John Graham Oral History Interview, February 14, 2018

JOHN GRAHAM: Are we rolling?

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: We are rolling now, yes.

JG: John Graham, born [...] 1954.

TEM: And today is Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2018. We are in the Valley Library and I am Tiah Edmunson-Morton. And today we are going to talk about you and also about your work with Oregon Tilth and farming and... life [laughs]. So, you were born in Oklahoma.

JG: Yeah, in the epicenter of the Dust Bowl. It's a claim to fame. Way out in the middle of nowhere, town of about 1,000 people. And I grew up in a farming family. My uncle really was the farmer in the family and I started working - I think I was about 12 years old - sitting on a tractor all summer long, going 00:01:00around in circles cultivating wheat and sorghum, were the crops.

And by the time I'd done that through high school and I'm ready to go off to college, agriculture was the last thing in the world that I wanted to have anything to do with [laughs]. I'd been there, done that. I went to the University of Oklahoma and just really didn't know what I wanted to study, so I just took a, you know, a range of classes, kind of basic classes. And there was a - after being there a couple years, there was a table, a recruitment table for the Peace Corps in the student union and I thought that was interesting, to go to tropical countries, and they paid you to go there.

So, I thought that was a pretty cool thing and so I... I filled out an 00:02:00application and the only skill that I had or any experience at all that I had was in farming, and so I kind of played that up on the, you know, the application. And I don't know, several months later I got a letter saying I'd been selected. I thought well, man, I must have just got in under the lowest rung in the - So when I went to meet the other Peace Corps volunteers that they had selected, my fears were... just kind of evaporated after seeing the quality of the people that they selected [laughs], that I wasn't so bad after all.

TEM: [Laughs]

JG: And so, that took me down into first Costa Rica and then Dominican Republic, and I just - you know, being in the tropics when you're from the panhandle of Oklahoma, you know, just a whole different world, and I really, really got a very, very interested - This was in the seventies and the Organic Movement and - 00:03:00there was another movement happening at the time called Appropriate Technology where they were trying to match like the technology with third-world countries, or where they're, you know, out of the mainstream.

TEM: Like farming technology or just generally technology?

JG: All kinds, like just - just farming, like electricity, cook stove, like fuel-efficient cookstoves, and just a whole range of different activities. And that was really - That movement was inspired by an economist, E. H. [F.] Schumacher, that wrote a book Small is Beautiful that is a very influential book in the time, and it should be again. I mean, it should make a comeback. But E. H. [F]. Schumacher developed the idea of the appropriate technology, and that was really a, you know, it got a lot of funding from like USAID at the time, and 00:04:00there were a lot of agencies, international agencies, that were involved in that. And so, I kind of absorbed as much as I could from that.

And then the organic farming was - I can't really - Well, during that time there were some books that came out that we didn't have the internet, so the way you found out was, you know, books mainly. And there was Wendell Berry, came out with his book The Unsettling of America. And I read some of the old classics like - Who was the English guy that had been at - or developed composting? An Agricultural Testament?

CARL BERG: Yeah, yeah, I don't remember either. I can't think of it.

JG: Anyway, there were books like that, that came out. And then one that came out I think in the late seventies, it was very inspirational to me, was Masanobu 00:05:00Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution. And really, you know, it was more philosophy than really trying to apply his methods to... to commercial farming. But it is the - the philosophy of it was very inspirational to me.

So anyway, you know, get - absorbing kind of that idea. Also, I went to - after the Peace Corps, you're supposed to stay in two years but I was in five years until they finally said, "John, it's kind of time to move on" [both laugh]. This isn't a career, it's a volunteer program [laughs].

So, from there I went to England and studied for a while biodynamic farming, and that was where I met some disciples of the famous gardener, Alan Chadwick that 00:06:00had inspired a bunch of people in the West Coast, in California. And that, you know, it's just a very exciting time to be around all this stuff for a, you know, a young person like me.

So, I met there in England a fellow from Wales that had started a group in Cottage Grove, Oregon called the Aprovecho Institute, and he - I had - he was kind of a fellow that originated a cook stove called the Lorena Stove made out of sand and clay for third-world countries and had worked, you know, around the world and had written a book about it. I had read his book and built some of his stoves, so we kind of hit it off right off the bat.

So, he invited me to come to Oregon under what I thought was a job, and I thought like Aprovecho Institute, I just thought it was a brick building with a bunch of IBM typewriters, you know? And I got out here and I had a - my young wife from the Dominican Republic who had never been to the states before thinking she was coming to America. And so, we wound up in a farmhouse in Cottage Grove without any windows in the winter and we were there about a week and I finally found out there was no money in this organization. Nobody had any money and they had no idea who I was or what I was doing there.

TEM: [Laughs] oh no.

JG: I come like halfway around the world to get there, you know, and [laughs] - so you know, my wife, young wife, was just confused and furious at the same 00:08:00time, you know. What - what have you gotten me into, you know? And so, we - on one Sunday afternoon I'd met the Bergs in Alvadore. Willard and Evelyn [00:08:18 phonetic] Berg were Peace Corps volunteers in the Dominican Republic and I'd known them very well. And so, we went to dinner at their house, a Sunday and a dinner, and we ended up living on their farm [laughs] like in a school bus underneath an oak tree. And you know, little by little spring came around and started hoeing strawberries and they had the U-Pick operation. So, we had employment through the summer.

And Willard Berg and his son Carl invited me to an Oregon - well, back then it 00:09:00wasn't Oregon Tilth; it was just Tilth. So, it was up here in Corvallis and I think on a Sunday, Sunday afternoon, kind of a potluck kind of gathering, maybe 100 people or, you know, a sizable crowd of people, and just the, you know, wonderful Oregon organic people that still are around today.

TEM: Where was the potluck?

JG: You remember the...?

CB: I think it was at the Greenberry...

JG: Grange.

TEM: Okay.

JG: Uh-huh. So anyway, I just fell into this group of people, the like-minded people, and... I think one of the interesting things about that time, there was no money in organic agriculture. There was - there's no jobs, there - it's just you had to kind of believe in it or their - just the idea of it was appealing to 00:10:00a certain amount of people. And those people really kind of started what we have today, you know, and it wasn't motivated by having a job or, you know, even you know, the - to sell organic produce at the time, in Eugene, there were four or five, six stores around town that had organic produce. There was no certification in the early days and so you just kind of went around and, you know, sold your stuff to individual stores.

I think in maybe the early eighties there were a group of farmers that kind of got together to buy a container, like a rail container of fertilizer from Idaho. I think it was...

CB: Rock phosphate.

JG: Rock phosphate from Idaho. And so, that was the origins of a co-op. And so, that kind of deal happened. And then there's six or eight growers that just 00:11:00thought well, you know, we could just deliver our stuff together. Instead of each person driving to the stores, we could just kind of, you know, have a little drop off point in Eugene and then deliver it around town. So... During that time I always desperate for work, you know, looking for some angle to, you know, make a little bit extra money. And so, I became the delivery boy, and another friend, Joe Gabriel, was this guy in the sales... he was a salesman on the phone. And to start out we rented out a, just a foundation at a dry ice and used tire plant in Eugene among the railroad tracks.

TEM: That's quite a combination [laughs].

JG: [Laughs] and on a weekend we built like a loading dock. We had bought like 00:12:00the panels to make a walk-in cooler and we had a little hut that was maybe four feet by four feet. It was like with Visqueen like plastic windows and a space heater like a milk barn kind of space heater. And Joe was on the phone calling up, you know, these stores around town. And we had an old, ancient bread truck. It was kind of like... like algae growing on the white truck, so it was a kind of greenish white truck.

And my job was to get to the stores early and get the best boxes, the best like used boxes out of the alley before the other farmers got there to get them. And sometimes there were like arguments out in the alleys, you know, trying to get 00:13:00those nice boxes that were mainly coming up from California. And so, that was a big part of the job, was bringing back boxes because we didn't have - those were the only boxes we had, you know?

TEM: So, did you - you delivered in the boxes but then didn't take the boxes back, so this was every time you did a delivery-

JG: Yeah, yeah. It was a...

TEM: You had to...

JG: Yeah. We'd fill up, fill up the truck with boxes, you know, coming back. And I think there were maybe, I don't know, maybe six or eight different drop off points. And to begin with, Joe and I were kind of new at business, you know, so we were going a couple weeks before John's wife said, "You know, you guys should write receipts for the sales." You know, we'd never really thought of that. But we had a cigar box [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

JG: To make change, you know, and it was all cash on the barrelhead, you know. 00:14:00So, we started to write - we got a little book for the receipts, you know, at the stationery store, and started writing the receipts. And I think my friend David Lively still has some of the early receipts. It was like for $2.50 or like [laughs] five dollars, you know, for a box of this and a box of that. And like the restaurants would order like two eggplants and like two bunches of carrots, and it was just really, really small at that time, business, but it grew.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: It just continually grew. And that company is really well established. They've been going for over 30 years now and... But it really started out in the very kind of grassroots kind of primitive kind of way.

TEM: Yeah, well I'm thinking about just that span of what you've just shared, that this, what must have felt like a very, very different environment and 00:15:00business model than growing up in Oklahoma in what I would assume was more macro farming, like larger farms.

JG: Oh yeah. Well, the - yeah, my early experience was just big, big farms where like I would sit on the tractor in the morning and like if it was a quarter section of land, it was like it took a whole day to get around it, or a half a day or something. So, to me, farming meant going around in circles at three miles an hour, you know [both laugh]?.

TEM: Which doesn't actually sound very fun [laughs].

JG: No, it wasn't. But you know, it was... It was what it was.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: I had - one thing I think I learned is I always had a job, ever since I was a little kid, you know. And that - just the work ethic of it is something that I think is a valuable thing. But... you know the... I was in farming because 00:16:00everybody else was. It was just there wasn't really any other, you know, activities in my upbringing. But you know, when growing up like in the sixties, I graduated from high school in 1972 and then just the world was just opening up in like music and culture, you know, the - it just, it was a whole different world that all of our parents were confused about, you know: "What are these young people thinking? You know they're never going to amount to anything." And my mother, I remember, was very disappointed. She always thought I was going to be a lawyer or a doctor or something, you know, and to be an organic farmer was just heartbreaking for her [both laugh]. You know, there - there just seemed to 00:17:00be no real future in that, you know?

TEM: Was that a point where - did - So, you grew up in a small town; did a lot of people from your age group leave? Or was it-?

JG: No, very few.

TEM: Oh, okay.

JG: Very few. And I left like the day after high school graduation pretty much, you know, so I got out of there pretty quick. But most people, you know, just kind of stayed. And even to this day I have - I had a graduating class of 12, so you know, they're - probably me and another guy are the only people that really left town.

TEM: I can imagine that would be... the pressure to stay, but then also the fear and pressure to leave, and that's not very many people, like-

JG: Well, to me it was an adventure, and I was out for adventure at that point 00:18:00in time and just like, just doing something different than I'd done before. And also, you know, we didn't have - TV was pretty limited. There was [sic] three channels, you know. There wasn't anything like the internet today. You really didn't have that much access to information, so you got it either from books or magazines or meeting people. You know, you'd run into people. But there was a lot of stuff going on, and even today it's hard to even imagine how we found out about things, you know?

TEM: [Laughs].

JG: But somehow, somehow you, you know, there was, you know... I don't know if it was postcards or telephone calls or letters, you know, it was just somehow people found out, you know, about things going on. That was very much true here in the Willamette Valley with organic farming. It was just like there's a lot of things going on, people involved, and you just met people.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: And the Oregon, or Tilth back in those days, I'm not sure when they really 00:19:00divided from Washington Tilth or Seattle Tilth and Oregon Tilth. I think it was sometime during the eighties. But the concept of certification started to take root because there was a need. Like when we were with the Organically Grown Co-op, we were receiving product that was brought up from California or down from Washington, and there was like trading going on.

And so, there was kind of - the need developed to certify this as being authentic organic because, before that, anybody had just said it was organic. That was kind of good enough. And so, Oregon Tilth, under the leadership of Yvonne Frost, she really developed the whole certification program within Oregon 00:20:00Tilth. And there were some other states and areas in the USA that were kind of thinking along those lines too. There was an international federation called the International Federation for Organic Agriculture Movements, IFOAM, an international group that just kind of set up some basic standards for what organic agriculture should be.

TEM: And that was already established at that point?

JG: Yes. So, that was kind of a basis for starting these certification programs. And in the beginning, like California had a program, Washington State had a program, and Oregon Tilth was initiating their program. And there was the idea of, they called it reciprocity; if one state would recognize the standards, say 00:21:00if California would Oregon's standards, Oregon would recognize California standards. So, that was in operation for probably, I don't know, maybe five years or so. Or maybe longer, but the early certification was - Carl, were you part of that early group of people that went around visiting farms?

CB: We were talking about it in '83 just before I went in the Peace Corps and it was kind of-

JG: I think it was '86 when it got...

CB: Right, right.

JG: So, I remember in the south valley there were six or seven people that went around in a couple cars to these different farms, to all of the farmers we knew. And we just kind of looked around and just kind of agreed that, you know, this looks organic, you know, this is a cert-

TEM: What were you looking for? I remember you saying that when we talked on the 00:22:00phone, like-

JG: We'd ask them, you know, we'd ask them what crops they were growing and kind of what fertilizer they used, and more to find out their secrets, you know [both laugh].

TEM: It was a spy mission [laughs].

JG: But at the end - and we trusted; everybody trusted each other. So, there's a - especially here in the Willamette Valley, everyone knew each other, everybody knew who was, you know - what - who was growing what, and there was just a trust level because there were so few people involved.

But toward the end of the eighties, there was kind of a... the recognition that there needed to be a national organic program. And that was initiated in the 1990 farm bill. There was an act called the Agriculture Productivity Act of 00:23:001990, or Organic Agriculture Productivity Act of 1990 [Organic Foods Production Act of 1990], something like that. And that established the concept of the NOP, the National Organic Program. And there was a group of people in Eugene that were very active. They - kind of trying to develop this idea, and the leader of it was a new congressman, Peter DeFazio, who will be speaking at this conference there.

TEM: Oh, he will?

JG: This week. But he had started out as a county commissioner in Lane County and he and another guy were the only commissioners that were supportive of having a farmers' market in downtown Eugene when it had first started out. And so, anyway, he was really - he had just gone to Congress and he - he worked with a senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy. And they were the sponsors of this 00:24:00Agricultural Productivity Act that sent into motion the idea of NOP. This was in 1990. It wasn't until 2011 that the NOP came into - no, 2001, excuse me.

TEM: Still, a decade [laughs].

JG: So yeah, it took 11 years. It took 11 years for it to be implemented into law. And a person that was really key in that process was - she still lives in Eugene - Lynn Coody, who was - she was one of the few actually educated people in organic agriculture at the time [laughs]. She was very, just very smart, just really knew just a - she had an organized mind, which most of the other of us, you know, were kind of challenged in that area.

But she set up a procedure to evaluate organic materials, and I think it was one of the first USDA grants under this Productivity Act. And you can inter-you can ask her for more details, but she was very influential in that, at that time.

TEM: Why was it called the Productivity Act? What was the - like it - that makes it sound so like...

JG: I don't know. I don't... They just said.

TEM: Like we need to justify that it makes stuff or [laughs] like it sells.

JG: I don't know, you know, I don't know how they determined that, but - and I can't tell you exactly the name of the act, but it was during that time that that all kind of came into play.

And so, Peter DeFazio has been a congressman since those days and he's been very, very supportive of all the organic... the organic movement in general. And 00:26:00today it amounts to defending organic agriculture against, you know, the political powers in Washington that would like to dilute it as much possible.

TEM: Did you feel like in those early days it was still about defending, or did it feel more like generative and - or - I was going to say organic but that - I mean it not in the organic term that we're talking about, but more grassroots I guess.

JG: Well yeah, I think - I know for in my case, and a lot of other people too, it was more of an environmental movement rather than a human nutrition. I mean, that played into it but by and large I think it was people that wanted to take care of the planet. Yeah. That was probably the biggest implement, or just to - you know, because there are some - you know, today there are a lot of, you know, 00:27:00chemicals out there, but it was just an open season for chemicals back in the, like the sixties and seventies. It was just like very few restrictions. And there were some alarming, you know, testaments to that, you know, what that was doing.

Here in the Willamette Valley, you know, this is a very heavy agricultural chemical place, and so I think, you know, to a certain extent the organic people that - or the movement was kind of a reaction against that.

TEM: When was the first time that you remember having that kind of environmental sensibility? Or not awareness, but-

JG: I think growing up in the sixties and seventies, you know. There was - you know, it was still - I'm not sure when Rachel Carson came out with her book Silent Spring, but-

TEM: I want to say it's '72, but I think that might be a little late.

JG: The sixties that was very much on the - in the news. You know, DDT, the damage that DDT had done to like migrating birds, and the persistence of it was just something that people hadn't really - it was kind of a new thing to find something that didn't break down. And I remember I used to collect these old USDA yearbooks. They would have a theme every year and one 1952 book was on insects, and toward the end of the book that was - different chapters were written by different, you know, soil scientists, or different scientists, and there was an article by an entomologist that said it won't be long before we'll wipe out insects completely. We won't have to worry about them. You know, we'll 00:29:00just completely control the insects. You won't even have to contend with insects. And I think there was one brief mention that - in some article - that resistance had begun to, you know, be a concern with some of these, like DDT was the wonder, wonder insecticide now.

TEM: Doesn't sound like there was an awareness of beneficial insects; that it was wipeout insects.

JG: Well, that was developing during that time. The beneficial insect thing came from an old friend of the organic movement, Everett Dietrick, who was working in the University of California, Riverside, and he pretty much got drummed out of the corps. He got fired from the university for his ideas about using beneficial insects. And so, he was a very, you know, dedicated guy, and he started rearing the insects himself. And his son, who I'm still close friends with his son, he 00:30:00and his brother had to release them at night in alfalfa fields just to kind of prove this concept of biological control.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: And that - that family still has the Rincon-Vitova Insectary. They're still in the... in the business of selling beneficial insects. But it was radical thinking at the time, you know.

TEM: Was that something, when you were in the Peace Corps, that people in other countries were talking about, the - both that sort of beneficial insect side, but then also the concern for chemicals?

JG: A very small movement, but there - you know, there were people, you know, very dedicated. And that's one of the things that I - when I went over to England to the Emerson college, the biodynamic farming college, very small, but 00:31:00I was the only American there in the course. I think there were maybe 15, 20 people just from all over the world. You know, it's just a really eye-opening experience to see, you know, to meet all these people that were kind of interesting in the same thing. Actually, biodynamic farming had taken hold long before the organic movement. It's like out of the 1920s.

TEM: Can you talk more about that? What did you learn and what felt eye-opening about that experience in England?

JG: Well, biodynamic farming started through the writings of Rudolf Steiner, kind of a mystic, kind of a religious, philosophical kind of guy out of - from Austria. And back in the 1920s, some German farmers got together and they had 00:32:00noticed a decline in productivity in their farms over the years and they hired Rudolf Steiner to give a series of lectures on farming. And this was a guy that was - had no agricultural experience really, but he was a kind of a mystic kind of clairvoyant kind of guy. And he gave a series of I think 20, or 10 or 20 lectures that became the basis for biodynamic farming.

So, it started out of the twenties in Germany and it kind of - it was kind of an intellectual, kind of a European intellectual farming kind of thing. And it just kind of grew little by little and, you know, over the course of the century, you know, it - there were some very dedicated followers and some - some German - it began with German agronomists that were kind of... set out to prove that 00:33:00Steiner's lectures were - that he had, you know, really something to say about farming. And so, it became a very dedicated group of people from biodynamics.

But for me, what I liked about - and still do - like about the concept of biodynamics: it's an integrated farm where you have - try to reduce the inputs onto the farm and utilize animals. It's a very diversified kind of system, and heavy on rotations, crop rotations, and just plain healthy farming. You know, just - I think that's the biggest value that I took away from it. I didn't, you know, end up become a diehard biodynamic kind of person but I really respect that method of farming.

TEM: Well, and I think what you said, the system of it, that it's not - that you're looking more holistically at what's happening.

JG: I think one of the things - I work in Mexico and in Latin America it's... really the biodynamic farming, by and large, is more of a European kind of concept because they have some kind of preparations that are made that I won't go into, but they're based on European herbs like stinging nettle or like yarrow or different things that you wouldn't necessarily find in the tropics. So, that's been kind of a... you know, kept it from spreading. But however, it has anyway, you know. There have been kind of people that have worked around those...

TEM: Well, it seems like it has to be smaller too. Does it scale? Do the principles scale?

JG: Well, I don't know if it's really tied into scale, but probably most of the farmers are small farmers.

TEM: Yeah. So, talk about your early memories and impressions of Eugene, Cottage Grove. We've talked a little bit about your house without windows in the winter, which just sounds...

JG: Well, yeah, so I found myself up here and, you know, being the - I think the Peace Corps attracts a certain amount of people or, you know, people that are kind of interested in things other than just the money, you know? The kind of idealistic kind of things. And so, I found myself out here, just met all these wonderful people like the Berg family, the - David and Tom Lively were close friends, and just a whole - Keith Walton, a fellow that had a family farm, and he invited all these kind of... I guess you'd call them hippies [both laugh], 00:36:00that's what we called ourselves. Today's a - there's kind of a colony of hippies living on his farm and growing organically.

And I became - I mentioned the delivery job with OGC; I also, another job that I... somehow got was the manager of the farmers' market in Eugene that had kind of fallen apart and it was kind of dysfunctional. And so, I was hired by a lady named Elaine English [00:36:38 phonetic], who was the manager of the Saturday craft market, and they wanted to have a farmers' market associated, but independent from the craft market. And so, I'll say I got the job, but there was no money involved in it [both laughs]. It was like, "You can be the manager but 00:37:00you kind of have to figure out your own way of, you know, making money out of it." So anyway, we kind of started out and we used the same kind of pay arrangement as the Saturday market, which was 10% of your sales went to the market.

TEM: Oh, okay.

JG: And so, we started out with like maybe five growers. I think Carl Berg had his strawberries, and there - we had the Lively brothers or the Keith Walton's gang of hippies was called Thistle Brook, and so they had an all-white truck that came down there with a - just a - you know, in those times just a big diversity of vegetables, you know. And there was a guy that sold a truckload of corn and a couple other, you know, just very tiny scale farmers or gardeners.

And the time must have been right because it just grew from the beginning. The 00:38:00people really liked it, except for the city, the people in the city government. They didn't like the idea of hippies showing - the Saturday market was enough for them to contend with. They didn't want a bunch of hippy farmers, you know, downtown Eugene, which they were trying to polish up in kind of an upper scale kind of town, you know, and the idea of these kind of mangy, long-haired [laughs] like vegetable farmers...

TEM: With their vegetables [both laugh].

JG: Yeah, it didn't sit too well, but as I mentioned, we were on county lane on East 8th and Oak, and there were a couple of county commissioners - Peter DeFazio was one, and Jerry Rust was another - that were very supportive of the idea of a farmers' market. And so, I don't know how many county commissioners there are, like five or six or - they were kind of the two that supported, and all the rest were just like, "You know, this isn't commercial," you know? "This 00:39:00isn't," you know... "this isn't anything that we should be involved in."

But little by little we kind of got a foothold and it kind of became established where there were - I don't - you know, even in the eighties there were hundreds, if not 1,000 or more, people coming down on Saturday. It was just, you know, very... a very active event that went on every Saturday.

TEM: Was there crossover in the people who were the customers between the Saturday market and the farmers' market? Do you think that was part of it, was that there was reason to come-

JG: Yeah, there was a lot of crossover. People would come and buy their vegetables or fruit and then they'd go over and eat something at the market, maybe buy, you know - it was a - I think that something that's just really incredible about public markets like that is that people don't normally go to buy, you know, their produce, or - it is a social thing. People go to meet their 00:40:00friends. You know: "Well, I'll see you at the market on Saturday," you know, and there's just a - you run into people that you don't expect to see, or just it's as much of a social thing as a... like a place to buy produce or, you know.

And I think Eugene really picked up on that early on. I mean that - it became a very big market, very quick, where pretty soon we were like one city block, and then two city blocks. I don't know, I haven't been there in many years, but Carl, my friend, is part of the board of directors, and he's saying that now the city wants to... they want to develop the farmers' market more. So, instead of the enemies of the farmer [laughs], they're very supportive of it. And actually, 00:41:00in the United States, there are over 4,000 farmers' markets now, so it's really something that's caught on.

TEM: Was there any - sounds like early on a lot of the people that were part of the organic farmers' movement were also part of the farmers' market. Was there any, not tension, but discussion between conventional and organic about who ended up in a farmers' market?

JG: Well, no. We - in, like the Eugene market isn't an organic market. That's just - it was just a place where you could sell your organic stuff, but I don't think there were any restrictions about conventional farmers. The public doesn't necessarily embrace that in the farmers' market, I think. I think they would like to see organic. That may be wrong. I don't know if that's still the case, but...

CB: It's about 80% organic now.

JG: Back in Mexico where I lived for 28 years now, I - based really on the experience here in Eugene, started the farmers' market 15 years ago. We just had our 15th year anniversary. And it's followed kind of a similar path as it started very small, just a few growers, and now it's grown into, you know, a big thing that's a very integral part of the community. So, people like it, you know.

TEM: Yeah, that's...

JG: It definitely has a niche for both the growers and the public.

TEM: Yeah. Well, and I think like you say, it's the social that's - so it's the grocery shopping while at the same time [laughs] talking. So, at that point - so let's just do a date check. So, when you were managing the farmers' market and eventually getting some money, what year was that?

JG: I think we started in - I can't remember if it's '81 or '82.

TEM: Okay, early eighties.

JG: And then I ran it, but I never have been really good at like the business, like actually accounting and that kind of thing, so I got over my head pretty quick. I - the cigar box wasn't big enough after a while, you know. And so, there was a fellow - I was very involved in Tilth at that time and I was - me and another guy, Tom Forster, did the Tilth newsletter. And as... just briefly digress to that. The beginnings of that, it was like cut and paste was literally cut and paste. It was like a typewriter and you cut out the thing and paste it, 00:44:00you know, and like steal graphics out of a magazine or something and cut that out and paste it, you know, and then Xerox copy it. And so, the early newsletters, you'd see like little kind of pieces of tape [laughs] was the only thing that - or the lines weren't always lined up and it was kind of crazy.

But anyway, I was the contact person for Tilth in the - in the Eugene area, and I got a call from California, this guy coming up that wanted to visit some of the organic farms in the Willamette Valley. And so, I told him that the day he was coming that I would be at a Nicaragua Friendship Day concert at Skinner Butte Park and just to ask around and, you know, he would find me.

TEM: [Laughs].

JG: And so, I was there and I got a tap on my shoulder and he said, "Do you know John Graham?" and I was the first person out of a crowd of like a thousand people that he approached [laughs]. I guess I must have looked like a hayseed kind of organic...

TEM: [Laughs].

JG: But he stayed at my little apartment that night, and the next morning at like five in the morning I hauled him to the farmers' market and kind of put him to work, you know, helping out at the market. And he became the manager, you know, after - I was the manager for seven years and then he became the manager, David Amorose, who still works for Organically Grown Company. But that's kind of how he got his, you know, foothold, or kind of how he became involved, being forced labor [both laugh].

But he - his father is an accountant, so he just was very organized, very pragmatic kind of guy, and so he whipped the farmers' market into shape and really made it into a legal kind of entity, where under my tutelage it was quasi-legal at best [laughs].

TEM: So, talk about those early days of Oregon Tilth, how people got together, how you shared news-

JG: Yeah, it was just a corps of very dedicated people. Yvonne Frost kind of took the certification realm, so that was almost - that really became the - a generator of cash for the organization because, you know, there was - there's money involved in certification, where the organization itself was really, you know, there wasn't really much money made. It's all volunteer labor. And they may have gotten a grant here or there, you know, for certain projects, but by 00:45:00and large just people that were volunteers.

There was, in Eugene, they had in those - I don't know if they still do this - but they had Vocality groups. So, Corvallis had a group, Eugene had a group, Portland had a group. I think Ashland had a group. And the communication was either by phone calls or like newsletters and meetings, you know. Once in a while, there would be like a, you know, once a month or something or so during - at least during the winter months. In the summertime, people were maybe busy, or maybe not so many meetings. But it was just, you know, a group of people that - I don't know how many, but 100, maybe 200 people with... As time progressed there were more diversity, more skills involved. So, there were, you know, like 00:46:00there school teachers and retail store people and just a diverse - farmers and diverse gardeners and a lot of different skillsets started to come into the movement.

And then, little by little, there was actually jobs, you know, some - like the first jobs in organics were probably at the little stores. Eugene had like the Kiva, Sundance, New Frontier - I don't think they're around anymore - The Barn [Red Barn], over on... where it is.

CB: Red Barn.

JG: The Red Barn. There was a place over in Springfield called Health Food and Pool. They had like a pool table and [laughs]... and there were a couple of restaurants like the Zenon. I don't know if it's still around.

TEM: I don't think so.

JG: Maybe a place or two at the 5th Street Public Market. Just, you know, very - just a very - a handful. There was a place over on the campus, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, it was an organic - they bought organic produce. But you know, it just kind of grew and grew. And then, little by little, Portland was kind of another kind of hotbed of activity. So, there was, I think it's called New Seasons now, but they had a different name back in those days. A guy named Jeff Fairchild was a very active organic buyer, so he bought a lot of product from the co-op here in Willamette Valley. And the other First Alt, the store in Corvallis, was a big buyer of the organic produce early on. It was 00:48:00really before the CSA kind of thing caught on.

TEM: It was funny when you were talking about delivering and having points of delivery, that's what I was thinking, that you go to pick up your CSA box [laughs].

JG: Well that, you know, it developed. People were looking, you know, for ways to sell because by the end of the eighties, there were some very skilled farmers, like the Bergs were always good at producing berries, but some of the other, like what do you do with like a box of kale, you know, back in the day, like "What? Kale?" [Both laugh]. Or like, you know, there just wasn't that big of a volume kind of market. That developed with the interstate trade, you know... There - as certification developed, there - I think probably 80, 90% of the commerce was between Washington, Oregon, and California.

But there were some things that got shipped back east by, you know, as time went on, and then - I know there's one farm out at Noti, Winter Green Farm, that kind of hit upon the idea of growing burdock and exporting it to Japan. And so, that's the first international thing that I knew about. We actually printed up a box with the Japanese labeling on it and it was like oh, kind of... we thought we had hit it big time with that deal. But you know, it just grew and grew and I think a lot of it was just the dedicated people that day in and day out just did the hard work, and then, you know, that grew into volume and the volume grew into more expanded territory of sales.

TEM: Was there any tension with that growth? Was there a "we need to stay small if we..." I don't...

JG: Yeah, a little bit. Like you know, small farmers have always been a little bit jealous, or like resentful, of big farmers kind of cashing in on the growth of the organic movement. And that's happening more and more than ever now, you know. It's a, what, a 40 billion dollar industry that seems to be growing every year, so there's a lot of commercial farms that are getting into organics as an economic activity rather than a philosophic kind of thing.

And I look at it as, you know, it's really tough to make a living on a small 00:50:00farm. So, it's not for everyone. But at the same time, I like the idea of kind of protecting the niche of small farming, but as an environmentalist, the more acreage in organic or whatever you want to call it, sustainable, or less use of chemicals, is a good thing, and I hope we're moving more in that direction because the amount of chemicals sprayed on the United States, like Roundup, for example, is unbelievable. I mean, millions and millions of pounds every year.

And you know, the effect, you know, it's debatable, the effect on human health. I think more and more it's - there is an impact on the human health, but the contamination of groundwater, the extinction of insect species and, you know, I 00:51:00think that's the real dire impact of the chemical use. You're contaminating the planet.

TEM: Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about the... I don't want to say politics, but I feel like I have to say the politics that are involved in that kind of activist side. And we were talking a bit when we talked - and I wrote down the name of the book so I would actually remember - what's the name of the book? The one that was written by the man from Japan?

JG: Oh, The One-Straw Revolution.

TEM: There - yeah, so now, as soon as I ask that, then I find it. I got it through our interlibrary loan and I haven't picked it up, so it's downstairs. I was going to bring it up and we could have looked at [laughs]. But, so you've 00:52:00caught that influential book. Talk about how the ideas or the principles within that influenced your thinking, work life...

JG: Okay. Well, I think one of the messages is that we don't have to work so hard battling nature. There's far more to gain by working with nature and understanding, you know, natural cycles, and just the idea of, for example, Fukuoka planted rice, but to weed his rice he would use geese in his rice fields, and before he harvested the rice, he broadcasted barley. And so, you would press the barley into the soil with your feet in the process of harvesting the rice and the barley would grow right behind the rice and crowd out a lot of 00:53:00the weeds, along with clover. He used white clover.

And just using that, he reduced the work that he had to do and the expense that he had to do by being very much in tune with the cycles of nature and the lifecycles of different plants. And to combat like the, for example, insects eating the rice grain or the barley grain, he would encase them in dry pellets of clay.

TEM: Wow.

JG: So, that would protect the seed until there was enough moisture for it to germinate, and then it took off. So, he had the highest rice yields, or among the highest rice yields, in Japan but he was ostracized during his time for not using modern, modern methods. So, he wasn't a mainstream farmer by any means. He was relatively obscure. But he became known by us westerners by a young guy, 00:54:00Larry Korn, who went over as a volunteer in the seventies and worked on his farm and ended up translating his book, The One-Straw Revolution, into English. And Larry's in Ashland, Oregon now. He might be another subject for another one of your interviews.

TEM: Yeah. Well, you were talking about when you went to - so, he came to visit and you bought the paper [laughs]?

JG: Yeah, Fukuoka came to Willamette Valley in, I don't know what year it was, '85, '86, sometime in there, and he stayed with a Japanese friend, a guy named Katsu. I don't remember his last name, but - and so I spent - he was here about a week and I spent a lot of time driving him around, showing him stuff. And he 00:55:00didn't speak any English. He didn't speak - I spoke even less Japanese, but he was just a very kind of pleasant guy to be around. Very curious. So, we went around and looked at different farms.

And then David Amorose, who I mentioned, a fellow that helped me, or helped out with the farmers' market, we organized a lecture at the U of O and also a, like a... The lecture was Friday night and then on Sunday morning we had - it was a beautiful sunny day and we were out on the lawn behind the library and Fukuoka was there and maybe 20 people, or 30 people, and he was kind of talking about some of his ideas, translated by Katsu. Katsu was a translator in the lecture and in this kind of workshop thing.

And I just somehow hit upon the idea because I knew he liked to do brush drawings, so I went over to the University bookstore and bought a stack of rice paper, a bottle of ink, a bamboo brush, and he spent the whole Sunday afternoon drawing his ideas in these beautiful drawings. And I had those drawings for a long time at - they stayed up in Eugene, and David Amorose and I gave them to Larry Korn, the translator, and he's used them in some of the subsequent Fukuoka books that have come out. So anyway, they got to the right place, but...

But anyway, it was kind of a magical time. We took Fukuoka down to the farmers' 00:56:00market. He's a little short guy in a, like a traditional Japanese farming outfit, and he didn't have any money but he traded - he would draw some of his drawings on a grocery sack and trade those for some vegetables that he wanted to get. He was - he was I think well enough known that he was kind of a notorious figure by that point in time.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: And so, one of my cherished photographs of that time is Fukuoka and I at the farmers' market.

TEM: it sounds so... slow. It sounds like, you know, people taking time with each other and that his farming was taking time to - I just imagine encasing seeds in clay, that there's such an investment that...

JG: Well you know, I think that's one thing that the digital age has robbed from us all, is that people are so scheduled and like, you know, they're just - they don't have a lot of free time, and it just seemed like a much more leisurely 00:57:00kind of day or like, you know? You know, conversations were more common among people, rather than, you know, little sentence fragments that we send around with a text or something.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: So yeah, it was a different time in that regard. And getting together was I think more common, like you know, getting together on a Sunday for a potluck or, you know, it just seemed like people weren't so scheduled; that there was a lot of that going on.

TEM: Yeah, and I guess that's - when I was asking earlier about like resistance to growth, that it feels like you maybe necessarily lose that as you get bigger and you have either bigger farms or more people involved, that it gets harder and harder to...

JG: Well, I think another thing that's very evident to me is back in those days it was, even on a rinky-dink, tiny little level, it seemed like it was kind of possible to do it, you know? I mean, you could rent a house for, I don't know, 300 or 400 dollars a month and, you know, it was just much more affordable for people on limited or lower incomes, where now I just - you have to really - just to stay in business you have to be much more sophisticated than most of us were back in those days.

But it's a different game, and I think that that's probably the hardest thing for young people, getting young people involved in farming, is dealing with the economic reality of doing. It's pretty much the people that are able to do it either have somehow family resources in land or money, they have an outside job or one of the, you know, if it's a husband and wife, one of them has a full-time 00:58:00job, and it's a challenge. And you can ask my friend Carl. He can tell you all about it [both laugh].

But it's - you know, here in the Willamette Valley also you have a growing season that's very limited, you know, maybe five months out of the year or something. And so, what do you do in the winter time, you know? Most people have to find some other way to make a living. And actually, that's how the Organically Grown - it used to be the Organically Grown Co-op, now it's Organically Grown Company because to stay in business in the winter they had to buy and resell produce as a distributor, where to be a co-op I think you have to have 40 or 50% of your volume produced by the members of the co-op, and it 00:59:00[phone beeps] - the buying and selling grew kind of beyond.

TEM: Sorry about... usually, I'm so good at turning everything off. I was that person. I was the person who forgot.

JG: [Chuckles] I didn't turn my phone off, so.

TEM: Well, I won't text you [laughs].

JG: I'm not - well, I'm not very popular, so I probably won't get any.

TEM: [Laughs] my mom clearly has something to say to me.

JG: But anyway, you know, it just... the... Little by little, the commerce kind of helped the - helped the whole movement grow, you know. And now, I mean it just seems like it's kind of a, you know, there's some big businesses involved in organic. But in the beginning, it was mostly very, very small.

TEM: Did you get people involved - and I guess I'm thinking about the farmers' market - like who came to the farmers' market back in the early eighties?

JG: Well...

TEM: I'm sort of thinking geographic distribution. You know, did people come from-

JG: You know, Eugene's not necessarily a typical community, in that there's a lot of kind of people that are attracted to that kind of thing.

TEM: Yes [laughs].

JG: You know, local produce and just the organic, and it's just kind of an osmosis kind of thing, you know. People know each other. But we had - this - I think one thing that drew the people was the incredible quality of the things down there like we have one of the university professors - I've forgotten her name, but she was a French woman who grew incredible flowers, made these just incredibly beautiful flower bouquets. Had another guy, Tom...

CB: Denison?

JG: Denison, from up here in Corvallis. He's probably still around.

TEM: Mm-hmm.

JG: He showed up with the earliest tomatoes, the earliest melons, and just very, very organized and just - it blew a lot of the other growers out of the water because he was just...

TEM: [Laughs]

JG: You know, had - he had it down. But then we had, you know, just seasonal things like berries that - back then there weren't so many everbearing strawberries, but there were June bearing. So, June was like strawberry month and people were like hungry for strawberries. But these little farms would kind of find their niche, you know, and pretty soon there was just an incredible diversity of things.

And you know, that appeals to people, just being down there and seeing what - and I think the, really the very valuable part of a farmers' market is the customers talk to the farmers, so there's a, you know, the farmers know their customers that come back every week, so there's personal relationships that develop. And then just seeing what's in season, you know you don't get that experience at a supermarket. Everything's in season all year-round, but you definitely - for example, apples, like you go to a supermarket in those days - maybe it's a little bit better now - but you'd have two or three varieties of apples. Well, we would have 15 varieties of apples. Most incredible apples, I mean just amazing, like things that you've never heard of the varieties before.

There are some people around here that had - we were talking about an old farmer, Mel Thompson [ 01:08:14 phonetic], who lived out on River Road that had like dozens of different kinds of apples, you know. And he knew a lot about each variety, so he could stand there and just tell you the whole history.

TEM: [Laughs].

JG: And there - you know, just a - just the diversity, just the personal relationships with all these characters that were - showed up down there to sell stuff, and then, you know, just people from the community, you know.

There was one person that was the wife of a university professor, Lotte Streisinger, who was very influential locally promoting art, and she was also one of the really big promoters of the farmers' market. And Lotte and I did a - for a least a few years we did a radio show on KLCC, "The Farmer's Market 01:02:00Report" [chuckles]. And so, she would tell about, you know, what's in season, what's going to be - what you could see down there this coming, you know, week. And so, you know, just little things like that just really made it grow into a very, you know, happening kind of thing.

TEM: Reminds me of like the farmers reports that KOAC used to do through the Extension, that they would have "Farmers' Hour" and people would tune in to listen to...

JG: Like OSU Extension?

TEM: Yeah, yeah.

JG: Yeah, you know, that's another kind of story. Some of the agents like in Eugene, they were at first like, "Organics?" you know, but little by little some agents would show up that were just really, really very supportive, and they became a very valuable resource for farmers to find out information. And there's 01:03:00one guy named Dan McGrath, I don't know where he went, but he was a county Extension agent that was very, very supportive of the whole organic - or just small time farmers.

TEM: Yeah, I mean it seems - that seems natural, that that's what Extension should do.

JG: Yeah, yeah.

TEM: What the people are interested in growing and farming, but-

JG: And there are some other programs out of OSU. There's a lady named Helen McMurray or - Helen Murray, I think her name was, that was a - from OSU - and had a program... I can't remember what the name of it was. There was an acronym going around in those days, LISA: Low-Input Sustainable Agriculture, and I think that it was somehow associated with that. But Elaine, or Helen, put together a resource book of organic resources in the Willamette Valley, you know, that 01:04:00helped kind of spread the word. But back in those days, before - it's hard to imagine a world without the internet, but people found out in other ways, you know?

TEM: Yeah. Well, that is just - I was thinking about the Oregon Tilth newsletter and what you decide to share with people, you know, and that kind of - those functions of those organizations are... is about making it easier to find out...stuff-

JG: Well yeah, you know the - getting back to the Oregon newsletter, I explained earlier that it was like cut and paste, like Scotch tape and...

TEM: [Laughs] we should call it cut and tape [laughs].

JG: Pirated artwork and just - and... David Amorose, his father, the accountant, 01:05:00bought one of the first Macs. This Mac computer was like a box, like a small box with a little bitty screen and a - the hard drive was like I think 128 megabytes. Something, you know, ridiculously small. But it was a magical machine at the time. Combined with a laser printer, like we couldn't afford a laser printer but we could take the floppy disc to Kinkos and get it printed out. And that was like - so, the - that was a monumental leap in the, you know, the newsletter production. All the sudden it looked like, you know, the lines of type were straight [both chuckle] and you know, it just increased dramatically in the sophistication of the newsletter.

So, it started getting around quite a bit more, you know. And there were advertisements in it and just like want ads and just different stories that people would, you know, would submit in it. So, it kind of became - it grew and grew until it's right now the Oregon... newsletter's called In Good Tilth, and it's one of the best publications in the whole country to find out what's going on in organic agriculture.

TEM: Do you feel like it's changed, though, its fundamental function? Like it-

JG: Well yeah, it's changed with the times, you know.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: It's become much more of a, like an advertising vehicle, but also the quality of the writing is very high. The editor just recently passed away, Andrew Rodman, who really took it to a stellar level, and hopefully, that can be continued, you know, with his passing. But yeah, it's been a reflection of the time, you know, and now, of course, it's online, so you don't have to worry 01:06:00about finding a copy of it somewhere.

TEM: Yeah. There's something about the physical copy of it that I - I mean I just - I love the idea of it being so grassroots that you are cutting and pasting and the - it becomes part of the creation.

JG: Well you know, I think that that too, I think it deserves maybe a revival because when we look at things on a digital format, it's just too easy to just like briefly look at it and then pass on. "Oh, I'll look at this later," which you usually don't, and just having that physical sheet of paper in front of you, like newsprint in front of you, it's like - with the coffee stains and the like, you know [chuckles]?

TEM: I am the reason why we can't have coffee in the archives [both laugh]. Do - you were talking about the spreadsh-the flowchart based on Lynn's criteria. I think that was when she was determining what would be organic?

JG: Yes.

TEM: And that the computer had crashed. When I was going through my notes, that was one of my favorite-

JG: Yeah. Well, that's kind of an extension of a Mac showing on the same [laughs]...

TEM: Here comes our [makes crashing sound].

CB: [Walking through the video shot] Put a little money in the meter.

JG: The Mac, Macintosh, revolutionized organic agriculture, I guess in some way of speaking, but - so we - I had this little tiny mac, and Lynn's flowchart diagrams using, you know, the classical kind of diamond and boxes and arrows, it became so complicated it was like 60 pages of like flowchart. And she would make a chain, like I would print out a copy and she would make all these corrections 01:07:00and like notes and stuff. And so, when I would be putting this - I was her assistant, you know. I really didn't have near the sophistication that she had in determining what the flowchart was about, but the graphics, I would, you know, at least in that time I was kind of up to speed on how to use graphic programs.

So, I was using a program called QuarkXPress, which was kind of a sophisticated program, but her flowchart became so complex that I would - to make a change on it I would have to redraw the whole flowchart and it would take like minutes, like ten minutes, for the computer to process each change, and then like toward the end it would start crashing, like frequently. And it's just - I think I told you that I became so frustrated I kicked a hole in the little rental house that 01:08:00I had, a hole in the sheetrock wall [laughs] just like - after like the, you know, half dozen crashes, I just couldn't take it anymore.

TEM: I just imagine that poor computer [both laughs], that little box of a computer.

JG: Yeah, it was smoking [laughs]. Yeah, it was like [unintelligible].

TEM: Oh my gosh.

JG: And it's like - and it's like you could do it on an iPhone nowadays, you know, but...

TEM: I know. That is the funny - that it doesn't seem that long ago, this... again, the patience required to even just redraw a flowchart [laughs].

JG: Now another thing during those times we've kind of long-forgotten mostly is that even the faxes that went around, the communications, and faxes were starting to be used quite a bit, but they were thermal paper faxes.

TEM: Oh, yeah.

JG: So, all of those faxes are faded [laughs], long faded away, you know. They would last maybe a month or something before they would were just starting to fade. So, that was - for several years, you know, that was the main communication. To save money on long distance telephone calls, people would send faxes, and those archives are long gone.

TEM: Oh, that thermal-I remember too doing research on microfilm and I would - you would print them out and it would print out, I think, on that paper.

JG: Uh-huh.

TEM: And if you left them in your car...

JG: Yeah, they were [unintelligible]-

TEM: Then that was - like it was...it was toast.

JG: So you know, I think that that's the importance of what you're doing here is, you know, we're capturing a little, you know, some recollections of those times because they may come back again. We might...[laughs].

TEM: I don't want thermal faxing to come back [laughs]. I'll bring back the tape newsletter. I can totally get behind that [laughs]. So, when did you or how did your move to Mexico come about?

JG: Well, I was involved with Oregon Tilth, the certification, not as their main inspector. Their main inspector was a fellow by the name of Pete Gonzalves. But I had been involved over the years in kind of the committee level and just kind of overall involved in - with the newsletter and just different aspects of the organization. And Oregon Tilth decided that they would do inspections outside of Oregon because there was some demand. There were states that didn't have programs. Oregon Tilth, from the beginning, had a pretty high reputation of integrity.

And there's a fellow, Larry Jacobs, who was working with Mexican farmers growing organically and shipping up to San Francisco. It was distributed out of San Francisco area. And the need for certification became apparent. He needed to be 01:09:00certified to expand his market a little bit. And California's certification, CCOF, only certified within California, so he reached out to Oregon to, you know, be a certified farmer. And kind of an exciting thing in Oregon Tilth that, you know, the international, you know, go outside of the country and - and Pete was the main inspector, however, Pete's Spanish was a bit rudimentary.

And so, they knew that I spoke some Spanish, and so I was on the - Pete and I were the first inspectors to go into Mexico. And we went I think in 1990 and then I made - I think we made two or three trips over the next year or two. And 01:10:00I did some consulting work with del Cabo, with some cooperative of farmers, just to try to set up a certification program with their growers. That included something that's hard to imagine today with Google Earth, but we had to make maps of all the fields, and so I became a fairly good old-fashioned map maker by plotting out the field. It'd take a day or two to make a map of the farm by pacing all of the distance points from a data point, you know, and then drawing a scaled map.

And so, that was a big part of the job, you know, when I first started out, but little by little, I think in '91, he said, "Would you like to just come down and work with us down here?" And having been in the Peace Corps, you know, I never really was too crazy about living in the United States. I was anxious to go outside of the country. And so, I took the job. And I never imagined I'd be there still, but it's been like close to 27, 28 years ago.

TEM: [Laughs] yeah. What was the - so, what are some of your early memories of what seemed similar and maybe what seemed different about farming culture or farming practice between - primarily you'd been in Oregon, so Oregon and Mexico?

JG: Well, I think in terms of - well, working with small farmers, which is 01:11:00really something I really had, you know, all of my adult life for one reason or another I've really been attracted to that. And then just, you know, the lack of...just diplomatically it's kind of a less sophisticated society, you might say, or like the farmers, many of the farmers, were - never had the opportunity to go to school, or maybe third grade or something, but they weren't really...you know, like they didn't read a lot or they didn't - weren't in the habit of making notes.

And one of the biggest challenges was to get people to write down - to keep notebooks, you know. Just - because that was kind of a foreign concept, you know. And it's not that they're not intelligent. A lot of these people were like, you know, they just had it all their head. They just knew intimate or really tiny little details, but it was all captured in their head and they weren't really used to writing it down or - and so that was kind of the big 01:12:00challenge. But little by little, I think I learned the same lesson that we learned up here with forming a co-op: it allows small farmers to have access to markets by combining their resources and combining the volume of their production. And so, you know, that's still as valid today as it was in the - when they first came up with the concept of co-ops.

TEM: Well yeah, I think we were talking too about the - that it's really expensive to get individual farmers to get certified and that there's-

JG: Well yeah, and that's something that we developed hand in hand with Oregon Tilth over the years, is the concept of the grower groups being certified as a group rather than as individuals. And so, we've really developed that, you know, 01:13:00over 20 or more years, and it's become a very... There's a lot of integrity in that, the system, because their internal controls were like if one grower in the group, you know, goes outside of the standards, like applies a chemical or something, it impacts everyone in the group, so there's a lot of like self... like control to - because it's in everyone's interest to follow the standards.

Which I think makes a very strong system because farmers are kind of like, you know, women are sitting around, sewing a quilt, you know? The gossip goes out [both chuckle]. So, if one guy's like - or one farm's not complying with the rules, you definitely hear about it right away. You know, it's pretty hard to 01:14:00keep a secret.

So anyway, that has...you know, over the years, farmers have been very accepting of the concept of organic because it differentiates their farm and also their products from, you know, the non-organic, or conventional, product. And it's - it's - at this point in time, it's like a driver's license to operate in the marketing - in the organic marketing system. You have to be certified to, you know, to sell your product, so...

TEM: Are farms in Mexico multigenerational farms? So, is it like the - it's the similar-

JG: Yeah. And you know, that's, for me, we talk a lot about sustainability, but 01:15:00if young people aren't getting into farming, it's not going to be sustainable [chuckles]. Now, I think that that's something that we've been able to show, not 100%, but there's the sense that farming is a viable way to make a living. And we've had, for example, in a - more than one case of people coming back from the United States to be involved in their family farm because they're - it's a better future for them than, say, working as a wage earner in L.A. or something.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: And so, there is like a recognition that, you know, it is a viable way of making money. And then there are a lot of young like sons and daughters of farmers that stay either as farmers themselves or they've grown into like a family business. And then like in Mexico - and we work with - you know, it's 01:16:00hard to say exactly, but around 500 small farmers, and there are all kinds of jobs associated with that, like administrative jobs, packing shed jobs, agronomists...

And so, there's a lot of families that have multiple members of their family involved in the operations, even though they're not necessarily out, you know, picking tomatoes or hoeing or something. But there are a lot of jobs associated.

TEM: Is there - I mean you've been there long enough, I'm assuming, to observe trends, but is there a - do you feel like now there's a trend of people coming back because of our current political environment around immigration in America?

JG: Yeah. Yeah.

TEM: So, are people coming back...?

JG: In some cases, people coming back, forced or not.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: Other cases of - I noticed this just very dramatically in the last few years - that Mexicans don't necessarily even want to come to the states because of the climate we've created up here. So, it used to be kind of a dream of like, you know, progressing in life, but not so much anymore. And in fact, in many cases, I think there are more opportunities for young people in Mexico than there are here. Not just Mexicans, but just in general young people. It's a very tough climate that we've created for people trying to get a start, you know.

TEM: Mm-hmm. For a lot of people. It's a tough climate for a lot of people [laughs].

JG: So, my daughter - my daughter is one. She was born in Mexico, she's 22 years old, and was up in California going to school and working, and she came back to Mexico and she doesn't really - she likes it better in Mexico than in the USA.

TEM: Yeah. Well, I think we were - we were talking, too, about a conference that you were at a few weeks ago, a month ago, up on Monterey?

JG: Yeah, the EcoFarm.

TEM: Yeah, that this idea of this being an interesting point where younger people are starting to get back involved in farming, specifically.

JG: Yeah, the - there is, and there's a tremendous amount of energy, you know, that doesn't necessarily make the mainstream news, but there are a lot of - particularly up here in the Pacific Northwest, there's just a lot of things going on. But... the reality of making money doing it is very real. I mean, people have to figure out a niche where they can generate enough money to do it 01:17:00where that, you know, 30 years ago wasn't really the same concern.

You still had to make some money, but it just didn't seem like the number one thing to think of, you know? It was hopefully that you'd be able to get enough to, you know, to get by on. But there was never the dreams of making it into a high paying job. That was most of unheard - or not even though about. And now there are, now, there are some high paying, or relatively high paying jobs, but for a young production like if you're making like if you're making, you know, goat cheese or you know, some - growing berries or whatever your little niche farm has, the reality of making it a viable and making enough money from it is very real.

TEM: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we were talking too about the... there - the price difference and the acceptability-

JG: Well, what's going on - and this is just a very broad, just an observation - that there used to be quite a bit of a premium market for organic food, but that's not so much - there may be a little bit still, but it's very, very - the margin between conventional organic is smaller and smaller as time goes on. And... the cost of production is almost always more with organics because you don't have like herbicides or, you know, chemical... pest controls and whatnot.

But also, the - with the consolidation in the produce industry - an example is 01:18:00Amazon buying Whole Foods - so, the strategy there is to reduce the price to the consumer which, you know, on one level is great, but there is like a, a couple of things happening. The prices are going down for organic produce in general, and the competition is going up because larger farms that, you know, are looking for opportunities, economic opportunities, they see growth in the organic market.

So, the sudden [sic] where there used to be... 10 acres of a crop, now there's 01:19:00like 100 acres of a crop or, you know, the bigger companies are devoting a portion of their production to organics. And so, that's creating more volume, which has the effect of lowering prices, more competition, which you know on one level it's good, but on another level it's kind of brutal to be like a small farmer against a big farmer, for example, when you're producing the same crop.

TEM: Seems like that's where the benefit of growers' cooperatives comes in, that there's-

JG: Yeah, that's where...

TEM: --some support.

JG: It's where you have to have enough volume. Another thing that has happened, like when I first went down to Mexico working with the small farmers, and I think it's very much the same here in the Willamette Valley, is we have a very seasonal thing. Like we were growing tomatoes in the winter, like November to, say, April, May. Well, supermarket chains aren't interested in seasonal produce. 01:20:00They want suppliers that can supply them year-round. So, that's one of the reasons we've started moving up the Baja Peninsula. It's a thousand-mile peninsula, so we grow like in the winter down in the south, and then slowly move up the peninsula following the seasons. And that was really initiated because supermarkets wanted year-round production.

TEM: And consumers want year-round tomatoes [laughs].

JG: Yeah, they'd like tomatoes year-round. So, that has kind of driven - just the supermarkets themselves have driven that, kind of the need, you know, to be a year-round supplier. It's very much true with the organically grown company. You know, they grew because of the year-round. They were able to provide organic produce year-round.

TEM: Makes me wonder; another thing we talked about was how much the space around where you live has changed and how - how has tourism and the increase of that industry impacted farming, or has it, down in Baja?

JG: Not so much down where we're at. There's been, you know - I don't - I think it's much more true up here in the states, like the farm to table kind of movement, like farm tours and, you know, that's I think more, much more developed up here. There are a few examples in Mexico but it's nothing like up here in California and probably Oregon and Washington.

The other - like I was just last summer in upstate New York and it's a very, very active thing there, the farm to table movement, which is - it's good to see but I - you know, I'm a little bit... oh, I guess jaded might be the word 01:21:00[chuckles] but you know, charging like a 100 dollars for a meal out on a farm where the farmer's probably eating like spam and like bologna sandwiches [both laughs] and stuff just to get by, you know. There's - it's kind of an incongruency [sic] there, but you know, it's maybe not apparent to a lot of people, but I can't help but see that.

TEM: Yeah. I think it is interesting, and I don't know if it's just perspective right now, but it certainly feels like... there is that, could be that socioeconomic wealth discrepancy between who is able to afford those experiences and who is producing... those experiences [laughs]. On the backs of-

JG: Another thing that the company that I work with, Jacobs farm in del Cabo, we're based out of the San Francisco Bay area, and just in the last few years a family in San Jose, California donated 290 acres of their family farm to the county to create an urban farm. And the county of Santa Clara County wanted it to be an organic farm and so we worked out a deal to lease the farm and create an organic form. Well, sounds like a great project. The only thing is, you can't find farm labor in Silicon Valley.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: I mean, we can't afford to pay 25 dollars an hour, you know, to pick tomatoes or, you know, and so it's very, very challenging to just have the labor to do farming.

TEM: Yeah, so... and then to have people-

JG: I think that's happening here in the Willamette Valley too, is that people don't like the idea of a 10 or 12 dollar an hour farm job, isn't that appealing to even young people, you know?

TEM: Well, I'm thinking about how you get there if you have to live so far away, the amount of like commute time, how much are you going to commute to go to that sort of a job.

JG: Yeah, as a living, you can't, you know, making 10 dollars an hour, you can't afford to rent a house or even an apartment, you know, so...

CB: And there's competition at the same time. We're picking late blueberries, there's - the vineyards are paying more than we can pay, you know, to get the grapes harvested.

JG: So I think that's a huge problem in small farming in general or just the agricultural in general. The farm labor, even big farms can't, you know, can't get the labor that they need. So, they're looking at robots [laughs] now.

TEM: Ironically [laughs].

JG: I think that's the next big thing is like... [chuckles]...

TEM: Oh yeah, and it's-

JG: Robots singing in the field, you know?

TEM: That would be lovely. That would be a certain kind of... farm to table experience [laughs] [unintelligible] farm experience. Yeah, but I think that that... yeah, the expectations that we have for price as consumers, the reality of the price for producers, just this very real logistics of who can pick and-

JG: I think, you know, it's - we really - I think it's something that we're all going to have to contend with. We live in a world where - or in a country, specifically, where food is cheap. It's so cheap that people don't worry about wasting, like they'll buy more than they need, knowing that they'll probably throw half of it away. Like 40% of produce is thrown away. And a lot of that - and some of it's through the distribution channels and whatnot, but a lot of it 01:23:00is people buying it not - and just not being able to consume it, you know.

So, it's also we live in a country where obesity is a bigger problem than hunger. Now, you can say that that's from the success of farming, but you know, people to say that we need, like for example, GMOs to keep people from starving to death, you know that might be true if the idea is that everyone eats Cheetos and Pop-Tarts, you know, like processed food. But the diversity of produce is really an incredible thing that a lot of people don't even - are unaware of, and really unaware of what it takes to produce that, you know. There's not, in our 01:24:00society, not the value, you know. Just in the broad population, they don't value the ethic and the, you know, the people that really provide.

TEM: Well, it's interesting that's a perspective on sustainable agriculture too, you know, that the consumer base certainly has to be consuming.

JG: Yeah.

TEM: But how sustainable is it to throw half of what is produced and...

JG: And just the irony is where you know in some parts of the world people are starving to death and we can somehow just afford to like - like the big box stores, you buy a big box of something rather than a little portion. So you know....

TEM: Yeah. Yeah, well and I...

JG: Now, that consumption's probably good for farmers, but it's also that there's something askew in a whole system where somehow we can... you know, afford to just waste so much. And then, even though we all have enough calories to eat, what we're eating is making us sick as a society, like the processed food and the sugar and - so we're not very... we're not learning how to really, you know, on a mass scale we're not learning, as a society, the value of good food.

TEM: Well, and I'm - I'm curious, I think, about the impact of farmers' markets and even the farm to table or people visiting farms, just knowing that farms exist, and I - so I'm curious from this kind of - if you - I don't - I feel like I'm asking you to get out a crystal ball [laughs], but I - so, I'm curious about 01:25:00how the spread of this through the country, I mean do you - I don't know how often you go back to Oklahoma now, but do you feel like the... this model of farmers' markets, farm to table, visiting farms is spreading to the center of the country?

JG: Yeah, not so much. It's basically a coastal thing, but yeah. I mean, one of the most incredible farmers' markets I've been to is Des Moines, Iowa. It's like 10 city blocks. I mean, so there's - there's a lot of people - you don't see it in the news media so much, you know, but it's - there's definitely something going on out there. And I think, you know, more and more people - there's not a family in the country that hasn't been affected by cancer or, you know, some debilitating disease that's - if it's not caused, it's impacted by diet. So they're - you know, the obesity problem, I think people are becoming aware of 01:26:00it. They just, you know, it takes a lot of discipline to change your habits, you know, and so that's something we need to... you know, be aware of, of how do we - how do we raise a young generation of people to live a healthier life, you know, when there are so many influences that are contrary to that?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

JG: And you know, it all tie - one - like medicine, for example, you know, we've - we're kind of coming out of a stretch where you could go to any doctor and get pain killers, or where there's a pill for every, everything that you need, or every problem, there's a pill for. Well, there's a little bit of an opening where people are saying you know, you can take care of yourself and avoid 01:27:00getting a lot of these problems that - and just like the prescription drugs of opioids, you know; 10 years ago anybody could go and get an opioid prescription, and now they're starting to think well, maybe that's not the best thing.

TEM: Yeah, the more holistic. Again, it reminded me of like the biodynamics, you know that you're paying attention to a system [laughs].

JG: So, we're - I think that we, you know, living here in Oregon or Northwest in California, there's quite a bit of consciousness about those kind of things, where you go in other parts of the country and it's not, you know, it hasn't caught on so much out there. But just, you know, things change and people aren't stupid, you know, so the hope is people will become more aware. And I think we have a - I guess I'm kind of becoming more and more of an old geezer, but there is a certain amount of responsibility to like the young people, you know, coming 01:28:00along, to try to steer them into a healthier lifestyle and to make this world a little bit better.

TEM: Well, and I guess that's where I think of that, the full circle coming back from a... making organic produce something that people can produce and then it - the real value of organizations like Oregon Tilth, or the real value of farmers' markets, is to - whether it's organic or not - to-

JG: You know, and I think another very important component in all of that is gardening, like home gardening. You know, that's something that all young people should at least get a taste of, you know. I - last summer I was mentioned I went upstate New York, I went to these - visit some Christian communities in upstate 01:29:00New York that they come as close to being sustainable as any example that I've seen. And they have their own schools. Their kids have their own garden. You know, each class has their own garden, and it's just a beautiful sight to see these kids marching off to the fields with their hoes and shovels and, you know, talking, and they know about the varieties of tomatoes or the cabbage and they have their favorite plants and they can tell you about them, you know? Where, you know, I think someone did a survey of American school kids where like 60% thought that chocolate milk came from brown cows.

TEM: Yes.

JG: You know, just a, you know, just totally isolated from...

TEM: Yeah, the disconnect. Yeah.

JG: So, somehow we need to do a better job at, you know, making people aware of the importance of good food.

TEM: What did you think that we were going to talk about that I didn't ask anything about?

JG: I don't know. We've covered a lot of it.

TEM: [Laughs]. What did you think I was going to ask him that I didn't ask [laughs]?

JG: I will mention one thing that I kind of became a little bit notorious during the eighties when I lived up here in the valley as I kind of - I guess I kind of got a knack for artwork from my mother. She was like a... in Oklahoma she would paint like cows and windmills, you know, like [laughs]...

TEM: Wait, so she actually like, she painted pictures of cows?

JG: Yeah, yeah.

TEM: Okay. I was like, she painted cows? Like that's like performance art [laughs].

JG: No, she didn't actually - no, she never got to - I noticed, though, someone in your lobby did that [laughs].

TEM: Yes, yes. Not a living cow [laughs].

JG: But that was [laughs] - anyway, I kind of caught a little bit of that knack and, you know, went to the University of Oregon and I took a lot of art classes and stuff. And so, when these penniless farmers, you know, they needed a logo, or some organization or event needed a t-shirt or something, I was kind of the go-to person to get like kind of free art [laughs]. I mean, sometimes I made a little, you know, a little bit of money, but really not much. But I was - I was always too embarrassed to ask for money, you know, but I'd just like stay up all night long doing a logo or something. So, I did a number of logos during that decade of the eighties and... it was, you know, kind of a, I think I'm probably more known for that than the farmers' market, or even for the co-op or anything agricultural. It was just being that guy, the free artwork guy.

TEM: The free art [laughs].

CB: And John's wife when he "I have a job I'm working on." "Oh great, how much does it pay?" "Well, uh..." [all laugh].

TEM: My enjoyment of sharing [laughs].

JG: No, but one of the - one of the, just a recent, interesting kind of thing that really kind of brought this to mind is in this EcoFarm conference in California a few weeks ago, I hadn't been, you know, for 20 years. I was up there and they were selling these t-shirts that I had done the logo back in the 1980s, and some other - it was some other guy's idea and he paid me like 20 dollars or something to draw it. And it was a takeoff on the group Earth First!. It was kind of a radical environmental group. Well, somebody thought of the idea of Dirt First.

TEM: [Laughs]

JG: And making kind of, you know, an organic kind of style with that logo. And so, I kind of reluctantly did it. I didn't like the - like for me it's always soil, not dirt, you know, and so I never did really like the idea too much, but I did it. And then I made a little extra money by printing the t-shirts that - that was another kind of a way to make a little bit of, you know, money here and there.

So anyway, I did the t-shirts and, you know, kind of forgot about it, and then to see them like 30 years later, all of the - it was kind, to me, kind of... I don't know how to say, but I wasn't really particularly crazy about this logo ever, you know, but some of the ones that I did I thought were - I wish I still had, you know, an example of.

TEM: Yeah.

JG: You know, but the one that survived was like my least favorite of all [laughs].

TEM: It sounds sort of like a - like a movie or a TV show, where you walk in and everybody's wearing your thing from 30 years ago, like-

JG: But that was kind of a - I don't know, I was really kind of into that, and I did - there's a few logos that are still around; the Organically Grown logo they still use, a couple of farms here and there still have those, long forgotten where the, the source of the, you know, the artwork came from. But it's kind of gratifying that at least something, you know, is sustainable.

TEM: Well, and you were talking about how that translated later, that you built your house in Mexico?

JG: Well yeah, that was a - you know, that was really a beautiful thing for me to go to Mexico because building without a permit here in a Willamette Valley became kind of, you know... and Carl can tell you what happens when you do that, that - with our-

TEM: I'm guessing it's not a good end to the story [laughs].

JG: Yeah. What the... the - I mentioned earlier about the packing or the little cold room-

TEM: Oh, yeah.

JG: ...and all this that Organically Grown Co-op kind of built on a weekend and, you know, we painted it grey to kind of blend in, you know.

TEM: [Chuckles].

JG: And so, it was a couple years later that they outgrew that place and they needed to expand on it, but they went to, you know, get a permit, and they said, "You never had a permit, to begin with." And so, they were going to get a fine, you know, levy these fines against a little company, you know. And so, the solution to that problem was to abandon that site in the middle of the night and move to a rented out space [chuckles].

But anyway, for me, going to Mexico was like a - just a kind of a freedom that was kind of not... or kind of disappearing up here in the USA, and so it's worked out well for me. You know, I fit in pretty well, an Okie Mexican, you 01:33:00know [chuckles].

TEM: We take our permits seriously up here [laughs].

JG: Yeah [laughs]. But things are changing down there as well, I have to say. It's becoming, you know, more international.

TEM: What do you think? Closing thoughts?

JG: That's - well, I just, I guess just a brief closing thought is that for me, you know, spending most, if not all, of my adult life working in this area of organic agriculture, for me the really rewarding thing - I don't really remember about struggling for money or, you know, I don't remember that part of it so much, but the people involved, they're just the most incredible, interesting, fantastic people involved in this movement. And you see it when at like this 01:34:00conference, the Organic Seed Alliance Conference going on here in Corvallis, it's like several hundred people, like-minded people. They're just incredible people involved, and to me, that's the most important thing, I think.

TEM: Yeah, individual stories and, yeah.

JG: It's just being a part, part of something with so many fine people.

TEM: Well, thank you for-

JG: Not counting him [mumbles].

TEM: I know, got - and we'll swivel the [laughs]. Thank you for coming to Oregon, thank you for coming to the library.

JG: Very happy to be here.