A monthly feature written and photographed by Southwest Washington native and Emmy Award-winning journalist
Hal Calbom
Production Notes
Don’t Romanticize the Family Farm I t ’ s grown its own American imagination.
people+ place
Freshly Minted: Warren Seely Move over Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey’s.
niche
in the
The Family Farm. From Willa Cather to Willie Nelson, we celebrate it, romanticize it, and worry about its prospects. We disparage it — those poor hicks down on the farm — and doubt it. We watch generation after generation abandon it for the lure of the cities. We predict its demise and doom. And I suggest that amidst all this handwringing and doom-saying we actually do something worse: We so romanticize the Family Farm we lose touch with its reality. Our nostalgia consigns it to the dated past, old times. In fact, our farms and the agriculture industry itself have always been — and continue to be — among the most reliable reflections of where we are and harbingers of where we’re headed. In three decades of Pacific Northwest journalism I’ve gained more insight from farms and farmers than a whole host of city council members. Settle down for a cup of weak coffee in Odessa or Quincy or Clatskanie, as per this month’s P+P, and you’ll cover a whole variety of topics with the denizens there: the state of immigration policy, the value of the dollar, tariff and trade negotiations, the prime rate, imports and exports.
Gourmet shoppers, searching out the finest artisanal confections, the perfectly-minted chocolate wafer, have made their choice: The best-selling holiday item at Whole Foods Market — the last seven years running — is the Seely’s Mint Patty. That’s Seely 4th Generation Mint Farm, Clatskanie, Oregon. Since the mid-seventies mint farms in Oregon have withered from 700 to 20. Wrigley’s, Proctor & Gamble, and Colgate — traditional consumers of peppermint oil — have switched to super-cheap synthetics and gutted the natural oil business. Yet the unassuming Seely’s, sitting on rich bottomland acreage outside this small Oregon town, is flourishing. Even expanding. To find out how they’re doing it, we climbed aboard a noisy, multi-ton harvesting rig and bummed a ride down the rows of mowed mint.
NICE TO MEET YOU Warren Seely
HC: What’s this beast called?
resides
WS: This is a self-propelled forage harvester. Originally designed for silage chopping, field corn and grass. It’s real progress for the mint industry, which used manual labor for a long, long time.
Clatskanie, Oregon occupation
Mint Farmer from
Clatskanie known for
While in college, driving weekends
HC: So these from WSU Pullman to work the rows we’re family farm. going back over, it looks like the mint plants have already been cut?
WS: Yes, this was mowed a couple of days ago. Like cutting hay. We let it dry in rows for a couple of days to get rid of extra moisture, then we come through with the forage harvester. We pick up the mowed plants, chop them into little pieces and air-blow them into the trailer behind us. cont page 18
And few business persons know like the farmer the delicate dance among our government, our people, and our land and water. Farmers tend to get the bad news first — failed crops, dropping prices, trade wars — and they adjust or they die. Globalization? We sold wheat to Russia at the height of the Cold War. Immigration? Talk to someone growing hops or cherries in the Yakima Valley about this critical issue. Innovation and modernization? Look at the agricultural sector and its transformation from manual labor to a vast complex of machinery, information technology, and sophisticated distribution. Farms and farmers are more than relics of our past. They are signposts and guides to the future.
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Columbia River Reader / September 15, 2020 / 17
