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Nearly four decades after they started the organic farm near Philomath, owners John Eveland and Sally Brewer hope to find someone to carry on their legacy.
In 1987, John Eveland and Sally Brewer, owners of Gathering Together Farm, realized they were outliers in Philomath’s logging community. Big trucks would roar past the farm, their drivers cursing at the new “hippies” in town.
Thirty-nine years after those trucks rolled past the acres of farmland, the organic farm has become an integral part of Philomath’s community and some of Oregon’s biggest farmers markets, including in Portland, Beaverton and Corvallis.
Over the years, the farm has gone through challenging shifts. These include recent increases to labor and material costs that their revenues don’t match, which has strained the balance between maintaining a business and their values.
These difficulties, on top of reaching retirement age, led Eveland and Brewer to decide to sell the farm. They hope to find new owners who will continue to cultivate vegetables and the community.
On July 14, Brewer sorted tomatoes at the farm. Each customer would pick one out for their weekly box of vegetables later that day. Looking back, Brewer describes Eveland as the farm’s visionary, and herself as the grounding force.
“Quality has always been my schtick,” Brewer said. “And John, he would sell any of these tomatoes.”
Growing up as his father’s right-hand man on his family’s corn and soybean farm in Iowa, Eveland learned basic mechanical and farming skills young, but he still never thought he would end up a farmer.
Brewer, on the other hand, has been a market farmer since her early years in New Hampshire. Eveland was brought back to farming after owning a vegetarian restaurant, Nearly Normals Gonzo Cuisine, and struggling to buy quality produce. This drove the couple to start farming their own vegetables.
“I started growing tomatoes, and it was a slippery slope,” Eveland said.
Getting started wasn’t easy. With little money, they stayed scrappy, buying cheap equipment that Eveland would repair on site.
He notes that success is built on teamwork, not competition.
Sense of family
JC Mersmann, owner of restaurant The Dizzy Hen, is a previous employee of the farm’s restaurant. The Dizzy Hen is one of at least 15 offshoot businesses created by farm employees during or after their time at the farm.
Eveland supported Mersmann as he explored different techniques in the kitchen. He started his own artisan bread program, and learned about salumi, a variety of cured Italian meats, while working at the farm restaurant.
“Did he prioritize making money over his workers? No, not even a little bit,” Mersmann said of Eveland. “He’s always concerned with doing the right stuff for his employees.”
While maintaining her role as field and barn manager, Mariana Fontaine started Fontaine Flowers with her wife on a plot of land leased from Eveland and Brewer. After moving to Philomath in her early 20s from Mexico, she considers herself to have grown up here.
“Gathering Together Farm is family,” Fontaine said.
This sense of family extends to customers of the farm as well.
Later that Tuesday, Gathering Together Farm customer Sarah Lewis searched for the perfect tomato in the parking lot of NW Hills Community Church while picking up her weekly community supported agriculture (CSA) box. She got her first CSA, a subscription to a weekly share of vegetables, in 2001. When she first began getting the boxes, she went in on it with a group of friends fresh out of grad school.
“It was a great way to get involved in the local farming scene even though at the time we couldn’t actually afford it all on our own,” Lewis said. “It brought us together to build a community around the food we were getting.”
She reminisced with Eveland and Brewer’s daughter, Haylee Eveland, 33, about flipping through her recipe book and finding a 2006 newsletter from Gathering Together Farm. Next to a recipe was a “written by the farm kids” section signed off by a then-13-year-old Haylee.
Some customers only knew Brewer and Eveland through the weekly newsletter, others from visits to the farm restaurant or from friends of friends, but among all was a bond shaped through a shared love for fresh food.
“There’s phases to everything,” Lewis said. “So if there’s a new phase for the farm, we’ll support however we can.”
This story was produced by student reporters as part of the High School Journalism Institute, an annual collaboration among The Oregonian/OregonLive, Oregon State University and other Oregon media organizations, including Lookout Eugene-Springfield. Lookout staffers who were on the institute’s faculty this year were Lilly St. Angelo and Tyson Alger. Learn more about the program at OregonLive.com/HSJI.
