From soil to society: Tilth marks 50 years of an agricultural revolution

Fifty years ago, people across the Northwest were hitchhiking, driving, or flying to Central Washington to support a new way of farming and urban agriculture. Some 800 people gravitated to the town of Ellensburg in November of 1974 for a pivotal event — the Northwest Conference on Alternative Agriculture, the birthplace of Tilth. Now known as the Tilth Alliance, the nonprofit organization was integral to building a sustainable Northwest, creating partnerships and supports for organic farming, composting, gardening and community education.

PCC has supported and partnered with the nonprofit since those first days. The organizations evolved together in some ways, said Brenna Davis, CEO of Organically Grown Company and former vice president of Social & Environmental Responsibility for PCC.

“We were both ground-up, homegrown organizations, built from the heart, built from a mission to accomplish something that hadn’t been done here before,” says Trudy Bialic, formerly PCC’s director of Quality Standards and Public Affairs.

“That was the great beauty of that time and people were swept up in it.”

Roots find fertile soil

Tilth’s origins can be traced slightly earlier, to a World’s Fair event that July. That was Expo ’74 in Spokane, where Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry gave a galvanizing speech on the dangers of corporate agriculture and the need for a healthier new direction nourishing and protecting the land

“Wendell saw the emergence of a constituency for a better kind of agriculture,” recalls Mark Musick, a Northwest food pioneer who was working at the transformative event. In response, Musick and three like-minded partners — Woody and Becky Deryckx and Gigi Coe — sprouted the idea for the Northwest Conference on Alternative Agriculture, a path toward that new direction. The conference in Ellensburg was held just 100 days after Expo and would be the beginning of Tilth, whose name comes from an Old English word meaning the quality of soil.

As Musick put it, “people were primed” for such a gathering, already individually striving to effect change in communities around the region, without a map to follow. Ken Kesey, the famed counterculture author — and a farmer — hosted an organizing tour in Oregon, while up in Washington’s Okanogan, Michael “Skeeter” Pilarski put together a barter fair. In Seattle, the organization Cooperating Community, funded with loans from PCC, was promoting cooperatives.

Gene Kahn was one of the 800 people drawn to the conference. Like many “back to the land” proponents, he had responded to the volatility of the era with a 1971 experiment. His then-small Cascadian Farm, a reclaimed rural dump site that ultimately became a global agricultural powerhouse, began to grow and sell produce, with PCC — then a single store known as the Puget Consumers Co-op — as his first customer.

PCC’s founder, John Affolter, attended the Ellensburg conference as well, both seeking to learn and exchange knowledge.

Such connections show how the Tilth movement, as Musick says, has been magnetic for like-minded people. He quotes Berry’s words that “the soil is the great connector of us all.”

The conference connections branched into relationships, careers, and people learning to cultivate their own food. Seeds planted in Ellensburg sprouted more than a dozen Tilth chapters, now settled at five.  In the bigger picture, Tilth nurtured major movements. Its members and advocacy supported state — and later national — standards for organic food, the introduction of composting in Seattle, organic research and the nation’s first college degree program in organic agriculture.

Tilling regional ground

From its rural beginnings, Tilth’s influence perhaps has been most transformational in the world of agriculture. Key to its early efforts was just connecting people, primarily under the name Tilth Producers. (Tilth Producers and another organization with a similar focus, Cascade Harvest Coalition, merged with Tilh in 2016 to form what is now the Tilth Alliance.)

Fresh out of college, Anne Schwartz, now known as a “farming cornerstone” of the community, attended her first Tilth Producers meeting in 1979 with Gene Kahn. “It was like I met my people,” she recalls. She jumped in to help, first as secretary and then as president, an office she held for fifteen years. Schwartz worked with Kahn at Cascadian Farm until 1991, also creating her own operation, Blue Heron Farm.

The instant affinity came from “just being able to work with people who were having similar challenges in producing crops,” recalls Kahn.

Diane Dempster, Tilth Alliance board chair and former manager of the Farmer’s Own brand at Charlie’s Produce, became involved with Tilth Producers in 1987. She recalls a roundtable where a researcher said “You just can’t grow brassicas organically.” Sitting next to him, a farmer responded “Well, I’m doing it.”

There was a lot of that, she says. “The growers really taught each other how to farm.”

The connections soon went beyond meetings to a quarterly journal, then a directory listing all organic producers, buyers and markets. Then it went deeper. Seeking research to confirm the value of organic growing practices, Tilth began collaborating with Washington State University (WSU) on techniques and certification standards.

Some of those concepts were controversial and not widely accepted, triggering skepticism from the conventional agriculture community.

“The exception was entomologists,” says Schwartz. Bug-studiers quickly understood a core tenet of Tilth practices: the importance of a healthy overall ecosystem. Those values aligned with another old-new concept, “integrated pest management” (IPM), focusing on pest prevention rather than pesticides. IPM, along with organics, became an early specialty of Washington state growers.

Over the years, skepticism began easing with formal programs like Washington state’s organic certification program, only the second in the nation, which began certifying farms in 1987.

Concurrently, Tilth worked with WSU on researching and implementing an organic farmer degree program at the school. “It’s difficult to push a state university, to nudge it in the direction that you’d like to see it go,” says Bialic. But the program — the first of its kind in the U.S. — opened the door to more action on many fronts.

Influence and “The Pushy Broads”

Quarterly meetings  were held  with WSU and partner organizations, including Tilth Producers and the Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network (WSFFN).

“We really became a leader nationally in organic farming research,” says Schwartz. That effort led to significant influence in the discussion over establishing national organic standards. The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 began the process of federal organic certification. Kahn was appointed to the first National Organic Standards Board in 1992, and PCC educator Goldie Caughlan sat on the board from 2001 to 2006.

Bialic recalls the group of women from the organizations in those WSU meetings — herself, Schwartz, Caughlan, and WSFFN heads Bonnie Rice and then Ellen Gray — making themselves heard. “We called ourselves the pushy broads,” she says. “We were polite but very clear in what we wanted and expected.”

Taking the plow to city soil

Rural agriculture wasn’t Tilth’s only focus. Its influence went into every Seattle garden, thanks in part to the vision of horticulturalist Carl Woestwin.

A WSU student pursuing a horticulture degree with an outlier’s focus on urban agriculture, Woestwin came across the then-new Tilth. He interned at Pragtree Farm, now part of the Northwest’s oldest community land trust, then operated by Musick and other early Tilthies near Arlington. Woestwin then became a groundskeeper at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. He saw it as an ideal place for an Urban Agriculture Center, which would become the Seattle Tilth Demonstration Garden. With backing from the Wallingford Community Council and grudging acceptance from the city parks department, he led volunteers in busting up concrete pads and former basketball courts, converting compacted soil to gardens.

The urban farm experiment became an example of Tilth concepts. “The way I thought about it was not that we’re going to grow a significant amount of food,” he explains, “but people would understand better what it takes to grow food and that would enhance relationships to farm communities.”

Not everybody was on board with Tilth’s gardening precepts. “Parks was not in favor,” Woestwin recalls. “They thought, ‘Here are a bunch of hippies who are going to disrupt things and disappear, and we will be left with the mess.’ They didn’t trust that we’d be a longstanding thing.”

But Seattle Tilth quickly established itself and people started learning. They held workshops, gained grants and experimented with winter gardening. “The whole emphasis on cold frames and solar frames, that was new,” he says. “People were pretty excited about that.”

The winter gardening techniques sparked the imagination of Seattle’s mild-climate growers, and Tilth leaders started planning to produce a book on the topic. The result was the classic “Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest” by Binda Colebrook, who had undertaken extensive trial garden experiments, with both the research and the book backed by PCC.

Teaching Seattle to compost

Perhaps the most far-reaching Tilth effect was to come from a crucial tenet of alternative agriculture: composting.

Woestwin landed a new job at Seattle Public Utilities, beginning a pattern that would see key Tilth folks go on to greater influence in the community.

The city needed a partner to distribute home yard waste and compost bins. Tilth, which had created a “Master Composter” volunteer training program and a telephone “compost hotline,” got the contract. One of the project’s leaders, Jeff Gage, became a composting consultant who has built a roster of clients stretching from Pierce County to Kazakhstan.

Then followed the Natural Yard Care program, applying the Tilth principles to the broader home landscape, evolving into the idea of “edible landscapes.”

Woestwin says the city indulged him in “my pet projects,” but the result was an urban foodscape remade.

Entering the 1990s, Seattle Tilth was energized by a group who had been educated in agriculture and were eager to expand the education program.

Carl Elliott, a demonstration garden coordinator, would become the cordial guide on organic gardening for an audience of a half-million on the public radio station KUOW. Elliott’s weekly, humor-tinged gardening call-in show with host Steve Scher became a must-listen for area gardeners.

Elliott says the program provided “a constant presence, so people knew that gardening and farming is a choice to make.” They shared the message that resources were available, Tilth was there to help, and “You can garden organically. It’s doable for every person, no matter what stage you’re at.”

An action-oriented board and growing staff leaned into the work, and projects bloomed. The Green Gardening Program, another civic-funded program, fueled greater education.

Tilth even contracted out for landscape design and development services — but only to PCC. The co-op hired Seattle Tilth to landscape the grounds of a new Green Lake store on Aurora Avenue, a project Elliott says was an extreme challenge. “I will never try to rehab an old parking lot in one year under contract ever again!” he says. “But we did do that.” The naturalistic landscape, replete with food and habitat for wildlife, arose from workshops and volunteer labor.

News articles, gardening columns and more publications shared Tilth learning. The Tilth-produced Maritime Northwest Garden Guide bloomed over the years into a comprehensive resource, and a publisher contracted with Tilth and its Education Program Manager and long-time Children’s Garden leader Lisa Taylor for the how-to book “Your Farm in the City.”

Seattle Tilth supported farmers directly too. In 1988, a one-day harvest festival took place at the Good Shepherd Center, bringing in farmers to set up produce stands, and offering acoustic music, healthy snacks from food vendors and, of course, tours and talks in the demonstration garden. It became the Tilth Organic Harvest Fair, sponsored by PCC, and ran for nearly three decades.

Other events raised funds and awareness, such as an organic wine tasting guided by PCC’s then- “wine guy” Jeff Cox. Tilth staff continued to find projects and funding to host a sustainability conference, build raised garden beds for low-income folks, start a community orchard or back new garden-focused parks.

Such urban agriculture projects, in new form, have recently “been really elevated again,” says Melissa Spear, executive director since 2018. The USDA is funding more urban programs. Tilth’s development of the 10-acre Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands (RBUFW) with other organizations was a landmark that brought the concepts to new communities and a larger scale. That project, on city-owned land, is dedicated to organic food production and distribution, environmental education and wetland restoration.

The list keeps going: Tilth was an original partner, with PCC and Organically Grown Company, in a program that funded farm-to-school educational programs through sales of specially marked bags of organic apples.

In 2020 Tilth Alliance became a founding member of the Eat Local First Collaborative, a collective of food systems organizations working together to facilitate connections between consumers and farm and food businesses statewide. In November of 2020 the collaborative launched Eat Local First and the Washington Food & Farm Finder.

Today, “it’s not necessarily chickens at your house, it’s communities coming together to have more sources of food in your community,” Spear says.

A new generation

As the Tilth movement enters its sixth decade, climate change and sustainable practices remain primary themes, with a rising focus on environmental justice, food equity and programs focused on inclusivity.

The landscape is far different than it was at Tilth’s birth. Organic foods are now a powerhouse, with sales of certified organic food topping $60 billion dollars annually in the U.S.

But, says Bialic, there is still a need for organizations like Tilth and PCC to pay attention. “When the language was written, I think people assumed that it all had been taken care of,” she says, “but it went sideways in some ways.”

While Washington’s organic movement was “really transformative,” says Spear, many young farmers today feel the massive industrialized organic producers that dominate the field today are not part of the movement. Some question whether “regenerative” policies provide added guardrails consistent with the original mission of the organic pioneers.

Attention to organic agriculture policy and research also has waned.

While working on public policy issues at PCC in the last decade, Davis says, new legislators would say “we know nothing about organic.”

A coalition started by Tilth, PCC and Organically Grown Company is tackling the problems at a grassroots level anew, through the Coalition for Organic and Regenerative Agriculture (CORA). The list of advocacy priorities — organic standards, research, markets, farmer support — is familiar, but the industry challenges have changed. Spear is hopeful the partners can address them.

“We now have this movement of passionate young organic farmers to see the opportunity to make advancements on some of the existential problems we’re having: food security, climate change [and] equity issues that have plagued the food system.”

Following the 2016 merger, which “sapped energy” from many longtime advocates, Spear says Tilth Alliance is now focusing on regaining statewide influence through new relationships with policymakers and agencies, leveraging partners such as WSU and programs like CORA. “I’ve tried to focus on having Tilth be seen again,” she says.

Bialic also looks to the next generation to hear that call. “My greatest wish is that there would be younger people who would take up the baton and just be fierce with it.”

Fifty years on, it’s clear that a role remains for the organization that rose from the passion of agrarians and the meaning of that unusual, ancient word tilth. It is “a connection to the soul,” Musick says, “and a connection to the roots of agriculture.”

Its fundamental mission is as essential as ever.