully. “If I plant them [cover crops] everywhere, I’d have to cut my tomato acreage in half. That means paying for labor and irrigation for a crop I can’t even sell, while losing productive land for tomatoes. We can’t eat cover crops. It doesn’t make sense here.”
Farmers innovate constantly, balancing soil, climate, and market realities. But innovation becomes incredibly challenging when distant decision-makers dictate what “sustainability” should look like on their fields.
One cotton grower told me, “We’re squeezed from every side, consumers, corporations, regulators, the market, the weather, and buyers keep saying we’re not sustainable because we till. But out here, tillage saved us: years ago the state required everyone to till at the same time, and that’s what wiped out the boll weevil. Without it, we’d still be drowning our fields in chemicals.“
At first, I was skeptical. We’re told over and over that tillage is one of the great sins of modern agriculture: it breaks up soil aggregates, accelerates erosion, and releases carbon into the air. How could it possibly be framed as sustainable? But after digging into the history, I learned he wasn’t exaggerating.
California and Arizona were on the front lines of the Boll Weevil Eradication Program, one of the most ambitious pest-control efforts in U.S. history. Success didn’t come from chemicals alone. The real breakthrough was a set of coordinated cultural practices: plowing under cotton stalks (“plowdown”), enforcing host-free periods, and synchronizing planting and harvest dates across the entire region. This stripped the boll weevil of food and habitat, collapsing its population without endless sprays. By the late 1980s, California was essentially boll-weevil-free, a status now shared by nearly every cotton-growing state outside parts of Texas, which remain under intensive monitoring and control.
Meanwhile, in regions where eradication was slower to take hold, especially across the Southeast and along the Texas border, farmers leaned heavily on pesticides. At the peak of infestation, some fields were sprayed more than a dozen times per season, often by plane, with runoff seeping into waterways and devastating pollinators.
The irony is hard to ignore: the very practice many now view as harmful, tillage, was essential to solving a massive environmental problem in this context. It became a tool of sustainability, not degradation. As the farmer put it: “And you’re telling me them applying all those pesticides is more sustainable than us because they don’t use tillage?” Context, cooperation, and timing transformed tillage from a liability into an asset. And it is precisely this kind of nuance that is so often lost in one-size-fits-all sustainability checklists.
I’ve spent years supporting the design and implementation of farm plans, and I am a deep advocate for soil health. It genuinely pains me to see fungi, microbes, worms, and living roots torn apart by a plow. I leap for joy when I dig into a field and find the soil alive, rich with organisms and the processes that sustain them. But my commitment to soil health doesn’t blind me to reality: every tool, even one as blunt as tillage, can have its place. Context matters. Used with intention, in the right moment and for the right reason, practices often maligned as “unsustainable” can in fact serve larger ecological goals.
Then, there are vineyards and almond groves, long criticized for their water use. In today’s era of scarcity, the instinct is to demand that farmers cut water even further. But history tells a more complicated story.
For centuries, snowmelt rushing out of the Sierras spread across the Central Valley in great sheets, pooling into wetlands and slowly sinking into the ground.
Areas that are dozens of feet deep in snow in the summertime melt into alpine ponds, cascade down waterfalls, and would billow out into the Central Valley. This natural cycle replenished aquifers, filtered water, and buffered communities against drought. In fact, this process created one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes, Lake Tulare.
With dams and canals now channelling most of that flow away, and Lake Tulare being a fraction of its original size, little is left to recharge groundwater, and aquifers across California have been steadily depleted.
In response, some farmers and researchers are experimenting with a practice known as on-farm groundwater recharge. The idea is deceptively simple: when winter storms or snowmelt bring an abundance of water, divert that flow onto farmland and let the soil act like a sponge. Vineyards and orchards, which were once seen as part of the water-use problem, are now being tested as potential allies.
Because these perennial crops sit dormant in the winter, fields can sometimes be flooded without harming the plants, while providing a pathway to push millions of gallons back into underground reserves.
At Terranova Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, Don Cameron has been leading that charge. “We built about five miles of canals on the farm along with a 450-horsepower pump to lift the water,” he explained. In 2023, after a parade of atmospheric rivers, they put the system to the test: “We put almost 19,000 acre-feet of water on the ground and into the aquifer for a very successful recharge year. The aquifer responded by increasing the water level 15 to 20 feet and has remained at levels higher than before.”
The early results are shifting assumptions. “We have flooded olive, almond, pistachio, and wine grapes for several months, with very little damage to the crops,” Cameron said. “Most growers thought it would damage their permanent crops.” Instead, they found surprises: “A real nice side benefit was the elimination of nematodes in our basins. Normally, we would have to fumigate before planting crops sensitive to nematodes. A real nice surprise.”
Other growers and groundwater agencies have taken note. Under California’s SGMA rules, recharge is now a ticket to keep land in production. “Without recharge, additional land would be taken out of production,” Cameron said. “So, recharge is incentivized with the ability to farm more of their land. A real win for growers and groundwater sustainability agencies.”
Of course, the practice is not without its risks. Flooding at the wrong time of year, or on poorly drained soils, can suffocate roots and reduce yields. Infrastructure is also required, canals, gates, and pumps that many farmers cannot afford on their own. Yet the experiments highlight a crucial shift in thinking: rather than viewing farmers solely as water consumers, they can become partners in rebuilding California’s natural hydrology. By mimicking the landscape’s historical patterns, even crops once vilified for water use may become tools to secure it.
For Cameron, the most rewarding moment came after decades of tinkering. “Turning on the main pump to bring floodwater onto the farm, after over 30 years of testing and small projects, that brought an immense satisfaction,” he said. “To see the dream turn into reality and the many benefits it will bring.”
The lesson is clear. Top-down, inflexible directives such as requiring the planting of cover crops, eliminating tillage, reducing water use, may be helpful in theory but harmful in practice when mandated everywhere, without nuance. Every landscape has its own constraints and opportunities, and its potential emerges when we work with it as a living system. The future of agriculture lies not in one-size-fits-all mandates, but in outcomes-based approaches that trust and support farmers to listen to their landscapes and innovate within their context.
This points directly to Leading Harvest because its Farmland Management Standard is built to do exactly that: move away from prescriptive practices and instead provide an outcomes-based, third-party verified framework that allows for flexibility across different geographies, crops, and farm systems.
