Nash Huber's organic carrots, potatoes and other row crops serve the community and save land from development, thanks to a trust fund run by Puget Consumers Co-op.

MY FRIEND Jon Rowley is on a lifelong quest for flavor, and now and then, he lets me tag along.

This time, we were on a carrot crusade, and our point of departure was to be the home of one Nash Huber, carrot farmer. Huber lives in Sequim, a small town that lies between the Olympic Mountains and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, about 90 minutes from Seattle. And today, he was hosting one of his weekly men's breakfasts. Jon and I had been driving for an hour and a half and the sun was still barely cresting the horizon.

Having left directions at home, Jon suggested I call and get them. I tried, but out on the peninsula, cell-phone reception can be sketchy.

"Let's just ask someone," I said. A few blocks down the road we saw an elderly woman in a yellow coat. "Excuse me," I said. "Do you happen to know a fellow named Nash Huber?"

"I don't think so," she said, eyeing me suspiciously.

"He's a farmer," said Jon. "Grows carrots."

"Oh," she said, "you mean that organic fellow. Sure; I know Nash Huber; grows carrots. You take your next left. His place is the second house on the left, lots of trees. Are you boys headed to the men's breakfast?"

"We are."

"Well, he lives right over there." I'd imagined we were going directly to the farm. But as it turned out, the Huber house is in a suburban neighborhood. Inside, pressed between wall-to-wall bookshelves and a baby grand piano, was a table surrounded by an assortment of chairs, each inhabited by a man with a plate. More men were in the kitchen pulling waffles out of a waffle iron, pouring coffee and putting the final brown on a pan of something they called parsnip fritter, which was really more like a parsnip mash.

"We started doing these breakfasts, must have been, oh — at least 18 years ago," said Huber. "We ground the flour for the waffles and this fellow made the plum preserves." The oldest men in the group had been friends for decades. The youngest men at the table, now employed by Huber on his farms, were probably still in diapers when the breakfasts got started.

"When I came here in 1968 that boy's grandfather was the first man I met," said Huber with a tilt of his head toward Josh Gloor. Gloor now drives heavy equipment and works the orchards on Huber's farms.

"Josh grew up on a farm in the valley, and he knows who he is."

			Most young men coming out of our community don’t know who they are. They’re stuck inside watching TV. These young men are the main reason I do this farming. Farming, you see, gives young people an identity. Nash Huber

"Most young men coming out of our community don't know who they are," said Huber when we set off after breakfast for a tour of his 76-acre Delta Farm.

"They're stuck inside watching TV. These young men are the main reason I do this farming. Farming, you see, gives young people an identity."

"In 1959," said Huber, "the general budget for this county was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. The population was about 33,000; 15 percent of that budget was spent on criminal justice. Last year, the budget was $24 million, and the percentage spent on criminal justice was closer to 65 percent. But the population has only doubled!"

These baffling numbers gradually took on meaning as Huber continued. "We've changed our economy," he explained. "We were once a stable, resource-extracting economy. Now we're something else." Fishing and logging interests are gone. With more people and fewer farms, there's a shortage of jobs, so idle kids are getting into trouble.

Before I had time to process these thoughts, we had arrived. I stepped out of the truck and surveyed the deep brown soil where carrots had recently been harvested. Frosted rows of cabbage and kale lay beyond. Delta Farm boasts a pigpen and a chicken coop, but is primarily dedicated to row crops. Built on land purchased by the PCC Farmland Trust in 1999, it's been leased by Huber ever since. PCC, or Puget Consumers Co-op, is a Seattle-based chain of natural-food stores, and its Farmland Fund is a self-supporting, nonprofit land trust. The fund was established to ensure a steady supply of organic produce for the stores, but founders knew it would also help check the conversion of agricultural land into residential areas. Delta Farm in Dungeness was the foundation's first purchase.

"This used to be a dairy farm," said Huber. "And the local milk was prized because it had a higher cream content than just about any other milk in the state." Cows transform the energy in the grass into energy in the form of butterfat. "If the grass is richer in sugar, the milk is richer in cream." What made the grass in this valley richer was a confluence of melting glacial water from the nearby Olympics infusing the soil with a high mineral content, and a relatively high proportion of sunny days brought on by the rain shadow of the Olympics themselves.

The high ratio of sunny days now prompts thousands of retirees to move into the valley, expanding pavement and covering farmland as they come.

But Huber is hanging onto the land, noting that those same factors make for incredibly sweet root vegetables. "The minerals in the soil give the plants the strength to capture all that sunlight in the form of concentrated sugars."

Later, I stopped by the farm stand in Dungeness, where a couple of young farmers-in-training were selling the produce they had grown on Huber's farms. I bought carrots, beets, winter squash, potatoes and kale, and when I brought them home, the vegetables seemed to emanate the energy of the valley where they were grown.

Nash Huber may be known for his organic carrots; they are extraordinarily sweet. But like the chard, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi, spinach, cabbage, celery, beets and leeks he and his crew produce, they're just byproducts of what he's really up to. Huber is raising farmers.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com.