On an Oregon family farm, a family and the farm endure

THE DALLES, Ore. (AP)--Joanne Brewer walks amid her family's legacy. Out of the old farmhouse, past buildings still used and others decayed, she wanders in the fields and loves the solitude.

Since her great-grandfather, Chester William Emerson, brought his family here from California in the 1880s to homestead and grow wheat, the land has changed little.

Joanne's two sisters left the farm, but she returned--and brought a farmer-husband. When her parents died, her sisters told her she was the farm's matriarch, although she doesn't like this old-sounding term. But with her straight and slender frame, elegant gray hair, and beautifully aging face, it fits.

On one of the hills, Joanne's eldest son, David, stops and crouches. He glides his hand over the stubble from last year's harvest, explaining that the dead stalks nourish and protect this year's wheat.

David became the fifth generation to farm here when he returned 15 years ago with his wife, Margaret.

Living in his grandfather's 90-year-old farmhouse, they now raise the sixth generation, 6-year-old Riley and 9-year-old Liam, who bears his great-great-great-grandfather's middle name.

David always cherished his roots in this land and the family and he wanted to maintain that connection, but as a kid he didn't necessarily want to farm. A foreign exchange to Ecuador in high school and a study abroad in Spain while at Oregon State University showed him other opportunities connected to agriculture, but he decided to return home.

"I began to appreciate more and more the special opportunity my family afforded me," he said. "There was land; there was a business here that could be continued or not continued.

"Some people get into farming because they're natural farmers or their undying passion is to farm. But I wouldn't put myself in that category. Stewarding the land, maintaining the business is more my passion."

Sustainability dictates his decisions. For generations, his family called it stewardship. His great-grandfather stopped burning the fields after harvest, and his grandfather stopped plowing the ground, a practice that exposes soil to run-off.

"We're just here as caretakers for a little while," Joanne says, "and the land is going to be here a long time after we're here. So let's leave it in as good a condition as possible."

A decade ago, when the Brewers decided to use a no-till method for planting, it lowered erosion and improved the streams where steelhead migrate. It also gave the land back its animals by encouraging the rodent population, which bolstered the raptors and coyotes, an uneasy blessing.

The family has also expanded the role of cattle. Now about 60 cows and calves and their accompanying bulls are on several pastures, and some of the acres that once grew wheat for the market now grow forage for the cattle.

David says that for a farm to make money it faces two choices. The first, produce more cost effectively than everyone else, which means getting bigger. Emerson-Dell Farm is the same size now it was in 1947, and David sees few opportunities to buy land nearby. The second choice is to add value to their products.

The Brewers joined the Country Natural Beef cooperative in the late 1980s, before David returned to the farm. He expanded their involvement in the group, which dictates that its members use no hormones, antibiotics or steroids in the cattle. While most of the group's cattle end up on feedlots, the Brewers belong to a subset of the group, Country Natural Pasture Beef, and their animals remain on pastures.

In Sherman and Wasco counties, as well as much of the rest of the United States, the number of farms has diminished as farmers have consolidated their holdings.

"It's right up there with my worst fears. Having to make a decision, someday, that it's not viable," David says. "What once was a large farm is now a below-average farm and you can watch the smaller farms go away. And every time a smaller farm goes away, and that ground is farmed by a larger farm, you're closer to the bottom of that pile."

Except for one other small field, the Brewers alone practiced direct seeding with the no-till drill in Wasco County in 1997. Now 70 percent of land farmed here uses the technology.

Local extension agents place David and his family among the area's most forward-thinking farmers, pointing to direct-seeding, his willingness to plant new crops--20 different grains and seeds in 10 years--and the thoughtful way he runs the farm.

"I do not know a more meticulous bookkeeping student than David Brewer. He's an absolute wiz," said Sandy Macnab of Sherman County. "He's got his day planner with him all the time and he records things down to a thousandth of a percent, and he looks back to how things performed five years ago."

The work of meeting customers at stores for Country Natural Beef appealed to David and Margaret so much that they are now part owners of a Northwest group called Shepherd's Grain. They began marketing directly to customers, delivering the meat between The Dalles and Portland.

"It's a completing of the circle, and for generations farmers didn't have that. It's really affirming of what you're doing if you know you're having an impact on somebody's family," David says. "That's a whole lot different from hauling a crop off to the river and getting paid a price and not knowing if it's going to Yemen or Taiwan or Korea or Japan or Ecuador."

The circle is new to David's wife, Margaret, who grew up with a father who was a petroleum geologist and took the family across the world trying to find oil. What this life lacked in permanence it filled with a freedom to move, to explore. Farms don't allow that.

"You've got a plan and you're dressed and ready to go and you get a call from the neighbor and the bull's out," she says, then describes what must be a common conversation. "'Oh, can't it just wait.' 'No, we need to go get the bull.' 'We do? We need to get the bull now? Can't we just go?' 'No.' "

Late one afternoon, with David in Boise for a Country Natural Beef conference, a gate is left open and not just a bull but a dozen cows wander into a neighbor's field. So Margaret bundles up Liam and his two school friends who came to play, and they drive to the field, where Mike Kelly, who works with the family, will help out.

As she steps out of the cab, wearing Carhartt overalls with a blue plaid coat and work boots, she calls to the cattle: "Come here, girls, come here, boys," and the cows stop and look at her.

Margaret and a hand move hay to the truck's flatbed and tempt the cows to follow Margaret back to their pasture. The whole drive, Margaret leans out the window and yells, "Come here, girls, come here, boys."

Headed back to the barn, Margaret says, "Oh I'm, driving with the window down. I used to get after David, 'Were you born in a barn?' and here I am, driving with the window down."

In the past, if Margaret had a three-day weekend she would go to Portland. Now if she has to go, all she wants is to come home. One moment that cemented her love for this life came as she catnapped while pregnant with Liam.

"I was overhearing an 80-year-old woman playing cards with an 8-year-old girl. There was a span of four generations in the house," she says. "It was really neat to know that this is what my kids get to be a part of, this family."

David's goal is to give his children the option to become farmers. David would rather they not pick the work than never have the choice. Liam has begun helping more, doing small jobs, and his sister will begin soon. But none of their elders would coerce or guilt them into tying themselves to the farm and continuing the legacy.

"To hope that it would remain in the family--that would be not fair to the ones coming along," Joanne says.

Thinking about why he returned, David says, "When I look around this place, this farm, I see the contributions made by the previous four generations: Great-great-grandpa homesteaded that, bought that, built that and great-grandpa built that and bought that and added this. Every generation has made their contribution and I'm sure I hope that down the road people can look and see what we got done, that we left a trail--evidence of being here and caring and taking care of it."

4/7/08
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Date: 3/28/08

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