In celebration of Organically Grown in Oregon Week (Sept 14-20), Edible Portland is bringing you three short stories featuring Oregon’s organic pioneers. September’s organic pioneer is Jack Gray of Winter Green Farm. (Stay tuned for Theresa Marquez of Organic Valley Co-op next month!)

Winter Green Farm

Winter Green Farm sits 20 miles west of Eugene, overlooking the Poodle Creek Valley. Its 170 acres produce a huge variety of crops, including blueberries, basil, Brussels sprouts, beets, burdock root, bok choi, and grass-fed beef, just to name the B’s.

Jack Gray (pictured at right) and his wife Mary Jo Wade were among those who headed back to the land in the 1970s. The farm was organic from the start, certified by Oregon Tilth in 1984. It began before the Oregon Organic Foods Law — the first in the nation to set thorough standards for organic practices — had been passed. That wouldn’t arrive until 1989, when Oregonians Lynn Coody, Robert DeSpain, and Gray himself drafted the breakthrough law. Gray and Wade have been active forces in Oregon’s organic agricultural community for nearly 30 years. “I feel very fortunate,” Gray says, “that I got into farming.”

Before Winter Green Farm was a glimmer in his eye, Gray was a Portland, Oregon city-kid who preferred grass to pavement and hillsides to storefronts. For as long as he can remember, he felt the imperative to spend most of his time outside. In college in the mid-70s, he majored in Geology, without a clue where it would lead him, and met Mary Jo Wade.

In 1980, after several years working for the Small Farmer’s Journal, a resource for draft-horse farming, Gray and Wade purchased the first parcel of Winter Green. “We wanted to be outside and do something for the earth,” he tells me very plainly. “That’s why we chose to farm.”

The early years, he recalls, were full of trial and error. Gray came at farming as others come at learning a foreign language: with exuberance but no background. As for textbooks on organic farming, there were very few, and their learning curve was steep. Over the decades, they have tried out numerous agricultural practices and business models, failing as often as they have succeeded. At times they have set the curve; at others they have followed its contour.

Among their past and present endeavors are: farming with draft-horses; cultivating and drying medicinal and culinary herbs; growing the world’s largest burdock root supply; producing pesto-base for restaurants; supplying 600 families with a weekly selection of organic fruits and vegetables; vending at five farmers’ markets; and supplying fruits and vegetables to grocery stores and co-ops through the Northwest distributor Organically Grown Company.

What guides Winter Green Farm after 30 years of maturation? More than ever before, Gray and Wade view the farm as a living organism, following biodynamic principals and practices. This means, Gray says, “the vast majority of fertility is produced on the farm” — from well-ripened compost to manure from the herd of cattle that grazes on their pastures. Additionally, they plan and execute a very careful crop rotation to keep the soil’s fertility at its utmost.

Beyond business ventures, Winter Green Farm also provides thousands of pounds of produce each year to the local food bank and offers a selection of weekly harvests to women who have left abusive situations. What’s more, both share their knowledge as though it were honey to fuel young generations of organic farmers.

Winter Green Farm is a beautiful, profitable example of organic, not simply as a term nor as a law, but as a living idea. Gray and Wade continually ask of themselves and others to push boundaries in pursuit of more healthful, sustainable systems. For all that they give, the farm returns: “The health of our farm is reflected in the quality of our crops,” Wade says, which in turn provides life to them and those whom they feed.