Farmer Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter, and another one in his office. But they are not to tell time, or warn him of impending storms. The alarms warn him that radioactive winds from Hanford are coming. Schreiber’s farm is in the shadow of the massive cleanup site, and the alarms are tested regularly. So far, there’s been no problem. And he says he rarely thinks about it. Schreiber farms here because, as he puts it, there’s no better place with such rich soil, abundant sun and cheap irrigation water. Schreiber joins us from our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter and another one in his office. They are not there to tell time or to warn of impending storms; they’re supposed to warn that radioactive winds from Hanford could be coming. That’s because Schreiber’s farm in the tiny community of Eltopia where he grows 350 varieties of fruits and vegetables is just across the river from the nuclear reservation’s massive cleanup site. Alan Schreiber joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Alan Schreiber: Good to be here. Thank you.
Miller: How often do those alarms go off?
Schreiber: It’s never gone off since I’ve been here – since 1999. What does happen though is when the electricity goes off, which happens pretty regularly, it flips on, and it flips on to the radio station that the alerts will come from. So if electricity goes off, then country music comes out of that, and it sometimes can be a little unnerving.
Miller: Unnerving because it’s just loud country music, or because coming out of nowhere, or because you’re thinking about what could be coming from that radio?
Schreiber: It’s more startling that this music is on. Like, sometimes we’ll come home, electricity will have been off, and you hear a noise playing, or music, or someone talking, and you go in and it’s the alarm because it’s through the emergency broadcast system, which is tied to the radio stations. And then you have 30 seconds of thinking, “Oh, I’m glad that it’s just electricity going off.”
Miller: What’s the purpose of that? I mean, what kinds of warnings have you been told might come to you on that radio?
Schreiber: It’ll give evacuation directions.
Miller: Leave.
Schreiber: Leave. Yeah, leave.
Miller: There’s a river between you and Hanford, so just go east fast? What is your evacuation plan?
Schreiber: So the winds come from the southwest. And we track winds. We have to, for farming. They can come from any direction – 360 degrees potentially. But usually they come out of the southwest. Our plan is to get to Boise as fast as we can.
Miller: How much do you think about what’s in the tanks, what’s in the soil, what’s in the dirt that could be blowing around? I mean, in a sense, the question is, how much do you think about Hanford?
Schreiber: I think about it from time to time. I mean, we go down and hang out at the river once a week or so, and that’s just right across … I mean, we’re literally looking at that. There is a plume of steam from the power reactor that we see 100 times a day. It’s in the back of our mind, but I really don’t think about it. I don’t worry about it. I’m not concerned about it.
Miller: Why not? I guess in a sense, the question is, what gives you that peace of mind?
Schreiber: It’s been here for a very long time, and nothing has happened that has given me any pause. I think they’ve got some of the best and brightest minds in the country working on it. They’re pouring a billion-plus dollars a year into it. I know the scientists that work out there. I know it’s not a good situation, but it’s something that I don’t see impacting me in a foreseeable future.
Miller: This is not a multigenerational farm that you’re on, right? You chose to come to this land a few decades ago. What attracted you to this place?
Schreiber: I’m a fifth generation farmer, and there’s been four generations before me, and they’re from the Midwest. No one in the history of my family has ever farmed soil this good, had access to water like this. This is like a garden of Eden here. This is the most diverse agriculture in the world at this latitude. It’s the most diverse temperate agriculture in the world. And our yields are high, our pest pressure is low. I might add, our production is all organic. And we can do that because we have great growing conditions. We have all the water that we need, it’s cheap, and we have low pest pressure. It’s just no one of my family’s ever farmed soil as good as we have here.
Miller: So when members of your family have come to visit, do they put their hands in the soil, and look at you, and shake their head?
Schreiber: Every one of them. Every single one of them, and they’ve all been out here. I mean, like dozens have been out there, and this is like a horticultural-like zoo to them.
Miller: Is this something that you can actually tell by touching it and looking at it, or is it just a question of mathematics and yield? I mean, you’re talking about beautiful soil, but could they honestly, could you honestly look at soil from here or from Iowa and know which one’s which and know which one would be better?
Schreiber: Yeah, I can. There’s soils made up of sand, silt, and clay. We have a loamy silt soil. We farm back in Missouri, something called clay knobs; it’s not as good of soil. Also, our soils here are of recent volcanic origin, and so we have a lot of potassium. We don’t have to apply potassium – one of our key fertilizers – because there’s just so much in the soil naturally.
Miller: I mentioned in my intro that you grow 350 different varieties of vegetables and fruits. We don’t have time for you to go through all of them, but just give us a sense for how you get to 350.
Schreiber: So I’ll give you our big crops. We grow green, white and purple asparagus. We grow about two dozen varieties of tomatoes for the commercial varieties, five kinds of watermelon, 12 kinds of melon, green and red okra. We grow about a dozen kinds of leafy greens. Right now, we’re picking pumpkins, gourds and squash; we have 60 different kinds.
Miller: You’ve made that decision because the market wants that variety or because you’re idiosyncratic?
Schreiber: It’s both. There’s a market for it. We sell just about everything we’ve got. We’re limited basically by how much land I have. But, I grew up on a diversified Midwestern farm, which meant we had corn and soybeans. [Miller laughs] Out here, I get to grow almost everything, and I like it, I want to.
Miller: It’s worth saying that there are people around here who have acres of potatoes, or onions, or wheat, or grapes as far as the eye can see. So, it’s not like that sort of the joke of diversification is just Midwestern. There are megafarms in the Northwest as well that focus on one big commodity crop. Is it boring to you to do that?
Schreiber: That would be very boring for me. Most of those big farms have more than one crop because they need to rotate. But, a farm that might have 10,000 acres, they may only grow five or six things. But there are other farms around that are like me, just not a lot of them. But in the Greater Columbia Basin where we’re at, there’s over 300 different crops. I have varieties of crops. So, there’s a lot of diversity here. You can do things that you can’t do in most other places in North America.
Miller: We talked yesterday about elk that were harvested last winter, not far from here, on what in English we call Rattlesnake Mountain. And Department of Energy contractors went along there with Geiger counters to check the elk meat for radioactivity. The meat was fine. Does anyone either test what you grow or ask if what you grow has been tested?
Schreiber: The former is true. We have scientists – I think they’re called radiation technicians – from the Hanford area that will come and pull samples and test. And we’re specifically – I don’t say targeted – selected because we have a wide variety of items. They can come to us and, “Oh, we can check this off, check this off, and check this off.” They go to other farms, but they come, during our growing season, I would say maybe every 60 days, pull samples, and test. One time, I said, “You know, I never hear back from you guys. I never hear any results.” And they say, “You know, if we come back with a result, and we talk to you about it, it’s not good. No news is good news.”
Miller: I think in general that’s probably always true when it comes to people testing for radiation.
We’re in Richland right now. You’re on the other side of the river, the Pasco side of the river, although, as I mentioned, you’re in this small community of Eltopia. How big a difference is there between these two cities, or two sides of the Tri-Cities: Pasco and Richland?
Schreiber: Well, there’s a third of a million people in the greater Tri-Cities community. Eltopia, of which I’m eight miles away, has maybe 60 people. Where we’re at is rural. There’s not a lot of traffic. You can see a few houses around, but it’s a different world. I mean, it’s a different world. It’s 30 minutes from my house to where we’re at now; as the crow flies, it’s just 10 minutes. It’s right across the river from here. But it is a different world.
Miller: The amount of money that first was spent on plutonium production and now is being spent on containment, it’s hard to fathom. Just recently, the government accountability office estimated that it could cost $640 billion in the coming decades for a part of this waste treatment program. And one thing I’ve noticed is that the price tag for cleanup, it never goes down; it just goes up. What is it like to have so much money attached to this one part of life here? And it’s not the part that’s your life. It’s not agriculture, it’s not education. It is Hanford.
Schreiber: You know, I lose maybe one employee a year that quits working for me and comes working over in Hanford because the salaries are higher, the benefits are higher, and the work is easier than being on a farm.
Miller: The last part is the only surprise to me in what you’re saying, that the work is easier, because I would have thought that doing radioactive cleanup is hard.
Schreiber: So much of the people that work out at Hanford aren’t really doing get-your-hands-dirty radiation cleanup work. They’re in support positions. They work in Richland, they work off-site. It’s not like working on a farm. You’re not lifting lugs. It’s a little harder. I’m not making light or diminishing the significance, or value, and the importance of the work. But I guarantee you the average Hanford worker is not working as hard as the average farm worker.
Miller: And, as an employer, it can be hard to compete for labor.
Schreiber: We never have enough people. We’re shorthanded all the time. It is one of our biggest challenges.
Miller: You’ve been generous enough to give us some of your time. I imagine you’re going to go back to your farm. What do you have for the rest of the day? You’ve got about 40 seconds for your answer.
Schreiber: We are harvesting our last crops. We gotta do our projections on how much that we have left, let our buyers know, and we are starting the process of putting our farm to bed for the winter.
Miller: And then you can relax a little bit?
Schreiber: I will relax a little bit. [laughs]
Miller: Alan Schreiber, thanks so much for coming in. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Schreiber: All right. Thank you.
Miller: Alan Schreiber is a farmer in the community of Eltopia right across the Columbia River from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. He grows about 350 different varieties of fruits and vegetables there.
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