Welcome to the Scholls Valley blog! I will be using this space to convey news about the farm, observations of nature and suggestions for land managers. We have an enormous and diverse inventory of native trees, shrubs and herbs, mostly as bare-root material and bulbs, but also containers and seed of some key items. This inventory has been crafted by field practitioners for field practitioners, so if you want to get stuff done with plants that have been field-tested and grown in a truly environmentally sustainable way, you’ve come to the right place.
News for today:
So yesterday I sprayed out my very last tank of Round-up. We have been Salmon-Safe for over 20 years, which already put us in a class of our own. Now we are beginning our organic certification process, which will make us the largest organic bare-root nursery in the US. Generally, the nursery business is about as chemical intensive as anything in ag. Nurseries employ an arsenal of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides, but we have opted not to go this route. We have never used methyl bromide or any insecticides or fungicides except natural oil emulsions and potassium bicarbonate, and we haven’t sprayed herbicides in our production fields for four years. Yes we have a few weeds – both native and not – but this has had zero negative impact on our plant quality and numbers. Here is what that looks like:
And the bees love it. We have worked with the Oregon Bee Atlas for years, and their volunteers have routinely found more bees and more diversity of bees here on our farm than anywhere else in the Willamette Valley. That this is happening on a bare-root nursery in western Oregon is absolutely revolutionary, and we have stayed in business for nearly a quarter century while actually building huge populations of bees right here in our fields. The notion that sustaining pollination systems and other natural processes is incompatible with economic farm production is false. We have proven that.
Pesticides are generally assumed to play a role in insect declines, and most people assume this means insecticides. There is good logic in this, since insecticides are extremely efficient in killing bees, and no doubt bees have been slaughtered in droves with DDT in the past and neo-nicotinoids today. But insecticides and other directly insect-toxic substances are not the cause of chronic, widespread declines in flying insects, including bees. The real culprit is the frightening frequency and extent of herbicide applications across enormous swaths of the planet.
Most herbicides have little to no observable direct effect on bees, but they are fantastically good at killing plants. There is no single assault humans have waged on biodiversity more extensive and destructive than herbicides, which have been applied to an ever-increasing proportion of the terrestrial world. Literally billions of acres of planet Earth have been sprayed with herbicides, some dozens or even hundreds of times. The vast majority of these treatments have targeted bee-supporting, nectar-producing plants (milkweeds, sunflowers, broadleaf trees and shrubs, etc) in favor of wind or self-pollinated species (grasses and conifers, soybeans,etc) which support no pollinators at all.
And then we ask where the bees and butterflies have gone? Come on!
When we wipe out nectar production on vast areas of the planet, we are going to lose pollinators. There should be no confusion on this point. While the neo-nics might be killing swarms here and there, it’s mostly herbicides that are killing off bee populations, indirectly, by eliminating their habitats and food sources and creating enormous nectar deserts. Most of the active ag land in the Willamette Valley, and right here in the Tualatin Valley, is a nectar desert. Hundreds of thousands of acres of nectar desert.
Scholls Valley is different. From our inception in 2003, Scholls has gone the opposite way by building and stewarding biodiversity right here on our farm, while at the same time producing over 50 million trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants for restoration of Northwest ecosystems. This isn’t just sustainability lip service and taking recycling to the curb. We are doing this right, and spending our time and resources to do it.
Modern ag’s habit of hammering living organisms with chemicals needs to end. The wiliest of them find a way to fend off these attacks anyway, and while we might win today’s battles against this weed or that fungus with the latest and greatest (and most expensive) product of the agrochemical machine, we will lose the war. The realities of population ecology have already foretold the outcome, and given the facts, no honest person can deny it. So what are we doing here, besides making our own planet less habitable and reducing our children’s chances at a decent life?
Scholls needs your support. We compete in an industry that has clung to the worst of agricultural pesticides for decades, including methyl bromide, one of the most violently toxic chemicals produced by Big Chem, and which as an added bonus is both a greenhouse gas and potent ozone destroyer. Yet we match current market prices, and our plants do not have a hidden pricetag and legacy of environmental damage. We actually spend our money and time protecting the bees and other resources that every environmental agency in this state says they want to protect. In competing with chemical-intensive ag, we have shaved our margins as close as we can and still stay in business, but we need you all to use more plants. Please buy them and use them to good purpose with a clear conscience. You can find plants for every local ecosystem here, in our current availability: https://schollsvalley.com/availability/
It’s a fantastic world if we give it a little love. Let’s get moving!