Producer

Katherine Humphrey was raised on a farm, so growing food has been part of her life for as long as she can remember. She's been farming on her own since 2002.

Katherine wishes consumers understood that farmers don't control the weather, and outside of selling through the Food Hub, they often can’t set their own prices either. On top of that, the cost of doing business in this state — labor, fuel — runs higher than in most other places.

Everyone assumes Katherine shakes her hazelnut trees to harvest. She doesn't — she waits for the nuts to ripen and fall on their own, then picks them up off the ground.

Old-timers have told Katherine that hazelnuts, once called filberts, were grown in this area before World War II, but no one has grown them commercially here in decades, making it a genuinely new crop for this region. She's leaned on new farmer friends in the Willamette Valley to learn the ropes, and she's had to adapt varieties to fit a colder, wetter climate: the variety she sells through the Food Hub has the shortest season and ripens about two weeks ahead of the others, which matters when a wet fall can mud out a harvest before it's finished.

Hazelnuts are a permanent crop, so Mother Nature still sets the growing season. What has changed is having a market through the Food Hub that connects Katherine with her neighbors and strengthens the local food economy, offering some steadiness against an extremely volatile world price for hazelnuts.