About the Farm
Open Oak’s farmers, Sarah Kleeger, Andrew Still, and Cooper Boydston are inspired by and dedicated to heritage staple crops. We have been involved in growing organic vegetables, seeds, grains, and beans since 2003.
Open Oak Farm is the home of Adaptive Seeds – Northwest Stewarded Seeds for the Resilient Gardener and Seed Saver. We grow and sell artisan quality, public domain, open-pollinated garden seeds. Find out more at www.adaptiveseeds.com.
Open Oak Farm is located in the Brush Creek watershed, a tributary of the Calapooia River. We are ten miles east of Brownsville, Oregon. We are at the same time on the edge of the Willamette Valley and at the edge of the Cascade Mountain Range.
Our farm name represents open-source and open-pollination, and our relationship to the rich history of balanced, long-term land management practices in this bio-region.
The Kalapuya, who lived in this valley until the mid-1800’s, grew foods such as camas, native strawberries, and acorns. They developed open oak savannahs, characterized by grasslands interspersed with large familial oak trees. Our farm’s branched old oak trees remind us of this heritage.
We currently participate in this ecosystem by growing our crops using balanced land practices such as crop rotations and conservation tillage. Grown in rotation with cover crops and vegetables, beans and grains support a resilient environment by enriching the soils of our farm. Eaten together, beans and grains form a complete protein -- an ideal local staple.
Land Use Practices
We are in the middle of transitioning all 30 acres of Open Oak farm to Certified Organic and Biodynamic. Using soil conservation and permaculture principals we are always striving to work with and learn from the landscape we occupy. Here are some of the many practices we use give to the land hopefully more than we take....
We see any single practice on the farm as a contributing part to a whole system approach. Meaning that single actions in cooperation contribute to greater success of the other practices. As an example, all of the following practices contribute to general soil health, but one practice might be more focused on weed control and compaction while another focuses on fertility and increased soil biology. However any single practice alone would have much less proportional effect on the landscape when isolated.
- Rotations, Cover Cropping and Composting help with fertility, nutrient cycling, disease and pest moderation.
- Chisel plowing/subsoiling and Reduced Tillage help to increase top soil depth and quality, reduce erosion and compaction. We do not use a moldboard plow, which can damage the soil structure and we minimize tilling to preserve the rich organic mater in the soil.
- On contour cultivation, swales, and hedgerows to to improve fertility and ecological balance.
Below is the survey of our back field we made in order to decide how our grain and bean beds will be oriented. It is also important for planning irrigation. As you can see below from the 2005 areal photo we will be reorienting the field's cultivation pattern 45° differently than the previous hay field. We will be cultivating following the contour of the landscape to help build soil quality and minimize the slow topsoil erosion that happens when fields are not cultivated following contour. We believe this is important even on our relatively flat ground. In the image below you can see our 12 acre back field with contours at 1 foot intervals.
