Postcards from the Rogue Valley

“Shall I take up farming?” a 1945 pamphlet by the U.S. War Department for returning soldiers asks.

Knowing you want to be a farmer, the authors suggest, often comes as a deep, undeniable pull toward working the land. What does it take to be a successful? How do the various farming options compare? How does one secure the loans needed to get started? The pamphlet answers these questions and many more. However, the bottom line, the authors conclude, is determining whether “you are meant to farm.” They offer four signs. You love the physical work. You care deeply about the source of things. You accept failure as a teacher. You view it as a life, not just a job. (“Shall I Take Up Farming?”)

The story that follows flows from a 90-minute interview with Oregon farmer Mary Eichler on the day she turned 80, produced by Teagan Moran as part of Oregon State University Extension’s Small Farms program and its podcast, “For the Love of Farming.”

Mary Eichler, born in Brooklyn the year after the U.S. War Department’s “Shall I Take Up Farming?” was published, will tell you that she knew from the start that she was meant to farm.

At four, she grew tomatoes (in her underwear) in her family’s tiny backyard garden. At six, she volunteered at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where, not old enough to join the classes for grade school children, she was given her own small plot of land. One day, after harvesting string beans, she bought more at a market so there would be enough for her family of nine. When she cooked them, she noticed the store-bought beans turned muddy green while hers stayed bright.

“And that’s when I realized the difference between fresh and fresh, and organic and not organic,” she says.

At 11, she answered a newspaper ad for a farm that hosted boys during the summer, writing to the family to explain that she was a hard worker and an accomplished cook who had experience with animals. They told her she was too young (and the wrong sex), but referred her to a dairy family in upstate New York. Her mother put her on a Greyhound bus to live with the family, where she spent two years working on a dairy farm.

At 23, with one child and separated from her marine husband, Mary set off for California where she rented a quarter-acre plot surrounded by condominiums, grew large amounts of produce, and sold it to neighbors. She eventually saved enough money to move to Oregon.

“When I drove through Oregon, I fell in love with it,” she recalls. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.”

In 1975, Mary pulled up into Alpine (pop. around 250) with a trailer behind her truck carrying rabbits, ducks, geese, peacocks and everything else she had accumulated in California. She quickly learned how difficult it was to make a living farming without capital. She bought a milk cow—the first thing she purchased—and grew, canned and preserved food for her family. She also worked nights stocking shelves and took livestock-management classes at Linn-Benton Community College.

“I took the classes because every time I got advice from somebody, then when it didn’t go right, I’d get advice from somebody else,” she says. “So I said, ‘I’ve gotta go and take official classes.’”

By then, Mary had three children. Realizing that her dream of going to vet school wasn’t going to happen, she found a job working with the City of Corvallis as an animal-control officer. At the time, unclaimed animals at Oregon humane societies could be shot, gassed or electrocuted. Mary searched for more humane solutions. The last thing an unwanted animal deserved, she said, was a painful death.

Meanwhile, she added pigs to her milk cows, relying on a lady with a refrigerator on her back porch to store and sell the produce. When she could not afford to have pigs professionally butchered, a police officer and two Mormon missionaries taught her how to butcher and skin one. Later, an instructor at Linn-Benton heard about her skills and brought his class to her farm. Mary began teaching students how to process pigs and farm in ways that differed from conventional practice.

“At first they thought I was never gonna make it,” she says. “But then I proved everybody wrong.”

Students eventually introduced her to an instructor she had known through her classes. A year and a half later, they married.

In 1981, Mary and her husband bought 20 acres near Corvallis, choosing the property partly because its floodplain and marsh offered habitat for wildlife. It was a barren wheat-stubble field with a tiny house whose floor required plywood to keep people from falling through. The back of the property had been used as a dump. They hauled away car parts and appliances, planted trees and slowly built a farm.

Then came the unlikely discovery that would change Oregon agriculture.

At the time, grass-seed farmers routinely burned their fields after harvest, sending smoke into the sky. A neighbor asked Mary and her husband to bale and remove the grass-seed stubble so she would not have to worry about a fire jumping to her house. They agreed. After bringing the bales to their farm, they noticed their cattle eating the stubble.

They contacted Oregon State University, which tested the material and found it was viable feed. Soon afterward, a man from California saw the green bales and thought they were hay. When Mary’s husband explained that they were grass-seed stubble, the man replied, “But it’s beautiful.”

He bought it and sent it to Japan.

“That was the first of Japan and Korea buying all the wheat stubble that now is a billion dollar market today here in Oregon,” Mary says.

What began as a practical response to a neighbor’s concern had become an international agricultural trade—and a way to turn a waste product into something valuable while reducing field burning.

But the success brought a new problem. Oregon’s Public Utility Commission said the material was garbage, not an agricultural product, and demanded special trucking plates. The couple was fined $720,000 for hauling the product to Portland.

“That would have shut us down,” Mary says.

Instead of giving up, Mary went to the state Legislature with her daughter, who was studying law. They found an agricultural bill that had died in committee and worked to amend it so the grass straw would be legally recognized as an agricultural product. Mary spent years attending Senate and House hearings, explaining what was at stake.

“We have a way of stopping field burning in the state of Oregon,” she told legislators.

A senator became their champion. Another legislator agreed to include the straw provision in a bill allowing horse stables on agricultural land. They joined forces, and eventually three laws were passed. One allowed the straw to be treated as an agricultural product; another allowed farm buildings to store agricultural products grown elsewhere.

When the bill passed, a newspaper headline read, “Horses saved by the last straw.”

In the years that followed, Green Gate Farm became both a working farm and a community. Mary planted hundreds of trees, raised cattle and sheep, sold produce and eggs, and welcomed children to the farm. 

“It was never, ‘What are you gonna get out of it?’ It was always, ‘What is everyone gonna get out of it.’”

Mary had her own notions about animal husbandry. She once cared for a bull everyone considered dangerous. She fed him, talked to him and watched him calm down. Another time, her old milk cow, Fawn, repeatedly ran between Mary and a much larger bull, blocking him from reaching her.

She never owned a cattle prod.

After a farm animal died because she and her husband had hesitated to call a veterinarian, she drew a line.

“Either you load up all the animals and you take ’em to the auction and sell ’em. Or the next time one of them needs a vet, we call the vet.”

When it came to wildlife, Mary gave them their due. Rather than poison mice in her hay barns, for example, she installed owl boxes and openings so barn owls could hunt inside. She used simple solutions to keep skunks from nesting under her house and observed the creatures around her farm with fascination.

“Farming means paying attention—to animals, plants, weather, soil and the small signs that something is wrong. It all works, you just have to figure it out.”

When it came to organic gardening, she never wavered. 

Mary retired from animal control in 1990 after an injury, but the farm stand grew, customers came to the garden, children visited the cattle (feeding black bananas to the cattle who swallowed them whole), and the farm became increasingly connected to its neighborhood.

“I’ve learned things from some of the people at the stand, and I’ve taught them things,” she says. “It’s more than just a marketplace.”

This community has sustained her through profound loss, too. Two of her children, Eric and Brandi, as well as three sisters succumbed at early ages to a genetic illness that ran through her family. She speaks openly about grief, especially the importance of remembering those who have died.

“Every mother who loses a child wants to hear the child’s name,” she says. “You help us by sharing that.”

After her son Eric died, Mary put a sign at her farm stand asking people not to stay away.

“Please don’t stay away. Come out to the garden where I’m working, just like always, and talk.”

People returned. Some brought stories about Eric—and much more.

She is still walking the fields, caring for animals, tending fruit trees and planning what comes next. She says she has learned that staying active means continuing to do for others.

“We’ve all learned you can’t see a need and not help,” she says. “And when you’re on a farm, you know, there’s always something that needs your help. I just don’t know how not to do something.”

She expects to have another decade and already has plans: build a beaver dam, improve wildlife habitat and make sure the animals can survive on the acreage after she is gone.

Her advice to other farmers is direct: “Don’t underestimate yourself. You can accomplish way more than you think.” She credits her mother, who never told her she could not do something.

Above all, Mary believes in learning. She has taken at least one college credit almost every term since she first attended community college and says she has the equivalent of three associate’s degrees.

“You keep learning. You keep asking questions,” she says. “I think that’s the biggest thing that has changed my life. I have always kept learning.”

And she has a philosophy for getting through difficult days: expect problems and prepare for them.

“Every morning when you get up, count on everything going wrong and start planning,” she says. “And when you get to the end of the day, when nothing bad happened, that’s when you relax and celebrate.”

Still, the deepest explanation for her love of farming is simpler.

“Plant the seeds and then I watch them come up.”

She marvels at the way a seed breaks through the earth, bends under its own weight, then slowly straightens and climbs a trellis. She watches cattle protect one another and sees birds build nests. She sees life unfolding everywhere.

“It’s not just a farm, it’s a life,” she says. “Happening in front of you.”

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