By Zoë Bradbury

July 14, 2008

I got a bird’s-eye view of the farm last week…in a tiny, yellow, Ultralight airplane that looks like a dragonfly on steroids. Our good friend, Joe — an ex-Air Force pilot turned organic cattle rancher — keeps his pip-squeak plane in a hangar 10 miles down the road. He offered to take me up early last Sunday morning when the winds were calm and the fog was high, giving me my first-ever aerial view of a landscape I have known only terrestrially since birth.

The wheels left the runway within seconds — the full mile of the old WWII Cape Blanco airstrip wasted on us — and we were airborne over dark coastal spruce forest, grey sand dunes and red cranberry bogs. Joe banked east away from the ocean and we followed the serpentine cut of Floras Creek five miles up the valley to the last reach of bottomland before the canyon closes in.

The farm was laid out below in all its straight rows: brown fields bisected by green farm roads, flanked to the north by the river. I could see my strawberry patch, and the mosaic of color that is my block of head lettuce. I looked down on the greenhouse I built this winter, and the scar from the irrigation trench we dug this spring. There was the mile of deer fence we put in a year ago and the newly plowed ground that will be planted to orchard next February. From the sky, Barney and Maude could almost be mistaken for regular-sized horses.

To see it all there, real, put a lump in my throat. Not too many months ago it was just sketches on graph paper and numbers on Excel spreadsheets. Clipboards, seed catalogs, and ideas. An empty, unirrigated hayfield. All at once from Joe’s little plane it was possible to see how far it’s come. There is a farm here now.

Not that I didn’t know that, with every day spent amidst the rows of asparagus and newly germinating carrots. It’s just that down at ground level, it’s easy to be distracted by all the things that still need doing — the tool shed that needs to be built, the weeds that need to be hoed, the cover crop that needs to be seeded, the credit card balances that need to be juggled. Farming is one of those jobs where the to-do list is never done, and in the daily hustle it takes conscious effort to stop and appreciate all the things that have been checked off the list.

Being up in that tiny yellow plane with a bird’s-eye view of it all, I had a chance to see how far it’s come. I snapped a picture so that now and then, in all the hustle, I’ll remember.

Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.