Sip Northwest, Winter 2015
Goschie Farms SIPNORTHWEST COM Gayle Goschie stands hops in hand in her familys fourthgeneration hop farm PHOTOS COURTESY OF GOSCHIE FARMS AND IWALANI CARR The necessity of family participation was largely due to the expense of purchasing hop speci c farming equipment In the early 1940s hops started to be no longer handharvested says Gayle Goschie a fourth generation hop farmer in Oregons Willamette Valley With the introduction of mechanized harvesting Goschie says hop farmers either committed to as a family farm putting in a sizeable amount of investment into how to harvest and dry and package or you chose to decide that that wasnt for you That change represented a turning point for the hops industry Goschie says that unlike wheat and corn that use transferable equipment with hops when youre in it youre in it In the 1950s hop prices tanked and many farmers abandoned the crop further reducing the number of farms in the industry The farmers whose personal histories intertwined with that of hops were the ones most likely to stick with the crop through these changes Goschie runs her 500 acre hop farm with her brothers Glenn and Gordon The trios paternal great grandparents emigrated from Germany through New York across the Midwest and into California before settling in Oregon They began farming in 1885 working largely as subsistence farmers with a small amount of hops which they traded for edible farmed goods The Goschies grandparents fully began farming hops in 1904 representing the rst crop our family would have been paid cash to grow Goschie says Her parents Herman and Vernice started a separate hop farm in 1943 soon after they graduated high school and married its the same farm that their children work today Goschie Farms has grown to include 600 acres of other crops including grass seed corn wheat and wine grapes Their hop acreage today represents one of the Willamette Valleys largest and they were the rst hop farm in the country to be certi ed as Salmon Safe an independent certi cation organization of the same name that assesses land management practices and their potential e ects on aquatic ecosystems
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