Harvesting Knowledge Program Has Helped Train Farmers, Others On Policy, Culture And Techniques

Phyllis Gleasman had no idea what the day would bring when she boarded a bus bound for Seattle one wintry morning last December.

Nor did the Chelan County orchardist know that two years of training, traveling and practicing would pay off in a big way.

While protesters and anarchists tied up the streets of downtown Seattle during the World Trade Organization meeting, Gleasman thought she would simply be going to hear a speech by President Clinton.

Instead, after a long bus ride and too long in the rain waiting to complete yet another security check, Gleasman would not only meet the leader of the free world, but be his tour guide in the Port of Seattle venue.

When she found out about it, Gleasman wasn’t nervous in the least. “I didn’t have time,” she admitted. “I had probably a half hour to get ready.”

Poised and professional, she carefully guided Clinton through the displays of wheat, apples and asparagus, talking about the great variety of commodities grown in Washington and how important the crops were to the economy.

It was her moment.

And while she had Clinton’s ear, she even made points about how U.S. policy affects Washington farmers.

Nearly 30 U.S. Congress members and hundreds of other farmers and press watched as the tour took place.

“He is such an easy person to talk to,” Gleasman said of Clinton.

But it helped that Gleasman had been trained for such a moment.

Gleasman, 56, is a graduate of one of the state’s largest and least known leadership training programs - a finishing school for farmers.

The Washington Agriculture and Forestry Leadership Program has trained hundreds of farmers, foresters, agriculture workers and government employers for more than 20 years.

Started with $50,000 of seed money from the Washington state Department of Agriculture, the foundation’s goal has been ensuring healthy farms, forests and communities and creating leaders in agriculture.

Today, graduates of the two-year program serve in the state Legislature, on school boards, on city councils and county commissions. They’re leaders in business and active in their agriculture commissions. They include government employees as well as farmers and orchardists.

Only a high school graduate, Gleasman said she felt at home in the program where she was equal with her fellow classmates - business leaders, attorneys and environmental specialists.

“I graduated from high school and here I was with people who have master’s degrees,” she said.

In a program that stresses diversity, Gleasman brought the perspective both of a small farmer and an employee of a fruit packing company.

The program

Tucked into a rehabilitated apartment complex in the Spokane Valley is the small office of the Washington Agriculture and Forestry Education Foundation, a 22-year-old, private, nonprofit agency.

It is based on a program started in Michigan in the 1960s. Pennsylvania and California also started similar projects.

The Washington foundation mails 900 applications a year, then weeds through the 12-page applications to select 30 people from different backgrounds for the class.

Many participants have been referred by graduates of the program or by an investor, but the foundation also recruits from outside the existing pool of applicants. Targets include Hispanic farmers, tribal members and environmentalists.

“We want to diversify the class enough so that we don’t agree on everything,” said Dave Roselip, foundation president and one of the first students in the class.

For example, Roselip doesn’t care whether students support keeping the dams on the Snake River or breaching them to save endangered runs of wild salmon.

“The foundation takes no position on anything,” Roselip said. “We’re going for the broadening part.”

Participants have included a travel agent, a bail bondsman and a commercial fisherman.

Foundation support includes contributions by large firms such as Weyerhaeuser Co. ($10,000 or more) and Cenex/Harvest States ($2,500) and from individual farmers and ranchers who sometimes offer grants as small as $250. Program alumni also make donations.

“We have about 700 investors,” said Roselip. “Much of the support comes from farmers, ranchers and foresters. Only a small percent of our total comes from corporate-type businesses. It’s very grassroots.”

At a cost of about $12,500 a student, the money funds a complex program with classes not only throughout Washington, but around the world.

Out of the ordinary

Wheat farmer David Ostheller woke up one morning in China in the tiny house of a family who spoke just two or three words of English.

The house had no heat, but the beds were warm, thanks to a conduit of air that ran beneath them from the cooking area.

The night before, the family made him and a classmate a dinner of sliced Spam from their kitchen and some unusual vegetables. The stay was uncomfortable, but just outside was one of the world’s great wonders.

“We were in a little mountain town, a very old walled city next to the Great Wall of China,” he said. “It was incredible.

Far from his Spokane home, Ostheller reflected on his life and his role in a world where a town like this existed.

Ostheller, now 46, had to cut short his college career to come home and farm when his father fell ill. “It was either I come back and carry on the farm or the farm would be sold off,” he said.

He sees his time with the agriculture and forestry program as his second chance at college. “I had been so focused on being a farmer and growing crops,” he said. “This really exposed me to the bigger picture.”

His friend, and fellow wheat farmer Karl Felgenhauer was in the first class in 1978 and said it changed his life.

That was enough encouragement for Ostheller, who traveled some in college and was still eager for adventure.

“I went in there with high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed at all,” he said.

In addition to China, Ostheller’s class traveled to Hong Kong and Vietnam.

Each class has its own overseas excursion. Some visited Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There they experienced life under a tight government regime, submitting to regular credential checks, encountering armed guards demanding passports and searching luggage.

“To be threatened like that, you just feel the weight of it,” Roselip said. “People would cry with relief on the way home, feeling the burden lifted.”

Some went to India, where they met Mother Teresa and toured the hospital where she and other nuns tended to the dying poor.

“We found out truly what leadership is about with her,” Roselip said.

They also saw incredible poverty, where people were starving and begging in the streets.

On that trip, one class member didn’t get back to the train in Calcutta in time. He hung on outside for two miles before a porter came to unlock the door and let him in, Roselip said.

“Then he said, `There’s no way in the world I’d let you leave me in Calcutta,”’ Roselip said.

In Mexico, one of the classes left money in a small village to pay for drilling a well for fresh water.

One point of the program is to take the students out of their immediate world and show them the people to whom they are connected through agriculture. “One of our biggest goals is to broaden the perspectives of the students,” Roselip said.

In fact, the students spend a total of 70 days away from their homes and businesses.

Each class makes two trips to Washington, D.C. - one to learn about the political system and the other to learn about life in the city.

Ostheller’s group visited a homeless shelter there. “We saw the very complex and troubled problems that go on in inner cities,” he said.

“Then we went to a police precinct and they showed us what they have to deal with day in and day out,” he said. There they watched a slide show that demonstrated crimes, ending with the death of a child. “It just turned us inside out.”

The classes

On a recent morning, Wenatchee cherry orchardist Gordon Congdon, 44, spent his breakfast crowded into a table at a Seattle Denny’s trying to solve the problems of one of the state’s largest farms.

Congdon and his team are writing a plan for the farm to handle the gamut of federal and state endangered species rules. While munching on oatmeal, Congdon and his classmates discussed the federal Endangered Species Act and what it could mean to the Eastern Washington property.

While timber companies create Habitat Conservation Plans all the time, this may be one of the first such plans for a farm.

“It’s very exciting,” he said. “There’s a lot of interest statewide in this project.”

If the group is successful, the farm will have a solid agreement with the government for taking steps to preserve endangered species. But perhaps an equal reward is that Congdon and the others in their group with varied interests have learned to work together. One is an orchardist, another a government employee a third a farm manager and one a forester with the Department of Natural Resources.

“We all tend to write off those who have a different perspective than our own,” Congdon said. “But I recognize you can’t take that approach if you want sound public policy.”

One year, a public policy project group like Congdon’s formed the Washington Wine Commission, which is now charged with developing markets and marketing for 102 wineries and the multi-million dollar wine industry.

In addition to the projects, the students meet monthly for seminars on subjects such as working with the media, state government, environmental issues, trade and culture, crime and corrections, and leadership.

Classmates organize and sometimes lead the seminars.

The program also forces each participant to work on public speaking skills. Students are faced with regular spot quizzes where one classmate hands a fact sheet to another to present a five-minute talk to the class.

“They’re not training people to have a singular point of view,” said Chris Bieker, a local spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who finished the class two years ago. “The idea is to try to develop leadership skills whatever side of the issue you take.”

The harvest

Graduates from the Agriculture and Forestry Program fill nearly every part of the state’s natural resources industry. And they say it’s thanks to the skills they learned in class and contacts they made that they’ve done so well in their communities and jobs.

“If I need to know more about the dairy industry, there are people I can call who can help me,” Bieker said. “Because I’ve gone through the program, I’m not just a government worker to them.”

Also, many attribute their involvement in politics, their communities and in their industry to what they learned from the leadership part of the program.

“It kind of whet my appetite for getting involved,” said Ostheller who graduated three years ago. He’s now president of the Spokane County Wheat Growers Association, on the board of his grain growers cooperative and active in other groups. He also has a connection with wheat farmers around with world, thanks to a monthly Swedish newsletter that offers his perspective as an American wheat farmer.

“We feel we’re building leadership capacity for our rural communities,” Roselip said.

Other graduates have served as state representatives and as their advisers. More than one program graduate has counseled Gov. Gary Locke.

A web connects the graduates from small producer to politician. Roselip hopes they’ll use it to better the lot of farmers and foresters and the environment.

“We don’t want them to just go through the class and stop,” Roselip said. “We want them to take what they’ve learned and start thinking in the future tense. They’re creating the future for natural resources.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: AT A GLANCE Farmer’s finishing school

The Washington Agriculture and Forestry Leadership Program at a glance:

Founded: 1978

Program length: 2 years

Class size: 30

Average age of students: 37

Mission: Train future leaders for natural resource industries through education and empowerment.

Notable graduates include:

Alex McGregor, former president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers and head of McGregor Co.

Heather Hansen, executive director of Washington Friends of Farms and Forests

Ann George, Washington Hop Commission administrator

Rep. Mark Schoesler, R-9th District state legislator

Rep. Linda Evans Parlette, R-12th District state legislator

Jim Davis, Coulee City farmer and candidate for U.S. Congress in the 4th District

Catherine O’Connell, Eastern Washington director for U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.

Bob Zagelow, Superior Court judge in Walla Walla County

Tom Robbert, vice president at KeyBank of Washington