Get in touch with local farming

If you don’t eat food, feel free to quit reading now.

But if you do, maybe you ought to spend a little time thinking about from where and from whom your food comes. On Saturday, 11 local farms will welcome the public to step away from the supermarket and into Clark County’s rich, productive dirt to see what’s growing there.

The annual Harvest Celebration Farm Tour “started out as a way to connect the community with local farmers, 17 years ago,” said coordinator Eric Lambert of the Washington State University Clark County Extension, which sponsors the daylong open-farms festival every September. “If you think about it, local food and sustainability weren’t the buzzwords 17 years ago that they are today.”

Nowadays, he said, “There’s quite a diversity of folks producing most everything you can think of, from fiber to chestnuts to honey.” Not to mention meats and vegetables of all sorts.

And yet, added extension director Doug Steinbarger, the total acreage of farmland in Clark County keeps slowly shrinking. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which conducts its own “agriculture census” every five years — there were 78,359 acres of Clark County land in 2,101 farms in 2007; by 2012 that had fallen to 74,758 acres in 1,929 farms.

“With more urbanization and development, we’ve seen a loss of farmland over the years,” said Lambert. “But we also know that people want to get back to those roots. People are really interested in learning about where their food comes from and showing their kids what life is like on a farm.”

That comes under the trendy label “agritourism,” he added — the practice of giving visitors an enjoyable real-time farm experience as well as selling them some great homegrown products to take home. “That’s a direction a lot of farms are moving in,” Lambert said. “It’s a way for people to come get a glimpse of that life and to provide the farmers with a revenue stream, too.”

There’s probably no better local example of the rise of agritourism than the wineries that have popped up all over West Coast. Clark County is no exception, with 15 wineries here, according to the site swwawine.com. One is on Saturday’s tour: Heisen House Vineyards, a small-scale, family-run, 5-acre boutique winery situated in a National and State Historic Site in the Lewisville area northeast of Battle Ground. (The historic site is the winemakers’ family home and not open to the public, but there’s plenty to admire from the outside as well as indoor and outdoor tasting rooms.)

Heisen House is pretty close to the geographic center of Clark County, as is Half Moon Farm, dedicated to beekeeping and making honey and wax products; at the extreme north are White Oak Alpacas in Woodland, where it’s “all things alpaca,” with onsite shearing and the Sheared Delights sales boutique, and Yacolt Mountain Farm and Nursery, which raises organic vegetables the old-fashioned way: draft horses, no tractor.

Down south are Linda’s Dahlias on Washougal River Road, where you can buy a bouquet or do your own bouquet picking, and Conway Family Farm near Camas, which gets special praise from Lambert for “being absolutely instrumental in supporting our small-acreage farming program here.”

“Laurie Conway helps out with our small-farms business planning class and she’s always willing to open up her farm,” Lambert said. “With the amount of planning and hard work that goes into that farm, it’s one of the best 5-acre properties I’ve ever seen.”

The Conway farm in particular is offering nitty-gritty afternoon workshops for fellow farmers, on matters like crop rotation and hydroponic feed production.

Given all that geographic spread and feedback he’s gotten about previous years, Lambert recommends keeping your itinerary reasonable.

“You probably couldn’t get to all of them if you wanted to,” he said. “My advice is to pick a region and check out the farms in that region. Every one is different so you’ll still get a really diverse look.”

Lambert noted that we’re heading into harvest season right now — a time when farms tend to exceed their normal level of busy. It takes them extra effort to meet and greet the public during this annual farm tour, he said. “They do get some benefit but it takes them a heck of a lot of work,” he said.

Therefore, Lambert and the farmers on the tour are hoping you’ll stop by with just a little more than a smile.

“One of the important things we ask for, because the farmers don’t and won’t necessarily ask: Please spend some dollars on your local farm,” he said. “This isn’t about just showing up and walking around. At the end of the day, spending money means you are ensuring that these farms stay open.”