upcoming

Humboldt County Historical Society

What:

Historians and board members of our local Farm Bureau, Donna Moxon & Gene Senestraro, present the “Early History of the Humboldt County Farm Bureau”at the Humboldt County Historical Society program meeting on Saturday, June 6 at 1:30 p.m. in the first-floor conference room of the Humboldt County Library, 1313 Third Street, Eureka. Admission is free and everyone is invited.
 
Donna Moxon, whose family has been ranching and farming in Arcata since 1857, is the former executive director of the Farm Bureau, and Gene Senestraro, an Elk River dairyman, is a past president of the Farm Bureau. When Gene and Donna began to put together a history of the Farm Bureau, they discovered it was the very first one in the state, and that it originated through an early-day grass roots effort.
 
In 1914, the state of California announced that it would place farm advisers in areas that had organized a Farm Bureau. The close-knit, multi-ethnic Humboldt farming community recognized the advantages of the offer, and worked together to form the state’s first Farm Bureau. As a result, the University of California Cooperative Agricultural Extension sent an educator and adviser for the areas farmers, ranchers, and dairymen to help with questions regarding agricultural science.
 
One reason Humboldters had been so quick to recognize the advantages of the state’s proposal, was that from the 1850s onward, as the area developed, settlers had brought various crops from all their different homelands, and there was already a great deal of sharing among farmers and ranchers as to what was working and what wasn’t. Building on this informal gathering of knowledge, they understood that the establishment of a Farm Bureau would provide an opportunity for even greater education and information sharing.
 
Join Donna Moxon and Gene Senestraro for the Early History of Humboldt’s Farm Bureau, with many historical photographs. For more information please contact the Humboldt County Historical Society at 445-4342, or visit www.humboldthistory.org

When/where: