Parkdale couple buck agricultural trends to make their dreams come true — and, they hope, maybe even turn a profit

Andrea and Taylor Bemis rolled across the country last year with a dog, a dream and $10,000.

The dog’s name was Henry, the dream was to make a living as farmers, and the cash was what they thought their first year working the rich, coffee-colored soil in the shadow of Mount Hood would cost.

The couple’s arrival in Oregon — two people in their early 30s, farming less than two acres — went against the basic demographic trend in American agriculture. The average U.S. farm is 441 acres, up threefold from a century ago. The average farmer is 55, a rise of 10 years in two decades.

“The work is hard, the margins are thin,” said Dennis Myhrum of the Oregon Farm Bureau. “Unless you were raised in the business, why would you think about getting into it?”

Taylor Bemis grew up in farming on the East Coast, but had no interest in making the family trade as a career. He figured there were too many mountains to ski and too many trails to hike to settle on a single piece of land.

Andrea Bemis comes from Lake Oswego and graduated from Central Catholic High School; she enrolled in beauty school because she believed the work would give her the freedom to go wherever she wanted.

Not long after they found each other, these two wandering souls decided they wanted to put down roots together. They gave themselves a simple goal for the first year: Break even.

“If we can finish back where started this year, that will mean it’s worth continuing,” Taylor, lanky and bearded with a goofy ski bum’s smile, said soon after their arrival as he stared at a field cluttered with rocks, grass and wildflowers. “If it doesn’t work, we can just walk away.”

Andrea, a foot shorter than her husband but more talkative by a mile, interrupted him.

“We can walk away,” she said. “But we don’t want to.”

Fall: Digging in

They met cute at a Montana dude ranch in 2004. She was waiting tables. He was washing dishes. They made long distance work for a few years as he finished college in Maine, and she completed Aveda training. Then they wandered together.

Four years ago, they were hiking in Sisters on his birthday when she brought up some worries. He was tending bar and coaching a ski team on Mount Bachelor. She was selling running shoes. Their life was more fun than fulfilling.

That morning, they’d received a package of blueberries from Taylor’s father, who owns a 45-acre farm outside Boston. The fruit, fresh and sweet, reinforced something she’d been considering:

What would you think, she asked, of going to work for your dad?

He’d been playing with similar thoughts. On the hike down that afternoon — “I always think better descending,” — he told her so. They went out for a beer to talk it over. That night, he emailed his dad to say he was coming home.

Andrea Bemis cooks what she grows. She’s offered a few seasonal recipes for Oregonian readers. Curried Cauliflower And Chickpea Soup See recipe

After one day spent pruning blueberry bushes, Andrea thought they’d made a huge mistake.

“I just couldn’t believe people worked that hard every day,” she said.

They spent year one in Massachusetts exhausted and bewildered. They spent the next two asking questions and dreaming.

“I went from, ‘This is terrible,’ to, ‘This could be fun,’ to, ‘I cannot imagine doing anything else,’” Andrea said. “Success would be living on the farm, a small house, a big kitchen, waking up at the crack of dawn and working to exhaustion, then having a big family dinner and falling into bed. It sounds silly maybe, but that’s the picture in my head.”

In that, they are part of a small but significant movement: young people entering agriculture.

“It’s oddly similar to the software startups of the 1990s,” said Garry Stephenson, who runs Oregon State University’s small farms program. “These are young people interested in becoming entrepreneurs, responding to the economy. But there’s also almost a philosophical part to it, a sense of wanting to change the world.”

Andrea missed family and friends in the Pacific Northwest — and they prefer the skiing here — so they found land to lease through Friends of Family Farmers, an Oregon nonprofit that runs an Internet “ifarm” program to match landlords with tenants. The goal is to ensure that as Baby Boomers retire, millions of farmable acres don’t disappear with them.

“If nobody wants to work the land, it’s probably going to get developed,” said Nellie McAdams, a child of Gaston hazelnut farmers who coordinates the ifarm program. “Once you lose farmland, you don’t get it back.”