Sydney Blaine and her husband farm in Hood River & Wasco counties. They have apples, pears, cherries, some cattle and some sheep. Her family has been in farming for a very long time—Sydney’s grandfather cleared his first farm in Hood River in 1908.

Hood River County has some of the most unique farmland in the state. Its orchards produce 800 million pears a year – 2nd most in the United States. Oregon is the nation’s 2nd leading producer of sweet cherries.

Hood River is also a growing recreational area located very close to Portland. The town and surrounding area have become a very desirable place to live. Sydney says all farmers feel the pressure to sell, but their high-value farmland cannot be replaced once cement is poured and new populations move in.

Some developers have seen Measure 37 and Hood River Valley as an opportunity for windfall profits. Sydney and her husband have three separate orchards. All of their orchards are surrounded by Measure 37 claims. Sydney’s son & his wife have two orchards and they’re almost completely surrounded by Measure 37 claims, too.

Sydney feels that the conflicts and pressures that these new subdivisions would bring to farming are tremendous. First, there’s the additional traffic and the conflicts of more cars on narrow rural roads that her farm machinery travels on. Then there’s the spraying of crops and the noise that farms produce. She’s not sure that residents in an expensive new housing subdivision want to hear a tractor starting up at five o’clock in the morning.

Sydney says that she and her husband don’t know what they’ll do. The investments they’ve made in their orchards are huge and it takes a long time to make a return on those investments. Sydney’s worries that not many of her neighbors who want to stay in farming will make these huge investments that are necessary to running an orchard if they’re surrounded by Measure 37 claims. Sydney believes there will be even more claims down the road if Hood River starts caving in as far as being a farming community. She says the Valley will become a bedroom community for Portland where farming won’t be viable.

Sydney Blaine believes that Oregonians need Measure 49 to provide a balance between the rights of property owners and the need to protect valuable farmland.

Read more Oregon stories for Measure 49.