Stahlbush Farms
At Stahlbush, we grow and freeze the most delicious fruits, vegetables, grains & legumes. Our certified sustainable, family farm is located in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley!
Our owners, Bill and Karla Chambers, started with 2 crops, about 300 acres and a dream in 1985. Today, Stahlbush cultivates 5,000 acres in Oregon and offers the freshest individually quick-frozen fruits, vegetables, grains & legumes available.
As the farmers and the processors, we are able to leave our products in the field or on the vine until perfectly ripe. We freeze it immediately after harvest, sealing in the perfect flavor.
We began supplying ingredients to the two toughest industries, baby food companies and the Japanese market in the 1980s. We have a robust food safety program as a result. We even go through the most rigorous food safety audit in the industry SQF Level III and scored a 97 (excellent) this year. Farming is an Art. Our Co-owner, Karla S. Chambers, is also a professional artist! She even designs artwork for our packaging. With each growing season, we use conservation tillage to reduce erosion. We also plant cover crops to return nitrogen to the soil and build organic matter. We even apply digestate from our biogas plant to our fields as it acts as an organic fertilizer and naturally increases microbial activity and builds overall soil health.
We continue to improve our irrigation, using weather, soil moisture and evapotranspiration data to track water use and needs. We have implemented automation systems that allow us to access real-time data that automatically controls and schedules our irrigation based on the needs of each plant. We plant native species that attract pollinators like bumblebees and plant cover crops in the winter that keep the blue herons on the farm year-round. We have a thriving blue heron rookery or habitat on the farm. We have programs and benefits in place for our employees to ensure job satisfaction and fulfillment. We also have programs in place to improve our local community, for instance we donate one million servings to local food banks every year. We were the first farm ever to be certified sustainable by the Food Alliance. We have always been early adopters of new technology. Stahlbush was the first farm in Oregon to use GPS technology and the first to build a biogas plant that generates electricity using agricultural by-product in North America.
