Spring/Summer 2006: Land

Harshness and Harvest

An Oregon farmer talks about the changing agrarian landscape

Interview by Gail Wells

Clinton Reeder farms the land his great-grandfather purchased from early homesteaders in Umatilla County in the 1870s. He taught and conducted research in agricultural economics at Oregon State University. He has been on the Umatilla County planning commission for more than twenty years and has served on many other county, state, and national councils and committees dealing with land use and agriculture. He lives on his farm near Helix, Oregon.

GW: I wonder if you have some general observations about Oregonians and their relationship to the land.

CR: Well, [post-settlement] Oregon is only about five generations old. This affects our relationships to environmental issues. Most all of us farming today still have relationships that go three to five generations back. So emotionally, there's a pretty close tie to the land. The current generation, if they haven't stayed on the farm or been raised on the farm, still have identification with the farm, but not like someone who's actually worked there.

GW: And this emotional connection to the land has conditioned people's attitudes about the land?

CR: Oh, yes. If you take a farm that's been in the family more than a hundred years, you don't want to be the generation that ends it. But after five generations, any farm base has been eroded by divisions.

GW: How has the physical landscape been affected by this multigenerational family ownership?

CR: One of the main issues here has to do with the land-use planning program in Oregon. I've been on the county planning commission for a long time. I see its regulatory effects firsthand from the county standpoint as well as from being on the farm. Umatilla County requires a 160-acre minimum lot size for agricultural land. The state's minimum is only 80 acres. There are young farm families that would love to buy the 80 acres if they could build their home on it. But even if they're active farmers, they can't buy 80 acres; they have to buy 160.

So it's frustrating to have the potential to help a young family to get a home and get started, but to have that long-time regulation [stemming from] the land-use planning process. Some issues with who owns the land and who operates the farm will intensify over the next generations. That's what's changed people's attitudes about rural land, in general--you have fewer people with firsthand experience on the land. They are going to be unfamiliar with what it means to manage natural resources.

GW: People are already saying that about rural extractive industries, forestry for instance.

CR: Well, forestry is a lot like agriculture. There are two different worlds: there's the corporate timber company world, with stockholders who live apart from the land and expect dividends on their stock. Then you have the woodland owner, who's smaller, who relies on sustainable yields from forestry, and who may have two or three generations involved in the business.

I think you see a difference in the current generation of people with respect to those two entities. The children of the corporate stockholder are going to have a different attitude than the children of the person who's operating a smaller forestry operation.

If you've never handled an ax, never driven a logging truck, never felled a tree, you simply can't have the same appreciation for what it means to a logger as if you've grown up doing those things.

I do quite a bit of work with environmental issues. Here's what I see happening. You look at people from an urban environment, who really think they appreciate natural resources but who have very little experience with them. They get involved in a public policy session, and they meet people who are actively involved in managing natural resources. Sometimes, it's very difficult for them to understand each other. Both groups have similar intentions--to protect the sustainability of natural resources--but a person who is actively involved prefers incentives or prefers to be rewarded for good work as a natural resource manager. A person without that firsthand experience tends to look for regulatory approaches.

So the people who are actively involved get hostile at times towards people who don't have that direct involvement and who think the best way to protect natural resources is having a law in place. That's an increasing problem, and I think, personally, that the planning process feeds that problem. It tends to isolate urbanites from their natural resources.

GW: But isn't the goal of land use to help preserve farmlands and to keep them in contiguous acres?

CR: Very little farmland today is in contiguous [ownership] acres. You may have a stretch of farmland fifty miles from east to west, and there may be sixteen different owners with half or more of the farms rented. The people I farm for live literally coast to coast: one person lives in Dominion, Virginia, and another couple lives in the Seattle area. Most of them are in this Northwest region but, overall, the landowners are scattered from California through the Virginias.

The landowner who lives in Virginia, I haven't even seen him in the twenty years I've been farming for him. We correspond regularly by e-mail, and I can get a message to him any time I need to discuss anything, but he's not had a face-to-face visit with me. This fellow inherited his land from his family, and he has another job that he likes. His ownership is not large enough to make him a full-time farmer. But he very much wants to keep the ownership. It means something to him to have that land and be able to say he owns farmland in Oregon. Though he's never actually farmed himself, he has ended up with a strong identification with the land, and the family history is significant to him.

GW: That tells me that the tie to land is not about whether you're in Oregon or Virginia or anywhere in particular.

CR: It's got more to do with the lineage relationship to the land, the family heritage. If you or someone significant to you has been involved directly with the land, you hear stories about the land that shape your values about the land. Land is a good, long-term investment, but it won't make you rich any given year. It's personal values that make farming sustainable.

In farming, the margins tend to be limited, year in and year out. So you don't dare get yourself into too much debt, because if the economic cycle turns downward at an inopportune time, you could lose it. So there's a certain caution that goes with the resources. It has to do with the weather and irregularities of the market.

GW: So, a certain kind of attitude about what life should be, about how you should live your life, comes out of this connection to the land?

CR: Yes. It's an agrarian set of values. It tends to follow heirs for a generation or two or three, like this fellow in Virginia. But his firsthand experience, other that talking with family members, is very limited.

GW: But those values get passed anyway. And the values that get passed would include, for example, caution?

CR: Yes, and this might sound a little weird to you, but there's a certain element of optimism, too. A pessimist doesn't last long in farming. You've got to have faith in tomorrow, you've got to have faith in your ability to work with the uncertainties of the weather and the markets and regulations. An optimism that only comes with getting beat up by the harshness. There's a harshness and a harvest both--that's a rural value, and it's a value that goes with most of life.

If you're living a firsthand experience with a natural resource-based industry, you're literally living the story. In the urban environment, it's not so obvious the effect the weather has, it's not so obvious what hazards are associated with cold weather. The threat to your income from these natural cycles is not so obvious. On the other hand, if you have a field full of aphids, it's obvious that your year's income depends on what you do in the next few days.

A serious issue among farmers is that government involvement, with conservation programs and so forth, is making older farmers sometimes discourage their children from coming back to the farm. Right now, in the wheat industry, there's a program called the Conservation Security Program (CSP). There are substantial financial incentives with that program, so it appeals to the farmers. The catch is, you've got to sign a ten-year contract, and if you want to deviate from your ten-year plan, you've got to go ask a government official's permission. Well, if it rains tonight, and tomorrow it's pretty wet and I can't do the plan, and the bureaucrat doesn't think I ought to deviate from the plan, I have a huge problem. The financial incentives are very appealing, but sometimes that transition is costly and laden with risks that you'd just as soon not take. And your flexibility gets lost in the process. But if you look at your income with and without incentive payments, the bottom line is if you want to pay off the farm you have to sign the contract. It's what you have to do to make it work. But it brings a person into farm decision-making who may or may not have farm experience.

GW: Specifically, how does it curtail your decision-making?

CR: Our rainfall is higher than average for the region. Everyone's supposed to encourage people to do what's called the no-till farming system. Well, no-till farming can't be done economically if you have any kind of residue on the soil. So, the transition from more conventional tilling systems to no-till systems requires risk-taking that a lot of us would rather not take. The university and the USDA research centers have not figured out how to make that transition well. In lighter rainfall areas, a transition is much easier, because you don't have residue from last year's crop to deal with. The wetter the environment, the more problems you have with insects [and the more residue you have to deal with]. There are complications that come with rainfall that don't affect drier areas. Sometimes, research is done in one part of the country and the agency decides that the research applies everywhere. The idea that "one size fits all" is contrary to farming.

The other side of that is that the landscape forms the practices. So, a landscape itself becomes part of what affects those rural values. If you're in a dry area where it's very difficult to make a living farming, you're probably going to have a different set of values about managing funds and taking risks than you might have in a different part of the world. In part, the values are tied up with the landscape in a very real fashion.

Ultimately, the quality of the soil, the steepness of the grade, the moisture that falls, whether you get snow in the winter--those are all major determinants of the values that develop in the people who are working here.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities