Agriculture very much still part of daily life

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Leland Larson grew up working on his homesteader grandfather's dairy farm on the Lakewood side of Smokey Point. He returned to the area after serving in World War II and bought a neighboring farm.

"I said to the Lord when I was overseas, 'Lord, if you ever get me back out of this I'm going to go into farming, because that makes the most sense of anything I can see in this world,' " says Larson.

Larson raised dairy cattle for decades, "retiring" in 1988 to raise beef cattle instead of the cows he milked daily at 3 a.m. for most of his 76 years.

As Larson scaled down his own farm, he spurned developers and sold his acreage instead to the nearby Smokey Point Plant Farm, which would work the land rather than build on it. "I feel I kind of lucked out," says Larson.

He is now an adviser to the Lakewood High School agricultural program and a constant champion of the need to preserve farmland.

"All my neighbors used to be farms, and they're all gone. . . . I can't hardly blame some of the old people who have owned land a long time and want to retire (and sell their property for development), but by the same token, when this land is gone, it's gone."

Ironically, agriculture has flourished in the schools even as it has waned in the community, with the greenhouse program at Lakewood High School drawing increasing enrollments each year.

Students bent over their work on a recent weekday even as lunchtime approached, shoveling wheelbarrows of dirt for a planned wetland, spritzing water on aggressively glorious geraniums and lashing young tomato plants to stakes.

The program, a mix of bookwork and hands-on horticulture, has been especially popular with students who haven't thrived in straight academic classes, says instructor Hartmut Schmakeit.

"They bloom here -- no pun intended."