I can see myself always being on the move, mainly because it seems to be my natural gear to be in overdrive. But if I pan out to visualize the river I’m a part of, I’m most excited about seeing the good work that my peers are doing and how we as a collective are creating momentum. — Nellie McAdams 5/13/2023
Who is Nellie McAdams?
Nellie McAdams is a farmer, attorney, and activist who currently serves as the founding Executive Director of the Oregon Agricultural Trust. She worked to create OAT as a way to help preserve agricultural land— to keep farmland from being lost to development. I first met Nellie when I interviewed her for my book on Oregon’s organic farm movement. At that time she was providing legal support to the Friends of Family Farmers organization. I next interviewed her for a video series I was putting together for the Mother Earth News website when she was creating a farm succession planning program for Rogue Farm Corps. Nobody works harder to preserve traditional family farms than Nellie. Visit the OAT website: oregonagtrust.org
The Interview…
J: Where are you from originally… where’d you grow up and what was it like growing up?
N: I’m originally from the Willamette Valley of Oregon. I grew up living in SW Portland on weekdays and my family’s hazelnut farm, where I’m the third generation on the land, on the weekends.
Our home in Portland was surrounded by forest. It was built in 1964 on a former dairy run by Swiss immigrants. The last farming heir of the dairy, Mrs. Foley, owned 11 acres of forest that surrounded us on 3 sides, and which included the largest stand of cedar trees in the city of Portland and a wooded corridor along Tryon Creek that led to two other parks. I still remember Mrs. Foley swearing like a sailor at horses, people, feral cats, and whatever else was in her way.
When Mrs. Foley died in 1995 or 6, her nieces and nephews discussed what to do with the property. One option was to develop it with 55 homes. Another was to build a Montessori school. My neighbors had just heard of a bond measure that just passed allowing Metro to purchase natural areas. They worked with Metro to purchase the land and transfer it to the city. This project was my first taste of land conservation, and I loved it.
Our farm was purchased by my grandfather in the 1930s with money he earned from contract tractor work. He was from one of the last generations where you could raise enough money from farm labor to buy a farm. It’s a total of 400 acres of hazelnuts, timber, and land leased for clover seed, grass seed, and winter wheat. I helped my parents plant 30 acres of our orchards, and would hoe and prune trees, drive tractor, and help with harvest. We also cared for my aging grandparents until they needed in-home 24-hour nursing. I still work at the farm with my parents, and plan to inherit it.
J: It sounds like you were surrounded with the beauty of nature both in town and on the farm; and your love of the natural world is apparent, as is your love of and commitment to family. You also seem to be committed to farming. Having grown up on a farm myself, I can understand the appeal of that lifestyle, at least from my perspective. But everyone’s views are uniquely theirs, so I’m wondering, what is it about nature and life on the farm that makes you love it? And what shaped it… do any childhood memories stand out for you?
N: I spent every weekend (Friday evening through Sunday evening) at our family farm, which kept me out of trouble. It also made me very close to my grandparents who lived at the farm. I learned how to make cherry pie, coleslaw, roast beef, and gravy from my grandma, and I helped provide her with in-home care after she developed Alzheimers when I was 16. My grandma’s dad had been born on the way to Oregon from Bavaria, and her mom had come over as a young woman from East Prussia. My grandma’s first language was German and she responded better to German than English as her memory faded.
My grandpa was a man of few words – when he had his stroke when I was 13 or so, the doctor asked him if he could do it all over again, would he do more work or more play. Without skipping a beat he said “more work”. Work was play to him – Play with an outcome that you could see and feel good about.
When my cousin came by the farm and lamented that she couldn’t go to church on Sundays anymore because she had to work in her hazelnut orchards, my grandpa said “Working with the land is the closest you can get to god.” He never went to church unless he had to. He preferred working the land, and when he couldn’t get into the seat of a tractor, we used a forklift to help him get up. He could tell what weather was coming hours ahead of time by looking out the window towards the coastal mountain range from his command center in his reclining chair.
He’d righted our remaining fruit and nut trees after the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, when some of the trees uprooted and flew across the fields like tumbleweeds. My dad learned from this, and he, brother and I did the same after the floods of 1996 toppled and split some of our trees – pulling them upright with a tractor, drilling bolts into the trees and a wooden stake in the ground and tightening the two with thick wire that we twisted to secure the tree in place. Split trees were bolted through the middle like Frankensteins.
We learned a lot from him, and I feel both of them still present. The farm feels like a grandparent and a grandchild at the same time.
J: I love your image of the farm as a multigenerational entity. Farms do feel like that when you’ve actually worked on them; especially, I think, when you’ve experienced them as a child. The farm I grew up on is no longer in the family, but I still think of it and wonder how it’s doing. Kind of strange, I guess, but I do think of it as someone I know… or have known and cared about. With such a strong agricultural focus, as you grew up, went to high school and then on to college, did you ever drift away from the idea of being a farmer? You even went to law school… did you know then that you’d be using your law degree in an agricultural career?
N: I did drift away from the idea of being a farmer. I took the farm and farm work for granted growing up. It kept me out of trouble as a kid to be in the country far away from our city home on weekends and not have the opportunity to go to wild parties, or even do high school sports (although I did do theater). I went as far away as I could in college, and did a lot of international terms abroad – Edinburgh, Nepal, around the world on a ship. I was always drawn to agriculture in one way or another — working for a permaculture and women’s health nonprofit in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal, for example. Being vegan for a few years was all about reducing my impact on the planet – although it didn’t work out for my body! 🙂
In law school, I thought I wanted to do international environmental policy, so I did a summer internship for a thinktank in Berlin called Ecologic. I researched how the European Union could best support developing nations in implementing the UN’s International Treaty on Plant Genetics for Food and Agriculture. After that work, I realized that international policy had no teeth, and I wanted to work closer to the ground, so to say, than the 30,000 foot perspective.
After law school, I got a job as Legislative Assistant to Tina Kotek in her first short term. I was very ignorant of the political process, and didn’t love being an impartial absorber of information. I wanted to get even closer to the ground, so I went to work at an organic farm in Troutdale called Dancing Roots for two seasons, working at farmers markets on weekends and spending one winter in New Zealand helping on 14 diverse farms in the off season. I wanted to gain information to bring back to my family farm, and even started a salad greens business selling to restaurants for a season, but we didn’t have irrigation, so much of what I learned couldn’t be practiced at home.
At one point fairly early in my farming career, I spoke with a respected farmer and neighbor, Anthony Boutard, who told me the best thing I could do is become active in policy creation to support farms. That led me to Friends of Family Farmers, where I became a board member and later a staff member as the Next Generation Program Director and Staff Attorney. I managed a major campaign to prevent canola production in the Willamette Valley, since it would have destroyed the specialty seed industry. But I began to feel uneasy being opposed to certain ag practices, such as chemical applications, that my own family used, and began to shift my focus somewhat. Eventually I became enchanted by the possibility of using working land easements to achieve the triple goals of land protection, land access, and cash for succession and viability.
As I worked through my various jobs, I never thought I’d return to farming. And even though every career decision I made felt random at the time, in retrospect, I was always spinning closer to my heart’s purpose of protecting farmland for farming.
J: Wow, what an incredible backstory. And what a special journey as you’ve woven together the threads of so many ideas and experiences into such a transformative tapestry of hope for the future. Sorry if I was getting a little too poetic there, but again, just wow. So now I have to ask, as the founder and executive director of Oregon Agricultural Trust, do you feel like things are finally coming together in the way you had hoped? Is tangible progress being made, or does policy, regardless of level, continue to lack teeth?
N: Personally, when I look back, I feel like I’ve been unwittingly on a rational path for the whole arc of my career, but that doesn’t mean that I can see my future any more clearly. I do think I can envision elected office or another form of public service for me, but not for a while.
In terms of the work OAT is doing, the money is starting to come in for easements, and I hope we can educate lawmakers on all sides about the benefits of protecting farmland. But the surrounding challenges for farmers have never been greater. This year’s hazelnut prices were half of what they were last year while input costs rose. Labor costs are increasing and labor rules are too stringent and complex for anyone but the biggest farmers to follow. If farmers can’t make a living, they won’t keep farming — they wouldn’t be able to — and I won’t have a case for protecting farmland. Easements and succession education are bandaids. But I don’t know what the biggest needle movers are that could increase margins for farmers under extreme, unpredictable international economic pressures. And then there’s climate change!
I also don’t know how to prevent non-farmers, investors, and developers from buying farmland. Most restrictions I can think of are unconstitutional, and incentives for farmers to buy land have the potential to inflate farmland values as well. Increasing farmland value due to competition by non-farmers is a problem, but I don’t know of a legal and effective policy solution yet.
The basic challenge in my mind is how we as as a society have defined “highest and best use” for real estate valuation. It’s not the best use for society, like protecting soils and building dense affordable housing. It’s what’s “best” in terms of how much someone will pay for land, regardless of what they do on the land or whether it benefits anyone but themselves and maybe a few others.
J: There are clearly a lot of challenges in the work you are doing, but it sounds like you still have that internal fire burning that keeps you moving forward… somewhat like a river that continues to move regardless of the obstacles it may encounter along the way. But keeping with the river analogy, when flowing water finds the right spot, it begins to pool and settle in. Do you think it will be the same for you? Do you foresee finding a place or a set of conditions that will allow you to feel more settled? Or do you see yourself as someone who will always be on the move— always working to enable others; always looking for ways to bring about change?
N: I can see myself always being on the move, mainly because it seems to be my natural gear to be in overdrive. But if I pan out to visualize the river I’m a part of, I’m most excited about seeing the good work that my peers are doing and how we as a collective are creating momentum. From former interns who are now staff attorneys at organizations I admire, to the passionate staff and board at 1000 Friends, to my own staff who amaze me every day with their creativity and drive, I’m really lucky to be surrounded by people I share a vision with, but who are taking on different essential pieces of the puzzle.
We pretty much never say no to an intern, because I’ve learned so much in my career from my intern positions and want to pay that forward. We also benefit tremendously from our interns’ unique expertise and passion and for the time they spend researching specific issues, from the constitutionality of state restrictions on corporate ownership of ag land, to how ag co-operatives can co-finance ag land protection projects, these folks are brilliant and they’re the future. I personally always had difficulty caring about a subject in school if I didn’t study it in context and know that my work would have real-life outcomes. If we can build people’s résumés, provide a context to accelerate their applied learning, and do better work as an organization as a result, that’s a great win-win!
My staff and I are also always thinking of new opportunities for funding land protection and better serving farmers and ranchers. The good thing about small/mid-sized nonprofits is that we have to be scrappy. You become more efficient with fewer resources and have a nose for finding opportunities for new revenue streams. We’re also looking to build out our Education Program to provide more direct services to farmers and ranchers for succession and business health. Big decisions for how to best meet our goals come after a decade of experience and many conversations. When we take on more work, we find ways to work smarter, not harder. And I want my staff to see pathways for career development – hopefully within OAT but also beyond if and when that’s where life takes them. As a result, the whole community will be better served by people with increased expertise, holistic thinking, deep relationships with partners, and confidence in their vision.