Harry MacCormack Oral History Interview, January 2, 2018

CHRIS PETERSEN: All right, today is January 2nd, 2018 and we are once again in the Valley Library with Harry MacCormack for our second interview with him. Last time we talked about a lot of the stuff that wasn't agriculture, and today we'll talk about agriculture. So, I want to begin with you finish up at Iowa, you mentioned last time you had a job offer here at OSU that was enticing, you wanted to return to the Northwest, but you also found yourself renting some farmland, is that correct?

HARRY MACCORMACK: Yes. When we first came here, my wife, my then wife Linda, [laughs] grew up in kind of a city in the upper Midwest and she said, "Well, why don't we get some land? I'd like to have a horse," and she'd never been around farm animals before. So, when we came to town we looked in the paper and we found a place for rent out in Beavercreek, which is about six miles beyond where I am, now up in a canyon. And it turned out the place was owned by Hal Schudel who used to be on faculty here in the Forestry Department, and Hal was just 00:01:00beginning Holiday Tree Farms right at that point and he and his wife were going to live out there in this big five-bedroom, two-story farmhouse, old farmhouse, and they had gotten it partially remodeled and then his wife suddenly decided that she didn't want to be that far from town. She had too many things going on in town. In fact, she-we had a private discussion with them in which she told Linda, "Honey, are you sure you want to live that far out?"

So, we naively took it on and part of the deal we cut was I would finish the remodel which was mostly painting I think at that point. And we established a garden. There was a year-round spring on the place, which I had never dealt with a spring before, but we established a garden right away when we got that first-oh, the first winter it snowed a lot and then when the spring came we had a garden. And we had the horses. Dr. Craig, who's here on campus, his horse was 00:02:00out there too. He and I went to high school together. So, he had a horse out there and then we had some-couple of white face, and it was kind of just a homestead at that point. We were-I was reminded by Linda a couple of weeks ago-we canned everything. We picked everything we could find, we canned stuff, we made wine, we bought meat from local people and had a freezer and, you know, had a half a cow or a half of whatever in there all the time. It was what I had grown up with back east, so was the beginning of that.

And then when we left that situation we actually were going to go to Texas. We came back and we established a homestead type thing with the Baldwins. Robert Baldwin was known in town here as one of the famous high school teachers and was on the school board actually for a long time after he retired. Barbara was in 00:03:00the English Department. That's how I knew him. So, we built a cabin on the side of their place, and they had a barn and we had a big joint garden and it was kind of another homestead situation. And from that, we left and started the River Run Live and Learn Community School, which was down off Garden Avenue, and that had a two-acre garden. So, in all of this, what was happening was I was learning how to grow stuff in the Pacific Northwest, which was way different from growing up back east. And at the same time, there wasn't a lot of information available. The Rodale stuff was all of course oriented to mostly the east coast and a little bit the Midwest and that's basically what we had, Organic Farming every month that kind of said anything. But most of what was going on was just trying to figure out how to grow in this climate.

So, after we finished with the free school and when I got my settlement with the school in Texas, we bought the farm where I'm now and we started and we started 00:04:00Sunbow farm in 1971. We bought it and we started the first farming season in '72. And we started it as an intentional organic farm, which there weren't any here, intentional. There were people that were probably doing stuff that would fit within some kind of organic framework, but we were doing it intentionally with a whole philosophy that came from J. I. Rodale that went back to European roots of Rudolf Steiner and older people in Europe which is where Rodale got his stuff.

And we put a sign out on the road, Plymouth Road, which is at the corner of Bellfountain, and in those days it wasn't much traffic at all but we managed to sell our stuff for-tomatoes for 50 cents a pound and corn for 12 for a dollar, and kind of that was the way it was in those days, you know, nobody expected to pay much for anything. So, we had a couple seasons like that and-

CP: Was this an honor system set up, or were you out there sitting on the side of the road selling?

HM: No, we just put a sign-out and they drove in.

CP: Okay.

HM: Yeah, it was people canning mostly. I grew a lot of tomatoes for people to get for canning. I did that for years. Even when we started the co-op, part of what people expected every year was me and a little bit from Tom; we'd have stacks of tomatoes sitting outside the co-op door and people would come buy their canning tomatoes. Nobody does that anymore.

CP: Tom?

HM: We used to sell a lot of them on the coast.

CP: Tom Denison?

HM: Yeah.

CP: Okay.

HM: So yeah, Tom came into the organic farming thing kind of right after-well, we all started selling together in the eighties, early eighties, so he was-he's younger. He's 15 years younger than me. And he went to Cornell so he came back with knowledge of hoop houses and a lot of stuff that taught a lot of us how to deal with things that we weren't being able to deal with.

CP: I want to ask a little bit more about that, the process of gathering this 00:06:00knowledge. So, what's interesting to me at the outset here is that you had a garden growing up and then you had a garden in this other space that you lived in here but you were never actually a farmer; you had to learn how to be a farmer, right? I'm interested in acquiring that toolkit.

HM: You grow up in upstate New York in World War II, you grew a farm, you know, doing a garden and in some loose way participating in the farms around us. We just had a garden at our place but we harvested hay for the community and my dad and I delivered it every weekend. So you know, you're just part of a farming community. And here the big difference was that even though we had had-and the first year we were here we had the worst snow I've ever seen here in all the years I've been here. It was 1967, '68 winter and it was three feet of snow on the valley floor. It crushed buildings and it was bad. They even had to shut this place down, which it never shut down in those days. So, gardening was just something that if I was going to live someplace, I got to have a garden. My 00:07:00sister's the same way, where you plant part of your food and you harvest part of your food. That's just something that's ingrained in us.

In terms of learning, the whole aspect of agriculture being so heavily chemical already at that point bothered me a lot, and I found that out, as I pointed out before, in California I think because we had-I'd gone to high school and I'd gotten sprayed when I was picking beans with Mexicans in the field and it just bothered me a lot that all these chemicals were out there. And I didn't grow up that way, so for me what we call organics was how-what I knew how to do. I didn't have to really ask anybody, except living in this climate I did because it looked to me like you could grow stuff here year around. Not very many people were doing it but it looked like you could. And it turned out you could and it turned out that we ended up actually writing a lot about that over the years.

This is a unique place. It's a unique place on the planet and it's-to grow food here is maybe going to become a necessity as climate change pushes its way. We'll see if it ends up being more but the fact is you can grow a lot of stuff here year around if you just pay attention. That's the key.

So, when we got on Sunbow I started working at the university again part-time, but in the mornings and afternoons I was building the farm out. We were getting enough of a customer base where it looked like we needed to do more cropping, and I had a tracker that Grandma next door had given to me to use. I was doing her place too. Just hay over there, but taking care of animals and hay, and we had animals. We had goats and sheep and we had a whole goat herd when we were first on the farm. We were milking goats and selling goat milk to people that 00:09:00lived over here across from where the co-op is now, in a housing project. And we were growing strange-to-me crops that they wanted like turnips and rutabagas and stuff. And I started growing grain for the animals. I picked up an old combine, a pull-behind Dearborn combine that still sits on my place.

And we were being known already by at least the neighbors and some other people as having this organic homestead farm, so anybody somebody here at the university asked a question about organic, usually they got pushed out to me. And that happened way out into the nineties that people here would refer people, like Jim Fullmer who wrote the back cover for this book. He's the head of Demeter USA and he was a student here at OSU and he was an organic guy. He had to go through all the chemical classes and, you know, he did pretty well in them 00:10:00but when he wasn't in school he was out helping me because he was trying to figure out the other way to do it. And he didn't grow up farming. He's ended up being a major figure that we have in the alternative ag industry.

So, we get up to the early seventies when we were there on the farm. An organization called Regional Tilth started up, up in Washington. And a bunch of us that were homesteading went up there for a conference. They thought there were going to be 50 people and 650 showed up, and that was the beginning of kind of thinking in a more formal sense about what organic agriculture was and how we should define it and how we should set it off against industrial chemical agriculture. So, started a journal, the Tilth journal that became actually famous all over the world almost instantly because nobody was saying the stuff 00:11:00that we were saying. We were young people that were discovering, using science, what we could do to do stuff, plant food and grow food without having to use chemicals.

And there came a point where Regional Tilth was actually going to publish a second book. We published a first one. It was called Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest. It was by Binda Colebrook and that was the result of research a lot of us were doing both in Washington and Oregon, trying to figure out how to grow in this year-round climate. So, that book sold pretty well and based on it, we got a loan to do another book and the other book was called The Future is Abundant. But it was about 10 years ahead of its time and it didn't sell and all the sudden the family that made the loan for 10,000 bucks needed the money back. They had a family emergency.

So, Regional Tilth was in trouble and they hadn't been doing proper stuff with tax base and all that, so on the way home, Lynn Coody, Yvonne Frost, and I 00:12:00decided we better start Oregon Tilth because we'd already started a very small certified organic certification business. Bob Cooperrider wrote the first one-page document for that and there were 12 of us that certified each other's farms the first year. But it was growing and we had a lot of interest, in both states actually, at that point. And some pretty big growers involved. Gene Kahn from Cascadian Farms in Washington, Trout Lake Farms in Trout Lake, Washington. That was Lon Johnson. He has a different name now, Lon Ball, but somebody told me he changed his name again. And those kinds of outfits were putting the money up for us to build the certification program out.

So, for about two years we hustled. I first wrote the Standards and Guidelines 00:13:00[holds up a spiral-bound document]. They came out first in 1987 and this version of it was just me. Lynn Coody went through it and edited it but it was me and we had three categories: "Encouraged," "Discouraged," and "Not Allowed." And it was based on Rodale philosophy. We were coming at it from a point of view of this is right and that's wrong.

CP: Lynn told me that the initial manuscript that you penned definitely read like the work of a novelist.

HM: Yeah, yeah. So, and then Lynn and I together did a second edition of that in, let's see, this one came out in 1989. So, this is March '87, this is March '89. And in the revised edition we started broaching, because of Lynn and other people-but Lynn was a big force in it-we started broaching the idea of maybe talking about organics in terms of inputs; that they were different inputs from 00:14:00synthetic chemical agriculture.

So, between those two things we established a reputation of Oregon Tilth and I ended up being the first Executive Director, and not because I wanted to be but I got pushed into it. and it wasn't a paying job. It was kind of like I'm doing the same thing with Ten Rivers now. So, we got Yvonne onboard to build the business of certification and these standards and guidelines, especially the second one, ended up being the basis for the Texas program and the Washington program before they wrote their own. We got a call from Jim Hightower one day and he said, "I hear you guys have got some standards," you know.

So, it was-and we even were getting inquiries from Japan. In fact, that second set of standards was translated into Japanese by somebody that was doing Organics in Japan. There was a group in Hawaii that used it. And this was before 00:15:00we put together the Western Alliance and all that. So, what was going on, on our farm at that time, by the time you get to 1984, we're into the first farmers' markets here in Corvallis. It's hard for people to think now that there weren't any things like that [laughs]. There wasn't even a co-op when I started farming. I was selling stuff to Gerding's Market. And Fran Gerding actually would-did a lot of work to help get the co-op going, support wise.

So, when we started the farmer's markets, the certification became even more important because we had something we could put out there and tell people we're different, you know. And at that same point, we started trying to raise money and we ran into the Northwest Area Foundation about '88. The Northwest Area Foundation, we contacted them and then they got back with us and they indicated 00:16:00that they were going to be putting together a sustainability grant program in five states and that we were eligible to take the one in Oregon if we were willing to work with Oregon State University. So, we said "Yes, we were," and we came over and made some overtures with a few people and figured out we could probably do it. We went ahead and applied for the grant and the first grant was I think-it was 300 and some thousand dollars, 310 or something like that.

And we had to struggle with the university. Some parts of the university didn't want that money in here, for various reasons. It was a grant that dealt with sustainable agriculture but it was dealing with a lot of disciplines, and that wasn't what was happening easily on this campus at this point. So, we had people from Sociology, we had people from Ag Econ, from Ag Production, from, you know, 00:17:00all these different places, plus me running the thing and I was across the street here at the theatre. So, we'd have these weekly meetings with heads of the Ag School and they were kind of slimy and greasy. I actually had to bring in a heavyweight from another part of the university to get the thing through.

But we got it through and at that point, the farming took off. As soon as we had farmers markets and then we had these new natural food stores-some of them were older but a lot of them were new-there was product that was needed. So, it was a matter of kind of trying to keep up after that, especially when we did the processing standards and then we did the animals standards after that. And once Oregon Tilth had all three of those, nobody else had those. They had food standards for produce. They didn't have anything else. So, we were instantly thrust into the national limelight and we were all over the place at conventions 00:18:00and conferences.

And meanwhile, there's life on the farms. So, I'm in here in the afternoons nine months a year, back at home before dark, use the lights on the tractor a lot of times to get stuff done. We, fortunately, had a lot of apprentices that-most of them came from Europe, but people that were backpacks and over here wanting to tie into farms. Working Weekends on Organic Farms, it was originally called, and then it became Willing Workers on Organic Farms, and it's still around. It's a worldwide program. And I had, in the early days of Tilth, Regional Tilth, I had set up the program here, so people would oftentimes come and stay at our place and then I'd farm them out to different places for a day or two. Some of them would stay all summer. It kind of depended on the year and who we had.

And then once we, in '78, we started the soy dairy on our farm, and that brought another whole round of people. So, we always had a lot of people on our farm, people coming to look at-I wrote this booklet [holds up booklet] called The Soy Dairy Farm and it was the process that we did, which was we grew some soy here as an experiment, which we did years later as part of the Bean and Grain Project at Ten Rivers Food Web, and Willamette Farm and Food were involved in, but mostly we brought in soy from Midwest. I contracted with a couple of different farmers over the years and had them grow it, because that would free up our land for not experimenting but keeping going with all the markets that were opening up for vegetables and fruits.

But the soy dairy itself was an interesting concept for a small farm, and of course, the farm in Tennessee became famous for that too. One of the things they weren't doing was they weren't making compost from the leftover okara. So I 00:20:00immediately, because of my upbringing with manure, I didn't have animals anymore and I went well, I've got 7% protein here, that's compost, you know. So, I brought in chips from the mills and we started this whole compost process, which I'm still in the compost business, but not with that.

And the idea of having an alternative source of protein that wasn't based in animal and that a lot of kids with snotty noses-we met all these people that had sick kids and we'd get them on tofu and the sickness would go away-so we started running nutrition stuff, which the latest version of that is in this book [holds up copy of Assessing Plant-Based Foods for Humans and Animals] which Ten Rivers published, but actually the material that I wrote in here was back in the soy dairy days because we were doing all that research back then, trying to figure out what nutritionally people actually needed to stay healthy and how to do that organically.

And that's kind of what our farm specialized in, was what can we grow here, 00:21:00let's figure out what we can grow here, let's figure out what we can grow here, how can we do it at the highest quality, and then how can we express that in the community through farmers markets, CSAs, how would we do it, you know. And the soy dairy was a big help in that in a lot of ways because it gave us a product that we could take into the old Waremart, which is WinCo Foods now. They were our biggest customer actually, here in Corvallis, because they were located over where Fred Meyer is now across the street. That neighborhood in there has got a lot of foreign students and he started selling out of tofu almost immediately when we put it in there. So, for the years that they were there he, Bill-I forget his last name-the produce manager, won I think three consecutive company awards for moving most product. He had all my stuff out there marked organic. We brought I another organic farm and put it there.

This is-the co-op was going but it was pretty small still, so we were pushing a 00:22:00lot of food through there: cabbage, basil, all the stuff on their shelves. And people were buying it, so we knew that that was one way we could move. We could eventually take this program from just being local-based in terms of farmers markets and CSAs and stuff and we could put it into regular stores where people shop, and if we had the growers, we-the products would move. And that proved out over the years. Yvonne Frost really pushed doing that, and once we got the National Organic Standards Program going in the nineties, why it allowed for almost every store now you can go in and see that USDA label and people trust that. A lot of people; some people don't. A lot of people trust that. So, that's kind of the basis of the early days of certification.

CP: Can I ask more about the soy dairy?

HM: Yeah.

CP: It's one thing for a farmer to grow vegetables and wash them off and to ship them off to somewhere, but I gather there's a little bit more infrastructure involved with creating tofu. Can you tell me about that?

HM: So, the basis for a soy dairy was in Japan and the reason we did it was because my second wife had grown up at Okinawa, so she knew how that stuff was supposed to be and she knew how to do it but she actually knew how it was supposed to be, and that was way different than the little bit that was going on in the state at the time. The other part of it is that I grew up around dairy farms. So, I'm used to-there's a picture in here of a milk shed off from the dairy down the road from me and you know, a milk shed like this [holds book open to show picture of milk shed], I don't know if you can show that in the camera, but they aren't very big. They're a small building about twice the size of this room. They've got a stainless steel sink and, you know, wash-down stuff. It has to be a clean process and it's state inspected.

So, when we started doing soy milk-which the state wouldn't allow me to call it M-I-L-K at that point because the state rules said it had to come from an animal, so I spelled it M-I-L-Q-U-E and they-that was fine. We had to run everything through their lab. So, I built a little building, I put a wood fired system into it, which nobody had. Might have been a few left in Japan that way, but Bill Shurtleff, who wrote The Book of Tofu, said he didn't think there were any left except ours. And we simmered because we were looking for the nutritional quality of the milk. Instead of putting it into a big boiler system, a pressure cooker system where the heat would be so high, we took it up to just around boiling. We had to get it passed 190 to take out the trypsin inhibitor in the soybeans. Other than that we soaked the beans until the sprout stage. So, our tofu tasted fresh. It almost tasted like eating grass in some ways. It had 00:25:00that kind of green feel to it because we had locked in nutrition at another level, just from soaking for a longer period and then using lower heat.

And we did that for six years, eight months and two days and what it allowed us to do with the farm was buildout the farm and have markets available. So, we didn't have to put a sign out on the road most of the time, except when we had a lot of tomatoes. I could go into Waremart or Ross Market or Richey's and tell them, "Hey, I've got 40 cabbages, anybody want some cabbage this week?" and they'd take them, you know. Because I was in-we were in there. It wasn't me all the time but one of us was in there every day. We serviced our tofu on the shelf every day. We put it in a twist-lock bag so we could change the water out so it would stay fresh. We brought our own water, too. We didn't use city water.

That was the other thing, is because we were on a farm well that had been checked out to be the standard of the Pedee spring, which is the state standard. We had this incredible water and that's why people that-actually some people in 00:26:00Eugene wanted it, so for a while, we sold it in Eugene, but it was a unique flavor, unique stuff. And then, of course, you have left over from the bean, you have leftover this okara. And we made five kinds of burgers with that but we still had a lot. We made soy sausage with it. So, that's what I started the compost thing with. But it was a nice way to run a small farm. It was a five day a week cash flow for half-time, and farming a lot of times, at least at that point in time, wasn't that.

CP: And the workforce was primarily your family and then these kids that would work with you?

HM: It was our family and then every year we allowed two interns to sign on for a year. We had housing on the farm for them. And partly they signed on partially for the soy dairy and to learn that whole process and partially to help out with the farm to learn that process. So, some pretty incredible people went through 00:27:00that program, and some of them started other soy dairies.

There was a big one that they started up in Mount Angel that went on for about five years before they-when you get to a certain size with either a farm or something like a dairy, you end up competing on a different level, and it's easier to get wiped out the farther up you get. So, Dayton [phonetic] came in, in Beaverton and underpriced them. They were in the same kind of market chain they were in and they underpriced them by ten cents and that wiped them out.

CP: Had you thought about the soy piece as a market that needed to be filled or were you more interested in it as a product that you thought would be helpful for people? I mean, it feels to me like it's an entrepreneurial risk that you're taking here. Were you confident that it was going to be fine?

HM: We were coming at the whole thing from the point of view of integrating it into a small farm system, but the reason Mia was into it was she'd seen the health effects of it, and she was also an excellent cook and a vegetarian. So, 00:28:00our farm transitioned out of me being an animal farmer with 13 milking goats. We actually, while we had the soy dairy going, for a while we still had a couple of milk goats and I finally gave them to 4-H kids. We transitioned over to becoming a vegetarian farm including the compost, which was a concept that nobody had thought about before. Everybody was just into let's grow it with manure. Well, as the standards have pointed out over the years, there's a whole bunch of problems with manure, and if you get with the chemical guys here, they'll go on for hours about manure.

So, by doing it with soy, and now I do it with leaves, leftover leaves from the city, making compost that that stuff was all going in the landfill, and incredible compost made out of leaves. It's just-it's a fairly long system, it takes me two years, but I've got it set up so it works fine and we make about, I don't even know, hundreds and hundreds of yards of compost a year and provide it 00:29:00for gardeners and for our farm.

So yeah, to answer the question about the soy thing, that was what we know, that's where the research was at in terms of getting protein, which is the way we first thought about it. We didn't know about amino acids yet because we hadn't run into Dr. Kapuler. But the soy thing was a way of using scientific research, a lot of which had been done in Germany during World War II when they were taking a look at how to feed babies and they did actual onsite science where you had comparisons of various soy and other baby formulas and soy always ended up at the top.

Years later, we find out there's some problems with soy for certain people, namely, it pushes estrogen in some people, but that was where we were at, at that time in the mid-seventies. I built the soy dairy in '78. In fact, the kids 00:30:00are out at the farm right now rebuilding the market room I built that-I did a lot of building that year. I built the market room that year, and they just tore it all apart about four days ago and they've got until tomorrow to get it back together because they're starting business again tomorrow [laughs].

Yeah, it was a way of doing that. Where I'm personally at right now with soy is that I still eat some of it. I'm a vegetarian and I have been for over 40 years. But what I've gotten fascinated with in the Willamette Valley and have done a lot of work on, both with recipes and with science: fava beans. They have about the same amino acid structure as soy, but they don't have that trypsin inhibitor and they don't have some other stuff. So, you don't get that estrogen hit from them and they grow here in the cold. They love this climate. They grow all over the-they're actually the most popular bean in the world, used to be. I don't know if they still are. So, I've spent a lot of effort translating our soy 00:31:00recipes over to making stuff-I have fava sauce, aged fava hummus, fava, you know, anything. You know.

CP: You described the early years on the farm as a homesteading life. Can you tell me more about what that means?

HM: Well, what it traditionally means is that you're trying to grow most of your food there, so you try to make it as closed a loop as you can get, but I recognize the fact that I'm an urban person. Part of the reason our farm is four miles from town instead of 16 miles from town is we were gregarious people who do stuff in town. We're university people, we're, you know. Plus, it turned out it's a great marketing area because as things grew, why we got all these people across the road from us and down the road from us, so in terms of direct marketing it's a nice little place to be. What was that question?

CP: Homestead life.

HM: Homestead life, yeah. So we, my second wife-well actually, my first wife and 00:32:00I described that out at Beavercreek. We did quite a bit of stuff. Second wife and I perfected the vegetarian thing and did a lot of canning. We-she was Italian and Jewish and we put up, first year, 35 quarts of tomatoes, and we were done with that by January. So, we'd usually put up about 90 quarts of tomatoes. And there's a-my old house was set up with a big pantry, so that's the way people lived. Originally those houses had two chimneys, which mine does, and the wood cook stove went all day in the kitchen; the one in the living room went at night. So, that was they heated, and we still heat with wood. We don't cook with wood but I'm set up so I can if I have to.

But we put up everything we could put up and pretty much lived off from what we were making because we weren't making that much. Even my jobs at the university here were on the low end of the low end of the scale. Being in the arts is one part of it and the other part of it was being where I was in the arts, you know. 00:33:00So yeah, so we managed to get by and stay healthy, and that's the main focus is to stay healthy, try to keep our other people healthy.

CP: How about for your kids?

HM: My kids?

CP: Yeah, growing up in this-

HM: So, my kids were on the farm when we-one of them was born there. Heron was-Blue Heron was born there, the first. That's pretty much why we ended up taking that place. So, the first few weeks we were there, he was born. Linda had an agenda kind of after that and she wanted to go to graduate school and she was starting to hang out with the women's movement a lot and ended up pretty much moving with women. They all ended up moving to Colorado, actually. So, my kids didn't really grow up on the farm. Lani came back while they were in Eugene and helped out on weekends and brought some of the kids, but that was two years. The rest of it, they remember it fondly but they're both business people. My 00:34:00daughter put the whole Umpqua Bank system together with Ray, who just retired, and she's still there but she'll probably retire soon. And my son is an international businessman who just lived the last five years in China and now he's living in Qatar. Yeah, they're both interested in food from a gourmet point of view, but they're both making a lot of money, so they eat out a lot [laughs]. They want to see the farm keep going, so they actually hold a trust after I'm gone, they and my grandkids.

CP: Tell me about the early days of the co-op.

HM: So the co-op, when it first started, I pointed out in the last interview that it started here on campus in discussions, went to the house over there on north...I see it coming back-4th, and then we moved after I think we were about a year, year and a half over there, and then we moved on one Saturday. We moved into the hamburger stand we bought across the Marys River bridge on 3rd Street 00:35:00and over the years expanded that into what it is now.

So, it was... The idea was the have bulk grains and bulk foods available at a price that people who didn't have much money could afford and have it all organic. So, that's kind of what pushed the whole thing ahead, and then gradually expanded into cheese. There was a point at which we weren't expanded enough down there, so another couple started Cheese, Please on 2nd street for two years to take the pressure off the co-op and they developed that business and then basically gave the business back to the co-op. That couple are the same ones that put money behind Grass Roots Bookstore. Not the ones that own it currently.

And we developed a produce shack and on the north side of the co-op. It was literally a shack, and about five of us I think that were the main farmers for 00:36:00it, and we had a woman that was in there part-time I think, managing it. So, then eventually we got big enough so we could bring the produce inside, but you know, that was a pretty small-it was a hamburger stand when we bought it but it had a lot of property to it, so...

CP: So, was the co-op basically formed and run by farmers at the outset? I mean, you talk about "when we bought it" and...?

HM: No, it was-I think it was mostly people that were here at the university I think mostly, and some church people. Church people in this town have always been involved in whatever we end up doing food-wise. They were the ones that got involved in started Ten Rivers. Kind of do-gooder people that were coming off both the civil rights and the antiwar movement, anti-chemicals, you know, that kind of a range of people in that set. And I think in those days we probably 00:37:00could count 2,000 or 3,000 people that we could count on for being part of that.

Eventually, with the Saturday market, which I ended up having to start because people asked for that, we've had a pretty steady 5,000 people that we can count on in this town, which seems like a lot but it's not really. It's a drop in the bucket of the amount of food that goes through this town. And nationally we're at, depending on where you're at, we're at about 5%. Some studies show that Eugene and possibly Corvallis might be up closer to 10% of the food being locally based and organic. But as soon as you get outside, it drops down to 1.8, in our research we've done. So, we're basically importing all of our food, you know.

Most people are eating stuff they have no idea what it comes from, what processes it's gone through, and that's why the nutritional quality of it is so 00:38:00poor, you know. In the organic industry, we've made-especially here in Oregon-we've made big pushes to try to keep even the stuff we're selling in the stores in a higher quality. So OGC, for instance, instead of having a 1,500 to 2,500-mile radius on their trucks, trucking products, their average is 800, which cuts down the time. Right now we're living off our friends in Mexico and southern California and Arizona, and the time coming from their fields to the co-op shelf is, as efficient as we can get it, it's still five days minimum. But it's pretty amazing that you can move stuff that far and have it semi-fresh, you know.

CP: And what is your sense of the co-op now?

HM: I think we're in the fourth generation of people that have been involved with it, and the same thing's true of Oregon Tilth. I see the fourth generation 00:39:00coming in now. And as these generations go on, they have different focuses and different interests. So, what the co-op started out to be, just because of the way the world has moved, it isn't. It is the spot in town where I can go in and I think 99% of the stuff I'm going to buy on the shelf will be organic and processed to the best of our processing abilities.

Some of those processing abilities were tested here at OSU. I called up Farkas, who used to run the food lab over here, one day and I said, "Hey, what do we know about this? It's called Xylene. What do we know about this chemical xylene that's in all the processing? Can we do without it?" And he said "Yeah, I just had a girl write a Ph.D. up. We could run steam jets in there instead." I said, "Has anybody done it?" He went, "no" [laughs]. I went, "You guys want to be on a 00:40:00grant with Oregon Tilth?" He said, "Yeah, you can't be on it, but we'll get somebody on it." So we had a big meeting and put other people on it.

And we found out that really that chemical is pretty much required to keep all the tubes and the processing clean, and it gets into the food. There's four different levels of it. We've got it all worked out, but it's still there in all the processing plants all these years later because the steam thing didn't work. We tried it. So, so much for a Ph.D. So yeah, just taking it to the limits.

And then we did this transition document the first time in 1988 and it was me dealing with a lot of these issues of ag chemistry in our food: how much did we know. So, I - actually, this is the fifth floor. The old fifth floor of the library had, I don't know where it is in here now but I know it's all here - you can research in our - the books here at OSU, you can find all the positive and 00:41:00all that negative stuff about anything chemical in agriculture that you ever wanted to know. I spent hours in this building looking at stuff and my conclusion was the guys that were making the stuff knew how bad it was and actually cautioned about it.

So that was the beginning of writing the transition document, which I wrote at night in the summer and then I would go over to Dr. Alan Kapuler's house and both of us were farming. So we'd sit in front of - he had a little Macintosh computer. I didn't have a computer. I was just writing it out. And we'd bang this stuff in and he had the Ph.D. and he actually had a worldwide reputation already as a microbiologist.

He graduated cum laude from Yale at 20 years old or something and then he was a big deal at Rockefeller Institute when they were first studying DNA. So he was - he had a worldwide reputation and he scared people here on campus. I brought him on campus a few times and one time I brought him in and he - he blew my mind in 00:42:00front of a crowd of grad students and he said, "We don't want to talk about protein anymore. We need to be talking about amino acids." And he went on and gave a whole lecture on amino acids and how they were available from all the fruits and vegetables. We didn't need meat. We didn't need animal agriculture, it was violent. He went on and on.

So he wrote the whole section in here on this radical approach to looking at diet by growing out amino acids. And he - we eventually tested the juices of a lot of tomatoes and other vegetables for the amino acids found. We ended up publishing a lot of that in here in these kinds of grafts [holds up a copy of "The Transition Document: Toward an Environmentally Sound Agriculture"]. He carried this thing off to a big biological convention. And he gave it to...now I'm going to forget his name. Anyway, a guy from USDA who ended up writing a big book for Rodale years later. But the guy came down and pronounced it a work of 00:43:00genius, and when he came back they were all sold. So we printed - we were over here at Kinko's across the street, printing these things out. He let us do it for free because he was fascinated by what we were doing [laughs].

We printed out another, I don't know, 1,500 of them or something and sold them off. And then there were two other additions of this at different times, the last one being in '93, but they pretty much all kind of look like this, kind of had the same stuff in. And then when I retired from the university, a bunch of people had said The Transition Document needs to be rewritten. So I took two winters, did a bunch more research, took a look at this went wow, this is really poorly organized. And then I wrote this [holds up a copy of The Transition Document: Toward a Biologically Resilient Agriculture], which has been out since 2000... I forget the exact date on it, but it was carried up until last year by Acres USA, which is an international ag magazine they carried in - they have a lot of books that they sell. They carried it. It's still being sold by some seed 00:44:00companies. I still sell it on our website.

But we went a little bit - I went a little bit further with this, using his work and using the work of Diana Tracy of ANTECH Labs, which was where we were - once we started testing soil, we were having all the testing done by her. And Dr. Wit [Dr. Robert Witters] here at Oregon State University kept looking at what we're doing. I kept getting in arguments with him all the time. Because of stuff I'd write, he'd call me in. And at one point he went up to her lab which is up in the Columbia Gorge and ended up giving her a blue ribbon at the end of the day and congratulated her on what she was doing. And she was pretty well known in the food processing industry for doing testing because it turned out that processors actually do test for chemicals, as we found out harshly in the organic business.

We had a - one of the best stories about that that's in the book, we had a 400-acre organic field up by McMinnville, sort of northwest of McMinnville, and 00:45:00one of the things that was wrong was cucumbers and another with squash and stuff like that. Cucurbits. And these were going into containers and being shipped to Japan to have - be made into baby food before they got shipped back here and had a label put on them. So the baby food factories all have labs and they all check the stuff coming in. They called us up, and I think they were dealing with a winter squash that they were making food out of, and they said, "This one shipment came in and it's hotter than a pistol." It had dieldrin and chlordane, high levels. So we were able to - nobody else could do this, but Oregon Tilth could go back and look at the field and look at our tests than we'd done in the field. But we were testing the top foot of soil, which seems like it ought to be enough for a squash plant to me.

Turned out when we got OSU involved because we didn't know what the hell was happening, we get OSU involved and we went "Are the chemicals coming through the 00:46:00skin of the squash and laying on the soil, or are they come through the roots? Because the squash are taking them up, and the unique thing that they're doing that we found in our research is they're magnifying what we find in the soil by four times in the flesh and eight times in the seed, and this stuff's going into baby food. That was the shocker that blew open the black box that made this book popular because nobody's - nobody knew him and stuff.

So Dr. Wit and some other people did - actually did experiments up on that field, and the levels that we found on the top level of the soil didn't match what we were getting at all in the squash, but what they did was they had a device that would allow them to see where the roots actually went. And it was sandy soil and the roots went down 12 feet and they were down in a level where they found heavy levels of residual chemicals, and that's what was being brought up. But then it was being magnified on top of that and nobody knows that 00:47:00mechanism for sure yet. I've had a few chemists take a guess at it. Really nobody knows. It just happens with all the cucurbits. In fact, it happens to a certain extent with other things. But the dieldrin and chlordane problem here in the valley floor with growing cucurbits is huge.

The other one we found was DDT, which you know, we haven't had DDT sprayed, we don't think, for about 40 years now or something. But the residues of DDT hang up in the soil after one application for 50 years or more for a half-life. And there was [unintelligible] one application, so we're looking at hundreds of years that that stuff's going to be around. And unless you test for it, you don't know. So there's a lot of organic produce being grown across the country on transition to ground that nobody's tested or they haven't tested adequately. And some of that stuff, the beets, for instance, will take up DDT. We know that. There's other things that will too. That's all in here. That's why this book is so valuable. Nobody - nobody wrote this stuff down anywhere except in - if you 00:48:00go in all the buried papers that all the academics have done.

The other thing that I did in this version of this book happened because of Oregon State University Library. I had a doctor friend who called me up one day and he said, "Harry, have you read the Trands - "Biological Transmutations" by Louis Kervran?" And I went, "What's that?" And he said, "You've got to read it." So I came over to the library, got in the old card file, and there it was. I went and got the book. Nobody had read it. Wasn't anybody on the - you used to be able to see who read stuff, you know. I took it home and read it and it was a little, I have to say, a little bit over my head, but I went this is brilliant because what Louis Kervran was talking about and why I wrote the book "Cosmic Influence in Agricultural Processes," what Kervran and Pauling were talking about was that elements that we think are stable, like calcium, for instance, 00:49:00are not stable in the presence of biology. If you have heightened biology, it's the same thing you have with heightened radiation. You have isotopes of those minerals that are free and because of the - if you can get heightened biology into a soil, you have a chance of calcium being produced within the soil system and you don't have to be out there liming.

And you know, we got in - that's how I got into the biology in a more intense level and started working with Dr. Elaine Ingham, who used to be here, left here and started Soil Foodweb, actually started it before she left here. And I worked with her for a lot of years. If you have the bacterial and fungal, basically levels in the soil that you can have that we usually don't have, you have 00:50:00processes going on that are creating levels of biology and chemistry that are going to feed those plants that are going to make really highly nutritious stuff. And if those aren't going on, you're not going to have that. And that's really the damages that chemical agriculture has done, especially with fungi. They tended to retard it down to almost nothing. And the fungi are what, it turns out, cycle the calcium and phosphorus and other stuff.

So if you've got a low fungal load from using fungicides and herbicides, you're not getting that cycling. And then you put on a lot of nitrogen and you get what Dr. Charles Benbrook in here calls plant obesity from too much nitrogen, which throws the whole thing out of whack, and they look nice, but nutritionally they're inferior. And we've got a whole agricultural system built that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. And that's why this book was written and why this book was written.

So Louis Kervran's work is French, was translated into English when he wrote the 00:51:00"Biological Transmutation" by the Soil Association in England, which is kind of the - sort of like Oregon Tilth in a way. A little older. So I'm in - I'm in England, I'm giving a little lecture in which Elaine's stuff was prominent and with a whole bunch of people, and the Soil Association sponsored it, and afterward I asked the people, "So what do you know about Louis Kervran?" Nobody ever heard of him. And then Sharon and I were in Paris where Kervran was doing a lot of his work, went to the ag people there. Nobody ever heard of them.

So basically, his work is lost except for what's here in this library, which is Linus Pauling's work and Kervran's work is here too. There's one of his papers translated into English called "Biological Transmutations in Modern Physics." And I don't think it exists anywhere else and it's just here. So this collection that we're putting together with alternative agriculture is way bigger than just Oregon Tilth. That's - it's what Pauling was working with and what these other 00:52:00guys a generation before us were discovering.

There's another one, Jacques Benveniste, another Frenchman. The things he discovered about water and the capabilities of water carrying energy and being able to - so the water part of us, so the water part of plants being able to work with the electrons, electrodes in the water and being able to move things because of that, that's all in here too. That - those are the two most controversial parts of this book, are the work of Kervran and the work of Benveniste, and Linus Pauling was involved with both of those guys.

CP: Well, we've touched on the origin story of Oregon Tilth a bit, and they emerged partly out of dysfunction and dissatisfaction with Regional Tilth, and it sounds as if there were three people basically involved: Lynn Coody, yourself, and Yvonne Frost.

HM: Yeah, I would say in terms of the heavy pushing the organization into being what it is, that was the three people, yeah.

CP: Can you share your memories of - well, let's start with Lynn, your earliest interactions with Lynn.

HM: So, Lynn and I started working together when we had Willamette Valley Tilth, which was part of Regional Tilth. That's how I met her. And at one point when she was president, she and I made a promise to each other to keep carrying this work on the rest of our lives. I talked about that up in our introduction to the archive thing.

But Tom Forster was another big force. He went on to actually work with the UN. And I don't know what he's doing now, but at one point he was working with Cascadian for a little bit, and he's been around the world working with water... food service stuff, to foodstuff of one sort or another. But in terms of the actual organizational stuff, Lynn was a person to be able to keep everything 00:54:00organized and in files that you could actually - Yvonne was the businesswoman who - once a year my wife would go up and clean her office out and Yvonne would complain for a week afterward because she couldn't find anything. But she worked with stacks and a phone. And some guys here in Extension and I got together and gave her a headset at a conference. We did this in public; we gave her a headset and pair of maneuver boots for slogging through the shit that she had to do every day on the phone with everybody all over the country. So, her energy was driven by a vision and she was older. She's 10, 12 years older than me and almost 20 years older than Lynn.

And then my ability to be able to do community organizing comes from my parents, I think. To me it's just natural to start stuff and run stuff as a community organization; to try to get other people involved to pick up the detail work. So 00:55:00between the three of us, we were a pretty good team. And then the first boards had some people on them like Jack Gray that put together Winter Green Farm and Tom Lively that was - he and his brother were the basis of Organically Grown Company our big wholesaler. And there were people in other states too, but you know, these names pop up. They were the people that took on the responsibility for getting stuff done. Tom's the one that I accuse of pushing me into being Executive Director of Tilth. He was the one that suggested it to the board and they all pushed me into it. I did that for I think four years or maybe five years, something like that.

CP: Tell me about that. Tell me more about that experience.

HM: Well, it's an interesting position to be in, and I'm in it right now in Ten Rivers. You have this overview of the whole organization and your job is to 00:56:00appoint, and keep going, all the different parts. So, you're actually involved with those parts, so I was involved with writing standards on trying to give voice to the stuff that we were all talking about because I'm a writer, but also fundraising. And I'm fairly decent at fundraising, but I hate it. I really don't - I consider it begging and a waste of time, but I know we have to do it. I just did it again with Ten Rivers, you know. We just had to send out - and I don't know what's going to happen to nonprofits with all this tax stuff, but with Oregon Tilth I wrote that first big grant. I'd never written a grant of that size before. I've written a couple of small grants, but... Between Kapuler and I, we managed to bang that thing out and get into Northwest Area Foundation.

And after that, I hired an administrative assistant, and she'd never written grants either, but she started In Good Tilth, a magazine, and between the two of 00:57:00us we could get stuff done. And she was actually on staff for Oregon Tilth. I was still free [laughs]. And the Office for Research and Education was on Sunbow Farm and the Office for the Certification was on Yvonne's farm up in Tualatin... until the day that the Tualatin river flooded. They had to try to throw everything onto - all the files onto trucks, and some of them got wet. And they took the first office in Salem and spent a month or a month and a half trying to dry out stuff.

CP: Wow. Well, it sounds as if Oregon Tilth really developed a reputation because of the standards that it created.

HM: Because of what?

CP: The standards that it created, at the outset at least. Can you tell me more about how that happens? I mean, nobody else had managed to do this, but Oregon Tilth did. How does Oregon Tilth create these standards?

HM: Yeah, The standards that we started with, if you read them, they deal pretty 00:58:00much with plant-based stuff, plant material, plant - you know, plants. But we didn't really talk specifically about pasture until we got into the second, third iteration of standards where we were dealing with animals standards too. But um, what made Oregon Tilth jump ahead of everybody else was Yvonne Frost coming up with this notion of if we're ever going to have enough money to do anything, processors are going to be the way to get that money, and that most people are eating fast processed food and we need to get into that business to put some standards in there to change the way processing's been done. That was her and another woman named Yvonne something in Minnesota. The two of them banged their heads together and came up with it and Yvonne took off with it. The other woman had a board that didn't want to go for it at first.

So we had these meetings with the Sikhs from kettle chips, with Gene Kahn from Cascadia, with Lon Johnson from Trout Lake that were all doing processing. And 00:59:00then I had my little processing thing going with the soy dairy, so I was familiar with the state rules from that. And we just sort of sat down and started banging out what we needed, and what was going to be allowed in processing that could be called organic processing. So first thing, obviously, you've got to have organic food. Well, then it comes up of does it all have to be organic because some things aren't available - in those days more than now - but there's still stuff that's not available.

So you have these funny labeling things in the USDA where you get 97% and stuff and you have to do - the organic on the label has to look different than if it's got 97% smaller and all this kind of stuff. So all that kind of stuff we sat and hammered out in a couple of meetings and then when I wrote it all down and we put it out there for everybody to review and then we did the same thing that same year with - we figured well, we did it with processing, let's do it for animals. So we did the same thing. We sat down with ranchers from Eastern Oregon 01:00:00over in Sisters. We sat down with people that were growing all kinds of animals and we figured out what had to go on in order for animals to be organic. And that was a tough one.

We had veterinarians involved because everybody's used to having all the medicines available for them. Nobody knows how to grow stuff without that anymore. So we figured it all out and then we wrote it up as Oregon Tilth and we pushed it when we did the - we did a - Around 1989 we did a three-state thing from Washington, California, and Oregon. Mostly we were meeting in southern Oregon, and we hammered out what we call the Western Alliance to try to make all of our standards the same, 'cause we had OGC going we were moving all this food around.

And that became the basis, the materials basis, that ended up being the basis for writing the national standards. So national standards, the way they were formatted actually came from the west coast. We had a lot of pressure from the 01:01:00east coast to do some different stuff. If it hadn't been for the Western Alliance, I don't think those national standards would have been hacked out in time. And I've said this many times: they never would have happened if it hadn't been for Peter DeFazio, our congressman, who's still our congressman [laughs]. I wonder when Peter is going to retire and who will replace him. But we went to Peter and told him what we needed and he did a head count. We knew we couldn't get out of ag committee in Congress, but in the House he did a head count, figured out he had one vote more than he needed on the floor, so he just bypassed the ag committee and put it on the floor. And Senator Leahy from Vermont, who's still with us, did the same thing in the Senate: just went around the chemical people that owned the committees and got it passed.

So we get it passed in 1990 and then it sits there for 12 years on funding, but at least it was passed. And that setup - and I don't think we ever would have gotten passed later than that. It was just a little bit of an opening there where 01:02:00we had everything ready and we went for it. And it's always been under pressure and it's under pressure again from the same chemical lobbies and, you know, big industrial agriculture. They're a little bit more willing to accept some stuff, but still they... They've got their way of doing stuff and that pollutes the world. It's all about money and bottom line.

CP: I'm interested in knowing more about the relationship between Oregon Tilth and OSU. It sounds like at the outset it was not a very good-

HM: It was pretty rocky at the outset.

CP: But I gathered it improved.

HM: Yeah. What was going on was there were... There were elements here in the university when I came here in the sixties that were entrenched [chuckles]. There always are in universities, or any institution, but there were entrenched elements. I think a lot of people don't really realize that the job of a land 01:03:00grant university was to promote modern agriculture, and modern agriculture did not mean organic agriculture. It meant modern agriculture and chemistry and Monsanto and all that, you know, which is still pretty much the stuff that goes on here.

So we walk into that with this little fledgling organization that's been meeting on campus. Actually, we've had - we had groups here of 150 people and Extension people would come and talk and stuff. So, there were people in faculty that kind of knew what we wanted and would talk to it. But the general tone of the university was they didn't want to go on record at that point working with an organic organization, even though it was a big national 15 million dollar grant. And at one point Carl Stopper [phonetic] had to fly out here from Minnesota and threaten the university that the work was going to go on and they'd fund it through Reed College, which they had done with somebody here in Economics.

So you know, we finally got that straightened out, that part straightened out, and then we started working with the people we're working within Sociology, Ag Chemistry, Ag Economics, Extension and that was all great. So what started happening as a result of the Oregon part of the program that we put together; when we'd go back to Minnesota and sit with the other four states, we didn't look anything like them. They thought I was a loud mouth radical, you know. But when I started bringing in the professors from here to meetings - I had Sheila Cordray from Sociology - took on all of sociology, said "you can't do that! That is not proper methodology," you know? And she was just like me. And brought in - a bunch of times I brought in Steve Radosevich, and Steve's really the reason we got the program through OSU in the first place. And Steve would do the same thing. He'd listen to people with poor methodology. This is a great university, a great research university with brilliant people. And I just have to say it, 01:05:00that some of the other land grant colleges don't have that level of people, or didn't in those days, at least involved in wanting to push things ahead in a sustainable manner. We couldn't use the word organic in that grant. We had to talk about sustainability.

And it worked out. We got the grant renewed. So, over the period of time that we had that money, it was 650,000 bucks, which was pittance around here, but for a little thing like that, it was huge. Helped that Bill and Karla were involved in it. I had - Bill and Karla from Stahlbush were involved in it. We had some pretty well-named people that had a little bit of clout involved in doing that [laughs]. Otherwise, I don't think we would've have gotten it done.

So there's a book that exists. I didn't bring that one in, even though I'm an author in there. Thirty-eight of us wrote a book at the end of that grant from 01:06:00all five states. The states were Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, and Oregon, which sounds like an odd bunch of states, but that's where the Great Northern Railroad went, which was where the money was coming from. So we wrote a book called The Future is something. It had another future term in it, and it ended up being the basis for the 2000 farm bill where they started talking about conservation land and all that. That came out of all that work we did.

And there's some other stuff that bounced off of it. What happened with the Oregon material was, in the book it's all in gray as sideliners because none of our stats fit. You know, Montana the average farm's 3000 acres. Here, the average farm's 50 acres, even when you're taking the 10,000-acre farms that my friend Harry has, you know. Fifty acres is the average farm size in Willamette 01:07:00Valley. So it was a whole different thing and it got sidebars all the way through. It's kind of highlighted.

CP: Was there ever any connection with Extension or experiment stations?

HM: Yes. So in that grant, we were working with two people from Extension directly. Dan... Dan was - I'm getting the wrong Dan in my head. Anyway, Dan and another guy that was at a partial appointment Extension at an ag - these guys all have appointments all over the place, but Richard Dick, who was a researcher here and he had some Extension stuff, they were both on the grant and then we had other Extension people that we worked with out on the Perthing grant [phonetic]. We were out on the farms doing on-farm research. So we had researchers that we're working with farmers gathering a bunch of different information on soil and stuff... marketing. And then we had... The Experiment 01:08:00station then, he was in those early, early meetings, but he wasn't involved afterward. I think it was just the very early thing. He was one of the ones they put up there to try to block it.

CP: As Oregon Tilth started to come together as an organization, what sort of response did you notice regionally with the farmers that you were communicating with? Were they pretty eager to get on board or was it a slower uptake?

HM: Yeah, the question about farmers getting on board had to do with two different things. One is we had a group of people who either had dropped out or were going to drop out of the mainstream society and buy land. So my firm that's now worth something under a million, I bought for $35,000. We were in that time period. So the early seventies we had all these people that came out of the Antiwar, Civil Rights movement and went back to the land, it was called. And 01:09:00that's when Oregon Tilth started.

Those people were still out there and a bunch of us went from being homesteaders to being - having commercial product to feed the organic movement. The other people that of necessity were brought in - and Gene Kahn was really the one that built this thing for his business, but actually for Oregon Tilth too - Gene would go - he needed peas for his Cascadian line, so he'd call up every pea farmer in northeast Oregon and northeast Washington, and he'd go visit them and find some guy that knew how to do it organically and do it with him. In those years we had a one-year standard, not the three year standards we have now, so in one year you could transfer over if you'd gnaw off chemicals. And you just had to sign an affidavit in those days.

So bringing in those bigger farms like the 400-acre cucumber, cucurbit farm I talked about up by McMinnville, that was Gene, and who was doing the processing 01:10:00was the processing plants up in the mid-valley on I-5. They'd shut down at 12 or midnight or something like that, clean the whole place down and do the organic product before they started back up again, so making use of what was there, the industrial size farms that were willing to do the transition and the industrialized processors that were willing to do stuff ahead and go through some standards. And that worked pretty well. That built the first stages of getting this stuff out there in mass amounts, past farmer's markets and that local marketing scheme.

So, I would say those farmers were enthusiastic, and a lot of them were because almost every chemical farmer's got somebody in their cancer - cancer in their family and they all know, you know. So, a bunch of times we had farmers come to us where the whole family was sick and they wanted to keep farming and they knew 01:11:00they had to do it organically, and they didn't know how to do it. Already been two generations that hadn't done it organically, so...

I remember here at OSU the CIA, of all people, was working with various organizations when the wall came down in Europe and people would end up coming in under USAID to OSU to get trained in how to do agriculture in the east, particularly in the Eastern Bloc. So for instance, when I was in East Germany, I took a look at the soil and I went "what the hell did they do?" There was two, almost three generations that all they did was dump chemicals on the soil and punch a time clock. There wasn't any farming left. Totally did the opposite in West Germany, but Eastern Germany. So we have people in here, USAID people that would get hold of me, sometimes through Oregon Tilth or sometimes directly with me, and I'd end up here with translators from Bulgaria... One of the guys I 01:12:00liked the best was from a small place in northern Mexico... I told him he should just keep doing what he's doing after we showed him everything that he thought he wanted to know. But those kinds of things were going on all through that period in the nineties.

CP: Well, also in the nineties, Oregon Tilth was growing significantly.

HM: Growing massively, yes.

CP: Can you reflect on that time period?

HM: Five to 10% year, pretty average. It's growing like that and... and the whole organic movement, yeah. And it puts a lot of stress on the people doing it. You know, especially trying to bring in all this new land that's needed. So the transition is still the focus of Oregon Tilth. I mean they've got - they went back to it again last year as the transition being what we got to look at because we got to bring in more farms. There's more product needed. The customers about run the product that's there, and if we're going to do it 01:13:00domestically, we got to transition a lot more land.

CP: What was it like for you, though, to see this organization grow like this that was founded by three or four people? It's now doing certifications in Latin America and the Soviet Union and all over the place.

HM: Yeah. Actually, I'm involved in rewriting a book right now that has the same kind of growth in it back in the nine - 1900 to 1930, and it's kind of when you're in it, you're so involved and you don't even realize what's going on. It's when you get back and take a look a few years later you go, "Oh my God," you know. But when you're in it, you're sleeping on floors, you're, you know, running here, running there, doing anything you can do to make it happen. And it happens really swiftly. We knew we had to keep ahead of the curve, and I think Chris and Connie feel that every day over there in the office, you know. There 01:14:00are 40 - what do they got, 46 employees or something just in the Corvallis office, and you've got an office in the Midwest and one on the East Coast and one in Mexico. You know, it's trying to keep ahead of all of it.

Mexico helped out a lot by doing some fairly strict national standards. That helped. And China did the same thing a few years ago. Their standards were the - at that time, the strictest in the world. Tilth had to actually upgrade some of our standards to meet the Chinese standards, which most people don't know.

CP: Yeah, that's interesting. What is the Institute of BioWisdom?

HM: So, we put together - because people were requesting me to lecture a lot and I was retired and my partner Cheri, who came with me after I retired, said, "Why don't we just establish a kind of an education center here at the farm; not just the apprentices, but start bringing people in and you can talk to them about the 01:15:00stuff that's in your books?" So, that's what we did. We put that together. And I had some other people lecture a few times too, but mostly it was me. And we ran classes for ten years. We typically ran I think six to eight classes a year. And I have all these overheads, some of which are getting made into PowerPoints as I - I have to give a thing for Master Gardeners at the coast in a couple of weeks, so I'll take some of that stuff and make it into PowerPoints. But it was a way to get more information to more people that were ready to hear it and charge them a little bit of money. So not much: 30 dollars for a class that went on for four hours. And that was an effort.

And that was an effort. And I'm still willing to do it, but we're not doing it at the farm anymore. I did - the last set I did, I did two years up in Forest Grove at another farm up there that was doing classes, and they've stopped doing 01:16:00that kind of class. Now they're doing more practical stuff about how to make bread and stuff. There is a certain number of people that are willing to pay for that kind of information and a lot of them are using it practically. So that's worth it.

CP: Can you talk about Community Food Security Advocates of Benton County?

HM: So, the community food security movement that started... actually, after 9/11 I think was probably one of the pushes for that, but it was the whole notion nationally that people should have some kind of basis locally to be able to survive. And it was kind of a fad that went across the country, like a lot of fads do. The way it hit here was Michael Papadopoulos, who used to be here at the university, pulled together an open mic upstairs in the Odd Fellows. It was 01:17:00on a Saturday and about, I think there was probably at least 100 people in that room. It could have been more. And we just went at it for hours. You had two minutes every time you went to the mic. And what came out of it was a group of people, most of whom were affiliated with the Methodist Church and the Catholic Church. Tracy Noel and I and Sharon Thornberry I think were people that didn't come from the church orientation. And we started meeting in one of the churches I think once a month or something, talking about what we could develop.

And what came out of it was Ten Rivers Food Web. Actually, this logo [holds up a copy of Nutrition: Assessing Plant-Based Foods for Humans and Animals] was developed at OSU by students in a design class [laughs]. We made use of OSU a lot. But anyway, it took about a year, year and a half 'till we had a meeting at the south co-op one night with about 75 people in the room and decided that we 01:18:00were becoming an organization and we should come up with a name, and the first name they came up with was Food Security Network or something like that, and it didn't ring right. People were kind of by the food security fad already, even though it's still in the language. And Sharon Thornberry and I started talking about asking people if they'd ever been on the top of Marys Peak, looking out over all the land that can grow food here. And we got everybody to kind of visually look out over that. What should we call this? Not just the valley, but all the way to the coast as far as you can see up and down Oregon, you know? And they came up with Three Rivers Food Web.

So, on the way home I had a thought, and Dan Sundseth, who worked for USDA at the time, had the same thought: there's more than three rivers. I mean, when you're up there, you kind of can see three rivers, but there's a lot of big rivers that are ag rivers, you know. So I called Dan up the next day and I said, 01:19:00"I'm counting on a map here that we've got ten major ag rivers in our three-county area," which we had decided on wanting to cover. He said, "That's what I come up with." So we shared and came up with the same rivers and we went back to the next meeting and they were going to call it Ten Rivers Food Network and somebody in the audience, not me, but somebody else came up with web. And I wasn't even thinking of web, even though I'd been involved in Soil Food Web a lot. So, that was what everybody liked. They liked the notion of the whole thing being a web around bioregion rivers. So, recently we've taken the Ten River concept bigger and started talking about Cascadia and that there happens to be ten major rivers that feed Cascadia. Five of them come off the Columbia. Come into the Columbia.

Anyway, that organization and the whole notion of keeping our food local... I 01:20:00like to say locally based regional because we're working - anywhere we work you can talk about the very local stuff, and I think your greens at least should be very local; out your back door and in jars in your kitchen. But as soon as you get into grains, we can go further out, and when you get into animals you're going to go further out. So, I think the concept of a locally based regional bio shed is pretty vital if we're going to keep agriculture alive. I don't believe that the big industrial ag that we've built on the back of the cheap petroleum is going to last. Maybe in our lifetime it will, but I just don't see it lasting, and it's not good for the soil and, you know, gradually people are discovering even in industrial ag that they have to do some stuff to keep the soil in better shape, but as long as they're using the chemicals, they're doing 01:21:00it with their arm behind their back. So, there's some movements toward no-till that use a little fewer chemicals. A guy I worked with 10,000 acres backed all of his chemicals off to less than a third of what he was using when he learned how to do organic with us. So you can do it. It's... we'll see where it all goes [laughs].

CP: Can you talk a bit about Sunbow Farms and what it's come to mean to you, your connection to this piece of land?

HM: So Sunbow Farm started out as a homestead farm, as I said, and I still consider it a market garden farm. That'd be three, four years ago I began to transfer over to a young couple that now own Sunbow Produce and run the farm as part of an LLC we formed and we all live there together. I still do some of the tractor work, but they're running the farm and doing everything else and it's their business. I'm on my way out.

So, that farm traditionally has taken on the job of... I'll just use one funny instance. One of the guys and I on the farm decided one winter hey, in a maritime climate, why can't we fall plant onions and sell them in the spring if we give them some protection? Or even if we don't give them protection? So we started this whole experiment. And the next year we had these huge Walla Walla onions in the market in May. And John Eveland I remember walked up to the stand and looked at me, he said, "What are those?" And I said, "They're Walla Wallas." "Where'd you get those? "I said, "We grew them." "Oh, I guess I got to learn how to grow onions over the winter now." So we're always doing that.

The green - bean and grain project that Ten Rivers started back in 2007 got a USDA grant for it, a small grant. And all the early grain, I think there were 18 01:23:00different varieties of grain I grew out on Sunbow Farm. Bought an old combine to replace my other old combine. And we had farm tours there and we had big farm tours out at Stahlbush - not Stahlbush, Stalford Seed Farm. And we introduced probably two, 300 people in one day to the fact that we can grow all this stuff here in the valley and we don't need to be shipping it in from all over the world. All kinds of really high-quality wheat, flax that used to be a major crop here in the valley, and there's all kinds of stuff here in the library talking about it.

Hemp's another one that's in the library here that they're finally getting back to, but we didn't grow it; all kinds of rye and triticale, and it was just amazing the amount of stuff we could do and the quality of it and the taste of it. And then we started running tests on it with what's called the bread lab now 01:24:00up at Bellingham, Washington, and these other grains, not white wheat here on the valley floor, these other grains: very high protein. We're up in the 14, 15s on protein count, which I've already said I don't think makes any difference. It's the amino acids, but... The oats are the best oats in the country nutritionally, grown on old ryegrass soil here.

It's all a matter of how you go at it, what you decide to grow, where you get the seed, what kind of seed you're going to acclimate to here, and the quality that you're looking for and that you're willing to maintain in the milling. And that all came from using Sunbow as an Experiment station, essentially. And then we used bigger farms as Experiment stations and we'd bring in people and get them to see what can be done, and then it becomes private industry after that. So, out of that bean and grain project we have probably -, I don't know how many 01:25:00are left, but at least three or four big operations with two mills attached to them and a bunch of smaller people that are either feeding into those mills or doing their own milling. That's just a kind of process, same thing with vegetables.

The latest thing Sunbow did this year was we participated with OSU in the second year of a dry land farm project. And it was pretty interesting what happened. We... we decided to grow our... The kids on the farm decided to grow out melons as part of the project on dry land, and they did the same melon irrigated. The melons that were irrigated, the variety, were like this big around [shapes hands to indicate size a little smaller than one foot], tasted pretty good were on our soils. The dryland melons of that variety we're this big [shapes hands to indicate a size of about two feet], never had an ounce of water put to them, and the flavor was off the scale. The whole thing that we're figuring out about you 01:26:00- if you pay attention, you can grow stuff in Willamette Valley with very little extra water, which is - used to be done, but people have forgotten the techniques.

So, I'm glad OSU is pushing that project because of drought, but - which I think we're in again, but I just think we get into habits like irrigation that possibly we don't even need and it affects - you know, if you put water into a system, it affects the biology and it affects the chemistry, sometimes negatively. So, if you take a fresh vegetable and throw it in a wash tank, what are the soluble vitamins in that vegetable that are likely to go off into that water without even cooking it? And I can tell you what they are" your Cs, your Bs, you know, right off the bat, and as soon as you cook something, you lose a bunch of that.

So that's part of the reason we did this nutrition stuff with Ten Rivers, is to 01:27:00try to talk about where are the... When you sit and assess your food, where are the points at which you need to be really concerned for quality? And one is the growing, one is what happens as a result of shipment or sitting at a farmer's market, and the other one is what happens when you yourself process stuff; what kind of heat knocks out certain things, so that you can be aware of that and use food acidicles [sic] or some kind of supplement to back yourself up and stay healthy.

CP: You are nominally retired now [both laugh].

HM: Yeah.

CP: What excites you at this point? What are you hoping to do?

HM: Well, what's been exciting this last two years since I've stopped farming is going back and picking up, manuscripts that have been hanging around. So I just published the collected poems. I'm right now at home working over the 01:28:00publisher's edit of a big book called Grandma's Song of Healing that I wrote a lot of back in the seventies and eighties while she was still alive, and then it just sat upstairs because I was farming and doing all this stuff.

I've got a novel that's half finished that was an old movie script that I wrote while I was here that nobody ever bought. But the novel is much - I can put much more detail on it, so it's a better story. And I plan on getting back into that this winter. Then there's another whole set of poetry to collect, and I collected the plays last - the shorter plays last spring, so they're ready to publish as soon as my editor's got any time.

And it's like gathering all this stuff together that's been sitting around. One of the things, as long as we're talking about agriculture, that I remembered on the way in here today: for seven years I wrote a garden column for the Corvallis Gazette-Times. So, I think all that is probably in their archives on microfiche or some, however they store it.

CP: They're here.

HM: But I've been asked by a couple of people recently why don't pull those out and publish them as a book, which might be something. I've got all the paper copies in a double drawer file cabinet that takes up that much room. They used to give me - in the first part of that column I said, "How many, how much can I write?" And he said, "Whatever you need." So it was a full page of the paper. And then they sold the paper and it went down to a half page and then it went, got sold again, it went down to every other week, a quarter page. But it was prior to the Extension wanting to do anything with organics. Once they started doing that, I didn't really want to keep writing. I was only getting 20 dollars a week doing it, so...and it was pretty repetitive. You can only say so much, you know [both laugh]?

CP: Was there anything that we didn't touch upon that you want to include in this?

HM: Well, I think the Cosmic Influences book, one of the reasons I wrote is for years what Sunbow did research-wise is we looked at a combination of what I call 01:30:00cosmic energy in terms of we planted everything with an astrological system behind it, the sidereal astrological system that is biodynamic is used worldwide. It's not used in this country much. So we're... We're interested in and always have been interested in what effects do the moon, the sun, the movement of the sun with the seasons, the fullness and stuff of the moon, what do all those effects have on plants. So, we actually did side by side testing, kept records for years and years and years. That's another set of notebooks that I better dig out for this project. I was just thinking that's all on calendars and stuff.

Anyway, I ended up writing this book to deal with that and to deal with, as I mentioned before, Louis Kervran's work and Jacques Benveniste's work in which we have all this energy around us that gets brought in by plants and us and everything else on the earth. What can we see, what can we take advantage of, 01:31:00are there systems that we can identify that allow us to predict what's going to happen in a season? Like I'm watching right now; we've had basically no rain this winter. We're back into where we were two years ago. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few weeks, but our main rain should be in December and January traditionally, but we're into this climate change thing which may delay all of it and put it later, which could end up taking rain into late May, which ends up affecting things on the other end.

So tracking all of that and tracking the bigger cycles has been something I've been interested in all of my life, and that's why in this book, there's a picture of me [laughs] when I was 13 years old, 12 years old, 13 years old. Anyway, I was at a Boy Scout expedition and we did a star chart thing somewhere here. I don't see it. Anyway, there's a little picture in this book of that. And I've always been interested in when people who back in Chenango bridge used to say, "Plant them by the moon," or do 01:32:00gestation with the animals according to the signs. And you'll end up with females if you want dairy animals and all that kind of stuff. I've always been interested in that. So that is one of the lectures that I did in my series of teaching and I still do that lecture with some people sometimes, and then I ended up writing a book with it.

CP: Well, thank you, Harry. This has been really interesting. I appreciate you documenting some of your life with us and-

HM: Well, I just remembered that we better - I better pull all those calendars I've got sitting around with all the material on them to put into the box with all the journals that we're going to put in the archives here.

CP: We'll look forward to that. Thank you.