Features

CORNELIUS, Ore. – Turn left at the American flag. Follow the dirt road lined with yellow dandelions. Pass the old house with the wooden porch and the dark brown llama in the front corral. Park in the back, where the rooster is crowing and the air is rich with a mixture of animal dung and ripening fruit. 

This is Duyck’s Peachy-Pig Farm. Twenty years ago, this was just a typical pig farm. But then hog prices started falling, and farmer Gary Duyck got, as he says, “crippled up.” 

“It was pure economics,” Duyck said of his choice to open his Washington County farm to outsiders. And it has proved a profitable choice. 

On a recent Saturday, the rolling hills behind Duyck’s home and barn were dotted with folks who held white plastic buckets in one hand and plucked garnet-red raspberries with the other. 

Beginning next month, customers will be back to pick beans, peppers and yellow raspberries. Fall brings pumpkins and a miniature corn maze for the kids. Next year, Duyck plans a bigger maze as well as hay rides. 

With food processors closing and increased competition from growers outside the United States, Northwest farmers have turned to roadside stands, u-pick fields and farmers markets as a way to boost profits and, in some cases, simply to stay in business. 

They’ve discovered that urban dwellers are eager to spend an afternoon picking berries or pumpkins. And some parents are even willing to pay a few dollars so their city-bred child can feed a pig. 

In 1992, 4,263 Oregon farms sold at least a portion of their crops at roadside stands, farmer’s markets or u-pick fields. Five years later, the number had grown to 4,594 farms with more than $14 million in sales. 

When the Oregon agricultural census is taken again next year, Homer Rowley, a statistician with the National Agricultural Statistics Service, bets the number will have grown yet again. 

“Farmers are being squeezed,” Rowley said. “Many are either getting out of the business” or marketing their products directly to their customers. 

Chris Olson remembers picking berries as a kid and decided on a recent Saturday that it was time for her 3-year-old daughter, Amanda, to know the pleasure of popping a ripe raspberry right into her mouth. 

“We want her to know that they come from a bush and not a store,” Olson said at a field outside Sherwood. “It’s also just good to spend the day with the kids outdoors,” she said. 

With strawberry season nearly finished, most pickers had raspberry jam on their mind. At 90 to 95 cents a pound, they agreed picking the fruit themselves was far better than buying berries at the store. 

Farm visits have become popular for myriad reasons. 

“Some people like to talk to the farmer, that’s important to them. For retired or semiretired people, getting back onto a farm is a big deal,” said Don Bradshaw, who owns the Seven Oaks Farm and serves as president of the Pacific Northwest Farm Direct Marketing Association. 

Bradshaw farms 200 acres in Central Point, just north of Medford. He had a strawberry stand about 20 years ago but dropped it because it was too much trouble. And then came bigger trouble in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade treaties that opened the door to crops grown outside the United States. 

To survive a changing marketplace, Bradshaw said he reopened his farm stand a few years ago. He’s been surprised by sales that are growing 20 percent a year. 

“We’re quite enthusiastic about it,” he said. “We feel there’s growth there yet.” 

The Koch Family Farm in Tualatin started selling u-pick pumpkins in 1983. They opened u-pick strawberry fields five summers ago. Depending on the season, there’s u-pick beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and other crops. Children also come for school field trips and birthday parties. 

“This has been our busiest year,” Kay Koch said as customers crowded around her fruit stand. 

The Koch family first plowed this ground in 1938. Population growth has since brought housing subdivisions and a seemingly endless line of cars to the Tualatin-Sherwood Road, which passes by the farm. There are days, especially when her husband crosses traffic in his tractor, that Kay Koch wonders whether it would be best to sell out to a developer. 

But then come days with perfect weather and laughter coming from the u-pick fields. Then Koch thinks of what her husband always says: “This dirt is too good to cover up.”