Cloud Mountain Farm Center’s nursery will close at the end of June, the latest cutback since its highly regarded fruit program shut down this year due to financial hardship.
Sustainable Connections, the nonprofit that took over Cloud Mountain six years ago, attributed the nursery’s closure to finances in a news release Wednesday, April 2.
“As [Cloud Mountain] operational costs have continued to increase,” the release read, “and despite substantial fundraising efforts, Sustainable Connections has not been able to replace the funds lost from a long-standing, large annual donation.”
Nursery Manager Edward Johnson said he and four other staff members are being laid off as a result of the closure.
Cloud Mountain currently lists nine employees on its website, including those who will be laid off. Sustainable Connections Executive Director Derek Long was unavailable for comment Thursday.
In November, Sustainable Connections announced it was pausing fruit production indefinitely in 2025. The farm, founded in 1978, had long served as a model for growing grapes and tree fruits in Western Washington.
Last year, the nonprofit also discontinued the center’s Incubator Farm Program, which offered new farmers affordable land. At the time, Long cited a competitive fundraising environment and job market in an interview with the Bellingham Herald.
In 2020, the center’s long-running internship program closed. Earlier this year, Long explained the decision was driven partly by budget concerns and partly by a shortage of viable applicants.
Will operate on smaller scale
With the recent development, Cloud Mountain “will operate at a smaller scale going forward, with a focus on essential site maintenance and its processing, aggregation, and distribution services,” according to the Sustainable Connections release Wednesday. The statement added the nursery won’t hold workshops past the end of May.
The farm center provides infrastructure, such as food storage, for Puget Sound Food Hub and Twin Sisters Mobile Market.
Cloud Mountain has had a nursery since its early days. Early this year, co-founder Tom Thornton said he and his wife, Cheryl, started selling fruit trees simply because they had extra. He remembered how “at one point, we were pretty much all apples and pears and just a small nursery business.”
For decades, the pair also put on agricultural workshops. The center’s programming, workshops included, has helped launch aspiring farmers in Whatcom County and beyond over the years.
Former Fruit Program Manager Maia Binhammer, who was laid off due to the fruit production halt, said the nursery was “a huge part of the farm center” as it provided a way to interact with the public.
“People really trust the nursery there to know what plants are going to do well here,” she said. “If you walk downtown in Bellingham or in Fairhaven, you’ll see lots of the Cloud Mountain tags on trees outside of people’s yards.”
The nursery has also been a resource for farmers, she said, adding neighboring farms purchase or work out trades to get Cloud Mountain’s propagation materials.
Johnson said the nursery is well known for informed staff who know how to grow and propagate the plants as well as sell them.
“To do that, we’ve had staff employed year-round, which has been a large cost to the nursery,” he said. “But it’s kind of what set it apart from other nurseries.”
Binhammer did not know the nursery shutdown was coming, but she suspected given the funding challenges Cloud Mountain is facing.
“With the closure of the fruit program, it felt for some folks like perhaps it was a matter of time before other programs also were shuttered,” she said.
Johnson and Former Field Manager Jacob Mills echoed the sentiment. Mills said he had been “100 percent certain” the nursery would close.
Binhammer said she worries about whether Cloud Mountain’s food aggregation services will continue long term, adding she is curious to hear Sustainable Connections’ plan for “operating the site and facilities at such a scaled-back level.”
Johnson is worried, too. It’s “not hard to see a trend in the programs here at Cloud Mountain,” he said.
Mills is also concerned about the state of the property. Maintaining the grounds is “not a small job,” he said, and layoffs mean less people to do that work — on top of the staff reductions that have already happened.
Sustainable Connections’ news release noted the nursery will have storewide sales in April and May, with online orders stopping at the end of this month. Cloud Mountain “will be reaching out to non-profits and mission aligned organizations” to donate plant materials, the release reads, and the farm center will sell or auction off all that’s left after Memorial Day.
“This is a significant programmatic loss for Sustainable Connections,” the release reads, “and the organization recognizes and shares in the loss that the community may also be feeling with this news.”
Johnson invited people to visit the nursery “one last time, while it’s still in its glory.”
“It’s a really beautiful place, really loved by the community,” he said. “I’m pretty heartbroken to have to step away from it.”
Sophia Gates covers rural Whatcom and Skagit counties. She is a Washington State Murrow Fellow whose work is underwritten by taxpayers and available outside CDN's paywall. Reach her at sophiagates@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 131.
