Farm futures: Kitchen-Dick to Dabob Bay

By Martha M. Ireland
for Peninsula Daily News

Nov. 4, 2005

      Lost farmland doesn’t always grow houses.

      Felled trees on Weyerhaeuser’s 300-acre Sequim Seed Orchard don’t signal impending residential development, says manager Bob Wells.

      “We’re making room for new orchard,” explained Wells, who was busy planting young trees to replace unproductive old stands along Kitchen-Dick Road.

      Weyerhaeuser transferred the seed farm’s northwest 96 acres to its development division, Wells added, but that development will be five small farms, not a suburban subdivision.

      Since the late 1990s, Weyerhaeuser’s land has been zoned agriculture retention, with a minimum lot size of 16 acres for new land divisions, or cluster development preserving most of the parcel in farmland.

      Wells predicted Weyerhaeuser won’t benefit financially if voters approve Clallam Proposition 1, a buyer’s excise tax of a half-percent on the purchase of property.

      Excise tax proceeds would purchase conservation easements to preserve farmland.

      “They’d be better off spending the excise tax on other land because this is already protected [by zoning],” he said.

      Elsewhere, however, farmland is being lost—for better or for worse.

      In the 1890s, Daniel Yarr’s grandfather cleared 200 acres of rich bottomland on Dabob Bay in southeast Jefferson County, and straightened part of Tarboo Creek.

      “My folks moved there in 1917,” Yarr recalls. “My brothers had a dairy there, but it got to be a losing proposition. People here can’t compete in dairying—it costs too much to get feed and other things over here.”

      By the time Dan Yarr retired in 1976, his brothers had closed their 50-cow milking operation. “Then I ran beef cattle there for about 10 years,” he said.

      Now 88, Yarr needed to sell and hoped the land would stay agricultural, perhaps as an organic truck farm. That wasn’t to be.

      The non-profit Port Townsend-based Northwest Watershed Institute (www.nwwatershed.org) received grants to buy and restore what director Peter Bahls described as “a big wetland that had been drained for agriculture.”

      The Yarr farm ranked third in the U.S. for a National Coastal Wetland grant last year, Bahls said.

      Tarboo Creek is getting its meander back and the Yarr fields are being reforested. The land will stay in Watershed Institute ownership, focused on “restoration and environmental education,” Bahls said.

      However, a private entity using some $2 million of public sector grants to eliminate agriculture raised concerns among Jefferson Conservation District supervisors, who noted a similar project in Grays Harbor County.

      Likewise, U.S. Department of Agriculture Wetlands Reserve Program funds were used to eliminate three Snohomish County farms totaling 500 acres

      “The conservation board didn’t object” to Bahls request to alter the 37-acre Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) agreement that Yarr had already established to protect his farmland’s riparian areas, said Jefferson Conservation District Supervisor Glen Huntingford, a former Jefferson County Commissioner.

      But he questioned the appropriateness of government grant guidelines that “allow the buying up of property in the name of fish habitat and taking it out of agricultural production,” Huntingford said.

      “Every piece of land is different,” responded Bahls. “We’re working on another project where we’ll have farming and restoration.”

      Upstream from Yarr, the 80-acre Getz farm, bought by the Watershed Institute with private donations, will be restored for agriculture and sold as a single farm after sensitive riparian areas along Tarboo Creek are restored to enhance salmon habitat.

      “It hasn’t been farmed for years and probably would have been developed,” said Bahls. “We’re trying to keep some of the larger farms from being split up.”

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