Greg Massa is the owner and operator of Massa Organics, a diversified farming operation near Glenn, about 30 minutes southwest of Chico. For more than 25 years, leaning on his academic training as a biologist, Greg has been steadily and persistently making improvements and changes to his crop mix and farming techniques to improve the resilience, biodiversity and soil health of his farm. What was once a conventionally-farmed monocrop rice operation now produces exclusively organic rice, almonds, mandarins, and sheep.
Greg has made good use of California’s Healthy Soils and SWEEP incentives programs over the years to help with this transition, as well as federal NRCS programs. Here are some of his practices that have been supported by climate smart grants and that Greg continues to use:
- Applied compost and cover crops to improve soil health without using synthetic fertilizers, which supported a transition to organic
- Installed a hedgerow along the edge of a mandarin orchard to increase beneficial insect and pollinator habitat
- Applied compost on no-till rice for a three-year period to improve soil fertility
- A Healthy Soils Program research grant compared treatments in an almond block of compost, cover crop and a combination of both, and found a yield increase with the combination plot and, when the nuts were laboratory tested, they found 50-100% more nutrients in the nuts compared to a nearby conventional farm
- SWEEP grant supported the conversion of a 40-acre flood irrigated rice field into a sprinkler-irrigated almond orchard
Greg has made other innovations that haven’t relied on grant support. For example, years ago he stopped mowing and flaming the cover crops in his almond orchards because he didn’t like using so much propane, and instead he grazes sheep to terminate the cover crops at least 90 days before harvest so there is no risk of food safety issues caused by animal waste. He had to do a lot of trial-and-error to figure out the optimal timing for moving the sheep after they ate the grass and before they started chewing on the bark and low-hanging leaves.
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