Bees Before Anything Else
West City Farm didn't start with a farming plan. Doug spent twenty years in landscape architecture, watching pollinator decline show up more and more in industry reports — vanishing native bee species, and just how much of the food system quietly depends on them.
That worry is what led him to purchase fifteen acres in the southern Willamette Valley — the same stretch of valley that produces 90% of Oregon's grass seed, rich with clover, phacelia, and wildflowers from March through October. He ordered three nucleus colonies from a local beekeeping club that same spring of 2016 — not a lifestyle purchase, but a direct response to how endangered he'd realized bees actually were. The vegetables and chickens came after, once the land was already his.
By June of that first year, Doug had read every book he could find on honeybee biology. By August, he had built his first top-bar hive from cedar planks salvaged from a barn demolition down the road. The original three conventional Langstroth hives remained, but the cedar hive — with its horizontal form, its comb left undisturbed, its colony allowed to determine its own natural comb spacing — produced honey that tasted unlike anything he had bought from a store.
"The first time I cracked open that cedar hive, the smell was so different — floral and almost savory at the same time. I knew right then that however we were keeping those bees was changing the honey."