Can you come home to somewhere you’ve never been?
For Dick Severson, the life-long passion of farming didn’t come from his parents. Their experiences in agricultural communities of Iowa during the Great Depression left them with hard memories but no soft spots for the life of a farmer.
It took Severson several decades of working in adjacent industries to finally “come home” and return to his childhood dreams of owning a commercial farm.
To recognize that life-long journey and his years of service as a board member and then president of Oregon Aglink’s original incarnation, Agri-Business Council of Oregon, the Oregon Aglink board of directors have awarded Dick Severson the 2024 Agriculturist of the Year award.
“Agriculture Adjacent”
In the 1970s, Dick Severson wasn’t farming in the traditional sense.
“I had to kind of look at some direction that would put me close to what I wanted to do, and that turned out to be fisheries” says Severson, though he considered wildlife and forestry too.
After a year as a Fisheries Technology Instructor at Mt. Hood Community College, he took a job with Oregon Aqua Foods 1972 to help develop the salmon ranching industry with a central question: if you release propagated salmon down a man-made river near the coast, would they still come back to where they started?
“We had some early success demonstrating that, yes indeed, you can create a man-made river out of saltwater from point A to point B and fish will imprint on it.”
Along with farmed salmon raised to “pan size” before harvest, the fisheries business with its seasonal ups and downs, as well as its regulatory pushes and pulls, kept Severson occupied through the 1980s and several legislative sessions worth of testimony. He stayed with Oregon Aqua Foods until pressure minimized the business so much in 1990 that it shut down.
A year as a consultant took him to Japan, Chile, and Norway, where other countries were exploring their options with aquaculture and propagated salmon. Between working at a desk and sitting on an airplane, Severson says, “I learned within a very short time that it wasn’t the sort of life I wanted. My heart was set, somehow someday, to production agriculture.” 
The next chapter of his career followed a similar path, though. A connection at the previous job, this time a member board of directors of the joint salmon ranching venture, had a business in Albany, Agri-Tech: “They had acquired this small company that had been doing trials with industrial by-products like paper pulp, boiler ash, and municipal biosolids that could be used for agricultural purposes.”
Severson once again was hired on to manage and grow a business, Agri-Tech, and he spent the next eleven years doing so. Toward the end of that time, a larger company bought out the waste management company was supplying the inputs for application, “so it was time for me to leave and start the family business, which was always my goal.”
Most of the acreage was already in hand, since Severson and his wife Maryanne had bought it all the way back during the fisheries days to raise their family. They had spent years building up some of the infrastructure and buying equipment. With a bit more planning, they were ready to commercialize as Severson Farms.
“At Your Age?”
“Of course I’m sixty years old at this point,” says Severson. “Most of my friends were going, ‘You mean you’re going to farm now?”
Severson’s response: “I’m ready to go, I’m ready to do this.”
Taking the family land and a plan to start with a diversified operation, they expanded by leasing and buying additional acreage. With about sixty-five acres, they spent twenty years dividing their efforts between cattles, field-grown nursery stock, and row crops like pumpkins and sweet corn.
“We grew a little bit of everything, but not a lot of any one thing,” says Severson. His years of growing and managing other businesses informed his strategy for running a small but successful operation: “It was diversified to the point that it allowed us some cash flow throughout most of the year depending on the crop at the time.”
While the Severson’s recently shut down the nursery side of their operation last year to lighten the physical load, they plan to keep their cow-calf operation running as long as they can.
“It’s hard to explain but I can say that my very worst day on the farm, whatever that might have been, and some days everything went sideways, but I can say that was better than my very best day in the corporate world managing these companies.” As much as Severson succeeded in his “farming adjacent” careers, he prefers to work in a field rather than at a desk.
Contributing to the Industry
Like the acreage that he had bought years before starting a farm, Severson’s participation in the Agri-Business Council of Oregon started during his salmon days. “Raising farmed salmon was more akin to an agricultural experience,” he says. “We had a product that we could harvest at any time of year.” Bruce Andrews, then-director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, connected Severson with ABCO in 1988. He’s been a member ever since.
After his time at Agri-Tech, when Severson Farms was up and running, membership became something more. The Agri-Business Council of Oregon was going through some rough times with staff turnover and difficult fundraising. According to a board member at the time, Severson says, they were “just an eyelash away from shutting it all down.” Severson continues, “It seems strange to think that at this point, but it was pretty tense.”
Coming onto the executive committee around that period, Severson ended up serving three terms as president. He didn’t set out to do it, but board members and staff saw his leadership as a source of stability while the organization worked to right itself.
“We persevered through it, and boy, today it’s a really healthy organization,” he says of Oregon Aglink. During that time, he was on the committee that hired previous executive director Geoff Horning. Since then, he’s seen the Adopt a Farmer program grow and has hosted several field trips at his own farm. Middle school students from Eugene, Coburg, and Harrisburg have gone to Severson Farms to learn about everything from soil health to animal husbandry. Severson hops comfortably between activities, sharing his passion for the hard work and the extra something that comes from doing what you love:
“When you look at the real nuts and bolts of it – the successful calf that was difficult but you’re sending it off to market, the corn you harvested that’s successful with no worms and the stalks are thriving – all of that is much more than the monetary aspect.”
By Allison Cloo