For more than forty years, Nash Huber has produced organic vegetables and fruits, food and feed grains, pork and poultry, and a variety of vegetable and cover crop seeds on 450 acres of prime farmland on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.  Much of Nash's land is leased, and most of it is protected by conservation easements. With the help of a permanent crew of twenty-five, and an additional fifteen during peak growing season, Nash manages diverse dynamic rotations that build soil quality, provide nutrients, conserve water, and reduce pest pressures to keep the farm productive and profitable. The farm receives an annual average of seventeen inches of rain, and its production is irrigated entirely with surface waters replenished each year by snowmelt from the mountains to the south.



Nash Huber first started noticing changes in the weather in the early 1990s. The growing season seemed to lengthen as winters grew warmer, spring temperatures and precipitation grew more variable, and fall grain and seed harvests were increasingly disturbed by more frequent fall moisture. "It seems like our springs have gotten longer, cooler, and wetter," says Nash.  "We always used to get nice warm weather in late April and May. We haven't gotten anything like that in years. Quite often, spring will start sometime between the middle of January and the middle of March, and it's really variable. It can have too much swing and that really puts the squeeze on us."