Grant Gibbs is a modern day pioneer who has integrated farming and forestry operations on his 80 acres into what he calls “a 1930s era fully cycling farm.” In his pine-encircled valley tucked in the North Cascades, eight organic garden patches are interspersed with pasture, orchard trees, a creek, poultry and pig pens, a small scale mill, and round wood buildings he constructed from timber he selectively harvested from the steep surrounding hills.

Grant has invested almost 30 years into managing and maximizing this land’s productivity, using every natural farming technique ever heard of and then some. He says, “I saw this farm as a spot to do ‘permanent cultures’ and pass it on generation after generation. When you plant an orchard it is not a one person lifetime thing – it goes on and on and on. The berries, the fruit trees, the forest, the riparian zone – the whole ecosystem is working together as a permanent culture. I am not ever going to take my hayfield out of hay because I need it for the cows, and I need the cows for compost, and I need that manure for the orchard.”

Grant’s first lesson in farming came in the late 1960s when he decided to head for Canada instead of being drafted for the Vietnam War. “I didn’t have enough money to make it to the border. So I went underground, working without a social security number as a migrant, a hobo. I rode the freights and picked orchards,” he remembers. In 1975 he was able to buy a deserted dairy farm. “It was a mess,” he says. “Nothing was here, no power, no wells, no fields, no road.” Grant started farming organically, after having worked on chemical farms in his younger life. He explains. “I could see what it was doing to the ground and the air and the water and the people that worked it. I knew I didn’t want to go down that road.” But he was less certain about how he would make a living farming a different way.

Grant’s goal was to make $10,000 off his land and he was happy when he first hit that goal. “My dream had come true,” he says. “Back then, who would have guessed that organic would do what it did? I thought it was going to be a problem my whole life trying to find a market, somebody who wanted to buy organic hamburger, organic pears, organic lettuce. Now the demand is such that you can basically stay home and let the phone ring and if you want to answer your phone you’ll sell your whole crop.” But Grant has chosen to only sell locally, even though the demand for organic produce is far greater west of the Cascade Mountains.

Grant refuses to haul his goods to Seattle. He says, “It is either going to get sold in this county or fed to my pigs. I’m not going to run the I-90 gamut and burn fuel. I just want to stay simple and sell it within 20 miles of the farm.” Even with that self-imposed limitation, demand has grown and Grant now raises produce on about two and half acres. “Originally I had three gardens, now I have eight,” he reports “I raise six to twelve cattle depending on my hay crop – they are grass fed and people love it. My hogs and fryers are all spoken for. Customers don’t have to pay me up front, but it essentially is a subscription agricultural program.”

In addition to selling directly to his neighbors, Grant retails the products of his farm at a number of local farmers’ markets and food co-ops. He acknowledges that the hardest work has been selling, rather than farming. “Probably the biggest challenge was accepting the fact that I was going to have to be a farmer and a marketer,” he admits. “To farm like I do and stay in control of everything you grow, you’ve got to be a marketer.”

Grant has designed his farming systems to assure that almost everything that comes off his land has a market or is reinvested in the fertility of the ground. He is close to meeting his goal of having no off-farm inputs. Grant keeps livestock to provide manure for fertilizing his fields. He designed and built a “pig tractor,” a movable pigpen that he rotates over all eight vegetable gardens as part of his four-year rotation. He explains, “Wherever I had the pigs last summer, I plant sweet corn the next summer; after that come the leafy greens; then a tuber on the third cycle; the fourth year I do a legume before I go back to the hogs.” Every second year Grant does a light application of compost on his gardens. He makes a couple tons of chicken manure compost every year. The coarse sawdust from his Volkswagen-powered mill is used as bedding for his cows, and then as a key ingredient in the annual batch of 25 tons of cow manure compost.

Grant designed his orchard to provide an additional hay crop. He says, “I manage the orchard floor like I would the pasture because I consider it a benefit to have that long tall grass in there that offers a sanctuary for the beneficial insects.” Every year he releases hundreds of dollars of beneficial insects, eight different kinds. He has been doing this for over 20 years, and monitors the populations to see if they are over-wintering and if they are keeping the pest insects in check. Grant explains, “I have had really good luck with it. Instead of a short-term ‘spray the problem with a biological insecticide and call it good,’ I am planning, 20 years down the road, on having the whole thing balanced out, the insect population working for me.”

Taxes make up Grant’s biggest yearly expense. “The best incentive that could ever happen to me would be if the county tax assessor realized that this awesome farm provides clean water, healthy forests, organic produce, organic Christmas trees, organic meats, and organic hay. If they valued that enough, they could cut my taxes a bit or even eliminate them.” Grant continues, “That would be a huge help to me. I’m doing the same thing I‘ve been doing for 30 years and everything is changing around me. All these mountain tops are getting second or third family dwellings built on them, and guess what, up goes my taxes.”

As the farm changes and new neighbors move in, there are a lot of things going through Grant’s mind. “Maybe it’s about time to bite the bullet and spend $10,000 and build a new stainless steel county approved kitchen so I can do value added food products,” he wonders. “Maybe that’s the way the farm can keep up with the increasing taxes and the surge of people coming into town with the big money.”

In the meantime, Grant has his hands pretty full as it is. Over the past 12 years he has hosted one to five interns in a seasonal farm apprenticeship program. Now other members of his family are taking on more of the farm work. Grant’s oldest son has built his home on the property and lives there with his wife, assuring continuity among the land’s human inhabitants.

As he surveys the tall pines that loom around his fertile green pastures and leafy green gardens, Grant reflects that his life provides for continuous learning: “I feel like life and farming are ongoing experiments with no certainties to the outcome. Whether they fail or not, it’s still a learning experience. As long as things keep changing, I’ll stay on the beginning end of the learning curve.”

Contact
Gibbs' Organic Produce
Grant Gibbs
11632 Freund Canyon Road
Leavenworth, WA 98826