The farm became my haven from the troubling commercialism of my city business. As my interest in quality meats, fruits and vegetables grew, I realized that I had a large deficit of knowledge. Growing up in the city, I had no experience in agriculture. I began to read more about farms and small agriculture. Down the street from the restaurant was a small used bookstore and I would walk through it once or twice daily when the dining room was quiet and buy up every book on animals and farming and farm-based cooking. I would return from my walks, sit at the bar and pore over the books, learning how to grow corn, pluck chickens, make cider. Everything was new to me and exciting. I wanted chickens, I wanted cows, I wanted pigs. All was great; everything was possible.
The neighboring eight acres adjacent to my house came up for sale and I decided to buy the parcel, not sure why I wanted it or what I would do with it, but having the instinct to know that I had only one chance to secure so much land for my own uses. These new eight acres had also been part of the Beall Greenhouse Company. When I took over the land, nearly all of it was covered in small first-generation trees: alders, willows and an understory of invasive plants: Scotch broom, blackberries, hawthorn. Once I began to have the land cleared, I could see the terrain of it. What had appeared to be a plot of original land, of undisturbed earth, had been in fact greatly abused. I speculate that the previous owners, who had owned the land for the prior hundred years, had bulldozed it, making roads, flattening hills for greenhouses and harvesting any topsoil for use in the greenhouses. I also found vast quantities of garbage: irrigation pipes, plastic bags, plastic pots, galvanized water pipes. Earlier clearing had pushed a century-old garbage dump into giant heaps mixed with felled trees, the trees rotting in the piles of plastic. Large empty oil drums the size of trucks were hidden in the brush, a stack of pipes to their side.
The irony of all this garbage was that it was primarily agricultural garbage, the detritus of raising plants for nearly a century. I found the odd soda can from the 1960s, but principally I found horticultural refuse. While spending months picking up irrigation pipes and small plastic plant markers, I vowed to leave this land free of any negative mark from my enterprises when I would eventually leave the land.
To work my land, I wanted a tractor. Objectively, I may not have needed a tractor for a plot of this size. Many small farms don’t use tractors; they raise crops better suited to hand work than tractor work. I had no idea what I would raise on this farm, but I wanted a tractor; I wanted to be taken seriously. Farmers have tractors, right?
I started at the largest John Deere dealer in the area, which boasted a giant, deeply masculine showroom. I’m not sure why I picked John Deere, but I knew the name and liked the color green. Really. I walked around and around and around, sheepishly pretending to check out this tractor and that, admiring the rows of implements, marveling at the new tractor models. None of the tractors had prices on them and the implements gave little indication of their intended use. I thought I would walk up to a salesman and engage him, but all that I had planned to ask was, “How much is that big green metal thing with the spikes on the bottom that rotate on the back side of it for mixing dirt or something?” Things could have become awkward, but no one even noticed me. I left with no tractor.
Undeterred, a few weeks later I searched out a smaller dealership. John Deere dealerships vary in their product lines. There are four distinct categories. The largest John Deere dealerships sell large construction equipment: bulldozers, excavators and such. I knew enough not to set foot on these lots. Some dealers sell equipment for large agriculture, located in farming communities well out of the city; their tractors are huge hundred-thousand-dollar machines. The men who shop at these dealerships are older, have lived in the community for years and are well known. Other stores are closer to the city and sell “compact utility tractors.” This is their classification for smaller-acreage-farm tractors. The prices range from ten thousand to upward of fifty thousand dollars. The fourth type of dealership sells lawn mowers and turf equipment. Their intended clientele run golf courses, cemeteries and parks.
I went to the fourth category, after starting at the second. I should have gone to the third. They were much nicer to me at the fourth, even though I clearly drove the wrong truck, wore the wrong clothes and talked the wrong talk. But they did have tractors for sale. I asked some poorly phrased questions about pulling trees with the tractor, the salesman responded ambiguously that the tractor could theoretically pull a tree if I set my mind to it and we had a deal. Only after buying the tractor in question did I learn that only a large piece of heavy equipment could pull out a tree.
These basic skills, such as which tractor dealer to go to, which tractor to buy, what to say, are hard to learn from a book and my only knowledge came from old, outdated books. In an ideal world I would have grown up on a farm, going to the tractor dealer to shop for new tractors, buy parts, look for implements with my father, my uncle, my grandfather. My father died when I was very young and even if he had lived long enough to take me shopping, to teach me the ways of the world, tractors were not his heritage. My grandfather had worked with cattle in the far northern reaches of British Columbia, but my father spent his life in an office, keeping the books for small companies until he moved to the United States. I inherited bookkeeping skills, not tractoring skills.
Even though it wasn’t suited to pulling trees, I quickly discovered that I liked my tractor. I liked it a lot. Part of the enjoyment was simply that the tractor was shiny and new. Driving a tractor is different from driving a car. In a car there is a disconnect between the driver and the engine. As you tap the gas pedal, the car accelerates tremendously. There is little sense, sitting in a car, of how or why you are moving. The engine is hidden, the interior of the car is designed to be like a living room. A tractor has no such disconnect. The engine is directly in front of you, the rear wheels high and just to your sides, and as you turn the steering wheel you can see the front wheels respond in kind. Tractors have little interest in speed, only torque; they have a goal of doing work. When I sit on the seat of the tractor and use the hydraulic controls, I feel strong. I can lift heavy objects, pull a huge weight, do more work than I ever could by hand. In a car I just feel as though I am on a sofa in a floating hotel room, gliding down the highway.
I had a book that showed how to cut a field. I would drive in concentric circles around the field, each circle one row over from the last, until I hit the edge of the field. I tried it out and it worked. The goal is to drive only in forward gear and never stop the tractor, nor change gears; to never put it in reverse, to not waste time backing up. After a long day at the restaurant I would rush home, hop on the tractor and drive around, regardless of whether I actually needed to perform a task with it. I liked the sound of the diesel motor, the bounce of the shockless ride, the noise of the brush cutter ripping through the weeds. As I drove up the hill toward the upper pasture, the oil in the diesel would begin to burn; smoke would come from the exhaust pipe that sticks straight up from the engine in front of me. I liked the smell, I liked to see the smoke; something was being done.
I was on my way to being a farmer and being thought of as a farmer.
Initially, I pursued growing food on the farm as a hobby, a way to stock my own pantry and explore the possibilities of the land. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to grow food full-time as a business, and that to do so I needed a business plan. I had to pick a business model that took into account what was needed in the marketplace, what I enjoyed growing and what the quality and the quantity of land I had could handle. By the time I began preparing to make the leap, I had owned my farm for a decade, but always as a restaurateur first and a farmer on the off days. With the eight acres I had acquired from my neighbor, I had twelve acres by then and a few sheep that friends had given me. I planted a garden every year and had started two orchards, one all apples and the other a mixture of nuts, cherries, pears, persimmons and plums. I was ready to stop working in the city and wo
rk the farm full-time.
I had attended a lecture given by a farmer named Henning from Lopez Island, north of Seattle in the San Juan Islands. In his lecture he described his farm where he raised grass-fed beef cows on a small scale. I was immediately inspired. I had never before met a successful farmer. Henning showed slides of his barns and cows and fields. They were all very tidy and well-cared-for. As I sat in the front row of the room, absorbed by everything he said, I began to notice the time frame that he was operating within. He spent ten years working on this project and ten years on that project and five years on the other one. As I looked at him I realized that he was far older than his body indicated. He was in great shape, trim, with a full head of hair and a brushy beard and spry, healthy. He gruffly called on me, asking me about what I grew, what animals I raised; he put me on the spot as to my farming practices. He thought I was a farmer. I liked what he did, I liked his life. I left that lecture thinking that I wanted to raise cows, beef cows. I had a hunch that there was a market for local beef; customers were looking for healthier meats, and I thought that the raising of beef cows could fit into my lifestyle. Beef cows need attention, but not necessarily on a daily basis.
I went back and read Joel Salatin’s book on grass-fed beef, Salad Bar Beef. The challenge was that I had a small amount of land for a cattle ranch and a large percentage of those acres was not yet cleared; the land remained covered in small trees and brambles. I simply didn’t have the quantity of pastureland necessary to raise enough cows to make the kind of cash that could cover my expenses. Feeding animals only grass is a great system if you have a large volume of pasture. This is the reason large cattle ranches tend to be in states like Montana: large expanses of inexpensive land. With the quantity of land that I did have, either I needed a higher-profit crop or I needed to find more pastureland.
I went off in search of more land to pursue my latest idea of raising beef cows. Surrounding my farm were small parcels with houses on them; there was no way for me to expand. There were large pastures on Vashon Island, but none were contiguous with my property, and all would have been prohibitively expensive to purchase.
So I began a search for a farm near Seattle, but not on Vashon Island. I considered selling my farm and relocating to a more rural area. In the late 1990s, farmland was still available one hour’s drive outside of Seattle. Today, it has all been bought up, but at that time I still found old farms for sale at decent prices. I came across a hundred-acre farm that was more than an hour from Seattle, but at $300,000 the price was right. I calculated that if I sold my farm, I could afford to make a go of it. I made an appointment with the real estate agent and went out to see the farm.
The farm was a former dairy operation, located outside of the small town of Sedro-Woolley. A humble house, a very large hay barn, a milking parlor, loafing sheds for cows, equipment sheds, all of the trappings of a dairy farm were there, including many acres of beautiful pastureland. At the time I remember looking at all these structures and having no idea what they were used for. I simply stared at them, trying to imagine what they had to do with cows. The barns I could understand, and although I had never seen a milking parlor, its simple design made its function self-evident.
A river ran through the rectangular-shaped plot, meandering back and forth across the pastures as it made its way down the long length of the property. The county had changed the regulations and had instituted a one-hundred-foot setback from the river. Previously cattle were allowed to graze right up to the riverbanks. With new clean-water legislation the county did not allow cows to graze near the riverbank for fear of high nitrogen levels leaching from the cows’ manure into the water, increasing the level of algae and decreasing the oxygen content, potentially detrimental to salmon. Because this river curved back and forth serpentinelike through the property, the owner was losing a tremendous percentage of his land. He had decided to sell.
If the owner were in his fifties or sixties this would be a story of a vital farmer forced out by ever-stricter county environmental regulations. This farmer, however, was ninety-five years old. I met him in his living room that morning. Not terribly mobile, but very much alive and active. He was ready to leave his farm.
After touring the pastures, checking out the barns and walking the river, I chatted with the real estate agent, who turned out to be a personal friend of the farmer. I assumed that he had been a farmer his whole life, and that he was coming to the end of a long run in the country.
She told me his story. He had been an accountant for many years in the city and when he turned sixty-five and retired, he bought this dairy farm and began a second career as a dairyman. Throughout his sixties, seventies and eighties he had run this dairy operation, taking care of his Holstein cows and milking them twice daily. When he hit his late eighties, he began to shut down his dairy, finding the work physically difficult. He continued to keep cows, now out of love, not necessity. With the pastures, barns and fences in place, he switched to beef cows, as it was less daily physical work for him.
Little by little his herd shrank as he aged, until just before he put the farm on the market he sold off the last cow. The pastures had no weeds and looked like they had been grazed that week. The barn still had old dry hay in the loft and it felt like the cows had just been in the milking parlor that morning.
The best part was that, even at the age of ninety-five, the farmer wanted to sell the property on a contract. He was willing to carry a thirty-year note and not rely on being cashed out by a bank on closing. I remember asking the agent to clarify this a couple of times because it was both so crazy and so sweet. He knew he would never live long enough to finish the contract, but for whatever reason he offered the option of carrying the paper. I want to think that he wanted a new farmer to take over rather than a residential developer.
After visiting the farm, I drove around trying to get a feel for the area, for the lifestyle and what it would be like to live there. North of Seattle by an hour and a half, Sedro-Woolley is located in Skagit Valley. The landscape is beautiful in this part of the state. Sedro-Woolley was a logging town, but by this point logging had all but disappeared. The small town and the neighboring area around the farm were economically depressed. In between the large, lush farms like the one for sale were small trailers, set off from the road, smoke rising from their metal chimneys. In front of the sad trailers sat clusters of old cars, baby toys and jacked-up oversized pickup trucks. It looked very much like my own property when I had found it: the same drab, moldy housing, the same junked cars.
The tone of the surrounding community, however, couldn’t have been more different. On Vashon the old cars were derelict Volvo 240s, no longer running but still with bumper stickers for Carter/Mondale. On the back windows of those same Volvos were stickers announcing advocacy of world peace or membership in the Sierra Club. The broken-down pickup trucks parked near the farm in Sedro-Woolley also had stickers in their back windows, usually Confederate flags, clearly marking the politics of this northern county. Vashon has a history similar to Sedro-Woolley’s—logging and agriculture—but Vashon gained a new lease on life in the late 1960s. With its proximity to Seattle, Vashon was colonized by hippies seeking what was at the time inexpensive land. Vashon went from being known for its lumber in 1900, to small fruits such as raspberries, strawberries and currants in the 1930s and 1940s, to premium-grade marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s. I liked the feeling on Vashon. It was a community of like-minded folks I wouldn’t mind inviting over for dinner. When I was on that Sedro-Woolley farm, looking at the large hay barn, checking out the pastures, chatting with the wise old farmer, I imagined that I could live there. When I drove around the area, I knew that it was impossible. I instinctively knew that I would never be welcome and could never feel safe. I could never be a part of that community.
So I never put an offer on the Sedro-Woolley farm, even though it would have been an ideal place to raise cows. The drive home to my farm was the hour and half south into Seattle
, then a short wait for the ferryboat, the quarter-hour boat ride and a short ten-minute drive down the island. In that time I had a chance to reflect on my trip. I had expected to sell my home on Vashon and use the proceeds to buy the northern farm. I believed that with the small amount of work I had done on my place and the increased real estate values on Vashon, I could clear enough money to afford the more expensive, larger farm.
On every level, the Sedro-Woolley farm was a real farm. The hundred acres were perfect for raising beef cows the way that I had been reading about. It was fenced and cross-fenced. There was a large barn for the cows to live in when the weather was poor. The pastures were in excellent condition and would feed a small herd of beef cows well. Water lines had already been installed, ready to keep the thirsty animals healthy on the warm summer days. All I would have had to do was move into the comfortable house, buy a couple of dozen beef cows, open the large steel gate to let them into the pastures and wait for them to gain weight on the lush grass. In a year and a half I could begin to slaughter great grass-fed cows for what I knew were waiting Seattle customers. I could be a farmer, a real farmer, in a very short amount of time. But I never could have called the community around the farm home.
I gave up this easy route to being a farmer. I chose the more challenging path. I would make my small, scrappy farm on Vashon Island a real farm. I realized that it had great limitations. There was not enough land to raise beef cows, my intended crop. I simply could never make a living raising beef cows on twelve acres of land, most of which was still covered by woods at the time. I would have to put that idea behind me and find a new model for farming that fit what I did have.
But I learned from the Sedro-Woolley farmer. He wasn’t born into farming, he didn’t spend his life as a dairy farmer and yet had pulled it off. When he was in his mid-nineties he looked wise and full of a lifetime of experience. Yet he had been an accountant and, as the agent told me, he’d probably gotten a book from the library and started reading about cows. I also want to believe that it was the obligation, the responsibility, the necessity of milking and feeding his cows every morning that kept him getting out of bed each day. He didn’t have a choice; his cows were his great motivator. I want to believe that if he had kept milking fifty cows daily he would have lived forever, that only once his herd was gone could he succumb to old age. It is my fantasy of the power of the dairy. It wasn’t his farm that I yearned for—it was his life.
Growing a Farmer Page 3
