DUNGENESS – An old crop whose past popularity is evidenced by the Clallam Co-op grain elevator towering over West Washington Street in Sequim is flourishing again in the Dungeness Valley.
The Dungeness River flows into a glacier-sculpted valley, a place where dairies and other growing concerns once thrived. Now, many of the farms are gone, having given ground to subdivisions and shopping centers — but not entirely.
Soft white wheat for pastry and pasta plus hard reds for bread are among the newest products being tried on land northwest of Sequim.
12 scrutinized acres
And this harvest season, 12 acres leased to Nash’s Organic Produce are getting special scrutiny: Washington State University wheat breeders Steve Jones and Kevin Murphy are testing the wheats – 44 winter and spring varieties — to determine their viability in wet, cool Western Washington.
So far the grain is looking good. On an Aug. 24 field walk, farmer Nash Huber waded into the amber waves, and then gave a kind of crash course in growing food without herbicides and pesticides.
Replacing the Canada geese that frequent these fields earlier in the year was a small flock of gardeners, farmland preservation activists and at least one member of the valley’s new generation of growers.
Joe Bridge, who with his wife, Lisa, grows oats and wheat on the Lamb Farm southwest of Sequim, was among those came to see and taste the Nash’s wheat.
He and Huber did that via tooth and nail, kind of like scratching out a living as a small-scale farmer.
Huber demonstrated, taking a kernel of hard red wheat in his palm and then planting it between his teeth. If you can’t dent it with your fingernail, and if it has a firm, al dente feel in your mouth, it’s ripe, Huber explained.
“This is ready, Sam,” he told Sam McCulloch, the Nash’s soil preparation and equipment manager who’s worked on the farm since he was a teenager.
Dry, sunny days
So McCulloch and his combine have gotten to work, but only during the dry, sunny days — or mere hours — when moisture won’t overtax the machinery.
If you want to harvest hay and grain in the Dungeness Valley, you had better get out there right after the morning fog lifts and go straight on until just before the evening dew, McCulloch said.
The trial crop is yet to be reaped; McCulloch expects he and Murphy will get to it next week. The wheats will then go to a WSU laboratory for analysis of their nutrient content and yield per acre.
Across the nation, wheat yields have risen, McCulloch said, yet the grain has grown nutrient-poor, compared with the crops of the past.
At Nash’s Organic, Huber and his crew mean to buck that trend, and they have two strong hands helping them in that regard.
One is that the Dungeness River delivers a rich supply of minerals to the valley. Another is that the soil is glacial till, and Huber couldn’t ask for a more fertile foundation.
The trial wheat field, however, used to be a turf farm, and it was in rough shape when Huber leased it and began preparing it for an organic crop.
For two years, he and his crew fed the soil the old-fashioned way, with a blanket of “cover crop” — rye and vetch grown at Nash’s — plus a layer of soft wood chips and young hay.
Once the wheat was planted last fall, Huber could be seen tearing through the field with the organic farmer’s chemical-free ally: a Lely tine weeder attached to his tractor.
Tests of wheat crops
While this will be WSU’s first test of the winter wheat varieties, Murphy and Jones conducted a first analysis of the spring wheats in 2008 — and showed heartening numbers.
“The protein was so high in last year’s trials, I thought Kevin had made a mistake,” said Huber. “I had him [test] it again.”
According to the analysis, the organic hard red varieties — which have names such as ruby, scarlet, comet and reliance — go as high as 15.5 percent protein.
The soft whites, such as Louise, Zak and White Marquis, go from 11.2 to 12.6 percent.
Huber gives much of the credit to the river running past his field.
“One of the real benefits of growing in the Dungeness Valley is the water we get,” he said.
The river carries sediment and minerals down from the Olympic Mountains, and “our calcium values are off the scale,” along with good levels of other minerals such as iron, zinc and magnesium.
“That’s the Dungeness River water,” Huber said.
And unlike much of the country’s farmland, he added, this valley remains rich in topsoil.
“This is all flood plain. You’ve got several feet of topsoil here. That helps a lot.”
Huber grows scores of other crops, from spinach to carrots to strawberries, on some 400 acres across the Dungeness Valley. As people continue to migrate into the Sequim area, he’ll strive to keep the land providing food for them.
Huber also seeks to keep his business viable by diversifying — adding crops such as wheat to the mix — and spreading the message that the Dungeness Valley is prime food-growing territory.
McCulloch, meanwhile, is preparing for the last day of the wheat harvest: Tuesday, weather permitting.
He rhapsodized a little on Friday about a particular planting of red wheat, still ripening in the late-summer sun.
“We want it to be perfect. It’s a special crop for us, one of our best ever,” he said of the swath in eastern Dungeness. “It’s a beautiful field.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
