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In 2003, the non-profit organization Sustainable
Northwest joined with the Center for Sustaining
Agriculture and Natural Resources at WSU, Shared
Strategy for Puget Sound, and Farming and the
Environment to identify and promote 50 outstanding
examples of ecosystem restoration, working lands
management, and watershed stewardship in the state
of Washington. “Renewing the Countryside”
is a national project brought to Washington in
partnership with Minnesota-based Renewing The
Countryside, Inc., which plans to publish collections
of case studies on land stewardship and restoration
for every state in the U.S.
Renewing the Countryside: Washington is
scheduled for publication as a high-quality coffee
table book in February 2005. For more information,
or to purchase a copy, contact:
Sustainable Northwest
620 SW Main, Suite 112
Portland, OR 97205
503-221-6911
www.sustainable
northwest.org |
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Farm at
a Glance
Grant Gibbs
Gibbs’ Organic Produce
Chelan County, WA
Location: about 100 miles east
of Seattle
Land: 80 acres
Products:
• timber, beef
• pork
• poultry
• mixed vegetables
• apples
• pears
Markets:
• informal subscription sales
• farmers' markets
• food co-ops |
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Grant
Gibbs is a modern day pioneer who has integrated farming and
forestry operations on his 80 acres into what he calls “a
1930s-era fully cycling farm.” In his pine-encircled
valley tucked in the North Cascades, eight organic garden
patches are interspersed with pasture, orchard trees, a creek,
poultry and pig pens, a small scale mill, and round wood buildings
he constructed from timber he selectively harvested from the
steep surrounding hills.
Grant has invested almost 30 years in managing and maximizing
this land’s productivity, using every natural farming
technique ever heard of and then some. “I saw this farm
as a spot to do ‘permanent cultures’ and pass
it on generation after generation. When you plant an orchard
it is not a one person lifetime thing – it goes on and
on and on. The berries, the fruit trees, the forest, the riparian
zone – the whole ecosystem is working together as a
permanent culture. I am not ever going to take my hayfield
out of hay because I need it for the cows, and I need the
cows for compost, and I need that manure for the orchard.”
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"My goal was to make 10,000 bucks
off this land. . . . Back then, who would have guessed
that organic would do what it did?" |
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Grant’s first lesson in farming came in the late 1960s
when he decided to head for Canada instead of being drafted
for the Vietnam War. “I didn’t have enough money
to make it to the border. So I went underground, working without
a social security number as a migrant, a hobo. I rode the freights
and picked orchards.” In 1975 he was able to buy this
deserted dairy farm. “It was a mess. Nothing was here,
no power, no wells, no fields, no road. It was all going back
to forest, so I had a huge chore to build all the buildings,
start managing all the timber stands, figuring out my field
layout.”
“I started farming organic after working chemical farms
all my younger life. I could see what it was doing to the
ground and the air and the water and the people that worked
it. I saw how it was a vicious cycle. I knew I didn’t
want to go down that road.” He was less certain about
how he would make a living farming a different way.
“My goal was to make 10,000 bucks off this land,”
Grant remembers. “I was pretty happy when I first hit
that and my dream had come true. Back then, who would have
guessed that organic would do what it did? I thought it was
going to be a major problem my whole life trying to find a
market, somebody who wanted to buy organic hamburger, organic
pears, organic lettuce. It was actually a project as much
as farming to sell your crop. Now the demand is such that
you can basically stay home and let the phone ring and if
you want to answer your phone you’ll sell your whole
crop.” But Grant has chosen to only sell locally, even
though the demand for organic produce is far greater west
of the Cascade Range, and that means marketing remains a challenge.
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"Customers don’t have to
pay me up front, but it essentially is a subscription
agricultural program. People say, ‘Raise me 10 chickens.
Raise me a hog. I want a quarter of beef from you.’
It works out real good." |
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“I refuse to haul it to Seattle. It is either going to
get sold in this county or fed to my pigs. I’m not going
to run the I-90 gamut and burn fuel. I just want to stay simple
and sell it within 20 miles of the farm.” Even with that
self-imposed limitation, demand has grown and Grant now raises
produce on about two and half acres. “Originally I had
three gardens, now I have eight. I raise six to twelve cattle
depending on my hay crop – they are grass fed and people
love it. My hogs and fryers are all spoken for. Customers don’t
have to pay me up front, but it essentially is a subscription
agricultural program. People say, ‘Raise me 10 chickens.
Raise me a hog. I want a quarter of beef from you.’ It
works out real good.” 
In addition to selling direct to his neighbors, Grant retails
the products of his farm at a number of local farmers' markets
and food co-ops. He acknowledges that the hardest work has
been selling, rather than farming. “Probably the biggest
challenge was accepting the fact that I was going to have
to be a marketer and a farmer, and learning how to market.
To farm like I do and stay in control of everything
you grow - you’ve got to be a marketer.”
Eliminating off-farm inputs
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"My biggest
bill every year is the taxes. The best incentive
that could ever happen to me would be if the county
tax assessor realized that this awesome farm provides
clean water, healthy forests, organic agriculture,
organic Christmas trees, organic meats, organic
hay. If they valued that enough they could cut
my taxes a bit or even eliminate them." |
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Grant has designed his farming systems to assure that almost
everything that comes off his land has a market or is reinvested
in the fertility of the ground. He is close to meeting his goal
of having no off-farm inputs. “All my fertilization comes
from the farm, that’s why I keep livestock.” Grant
designed and built a “pig tractor,” a movable pigpen
that he rotates over all eight vegetable gardens as part of
his four year rotation. “Wherever I had the pigs last
summer, I plant sweet corn the next summer; after that comes
the leafy greens; then I grow a tuber – carrot or beet
– on the third cycle; and the fourth year I do a legume
before I go back to the hogs.”
Every second year Grant does a light application of compost
on his gardens, and that is where the other livestock are
useful. He makes a couple tons of chicken manure compost every
year. The coarse sawdust from his Volkswagen-powered mill
becomes bedding for his cows, and then a key ingredient in
the annual batch of 20-25 tons of cow manure compost. “I’ve
been monitoring the plant growth – as long as I see
good vigor, good dark green color in the leaf then I know
my nitrogen level is up – so it’s saving me time
and money in the long run not over-fertilizing.”
Grant designed his orchard to provide an additional hay crop.
“I planted the trees far enough apart because I knew
I wanted to get a crop out of there in perpetuity. I manage
the orchard floor like I would the pasture because I consider
it a benefit to have that long tall grass in there that offers
a sanctuary for the beneficial insects. I release hundreds
of dollars of beneficial insects every year, eight different
kinds. Over 20 years I’ve been doing that, and now I
am monitoring the populations to see if they are over-wintering
and checking their work out to see if they are keeping the
pest insects in check. I have had really good luck with it.
It is a long-term fix. Instead of a short-term ‘spray
the problem with a biological insecticide and call it good,’
I am planning, 20 years down the road, on having the whole
thing balanced out, the insect population working for me.”
“My biggest bill every year is the taxes. The best
incentive that could ever happen to me would be if the county
tax assessor realized that this awesome farm provides clean
water, healthy forests, organic agriculture, organic Christmas
trees, organic meats, organic hay. If they valued that enough
they could cut my taxes a bit or even eliminate them. That
would be a huge help to me. I’m doing the same thing
I‘ve been doing for 30 years and everything is changing
around me. All these mountain tops are getting second or third
family dwellings built on them, and guess what, up goes my
taxes.”
“As the farm changes and new neighbors move in, there
are a lot of things going through my mind: maybe it’s
about time to bite the bullet and spend $10,000 and build
a new stainless steel, county-approved kitchen so I can do
value-added food products. Maybe that’s the way the
farm can keep up with the increasing taxes and the surge of
people coming into town with the big money.”
In the meantime, Grant has his hands pretty full as it is.
Over the past 12 years he has hosted one to five interns in
a seasonal farm apprenticeship program. Now other members
of his family are taking on more of the farm work. Grant’s
oldest son has built his home on the property and lives there
with his wife, assuring continuity among the human inhabitants.
As he surveys the tall pines that loom around his fertile
green pastures and leafy green gardens, Grant reflects on
how his lifestyle is a continuous learning process. “I
feel like life and farming are an ongoing experiment with
no certainties to the outcome. A lot of my experiments have
failed and a lot haven’t; whether they fail or not,
it’s still a learning experience. As long as things
keep changing, I’ll stay on the beginning end of the
learning curve.”
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