Conscious Choice Seattle: Sexy and Sustainable

November 2005 | Cover Story

Sexy and Sustainable

Local organic farmers are getting personal with consumers to upturn the profit model

By Ritzy Ryciak

If you eat lettuce and live in Seattle, you may have noticed that the face of farming has changed. Farmers markets have popped up in practically every neighborhood. CSA (community supported agriculture) is the hot acronym. Local is in, pesticides are out, and somewhere along the way sustainability has gotten sexy.

It’s not just the peas and carrots that are looking good.

On a fall day in Seattle, the afternoon sun warms the red bricks of the Pike Place Market. The morning chill has vacated and Pike Place is pulsing with fruit vendors and produce shoppers. Chinese chestnuts, giant pears and rainbow-colored peppers line the stalls.

Jay McPherson, a 25-year-old organic farmer with aquamarine eyes and arm muscles as supple as the peaches he peddles, offers sliced samples of his family’s fruit—pluots, doughnut peaches and the best Gala apples I have ever tasted.

Jay is dressed in a white tank top, apron and jeans. Since when did sexy and sustainable keep showing up in the same sentence?

And then there’s Jay’s brother, John…

The duo is enough to make any female stop and sample.

Jay and John are both University of Washington graduates in their twenties who have chosen orchards over corporate America. They aren’t hippies and they won’t tell you that they farm to feel close to the land. But they are passionate about the organic fruit they produce. It is why they do what they do.

“When the boys were growing up, if kids were aspiring to do anything it certainly wasn’t to work in the orchards,” says Greg McPherson, John and Jay’s father and a farmer since 1979.

Going public

“We knew that if the public had a chance to taste our product, that it would just take off,” explains John, who, three years ago helped his family shift from the wholesale model of fruit sales into farmers markets and direct marketing.

Operating under the wholesale model, the family was on the brink of bankruptcy and out of ideas. They believed in their product, but amid fruit packing fees and wholesale distributors, they couldn’t turn a profit. Meeting the public was the best decision they ever made.

“I have at least 10 people a day who bless me for growing organic fruit and tell me that they want to become an organic farmer,” says Jay, who with John, runs the farmers market and home delivery service of Tiny’s Organic Fruit, their family business.

The McPhersons own a 42-acre farm in Wenatchee and grow fruit varieties with names like Arctic Snow nectarines, Indian blood peaches and Dapple Dandy pluots (a hybrid between a plum and an apricot). Sumptuous flavor mixed with aquamarine eyes is apparently a hard combination to resist.

“I have a friend in Coupeville [on Whidbey Island] who visits the farmers market there just to see Jay,” affirms one customer in the midst of picking pluots for the week.

Whether customers are coming for the notable deltoids or Tiny’s unusual fruit, the McPherson brothers represent an interesting new development in farming. Call it fresh-face farming. Local officials say there is a significant influx of entrepreneurs who are opting to become organic growers. One key reason is market demands, another is the lifestyle it promises.

Producing the goods

In 2002, a consumer survey conducted by Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources found that 43 percent of consumers purchased directly from farmers once a month or less. But more than 80 percent of those surveyed said they wanted to buy more fruits and vegetables directly from local farmers. At the time of the survey, one of the biggest factors preventing consumers from buying directly from farmers was a shortage of farmers markets in their area or inconvenient market hours of operation.

The number of farmers markets has steadily increased. This past summer there were more than 100 farmers markets in Washington, 23 in King County alone. It is unlikely inconvenience will remain an issue.

“I think there is a trend that is starting to grow where consumers are picking a farmer or two who supplies them with their food,” says Steve Evans, a farm specialist for King County who works with Washington growers to help them become more profitable. “It benefits the farmer to provide more and more of a complete range of items—you grow as much as you can.”

Plus, organic farming offers not only a promise of food safety but also a romantic glimpse into pieces of ourselves that may be missing. When most of us spend more time with our computers than the trees outside, what could be better than growing your own food, working with the land and possibly getting muscles like the McPherson brothers?

“There is something about sticking a seed in the ground, nurturing it, watering and picking it,” says Evans.

While the average age of the farmer is still older (54 years old), Evans believes the public tends to deal more with the younger farmers now because they are the ones doing the new things. The older farmers are still farming in the old way and selling to wholesalers.

“The new farmers are out there and working with the public,” says Evans.

It wasn’t too long ago that customers never met their farmers.

“As people shop more at farmers markets and meet the growers,” says Evans, “they realize that they are kind of cool people, and jeeze, working outside in a beautiful field and growing your own food beats typing in a cubicle.”

Farmers are the new version of cowboys, says Evans: “Ten years ago everyone wanted [to quit the corporate life] to become a cowboy—it was the sexy new thing—now it is farming.”

Organic boom

According to the Department of Agriculture, organic farming is one of the fastest growing segments of U.S. agriculture. Certified organic cropland has nearly doubled from 1.3 million acres in 1997 to 2.34 million acres in 2001.What’s more, organic food sales grow at a clip of 20 percent per year.

Mary Embleton, executive director of Cascade Harvest, a Washington-based organization committed to farmland preservation, also heads up Farmlink, a program that connects people who want to get started in agriculture with farmers and landowners who are committed to establishing the next generation of producers. There are currently 180 individuals actively looking for farmland who are enrolled in Farmlink.

Embleton flips through her list of applicants and reads off their current occupations: airline employee, Microsoft, Boeing, molecular biology and software engineering.

“Farming is a simplification in one way even though the job may not be simple,” she says. “I know that a lot of people have said they are looking to reconnect and add something to their community and they feel like they can do that through local agriculture.”

In October, Andrew Stout, owner of Full Circle Farm—alongside CEO’s, lawyers and techie-gurus—received the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 as one of this region’s rising business stars.

“In 6th grade, the worst insult that you could give someone was to call them a farmer,” says Stout. “Now it is one of the best pick-up lines out there.”

Many young farmers possess the confidence to break out of the mold, create their own reality and do it in a way that benefits the community around them instead of depleting it, says Stout.

Now that’s sexy.

“We are not the hippie generation anymore,” says Stout. “Everyone is wired.”

One farmer, Sarah Caasidy, is in it for the learning experience—and the dirt.

“I like working with plants and learning from them,” says Caasidy, a 38-year-old who runs Oxbow farm in Carnation with her husband Luke Woodward. “It is a classroom out here.”

According to the 2002 Census of Agriculture, there has been a 13.4 percent increase in the number of farms operated by women since 1997, including an 8 percent jump in Western Washington.

“I do think that people still consider farmers to be kind of dirty and smelly,” says Caasidy. “And I am not saying that I am not. But dirt is sexy.”

Caasidy recently delivered a CSA box to a bakery in Seattle. A man on the street stopped and stared at her. He stared for so long that Sarah become uncomfortable. She asked if she could help him—broke the spell—and the man simply looked at her and said “you just look so healthy.”

Caasidy notes a glow that she observes from all of the “crazy farmers” who get together at the Washington Tilth gatherings she attends. She believes that when you surround yourself with nature, plants and animals rather than concrete and offices, you start to look different.

“There is a sparkle in people’s eyes,” she notes. “It is because we love what we do.”

Traveling Full Circle

The fields of Full Circle Farm are a rich brown. Much of the summer harvest has been picked—only glowing green lettuce and kale remain. The farm is alive with autumn hayrides, banjo music and pumpkin picking. The farm is hosting the Third Annual Slow Food Seattle on the Farm event. And Michael Ableman, a pioneer in the sustainable agriculture movement, is there signing his new book, Fields of Plenty.

“This book is really about hope,” says Ableman, speaking to Seattle’s slow food folks. The crowd has just finished savoring pretzels, bratwurst, sauerkraut and some memorable potato salad. It is the perfect time to talk about the people who produce our food. “I am holding my heroes up for everyone to see.”

In his new book, Ableman takes a cross-country journey from Canada to Connecticut in a VW bus with his 22-year-old son, Aaron. In search of Ableman’s heroes, fellow artesian farmers, the two leave their farm in British Columbia at the height of the growing season so that Ableman can “see summer come to other people’s land.”

Ableman describes the book as a travel story that ends up being a long conversation with his farming colleagues around the country. “I met with people who are demonstrating that agriculture is not just some lowly form of drudgery that you end up in,” says Ableman. “Instead, they demonstrated that farming is a refined art and craft and an honorable profession that deserves respect.”

When you ask someone to support local agriculture or to look at how they can get involved in the food system, says Abelman, “all that you are really asking them to do is to increase the pleasure in their own lives.”

Ritzy Ryciak is a Seattle-based writer and frequent contributor to Evergreen Monthly. She had no complaints about taking the photos for this story and this month’s cover.

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