SEQUIM — Nash Huber, the Dungeness Valley organic-farming pioneer, has been nominated to become the nation’s first White House farmer.
At www.WhiteHouseFarmer.com, an election is under way for the man or woman who would turn 5 acres of south-facing White House lawn into an organic fruit and vegetable garden — and set a crisp, leafy example for the country.
Huber, the 67-year-old owner of Nash’s Organic Produce, is one of more than 100 nominees nationwide.
Polling continues until midnight Saturday on the site, and the top three vote-getters’ profiles will be sent to President Barack Obama’s staff.
Washington state’s organic farmers are well-represented on WhiteHouseFarmer.com, with 15 nominees, including Huber.
Only Wisconsin, with 17, has more nominees for first-family farmer.
The idea for the position sprang from Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Believing the country hungry for real nourishment, Pollan penned a memo to the presidential candidates last October and published it in the New York Times Magazine.
Set and example
He called for a collaborator for the White House chef, a grower who could show the American people how fresh, chemical-free, delicious food can come straight from backyard garden to kitchen.
“When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime,” Pollan pointed out.
“By the end of [World War II] more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America.”
With a new Victory Garden movement, Pollan wrote, Americans could emerge triumphant over high food prices, lousy diets and the computer-potato lifestyle.
Huber has sung a similar song for about 40 years.
In 2008 he was awarded the American Farmland Trust’s Steward of the Land award.
The award came with a $10,000 prize, a hearty celebration at the Sequim Prairie Grange Hall and a visit from the trusts’ leaders, who came from Washington, D.C., to stroll Huber’s fields of wheat, carrots, berries and numerous other crops.
From Jan. 21 through last Saturday, Huber partook in the Ecological Farming Conference in Pacific Grove, Calif., and spoke on a panel of successful organic farmers, said Kia Armstrong, outreach coordinator at Nash’s.
This week he’s been bicycling along the California coast, she added. Huber couldn’t be reached for comment on his nomination.
There’s a chance he hadn’t heard about it yet.
Huber’s wife, Patty McManus-Huber, reached at her Peninsula College office on Thursday, was silent when given the news.
Then she burst out laughing.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. But McManus-Huber doesn’t see her husband picking up and moving to Washington, D.C. — at least not full time.
“He’s got a business to run, payroll to make,” she said.
But according to WhiteHouseFarmer.com, the grower-in-chief would be responsible only for designing the 5-acre garden.
Pam Larsen, a fellow organic garlic grower in Carlsborg, envisions Huber as a consultant who could keep his West Coast growing concerns.
Yet a mystery remains: Who nominated Huber?
Armstrong thought Larsen did it.
But Larsen said that although she tried to submit a nomination, she was notified that the deadline had passed.
Larsen thought perhaps Bob Caldwell, founder of the Friends of the Fields farmland preservation coalition, nominated his longtime ally.
But Caldwell said no, it wasn’t he.
The Web site shows Huber was nominated by “jas,” and queries to the site’s host went unanswered.
Hearing that the WhiteHouseFarmer.com election was the brainchild of the Brockman family, who farm in central Illinois, McManus-Huber laughed again.
“We have family in Illinois,” she mused. Her husband grew up working on farms there, before going west as a young man four decades ago.
Larsen, for her part, said she hopes people will vote with their knives, forks and dollars on locally grown food.
There are a lot of things wrong with the nation and the environment, Larsen added, that are “out of control. We can’t fix them,” and we can’t know when the next imported-food scare will happen. What people can do is support the chemical-free farmers on the North Olympic Peninsula, she said.
“They’re growing things you want to eat.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
