Spring 2002 - The Food Issue

Growing Green
by Amy Khuta
Photos by Sarah Galbraith

Loren Bailey’s greenhouse is alive and flourishing while Bellingham raindrops form puddles in the surrounding yard. Bushels of lavender spill into the doorway, where trays of nursling herbs and starter plants stretch and grow to the sound of classical music from the radio in the corner. The sticky air smells like fertile soil, oregano and rosemary.

Loren Bailey rises at 6 a.m. to gather mixed greens, kale, onions, beets, radishes, stinging nettle and herbs from the greenhouse and field so his son Jed can get to the Saturday Farmers Market by 9 a.m. The Bailey’s have worked on Loren’s farm, The Evergreen Station in Ferndale, Wash., for three generations. He became the certified-organic farm’s primary operator in 1971.

Few consumers can buy produce the way the Baileys sell it — fresh from the earth. According to the University of Massachusetts’s agricultural extension office, food in the United States travels an average of 1,300 miles before it reaches the consumer.

“What’s wrong is that the public doesn’t support local production,” Loren said. “We’re paying the same price for two-week-old Californian produce as we are for the freshness of a local product.”

Loren’s wife, Marti Bailey, shares Loren’s love for the land and the long, strenuous hours spent cultivating the harvest.

“You have to really be in love with it to put up with the long days, the seasonal needs and the weather,” she said. “Loren works any time there is daylight.”

The Baileys were ahead of their time when they rejected chemically intensive farming trends in the early 1970s. Because of that commitment, The Evergreen Station has remained as it was when Loren‘s grandfather and grandmother bought the property years ago — a model organic farm.

In 1940, Lord Northbourne first used the term “organic farming” in his book, “Look to the Land”. Northbourne had a “vision of the farm as a sustainable, ecologically stable, self-containable unit, biologically complete and balanced — a dynamic living organic whole.” Sixty-years later, organic is shorthand for chemical-free farming.

According to a 2000 U.S. Geological Survey report on pesticides in stream sediment and aquatic biota, approximately 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the United States to control weeds, insects and other organisms. Agriculture accounts for about 80 percent of that total.

The USGS report indicated that pesticides’ greatest unintended effect is the contamination of the hydrologic system. In recent studies, the agency detected organochlorine insecticides DDT, chlordane and dieldrin in water systems, even though the chemicals haven’t been used in the United States since the 1970s. Field studies indicate that the half-life of DDT in soil is 15 years or more.

Loren and other Whatcom County organic farmers are trying to minimize the amount of new pollution. Organic farmers, however, have had to deal with the public’s misconceptions about their trade.

“At first people thought our produce should be cheaper; what they didn’t understand is that there is still a ton of manual labor involved,” Marti said.

Loren said small-scale organic farming is unprofitable because the consumer who consistently demands cheap food establishes the price. If Loren can’t provide a cheap head of lettuce, other food producers can. For example, large grocery stores buy their produce from large farms in California, driving the product’s price down.

Marti said consumers would not buy his produce if he sold it at a price high enough for him to profit.

Steve Power, an organic farmer in Skagit County, said he recognizes that people on the West Coast are accustomed to cheap food. Power has worked his 10 acres for 10 years, and, because his profits are so small, he hasn’t been able to purchase the land he tills.

This growing season, Power has four acres under cultivation with annual vegetables and herbs. He sells his crops at a seasonal produce stand and through subscriptions to Community Supported Agriculture, a produce delivery service.

Sitting on an old milk crate in one of his greenhouses, Power recalled the past 10 years he’s dedicated to organic farming.

“I didn’t get in this to make money, but I have to feed my family,” Power said.

He came to organic farming after traveling in his younger days.

“I started to recognize how tenuous the food system was and that food is not distributed equitably,” he said. “We have to stop shipping our food all over the world. We need to work within our own regions to produce our own food. We don’t produce nearly what we can.”

Power said he believes global companies are seeking more control of today’s organic market.

“If there is going to be any recognition of local farmers the public needs to demand it,” he said.

Bellingham resident Susan Dufner has responded to this pivotal time for organic farming by subscribing to Power’s CSA. From May to November, she receives a box stuffed full of locally grown fruits and vegetables every week. Dufner’s home is one of the drop sites where other CSA members come to collect their fresh produce.

“It kind of marks time for us in the summers,” Dufner said. “My kids know that deliveries come on Wednesdays and that we will lay all the produce out on the kitchen table, look over some recipes and decide what to cook.”

Dufner said buying and consuming organic produce is a priority for her and her family.

“It’s such a wonderful thing,” Dufner said. “I open my box and see a head of lettuce as big as a watermelon. It’s a great feeling to know where your food comes from.”

Jill Brubaker, the local produce buyer at the Community Food Co-op, said she has witnessed organics join the mainstream market in the past 12 years.

“It’s good there is more national demand for organic foods,” she said. “It used to be the only thing we knew about our carrots was what kind of a bag they came in. Not knowing where our food comes from has eroded our values, it’s established more anonymity. We are less responsible to our neighbors as a result of all this.”

Part of the Co-op’s mission is to buy and support local organic agriculture. Seventy-five percent of the vegetables sold at the Co-op in the summer are locally grown. Employees always hang a sign above local items, indicating the crop’s origin.

Brubaker said the local organic scene is having growing pains right now. She said meeting the mass market’s needs is a complicated undertaking, one that some small family farmers are unable to endure.

“We are at a point where things could get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse,” Brubaker said. “Collective need for local organic production is what will make it happen.”

Junior Amy Kuhta studies English and environmental studies at Western. This is her first published piece.

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