Oregon Farm Loop

At E.Z. Orchards Farm Market, on Hazelgreen Road NE in Salem, two flavors of donuts are made fresh each day, and the flavors follow the calendar: citrus in spring, berry in summer, apple cider and pumpkin in fall, holiday flavors in winter. When strawberry season begins, the Shortcake Stand opens beside the market and serves shortcake, milkshakes and smoothies from the end of May through early September. The orchard also makes a French-style hard cider it calls Cidre, which the Oregon Farm Loop describes as “slightly dry like champagne.”

Twenty-six stops on one map

E.Z. Orchards is one of 26 stops on the farm map kept by the Oregon Farm Loop, the public name of the Oregon Agritourism Partnership, a nonprofit with a post office box in Wilsonville. The stops spread across the valley. Plumper Farms sits on NW Old Cornelius Pass Road inside Portland. Liepold Farms is on SE Richey Road in Boring, Wayward Winds Lavender is on NE Courtney Road in Newberg, and Source Farms is on Oregon 47 in Yamhill. The map can be filtered by category: Animal Experiences, Dairy / Meats, Education Experience / Tours, Farm Market, Fiber / Wool, Flowers / Nursery, Pumpkin Patch, U-Pick, Winery / Alcohol, and Other. The organization’s Facebook page sums up its audience as “Families & Over-21s!”

Each loop is a scenic driving route, and the organization says the loop “can be done in whatever order tickles your fancy,” one stop in an outing or all of them over several days. Farm products come in seasons, so some stops open daily and others only for a few weeks or on weekends. Printed map brochures reach many Clackamas County and Marion County visitor centers and libraries by mid-April.

The loop’s checklist for visitors asks for long pants and closed-toe shoes, mud boots after spring rain, and a jacket in fall wind. Visitors should stay out of buildings and off equipment unless invited, and keep off the crops even for a good photograph. Not every member allows pets. The checklist also warns that “there might be loud noises, uneven ground, unpathed paths, and unique smells.”

Ostriches, honey flights and whey vodka

The website lays out mini loops, each written as a day’s itinerary. The Salem loop starts at Arrowhead Lavender Farm & Co., which holds a Lavender Festival for a few days each July. From there it goes to Beilke Farms for apple U-pick from August through October, then to Flying Bee Ranch, where a visitor can order a flight of honey. Adelman Peony Garden follows, with over 200 varieties of peonies in bloom and for sale in May and June. The day ends at E.Z. Orchards in mid-afternoon, “probably feeling hungry again.”

The Canby loop leans toward dairy. TMK Creamery makes its own cheeses and cheese curds and offers tours of a distillery that turns leftover whey into a vodka called Cowcohol. Lady Lane Farms, out in Mulino, sells cheese, butter, milk and meat raised on the family farm. Union Mills Feed stocks tack and feed for visitors’ own animals. Swan Island Dahlias holds its Dahlia Flower Festival in August or September. The route finishes back in Canby at Puddin’ River Chocolates, which offers hazelnut toffee, fondue to take home, and 37 truffle flavors.

Toward McMinnville the stops get larger. Eola Crest Cattle runs the 71X Farm Store and a bed and breakfast on the farm. Durant at Red Ridge Farms in Dayton, “one of the handful of olive farms here in Oregon,” gives Olive Mill tours, sells edible landscaping plants, and keeps a wine tasting room. Source Farms in Yamhill sells its own meats, jerky and vegetables and has a sister restaurant, humble spirit, and lodgings at The Ground Inn.

Closer to Portland, Triskelee Farms in West Linn keeps classic farm animals and also raises ostriches, and its farm stand sells ostrich meat. Tollen Farm in Wilsonville has a herd of mini donkeys and a farm store of art, antiques and vintage decor. Around St. Paul in northern Marion County, Ken & June’s Hazelnuts sells chocolate-covered hazelnuts and hazelnut spread by appointment. Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm holds its Spring Tulip Festival from March to May and a Summer Flower Festival from July to August, with a tasting room for its own wines. The St. Paul day closes at Topwire Hop Project, an outdoor beer garden and tap house in Crosby Farms’ hop fields, open May through October, with dinner from food trucks.

Seasonal loops cut across the map. One collects flower festivals, among them Bauman’s Gardenpalooza in April, a two-day event with close to 40 gardening vendors. Another gathers farm-to-table dinners, including Fiala Farms’ Field and Vine Dinner series. A Christmas loop sends visitors to Bauman’s and Plumper Farms for u-cut trees and pumpkin donuts. In late October 2025 the events calendar listed Bauman’s Cider Festival at the Gervais farm, with cider tastings and local beers, and a Friday Happy Hour at Triskelee Farm with drinks, music and free admission.

Corrugated signs in Clackamas County

The farm loops were on the roadside before the partnership that now runs them existed. A 2015 signage study for Clackamas County Tourism and Cultural Affairs, prepared by Mary Stewart of the MARStewart Group in Wilsonville, dates a program of signs marking farm stops to 2009. Through 2015 those signs were temporary corrugated plastic, about 24 inches square for route signs. Volunteers put them out and took them in each year, and the material lasted only one to two years. The study listed the other trouble plainly: vehicles and farm equipment hit the signs, and “people steal the signs and reuse them to direct people to their garage sale or other event.”

In May 2014 a City of Wilsonville tourism strategy urged farm operators to join agri-tourism experiences, including “the new Wilsonville-West Linn-Milwaukie Farm Loop.” That August, a group of agritourism operators founded the Oregon Agritourism Partnership with support from Oregon State University Extension staff. Claire Zielinski, the partnership’s president, later gave the reason in writing: in 2014, she wrote, “agritourism was having a hard time finding a place for promoting themselves in Regional Destination Management Organizations to Destination Management Organizations and beyond.”

The 2015 study described the Oregon Farm Loop as “an organized and supportive community of 62 agritourism farm and related entities.” It counted three loops in Clackamas County: the Canby Area Farm Loop, the Farmlandia Farm Loop and the Molalla Country Farm Loop. Each had 20 or more stops, including flour mills and livestock feed processors. That June the Lake Oswego Review traced Farmlandia from Milwaukie to Aurora, from Bob’s Red Mill Whole Grain Store to Pete’s Mountain Vineyard and Winery. The list also named Fiala Farms, Barn Owl Nursery Herb & Lavender Farm and Tollen Farm, all three still on the map. The paper gave one of the loop’s goals as helping visitors answer the question “Where does my food come from?” Wilsonville gave the Farmlandia loop $1,000 in 2016 and $2,000 for signage in 2017.

Marion, Yamhill, and the map that replaced them

Marion County’s records say OSU Extension, Marion started the Marion Farm Loop in 2017. By July 2019 it was entering its third season with 22 stops, according to the Woodburn Independent, which found Barb Bauman and her staff busy with visitors at the Howell Prairie Road farmstead in Gervais. “A farm loop provides families and individuals — local folks and visitors from elsewhere — with an easy way to locate authentic farm products and on-farm experiences,” Mary Stewart, then speaking for OSU Extension’s agriculture business development program, told the paper. Alexis Taylor, director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, added that Marion County “is home to nearly 3,000 farms and is the No. 1 agricultural producer by value in the state.”

In 2020, as schools and restaurants closed, Extension helped the partnership produce a brochure and an interactive website for the Marion loop’s 24 farms. By the end of that year 5,000 brochures had gone out. According to Extension, new customers found U-pick fields, CSAs, on-farm bakeries and nurseries, along with harvest festivals held under strict safety measures. Audrey Comerford, Extension’s agritourism specialist, then convened the Willamette Valley Visitors Association and its partners for Yamhill County. The Yamhill Farm Loop opened in summer 2021, six months after it was conceived, with 10 farms offering alpacas, pasture-raised meat, fiber, olive oil and lavender.

The county loops did not last as separate routes. The organization’s website explains that the Oregon Farm Loop “used to be divided by county loops Marion, Yamhill, South Clackamas, and Farmlandia.” Adding a new county loop for each farm farther out became impractical, so the county loops were replaced by the single interactive map. The Instagram bio still describes “4 separate loops of farmers, producers, wineries” in the Portland area.

On February 4, 2026, Zielinski wrote to the House Committee on Agriculture about House Bill 4153, taking a neutral position and reporting 26 members. “The learning is not just a one way street,” she wrote, “our members learn just as much from their guests through visiting and experiences.” She noted that some members had changed their accessibility after meeting their guests, and others had adjusted their educational tours to fit classroom curriculums.