Nash Huber has been farming in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley since 1968. This year he was awarded the American Farmland Trust’s Steward of the Land award. Photo by Anna Lillian Moser

 

Forty years ago Nash Huber got in his car and headed west with the intent of starting up his own farm. Today his company Nash’s Organic Produce farms 400 acres of land in the Sequim-Dungeness Valley and offers more than 100 different varieties of produce.

Huber also has become a nationally recognized figure in the farming community. This year the American Farmland Trust, a leading organization in farm and ranchland preservation, named Huber as a Steward of the Land. While some may consider him a visionary, Huber maintains he’s simply carrying on an agricultural tradition, doing what others have done for thousands and thousands of years.

Huber’s story doesn’t begin with him. It begins hundreds of years back in the Black Forest region of Germany where his ancestors maintained a farm for generations before immigrating to the United States. Settling in Illinois, the family continued with their long agricultural tradition, passing it down from generation to generation.

“There wasn’t a lot of cash flow in that type of agriculture, but there was a real solid sense of community,” Huber recalled. 

But like many others of Huber’s generation, he left home to pursue college, majoring in chemistry. He landed a job in the food industry, experimenting with high fructose corn syrup.

“They would make these pies and they’d draft us willing 20-year-olds as they did their double-blind, replicated testing, you know, and I grew up eating homegrown cherries and cherry pies my grandmothers made — and that stuff was just utter crap,” Huber said. “After the first bite of one of them, I just didn’t bother with them anymore. I don’t know how they got away with calling it cherry pie.”

It was while working with all the additives and preservatives that Huber realized the life of a chemist wasn’t for him. He drove west and in 1968 began working his farm. In 1979, Huber received his organic certification. A strong believer in supporting the local economy, the majority of Nash’s Organic Produce is available only on the Olympic Peninsula.

To Huber, organic farming and organic products are the way farming always has been and it’s a system that is absolutely essential. The use of chemicals, to Huber, is just a short period in the history of farming as a whole. 

“I didn’t know what organic was but that’s the way we farmed, that’s the way I was raised and that’s the way it was. Nobody used chemicals or pesticides. We didn’t have them,” Huber said.

While Huber strives to maintain a traditional way of farming, he’s seen a number of changes over the past 40 years and some of them, he said, are not so good. 

“The way we do agriculture in this country now, everything is market-driven and we don’t look out for the next generation, we don’t really try and set them up,” Huber said. 

According to Huber, more and more farmers view their land as retirement packages, selling it off rather than preserving it for future generations. The state of agriculture today is exactly what drives Huber to go against the grain, so to speak, working tirelessly toward farmland preservation. Huber is a founding member of Friends of the Fields, a grassroots organization working to preserve agricultural land. He also has worked at the county and state levels as an advocate for preservation efforts. Huber has a core staff of men and women who work with him year-round and who plan to maintain the farm when he’s no longer able to.

“The only way you’re really going to change things is to show how it should be done,” Huber said. He will be honored by the American Farmland Trust as the organization’s 2008 Steward of the Land during a private ceremony on June 4.
“It actually feels pretty good,” Huber said regarding the award. “It was kind of a real big surprise and it kind of causes you to reflect on things. In some ways you kind of go, well, what’s next?”