These sheep, raised on Bruce Dunlop's Lopez Island farm, have an idyllic life, grazing free-range on natural pasture. Their meat is a gourmet treat Dunlop sells direct from the farm.
	These customers buy their produce by subscription from Terry Carkner's farm in Puyallup. They pick up their vegetables weekly right at the farm.

Through the drowsy days of summer and into fall, customers swarm like bees in the barn, hovering over tables piled with produce picked that morning.

Terry Carkner, who owns and works this farm full time, sells everything she grows within 30 miles, and never leaves her driveway to do it. She has so much business she turns people away.

Carkner has been farming here now for 20 years, but it wasn't always this way.

Raspberries used to cover all of her 20 acres. She sprayed them with chemical pesticides and sold the entire crop wholesale. But locking up the kids and the pets before spraying, as the label advised, and picking up dead robins in the fields afterward was troubling.

Then, the wholesale markets went south — and global. Carkner found that no matter what she sold her raspberries for, someone else in Chile or Guatemala or Yugoslavia or wherever could always grow them cheaper.

Carkner decided to try another way.

She switched to organic methods, plowed under most of the raspberries, planted a rainbow of other berries, vegetables and an apple orchard, and traded the global market for the farm stand at the end of her driveway.

That, and 200 neighboring families more than glad to pay a subscription of $490 in advance for 20 weeks of fresh produce, give Carkner a certain market and price. Her customers get a full sack of fresh fruit and vegetables for less than $25 a week, cheaper than organic produce sold in the grocery store.

And something more:

Terry Carkner thrives on farming organic vegetables and fruit for her customers, selling all her produce direct from her Puyallup farm.

As customers arrive to pick up their produce on a summer afternoon, mothers unleash their children to run between the rows of vegetables in the sunshine and snack on peas as though they were candy. Some stroll through the crops just to relax, or choose the U-pick option for the pleasure of disappearing into the strawberries for awhile. A far cry from the blinders-on, get-the-duty-done dash to the supermarket.

And more is exchanged here than food and money: Hugs, preparation tips and news since the last visit get packed in along with the vegetables. "They are my new community," Carkner says of her customers. And they are the reason she can earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year from the farm — figures that continue to rise. The irony of it all is not lost on Carkner. "I'm making more by growing less."

The mystery to her is why more people don't do what she does. Which is not to say Carkner is alone. The proliferation of small, diversified, direct-market farms like Carkner's, especially west of the Cascades, is the reason the number of farms has increased statewide from about 37,000 in 1991 to 40,000 in 2000.

Growers have figured out a way to break the dreary mold of farmers getting killed by low prices, overseas competition and fickle markets. This new generation is making a living with small-scale farms that nurture carefully selected niche crops of superb quality, sold directly to local customers. It's one of the few bright spots in Washington's $5 billion agricultural industry.

Theirs is no country vacation. The pay is low and the hours long. Working 16 hours a day, eight months of the year is not unusual. Hired help, if any, is rarely paid much more than minimum wage. The risks, from weather to bugs to just plain going broke, come without a safety net.

	Farming interns Johanna Hök, 25, of Sweden (left) and Vanessa Marsh, 24, of Texas, milk Loveday the milk cow at Henning Sehmsdorf's Lopez Island farm. They are careful to leave some for her calf.
	Sehmsdorf's hands bespeak proud work fixing machinery, tending animals and raising food on Lopez Island.
	Sehmsdorf stacks freshly cut hay into a pyramid to dry it. He raises the hay for his cattle.

The skills required — from strategic planning to accounting, horticulture, marketing, waterworks and small-engine repair — are daunting. And most small farms typically need a second income off the farm to survive. Carkner, for instance, works as an accountant in the winter, and her husband has a full-time job elsewhere.

But whether they sell at farmers markets or by subscription through so-called Community Supported Agriculture, whether they market directly to restaurants and local supermarkets or to a combination of each, these growers are thriving.

THE NOT-SO-BIG secret these niche-market farmers have uncovered is that it pays to sell locally and directly instead of to wholesale, retail or export markets. That enables the grower to capture the whole food dollar instead of the fraction left over after their goods pass through more than 1,000 miles of transportation on average and five to seven middlemen, who each get a cut.

The economics of direct sales are compelling: A grower selling a head of organic lettuce at a local farmers market can make $1 to $2 a head, depending on the variety. Sell it wholesale, and the take is 18 cents.

At the University District Farmers Market, the most lucrative in the state, the most successful farmers can gross up to $800 an hour. Average sales are more than $900 per day per farmer.

Growers working several markets a week can gross $160,000 in a season, says Zachary Lyons, executive director of the Washington Farmers Markets Association. "That is when you start talking about a market creating so much income for a farm that the land is now more valuable in agriculture than for development. And that is how you keep land in agriculture."

It certainly helps that the local-food revival is booming: Statewide, 70 farmers markets topped $15 million in sales last year, up from $5 million at 56 markets in 1997. "Show me one other sector of the food industry that has tripled sales in five years," Lyons dares.

And local, direct sales are a market that has just begun to be tapped: "We haven't achieved our full potential in any way, with the kind of market we have in the Seattle area," says Marcia Ostrom, director of the small farms program at Washington State University in Puyallup.

"A lot of these are start-up farms. They are supporting families on a couple of acres. People say that can't be done, but that's not true; they are doing it. These are not hobby farms."

They are farms familiar to anyone whose grandfather ran a truck farm, or who has traveled Europe, where small farms still nourish the villages and towns.

Local produce is often tastier because it is fresher. Local markets also recirculate dollars in the local community. The environment benefits because transportation is reduced and open space is preserved.

And in a world of fast-food hamburgers made up of micro-bits ground from more than 1,000 cows from multiple nations, there is something comforting in locally grown produce, purchased directly from the person who grew it. It's food with a clear chain of production that is not only knowable but likeable: food that feels good to buy, to eat and to serve. Food with a face.

These sheep are rotated around Sehmsdorf's pastures to make sure the land is not overgrazed. The sheep surge eagerly into the proverbial greener pasture next door.

"There is a thirst for personalization, and in food it is probably more true than with so many other things," says Christopher Feise, director of the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at WSU. "What could be more central to your health and well-being than what you put in your mouth? It is not like buying a TV or a computer."

It all adds up to a new agriculture that looks a lot like the old one, before farming became a global, industrial-scale enterprise.

"Really, it's back to the future," says Steve Evans, farm specialist in the King County division of land and water resources. "None of it is really new, it's how people started with agriculture. The circle has come around again."

WADE BENNETT'S epiphany lines the road in rows of stately green: Asian pears.

Planted at first as a treat for his wife, Bennett earned her ire when the crop attracted so much attention he sold it. So he planted more. Lots more. When those sold, too, he tried Oriental vegetables — which also sold.

So Bennett, a 47-year-old former movie-theater manager, became a fulltime farmer. It's a calling he attacks with a strategist's precision and planning, an artist's passion and a showman's marketing zeal.

Andrew Stout keeps a shed full of vintage tractors running to work his Full Circle Farm in Carnation.

	Wade Bennett of Rock Ridge Orchards near Enumclaw specializes in unusual varieties of vegetables, picked the morning of market day, even when that means getting up at 4 a.m.

Bennett grows high-end Asian fruits and vegetables on his 61-acre farm between Enumclaw and Auburn.

He sells his edamame pods for $3.90 a pound, and snap peas disappear at $4 a pound. Wasabi? Try $47 a pound. Ginseng goes for $25 a pound, green tea for $12, heirloom tomatoes for $3.50 a pound. Asian pears — his top cash crop — are a bargain at $2 a pound, cheaper than at the grocery store, if you can even find them.

He sells his produce at six farmers markets a week throughout the Puget Sound region, rising at 4:30 in the morning to pick the vegetables that day, then heading out to work the market crowds himself. "I have to talk to my customers," Bennett says. "It's the only way I know I am doing this right."

He takes in more profit from the 20 percent of his sales made directly to customers than from the 80 percent of his business with wholesale clients. In time, Bennett expects to sell 80 percent of his crops directly.

It's a change small producers have been forced into, as wholesalers and retailers consolidate. Big grocery chains deal with regional buyers and large growers with industrial-scale operations to supply dozens of stores.

"I can't sell my product to my hometown store," Bennett says, "but I can sit across the street and sell it all from the back of a truck.

"I can't compete with the guy with 1,000 acres. What I can compete with is things that are so fabulous and so delicious you can't resist them. The flavor is just so delicious, or so unusual."

The Columbia City Farmers Market is one of the newest and most successful in Seattle. Its customer base is so diverse flyers advertising market days are printed in 12 languages.

LOVELY AS they are, these small, family-owned farms are not places of reverie for those who run them.

Andrew Stout looks over the rows of vegetables at his Full Circle Farm in Carnation with the appraising gaze of a general watching troops pass in review.

"There is lots of money out there," he says.

At just 33, Stout is nobody's dewy-eyed, hippie-dippy hobbyist. He is an organic entrepreneur, a fresh-faced guy in a Dirt First T-shirt, yelling "Dude! Do we have beets!" into a cell phone from a swelling purple row out in his fields to a distributor in search of fresh vegetables.

Stout rents a former dairy farm, and commutes to his crops from Capitol Hill. When the weeds get ahead of him, he hauls in day laborers from Seattle to supplement his full-time staff.

He is an innovative marketer, teaming up with the head chef at Cascadia Restaurant to host a five-course, $90 Feast in the Fields farm tour, dinner and sparkling-wine tasting at his farm on three Sundays this summer.

Not a purist but a pragmatist, Stout makes no apology for brokering produce from up and down the West Coast to fill out the weekly boxes of fruits and vegetables for his subscription customers.

By July, the produce in his subscription boxes is 100 percent Washington-grown, but it's not all from Stout's farm, a fact some purists would still sniff at. Still, his partnership with growers around the state helps other small farmers connect with high-end Seattle markets.

Stout's Seattle-area customers benefit, with hot-weather treats from east of the mountains. And Stout doesn't have to deal with babying eggplant, peppers and tomatoes in Western Washington's cool climate.

Stout wants to build his subscription list to 200 customers this year. He also sells directly to PCC Natural Markets, Larry's Markets, six farmers markets around Puget Sound and about 30 Seattle restaurants, including the W Hotel's Earth & Ocean.

	Judy Bennett tends heirloom tomatoes at Rock Ridge Orchards near Enumclaw. These tomatoes, in every color from yellow to nearly black, are one of the specialties at the farm she and husband Wade run.

Executive chef Johnathan Sundstrom remembers the first time he met Stout, back when Sundstrom was head chef at the Dahlia Lounge. Decked out in shorts and a baseball cap, Stout arrived at the back door with a box of vegetables.

"We were so excited to have new products, and high-quality ingredients. It was a real treat, we were thrilled to meet him," Sundstrom says.

"It just felt like the right thing to do to work with local producers. It is the right thing to do in terms of supporting the local economy. And I think food is better when it comes from your region. I am not a globalization fan when it comes to food."

Stout started that first day of cold calling with no customers, and ended it with 20 and $1,600 in sales.

He has plowed his profits back into the business for the first seven years of its operation, moving up, for instance, to industrial salad spinners in place of mesh gym bags he used to dry lettuce in the spin cycle of a fleet of Kenmore clothes washers.

He pays himself a modest $20,000 salary, but hopes to make a profit for the first time this year. "The promise of the money is there." He explains:

"I think agriculture is going to get smaller, and more local. People's relationship with their food is going to change. People are going back to the sources of things. There is such demand. What we have here is a fantastic, metro market."

WHILE THE metropolitan-area market is a grower's dream, Henning Sehmsdorf's homestead on Lopez Island shows that a small-scale, sustainable, diversified farm that relies on direct sales can survive even in remote areas.

Sehmsdorf works 50 acres, and owns 15, purchased with his earnings as a professor at the University of Washington. Now retired, he moved to Lopez in 1994 and farms full time. His wife still works half time off the farm.

Sales of farm products usually aren't enough to buy and support a farm, and never have been, Sehmsdorf contends. Today as in the past, farms are typically inherited, are supported in part with off-farm income, or both.

Becoming a successful farmer on small acreage has taken a lifetime of learning. "There is a huge distance between the intent and knowing how," Sehmsdorf says.

All of the basics he needs to "feed" his operation, from hay for his cattle to compost and fertilizer for the ground — in the form of manure — come from his own animals and land.

His two dozen, free-range beef cattle eat only grass or hay from Sehmsdorf's pastures. "So many people want to buy this beef, I always have a waiting list," he says.

Working with Seattle's Cascadia Restaurant, Full Circle Farm hosts a summer Feast in the Fields to help build customer demand for locally grown food. Cascadia's Andrea Walker serves hors d'oeuvres, which were followed by such treats as salad of baby lettuce and edible flowers, candied wild salmon with fingerling potatoes and berry tarts for dessert.

Sehmsdorf grows his vegetables in double-dug beds with three feet of compost-enriched soil, so intensively planted that Sehmsdorf estimates he produces $15,000 worth of produce on just 2,000 square feet of ground.

He grows his produce organically, but doesn't bother to certify it as such with the state, part of a growing trend of small producers who seek no state seal of approval because their customers can hear and see for themselves how their food is grown.

Besides, with the corporate food giants' incursion into organic-food marketing, the organic label has lost much of its meaning for purists who intend it to be more than a marketing tool.

"It can be organic but not sustainable," Sehmsdorf says. "Sustainable means ecologically sound, economically viable and socially responsible."

Anne Schwartz, a Rockport grower and vice president of Washington Tilthe Producers, says there is a movement to come up with alternative labeling "or just forget it and count on quality and reputation."

When forced to choose, she buys locally-grown food over organic food from somewhere else. "It is the only thing that is going to save us" small growers.

Sehmsdorf has been a local-food zealot since buying his first 10 acres in 1970. He set — and achieved — a lifelong goal of growing quality food sustainably for himself and his community, teaching others about it, and being debt-free.

Today the farm provides vegetables, eggs, beef, tree fruit and berries, and even fresh milk from the family cow for Sehmsdorf and his wife, four on-farm interns, and 23 island families. Interns do some farm work for free in return for room and board and education in running a self-sufficient, sustainable farm on small acreage.

Sehmsdorf estimates the farm grosses $25,000 to $30,000 a year, with benefits: "It is a beautiful place to live and work, and I don't have to commute or put on fancy clothes." All that, and great food, too.

And at 65, Sehmsdorf swings 60-pound hay bales effortlessly, without gloves, working faster than his interns. His hands are broad and sun-tanned, the palms hummocked with calluses lumpy as garden peas.

Like farmers from earlier generations, Sehmsdorf built his own home and outbuildings, designed and maintains his own water system, breeds and nurtures his own livestock, runs the orchard and vegetable farm, keeps his own machinery running, and sees to his own hay and compost production. "Life is just endlessly interesting," he says.

He knows most people aren't willing to live on the income or do the work it takes to run a small, sustainable family farm, or even stay in one place long enough to make it work. But still he dreams.

"I would like to see farms like ours on Lopez feed every man, woman and child. Local food on local plates. That is what it is all about."

Lynda V. Mapes is a Seattle Times reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.