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Bill Chambers, Willamette Valley, Oregon
When Bill Chambers began working to make his Stahlbush Island Farms
more sustainable back in 1990, doubtful observers in Oregon’s lush
Willamette Valley expected a wreck. Their only question: Which of
his varied fruit and vegetable crops would fail first? “
The pleasant surprise was that we haven’t had any disasters,” says
Chambers, a cattle rancher’s son who chose to raise crops rather
than cows in the valley’s classic Mediterranean climate. “There
have been no crop failures — and a lot of folks thought we wouldn’t
have any crops to harvest.”
Stahlbush Island Farms, an 1,800-acre integrated farm-food processing
plant in Corvallis, Ore., markets its frozen products to industrial
food firms. It no longer uses herbicides, fungicides and insecticides
in its sweet corn, squash, pumpkins and green beans. Compared to
its conventional competitors, Stahlbush applies only 15 percent
as much pesticide on its broccoli, strawberries and spinach.
Educated as an agricultural economist at Oregon State University,
Chambers knows that staying profitable is key to sustaining the
farm. “But,” he says, “profit maximization is not our sole objective.
All economic decisions are not dollars and cents. We include non-cash
factors in our decisions. We value how we do things as much as what
we do: If our farm is healthier and if we’re healthier, then we
live longer and more fulfilled lives.”
The costs of using a pesticide should not be underestimated, Chambers
says. They include potential damage to beneficial organisms, to
the environment, to crops, to consumer trust and to worker health.
“Who likes to deal with a poison or a toxic product?” asks Chambers.
“I won’t ask people to do things that I’m not willing to do myself.”
A main Stahlbush value is innovation — and innovate they do, by:
 Growing
no crop on the same ground two years in a row, and by completing
their rotations in a minimum of seven years, they break disease
and insect cycles, control weeds and improve overall soil health.
Planting
cover crops each year after harvest and working them back into
the soil before planting, they build organic matter, generate
soil nitrogen, control weeds and prevent nitrogen leaching.
Substituting
mechanization, computer technology and intensive management for
pesticides, they deliver a higher-value product to their customers,
usually at the same price.
Stahlbush’s
cost structure is not equal. “We tend to have much higher labor costs
than a conventional system, but I believe the sum of our costs is lower,”
Chambers says. “They’re different kinds of costs: our system is management-
and capital-intensive and most conventional systems are much more chemical-intensive.”
Not only do
ecologically based operations have different costs, they also bring
unusual payoffs. When Chambers first stopped treating garden symphylans
with pesticides, he calculated that he could tolerate any resulting
crop losses. The value of the small patches he was losing was less than
the cost of the pesticide that would keep the root-chewers in check.
Instead, Chambers
hit paydirt: “I found that over time, the symphylan damage just disappeared.”
The pests, he believes, “have come into balance with an insect or disease
or something else that preys on them.”
“What we’ve
found is that the whole soil-insect-fungi-bacteria relationship is an
interwoven web of predators and prey,” Chambers says. “When you go in
with a harsh pesticide, you disturb all of that.”
To keep soil
microbes in balance and prevent some from reaching bullying levels,
Chambers takes his fields out of irrigation every three or four years.
Chambers reflects
on what he was once taught: that the soil is a “mineral sponge” to be
managed with an input-output model. For best results, yesterday’s farmers
were told to simply replace pound-for-pound the fertilizers their crops
had used.
“In reality,
the soil is an ecosystem and I’m just putting the dominant species into
that ecosystem,” says Chambers. “By managing it as an ecosystem, we’re
much more successful than looking at it as a mineral sponge.”
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