Gary and Connie Moore

Clackamas County, Oregon

Farmers face so many obstacles on any given day, it's no wonder that tenacity is chief among the strengths needed to stay in agriculture. One of the obstacles that doesn't get talked about much is something Gary and Connie Moore have come up against on their 150 acre home farm in Oregon, and that is a lack of agricultural services nearby. It's a problem more and more farmers face as they watch the continual tide of farm closures taking family farms away from the countryside. When the farms disappear, so do the services—feed, equipment, equipment repair, veterinary, processing facilities. The support infrastructure farmers rely on to do business is replaced by fast food restaurants and cineplexes, though thanks to Oregon's land use laws, this has not been the case around the Moores' farm. Even so, "you'd have to go fifty miles to find the nearest dairy to me," Gary Moore says.

Gary's grandfather bought their original thirty acres in 1924 after immigrating on his own from Switzerland at age 15. His first stop was Wisconsin, where he hand-milked cows for other farmers before he saved up enough money to make it to Oregon. Up until the 1950s, Gary's grandpa was an organic farmer, though because it was the only way to farm, it did not yet have a name. Gary remembers his grandpa bemoaning the coming of tractors because they compacted the soil so much. The man knew a thing or two about soil. When his grandpa passed away in 1963, Gary's dad took over the farm just as the heyday of the "new" farming model—synthetic fertilizers and pesticides—was really taking hold. That's the model Gary grew up with and practiced with his dad on their farm.

In 1992, Organic Valley CEO George Siemon was in the Northwest visiting farms and stopped by the Moores'. "He sat in this chair I'm sitting in right now," Gary says. "We talked about different philosophies of farming, and I talked about how I was burning out cows quicker than I could replace them, and we didn't even use rBST [a synthetic growth hormone injected into cows to make them produce more milk that is banned in organic agriculture]. I went to a meeting George had with a bunch of dairymen around Trout Lake and my interest was perking." Although Gary's dad didn't feel it was the way to go, after much discussion the transitioning to organics started in late 2000.