11 Sep Finding Hope Under Our Feet: Ben Saur on 20 Years of Gorge Grown
My wife Anastasia and I grow veggies and flowers in Parkdale, this is our 16th season if you can believe it.
This year we are celebrating Gorge Grown Food Network’s 20 year anniversary. I’m gonna tell you a bit about our story and how Gorge Grown has been a big part of it.
Anastasia and I both grew up in Hood River, and graduated from HRVHS. Then we both got our associates at CGCC. We got married in 2009 and moved to Portland for Anastasia to finish her degree at PSU. We weren’t there more than 4 or 5 months before we started planning what we’d do when we moved back; it became apparent very quickly that our place and future was the Hood River Valley, and though we may not have been able to say it at the time; our ties to the land and the community were something that were a essential part of us.
We both became interested in farming somewhat separately, me from reading Wendell Berry and the SFJ, and Anastasia working on an urban farm for her senior community project. And so we began to farm someone’s big back yard outside Hood River before we even had moved back from the city.
We were first introduced to Gorge Grown when we applied for the Farmers Market. We started selling in June of our first season at the Community Table. The Community Table gives small or starting farmers an opportunity to sell produce without committing to certain dates or paying a booth fee. Its a great part of our market still. After selling at the Community Table for a couple months our display begin to grow and Todd, the market manager at the time, informed us we had outgrew the community table and it was time to start our own booth. We finished that year with so much more confidence than we had started with, in large part thanks to Gorge Grown.
Our second season we took on another property (again, someones extra lot behind their house) and with the help of a Gorge Grown season extension grant we were able to put up 2 small unheated greenhouses. These hoophouses, as we call them, gave us the ability to have food ready to bring to market weeks earlier in the spring, and then weeks later in the fall.
After four seasons of commuting between our various leased properties, we were able to buy our land in Parkdale and have all of our production in one location. Our dream had come true. But as I started saying after moving, our dream just ended up being a lot work!
At the beginning of our second season up at our new place the Farmers Market moved from Thursday afternoons at the Middle School, to Saturday mornings downtown. We were somewhat against this decision because it meant that harvesting and going to market no longer was a day of work production, but now split over two days. We were also worried that moving the market day, time, and location might kill it. Our fears were not realized though, and with our new market manager, Hannah, at the helm, the 2016 Hood River Farmers Market was the most successful thus far and set us all up for years of steady and sustainable growth. Good leadership sometimes means making decisions that everyone does not agree with; and I’m glad they didn’t listen to me about that one!
In the late winter of 2020 as the world was shutting down from the pandemic, Gorge Grown again showed leadership and vision; creating a market that kept everyone safe and kept local food available to our community. Despite our fears that year, the 2020 market season was an exceptional market year for us and again, gave us the confidence to increase production and an outlet to feed our community.
Every year that we’ve sold at market for the past 16 years our sales have increased from the year prior. This in part has been possible because of the vision and leadership that Hannah and Gorge Grown have had for this Farmers Market.
And of course the Market is not just about us, here are some fun market stats:
- HRFM was GGFN’s first program- started with just 9 vendors in 2006. 20 years later, the market supports 100+ local farmers and businesses and grosses $1.7 million in annual sales.
- 2008 is the first year we have sales data available and grossed $71,000. Now, we do that in one market in August.
- In 2017, the market opened its first winter season becoming the only year-round farmers market in the Gorge
- Since starting our SNAP tripling program in 2023, we’ve harnessed $420,000 in SNAP, SNAP Match and Double Up Food Bucked to be spent at the market with local producers
- Last November, when SNAP benefits were not issued during the government shutdown, Gorge Grown distributed nearly $12,000 in emergency SNAP Match in one weekend to help local food-insecure families buy food at farmers markets.
This Market isn’t just about my farm and other farms being able to sell food to our community, this market also makes is possible for folks of all income levels and means in our community to be able to purchase local food for their families.
Many of you know we lost Wendell Berry last week. It would be an extreme understatement to say his work was an inspiration for our farming. To be truthful, I’m not even sure we would be farming today if it wasn’t for Wendell Berry. His work got us farming, and has kept us farming.
I’m going to read a poem of his about hope.
A Poem on Hope
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work. Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.
Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
Wendell Berry’s writing can be be beautifully inspiring and also can be a stark warning. I can relate to the feeling of losing hope as I get older. I find it hard to find hope in the overwhelming problems of our world.
And so I take Berry’s advice, I look for hope under my feet; in the land I live on, in our place. I find hope in our community, in the people in this place, in you all here tonight. I find hope in the chefs who buy from local farms, in the customers who come to the market every Saturday to buy from local farms. I find hope in the SNAP programs that Gorge Grown leads, where someone can triple their SNAP funds at market to buy local food.
Berry says, “the world is no better than its places, and its places no better than its people”, lets be the people who invest in their place. I am overwhelmed when I think about how to help make the world better, but I can start here in my community. We can all start here in our community.
We can start tonight as we support Gorge Grown and the work they do.
-Ben Saur, Saur Farming