Farm to Fable
On the West side of the Cascade mountains, just before the foothills of the Coastal range, there lies a luscious valley. It has a strange shape to it - a flat, fertile bottom, with hills rising from it to the South, East, and West. Before the arrival of Western Settlers, perhaps even before the arrival of the Kalapuya peoples, the valley brimmed with water - runoff from a spring thaw that spanned a thousand years.
When the lake finally drained, it left behind a flat sediment bottom, eroded on the West by the Willamette River, and bordered to the North by the massive swell of the Columbia River. From above, it’s possible to get a sense for just how much this place has changed from the quiet, grasslands that followed the flood. The lowland portions of the valley are a sea of grey and brown concrete, spreading in either direction from I-5, the artery that moves people, goods and culture from Mexico to Canada.
Before the arrival of the Westerners, this gentle piece of land sustained something like 20,000 of the Kalapuya people. They lived along the Willamette and it’s tributaries, managing the land. Not by bending the backs of beasts of burden, but through fire - to drive the animals during a hunt, to clear the ground beneath the native oaks and hazelnuts, to help the berries bloom and ripen. The tide of Westerners that began as a trickle at the end of the 1700s and ended in a flood by the late 1800s, utterly transformed this place. A story as old as life itself has played out on this fertile ground - a new arrival brings change, disease, decimation. It sifts the old way of life into something unrecognizable, a transmutation that is as inevitable as it is tragic.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, leaders of Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery, were sent West to find “the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce.” They followed the Columbia River, still untamed, and claimed the Northwest Coast for the United States. It mattered little at the time that the land was already occupied, for the thousands of Kalapuya people were already weakening - their numbers dwindling to almost nothing as the diseases of the western traders - smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis - swept through their populations.
By the time the first settlers arrived on the Oregon Trail in 1845, there were only about 600 of the Kalapuya peoples left. The conversion of the land to Western ownership was an open and shut case. Henry Warre captured the transition between eras in his 1845 painting, Valley of the Willamette River. Open grassland interspersed with stands of conifers and white oak stretches into the distance, the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood barely visible in the distance. Two figures are seated on the bluff at the bottom right, absorbed in conversation. I imagine the one in yellow is trying to make some kind of bargain to forestall the inevitable.
The Century Farm
Today, the Willamette Valley is a land of farms. Driving down country roads that split neatly-tended plots of land, you occasionally see the signs marking just how long this has been the case. “Century farms” are those that have been continuously operating for the last hundred years. Passed down parents to children, these properties have seen commodities change from hay, alfalfa, and timber to more fashionable products that fetch a higher price: hazelnuts, grass seed, nursery stock, Christmas trees - even wine. Only about 1,200 of the state’s 38,000 farms are century farms, but more than 80% of them are family owned.
Up until fairly recently, agriculture has been central to the identity of most Oregonians. Here, as in the rest of the country, the number of farms peaked at some point in the last hundred years, and has steadily decreased since then. The total number of acres under cultivation, however, have stayed relatively constant - meaning the size of each farm has grown.
The large number of farms in the middle of the 20th century had a lot to do with how the west was settled - each family willing to relocate to the sparsely populated Western states was given a plot of land. Even single women, though few in number, were welcomed and given a fair stake. However, then as now, not everyone was cut out for farming. During the Great Depression, when pretty much everything difficult became even more so, many farms simply couldn’t afford payments to the banks any more - over-leveraged on seed and animal stock, they were foreclosed. That land was redistributed to neighbors that were doing well nearby, causing the size of those farms to grow. The trend has continued with each economic downturn, to the point that something like 65% of all agricultural products in the US are produced by less than 5% of farms.
What’s interesting about this moment in history is that another sea change is on the horizon. Within two decades of the COVID downturn, 64% of the extant farmland in Oregon is going to be changing hands - and most farmers don’t have a succession plan.
There’s two futures available for this place - one of industrial duocropping, gradually increasing farm sizes, and depletion of precious resources, anonymous supply chains. The other is a network of small farms that are tied into their communities, with diverse income streams that are capable of weathering an economic downturn, focused on regenerative practices that leave the land stronger than when they began. The problem is, though, that it’s hard to find anyone that’s willing to take on the burden of farming.
In many ways, though, the future depends less on those that are farmers already, and far more on the rest of us. At this tipping point, it’s the consumers - not necessarily even Oregonians - that will decide the future of this place.
Home on the Range
Dan Andersen’s ranch keeps a herd of cattle on the hardscrabble grasslands out in the Eastern part of the state. Out here is the sun-browned part of the state, far from the moss-green dapple of the Willamette Valley and the constant grind of Interstate 5. Only ~ 200,000 of Oregon’s four million inhabitants live out here, a place that’s a perfect example of how statistics only tell part of a story. Despite being a little more than 2% of the state’s GDP, agricultural activity is pretty much the only business in town once you cross the Cascade Range.
Mr. Andersen has been out here for 44 years - his entire life, save for a few years after he was born and a few years while he was away at college. The lifestyle ended up calling him back, and it’s been him and his brother on the ranch ever since. When I first call him, he’s in the middle of taking care of something, and he asks me to call back when he has a moment. When we speak 30 minutes later, he tells me he appreciates the opportunity to visit with me while he sits in the shade of the cottonwood tree and listens to the cows munch the grass.
It’s been a hard few weeks for the guy. He had to make some hard decisions about his animals with an eye on the changing economic scene. Instead of selling them outright, he decided to retain ownership, in the hopes that the markets would recover by the time it was time to sell his cows to the processor. There’s still time, as the harvest doesn’t come until June, but he’s watched the commodity prices fall, day after day. There’s more livestock on the market than there is demand, and the only thing that can reverse the trend is reopening.
He’s concerned, sure. It’s going to be a hard year. But he’s been ranching on this piece of land for decades, and him and his brother have made good financial decisions. Back in the 50s and 60s, when it was his parents on the land, he says, there used to be “family farms down the road, who kept a few cows, some pigs, and a few acres of hay land. But then their kids didn’t come back,” leaving the aging parents alone with the burden of a farm that never took a rest day. When they couldn’t stand it any more, Dan and his brother would buy up the lots. Today, they’re working an area that used to be five or six sustainable farms. They’re financially secure, but it’s not lost on him that they’re in the same boat that those farmers were in when he was a kid.
He’s got three boys, the youngest of which is 16. They’ve watched him work “12-16 hour days, every single day of the year, every single day of my life. They’ve got other interests, despite the fact that they love the lifestyle. And I had to tell ‘em, ‘I’ll help you get to where you’re trying to go.’ Because you have to love the lifestyle to really appreciate what you’re doing.”
“I had a friend, MIT graduate, he made millions at Microsoft. Then he came back to the area and decided he wanted to farm. So he did it for ten years, since it was always a wish of his to come back and farm.” But after a few years of toil, the friend decided to close up shop - he had lived the dream, and had to admit that he just didn’t love it enough to work that hard.
At the end of our call, he mentions that he took his wife on a small trip for Mother’s Day, something nice to show his appreciation. They went to the Owyhee Canyon - about an hour drive away. It’s one of the last places of darkness in the continental United States. At night, the Milky Way shines across the highland scrub while creatures stir, far from the bustling hive of the Willamette Valley. With a wry chuckle, he tells me, “You know, I’ve lived here for most of my life, but I’ve never been there. There’s certain things that you get busy and never do.”
Solutions at the Source
Back in Multnomah County, people have been seeing this change coming for a long time. Since 2013, the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District has been trying to do something about all these farms that are going to change hands in the next few years.
The Headwaters Incubator Program (HIP) was established to attempt to prevent the seemingly inevitable rise of mega-farms. They hope that, by helping people develop a relationship with the soil in a controlled environment, that they’re going to be able to support a sustainable farming community in the state.
Normally, farms get passed down through generations - it’s how there’s 1,200 century farms around the state - but things are different now. Like Mr. Andersen’s children, most kids leave home and they don’t come back. The work is just too hard, the farm country just too empty. Moving to the city, any city, offers the rewards of a higher paying job (average salary in Eastern Oregon is around $30,000 a year, vs ~50,000 in the Portland and Willamette Valley area), the stability of a social safety net, and the lure of paid time off.
But Rowan Steele, Headwaters Farm Program Manager, finds that there are still people who are captivated by the craft of farming - even though many have been raised in the land of sidewalks and storm drains. The only things stopping them from becoming full-fledged farmers are simple: education and access. Speaking by phone, he admitted that “there’s a lot of people that aren’t cut out for agriculture.” But there are also many that don’t know that they’re cut out for it yet. For these folks, learning to farm causes them to “fall in love with eating food that they grow, watching the soil improve.” The difficulty, he says, is reaching them - because “there are probably many people who would be surprised to find that there’s something in it that calls to them.” This is especially true for those who are raised in the tradition of regenerative agriculture, rather than the industrial duocrop model that’s popular in the great plains.
He’s quick to point out that regenerative agriculture is not permaculture. This is production scale farming that’s focused on leaving the land healthier than it was when the work began. It produces food with higher nutritional content, protects land from erosion and fertilizer runoff, and places great emphasis on biodiversity. Many farmers believe that the food produced on these farms is better than the food produced by industrial agriculture, but the benefits extend outward to the community. Rather than producing food for multinational distribution, the majority of regenerative farms are small and local, in defiance of the Earl Butz “get big or get out” philosophy that has driven the explosion of big Agra over the course of the last hundred years.
On paper, regenerative agriculture offers clear benefits, and seems like it could easily be practiced on larger and large scale. But the success of these programs isn’t guaranteed. There are still more farmers leaving the business every year than there are coming in, and the number of new farms isn’t taking off. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the cards are stacked against small growers with high expenses and low revenue. It’s also partially due to the fact that it’s easier to sell a farm to a large buyer that’s in the area, ready to fold your operation in with something they’re already doing, than it is to find an external buyer to come in and set up shop. Few brand-new farmers are able to afford a plot of land that’s big enough to generate returns that will sustain the business over a long period of time.
Headwaters, and organizations like the Rogue Valley Farmers Co-op are hoping to reverse this trend. They offer internship programs, educational opportunities, help with networking, and assistance for new farmers looking to get on their feet and out into the field. In an ideal world, schools would be the place where students encounter farming for the first time, so that they’re able to graduate already walking down that path.
But the question of inevitable social change remains. Sure, we have to eat. But isn’t industrial agriculture the most efficient way to do that.
Fighting the Inevitable?
In some ways, the rise of large-scale duocrop farming, and big Agra on the California scale is an inevitable process. The industrialization of society caused people to get pulled into the cities to work in the factories. The same thing is still happening in Oregon - since the 1980s, Oregon’s GDP has become more and more dependent on manufacturing and the financial sector. There’s simply less of a drive for people to live out in the country, away from services, if there won’t be significant financial returns for it.
As a society, we’ve come to associate quality of life with quality of leisure time, measured in one’s ability to ‘get away from it all.” This makes working a business with narrow profit margins that requires 12-16 hour days for the rest of your life much less appealing than being able to live and work in the city for a corporation that can offer security and easy access to the pleasures of modernity. Rowan makes the point that farms are a lynchpin of their communities, providing far more wealth than can be measured by the almighty dollar.
During uncertain times like these, regenerative farmers have been able to pivot quickly. Direct-to-consumer sales are booming, morale is high. There are great difficulties ahead, but small scale farming seems like it might survive this downturn more easily than the big guys. There are fewer people between planting, harvest, and sales - and the people purchasing the foods are fundamentally interested in the process itself. They’re willing to pay the premium for something that’s been grown with great care.
In other words, they’re idealists. Even better, they’re willing to put their money where their mouths are. They might not be interested in going into the fields themselves, but they’re willing to support those who believe in taking care of the Earth. The question is, will it be enough to stop the steady march of history?
That’s much more complicated, and depends on our ability to prioritize meaning over pleasure. The farmer doesn’t get to drive the beamer, doesn’t have the high-heeled shoes, probably doesn’t even have avocado toast. But they do have the ability to form the community around them, and turn the earth a rich, deep brown.
The choice is between ease and meaning. And the worst part of it is… no one can make it for us.
