Whidbey farmers find soil is best undisturbed

By Kate Poss

There’s a 20-acre farm in Clinton where ducks and chickens scratch and peck in the farm fields, goats graze, orchards bloom, rich compost fills bins and produce is grown without tilling the land.

Welcome to SkyRoot Farm, a certified organic farm that practices regenerative farming to sustainably grow food.

Its owner and founder Eli Wheat, an associate teaching professor with the University of Washington’s Environmental Studies Program, is an advocate of regenerative farming and teaches courses in sustainable food production. He outlined three ideas that help define regenerative farming, practiced for centuries by indigenous people working with rather than against nature.

“If I think about what regenerative means. … One is minimal soil disturbance, right?” Wheat said. “The second is integrating natural systems of fertility management, so cover crops, crop rotation, compost production is the source of fertility, rather than external imports of fertilizers. The third, pretty strongly represented, is the integration of animals.”

The presence of animals helps nourish the farm’s soil and manage pests.

“You can see our ducks wandering around right here inside the perimeter fence of our field, that’s important, right? They’re there because we’re moving them around the field, and they’re eating slugs, and they’re helping be part of the integrated pest management of the farm,” he said.

Likewise, when Wheat decided not to till the fields, he used sheet mulching to smother weeds and protect the soil’s mycorrhizal fungi, which create a symbiotic relationship between the host plant’s roots and the fungi, further enriching the soil. When the fields were no longer tilled, worms showed up, and robins arrived to feast on the worms.

“One of the things is I love birds,” Wheat said. “I think birds are a really great gateway to being in love with the world, and many of the birds that we love to see are birds that are eating invertebrates, right? So they’re eating small insects, or they’re eating worms, or they’re eating ground dwelling beetles or whatever it is, birds are all around us.”

Since making the decision to stop tilling three years ago, Wheat has noticed an improvement in the soil, the food it produces, pest management and the crew’s increased upper body strength.

“About three years ago,” he said, “after we made the decision to become a no-till farm, I sold the farm’s rototiller, so we don’t have a tractor powered rototiller anymore. I haven’t hooked the discs, which are another soil disturbance tool. Doesn’t it feel better not to do that? It feels great. It’s quieter, it’s nicer to work. It’s better for our pectoral muscles. We move a lot more to accomplish this.”

Looking out at the landscape framed by cedar, Doug fir and other members of the standing nation of trees, there’s a feeling of well-being, from the gray tuxedo cat who leaps into the field in greeting, the black Lab coming by for an ear scratch, the hens clucking, the robins singing, the rich smell of compost in bins ready to spread on farm fields. A fruit tree blooms pink with yellow daffodils at its feet. Work party volunteers attach plastic sheeting to hoop houses where, at this time of year, kale, spinach, carrots, cauliflower and spring seedlings are grown.

Deborah Koff-Chapin, a volunteer on the farm, said her family had been buying SkyRoot produce from the farmers market for years and decided they wanted to be more deeply connected with the farm.

“It’s really wonderful to be part of it,” she said.

SkyRoot Farm has had a presence at the Bayview Farmers Market for some dozen years or so. Additionally, the farm sends weekly emails listing what’s available for the week. Orders are placed and picked up Wednesdays, either at the farm or in Langley at the United Methodist Church.

Wheat credits Arwen Norman, a former farm co-manager, with creating the farm’s online ordering system. Norman left SkyRoot Farm to run Coupeville’s school farm in 2023.

“But one of the really cool things that is still happening here is this weekly produce list, and that’s very much Arwen’s brainchild,” Wheat said.

Wheat and partner Sarah and their young child arrived at SkyRoot Farm in 2012. At the time, the farm was owned by Karen Liftin, professor emeritus at UW who specializes in global environmental politics. Karen ran the farm with farm managers and was interested in creating an intentional community.

“We were in Seattle. We had just our child, Schuyler who was 3, and I wanted to be farming,” Eli recalled. “And Sarah, my partner, said, ‘You can farm, that’s fine, but you can’t quit your day job, and so don’t go find a farm too far from Seattle.’ So that was how I got here. Well, I (thought) I’ll try both those things out at once. And so Sarah and I decided to come here, and we moved in.”

Wheat was interested in farming and wanted more hands-on experiences in vegetable operations. He volunteered on various farms in the Pacific Northwest to learn about growing produce and marketing it. He found that working alongside other farmers helped dramatically enrich his awareness of how to succeed in vegetable production. He is grateful for the time and energy of co-managers at SkyRoot Farm, including Anna Petersons of 12 Birches Farm and Joanne Pontrello of SaltWater Seeds, in addition to Norman.

However, creating an intentional community and a production farm proved to be too much and something had to give. Wheat, Liftin and Sarah conferred. They decided that they wanted to put their energies into the farm systems.

“In the end, Karen decided to sell the farm to us, which was amazing and is what made has made this all possible,” Wheat said. “My gratitude for that, like, is huge.”

Wheat is also grateful to Judy Feldman, executive director of the nearby Organic Farm School, a program which trains new farmers how to develop and manage small farms with a focus on sustainability, regenerative farming and building community. Wheat has taught at the Organic Farm School on occasion.

“Judy Feldman does a really good job of adding back in the this other element of what regenerative is,” Wheat noted. “It is also regenerating the social capacity, the social resilience of rural communities, right? And so maybe that’s a fourth dimension that’s not quite as ecological, but that’s a little bit more human cultural connection.

Wheat appreciates the rippling effect of the farm in the community.

“And so it all sort of builds into this really cool loop of a food system,” Wheat noted. “And the farm is, of course, a food system, but it’s like, really cool to think about the food system of the farm being not just about humans, but also thinking about our non-human kin.”

It’s the life of the soil, full of organic matter that makes SkyRoot’s produce genuinely taste good and fill one up.

“I think one thing that’s pretty special about what’s going on here is that, as we have stopped disturbing the soil, we’ve seen big gains in the amount of stored organic matter in our soils, and that stored organic matter is fueling a lot of biological activity in the soil, not just worms, but bacteria and fungus,” Wheat said. “There’s a lot more life in our soil. That life in the soil is helping give actual life force to the plants that we grow. And so that’s a theoretical idea, but there’s actually a lot of science to back that up.

“What we know now is that soils that are not being disturbed are producing crops with more micronutrients in them, and those micronutrients are really important for human health and well being. So it’s not just that you feel like our vegetables are healthy and good for you. They actually are, right?“

In addition to growing nutrient-rich tasty produce, Wheat is also interested in native plants, such as nettles, which are prolific in early spring and good to harvest.

“Yes, we grow spinach on this farm, but wild nettles have like, two or three times the nutrition of spinach, and so I’m really thinking about wild foods,” Wheat said.

Through his experience working with the land, Wheat has come to believe the natural world wants to support us.

“I think this is a really important moment in history to kind of step back and look at marginalized groups of people, especially indigenous people here, and remembering that, before this kind of production agriculture, people were eating, and the land was providing,” he said. “One of the ideas that I think is really special to think about is that the Earth does love us. The Earth wants us to be fed. The Earth wants us to experience abundance, and it doesn’t want us to be feeling scarcity. When we’re feeling scarcity, that’s when we’re the most vulnerable.

To learn more about SkyRoot Farm, visit its website at https://skyrootfarm.com.