Fifty years ago, a group of Washington activists began a movement that revolutionized Western food growing, eating and composting. With a focus on organic farming and sustenance, the group of activists would eventually become Seattle Tilth and later Tilth Alliance, which turns 50 this year.
Over five decades, Tilth Alliance’s impact has been significant. Its efforts have influenced organic farming standards for Washington and federal agriculture departments, and the group helped create the state’s first organic farming degree, at Washington State University. Tilth championed the farm-to-table restaurant movement and spurred Seattle to compost at home — and for the city to collect food and yard waste.
By educating and empowering a new generation of sustainability-minded farmers — as well as everyday citizens looking to be conscientious about food waste, production and more — the organization aims to improve today’s food system as we contend with climate change and systemic inequities.
Tilth Alliance now hosts conferences, workshops and classes around the calendar, as well as community events like the group’s May Edible Plant Sale, which is May 4-5. In honor of Earth Day on April 22, we looked at the organization’s 50-year history.
Tilth Alliance roots
A fiery speech by Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry at Gonzaga University in July 1974 sparked the drive to create Seattle Tilth. Mark Musick heard Berry decry the loss of small farms and their cultural knowledge to industrial farming, and later, Berry said activists for sustainable food practices needed to unite agriculture’s disparate interests in a “constituency for a better kind of agriculture” through education.
Inspired, Musick, Gigi Coe, and Woody and Becky Deryckx organized a three-day Northwest Conference on Alternative Agriculture in Ellensburg that November.
“In 90 days, we put on a conference with nearly 800 farm and food activists from all over the West Coast, and the energy level, the mood was totally explosive,” said Musick, who after decades of working in food activism, continues as a board member and Tilth Alliance’s archivist. That tradition will be echoed in a three-day 50th anniversary conference and trade show in Vancouver, Wash., Nov. 14-16.
The group expanded, beginning with creating a community garden plan for Meridian Park’s Good Shepherd Center in Seattle, which became Tilth’s HQ in 1978. Tilth chapters sprouted in Washington, Oregon, California and Idaho, all under the umbrella of a newfound Tilth Association, but that association disbanded in 1984, with chapters encouraged to operate independently. Seattle Tilth lasted through decades, merging with Cascade Harvest Coalition and Tilth Producers to become Tilth Alliance in 2016.
Carl Woestwin was Seattle Tilth’s first official employee, as the head gardener at the Meridian Park site. He later worked at Seattle Public Utilities, spearheading the SPU-Tilth Master Composter education program in 1986, which would become a model for similar programs nationwide. After studying about composting and sustainability, students are required to share their knowledge in schools and farmers markets.
“We were the first Master Composter program in the country,” Woestwin said, “and it was the model for others all over the country.”
He credits Tilth Alliance for making Seattle a place where people grow food in parking strips, host chickens and cultivate worm bins in their city yards. Without Seattle Tilth, there may not be a city curbside compost collection program.
“The move to those things was really enhanced by Tilth’s presence in the city,” he said.
Today, Tilth Alliance shepherds numerous education and outreach programs and resources, many free, from the Master Composter and Sustainability Steward program to culturally relevant food programs for older adults. The Natural Yard Care Program and Garden Hotline support Earth-friendly gardening, while on Farm Walks, farmers learn about organic agriculture best practices.
Tilth Alliance’s connections unite various sectors of the food web, leaving it poised to “make sure our food system stays strong and has the resilience to handle the challenges of climate change,” said Marcia Ostrom, WSU professor of sustainable food and farming systems. As director of WSU’s Food Systems Program, she appreciates Tilth’s unique ability to lobby for agricultural change. But above all, Ostrom says sharing knowledge and infrastructure for new farmers is “crucial to inviting in the next generation” as the first generation of organic farmers begins to retire.
And the movement still has momentum. Tilth Alliance now has 42 full-time employees, and its revenue ramped up 30% from 2018 to 2022, reaching $4.73 million two years ago. Compared to a scattered few organic farms in 1974, by 2021, Washington had 949 certified organic farms. Tilth had a massive impact on that growth.
Organic engagement
By teaching people to garden, farm and make environmentally conscious decisions in their homes and businesses, Tilth Alliance’s grassroots impact grows from neighbor to neighbor and farmer to farmer. It’s not hard to find a Tilth success story in Washington.
Graduating from Tilth Alliance’s Soil and Water Stewards program empowered Hannah Alhajahja to join the National Young Farmers Coalition to advocate for land access for marginalized farmers with the 2023 Farm Bill. Today, she enjoys working on a local scale at home and with her Des Moines neighbors.
“There’s only so much energy anyone has to fight pipelines or work on utility scale green stuff,” she said. “I love accessible, low-impact stuff — save rainwater at your house, grow food with medicinal value at a neighbor’s place — participate in things that actively fight climate change while making life more enjoyable.”
Meanwhile, Tilth Alliance’s youth programs help grow future advocates for the Earth. At Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, a Tilth Alliance community garden built in 2017, Lexy Timmermans is a volunteer with the YMCA’s Earth Service Corps. She brings students from the Rainier Beach High School Garden Club to grow plants from mint to microgreens in the greenhouse. Some take Tilth-led cooking classes, too. The group sees “gardening as a way to liberation, being able to support yourself.”
“Most of these youth have never done these types of activities,” Timmermans said. “One of the first things we did was pickling. It’s just really enriching the times we spend at Tilth. I feel like I learn so much when we go there.”
Gardening fosters generosity — it comes with the territory. Atop a Seattle Center parking garage, Jon Lourenco-Vlaskamp and his husband, Wallace, use their Master Composter training to lead the composting at the UpGarden P-patch, growing hundreds of pounds of food annually for food banks.
“It’s been a highlight to be able to participate in these programs,” said Lourenco-Vlaskamp. “They’ve brought a lot of value to my life.”
Many Tilth devotees have grown with the organization. Sarah Cassidy was a garden coordinator for Tilth Alliance in the late ‘90s, when “we were kind of off-roading, in that DIY form of nonprofit,” she said. She now co-runs The Hearth farm and The Grange restaurant in Duvall, and Tilth-sponsored grants have funded a supersized worm bin and elk fencing, enabling her sustainable farm-to-table service.
Farm-to-table service is just another movement that might not exist without Tilth. Cassidy said she admires the way Tilth Alliance brings people back to nature.
“There’s a dearth of humans who interact with soil today,” she said. “Tilth does that essential work reintroducing humans to that relationship with the soil.”
Looking forward
While concepts like “organic” and “sustainable” have gone from fringe to mainstream since Seattle Tilth began, there are new challenges to tackle, said Tilth Alliance Executive Director Melissa Spear — like being resilient in the face of climate change.
“The way we grow food is being seen as critical to addressing climate change and also figuring out how our agricultural sector remains resilient in the face of climate change,” Spear said. “Those are challenges Tilth Alliance is really invested in helping to address.”
Spear highlighted the need to reduce food waste — a major contributor to greenhouse gases — on multiple fronts, while encouraging carbon sequestering methods like rain gardens, healthy soil care and composting.
Within the organization, Spear says that equity and inclusion are also primary goals.
“Agriculture in general has struggled with equity issues,” she said, recalling the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit, a class-action suit by Black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for unfair loan practices. “We recognize clearly we are a white-led organization and have been putting a lot of work and effort into understanding systems of oppression that have perpetuated racism.”
She says Tilth Alliance has diversified its staff and worked with a consultant to focus on racial equity in the organization. “It’s very challenging,” Spear said, “but we are completely committed to it.”
Through its cultural impact and food growth and consumption practices and with its sustainability-minded classes and programs in both urban and rural settings, Musick says Tilth Alliance has been answering Berry’s call to create a better form of agriculture for five decades.
“To my mind,” Musick said, “that is what we at Tilth have been doing for 50 years.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Sarah Cassidy’s farm.
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