New West Book Review

David Mas Masumoto Pays the Price for Perfect Peaches

By Jenny Shank, 10-22-09

Wisdom of the Last Farmer
by David Mas Masumoto
Simon & Schuster, 238 pages, $25

David Mas Masumoto‘s Wisdom of the Last Farmer will make you want to go out and pay a farmer more than the asking price for his produce at a market.  Masumoto grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on his farm in California’s central valley, carrying on in the tradition of his family.  His grandparents emigrated from Japan over a hundred years ago with the dream of buying land.  Because they weren’t native born Americans, laws forbade them from purchasing land, so instead they worked in other people’s fields and suffered through internment in the Arizona desert during World War II.  But they persevered and eventually their sons established the 80-acre farm that Masumoto now runs with his wife and children. 

Masumoto is on a mission to preserve flavorful heirloom peaches that his family has grown for decades, varieties most farmers have abandoned because of supermarkets’ demands for harder, redder peaches with longer shelf life and transport durability.  Masumoto wants people to experience the “Sun Crest peach, a fat and juicy gem with a stunning, honeyed flavor.” If people could try it, he thinks, they probably wouldn’t settle for the fruit that’s sold as peaches today.

In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, Masumoto, a columnist for the Fresno Bee and the award-winning author of several previous books, discusses his father’s decline in the wake of a stroke, and how their hard work in pursuit of a perfect peach breaks their bodies and spirits down.  “Organic farming is not simple or easy,” Masumoto writes.  “It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve.  I cannot replace tedious labor with faster technology or equipment when things go wrong.”

Masumoto’s suffering at the hands of the weather, weeds, market demands, and plum bad luck will make readers wince, particularly those like me who have former farmers in their families.  The sad narrative repeats itself: some years the crops fail due to weather, other years the fruit is abundant, which drives prices down so low it’s hardly worth it to harvest.  Masumoto writes, “I sometimes have a dream that all the farmers I America are lined up in a single column, the oldest first and the youngest last.  I then look behind and see very few behind me.” But Masumoto can’t seem to keep himself from striving toward the perfect peach.

Masumoto’s father had his first stroke when he was out in the fields, driving a tractor to remove weeds.  He managed to navigate his way toward the shed, where Masumoto found him and got medical help.  Masumoto’s father lingered in a coma for several days, during which his grief-wracked son realized how much he still needed to learn from him about life and farming.

Masumoto’s father eventually emerges from his coma, and after strenuous rehabilitation, he is able to resume some farm tasks, though he is unable to talk.  During the period of his recovery, before additional strokes render him immobile, Masumoto enjoys his time with his father, who is a tireless worker, and is somehow seems content with his life despite the numerous setbacks he’s endured.

Masumoto doesn’t want to continue the body-breaking dawn-to-dusk all-out farming that his father practiced.  He keeps the farm running, but carves out time for his writing and speaking to groups about farming and the glorious peaches of the past.  To do this, he must make compromises, such as plowing under an orchard of grape vines that are too time-consuming to maintain.  “I still seek perfection,” Masumoto writes, “not in outcomes but in effort.”

But the outcomes can be pretty good, particularly when his harvest yields a crop of old-fashioned, juicy peaches.  Perhaps the best chapter of the book is “Names We Wear,” in which Masumoto lists the names of bygone wonder peaches and describes them, such as the “Elberta: the queen of peaches, buttery sweet with a succulent yellow flesh” and the “Rio Oso Gem—a peach with character, not pretty with pronounced sutures but with firm flesh and distinctive ‘orange’ flavor.” Here’s hoping that Masumoto’s philosophy and methods will catch on, and one day more people will be able to savor these ancestral fruits.

David Mas Masumoto will be in Utah to present his book in Salt Lake City at the King’s English Bookshop on Thursday, October 22 (5:30 p.m.).  On October 23 and 24, he will participate in the Moab Confluence “Eating the West” literary festival, and on October 25 he will visit Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, 2 p.m.) as a part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library reading series.

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