The Delicate Dance

Fifth-generation farmer Carl Hausauer squints in the bright sunlight and points toward a massive field of thigh-high green plants dotted with purple and white blossoms. At the base of these luscious plants, growing under the soil, are thousands and thousands of potato tubers.

“It’s like your babies out there,” he says. “All the work that goes into them, all the hours you spend out here. It’s fun to watch them grow, and when harvest season comes around, it’s just such a good feeling to put them in that shed.”

Hausauer walks the Washington Grown team through his family’s Mount Vernon farm, S&B Farms, alongside his aunt, Jenn Smith. The farm’s 1,500 acres include fields of wheat, spinach seed, and potatoes, and in 1998, the farm partnered with Morrison Farms to create the Smith and Morrison Farms packing facility, where they sell potatoes under the brand Skagit Valley’s Best Produce.

Hausauer and Smith said neither of them had planned to be potato farmers. Smith grew up on a dryland wheat farm in Eastern Washington but didn’t think she’d go into farming until she married her husband, Brad, who also works on the farm. Hausauer had originally trained to be an elementary school teacher. But now they’re here, representing the fourth and fifth generations to farm this land.

Hausauer digs up a few baby potatoes to show the Washington Grown team.

“How close before these are ready?” asks Washington Grown host Tomás Guzmán, holding up a handful of small yellow potatoes covered in soil.

“Quite a ways,” says Hausauer.

“So they’re going to get much bigger than this?” Guzmán asks.

“We hope so,” Hausauer says, adding that he hopes this will be a good year for potatoes. “You know, you don’t really know until you get down there and dig around.”

“Plants do crazy things,” says Smith, laughing.

Farming can be an unpredictable vocation, with so much depending on outside factors like weather or pests. In addition, farmers often need to contend with policy changes that could affect their practices and land, which is something the folks at S&B Farms are wrestling with now.

A 2024 report by the Washington State Riparian Task Force recommended many changes that have concerned farmers. The focus of the task force is to propose policies and funding strategies to improve riparian habitats and support the recovery of salmon and steelhead. This includes recommendations on creating riparian buffers — strips of trees, shrubs, and plants along rivers and streams — that can help protect fish populations. But proposals around the recommended width of buffer plantings have drawn criticism.

“What has been proposed would take half the land that we farm out of production,” says Smith. “I don’t know a single farmer that could survive that.”

Smith says she and her family agree that the fish populations need to be protected, but not all ideas make sense. For example, a drainage ditch that doesn’t contain any fish shouldn’t be held to the same standard as a river or stream containing salmon or steelhead.

“There needs to be a lot more conversation,” Smith says. “And there needs to come an agreement where we’re talking about this on fish-bearing waterways, not on irrigation ditches.”

Hausauer agrees. He says protecting water, whether it’s the rivers or the groundwater, is crucial, but the farmers need to be consulted.

“We’re dependent on both of those elements,” he says. “To create a 200-foot buffer on four sides of a field would render it useless; really, you couldn’t farm in there.”

Smith and Hausauer take the Washington Grown team to a part of the property that the farm donated to the Nature Conservancy in Washington as part of its Fisher Slough project.

“My father-in-law donated this land for a salmon habitat project as good faith,” said Smith, “to show that the farmers are here doing what’s right for the environment and trying to be good partners.”

But partnership, collaboration, and communication are key.

“Farmers everywhere are trying to help out,” says Hausauer, “and do what they can to collaborate and help preserve the fish as well.”