An Agricultural Mystery

David Knaus, 30, works in one of the greenhouses on his one-acre organic farm near La Center. The farmer grossed $30,000 in his first year of business, but the county has few like him. (Steven Lane/The Columbian)

David Knaus is the most wanted man in Clark County farming. It’s because he’s the key to its biggest mystery.

You can chase the mystery, if you want, at his tiny vegetable farm on a dead-end road in the hills east of La Center. You can circle through the weedy paths of his two greenhouses, past the racks of leeks and fennel he’s raising for sale to posh Portland restaurants.

You can even sit in his little studio apartment, where he’s propped his banjo beside his bed and hung Dalai Lama quotations next to the fridge, and hear him confess that he’s been way too busy farming for the last six years to have had a steady girlfriend.

If full-time farming has a future in the county, local farm advocates say, it’s with young people like Knaus: Multitalented believers willing to bend their spines into rubber and work the land for years in something close to poverty for the sake of a career they love and a product that’s second to none.

Farmers who, like Knaus, can combine forgotten wisdom and booming new markets to pull a seemingly miraculous $30,000 in produce out of a single acre in a year.

Here’s the mystery: almost a decade after the local food movement began to go mainstream, why does Clark County have so few farmers like Knaus?

Some people, raised in a different age of farming, say there’s no mystery. They simply swear that this tall, energetic 30-year-old couldn’t possibly be for real.

“To think that someone’s going to make a living on five acres is ridiculous,” County Commissioner Tom Mielke, 66, said at a debate last fall sponsored by the local farm bureau. “That’s not a farm.”

If Mielke is right, no one told Knaus. He’s up before the sun each morning, and his radishes and argula taste sweet and sharp on your tongue.

The county has a handful of the young, landless idealists, said Jim Hunter, 50, whose community-supported Brush Prairie farm made him a pioneer in the local-food movement.

But even Hunter is troubled that more of these Don Quixotes haven’t found places to hang their hats.

“Those young people apprentice from farm to farm to farm for several years with the hopes of someday a miracle happening,” Hunter said.

Standing last month in the warm winter sun, his cat Raja rubbing at his legs and half his winter harvest ruined by snow in the fields around him, Knaus said he’d never trade his job for one on the chemical-dependent farms that flourished in the late 20th century.

“Smaller is better in farming — I’ll say that ’till I die,” he said. “If they’ve got to use poison to successfully farm 100 acres, I’d rather farm one.”

A year after he left Portland to chase a dream on this rented acreage, Knaus said he’s baffled why more people don’t do what he does.

“The demand is there, and it’s just waiting,” Knaus said. “Just waiting.”

A close look at the successes, struggles and limitations of Knaus’s budding operation shows that the demand is waiting for four things: affordable land, available water, teachable skills and seasonal labor.

Problem 1: Land

David Knaus launched his tiny operation, Fresh Earth Gardens, in late 2007 with $2,000 in savings, $2,000 in credit card debt and a $10,000 loan from his mom, a violin teacher in upstate New York.

He worked five years on a farm near Hillsboro before deciding he was ready to set out on his own. Finding land to rent wasn’t hard, he said. The parcel he settled on belongs to a California couple; they rent it to him one year at a time.

They could decide to move up at any time. When that day comes, Knaus said he’s “wishing on a star” that he’ll have saved enough cash for his real goal: land of his own.

What about a bank loan? Knaus only shakes his head. Not at Portland-area land prices.

“They don’t understand this business,” he said.

Once, a banker friend laid it out for him in three words: “Too much risk.”

The sentiment, which Knaus says is common, maddens the young farmer. He says he wouldn’t be in the business himself if he didn’t see a good living in it eventually.

“If I had been on this piece of land for the last six years, I’d easily be making 50 grand for myself,” Knaus said.

But for now, Knaus holds back from the investments — better irrigation, moveable greenhouses — that would let him cultivate more land. After grossing “$30,000 to $40,000” in the first year, he said, he’s nearly broken even and is starting to pay down debt.

After it’s gone, he’ll start saving for the next farm, which he swears will also be his last.

“I will own,” he said. “Or I won’t farm.”

He can’t walk away from another investment like this one. He doesn’t have enough years left.

“Whenever I plan to leave this place, I stand to lose thousands of dollars,” Knaus said. “And it only goes up the longer I stay.”


Problem 2: Water

For a short moment last fall, Knaus thought he had it made.

With his biggest harvest out the door, money was tight. But he figured he could avoid the same squeeze next winter by planting more potatoes — easy to store, easy to sell — and saving them for the winter months.

All he needed was a bit more land. Then, at a public meeting, he learned that Clark County had 850 vacant acres available for rent.

Then, the bad news: the land had no irrigation. It’d be useless for almost anything but hay. As with many farmers, Knaus’s back stiffens when he talks about water. So do his sentences.

“Water policy is an issue for every farmer,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully. “The policies of Water Resources force farmers to be conscious of every drop they use.”

In Washington, when a family builds a house in an urban subdivision, they get an all-you-can-drink water buffet for the price of utility connection, perhaps $2,500, plus the small per-gallon fee. Their rights to that buffet are lined up years in advance by utility companies that spend thousands of dollars to leapfrog the state’s 15-year waiting list for new water rights. Farmers have no such system. Like any homeowner, they can use up to 5,000 gallons per day; any more, and they need the state’s permission.

Because Knaus doesn’t own his land, he won’t spend the $15,000 it would take to skip the state’s waiting list. So he can’t plant crops beyond his single acre, he said, because more crops would require more water than his well could take.

If he were allowed to store some of the rain that falls on his land all winter, he said, he wouldn’t need to suck extra water from his well. But in Washington, harvesting rainwater is illegal.

Dan Partridge, a spokesman for the state Department of Ecology, said the state has considered changing this rule. After all, it’s better for rivers when rainwater seeps into dry earth than when it flows in torrents during a winter storm.

Last year, Partridge’s office held hearings on the issue. But when the state’s vast deficit took shape, officials decided they needed all their time to focus on budgets. The rule change was indefinitely sidelined.

Problem 3: Know-how

When Knaus began farming, he paid the price for avoiding chemical herbicide: weeds sprang up between his furrows, threatening to choke his crops. Knaus, who is up before sunrise and works more than 12 hours a day most of the summer, had to waste precious hours pulling them up by hand.

Then, at a conference, he learned a better way to fight back: clover. The plant spreads between furrows, blocking weeds.

Today, he buys sacks of clover seeds, $8 a pound, and scatters them regularly.

“I had to discover this crap myself,” Knaus said. “The only way you’re going to find the knowledge is the farmers. You’re not going to learn it from the schools.”

Knaus’s path to farming began in 2003, when the University of Pittsburgh business major was laid off from a job as a tech recruiter.

But after looking into college farming programs, Knaus decided none taught the natural, organic methods he wanted. So, with a ticket from his mom, he flew to India, where he worked for five months on a small farm, then to Hawaii, where he spent five weeks on an orchard.

Finally, he returned to Portland, where he found his first work on a farm by swapping his labor for banjo lessons. After five years of trials and errors, he was the farm’s full-time manager.

Knaus knows not every would-be farmer will get the chances he has. That’s part of the reason he’s teaching 10 classes this winter with help from Washington State University Extension, trying to pass on the skills he’s picked up.

Just talking about the notion that someone could quickly pick up some of what it took Knaus five years to teach himself makes his voice rise.

“If you have the knowledge right away, then you can leapfrog the first five years, 10 years,” he said, excited. “They don’t have to work backwards and build the system from the ground up. They’re getting something that’s going to produce!”

The third four-hour class, on field work, is next Saturday. Knaus said students can start any time, $50 per class.

Problem 4: Labor

For those who can grow crops as well as Knaus, there’s no shortage of buyers.

“Demand for this type of produce is far outstripping supply,” he said. “If I had a 500-acre farm of this, I’d probably be shipping it around the world to five-star chefs. That’s who I compete with.”

But even if he found the cash and water he needs to expand a bit, Knaus would have another problem: Harvest season.

Those are the months when he sleeps five hours a night, he said. Last summer, when he had to raise extra cash by selling some of his crops directly to consumers, he said, it seemed impossible.

“I felt like I was four people,” he recalled. “I’m building the farm, I’m managing the farm, I’m planning the farm and I’m making recipes for my customers. And I’ve got to eat and sleep?”

He’s considered hiring temporary help. But to do that, he’d have to become a payroll manager, too. Keeping up with state and federal labor laws, not to mention taxes and insurance, would take skills, time and money he doesn’t have.

So Knaus is maxed out. Without more water, he’d be a fool to invest in labor; without more labor, he’d be a fool to invest in water.

What’s more, the more people he hires, the further he’ll step from the secret ingredient in his current business plan: a farm where 100 percent of the workers are highly skilled professionals.

“I’m so strapped for time that I don’t have the time to train somebody,” Knaus said. “Even if there was somebody who were willing to work for the peanuts I’d pay ’em.”

Maybe someday, he said, he’ll have be ready “to do a 5-acre farm, have a wife or whatever.”

For now, he’s content to keep wishing on his star and wondering why more people aren’t doing the same.

“Nobody wants to be a farmer, but gardening’s the number one hobby in the world,” Knaus said earlier this month, looking down at the pastures below his greenhouses.

“Everybody goes and works at Intel so they can come home and work in their back yard,” he said. “We’re backwards, us humans. We aren’t who we think we are.”