The Revolutionaries

Space Invader

Who: CHRIS CURTIS

What she does: Runs the wildly popular, nearly profitable farmers market program in four Seattle neighborhoods.

In 1993, Chris Curtis and her husband were proprietors of the H䡧en-Dazs franchise on University Way when the Skagit Valley native's nostalgia for wide-open sprawling farmland got the best of her. Inspired by a visit to a bountiful farmers market in Santa Barbara, Calif., she proposed a similar idea to the University District Chamber of Commerce as a way of building retail traffic for the neighborhood. With that, she embarked on a busy, unpaid career as market organizer (she's paid now).

"I thought a farmers market would be a good community project, but I had no idea how much work it would be," she says.

Finding small farmers to participate proved challenging at first—a lot of farmers weren't used to the in-city, direct-sales concept (the model Curtis had seen in California). The market opened that year with 17 farmers and five additional vendors. It was, and is, an all-food market—that means no crafts or wholesaling allowed. Farmers and shoppers were hooked.

Now the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance runs four markets (Curtis has set up operations in West Seattle, Columbia City, and this year, Lake City) with plans for a new one in Magnolia next summer. The 17 farmers have grown to more than 140, bringing in over $2,600 a day among the four locations. (The alliance collects 6 percent of daily vendor sales or $25, whichever is greater.)

Once run out of Curtis' basement, the alliance—now with three full-time employees—has moved to a proper, if still spatially challenged, office on University Way, thanks to a hefty annual grant from the city of Seattle Office of Economic Development. The city also helped the alliance draft a business plan that includes launching three additional markets by 2007 and that, if projections are met, should make the alliance economically self-sufficient by the same year.

What the plan doesn't solve is Curtis' latest dilemma-she doesn't have enough space to support farmer demand (all four sites have lengthy waiting lists), and the space she does have-while generously donated by parking-lot owners— isn't permanent. "There's very little open space in Seattle," she says, "and parking lots are certainly prime for development."

Katie Millbauer

Ergo Orgo

Who: MIKE VERDI and SHELLEY PASCO

What they do: Keep a suburban farm thriving by going organic.

Mike Verdi used to feel sorry for the organic growers who stacked their puny piles of produce next to his in the Pike Place Market in the late '80s. A veteran local farmer whose family has sold at the Market for nearly 50 years, Verdi says he was selling conventionally grown vegetables for twice what the organic guys were charging for their bug-bitten, runty squash and onions.

But Verdi, 52, got an education a decade later from his second wife, Shelley Pasco, a computer graphics designer who had developed a passion for gardening. Those pioneering farmers had learned a lot, Verdi discovered. Fish fertilizer and botanical pesticides helped them produce plump, bountiful crops. And the boom in farmers' markets around Puget Sound had created lucrative opportunities.

Now Verdi and Pasco farm organically on 18 acres tucked among railroad tracks and auto salvage lots in the Green River valley just south of Kent. There are no labyrinthine fields of corn at Whistling Train Farm—every few feet a different crop rises from the ground: artichokes, kohlrabi, radicchio, Swiss chard, basil. Verdi grows fewer vegetables, but he hauls in much better prices. To take one seasonal example, Verdi used to let conventional pumpkins go for 4-6 cents per pound; now he sells them for around 60 cents per pound. Organic produce earned Whistling Train entr饠into the University District Farmers Market, one of the most heavily trafficked in the state, where growers average sales of $900 per day.

Organic farming is hardly a life of leisure. It means spending hours pulling weeds instead of a few minutes with a spray bottle of herbicide. But sometimes the organic approach is simply smarter, not harder, say Verdi and Pasco. Instead of driving flea beetles off the arugula with pesticide, for example, they don't plant until fall, when the voracious leaf-grazers have gone dormant.

Whistling Train now grosses about $80,000 annually, enough that Pasco has been able to leave her day job behind, and Verdi and Pasco don't bother with Pike Place Market any longer (except for the Market's "Organic Wednesdays"). Says Verdi: "I'd be broke if not for taking the organic approach."

Kevin Fullerton

Meatier Market

Who: BRUCE DUNLOP

What he does: A livestock farmer in the San Juan Islands whose mobile slaughterhouse is opening doors for local meat.

Farms out on the San Juan Islands tend to be modest in scale and more diverse than your industrial ag operation. Bruce Dunlop on Lopez, for instance, has a few grass-fed lambs, some hogs, and a small apple orchard. Trouble is, he and his fellow islanders are hours away from the nearest USDA-approved meat processing facility—in Chehalis, south of Olympia—so there's not much they can do with their livestock.