Lynn Coody Oral History Interview, December 20, 2017

CHRIS PETERSEN: Okay, today is December 20th, 2017 and we are in Eugene in the home of Lynn Coody, and we are going to talk to her today about her early life and career and also try to capture some institutional history on the Tilth organizations, with a specific focus on Oregon Tilth. But let's begin with your early life, and I'll ask you where were you born?

LYNN COODY: I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and actually my name is pronounced Cody, oddly.

CP: Oh, I'm sorry.

LC: Even though it's got two Os. It's a common-I've been dealing with this all my life, but since it is official, I'll just say we do pronounce it Cody. So, I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, and I grew up in Point Pleasant, New Jersey which is a small town, about the size of Cottage Grove or so, on the coast of New Jersey. So, it was mostly tourists. And that's where I went to high school and graduated from to-in order to go off to college.

CP: So, tell me a bit about your family background. Why did they locate in this area?

LC: Well, my family has been in New Jersey for many, many generations. In fact, my middle name, the S on my business card, is for Stockton, and Richard Stockton was a signer of the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. So, that's how long my family has been in New Jersey. And my parents were living-they grew up and were in northern New Jersey, but it was my mother's dream to have-raise-her family along the beaches, and so they bought a house in Point Pleasant, which at that time was a pretty...it was just a developing town. So, they bought a house there and it was kind of partly finished, and we finished it as we went along, and so they ended up in my mother's dream area [laughs]. So, that's how we got to Point Pleasant.

CP: Can you tell me a bit more about community life?

LC: There?

CP: Yeah.

LC: Oh my gosh. Well, like I say, it was a small town. For me, the center of the universe there was the school, and I was always a very eager student. So, when other kids moaned and groaned about summer vacation being over, I was secretly rubbing my hands together and being very eager to get back to school. So, that was where I focused, for sure. In those days, there were no sports for women, there was nothing. It was just basically school, and for me a big part of that was choral singing, believe it or not. So, that's what I enjoyed at that time. I was in lots of plays and choral concerts and really, really involved in school stuff. So, my grandparents eventually moved there as they aged, and so we took 00:03:00care of them, and that was pretty much our life. So, it was a small town, not a whole lot to do there [laughs].

CP: Where do you think this interest in school came from? Was that emphasized in the house?

LC: Yeah. My mother had a dream that all of her kids would go to college, and we all did eventually. One-we all took different paths to get there. But I was always just a very curious girl. I was-I wanted to learn; I learned a lot on my own, I studied on my own, I studied big things on my own, big chunks of disciplines on my own, even as a kid, and so I just thought that it was the best thing ever. I enjoyed it, I took it as a challenge, I did well, and that spurred me on, but to me it was just fun to learn.

And actually, that's helped me throughout my whole entire life, because now I'm 00:04:00in a job, I chose a field that was just developing and there wasn't really a path to people to learn from. We were basically making it up as we went, and so that early training was perfect. Just being a person who likes to learn about new things, it's served me so well throughout my entire life and career.

CP: Was there a connection for you to the ocean, living next to it?

LC: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean for a long time I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, because that was the only type of biology that I was familiar with, was the biology of the ocean. And I knew from an early age that I was interested in biology, but again, in those days it was discouraged for women to study science. I was actively discouraged, even in my precious school, from studying science, and I just said well that is totally crazy. I'm just going to have to 00:05:00do it anyway. And I did [laughs]. So, I really did have a connection with the ocean, and I still do, so that's one thing I love about living in Oregon, because I still have the ocean, except it's a totally different ocean.

CP: At this point in your life, is there any association or connection with agriculture or gardening?

LC: Oh, when I was little we always had gardens around our house, mostly flowers, and [laughs] I was very involved in that. My brothers were cub scouts, and in those days they raised money by selling flower bulbs, so my mother had to buy flower bulbs, and then who would plant them was me. So, we just had tons of flowers everywhere. And then I got involved with-actually there was a pivotal moment for me that, when I was a little kid with these little gardens that we 00:06:00had, where my mom gave me some marigold seeds to plant, and I, you know, went out, planted them, tended them, and then she said "well, you need to go out and deadhead them so that they'll keep growing," and when I deadheaded it, of course the seed head fell apart in my hand, and it was the seed that I had planted, and it was just like [gasps] this whole big cycle became just totally apparent to me and almost knocked me over. It seemed so incredible. So, that was actually the beginning of me being a botanist, was that little seed head opening up in my hand. It was an incredible-I mean to this day it just brings me incredible joy.

And then we had a very small lot and it had a lot of trees, but my neighbor behind us had a very big, extensible vegetable garden. It was a big, open field 00:07:00of sandy, New Jersey soil, and he...he was a dedicated gardener, very proficient gardener, so I, being a very shy little girl, would stand there at the edge of his garden, never saying a word, and just watching, watching, watching, watching. And finally when I was seven years old he said-he was holding up tomato plants-and he said, "I have these extra plants; I don't have any room. I wonder if anybody would want them," and then there was a little voice from the side that said "I do, Mr. Lee!" And that's how I got started in gardening. So, he not only gave me the plants, he set out a little spot in the sun that I could have for my own garden, and we put a little string around it and he helped me dig up and plant the tomato plants, and that's how I got started in vegetable gardening. So, from there on it was just like a constant expansion of interest.

CP: So, that continued for you as a girl?

LC: Oh yeah, yeah. I had gardens all the way through high school and until I left home to go to college. So yeah, I was always interested in vegetable gardening, and the gardens got more and more...I guess diverse and interesting as time went on. So yeah, I got-I just was-it was one of those things that captured my fancy, that you could actually grow your own food and you could hang out with plants in the meantime and learn about plants, be with them. That was what was fun.

I used to make a little plant like tomato plants with one missing in the center, and I would take my little Girl Scout sit-upon and put it in the middle and sit there with a tomato shaker-I mean a salt shaker-and eat tomatoes and hide from my brothers and read, because they would never look in my garden to find me [laughs]. So, that's kind of how I spent my time when I was a little kid 00:09:00[laughs], hiding from my brothers, because they were, you know, they were very active boys and I wanted to read. You could not read in our house. It was too chaotic. It was just too much energy. So, that's how I found my reading spot.

CP: Did you have any connection with groups like 4-H, or?

LC: None. We had no connection at all with that at all. This was a sea town and we didn't really have 4-H, to my knowledge, at all. It wasn't really farming based; it was fishing and tourism. That was it. So, we didn't really-we didn't have 4-H in school, we didn't have any focus on farming. I mean really, I didn't really know much about farming at all, as far as actually growing food, even though we lived in the garden state. There were lots of small farms around, but they were more inland from where we were, which for me was out of bicycling distance; you'd forget about it. It was not part of my world.

CP: Do you remember having any sense of an environmental perspective, or even that being an issue?

LC: Well, I was all-that was one of the things that I always read about actually, when I was a girl, and of course the famous Rachel Carson books came out when I was in sixth grade, or at least I found them when I was in sixth grade, and I became actually very disturbed. I became very concerned that this was going on in the world; that we had pesticides and we had-and of course, see Rachel Carson also, she shared with me this love of the sea. That's how actually the first books I read from her, was her ones about the sea. Then of course came Silent Spring, and since she was one of my favorite authors, oh dear, that was a big problem. It was a big problem for me.

So, from then on I was, in my own little way, a little environmentalist, and 00:11:00actually when I went to college I did get-I started out as a biology major, but I also got a degree in environmental studies because I had been very interested in that and felt like it was a duty to address that in our lifetimes. Actually, I actually was a little bit...I would have to say I was an unusual kid [laughs], and I recognize that now. I actually have gone back and tried to understand why that is, and my son was a little bit this way too, but it's just being very, very curious and being interested in things that are kind of mostly not-people don't think about until they're a little bit older, but I thought about them when I was like 10 and 12, because I was a big reader in my garden [laughs].

CP: So, it sounds to me like this was mostly self-selected reading, or you-

LC: Oh, yeah.

CP: --you didn't have to-you didn't have a mentor of any sort.

LC: Totally. No, no. Actually, I had only mentors that discouraged me for the longest time, until I met my biology teacher in 10th grade. Then he became a mentor, and he saw that I was super interested in biology, and he was the first person who didn't make fun of me, and actually fed me information. He would give me extra books, always kind of like under the table so that the other kids wouldn't see. But he gave me books about taxonomy that he had used in college. So he, he really helped me a lot. He showed me there was a bigger world than what you could learn in school, that, you know, when you went to college, there was actually a whole lot out there to see. You didn't have to follow along in this little path and be kind of constrained by a high school curriculum. So, 00:13:00that was very exciting. And he, when we did our senior paper in high school, I did it on the food chain in the ocean, largely fueled by books that he gave me specifically to be able to study about that. So, it was a good-I still feel very grateful to him, and he was one of the best teachers in my whole life [laughs]. So yeah, I'll tell you, one teacher can make a huge difference in a kid's life.

CP: Absolutely.

LC: It's an amazing-it's an amazing gift if you can just find somebody, just one person, that's all it really takes. So, yeah.

CP: So, you have a strong interest in school, you're a good student and college is always within your sights, and you-

LC: Oh, yeah.

CP: -you ultimately decide to go to Colby College. Can you tell me about that process of deciding on Colby?

LC: Well let's see...I really didn't know how to figure out how to-where to go to college or anything, and my parents were very supportive, but they also didn't know how to choose. My mom had not had the opportunity to go to college, and my dad went to the Merchant Marine academy in the war, so he just kind of-he went there and didn't go through a college choice; he just went to there and learned to be an engineer [laughs], and run liberty ships where they were going blow up out of the water.

So, I didn't really know what I was doing, and at that time we had this big, fat thick book that had big charts in it about which majors you could study at different colleges and things. That was all you had. And of course I knew I was going to study biology, so everybody has a biology program. There was no help at all. So, I decided-I sent away for I would say 100 catalogs, and I read every 00:15:00one of them. I was like really a big consumer of these goofy catalogs they send out. And most of the time they're just like pictures of people eating in a dining hall and everything.

But I chose Colby. It's kind of goofy, I hate to have to say it, but [laughs] Colby had a bog and an arboretum, and I thought wow, that's unusual, that's a great place to study about plants. So they did, they had their own, you know, in Maine they have bogs kind of like in Ireland where they float on the water. There are some here in the Cascades too, in the high Cascades, but it's a very, very unusual environment, and they had an arboretum that was really many acres, 00:16:00and you could walk to it from the campus. And I did end up doing quite a few projects in this arboretum when I was there. I enjoyed it like crazy; I would walk in it all the time, so it was a good choice.

And we went-my parents drove me all the way up to Maine so we could go see it, and the second I got here, I just said "wow, I could actually fit in here." They took me to see the biology labs, I mean they really took it seriously like I was going to study biology, and so I thought okay, this'll work for me, and I just applied early decision and got in. It was the only place I applied to. Because of the bog [laughs]. Other people went for the skiing, but not me; I went for the bog.

So, that's actually why I went to Colby, plus it was also an academic type 00:17:00college. It wasn't a college where it was known for partying or anything. It was really meant for academic people. It's kind of secluded in rural Maine [laughs]. And that's what it was, and I loved it and had a wonderful time there. I really enjoyed it.

CP: So, it was an easy transition.

LC: Yeah, oh yeah. I just packed up a couple suitcases, I didn't take very much at all, and I-my dad dropped me off, and I was just happy. In fact, I'm still friends with my-the first person I met when I got there turned out to be living in the same floor of the dorm as me, and we're still friends after all these years. So, I just had a friend, from the start, and it was-I was just ready. I was eager. I couldn't wait to go. I was-my dad had told me "don't worry, you 00:18:00know, these things that bothered you in high school, they'll go away in college and it'll be really fun for you," and he was right. So, it was great.

CP: And was he referring to the discouragement that you'd received from-

LC: Yep, yep. The discouragement and also I didn't have-I had friends in high school but I didn't really feel like I was-I certainly wasn't a popular girl getting lots of dates, that's for sure. But I didn't actually feel like I had people who were like me in a way that I was searching for, and at Colby there were many people like me, so I felt very comfortable there. I felt like I could be myself a lot more than I could in high school, and that was a great thing. And since then, it's just become more and more and more that way [laughs].

CP: And how would you describe this niche? People who are serious about their 00:19:00studies, but also-was there something more to it?

LC: Oh, yeah. I would say people who are serious about studying, but also people who have kind of an inherent quality to question things and look deeply, really look deeply, not just, you know, read a book because somebody tells you to, but you're reading not only that book, but five other books, and looking at the footnotes just because you really want to know. You want to know enough information to make your own mind up. That's kind of the type of people I was looking for. And I found many of them there. It was wonderful. And of course the teachers were really a lot more-they were a lot more-they were a lot more...willing to let you do that-I mean they encouraged that, so that was-it was so different, being encouraged to do that, versus thought of as like oh no, 00:20:00now you're causing me too much work. In high school it was just like if you did that, the teachers didn't know how to grade you, they didn't quite know what to do with papers that you wrote; it was a little bit hard. It was challenging, I was a challenging student, I guess, in high school [laughs]. Now looking back on it, it's, yeah, I probably made it hard for some of my teachers [laughs]. They didn't know what to do.

CP: So, was the intent from the outset to do the dual study in biology and environmental studies, or did the latter emerge later?

LC: No, I actually could not even imagine anything more outside of biology. To me, to be able to do that was just going to be enough, but you know, when I got there they started the environmental studies major when I was in my sophomore year, and they sent out a little note telling everyone "okay, we're going to have a new major," and I said wow, that looks really great. So, I added it in. I 00:21:00had to go get all kinds of permissions and I had to write out how I could complete all of the requirements for both, that even though I wasn't starting at the very beginning, but there was a lot of overlap because a lot of the biology I was taking was at that time the beginning classes, but it was focused on botany, through my own interest, and so a lot of it would help fulfill the requirements to both. So, that was not too hard, and I was able to complete that.

I didn't have a lot of choices of things that I would choose to study, because of starting late in the second major, but all the things I got to study were very interesting, and environmental studies added a component. It directed me in 00:22:00areas in sociology and economics that I probably wouldn't have chosen on my own, but those requirements turned out to be of great interest once I got started on them. And the classes that they had chosen for the major were-they were oriented toward questioning like how, how do you account for the parts of a system that are normally related to money, and things like this that were very ecologically based, and really made me think so much. So, that was actually a big...I feel a lot of thankfulness that they had oriented the classes the way they did. It helped me broaden out my thinking quite a bit, and I'm glad I did that, otherwise I probably would have been taking biology and music the whole time [laughs]. So, this was a good choice.

CP: So, it was an interdisciplinary curriculum, then.

LC: Yes. Yeah, yeah, it was. That was the goal of it, was to have different-choose classes from all the different departments that were kind of-had an environmental theme. And it was the early days of doing these interdisciplinary majors. It's like I think that might have been the first one that they had at Colby that was interdisciplinary, because you know, it was like-I-it was between 1970 and 1974. It was early days before for all that stuff. But I thought it was a great idea. And actually I thought to myself, this is how I want to work the rest of my life. I want to work with people who are thinking about other things, and I can contribute a piece of the pie. So, it made a huge impression on me, as far as being able to envision how to proceed after college.

CP: Was biology for you an entrée into botany? Was there no botany program, or was there more to biology that appealed to you than just plants?

LC: Oh, well...a lot appealed to me; mostly, though, I had trouble with biology because I go do invertebrate zoology-I could botany, but doing the vertebrate zoology was tough because you had to kill animals, and I couldn't do it. So, after the intro class to that, it was very clear to me that I needed to orient myself towards botany and ecology, and that's what I did. So, we had-you know, it was a small college, so we didn't have separate departments or anything, it was all the biology department, but you could kind of chart your own course through it. So, just as knowing myself, I just said well, this is not for me. 00:25:00I'm not really going to dissect a cat, you know. That was just not something I was going to do [laughs]. And like we had to kill frogs, and I just, I literally couldn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

So yeah, so I studied invertebrate zoology quite a lot, based on my interest in marine biology, and then that went over into studying insects and soil based organisms, all kinds of things that there was all kinds of worlds out there that you could apply, I could apply what I had learned about marine zoology to these land based systems, and that became a big interest. And that's how it got started into being very interested in farming. So yeah, I started seeing connections between "oh, that's what I saw when I was a kid and I had my garden," and "that's what that was" and "this is why this was happening."

So, it was a combo of that stuff, but yeah, never did the vertebrate zoology thing. So, I never got past, yeah, the histology class where you killed the frog. That was the end for me [laughs]. We had to make tissue samples with frogs and I'm just like okay, yeah, not for me. I want to study things that are alive and functioning. And that's what I did.

CP: Was there a strain or a community of environmental activism at Colby during this time?

LC: Oh yeah. It was just beginning, right. So, there was an effort to start a recycling program on the campus, which I participating actively in, schlepping newspapers around and all that stuff, and there were some people who were I guess being more-it was just the beginning of environmental activism, so there 00:27:00was a small group of people that would-were more active in that. I didn't really participate too much in that, because a lot of the activities were off campus and I was very based on campus. I was-had a financial aid job and, you know, I was-had to be there a lot, so that-I didn't do that kind of stuff, like go down to Augusta for protests and things like that. Nope. I was serving breakfast. My financial aid job [laughs]. So yeah, but it was starting up, and I certainly felt a kinship to it, that's for sure.

CP: How would you say that your point of view changed during your undergraduate years, or matured, or did it?

LC: Well, I would say it certainly broadened quite a bit, because I was with people who were from different parts of the-mostly the east coast, but they 00:28:00seemed very-like in those days, New Jersey was a whole different region than New England. There wasn't a lot of traveling then like there is now, and so even New York was a very foreign place to us. So, being with people from different areas of the country, different states, and also there were a lot of people at Colby who, unlike me, had gone to private school and who were much better off; their parents were more...better off financially, and that was an eye-opener to me. I didn't ever know about that kind of stuff before.

But I would say intellectually I was exposed to many disciplines that I didn't even know existed. There were classes that when I would look at them in the 00:29:00catalog, I wouldn't even know what they were, like I had never heard of the discipline of sociology before. I didn't even...I had to, you know, look it up in the dictionary: what is this, and what would you study about society, and how, you know, I just didn't know. I barely knew what economics was. So yeah, it was a big, big chance for me. And I tell you, I grabbed everything I could when I was there. I was one of these students who just knew, you know, you really appreciated the chance to have an education, really appreciated it. And so, I would-I just tried to do everything that I could. I mean, I would audit classes; I would sneak into classes after they got started, just to see what is this. What is this? I don't know. And so, between that and my financial aid job, like I said, working in the cafeteria-later I became a biology tutor, that was a lot 00:30:00more fun [laughs]-then, you know, I was busy. I was like, I just felt like it was a big, big opportunity.

The other thing they had there was a pool. They had a big field house. They had a pool, so I could swim, and I thought, I'm never going to have this again in my life, and that turned out to be true [laughs]. So, I swam a lot.

CP: And by the end of this time, agriculture is something that's emerging for you, is that right?

LC: Yeah. Well, what happened there was we had a chance-so, at the end of your biology major, you had a senior seminar, and we were supposed to choose [laughs], choose a topic [laughs] related to flagella [laughs]. Honest to God, 00:31:00this was the truth, and they were going to have this seminar about all the different aspect of-that flagella play in the world, and I'm like that's not all that interesting to me [laughs]. I wasn't really a person that liked to have a boundary on academics, so I said "actually, I'm also an environmental studies major, so can I have a topic that relates to both?" And sure enough, this guy who was just interested in flagella said "yeah, go ahead. Just tell me what you want to do."

So, I chose-I thought to myself well, I'm going to choose something that tries, in my own way-now this is still pretty limited-but try to choose a topic that encompasses many different disciplines that I've been learning about here. So, I chose the Green Revolution, and I started studying about that. And of course, I 00:32:00ran into stuff about organic farming in the course of doing this, so I became a totally...a big proponent of organic farming, just from reading about the horrors of the Green Revolution and how it was causing all these problems in fertilizer eutrophication and problems for the societies-because by then I knew what sociology meant-and economic problems, because they'd been through a while. They'd been doing the Green Revolution for a while.

And then, on the other hand, I was finding like Organic Gardening Magazine, these nice little articles by Rodale, and a few books from England that I came across, and I thought well, here's the solution. Here's the solution! And so, I 00:33:00said "when I get done with Colby, this is what I'm going to do. This is a way for me to contribute." And I'm good with plants and I love to grow things, and so it seemed to me like it was a natural.

So, sure enough, at-right like in the spring of my senior year, I'm thinking wow, what the heck am I going to do? Where am I going to live, what am I going to do, how can I proceed? I go to the Biology Department bulletin board, literally a bulletin board with cork and pushpins in those days, and there's a little sign up there that says "do you want to intern on an organic farm in New Brunswick, Canada?" and I said, "you betcha." I called them up, I wrote them letters, I said "I want to come, can I come?" and they said, "yeah, you can come as soon as you graduate."

So, that's what I did. I went up there, and I thought, this is a good chance, because I need to be able to know can I physically be a farmer, would I enjoy that life, what would it be like, you know, because I'd never-all I did was my own gardening. And so, that's how-that's how I got started in that direction. It was like starting from seeing that marigold seed and then all these things just happened at just the right time. At least, that's the way it seemed to me [laughs].

CP: What did you learn about yourself during this internship?

LC: Oh, wow. Well...

CP: Did you decide you could be a farmer?

LC: I did decide I could be a farmer. I saw that I was an unusual hard worker, compared to many people, that I did have a lot of physical energy, and I could 00:35:00understand-I could not only do things, I was practical, but I could understand why I was doing things, because at this farm, one of the ways they made money was there was an internship program, which was basically slave labor, as it used to be for all organic farms in those days. You just went and got room and board and worked your butt off, and I did the same thing on my farm; I had apprentices too. But they also had people who paid to come there to learn about organic farming. So, lo and behold, after you got your work done as an intern, you could attend those classes too.

So, I saw that I knew a lot more than these people who were paying to come and thought themselves, you know, kind of above and beyond the beginner stage; that I already knew a lot, and that my studying about humus and lots of entomology, 00:36:00it all came together and was actually now a useful skill. It wasn't just an academic discipline; it was all useful. So, taxonomy, entomology, invertebrate biology, soils, all that stuff was now like a tool. It was incredible. And so, I thought wow, I actually learned a lot that I didn't even know...I didn't really put it together, but this pulled it all together, and to me, integration of knowledge is so satisfying. It's so-oh my gosh, it fulfills such an incredible need that this experience during this internship program, that's what I learned, was that the integration of knowledge was not only possible for me, but this was 00:37:00a discipline in which I could prosper.

And I did, I was a very hard worker. I have a lot-I found I had a lot more perseverance in the face of difficulty than most of the other people who were there; that I had a lot of patience with working through problems, all of which helped out many times in this crazy life that I ended up doing, as far as organic farming and consulting and everything else. Even being a mother [laughs]. So, that's what I learned.

CP: So, born and raised in New Jersey, college in Maine, this internship in Canada; at some point you get to Oregon, but I don't know how.

LC: Oh, no. Yes.

CP: How does this happen?

LC: Okay. Well, after I-after I did my internship, I had a short stint in 00:38:00working in Milford, New Hampshire as an environmental-actually it was termed an environmental geologist, even though I didn't-I wasn't really a geologist, but we were [laughs] basically collecting rock samples, walking through the woods collecting rock samples all day, putting them in a backpack basket, and slogging through spruce trees that would scratch you to death. This was my job. So, at the end of the-when it started getting snowy and we couldn't do that anymore, I got laid off. So, I was-happened to be reading one of these free newspapers and thinking wow, I have to find a job. What am I going to do? There was this little add for an intentional community in Oregon, and I thought yeah, that-and they said, you know, "we are going to have no cars, and we have land, and we're going to live an ecological life."

So, there was a local person who was a member of this. You could-this was 00:39:00actually the Cerro Gordo Community in Cottage Grove-and he was a long distance member of it, so he was going to be putting on a little slideshow. At that time, they sent a slideshow around the country to try to recruit people to come and be part of this. So, I saw that slideshow and I immediately started researching is this a good place to have an organic farm, because I was trying to-of course I knew I couldn't stay; I didn't want to stay in New England and try to be an organic farmer. I certainly didn't want to go back to New Jersey, because land was way too expensive there, so I started researching it.

To me, the Willamette Valley sounded like the garden of Eden, and I thought wow, look at this, you know, you've got mild temperatures, doesn't snow all that much, good soil-of course, I had soil maps, I had everything-so I said okay, my 00:40:00goal is I will go there, I will checkout this community. If it doesn't work out, at very least I'll try to go to the University of Oregon and get a master's degree, and then if I really don't like it at all, I can at least have better skills for finding a job in biology.

So, that was my plan, and that's how I came to Oregon. And I did get really deeply involved in the intentional community of Cottage Grove. I lived in Cottage Grove for over 20 years, and still my closest friends here in Oregon are associated with that time, many of whom live now in south Eugene, and so we're still very close friends. Yeah, so-and I did live on that land and I helped develop the homestead part of it. We had big, extensive gardens, and from there I had some of the people from there, we started Fresh Start Farm in Cottage 00:41:00Grove in order to have our own control over our own land later on. But that was why. It was this little tiny ad about ecological living that did it. And then research about the Willamette Valley.

CP: How big was this community?

LC: Oh, well at its height there were hundreds of families, but we weren't-most of them were living in Cottage Grove. So, in the-let's see, what years were those...those were like the mid to late seventies, there were hundreds of families. And we interacted socially, but the land was completely undeveloped at that time. In fact, we, my friends and I, were the first out there to live permanently in this homestead neighborhood, where we lived with no electricity or running water for many years, and basically developed farms, a farm, and had goats and, you know, the whole nine yards of the seventies. So, I was basically 00:42:00a hippy on the land, but I was also, like I said, I was also very organized and focused and directed to make things happen. So, it's kind of a wacky way to go, but it was the seventies [laughs], what can I say.

CP: Is this where you spent most of your time? There's about a two-year period here; it's kind of a gap between when you start at U of O. Did you spend most of your time on this piece of land, living and developing?

LC: Yeah, I-well, it took me a while to get to U of O because I had no money. And so, the way I got to U of O was I was actually living in Creswell at the time, working at a woodworking shop, and I was trying to save money to go to U of O, but it was way beyond what I could ever imagine. It was taking way too 00:43:00long. So, I was at a craft show [laughs], and somebody laid one of these, again, one of these course catalogs from U of O, they left it behind at our booth after looking at our stuff. So, I thought okay, well they'll be back any minute, I'll just leaf through it. I'll just look at it, you know, while I can, and I was like totally engrossed in it! I totally forgot where I was; I wasn't selling anything, I was just looking at this catalog.

And they had a class in limnology, which was fresh-it's freshwater ecology-and I got it in my head that I absolutely had to take this class, because at Colby I had done some independent study with the Cobbossee Watershed area association on eutrophication of lakes, and so although I had never studied limnology per se, I had done a lot of reading, and I had such a strong drive to try to learn from 00:44:00somebody else who knew a lot more and kind of get a bigger picture of how it all fit together.

So, I said I'll walk over to the U of O and I'll just find this guy who is the teacher and I'll just tell him, "I really need to take this class, what can I do?" And so, I found him. He was sitting in his office, it was a miracle. He was sitting in his office and I explained to him why I needed to take this class. I really-and if I couldn't take it, could he at least tell me the name of the book so I could study it, could I get it out of the library, what could I do, and he said "you cannot just take a graduate level class out of the blue, you know, I would have to know a lot more about why you're qualified." So, I'm like trying to explain it, and finally I could see he was very doubtful, so I said "well, you know, I'll-could I just sit in on the class, and I won't say a word? If I 00:45:00could just listen, that's all I'm asking. I'm not asking to get credit, I'm not asking anything, I just would really like to listen." He said "no, no, no, no, no way."

So, I said "okay, well thanks for considering it, I'll go look up the book in the library, thank you so much, I really appreciate it." And I'm walking down the hall and he sticks his head out from his office, he says, "wait a minute, come back here." So, I came back, he said "you get a transcript, you show me you've been to college, you show me, you bring your paper in from the Cobbossee Watershed District, and I'll see if you can sit in on the cl-" because I couldn't even pay the auditing fee. I was asking him just to sit there. And finally, he said "okay, you can do that. You don't have to pay the auditing fee, you can sit here."

And I sat in it. You know, it's a five-credit lab class, so I say "well, what about the labs?" [Laughs]. "Can I come to the labs too?" And he goes "no way," 00:46:00you know, "we don't have room at the bench." And so, I said "well, how about if I come every time, and if somebody's not there, I just stand in for them?" So, by this time the poor guy is totally worn down; he says "okay. That's not very likely. Not very likely." But what he doesn't know is that there is nobody more dedicated to studying than me, and I know that out of like 20 people, usually one of them's going to be-I'm thinking okay, you know, we've got 10 weeks, we've got field trips, somebody's not going to show up.

So, sure enough, I got to attend every lab and every field trip. In fact, I lived in Creswell, rode my bike up, and he got so-he did not know how I was living; I was living in a six by 12 trailer with no running water, anything, no bathroom even, in a horse pasture by the woodworking shop, and I had to ride my 00:47:00bike 12 miles back and forth in the dark to go to school. Well, he found out because I got a flat and I couldn't-I was a little bit late and I was super apologetic. So, after that, when they were going south, they would stop at the horse pasture and pick me up so I wouldn't have to ride my bike. That's the kind of guy he was. Really sweet.

So, at the end, he said "okay, you've been to every class, you've been to every lab, if you get the highest grade in the class, I will arrange that someday when you get to go to graduate school, you can have these five credits, because you've clearly earned them." So, I'm like oh my god, because at that time a master's degree was only 45 credits at U of O. I don't know what it is now, but anyway, I thought wow, that's 1/9th. So, I'm calculating; wow, that's going to save me so much money when I go to graduate school one of these magical days.

And so, of course I study, study, study, get the highest grade, he says "okay, 00:48:00I'll make sure. You just tell me when you go to graduate school." And then he said...when he was handing out the-on the top, it said "come and see me" on my test, and he said "okay, you deserve to go to graduate school." Unbeknownst to me, he was on the Admissions Department for the Biology Graduate School. Of course, I didn't know, I just chose him because of limnology. He was my limnology [laughs] guy. And so, he arranged for me to be admitted, in the winter term even, and I went to graduate school. Yeah, so that's how I got in. And I-this is probably the gap you're referring to, living in Creswell and riding my bike and trying desperately to go to graduate school.

And so, it took me a while to get through because I had to work, I was paying 00:49:00and doing all-oh, it was very slow. I could sometimes only take one class, but I did it, and it was really fun. It was really great. So yeah, so there's lots of kind of gaps and confusion, and me trying to figure things out in odd ways. I don't think I ever did anything the way you're supposed to. So, yeah. Oops, my phone's going.

CP: That's an incredible story [laughs].

LC: Yeah. So that's the, again, a teacher helps me, right. Somebody, somebody else sees the vision, and I'm just so lucky to have run into these people at the right time, and they could...they were so kind and offered me so much, and really could see that, I don't know, there was just something there where they could see that I was sincere and really wanted to learn about things and really 00:50:00wanted to get enough info to integrate things. So, that was another discipline that was an integrative discipline.

CP: And this is systemic ecology?

LC: Yeah. So, at U of O they have a Biology Department, but once again, you can choose like kind of what areas you want to work, like you could have been a microbiologist or a geneticist or anything when you got done. But yeah, I did a lot of it by independent study, like I studied hydrology. They didn't have a class on that. Because, you know, I was kind of like halfway between U of O and OSU in what I wanted to study, and at the time, OSU didn't have any kind of programs about organic farming or sustainable farming or anything, so I didn't want to go there and just learn about how to grow things with pesticides. I knew that wasn't right for me.

So, I figured systematic ecology was the basis of organic farming, which I was 00:51:00still aiming at. But see, this is a very weird aim. It's kind of like an aim that goes like this [indicates frequent turns, like a winding road], compared to most people, most of my friends in organic. Their goal was to get land and start farming. My goal was to learn a whole lot and then figure out how to apply it. So, it was a-I was always a little bit different than most of the people who actually became real organic farmers. It was not-I didn't ever see any way I was going to own land. I did end up owning land with partners, but I-just because it was all so expensive, and I wasn't really focused on making money. I was focused on learning and exploring ideas. It doesn't really pay a lot [laughs], at least at that time. Now it pays a lot, but not then [laughs]. Now it turns out the 00:52:00same exact thing is what fuels my consulting work, which, yeah, I definitely get paid for that.

CP: So, this is another interdisciplinary program.

LC: Yep.

CP: Are you narrowing your focus at all, or are you still picking and choosing from all different corners of...?

LC: Oh, well I was still picking and choosing from all kinds of different things. I was doing botanical taxonomy, hydrology, a lot of botany. I got involved with classes by Dr. David Wagner there who, oh, he is such an incredible botanical taxonomist that I got really entranced by his classes, and so if he taught anything, I would take it. He's an expert in lichens and all the oddball things about botany. So, that was-that was-yeah, so I was kind of like 00:53:00still ranging around and still, in my own mind, seeing how it fit together, yeah. And that's why I said it's systematic ecology, because it was a lot of ecology classes, quantitative ecology, lots and lots of ecology.

I think I took every ecology class that they had there at the time, which was a little odd because there weren't a lot of women in field biology at that time, and I used to-I had a couple experiences where I was the only woman in most of the classes that I took in ecology at that time, and we went on a field trip that had a German professor, and he had never had a woman in his class before, so we went on field trips and he had no clue what to do. So, he brought-we had these big, I guess they were 12-person canvas Army tents, that's what we went on 00:54:00field trips on, but he did not think I should sleep with the other students, because of being a woman, so he kindly brought me my own 12-person tent, which I couldn't even drag across the ground to get it set-up, and I'm like, well I can't-I can't even possibly get this thing set up. This is not-I'm just going to have to like sleep in the van [laughs]. So, it ended up, the way we solved the problem was he slept separately and the students slept together, because he just did not, he just never-he was very old-school. He was an older guy to start with, he was from Germany, many ecol-you know, many ecologists were from Germany at that point.

So yeah, we had lots of kind of oddball things to deal with, but yeah, nevertheless, I persisted [laughs]. And I had fun. And the other students were very accepting of me. They had no problem and were kind and, you know, everybody 00:55:00was, was sharing the work of camping evenly, and so I thought it was fun. And most of the other teachers didn't have a problem at all.

CP: Did you see that gender gap start to shift very quickly, or were you an outlier for a while?

LC: No, I was an outlier for a long time. I...yeah, most of the women in biology-there were a lot of women in biology at U of O, but there were almost all studying things like genetics and lab-based sciences. There weren't very many women at all. In fact, I can only remember one other class where there was one other woman in it that was a field based class, because you know, you had to be out camping and you had to travel a lot in a funky van [laughs], jostling all around. But I don't know, to me it was not a problem.

It was just so cool to be able to get to the-I mean gosh, to go to places in Oregon to study ecology, like I'd never been to the Cascades, I'd never been to eastern Oregon, I'd never been to Crater Lake, you know, and these field trips were like candy, I mean just you were - everything, seeing everything along the way, being in a new environment, and then studying it in detail. I mean, what could be better than that? I would have done anything. I would have even figured out the 12-person tent if I had to! Later on I bought a nylon one [laughs]. Figured if this was going to happen again, I'd have a nylon tent for myself.

CP: So, living in this community, on some level, is an expression of an activist point of view.

LC: Oh, yeah.

CP: I would say.

LC: Oh, yeah.

CP: Were there other groups, organizations, or movements that you were a part of during this time period?

LC: Oh, well I started getting involved with NCAP. Well, that was the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides. And I actually did some-you know, I had financial aid work from U of O, and one of the things you could do was work at a non-profit, and so your work furthered the work of the non-profit but you got paid for financial aid from the U of O, so it helped in two ways; helped me go to school, and it helped them have somebody to work for them. So, I did quite a bit of work there, and eventually they actually hired me for a while to fill in for Mary O'Brien, who was on a long sabbatical trip with her family, which I very much appreciated.

Let's see, I did become involved with a lot of different kind of national environmental groups, just as a member and reading their literature that they 00:58:00put out, that kind of a thing, but you know, I didn't have a whole lot of time. I was pretty engrossed trying to go to school and work and everything else, so yeah. So, that was basically-that's about all I can remember from that period. NCAP was my main interest, which was kind of farm-they were mostly involved with forestry then, and the Cerro Gordo land was heavily forested. It's kind U-sha-there's big valleys and then there's forest all the way around and then it's surrounded mostly by BLM land, so I became interested in sustainable forestry and learned about NCAP through forest, you know, their work against forest spraying, herbicide. So yeah, so that was a really great opportunity. I'm still a member of NCAP, by the way, after all these years [laughs]. It's a great organization.

CP: You mentioned several years earlier reading about the Green Revolution and 00:59:00that being sort of a formative moment for you, in terms of this real focus that you have on organic. Were there other incidents that happened along the way that reinforced that for you, or was this just something that you had decided at some point, and it just maintained from that point? I mean, there's an origin story here I'm trying to get at.

LC: Yeah. From that point, I would say that all that I was studying, I intended to apply to...basically reform the agricultural system that had been described in those Green Revolution papers that I had read. I didn't come from Iowa, where I saw soybeans and corn. I didn't come from that kind of environment, but always I was reading about that. I was very interested in it, and I always was reading about food production.

So, at Cerro Gordo there was a 10 acre parcel that was designated as for-for 01:00:00basically for farming, and that's where I intended-I intended to become knowledgeable enough to be able to really participate in that when it became possible to do so, and that's exactly what I did. So, I was studying farming all along. I still, where I was living in Cottage Grove, we had many-we had five people living in this household, and we had a very big extensive garden that I would kind of plan and organization, and then everyone would work on.

So, I was still-I mean that was probably a quarter of an acre that we had there, because we had an extra lot. We had one big lot, and then another whole lot that was next door, right next-at the base of Mount David, and so it was a kind of secluded, quiet area. So, we had quite a big-we had fruit trees and berries and 01:01:00a big, big garden there, so it was-I was still doing all that. It was kind of the learn by doing approach.

CP: Well, you completed your degree, and what begins after that point is a very busy professional life.

LC: Yeah [laughs]. Well, the end of my master's degree was overlapping with moving out to Cerro Gordo and actually beginning to farm on bare land with no water. So, like we were there drilling a well, and we had a hand pump, we had no electricity, so this was a very spare, austere lifestyle where we were mostly growing food to support ourselves for quite a long time. We had 13 people that were living there, participating at various levels to this, but I was one of the 01:02:00more constant of the people. So yeah, that's [laughs], that was a heck of a time to make it through all that.

I built a little yurt, a wooden sided yurt, at 16 feet across, and that's what I lived in while I was basically a beginning farmer with no electricity and no running water. We had stream-we developed a stream and we used that for-it was all gravity fed and came down to big old barrels that were strung together with pipes, and that was how we stored the water, and then we would use-it was up on a big stand, and we would just water with that. So yeah, it was definitely learning by doing.

And luckily there were some people there who actually knew how to build. We built a big barn, starting from milling the logs with a chainsaw. We made 01:03:00six-by-sixes and then we made-I was not in charge of this; I was a worker, there were other people who knew how to do this-we made these big joints that fit together like this, and built this big timber framed barn there for all of us to use. And then we each had small, small little, basically cabins like this. This is why I have this building, actually, because I still crave to have a small little space that I can think in [laughs]. So, now I have this.

But yeah, that's kind of how I got started out in farming. And during that time, I became involved with Tilth, which was a regional organization. So, then we were really, really, really, you know, we were land based, and I was super land based. I had goats, I was there twice a day to milk them; we were definitely 01:04:00living the hippy homesteader life. And yeah, we were great entertainment to the BLM folks who used to come down there and take a long look at us and try to figure out what the heck we were doing there. Whenever they would come around, they would come and visit [laughs].

But yeah, I found out about Tilth. It was then regional Tilth, and they sent a-somehow, I guess-I don't even know how I eventually heard about them, but I had some of their newsletters. And the first thing I did for Tilth was life changing, because I decided that I would try to attend this gathering of agricultural women that Tilth was putting on in Ellensburg, Washington, and this 01:05:00was a huge stretch for me, because I didn't have a car, didn't really know how to drive; I had to beg rides from people. But there was a group that was going to be starting in the southern valley and basically picking up women as they went along, and we were all sitting in the back of an old van. So, these were women I'd never met before, but by the time we got to Ellensburg, they were sisters. And the whole thing was like that. The whole, every second was like that.

And so, I actually-I don't know where I-why I thought I should do this, but I had volunteered to give a talk about [laughs] tying-it was about books that you could read about rural women and lessons that you could learn from them. They were novels. And so, it was meant to be like you could read this by your wood stove and feel inspired. And it turned out-I thought no one-well, how many 01:06:00people will be interested in this? I walked into the room and there were like 40 women who wanted to hear about this, and I was like oh my god, wow, am I really up to this? I don't know.

But I gave my little intro, and it was supposed to be like a discussion group, and everyone, there was no problem starting the discussion. Everyone was vitally interested, and it was such a success that I then thought well, I should do more with Tilth, and that's how-this was like in maybe, maybe it was like 1977, something like that. I can't remember exactly when that was, but it was somewhere in the late seventies like that. And so, that was my first touching of Tilth, and I was-it was like fairyland. It was like all these people that were 01:07:00living similarly to me understood what my life was like; many of them really had-were integrating ideas in their own right, and it was wonderful. It was finding a clan. And they were all women [laughs], so it was like suddenly instead of having to have my own 12-person tent, I was in the tent. It was great, it was really wonderful. So, then Tilth came [laughs].

CP: So, by they were all women, you mean the organization was largely dominated by women, or this particular group that you were in-

LC: No, this particular conference was specifically for women, because the women-it was so hard to find women. Now, first of all, you're isolated on farms all over the place, so we were all very isolated. In those days, organic farmers were few and far between, and we-it was hard to even find another organic farmer 01:08:00in your area that you could travel to. I mean, for me in Cottage Grove, it was like that. But this conference was organized just for women, so it was all women, and it was just an amazing experience to know there were all these women scattered all over the pacific northwest doing their own thing in different ways. Some were raising animals, some were raising crops, some were subsistence farmers, some were trying to figure out how to buy land.

And we just talked, as women do, about everything. Everything, you know. Just, it was just great. Every little bit of life was able to be examined, from like how you find work boots that fit you, where did you get those gloves that are small enough to fit hands like that, that's a real problem. That's a real 01:09:00problem. Look at those hands, they're tiny. Size five ring, like I had to get a kid's wedding ring. It's terrible [laughs]. But there were other women that had hands that size, and so sure enough, yeah, it was great, people had found many, many different resources that, everything from, you know, how not to be lonely-some people had kids-I didn't have kids at that time, but you know, how you were raising kids when you were really isolated.

I mean, so there was everything, everything was up for grabs. It was just a giant talkfest, and people like didn't even sleep. Everybody was up talking, talking, talking, sharing all this information about farming and life. And being a woman. And it was great, it was amazing. So, that was Tilth. That was like an explosion for me, that wow, this is something I absolutely have to do.

CP: Yeah.

LC: Yeah.

CP: So, that's your root in the organization, it sounds like.

LC: Yep.

CP: But you obviously expanded from there.

LC: Oh, yeah. So...

CP: So, take me through that next step.

LC: Wow, so that was regional Tilth, so that was-in those days, Tilth was a regional organization for Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and a little bit of northern California. That was-so we had chapters. There were chapters all over the place. So, unbeknownst to me, there was a Willamette Valley chapter, because you know, Cottage Grove, and then I'm outside of Cottage Grove, not really exactly interacting much with these people in Salem and Portland, and we were-so this was news to me.

So, I thought okay, I'll try to go to some of these Willamette Valley Tilth meetings. And I went and it was wonderful. And it was a small group, relatively small group, but there were people from all over the Willamette Valley, and they 01:11:00embraced us from Cottage Grove and said yes, you know, that's Willamette Valley-ish, you can be in the group. And I quickly saw there was a need for organization, and so I thought I could do that. Yeah, I could do that. Even though I'm brand new, I'm good at that kind of stuff. I could do that with my eyes closed, what they need.

So, we started a special chapter of-so, Willamette Valley Tilth was so big we had smaller chapters of it, so we had a Cottage Grove group, and so a lot of rural folks-I mean we had a pretty good size group in Cottage Grove, and we basically, we'd just get together for potlucks and talking. But the big Willamette Valley group needed some kind of an organizational structure to 01:12:00manage all of these other emerging groups. So, I said I-they were having an election, and of course everybody's sitting on their hands and nobody wants to-nobody wants to volunteer, and they're like looking and saying "who will we get, who will we get."

So, they needed someone to do the membership secretary, and so I volunteered for that, and I thought how hard can this be, you know, like sending out-making labels and taking in dues and this, so yeah, I thought okay, that's not hard. Do that with my eyes closed. So, I got started on that, but that meant I had to go to the, like basically the organizing meetings for the other folks, like the membership secretary, the treasurer, and the president, who was Bob Cooperrider at the time. So, I started meeting people at those meetings who were interested 01:13:00in really created an infrastructure, although they wouldn't have used that word. I would have used that word, but they wouldn't have. They wanted to have like a focal group. And so, I thought well, this has to be a lot more organized. We're not going to get anywhere like this [laughs].

So, the next time, Bob Cooperrider want-he was a farmer in Sheridan. He was a green farmer. Really unusual then, to have an organic green farmer. And he decided "okay, it's time for me to step down"-he was president for quite a while-"and so who's going to be the president?" And so, again, nobody wants to volunteer, so I volunteered. I said "well, this is-I think I can do this." And at that time-so, we started getting a lot more organized as far as doing conferences and having the newsletter, and Tom Forster and John Graham, who's 01:14:00still a close friend of mine-he farms at Del Cabo Farm in Mexico and California-he's an incredible artist. In fact, he did art, like this is one of his pieces right here [points to art off camera], and he did-he was so good at creating graphics, and even like little drawings of plants and everything.

So, Tom and John would do this newsletter, and I would help with organizing these conferences, like basically like being the one at the door and keeping everything going and making sure everybody was signing things and all that kind of stuff you have to do. And so-and also reaching out to get speakers. And we tried getting people from OSU, like they were like "could you please come and talk to us about soil? Could you please come? One talk about worms? We would 01:15:00love it!" You know, and so we were trying to get people at OSU to do this. They were doubtful at best. Sometimes they would come. And we got like-we had Peter DeFazio was going to come. We had some no-shows where like Tom Forster got up and extemporaneously filled in for one of the politicians who got called away at the last minute, and gave quite a good speech. I mean, it was incredible.

So, that's what happened. And during the time that I was president, we were really expanding quite a bit, and we started realizing that-we started thinking well, let's see, what is Tilth actually providing? Research and edu-well, education was clearly the key. We wanted to be able to do research, and we were trying to get professors at OSU to do on-farm research with organic farmers. 01:16:00That was a huge desire, and it was-they were just starting to be doing that, but that was one thing we accomplished. That was a big thing. That took a lot of convincing [laughs]. Well, it did.

But, once we got that professionalism from the professors, whoa, things started taking off. We started getting like research grants that required farmers to be participating, and so they started seeing oh, well there is a niche for professors that are interested in this, and it started really expanding. So, then we needed to have farmers who could like think like a scientist. That was also hard to find, so it was kind of like a matchmaking system; who can be organized enough not to let this researcher down, and who can-who is interested enough to, you know, have-deal with this kind of a farm. So, that was very fun.

And then we realized organic-we need to differentiate, and that's where we got this idea of certification. So, we started talking about that, and I was like wow, why do we need to do this? This is just-it's just like we're going to need all this organization and all this mechanism, and it's going to just drag us down. How are we going to do it? And eventually, we did setup a system that was not too labor intensive, where farmers inspected each other. So, it was basically like I would go to a farm and say okay, let's see, you've got cover crops, you've got this, you've got that; there were no standards, nothing. We just said yeah, this looks organic. Let me see what you're putting on your fields, let me look at the fertilizers, you know, are they all ones that are 01:18:00from nature, you know, like this was as far as we could go.

So, we did that for a while and then we said wow, we need to write standards. So, Harry is a writer, I mean he is a writer, he really is.

CP: Harry MacCormack?

LC: Yeah, Harry MacCormack. He really is a writer. He writes novels, he writes plays, he writes poems, he writes everything. So, Harry said "okay, I'll write some standards." So, he wrote some standards that were like a novel and a poem and a [laughs] play. They were beautiful, they were philosophical, and I said "all right, where is the science here?" So, we started out with the standards that he had written, and I edited them because my forte-I did not know that I could write at this point in my life, other than write term papers for school. I 01:19:00did not at all consider myself a writer, but I knew that I was good at organizing ideas, so I thought my goal was just to make it more...organized and linear. That's all I was trying to do. I was certainly not trying to edit Harry's writing. I was just trying to make it more organized.

Now, I'm a person who writes almost everything in outline form so I can see how the ideas are related, still to this day. So, that was my contribution, was to make it more organized, and so that the ideas were not so-the ideas that were related were together and it showed arcs between them. So, we eventually did put out a set of standards, and if you don't have them for the archives, I have all 01:20:00these original standards, which I'm going to give you. And I have all the iterations of them, and on the computer I have all the documents that showed how they were developed, with all the red underlining and everything, which I have to get permission from Tilth to give you, because I signed a confidentiality agreement when I worked on them.

But anyway, so then we had standards, and then it was clear that okay, we need to have people who can see whether the farms are actually meeting these standards, and we started developing-on our own-developing the way of performing inspections on a farm. We started understanding, okay, we need a checklist that is like the standards, but so that the inspector can say "yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no." So, we started having just a rudimentary understanding of what certification might look like, culminated by having a certificate. And then 01:21:00everyone proudly had their certificate on their farm kitchen wall.

So we-this was a long-this was a process of evolution, literally, and this was mostly this inner core of people at Tilth; Harry, Yvonne, me, Tom Forster, like maybe 10 people that worked this out. My contribution was mostly to keep things organized and say, "well, wait a minute, how are we going to get from this step to this step?" So, I was always like really procedural. And eventually we did get our certification up and running in what I would call a semiprofessional status, and we were only really trying to do this for Willamette Valley Tilth. That was it, just a subset of regional Tilth.

So, meanwhile-and this scroll [points off camera] will show you how this all 01:22:00interrelates, but there was all this other stuff happening in Washington and California and Idaho and the many other chapters of Tilth in Oregon, but we were the only ones working on certification. So, eventually people said "hey, we need that too. We need that too," and we're going "we cannot cover all of these farms so far away, and our infrastructure is not up to that. We cannot do it." So, that was a crisis.

And meanwhile, in Washington, there was a crisis because regional Tilth had hit some financial snags because they published this book called The Future is Abundant, and it cost more than what they had budgeted for, so they had financial problems. So, they started convening the leaders of-basically the 01:23:00presidents of the chapters, to see what to do. So, our Willamette Valley chapter said "we don't see that that's sustainable. We don't think that's going to work. We can't-we're not going to get dragged down by financial problems, that's for sure. We got enough challenges here."

So, I went up to the meetings in-they were held mostly at Evergreen College, and we all slept on the floor in sleeping bags and had long talks, very serious talks about the future of agriculture in the pacific northwest and what are we going to contribute and how are we going to make a change and what are we going to do. And so, we decided that-through a series of these meetings-the end result was we would close up regional Tilth and we could create statewide organizations. So, we had, I think there were nine chapters; I can't quite 01:24:00remember how many chapters were in Oregon, but there were quite a few, and our goal was to try to get these separate tribal groups to combine with this vision of Oregon Tilth.

Well, that was difficult because, you know, like we had the Rogue Valley, the Willamette Valley; we did not know each other, we did not ever talk to each other. We just sent newsletters, that was it. We didn't-I didn't even know these people. They were like foreigners. So, anybody outside of our watershed was in a totally different mindset. So, Harry and Yvonne and I had to travel around and go to give presentations about this vision of Oregon Tilth and why they should give up their own little potluck-they could still have their own potlucks, but 01:25:00they needed to contribute to the infrastructure of Oregon Tilth. And then we were going to-they each had to have a vote and they had to join. So, it was kind of like the opposite of the civil war. It was the civil un-war. We were trying to come together.

And eventually they all joined. So, with the promise of we will expand our certification system to cover you in Oregon. Only Oregon, not anybody else. And so, that was something we could offer. And so, they did sign on, and we, meanwhile, because we were the biggest chapter, had given up our 501(c)(3) to the folks in Washington. We said "okay, you reorganize under that one, we'll get our own again." In the Reagan era, this was a big risk. So, at the same time we're telling these people "okay, we're going to have a 501(c)(3), it's all going to work out, it's going to be great," we're writing all these things to 01:26:00the government and the IRS and trying to get-my farm partner, Joey White, was the main one who was writing all this stuff, and he-and so finally we did get the 501(c)(3), we did organize Oregon Tilth as an official organization in Oregon, and the people came. So I guess it's true, if you build it they'll come, because that's what happened.

And we-then we started having all of these statewide conferences. We would invite everyone to come, and then they would get really big. Like we would fill up the entire big lecture halls at OSU, and the professors then said "oh my god, look at all these people coming here on a Saturday to learn about soil science! Sure, I'll talk." And so, then it was this spirit of wow, we're really moving 01:27:00forward. And yeah, sure enough we would have like hundreds of people show up to learn about how to put fertilizers on your soil. Mostly we did all this at OSU, because Harry worked at OSU then [chuckles] in the Theater Department [laughs]. But he knew how to go talk to people and how to get a room and this kind of stuff, so-and he was right there, and he was like I guess some kind of a reliable guy, because he was somehow working at OSU, so they said "okay, you can have a room."

And so, we had a series of really great conferences there and seminars and panel discussions, and it really just, from then on, it just totally took off. So I got-Yvonne took over the certification program, and she had run businesses 01:28:00before. So, this is Yvonne Frost, and she was like 20 years older than me maybe, about. She was a different generation. She had run businesses and was really entrepreneurial, to the point of being a heavy duty risk taker, and so she had no problem with saying "oh sure, let's just do this and do that and do this and do that," but the person who actually-when she would get the big idea, it was to me to write the actual documents, make sure we were legal, check in with lawyers, make sure that there's a process that's fair, all that kind of stuff.

So, I became the policy director of Tilth for quite a long time. And in that capacity, I was charged with keeping the standards updated, eventually writing 01:29:00[scoffs] certification policy and procedures, which we did not have. We just did it-we just did it. But as it got more and it got larger, we had to formalize it, and then eventually had to become accredited. We first became accredited by IFOAM, and boy, that was a wild ride to bring everything up to the standard of ISO guide 65 and the accreditation process. The standards, all that stuff was fine; it was the process we had to work on quite a bit.

So, I spent literally years working on that, trying to figure out how to translate ISO guide 65 into procedures that you could explain to farmers that would make sense and be practical, and wouldn't be too expensive, and most importantly, were related to what we needed to actually do to inspect a farm. So, I became kind of an expert on that. And actually, yeah, I'll just say I 01:30:00became one of the few people who knew about that in the country.

And so, that had become the basis of what I do for certifiers now. I work with many, many certifiers all over the world, helping them with their policies and procedures and accreditation issues. So, it was an incredible career move on my part, I would say [laughs].

CP: So, was there a model anywhere else that you could look towards at this point, or were you figuring it out for-

LC: No. We were, to tell you the truth, making it up totally. Totally, we just totally made it up, until we got to the point of finding out-well, on a separate track, so all over the world things were developing in this way, and one of the things that developed was IFOAM developed an accreditation system that could be 01:31:00used all the way around the world. If you were-they had standards for standards, so if your own, if the Tilth standards were compatible with these standards for standards, then you could apply for accreditation. And it wasn't until I met up with those folks and they did know about-they studied about certification processes used in other industries, so I felt my learning curve was very, very steep until I could come up to their level, but that's how, once we met with them, there was a path, a clear path. Until then, we were literally making it up.

The first procedures that I wrote, I mean I laid on my bed for the longest time thinking up how to make an appeals procedure. I knew we needed to have some concept of an appeals procedure, like if someone felt something was unfair, and 01:32:00I searched and searched and searched for this word. I could not think of the right word, but the word was adjudication, and somehow, once I got that word, the whole thing just fell right into place, and I just sat down and typed out this whole thing. Here's the procedure, here's how it's going to work; we need a separate entity making the decision, because we don't want to go back to the same people that made the decision in the first place, we need to have a findings of fact, and it just came together. But it was all made up.

Later on I found out, though, that there is-there is almost a...a universal guide. There's a universal principle for these procedures that is expressed in ISO guide 65 and other-in other international standards for certification, and I 01:33:00had intuitively hit on a lot of these same principles. So, I guess that's just an example of integrative thinking coming to the fore. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not really a policy person, it's just that I read so widely and I could see the need, that it would just come to me that this is the way, this is the direction we should go. And then you could just iteratively correct it and make-when you ran into a problem, like you came up with an actual decertification process and you saw that the person might appeal, you would say oh my god, you know, now I see I left this little piece out, or that little piece out, and we would correct it as we went along.

So, we were certainly always willing to, yeah, redline our own documents like crazy and just make them better over time. Still that's what I do, like when people send me documents, oh my god, they get them back with so many comments, 01:34:00they can hardly even see the forest for the trees, because I just can-now I've read so many of these procedures that it's almost second nature to me and I can see the problems right away. So yeah, just making it up, that's all it was [laughs].

CP: You mentioned the, not divide necessarily, but there's a separation to a degree between Willamette Valley and Rogue Valley, and Oregon in its own way is a large and diverse state, and I'm interested in knowing more about how Oregon Tilth formed a common point of view from all these different growers from, presumably all around the state. I mean, it's not just western Oregon, right? We have eastern Oregon folks.

LC: No, it's eastern Oregon-most of the people were in the western side, but we did have some folks on the eastern side, and we did certify folks on the eastern side.

CP: Very different crops, very different-

LC: Very different.

CP: --cultural situation.

LC: Oh yeah, oh yeah. But they were pretty happy to have us, because they were 01:35:00really isolated over there. So, basically when we would go to-my-now, Harry and Yvonne and I are very different personality types. Yvonne was really bombastic and like basically would be willing to force people into her point of view. Harry's a-Harry would be much more circumspect and tell people about Native American thought, and I would always-my selling point would be why it was in the best interest of all of us to join together. So, we did these meetings usually with two of us, and so they would have a balanced approach. Mostly it was just because it was so awful to drive around all over Oregon by yourself and do this. It was nice to have someone in the car [laughs].

So, usually it would start out with everyone thinking this was a bad idea and 01:36:00there was no way they were going to listen to us, and they had their own setup and they were happy with it, and why the heck would they listen to somebody who didn't know their own situation. But by talking with them about what we were facing with the dissolution of regional Tilth and that we saw that there was strength in numbers and that we had to have enough of a base to really make this thing work and make it go for a long time, that made sense, because they were all struggling with their small bases and saying "well, we can't put on big conferences like you can, we can't do this, we can't do that." I said "yeah, well that's because you just don't have enough people. You don't have enough energy." It's all run on volunteers, so you have to have a big enough base to get enough volunteer hours to make this happen.

I didn't get paid for most of this work that I did for Oregon Tilth. I worked for Tilth for 19 years; I didn't start getting paid until I wrote the first procedures, which was in like the-maybe like 1993, something like that. This was all volunteer. So, you have to have a lot of people and you have to have a person who can basically be a community organizer. So, we did not have an organic Barack Obama. We had to become the organic Barack Obamas, community organizers. Again, something that we knew nothing about.

So, we would mostly-my tactic was mostly to listen to them and hear what they wanted and what they needed and what they didn't have, what they couldn't provide for themselves, and then swoop in and tell them then exactly how we could provide that exact thing. So, then they would go "hmm, well this 01:38:00is...maybe there is something in it for us." And then we also had this certification thing to offer them, which they had no clue why they needed certification, so we would explain to them the benefits and how you could sell your commodity or whatever you had, outside of your little local health food store, like you might be able to ship it to OGC, Organically Grown Company co-op at the time, or you might be able to have a bigger market for your apples, or your pears from the Rogue Valley. And hmm, so that all started to make better sense. We were saying, you know, OGC won't accept your pears unless you're certified. This is the way it's going to go now, so you're going to get aced out unless you can get certified, and we-guess what-we can provide that certification service.

So, that's how we-it was really, you know, it did remind me a lot about the way 01:39:00that the colonies came together to create the United States. Actually, personally, that was one of my models, because based on my connection with Richard Stockton, I was always thinking about how can we get these disparate things together. Well, of course the answer there is compromise, like you know, you end up with a bicameral governmental system, and all these different compromises that they made.

That's what I had in my mind, what can we offer, what can we-what value can we offer and how can we solve the problem that they have, as well as the bigger problems that we all have. So, explaining commonality, explaining that hey-at the time I was a farmer-you know, we're farmers too, we face these same days working in the rain to setup fences, we know what it's like to plant apple trees 01:40:00all day and dig through rocks and deal with, you know, getting rock phosphate to your farm. It's really heavy to carry it up hills and plant it in an orchard area that's hilly. You know, we knew that, so we had commonality.

So, they did eventually listen, and by the end, like usually of course we always had potlucks, so by the end, we would just be sitting around at our potluck and they would, we would have made an entrée into that tribe. And so, when we asked them, "okay, now it's time to vote, who's with us?" They all said "okay, we'll do it." And then it was just like so energizing that it definitely seemed like it was the right way to go, yeah.

So we got, you know, then like I said, we got better relations with OSU, we got better relations with some, few, Extension agents around the state that were saying "oh wow, look, these people are pulling it together. There's a lot of them." And of course there-at that time, more and more people were coming online as organic farmers. So, part of it was it was expanding. You know, not related to anything we were doing; it was just a good idea.

CP: Yeah, well that's my next question, is growth of the 1990s especially. Things changed dramatically.

LC: Yeah, well that was crazy town [laughs]. It was just crazy for everybody involved. From my perspective-so, I was heavily involved with Tilth at that time, until the very end of the 1990s, I was working with Tilth. And wow, Tilth 01:42:00was growing; the certification program was going gangbusters. By that time, we had, due to Yvonne's foresight and interest, we expanded into certification of processed products, which was kind of unusual for an organic organization. So, that was another whole area we needed to develop: new procedures, new inspectors, new everything, because nobody knew how to walk into a processing plant. I mean god, did you know you could not wear manure coated boots in a beautifully spic and span processing plant? We didn't know, so there you have it. We had to get different people.

So, that was huge. Every single company and every single element of the organic world had to expand, and what I saw, I guess what was of interest to me, was 01:43:00different elements of infrastructure that were going unfulfilled. So, I got involved as-and Tilth was a big, big...we had a lot of offshoots. We were very, I guess very...we never really saw limits. I don't know why that was, because there sure were a hell of a lot of limits, but we didn't really embrace the limits, and so like we would just say "yeah, let's just have-let's just found OMRI! The Organic Materials Review Institute. Let's have the-let's have interactions with California and Washington and get our standards all organized all as one so that when we are working in the legislature, we can all work in the same direction and we'll have the whole west coast having the same standards 01:44:00and legal basis."

And did we know how to do any of that? Oh, no. But that's exactly what we did. I mean I got tasked with...like we had the federal-that state law in Oregon happened in 1989, which was another example of crazy town. We had been writing our-we had been writing standards, and what we wanted was the Oregon Department of Ag to use our standards as a law. Well, we tried and tried and tried and tried, and they said no. Apparently, as it turned out later, that this was a Republican administration in Oregon then and they were-ODA-was given specific instructions: do not do organic. So, we were trying and trying and we kept running up against these roadblocks, didn't know why, didn't have a clue how to 01:45:00go ask somebody about it or try to talk to a legislator; we just said "hmm, we don't understand it. Why-everyone else is excited, why aren't they?" Well, you know, we didn't know about politics.

So, consumer group OSPIRG got ahold of our-some document. We don't know-to this day I don't know how this happened, but they got ahold of our letters and our documents trying to get the ODA to do this, and they, being much more politically astute than we were, went to a legislator and got her to introduce it as a consumer bill; as not an agriculture bill. Oh, what a concept, huh? We never would have thought of that. But it went right into the legislature and it was not formed. It was not formed. It was going to be really awful for organic farmers. So, the legislator-again, a stroke of cosmic reality-the legislator 01:46:00that put it forth was Peg Jolin from, guess where, Cottage Grove. She was on the consumer committee.

So, I said "Peg look, this is...this is not going to be good. It's not going to work out the way you want or the way that we want. Let's work together and make it better. Can you withdraw it out of the legislature?" And little did I know that was a dumb thing to ask for, but sure enough, she said "okay, we'll pull it back, we'll work together on it." And so, OSPIRG and Tilth and a couple other organizations, NCAP, others, we said "okay, let's try to get something that's going to work that consumers can support, that is realistic for farmers, and at least has some recognition for processing," because we had already been involved in processing.

Yep, so what did they say? "Okay, send us a draft." Really? They want us to 01:47:00write it [laughs]. Well you know, I'm like "well okay, we'll give it a shot. We'll write it. We'll write a law." So, in our spare time I go-I was working with Jack Gray and Robert DeSpain, who were involved with organically grown co-op, and I went up there and we sat around at night and wrote a law. We had no clue what we were doing. And now, it wasn't in legal language. It was just like it was organized-it was an outline of a law, and we didn't know how to write anything in legal language. So, Peg Jolin said "okay, we'll get a lawyer on this and they'll turn it into legal language, and then you take another look at it."

So, that's what happened. We get back this thing, doesn't look anything like what we sent in, but it was our words. It was our concepts, but it was all 01:48:00structured with, you know, lines and all this stuff that you have to have in a law, and section numbers and all this stuff. Wow, it was incredible. So, we marked it up a bunch of times, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Finally, everybody was happy with it on our side and Peg Jolin reintroduced it. And then we got ourselves up there to Salem, and we did not know you needed to be a registered lobbyist, so we lobbied for it without being a registered lobbyist. We didn't know that. If we had, we would have done it, but we just didn't know. And we were bringing like fruit baskets along and telling people about organic food and why we needed this and why it was going to be good for Oregon and all these farms that we had in Tilth already certified in Oregon, and sure enough, people listened.

And so, it went-oh, we did have some run-ins at-wow, I learned a lot. I learned 01:49:00never to talk to people in the hallway and tell them what you're going to say in your testimony, because when you go in, you don't know who you're talking to, if you're me, and they can rebut your testimony, because turns out they were from Oregonians for Food and Shelter. Ooh! That was a bad, bad, bad, ooh, I cringe every time I think about that. But I never did it again. Anyway, we did lobby, we went through. I went, I spoke at all the hearings, and two days before my wedding, they passed the bills, and I told my husband, "if this bill doesn't get passed, the bets are off for this wedding. I don't know if I can show up. I don't know how this is going to work, you know. This is-" I was dead tired. I was so tired at my wedding that I literally, we went to the coast [laughs] for a 01:50:00honeymoon; all I did was sleep. I was so exhausted. My poor husband [sighs]. I'll tell you what, he has put up with a lot over all these years. But literally it was just, it was like the end of the week and my wedding was on a Saturday. If it wasn't for my sister-in-law coming there and literally putting a dress on me, I don't know how I would have even stood up at the wedding.

But yeah, luckily they did pass it. And they waved to me from the-I was up in the gallery in the House and they waved to me when they-they turned around and waved, because they knew that we had worked so hard to make all this happen. So that, yeah-but that was an example of flying by the seat of your pants. We didn't know anything about anything, but we just didn't see the limits. We were 01:51:00just too naïve to know there were even limits at all. So, it was a blessing in disguise, I guess. I don't know. It's just the craziest thing [laughs].

CP: Well, that was clearly one milestone in Tilth's growth, but I want to dial in on this a little bit more. My notes here say as of 2007 Tilth had certified 700 farms in the U.S., Central and South America and Russia. I mean, it's...

LC: That sounds about right.

CP: It's mind-boggling to hear you talk about the origin story, which really wasn't that long ago-

LC: No.

CP: Relative, 2007, to know where we're at by 2007, and I wonder if there are other milestones along the way that you can reflect on as you think about this transition.

LC: Well, certainly getting involved in processing was a big milestone. That was Yvonne's vision, and a lot of people thought that was a big mistake, and it was 01:52:00a sellout, actually, because it wasn't just related to organic farms. But what Yvonne saw-and many of us agreed with her-that the farmers needed a place to sell this product that was not just the fresh market. The fresh market wasn't big enough, number one, wouldn't be big enough over time, and secondly, there was no place to sell seconds and fruit that wasn't perfect for the fresh market. So, we needed processing. And you know, the Willamette Valley always had lots of processing, food processing plants here. So, it was kind of a legacy that was declining at that time, except organic could take those facilities and use them.

So, that was a really big difference between Tilth and say like CCOF in 01:53:00California. They refused to certify processing and thought we were sellouts for quite a while. [Whispers] now they sell--now they certify processing. But the other thing was that Yvonne saw that, from Tilth's own operations, these processing plants could provide quite a bit more licensing fees. So, certification works on you pay an initial fee for the work that you do to actually perform the certification, and then each year you pay a percentage of your gross organic sales back to the certification agency. So, you see this fee is covering your actual work. It's not really-it's covering your expenses but it's not making much of a profit. Where the money comes from is these licensing fees.

So, Yvonne saw that processing plants could expand and could-they make a higher profit-they have a higher profit margin than farmers do, unfortunately for farmers, but that's the way life is. So, that money then could help Tilth expand, train people, pay me to write procedures, pay for accreditation fees, and be able to put on education programs and have sponsor-actually sponsor research projects that were related directly to organics. So, we would not be the poor stepchild of the conventional farmers. That was the idea. So, that I think was a visionary milestone that Tilth was-we may have been the first 01:55:00certifier in the country to do that. I think we were, because CCOF was totally against it. Now, we were definitely ahead of Washington.

So anyway, that was definitely a big step forward, and then another one for me was this accreditation; was really professionalizing the certification system so that it contained all of the elements of a real system. All of the elements of the system were there. So, first we always had just the inspection and the review, but we didn't have things like, like I said, an appeals process, a suspension process, a revocation process, a way to get the certificate back if 01:56:00they weren't following the standards, legal mechanisms to make that happen, a way to integrate with the state law, and importantly, a materials list. We didn't have a materials list when we first started. It was just like "use natural materials."

So, we started to build out what does this actually mean and what is-how are we going to decide which materials are natural. To our chagrin, we found out some of the things we thought were natural actually were chemically changed, which meant a different...that meant, in our definition, that they were synthetic, and so now we had to come to terms with that. So, I think that was also a milestone, was really being willing to look at this issue of materials. And then it went so far, as we started working with CCOF to have a joint materials review system, 01:57:00Tilth and CCOF together, and I was one-Diana Tracy and I were the ones that worked on that for the Tilth side, along with real pioneers in California, Brian Baker and Zea Sonnabend, I mean they are still all active.

And so, we put our heads together and we really started looking at this in the best way that we possibly could. All of us have a science background, and so that started to integrate a little bit more. And as a result, the Oregon state law was the first one that had a materials list in it, and that became something that carried over into the federal law. So yeah, those are, for me, along with 01:58:00some of the other really fun things we did like special conferences at OSU and celebrating our anniversaries together in big tents and things like this and all those fun things-because Tilth for me also was a lot of fun [laughs]-I think those were some of the kind of more structural and mechanical things that we needed to develop to move forward.

To me, it was an issue of...instead of, like we talk about supply and demand in economics, but to me the organic industry is on its head in that way. It's a demand, and then you have to supply it, so you're always playing catch up. You know, we already have a demand for a materials list, but we don't have one. We're seeing we need it, so how the hell do we get there? And we don't have a state law, and then we don't have a federal law. We need all these things, but 01:59:00we have to learn how to supply them.

So, it's really, everything is topsy-turvy and turned upside down, and it requires just a lot of people who can think on their feet and be willing to try something and make it better iteratively; to be really humble at what you're doing, at the same time fearless. It's not really for everyone, but at that time we had a crew of people who could do that, just the way they had the founding, all fathers, at the time of creating the colonies. So, there were a lot of-for me-a lot of parallels that way. It felt similar to what I think they must have felt, was let's create a better life, a bigger-a reformation of, in our case, in agriculture.

In fact, one time we were sitting in Harry's barn. He has a big loft in his barn 02:00:00with a wood stove, and we had many, many meetings up there, everyone sitting on the floor, even Yvonne [chuckles], and I said-people were kind of discouraged because we had to deal with all this, you know, writing and standards, and it wasn't just like fun envisioning, and I was saying "no, we actually have to get this written down. We have to be organized, we have to do this," and they were getting discouraged. So, I said "you know what, folks? We really need to remember here that what we're doing is nothing short of reforming American agriculture."

I literally voiced this, and I said "you know what? Someday OSU will be coming to us to find out about how to do organic farming. They will literally be asking us to explain it to them," and they couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it. It was just so far beyond what our current situation was; a bunch of muddy 02:01:00farmers bedraggled in the rain, sitting in a loft of a barn. You know, it was just way beyond what anybody could believe. But damn, it happened [laughs]. It really happened, which is just the joy of my life. It's just the joy to see how it played out. Unbelievable. Who could have ever asked for a life filled with that? It was-it's just been astonishing. And to have that vision actually come true, it's...yeah, it's just like you-not many people get that opportunity in their life, to almost like invent a system and see it come alive. Wow. It's an astonishing...it's really, it's an astonishing thing to think that's what became of this, looking at this marigold seed [laughs]. That's what grew from it. You 02:02:00never could have predicted it. I couldn't have.

CP: Well, I think that's a great place to stop for today.

LC: Yeah, I'm ready.

CP: So, we'll come back another time and talk more about sort of the rest of your career.

LC: Okay.