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I've been chronicling the progress of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project since January of 2008. During that time I've used the Mud City Press website as a repository for the pieces I've written and documents others have written that are related to the Bean and Grain Project. As any one who's been following this work knows, organic farmer Harry MacCormack is really the heart and soul of this ground level effort to rebuid the Willamette Valley food system by promoting the production of storable staples–like dry-land beans and grains. (Click for more on Bean and Grain Project.)
Harry MacCormack, however, is much more than the Bean and Grain Project. He has been farming in the Willamette Valley at his fifteen-acre Sunbow Farm for almost forty years now, and during that time, has been a part of almost every important step the organic farming community has taken in the south valley. He co-founded Oregon Tilth, prompted the creation of farmers' markets in the area, helped establish the national standards for organic certification, and assisted Elaine Ingham at the Soil Foodweb Lab in Corvallis in the development of compost tea. Currently, Harry runs Sunbow Farm as a market-garden and sells produce online and at the Corvallis Farmers' Market. He also focuses quite a bit of his time on in-field research and experimentation. At the core of this work is perfecting organic techniques, delving the biology and chemistry of the soil, exploring the variety of food crops that can be grown in the Willamette Valley, and studying the relationship between the way food is grown and its nutritional value. It is no exaggeration to say Harry has been at the cutting edge of organic and sustainable farming his entire adult life. He is also a poet and a writer, who is open, expansive, and engaging.
On January 23, 2009, I drove from Eugene, Oregon to Sunbow Farm outside Corvallis and sat down with Harry in his living room for an informal and wide-ranging interview. Krishna Khalsa, another member of the Bean and Grain Project, accompanied me and videotaped the entire hour and a half session of questions and answers. What follows are selection portions from that interview:
Mud City Press: Maybe the best place to start this interview, Harry, is with the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project and the most basic of questions–why beans and grains?
Harry MacCormack: When I first started the farm back in the early 70s, it was a homestead farm, and my instinct was to grow food that could feed both my family and our animals–we had a goat herd then and some cattle–and that included grains and beans. So way back in the beginning of the farm, I bought an old combine and grew some of the stuff that we're doing experimentally now. I grew hard red wheat and it made beautiful bread and also fed our animals. As the farm progressed, the entrepreneurial part of the alternative movement took over, and in the mid-80s, we started forming farmers' markets. That made the demand for what we were doing with the organic vegetables supercede anything else that we were experimenting with. People have to think about the fact that there weren't any farmers' markets in the south valley as late as 1980. We had to build these markets, and as customers came, we had to grow more and more produce, so the farm expanded and we concentrated on fruits and vegetables. In the summer it would take six to eight people to run the place, and at one point, we were doing five farmers' markets a week. We eventually pulled back from that, but another farm down the road has gone the other direction. They're now a multi-million dollar operation that does eleven of these markets a week and employs fifty people.
In the process, we lost the notion that the grains and beans were really the basis of a food system. So about four years ago, when food security became part of the discussion in our community, we started talking about the need for localizing a stable food system. As we did that, there were some folks in Willets, California having the same discussion. In fact these discussions have been going on everywhere all around the country. The Willets' people put together a study in which they determined that something like ninety percent of what was involved in their local food system was grain or bean-based. I did some quick calculations based on what I saw as typical diets around here and came up with a figure a little less than that, but it's pretty substantial for either a vegetarian or carnivore diet–and if you've got dairy involved and you're feeding the cows grain, you're looking at producing considerable amounts of beans and grains to have a working local food system.
I started talking about this with people in our Ten Rivers Food Web group, and Chris Peterson went in–she's a local writer and part of our group, she went into the First Alternative Co-op in Corvallis and did an analysis of what was on the shelf in the dry food section–the beans and grains and the nuts and stuff. She shocked everybody by writing an article saying none of it's local and almost none of it's from the United States. Even the co-op was shocked by this because they hadn't thought about this either. When we started the co-op, we had a thing about local production and local buying built into the original statement, but because of the entrepreneurial nature of everything and money, things began coming in from the outside. So that's kind of how we got to thinking we needed to localize bean and grain production. It was a reaction to food security questions.
MCP: What about edible seeds? I know edible seeds are also part of the Bean and Grain Project philosophy.
HM: Back in the 70s when we were first putting together the organic movement, we were also thinking local was part of it. In the back of my mind, for instance, was always, okay, we're building vegetarian diets based on rice. Some people, like my partner Cheri, can't eat foods with glutens, but most people with gluten problems can eat rice; so we've got this problem of gluten grains getting downplayed in a lot of our vegetarian diets. Dr. Kapuler, one of the founders of Seeds of Change, and I grew rice here, and he also grew it on John Sunquist's farm outside Eugene. It wasn't very successful. So we began thinking about things like rye and using it in recipes instead of rice–again trying to avoid the gluten reactions. That led us to explore other options–like edible seeds–which people don't even think of as seeds–but amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, millet–these plants all produce nutrient dense seeds that are edible and that are not grains and contain no gluten. Teff is another one. We'd like to include several of these with our bean and grain rotations, because it would add a whole new level to our local diet.
MCP: Can any of these edible seeds be viable crops in the Willamette Valley?
HM: Yes. We know that buckwheat was traditionally grown here in the valley and still is in small acreages. We also know that some of these plants grow rather rapidly and can mature in our short-season climate. My friend Mark Stewart has grown quinoa off the valley floor near the coast range for 16 years. It grows better at elevation, but we can grow it here also. Amaranth is pig weed. It grows like a weed on the valley floor. Like many of these plants, it takes good management to grow productively, but it's a really high potential seed. The other seeds that we're talking about are things like cilantro, most of the herbs, mustard seeds, and flax–red flax, that is, not the golden flax, but they're basically the same plant. Red flax was huge here for 50 years.
Something else we should be thinking about is that you're not just growing these plants for the seed. I have one variety of wheat out here from England that's traditionally grown for thatch straw. So think about our roofs. With growing concerns for peaking oil production and rising petroleum costs, at some point we've got to rethink that whole thing. Because it's going to be way too expensive to put asphalt shingles on our roofs or even put asphalt on the roads. The lignum part of these grains and edible seeds, like with flax, can be used in many different ways. Roof thatch is just one. Much of our clothing has petroleum products of some sort in it. So we should start looking at alternatives for clothing. Linen for instance comes from flax. It's a fascinating realm to get into. Flax seed can also be used for oils–a lot of seeds can–ncluding grapes seeds. We have all these grape vineyards around here and we have all this grape seed that could potentially be made into oil or other products. This is part of what we're trying to do. Expand the uses of the plants that grow right here and incorporate them into a rebuilt local-resource-based economy.
MCP: Critical to what you are doing is maintaining the health of the soil, the rotations you mentioned and so forth. You often talk about soil testing. What are the types of things you're looking for in a soil test?
HM: One of the first tests we do looks at residues that are left in the soil from previous chemical practices. That test can be done by Antech Lab up in Corbett, outside Portland. In the early days of the organic movement, it blew our minds when we found out that forty percent of our farms had substantial residues of chlorinated hydrocarbon in them, and we had organic farmers getting in big trouble, especially around squash that was for baby food. So when we first got involved with doing the beans at Stalford Seed Farms (Stalford Seed Farms was the first big grass seed operation in Oregon to experiment with the growing of beans and grains—see Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project Report 1), we went over there and said, okay, we want to look at the residues. And we're all thinking, including Harry Stalford–we're thinking this place has been hammered by chemicals for thirty-five years. But what they were growing was grass seed. They weren't growing vegetables, so they never really had the chlorinated hydrocarbons there. They had herbicides and chemical fertilizers which are much less damaging, and they don't hang up for long periods in the soil–rarely more than six years. Most of that stuff is gone in two or three years. Some of it's gone in six months. You can't find any trace. So that's why we set the three-year standard in organics. But in terms of the chlorinated hydrocarbons that are in some of the pesticides, this standard is total malarky because they're not going to go away for two or three hundred years. So the standard has been changed. Now we're required to test for residues on any farm that's coming into organics. We want to know what the base is, and then if they have a base of chlorinated hydrocarbons, we don't let them grow certain crops, including squash and cucumbers and melons–the things that we know can take the stuff up. So that's one test–for residual chemicals.
The second test that we do–and that we did over at Stalford Seed Farms–is what's normally thought of as a soil test. I like the one that comes from International Ag Labs in Minnesota, because what they're looking at is calcium and magnesium and what we think of as the minerals in the soil. What's important is they're looking at them in a biologically systematic way, so it's not isolating them and looking at them as things. They're looking at how they're involved in an active biological system. One of the parts of their tests, in a formal soil test, is a formazon measurement. Formazon is one of the enzymes that's left from biological action. It's kind of an indicator of where your biology is. The measurements are rated from zero to 2000. So typically when you go into a farm and look at formazon, and it's been a chemical farm with no biologic resuscitation going on, you're going to find numbers around 200. Then when we go in and start applying some biology, like through compost tea or rotations or whatever, that same chemical farm, still using chemicals, will get a number around 600. Pretty typically, an organic farm that's just starting to be organic and has some biology going and doesn't have any chemicals in the system is usually going to have a score around 1000. And an organic farm that was functioning fully scores about 1500. So that's a fairly large range that we can actually measure.
MCP: So this number, the formazon rating, is an indirect way to measure the soil's biological activity—meaning the level of microorganisms, protozoa, nematodes, and bacteria that exist and live in the soil. Is that what you mean by the biology?
HM:: Yes, fungi are also part of that. The fungal element of the soil is not always appreciated and is really important and should be there in all soils–we know it's there in forest soils in high numbers, but even in garden soils–and this fungal element should exist at a one to one ratio with the bacterial element. That fungal element, when it's missing, and it's often missing in agricultural soils–that fungal element is where the calcium is held. So part of the reason we have this big dip in calcium levels all over the world in agricultural zones is because we go in and do tillage–and in doing the tillage we're ripping apart the hypae, which is the fungal mat that makes a beautiful forest floor spongy. It should be there in all kinds of agriculture. It can be rebuilt, but it takes time to rebuild.
MCP: So tilling the ground can be a negative?
HM: In some cases, yes. No-till agriculture is something people are starting to talk about more and more, even with organics. For example, we triple-crop a lot of our beds here on this farm. We try to do as little tillage as possible to protect the hypae, and when we do, we use a spader, which is a slower mechanism and doesn't go so deep. Even when we go in and harvest carrots, we're ripping some of that fungi apart. When we go in to harvest potatoes, it's a mess. Or garlic, it's a mess. And we have to go in there and rebuild consciously with foods for the fungi to re-grow. The bacteria are going to be in there anyway. They're going to grow really fast if you've got those foods there–then you've got the protozoa, which are going to cycle the nitrogen, along with the fungi doing the calcium. So this whole biological process is really important to having a healthy plant that's going to grow healthy food. Anything short of that is a compromise.
MCP: You say, foods for the fungi, food for the bacteria. What is that?
HM: Good compost or compost tea or liquid kelp. They replenish and feed the existing biology.
MCP: And so when you enter a new farm, like Harry Stalford's farm, what do you do to rebuild the biology and transition the soil to organic?
HM: I started by introducing Harry to another guy that's been with us and has his own business here, Shepard Smith. Shepard runs Soil Smith Services. He makes compost tea like I do, but he makes it in great quantities with a 500-gallon brewer. I have a 28-gallon brewer. So he has the capacity to work on a larger scale. He could bring 1000 gallons of tea over to Stalford Seed Farms all at once, and then put it into one of these big boom sprayers and cover 60 or 70 acres. It was kind of fun to watch these big booms that go out across the field–that usually have chemicals in them–spraying compost tea. We have other farms that are doing this where the teas goes out in a center pivot. In fact, they can do cool things with it. They can put tea on half the field and not on the other half–and see the results–like some potato farmers over there in Idaho did. So the equipment that has been developed for chemical agriculture can also be used for building biology when we do the tea. And it's a lot cheaper than the chemicals. I think there's almost 300 acres over there at Stalford Seed Farms that's had tea on it in the last few years. And some of it's grass seed to build the biology in that ground.
MCP: I hadn't heard about that.
HM: When they first started putting the tea on the grass seed–on the rye grass, they were trying to see if they could get enough biology there to stop rust diseases, and they pretty much saw that it controlled the rust. The first thing that they had to do was stop using the fungicides, because they were going to kill the fungi if they put the fungicides on there. So because of the compost tea technology, we can back into these chemical farms and show them through their own use of the stuff–really quickly and pretty cheaply–that they can rebuild biology and soil and have an immediate effect.
MCP: How much compost tea is required per acre?
HM: Fifteen gallons an acre is what we do. Actually on the grain fields of North Dakota, they established it at 10 gallons an acre. It went on three different times. It went on at planting, half way through the growth cycle at a particular stage of nodulation, and then after harvest, so that the tea was put on the straw in the field to help with the composting of the straw in the field.
MCP: How does that compare price-wise with ordinary chemical inputs?
HM: The chemical inputs are going to be way, way, way more expensive. Typically you're looking at something like–even if you cost in the price of a big brewer–you're looking at something like 25 cents a gallon, probably even less than that.
MCP: What's the background on compost tea? Where'd it come from?
HM: One patent for the compost tea machine came out of this area. We call the device a brewer, but it's actually a bubble machine, and the way to think of it, is as a fish tank. You know how a bubbler works in a fish tank. So the guy who originally started working with this stuff around here essentially patented a bubble technology. The bubbles have to be precisely sized bubbles. He didn't know a lot of this when he first started working on it. A lot of this has been seat of the pants development by people involved mostly with Elaine Ingham and the Soil Foodweb. And in the process, we found that certain size bubbles would pull bacteria from the compost. Then we found that if we had a little bit more intensity–and it had to do with the conical shape of the machine and the kind of air flow that was required in making these bubbles–we could not only pull bacteria from the compost, but we could pull fungi from the compost in fairly good numbers too. In the first machines, you couldn't get any fungal counts at all or very, very low counts. So the machines went through a series of developments over a period of time.
At the same time, the compost industry had to start making really potent compost to work with these brewers–and there's not very much good compost out in the world. If you actually measure to see what's in it, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, most of it is bacterial compost. There's some out there that's really well made where it has an almost equal bacterial/fungal count. So those kinds of composts, when they're put into a bag and put into water, where the biology doesn't what to be, and then the compost is stripped by these bubbles–this is the way to think of it. Within a period of hours, the biology is out there in the water. What's in the water at the same time is food to feed that biology. And we went through three or four or five years of development trying to find out which foods are best to feed the biologies that we want. If you want a highly bacterial compost tea, say to fight fungal infestations, like in a grape vineyard, you feed them one kind of food. If you want highly fungal stuff to rebuild the soil, after you've torn it up, you feed it another kind of food, and you let it brew a little longer. The brewing doesn't have any heat involved. It's just the bubbling and then it's letting that interaction happen between the microbes and the foods. In a 5-gallon machine, that process takes between 8 and 12 hours. In a 28-gallon machine and on up, it takes between 18 and 24 hours. We've done tests at as low as 18 hours and gotten good counts. You can also take it beyond 24 hours and put in a little bit more food and have other microorganisms develop. And if you let it go three or four days, you can actually have a tea made out of amoeba that you're putting out there, which introduces other factors. For instance, the amoeba don't go through spray heads very well, so it's not a good idea to do it. We had to open up the orifices on the sprayers because these microorganisms go splat (Harry smacks his hands together) like that and it knocks them out. We also had to adjust output pressure so that they aren't firing against the ground and being broken up. It was a whole process. The way to think of it is very much like putting yeast into bread. So that the microbiology can make something happen that you want to happen.
MCP: Harry, you've worked almost all your life promoting organic farming and organic techniques. Can you imagine a time when this entire valley would be growing organic?
HM: The problems that we've got today are all human-made problems. And so humans can turn those problems around utilizing the best of what we know at this time–which, of course, is always changing and improving. But we're at the point now where we have technologies, like the compost tea–that wasn't even here ten years ago–and other testing instruments–that weren't available 10, 20 years ago–to dissect and correct the problems. So we already have the tools to do this stuff. Now what we have to do is change people's paradigms. Then in terms of those paradigms, change their intent, so their intent is to makeover this valley. I'll use the refrain that's been out there for the election: "Yes, we can." We can certainly do it, but it takes a lot of work. It takes conviction and it takes a high sense of tuning in with the soil, with the air, with the water and putting that as a priority. It's a priority that has to override all the news of the day. It has to override, you know, our entertainment values, and we have to shift that priority. And if we were to put together a political–I call it a "polity"–if we were to put together a polity, which is a Platonic term based on fertility, and that was our primary focus rather than defense contracts and property holding, it would completely change everything and anything is possible. That's what I'd say. Anything is possible.
MCP: Good to hear that. And thank you, Harry. Thank you for taking the time to talk with Mud City Press.
HM: My pleasure.
Special thanks is extended to The Willamette Farm and Food Coalition and The Ten Rivers Food Web and Hummingbird Wholesale for their continued support of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project.
