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Eric Mortenson has been a reporter in Oregon since 1980, working for both the Eugene Register-Guard and the Oregonian, the daily newspaper of the Portland metropolitan area, and currently Capital Press in Salem, Oregon, a weekly newspaper focusing on agricultural news related to the West Coast region. This selection first appeared in the Oregonian in September 2011. In an email to one of the authors of this textbook, Mortenson reports that he grew up in Hood River, Oregon, surrounded by orchards, and that his summer jobs involved picking fruit, operating combines, plowing, and driving wheat trucks. His older brother has spent his career working for a timber company. Mortenson hopes that these experiences give him a better understanding of the issues he writes about than someone who has not had these opportunities might have.

As is often the case with newspapers that have print and online editions, this article appeared with two different titles. The online edition uses the title that we use below, while the print edition carried the title “Family Pulls In, Branches Out: Tom and Barbara Boyer Adapted Their 400 Acres to Fit a Changing Market, Lifestyle.” As you read this article, consider which title you think is more appropriate; also pay attention to what this article teaches about the complexities of eating locally as well as the questions it raises about sustainability.

A Diversified Farm Prospers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley by Going Organic and Staying Local

ERIC MORTENSON

MCMINNVILLE — To hear Tom Boyer explain it, farming has a proper pace to it. He shakes his head at farmers who get too big too fast. The ones who get out ahead of themselves in terms of acreage, bank loans or expensive equipment. In their haste, those fellows are “right next to stumbling,” he says.

Sometimes, of course, every farmer races from chore to chore, hustles to beat the weather and scrambles to solve the latest tractor breakdown. “It keeps you high-stepping to keep on top of it,” Boyer says.

On their 400 acres a mile south of McMinnville, Boyer and his wife, Barbara, face the challenge common to Oregon’s 38,800 farmers: How do you keep your balance when markets change, costs increase and regulations crank?

How do you mesh what you love with the complications of water, fuel, fertilizer and financing? What about consumer expectations? What if traffic is so thick and fast you’re scared to move bulky equipment to your next field down the highway? What if the neighbor sells out and plants condos instead of crops?

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5 How do you adapt, hold on and prosper?

This is one farm’s walk. The Boyers found their pace by going organic and sticking local. By scaling back while reaching out, and by dialing in and diversifying.

Tom Boyer is 54, the fourth generation to farm in Oregon and the third on this ground, which hugs the curving contour of the South Yamhill River. He’s a jacket and jeans guy, wears his cap to the dinner table and calls his wife Babs. He’s bald, stocky, keeps a droopy 1970s mustache and is a central casting font of laconic country expressions.

Which can be misleading. He gets by on four hours sleep a night, and spends his time, when the house is quiet, reading and researching. “You’re constantly fine-tuning,” he says. “If you’re not fine-tuning, you’re out of business.”

“I call him my Einstein,” Barbara Boyer says.

10 She’s 44, a Connecticut girl with a plant science degree who never imagined she’d end up an Oregon farmwife. She’s dark-haired, gregarious and a natural organizer. She won election to the board of the Yamhill County Soil & Water Conservation District and in November will take a seat on the Oregon Board of Agriculture.

She co-founded and now manages the McMinnville Farmer’s Market. She’s leaning on the county’s school districts to add local fruit and vegetables to lunch menus. A “no brainer” in such a fine agricultural county, she says.

The Boyer farm, under Tom’s father and grandfather and in his first years, grew grain, multiple varieties of grass seed, and turnips, radish and mustard for seed. That changed after a seed marketing company folded and left him holding several million pounds of vegetable seed. Never again, he vowed, would he let a middleman control his destiny.

DIVERSIFY AND PROSPER

The Boyers set out to establish five “profit centers” at the farm — five ways to make money.

At the heart of it is their “Gourmet Hay.”

15 The Boyers have always grown grass hay — some fields have produced 30 years running — but they began marketing to the many hobby farms and ranches in the area, people with a few horses, goats or cattle to feed. Although international demand has pushed the price of Oregon hay to $220 a ton or more, the Boyers sell for $130 to $160 a ton. Couldn’t look customers in the eye if they gouged them, they say.

They produce 30,000 to 40,000 87-pound bales annually and deliver to about 450 regular customers. They restrict deliveries to a 50-mile radius. Haul beyond that, Tom Boyer says, and you’re a trucker instead of a farmer.

They use organic techniques. Instead of chemical fertilizer, the Boyers buy 300 to 500 tons of pomace — grape skins and seeds left over from pressing at local wineries — and mix it with manure. They spread it on the hay fields in the fall. Tom Boyer calls it “trail mix” for earthworms, whose work makes for rich, healthy, well-drained soil. “Our worm count is way high,” he says.

A second profit center emerged in 2004 from a conservation project along the South Yamhill River. Working with the federal Farm Service Agency, the Boyers and various community groups planted 10,000 trees over seven years. The Boyers estimate they gave up 24 acres of cropland by planting trees in a buffer zone stretching 180 feet from the riverbank, and the FSA pays them $6,000 annually as compensation. That’s less than what they could earn if the land was kept in production, but the restored riparian buffer cools the river and controls erosion.

“We want to have as nice a river to swim in as I did when I was a kid,” Tom Boyer says.

20 Third is a Community Supported Agriculture operation, in which subscribers pay for weekly boxes of fresh vegetables. The Boyers converted 1.5 acres of hay field into a garden, and grow tomatoes, carrots, beans, kale, cabbage, squash and other edibles.

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They plan to expand the garden by another quarter acre and continue enriching it with the pomace treatment.

“If you caress a garden it will produce a third more,” Tom Boyer says. “That’s how you do it.”

The fourth profit center is Barbara Boyer’s job at McMinnville Farmer’s Market, which pays $5,000 a year.

The fifth is a work in progress. They’re fixing up the original farmhouse, a two-story, 1909 beauty, and plan to rent it to vacationers who want to experience a working farm. People ought to know, Tom Boyer says, there are “land rich, pocket poor” family farmers who are “out there busting their butts.”

25 The restoration has a proper pace, as well. They pick one major project each year: replaced the roof in 2009, rebuilt the front porch last year and this fall will add stone steps, front and back.

Tom Boyer sees the house rental as a way to “keep the story alive.”

His son, Ted, lives nearby and is beginning to show interest in returning to the farm. And Ted’s young daughter, Josi, loves every aspect.

“If heritage were not important, why not just sell it and coast?” Tom asks.

His smile is his answer.

30 “I think it’s worth punishing a few more generations,” he says.

THERE’S MORE

The Boyers have farmed up to 1,000 acres by leasing land, but found themselves “highway farmers” moving from field to field. They’re scaling back to the home place, and believe they can maintain hay production with additional irrigation.

Even that comes with complications, however. The Boyers hold the oldest water rights on the South Yamhill. If they increase their take, some newcomer to the fast-growing county might get bumped off. They don’t relish the prospect.

But farming is tough. There are testy times during harvest, when rain threatens the hay and the baler or stacker breaks down, when Tom Boyer says he has “a regular Jesus moment” and questions why he does it.

The answer lies deep. Farming, he says with a laugh, “gets in your blood and then you’re screwed.”

35 But good moments overcome bad. Delivering hay to somebody you like, he says, is like going to meet a friend.

Perspective and energy also arrive with the farm’s idealistic “woofers,” unpaid interns who come to the farm through a program called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. In the past three years, the Boyers have hosted 79 woofers for two-week stays, putting them up in their basement. The current intern, Meghan Bender, was a waitress in Manhattan before arriving to pick beans and tomatoes and push a wheelbarrow for the first time.

“I spend most of the day in the garden,” Bender says with a broad smile. “It feels really right.”

That goes both ways.

“Maybe we are doing something right,” Tom Boyer says. “These kids are coming from across the country to be here.”

40 The Boyers have worked only two Sundays in 18 years; once when they had to catch up on the harvest after a friend’s funeral on a Saturday, another time to help a friend whose equipment had broken down. Otherwise, Sundays are for spiritual recharge. Time to find that proper pace. Stay on the steady.

A reminder, Tom Boyer says, “That there’s some sort of life other than on a tractor.”