TURNING POINT: TIM BREHM, '84, & BARB FITZGERALD, '85

Getting Down to Earth

EDAMAME, OZETTE POTATOES, Walla Walla sweet onions, French breakfast radishes. If it’s exotic and organic, it probably grows in the gardens at Coyote Creek—the green dream of a couple who met on the Farm.

Tim Brehm, a hazardous-waste specialist who studied engineering at Stanford and MIT, had always wanted to farm for a living. Barbara Fitzgerald, a human biology major turned pesticide toxicologist, wasn’t so sure about working a farm but had always wanted to live on one. So in 1993, the couple—sharing a new last name, Morrissey—moved from Seattle to the countryside south of Olympia, Wash., and planted a large garden. Friends and relatives reaped the fresh benefits. Two years later, Tim quit his regular job to work full time as an organic farmer.

The family operation, Coyote Creek Farm, is part of an alternative farming system called community-supported agriculture. Every year, members pay a set price ($490 full share, $280 half) for a weekly mix of organic eggs and 40 different fruits and vegetables, plus invitations to come out and help with farm projects. A full share supplies three to five people throughout the 20-week produce season.

Under a local membership arrangement like this, “the farmland becomes . . . the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production,” explains Suzanne DeMuth of the USDA’s Alternative Farming Systems Information Center in Beltsville, Md. “Farmers typically use organic or biodynamic farming methods and strive to provide fresh, high-quality foods.”

The Morrisseys serve about 80 families in the Seattle/Olympia area by cultivating just two acres—entirely by hand. “It’s very intensive,” Tim says. “There’s no wasted space for tractors.” Nor are there any pesticides. Barb, still working as a toxicologist with the state health department, says the pesticide-related illnesses she sees offer “a daily reminder of why to go organic.”

Having started out as a computer engineer before specializing in waste management, Tim laughingly describes his revenue trajectory as “one long, slow slide in reverse, with farming as the crowning end.” But Coyote Creek “is not just an indulgent hobby,” he insists. With memberships totaling around $25,000, the operation turns a small profit.

Tim relishes the physical and mental challenges of intensive farming and enjoys turning people on to different kinds of produce. He’s particularly proud of small victories, like the conversion of one member from “an avowed beet hater to a beet lover.” He and Barb also find satisfaction in seeing their labor yield tangible results—and in knowing that their three sons, Thomas, 7, Michael, 5, and Joseph, 2, understand the point of it all. Working with their dad almost every day, the boys “see work as a good thing,” says Tim, “not just something to be put up with or avoided.”

—Leslie Talmadge, ’86