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Joel Huesby comes from a long line of conventional farmers, but in 1994, he had what he calls an epiphany that led him to switch to organic farming. He’s of the mind that we’ll drive ourselves to extinction if we drive our farmlands that way first. “Conventional commodity agriculture, to my way of looking at it, is standing in the boots of a dead man with toothpicks holding his eyes open,” he said. “It looks alive but it’s not. I don’t see that as the future.”

Through years of trial and error, Huesby and his family found a way to build their soil and make a living that felt authentic. Then, in 2003, their farm — 225 acres near Walla Walla, Wash. — was threatened by developers looking to subdivide it and convert it to “ranchettes.”

So Huesby put together a binder of information about his property and took it to the PCC Farmland Trust, a nonprofit organization formed in connection to Washington’s Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC), the largest consumer-owned natural food retail co-operative in the United States. The PCC Farmland Trust was able to change the legal status of Huesby’s land, ensuring that it will be “organic and undeveloped into perpetuity.” His was the second farm the PCC Farmland Trust saved from development, but it was far from the last.