I HAPPENED INTO A CONVERSATION with an 83-year-old farmer the other day. His image was painted on the building behind him. We were standing under a giant willow tree near the bay door of the warehouse which has been turned into a pizzeria/farm store/gathering space.
“My grandmother planted this willow tree,” says the farmer, Byron Siemers. “Must’ve been before 1930. I know everybody, but I don’t remember their ‘times.’”
Back in those days, his grandmother ran the farm with her seven kids. His grandfather, he said, had ‘disappeared.’ Byron grew up a half mile down the road from here but he remembered they’d often come spend time and help on the farm. Everybody knew everybody back then and everybody helped each other out.
“I knew a lot of old timers around here,” he said. “Now I am the old timer. There isn’t anyone else left to ask, so I guess I could tell you guys anything…”
He laughs. His hands are in the pockets of his denim jeans, held up by hefty suspenders. He’s wearing his work shirt with a notepad in one breast pocket and a pen in the other. A well-worn sweat stained baseball cap covers head. He’s got a slight hunch in his stance that indicates many years of working in the dirt. Before we got to talking he’d driven up the long dirt road on a picturesque red tractor. He speaks straight forward and in simple sentences.
He talks a lot about his carrots.
There was a lady one time that complained that his carrots were too sweet, he says with an inflection of ‘can-you-believe-that?’ When I asked what made them so sweet, he went off on tangents about varieties and organic practices with a decent bit about gypsum. He blew my mind explaining the practice of dry farming in which acres of crops are grown without supplying any water via irrigation. It’s one of the last farms in the area to still grow crops that way. They plant the seeds in the upper portion of the moist layer of soil beneath a dry mulch, cover it back up and stamp the area with their feet, which creates “what I think they call capillaries,” Byron says, where the water comes up from the ground to feed the crops. Almost all of it is done by hand.
Some 50 acres. By hand. It sounds a bit like black magic to me. But for Byron, that’s how he’s been farming his entire life.
We’re in a place about 20 miles north of Spokane called Green Bluff.
Byron sold his farm a few years ago. He’s not farming every day anymore. “Just poking around,” he says. The farm’s new owner is a self-professed “real estate guy” named Bert who owns apartment complexes for his day job, bought the farm for his daughter, ended up with a passion for dry farming and refers to Byron as “The Legend.”
Earlier in the day, a slow day on the farm, Bert had given us a quiet tour. We walked past a wizard mural through a locked gate to a party room, past a stable of dwarf goats, through a turnstile to a maze of hedges leading to a three-story castle built in the middle of, Bert’s words, “the inland empire’s biggest corn maze.” That’s the only crop that is irrigated. And it’s quite an attraction for the yearly festivals that happen in this area.
Green Bluff is basically a big neighborhood of farms, many open to the public year round for farm tours, u-pick, produce stands, games, livestock, wineries, breweries and more. I’ve been to this area a few times. I also used to go to Farm Day Tours on the Olympic Peninsula. It’s nice to get out of town once in a while. But, not until now did it dawn on me that, this is what agritourism looks like.
Bert says the farm now makes the bulk of its annual income during mid-summer and fall festivals.
As defined by the National Agricultural Library, agritourism is a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and processing with tourism to attract visitors for the purpose of entertainment or education to generate income for the farm/ranch/etc. The purpose is multi-faceted. Chiefly, it seems to aim to provide farmers with diversified sources of income and generate tourism dollars for the areas in which they reside, but, according to a 2021 study by the North Carolina State Extension, it also holds the potential to spark consumer interest in local foods and support for local agriculture. // BILLMAN
THE INAUGURAL Kitsap Farm Tour welcomes the public to farms across the peninsula 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 13. Free with a $10 suggested donation. Find more thru WSU Extension, @kitsapfarmtour or by emailing kitsapagritourism@gmail.com
