There is a realization that follows when you discover that standing and surviving are two very different things.
In late August, the Hawk Fire swept through the mountains and neighborhoods of north Reno, burning more than 15,000 acres, destroying 47 homes, and forcing thousands of residents to evacuate.
My partner, David, and I co-own and operate Prema Farm, a certified organic vegetable farm. We grow year-round on approximately two acres of high-desert soil in Long Valley, north of Reno.
When flames began cresting our ridgeline above Long Valley on Sunday, Aug. 23, we watched firefighters work to keep the fire from advancing farther into the surrounding communities.
We were fortunate; the farm did not burn. But another crisis was unfolding.
A farm without power is a farm without water
The Hawk Fire damaged electrical infrastructure throughout the region. At the height of the emergency, approximately 60,000 NV Energy customers experienced power outages.
Without electricity, our water pump doesn’t work. Without a water pump, our irrigation lines are dry. Without irrigation, crops enduring the heat of a Northern Nevada August are suddenly left to fend for themselves.
For approximately 110 hours, our fields went without their normal water supply. By the third day, we were seeing damage. Some of our older, more-established crops stood a chance of recovering once irrigation resumed; the younger transplants did not.
We began hand-watering what we could, prioritizing the crops with the greatest immediate need and the best chances of survival. Our friends at Mountain Mushroom opened their water supply, allowing us to fill buckets and haul them back and forth between their property and our thirsty fields.
But access to water was only half the battle. Getting it to the crops required a tremendous amount of physical labor—and that’s when our community showed up, quite literally, with buckets in hand.
Friends who had been evacuated from their own homes came to help us save our crops. My parents, who just so happened to be visiting from Hawaii, traded their vacation for a few days of backbreaking farm work. Close friends took hours out of their workdays to fill buckets, haul water and help us keep whatever we could alive.
It was an extraordinary amount of effort from people who had plenty of their own things to worry about. It was a reminder that when the systems we depend on fail, it’s often the people around us who keep things running.
A farm without power is a farm with no cold-chain refrigeration
Fresh vegetables are perishable products, and their quality depends on what happens immediately after harvest.
This process, known as the cold chain, keeps produce at consistently controlled temperatures from the moment it’s harvested until it reaches someone’s table, preserving freshness, nutritional value, and food safety along the way.
Without electricity, our large refrigeration units were unusable. Our wash tubs and greens spinners couldn’t operate as usual without water supply.
We purchased a generator-powered refrigerated trailer to preserve what we could harvest. It was a temporary solution, but its capacity was 5% of our normal storage space. And while a generator could keep a small cooler running, it couldn’t restore the entire operation.
The situation forced us to confront something that had never before been quite so obvious: Growing food is only one part of feeding people. The systems required to safely get that food from the soil to someone’s dinner table are just as important.
The cost of a week without farming
By the middle of the week, David and I made the decision to cancel our scheduled CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) distribution.
Our CSA serves more than 60 households over an 18-week season. Members pay in advance for a share of the farm’s harvest, receiving a weekly assortment of vegetables throughout the summer.
But without reliable irrigation, washing infrastructure and refrigeration, we could not responsibly harvest, process and distribute the volume and variety necessary to fulfill our commitments. Canceling one distribution meant disrupting the food supply of our members while also creating additional financial pressure on an already strained business—and the financial consequences of a wildfire don’t necessarily require flames to reach your property.
There are the immediate costs of emergency equipment, fuel, additional labor and interrupted sales. Then there are the less visible costs: crops that survive but produce less, delayed harvests, reduced inventory, and weeks of work required to restore normal operations.
For a small farm operating on razor-thin margins, these losses matter. That week cost us roughly $4,000 in lost sales and emergency expenses, and a couple thousand more in the weeks that followed.
We decided to open our online store with the limited produce we could safely harvest and handle, hoping to offset some of those costs.
The vulnerability of our food system
The experience raised questions that extend well beyond our particular farm.
In Northern Nevada, agriculture operates within an increasingly complicated environmental landscape. Growers contend with limited water resources, short growing seasons, high winds, extreme temperatures and the recurring threat of wildfire.
We use season extension tools (greenhouses and row coverings), regenerative growing practices, careful irrigation management, and an impressive amount of creative problem-solving to grow food in a place that doesn’t make it easy. But the Hawk Fire exposed vulnerabilities that good farming practices alone cannot solve.
Since the fire, we have begun evaluating our emergency preparedness, including additional generator capacity, backup water options, and ways to protect critical infrastructure during extended outages. Some improvements are relatively straightforward. Others require investments that are difficult for us, a small farm, to absorb.
There is also a larger conversation worth having about the resilience of local and regional food systems, and more importantly, what we’re willing to invest in to protect them.
When people talk about supporting local agriculture, the conversation often centers on freshness, sustainability, and keeping money circulating within the local economy—all worthwhile reasons. But local food production also represents infrastructure that communities depend upon. Just like roads, utilities, and other essential systems, that infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption.
Perhaps it’s time we start treating it that way. That could mean emergency-preparedness grants to help small farms invest in backup power, water storage, and refrigeration. It could mean shared equipment and resources that neighboring farms can access during a crisis, or disaster-relief programs that recognize agricultural losses even when flames never reach the fields.
These aren’t extravagant investments. They’re practical safeguards for a food system we claim to value, but often leave individual farmers to protect on their own.
A farm doesn’t have to burn down to stop feeding people.
What recovery looks like
In the days following the fire, as utility crews worked to restore service and firefighters continued securing the perimeter, we slowly began returning to normal operations. Our electricity was restored; irrigation resumed; and we began assessing what had survived.
Some crops recovered. Others represented losses we would have to absorb and are still absorbing to this day. And the interruption had consequences that extended beyond the week of the fire, reducing the volume of produce available for subsequent harvests.
We’re not navigating the aftermath alone. People called and texted to check on us. Neighbors and friends offered equipment, supplies and labor. Other farmers helped us troubleshoot problems, share resources and find solutions when our usual systems failed.
Emergencies have a way of making that dependence impossible to ignore. We discovered that our farm was more vulnerable than we fully understood. We are now planning for a future in which emergency preparedness is as much a part of farming as crop rotation, irrigation and planting schedules.
At the top of our list is installing a solar-powered water pump so that losing electricity doesn’t also mean losing access to irrigation. Unfortunately, a system like this costs of $10,000 to $25,000. It’s an expense we’re hoping to make possible through grant funding. We’re also exploring backup generators large enough to keep our refrigeration running.
Each of these projects comes with a substantial price tag, and none will happen overnight. But after experiencing firsthand how quickly a farm can become vulnerable without power or water, we’re beginning to understand that the cost of preparing for the next emergency may be far less than the cost of surviving it.
The fire reminded us how quickly the things we’ve built can become vulnerable. The people around us reminded us why they’re worth rebuilding.
Funding for this story was provided by the Institute for Nonprofit News and Google News Initiative’s Disaster Response Fund.