Farmer Interview with Nash Huber
(second in a nine-part series)
by Scott Vlaun

In late October of 2006 I had the distinct pleasure of spending a few days with Nash Huber where he farms in Sequim, Washington. It is a unique location on the Olympic Peninsula in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, enjoying more sun than most farming regions in the Pacific Northwest. It is also a place that is under intense development pressure, threatening some of the best farmland in the area. Nash farms numerous plots scattered around the area, so we had most of our conversations in his aged but functional Toyota pickup.



Scott Vlaun: So Nash, how many acres do you have scattered throughout this area?

Nash Huber: It's probably around 400 acres right now; maybe a shade under that. We're probably doing 200 acres of produce, row crops that we rotate through that land. A fair amount of the land is in habitat, barley and grain cover crops, fencerows and insectaries. We rotate quite a bit of our land every year.

SV: And you also do some seed crops?

NH: We do vegetable seed crops. Acreage-wise, it's not a large portion of our land, but it will definitely be a part of the future here as far as not only maintaining the germ plasm and access to seed that fits our market niche and climate, but could also be a larger part of the farm's economy in the future.

SV: I was talking with your production manager Scott Chichester last night and he said that a lot of the young people that come here to work on the farm these days are very interested in seed production.



NH: I think it's in the air, not only on this farm. I dont use the word "fad" but it has some elements of that, as people are beginning to focus on the importance of seed. Of course for the farmer seed has always been important, but now that seed, access to seed, and the seed business is falling into fewer and fewer agribusiness hands, I equate it to large corporations buying up libraries and deciding which books they want to keep and getting rid of the ones they don't want. It's much like seeds: We lose varieties, we lose access to germ plasm as large corporations decide that certain kinds of seeds are no longer profitable.

SV: So are you working on varieties to replace some of those that are being lost?

NH: Either to replace them or just maintain them–to get ahold of material that is being dropped. A couple of our carrots that are important for our production have been dropped by the commercial interests that hold those varieties, so we've maintained them because they are particularly important to us. That happens quite often in the business we're in. You get to know a variety and it becomes important in your production schedule, then they (the seed company) decide that it doesn't fit in their business anymore and they drop it. And the people that are dependent on it have to go looking for another variety.

SV: What about these carrot varieties that you are saving is special, that's not available in other carrot varieties?

NH: Well, they're OP (open pollinated) and they have flavor characteristics that aren't available in a lot of the hybrid varieties. A lot of the hybrid varieties have been developed for ship-ability or appearance, which are important, but our market niche is a combination of flavor and those characteristics. Flavor is right at the top of the list for our carrot varieties. You have to interplay those elements, but flavor is pretty important for the small producer. We ship, but we don't ship a thousand miles. Most of our produce stays within the bioregion that we live in.

SV: So you do you save a lot of seed here?



NH: I've been saving seed here for twenty-five years, but I really didn't know what I was doing. I was doing a little studying but not enough. But now there's this focus on seed and it's wonderful. You've got people like John Navazio, and Micaela (Colley) and Matthew (Dillon) from the Organic Seed Alliance, and Steve Peters and Erica Renaud at Seeds of Change, and now Alf Christianson. I'm getting some help. You're not out there by yourself any more, which is really cool.

SV: It's a start.

NH: Yes, it is.

SV: Obviously a lot more needs to happen and more support has to come from a lot of places.

NH: Yes, but we're doing it. We're building it a brick at a time now, which is wonderful. It's like all the forces came riding in at the right time.

SV: How many different crops do you save seed on?

NH: Oh god! At least ten or twelve crops. It's gone down in the last couple of years as I focused a lot of attention on spinach, cabbage, kale and carrots, because those are pretty key crops for us. There was a while where I was working on baby Bok Choy, and Tatsoi, and radishes. We haven't done any work in that area for a while, but we might come back to them.

SV: When we were speaking yesterday, you mentioned that you have an amazing crew of people working here and how you've worked to develop your crew. How many people do you have working here?

NH: We're pretty stable at around 25 people. For the last few years we're pretty consistent in that range. We tend to get a little short-handed when people go back to school. That's the main way we lose employees. So, we're always looking for good folks.

SV: Over the years have you noticed a growing interest among local young people?

NH. I haven't noticed much change. We've always been fairly lucky in garnering good employees. It's something we consistently keep our eyes open for: people who are pretty smart, fairly motivated and seem to have an idea about what they want to do with their lives.

SV: Do you see education as an important part of what you do here?

NH: Most definitely. Besides the food, our main product is people. You can't have a good farm without people, land and water. They're all extremely important and they all go together. You've got to have all of those elements.

SV: Well we know you've got the water, and it seems as though you've got great people that you are nurturing along to become a new generation of farmers. Can you talk a little bit about the land? I couldn't help but notice, driving in to Sequim, that development is ubiquitous. There is construction going on everywhere and you've got this amazing farmland right in the middle of it. I know you've done a lot of work to conserve this land.



NH: Well it has been one of my main foci, even more so than garnering the people. I don't want to leave a false impression though. I have made an effort to draft people if I find somebody that looks like they have the elements that would be important here. I tend to go out and go after them and make sure it works for them.

The land has been somewhat similar. This is awful good soil here. It's deep fertile soil formed in alluvia. The Dungeness Delta is not a large area; there are just a few hundred acres of this good stuff. For almost 25 years now I've been focused on its importance to agriculture, not just our agriculture, but agriculture in general, and trying to maintain it. I'm not a great fan of development. I find that development never supports itself. It always causes an increase in overhead in local government, whereas agriculture works the opposite way. It tends to support community and government in very creative ways. So, conservation of the ag land here has been an ongoing project. We've had to use many different ways to try and keep this land in agriculture. A lot of it is just a very personal struggle. We try to highlight the benefits of agriculture, find the money for the people that hold the land–to make them whole so that they get out of it what they need. It's been a continuing struggle because the land has become much more valuable for development than it is for agriculture. So it's extremely difficult to find the money necessary to keep this land in ag. But we have a more heightened community awareness now than we have had at any time in the past.

SV: Do you think that's a general trend or something that's specific to this area?

NH: No, I think it's a general trend, at least in certain kinds of ag. The kind of ag we do, local, organic, community based agriculture–the community is beginning to understand the importance of it to life, to quality of life. And they're beginning to understand how important it is to have a good local food source, to know where your food comes from and all the other benefits it provides to the community. But, at the same time, development has really become...rampant...I guess is the word.

SV: I noticed when we were out in the cabbage fields that you have huge rows of flowering cilantro and dill. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the role of diversity on the farm. It seems like you grow a lot of different crops and have a lot of things "stacked."



NH: Yeah, the other day at the farm harvest festival we made a list of all the crops we had on the farm. The letters were maybe two inches tall, but the list was around fifteen feet long! It was amazing. I think we do about 35 or 40 different crops, not counting the beneficial habitat. It's important to keep a diverse landscape, so that you're just not mono-cropping 400 acres of spinach or cabbage or corn.

[While we were doing this interview we passed by a beautiful field of spinach. It was a week after E. Coli had been discovered in spinach that was grown a thousand miles away, but it clearly had an effect.]

NH: Here's a spinach crop we had to walk away from because of the events of the last week in Salinas Valley. About an acre and a half of spinach. We gross about $2,000 per bed and you're looking at 15 beds here, so that's about $30,000 worth of spinach. Ouch!

SV: For something that you had nothing to do with. As if the weather and all the other variables aren't enough...

NH: Weather, bugs... The microclimate we farm in here is a real advantage though. The Dungeness Delta is a very special place. Climatically...we never get hot. The temperature never gets over ninety other than for an hour in one or two days in the middle of the summer in the afternoon. Then the wind comes in and blows all the heat over to Seattle. Besides having really great fertility, we're dry here but the ground sub-irrigates. The water comes up from below and brings up a good mix of minerals with it. I've never had to add calcium to this soil, no matter how hard we hit it. This is such a unique growing area. We also have good access to irrigation water, which is important for certain types of agriculture that we do.

SV: Can you talk a little bit about the campaign you had going on the last time I was out here to try and preserve the farmland in this area?

NH: The campaign was to make the problem become part of the solution. And the problem of course is development, building houses on the land. The idea was to have the people that are purchasing the land for development pay a one half of one percent tax on the price of the land which would go into a fund to purchase development rights on the land. The real estate community came out strongly against us. They spent over $150,000 in their campaign against us. We were able to raise about $42,000 which is twice as much as has ever been raised in a political campaign in Clallam County. We really stirred up a hornet's nest, so the national and state real estate associations both dumped large amounts of cash into the campaign against us.

We did manage to bring the issue to forefront. It was a large educational exercise as I look back a year later. The process is ongoing. Part of the advertising that the real estate community came up with during the campaign was that they had a better plan. Of course they didn't. It was just a campaign promise. They've been asked several times by members of the community what their better plan was and it doesn't truly exist. But, in the process we were able to mobilize a large part of the community; we got 42% of the vote...but that only counts in horseshoes.

SV: But like you said, you did manage to raise awareness of the issue and get it on the radar and people will be looking for other solutions.

NH: Yes, we did.

SV: How is it that you managed to keep all of this land in agriculture? I noticed some plaques on one of your barns that honored some of the donors.



NH: Lots of different ways (laughs), lots of different ways, Scott. PCC Farmland Trust was an idea that came about in an association between myself and the folks at the PCC food co-op over in Seattle. I went to them when a piece of property came up for sale here in the valley. It was a key piece of property. We were farming around this hundred-acre piece, one of the old farms that got a real estate sign put on it. At that time we didn't own any land. We were leasing land and it was one of those issues that was always on my mind: What was our sustainability here? So I went to PCC and said "We have a problem, and it's access to land. And here's a hundred acres and it's for sale. What can we do about it?"

To their ever-lasting benefit they went to the bank, borrowed the money and bought the land. Then they put a person, Jody Aliesan, on the project to raise some money and pay off the mortgage, and she did just that in about three or four years. That was a big move. And then several other individuals have come forward. John Willits, a local community college teacher who's retired and loves birds and loves land and has purchased land and put conservation easements on it. We put conservation easements on the PCC Farmland Trust land. John Willits' daughter and son-in-law purchased a farm and put a conservation easement on it. So, through those kinds of means we have been successful. Now we're trying another tack here on another piece that we've been farming for about 20 years, the Wilson Farm.

SV: So mostly you've been able to preserve the land through conservation easements?

NH: Yeah, taking the development rights off the land. The right to develop land is something that is granted, usually by the governing authority. How that land is zoned and whether or not the land can be developed is something that the people decide within the community. So this land has all been zoned for one for one, or one for two and a half, or one for five, or one for sixteen or one for twenty and most of it's been one for one or one for five.

SV: Houses per acre?

NH: Yes. The zoning was pretty much done back in the late seventies and early eighties. It was a fear campaign by the real estate community and the surveyors. The county pretty much gave everything away without getting anything in return. So we have to buy it back now. Once people have that right...well you can down-zone, but if you're a politician, and those are the people that have to do the down-zoning, it's not going to happen, to take those development rights away.

Like the Wilson farm that we're trying to buy the development rights for: That land is appraised at $30,000 an acre and there's 28 acres there. The development potential of that land is probably worth $25,000–$27,000 an acre, while the agricultural value is around $3,000–$5,000 per acre. So a conservation easement removes that development value by paying the owner the development value of the land and not developing the land. So, where does that money come from? Well, you get it where you can. Right now we're trying to get some from the state farmland protection program. They have a grant that gives half the value of the conservation easement, then locally we have to raise the other half. We're in the middle of that process right now. So there are several different strategies that we've used to conserve this land.

SV: In listening to you talk, the thing that keeps crossing my mind is that you are growing so much more than food.

NH: It became obvious to me several years ago that your position in the community really counts when you are doing something like this. How people look at you, and look at what you're doing influences how they make decisions about what you are doing and whether it is worthwhile or not. So, at the same time, we're growing this farm, and growing this food, and growing these people, and providing employment and trying to conserve agricultural land. These things all work together. They are not isolated incidents. You're doing them all at the same time.

SV: That's amazing. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us and for doing what you're doing.



Scott Vlaun
Editor

Photo captions: (1)Nash Huber in a cabbage field at his Sequim, Washington Farm (2)Scott Chichester, Field Manager at Nash's Produce (3)Nash inspects an insectary hedgerow. (4)An over-wintered purple kale seed crop (5)Mechanically harvesting a beet crop (6)Plaques honor the many donors that have helped preserve the farmland in the Dungeness Delta where Nash Huber farms. (7)Nash's Farm Store provides fresh produce to the local community.