‘When Hoedads Walked the Earth’

Many tree planters know what a Hoedad is. Or do we?

This engaging story in Oregon Quarterly (excerpted below) tells the story of Lane County tree planters whose enterprising co-op lasted 24 years and had 250 members at its peak. Read Robert Leo Heilman’s entire story, “With a Human Face: When Hoedads Walked the Earth,” in Oregon Quarterly, The Magazine of the University of Oregon. Many thanks to NPR’s Jeff Brady for alerting Friends of Trees to this fascinating part of Oregon’s history.

There was always something a bit tongue-in-cheek about the mighty, muddy Hoedads despite their dead-earnest approach to worker-ownership. They were a strange bunch—leftist radicals and “simple life” hippies with reforestation contracts that, over the years, amounted to several millions of dollars. But, considering that they planted trees for a living, the strangest part was that a very high percentage of the Hoedads had college degrees. …

Forty years ago, when a Lane County tree planting crew named itself after their quintessential planting tool, many young people believed, quite seriously, in creating a new approach to living. The “counterculture” it was called, and though it presented itself in forms that were shocking to their parents and to the House Un-American Activities Committee, it was, at heart, just an attempt to bring into the world a society that lived up to solidly American principles. Beneath the beards, beads, long hair, and odd forms of dress and speech, the hippies were merely young people who wanted to live according to the sorts of things they’d been brought up to cherish: freedom, equality, kindness, honesty—all the noble Sunday school and scouting values that, as children, they’d been taught to believe in, and which, they later discovered, were so very often either ignored or routinely violated in the conduct of our nation’s governance and business practices. …

Each year brought more planters and more contracts. The first Hoedad crew grew to an ungainly fifty planters before dividing itself, amoeba like, into smaller, more workable groups. Shortly after the first stages of growth, the question came up of just how big the co-op could get and still be self-manageable by fully equal and fully engaged partners. One hundred? What if there were say, 200 or maybe even 500 worker-owners deciding things? A call for workers went out, crews were hastily formed and partially trained and sent out on big contracts. By 1974, in large part through the organizational efforts of Ed Wemple ’71, Hoedads had incorporated as a full-fledged cooperative and boasted nine crews. The total contract earnings during those first five years came to $2,395,491 in 2009 dollars.

At their peak in the late 1970s, Hoedads Inc. had about 250 members and annual earnings over $6 million (adjusted) per year. With all of the joining and quitting, some 3,000 men and women worked as Hoedad partners over the co-op’s twenty-four-year lifespan. Of those 3,000 planters, many left the co-op voluntarily (some within just a day or two of hitting the slopes), but none of them were ever forced to quit. …

Read more about the Hoedads in Oregon Quarterly.