Jim Wilcox, of the Wilcox Family Farms, has slowly become a believer in sustainable agricultural methods.  According to an article in the Tacoma News Tribune, he says of Wilcox Farm's shifts, “We’re changing for two reasons.  One, it’s good business, and, two, it’s the right thing to do.” . . . “Twenty to 30 years ago, we weren’t very good stewards of the land,” he said. “We’ve kind of seen the light.”

Wilcox Farms has been in business 100 years this week. The family has 1,500 acres along a mile-long stretch of the Nisqually River; they've been selling milk and eggs, at one point selling 1 million gallons of milk a week.

Lately however, they have gotten out of the dairy business, moving 2,500 Holstein cattle off the Nisqually riverbank to prevent the waste products from entering the river, planted hundreds of shade trees along the river to protect the salmon, built expensive new chicken houses that allow chickens to roam outside safely, carted away 100,000 tons of chicken manure each year and built a 40-million gallon containment lagoon to wash the water from the remaining chicken poop. 

Wilcox said that his family came to recognize that their strength lay in husbanding the environment and their animals and becoming a local sustainable family farm.  The changes have been painful.  "At the height of its dairy operations, Wilcox Farms was producing $300 million in annual sales and had more than 600 employees."  Now they are one-fourth that size and they had to lay off 130 of their 365 employees when they sold out of the dairy business. 

State ecologists and Puget Sound ecosystem scientists are grateful. 

But it wasn't always that way.  Jim Wilcox has undergone quite a transition personally.  He joined the new Nisqually Delta Task Force in 1985 in order to work with the other farmers, landowners and timber-owners in a quiet coalition to undermine the Task Force.  Naturally enough, meetings were contentious and the task force was deadlocked.  Then Billy Frank Jr., Native American leader and one of the driving forces for decades behind saving the Nisqually Delta, broke the deadlock.  Frank said, according to Wilcox on the Frontline documentary by Hedrick Smith, "Poisoned Waters", that they just had to stop the acrimony.  "I want everybody to know that we want Weyerhaeuser Timber Company to continue to operate and own land along the river. We want Wilcox Farms to keep farming. We don't want to do anything that's going to put them out of business. We want other farmers to stay along the river."

According to Wilcox, that evening was the turning point in the working of the task force as well as in his and his family's willingness to work with the state, the tribe and Billy Frank Jr.  Now, years later, the two of them go on the road with their story and the results of that initial beginning cooperation. 

The family is banking on the idea that good environmental stewardship also can be good business.  We all better hope they are right.