Fruit production is on an indefinite hiatus at Cloud Mountain Farm Center due to a lack of funds, signaling the end of an era for a beloved program with a long history.
For decades, the center near Everson has served as a model for growing grapes and tree fruits in Western Washington. It’s helped launch aspiring farmers through internships, workshops and other programming. The center’s nursery boasts of “the best selection of fruit trees in the maritime Northwest.”
Mike Finger, a former employee and retired farmer, said Cloud Mountain was “recognized regionally as one of the best places to go for information about growing Western Washington, Pacific Northwest fruit.”
Three people lost their jobs in the closure. There’s still a chance the program could start up again if Cloud Mountain leaders find a partner to support it.
Cloud Mountain also runs an agricultural mentorship program and provides infrastructure, such as food storage, for Puget Sound Food Hub and Twin Sisters Mobile Market. Those services, along with the nursery and workshops, will continue. The internship program was discontinued in 2020.
Last year, the center’s Incubator Farm Program, which offered beginning farmers affordable land, equipment and other support, also shut down in part because of financial challenges. Sustainable Connections, the nonprofit that merged with Cloud Mountain in 2019, is selling the 20-acre property near Deming that once housed that program.
Up until this year, locals could find Cloud Mountain grapes, peaches, pears and other fruit at the Bellingham or Twin Sisters farmers markets, grocery stores and restaurants.
“There’s so many folks working here in Whatcom County, especially east Whatcom County, who have connections to Cloud Mountain,” said Fruit Program Manager Maia Binhammer, who was laid off due to the program stoppage. “It’s a sad thing.”
Growing costs
Revenue has stayed largely flat over the past decade, while costs have risen significantly, wrote Derek Long, executive director of Sustainable Connections, in an email.
Fruit sales brought in around $50,000 this year — not enough to cover the fruit program’s hefty price tag, which ranges from $200,000 to $225,000 annually, due in part to facilities maintenance and the expense of planting new trees and vines.
For many years, the center relied heavily on a donor who has since moved on, Long said, and it has been unable to secure funding to replace that loss.
Remaining staff will keep up pruning and other necessary farm work “on a limited basis,” Long said. Going forward, the center’s leaders hope to partner with another organization to revive the fruit program in some form.
“We’ve tried so many different things ourselves and we haven’t come up with an answer,” he said. “And so we’re looking for help.”
They have about two or three months to find that help before the workload on the farm ramps up, he said.
A labor of love
Local couple Cheryl and Tom Thornton opened Cloud Mountain in 1978.
They were among the scores of American young people moving to the countryside as part of the back to the land movement of the 1960s and ’70s — an “army of people all over the country,” as Tom Thornton put it.
“I just started planting orchards to see what would happen,” Thornton said. “There was no really hard-and-fast business plan.”
Thornton had no formal agricultural training, so he leaned on mentors from various universities as he built the fruit program with his wife. In the early days, it was mostly apples, pears and garlic, plus a small nursery.
The couple started putting on workshops, at first for home gardeners. In the ’80s, interest in commercial workshops surged as apple growing boomed. When the apple market collapsed in the ’90s, the pair cut production by more than half and regrouped.
They decided: “Let’s just do the things we want to do and see how that works.”
Cloud Mountain’s fruit and vegetable offerings expanded.
Finger, who worked at the farm in the ’80s and ’90s, said Thornton’s extensive knowledge of fruit made him “an invaluable resource” for other growers.
“Tom really played a role in [developing] commercial orchards … in Whatcom and Skagit,” Finger said. “Really in Northwest Washington.”
Finger, now retired, and his wife went on to own a farm in Whatcom County.
In 2011, the Thortons expanded the farm’s educational model by forming a nonprofit. They stepped down eight years later, when Sustainable Connections took over, but still live on the property.
Transitioning to organic production
Sustainable Connections leaders decided to pursue organic certification at Cloud Mountain after the 2019 merger.
Among the reasons behind the switch to organic was a desire to provide a profitable organic farming model for others, Long said.
Concerns about the environment and employee safety also factored into the decision.
The transition involved narrowing down the farm’s fruit to varieties that respond well to organic treatments, Long said, meaning staff removed plants that weren’t working.
The farm is down to about 4 acres devoted to growing fruit now, Long said. By Thornton’s estimate, the farm had about 14 acres in production at the time of the merger.
Long estimates it would take another five to seven years to research varieties that would grow well organically and fill out the vineyards and orchards again.
The Thorntons grew hundreds of varieties of fruit, Long said. “It was such a large amount of variety that transferring the knowledge of how to care for that wide, wide variety is pretty next to impossible … almost like only Tom could do it.”
It wasn’t a model the nonprofit could document and share with other farmers, he said.
For local fruit farmer Stephanie Barmann, owner of Barmann Cellars, taking out those plants represented “a tremendous loss” of knowledge. She noted Thornton spent decades finding fruit varieties that grow well in this region.
“When we go to plant a new vineyard, typically you would go to a place like Cloud Mountain Farm to source the plant tissue,” she said, “and it’s completely gone.”
A loss for local fruit growers
From the outside, Barmann said, it seemed as though Sustainable Connections “came in heavy handed” when it took over.
When asked about the transition, Long acknowledged moving to organic production was a risk, but said the farm couldn’t have continued on as it had before anyway given the challenges it was facing, such as high inflation and the difficulty of documenting the farm’s existing system.
Reliance on a single donor was also among those challenges. Long, who served on Cloud Mountain’s board from 2011 until the merger, said the farm has had “an extraordinarily difficult time” finding additional sources of funding.
Since the merger, Sustainable Connections’ success rate securing grants for the farm has been lower than for its other programs, Long wrote, noting other similar farm training programs in the region are struggling financially, too.
The merger was no cash grab. Sustainable Connections merged with Cloud Mountain after a fruitless search for a successor to the Thorntons, who were nearing retirement, he said. He stressed though leaders may have made some decisions they would change in retrospect, they made them with “a good rationale.”
Jacob Mills, the fruit program’s recently laid-off field manager, said many of the changes on the farm related to the transition to organic were “midway through being completed.”
“Me and my co-workers had a … long-term vision of where we would like to see the orchard get to,” he said, “and we just didn’t have the runway financially to get there.”
Going forward, Finger said, local farmers who depend on the center’s fruit-growing expertise will need to look elsewhere. But he believes people will adapt.
“I don’t think it spells the end of small fruit in Whatcom County,” he said, “but it is a loss. There’s just no question that it’s a loss.”
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.
