Although the farming landscape remains largely unchanged on Ebey’s Prairie since the 19th Century, the surface activity has gone through several evolutions.

One of the foremost experts on the area’s farming history is Roger Sherman, who along with his brother Al Sherman ran a dairy on the Central Whidbey prairie for more than three decades, caring for a herd of about 500 cows.

But before the Shermans milked cows, they talked turkey.

Their father, Clark Sherman, started raising turkeys in 1934. When his sons returned from military service to the family farm in Coupeville in the 1950s, they helped take turkey production to a new level, going from 10,000 turkeys to about 100,000 gobblers, creating quite a cackle on the prairie.

“That’s traditionally what farmers do,” said Roger Sherman, now 80 and retired. “They find something that makes money and overproduce it and ultimately the price goes down. Milk is a good example.”

Nearly a dozen dairies were in operation on Whidbey Island in the 1990s. The Shermans’ operation was the last to close down in 2007, less than a decade after the farm had been passed down to the next generation and ultimately split into two separate farming ventures.

The structures still stand but now serve other agricultural uses at the Ebey Road Farm, owned by Karen Bishop, the daughter of Al Sherman, and her husband Wilbur Bishop, along with their son Clark, a sixth-generation farmer.

A large portion of the 700 acres they farm is devoted to growing alfalfa and grass to provide hay for livestock. They also produce grass seed for seed companies, among other crops.

“It’s amazing how many horses there are on the island,” Al Sherman said. “That’s why guys are selling so much hay. It didn’t used to be that way.”

When white settlers first started arriving on Whidbey in 1850 and began congregating around the fertile prairie lands, potatoes and wheat were the first major staple crops.

Whidbey, with its rich soil, mild temperatures and vast prairies, gained the reputation as having the best agricultural land in the entire Pacific Northwest.

North and Central Whidbey also average about 20 inches of rainfall a year because of the Olympic Rain Shadow, about half as much as Clinton.

“We have the climate here where crops can grow,” Wilbur Bishop said.

And, apparently, animals, too.

Whidbey’s livestock roots date back to 1852 when John Alexander imported the first bargeload of domesticated animals to the island, consisting of pigs, cattle and sheep, according to author Richard White, in the book, “Land Use, Environment and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington.”

The animals were preyed on by wolves on the island until the wolves were eliminated from the county by 1860, White wrote.

By the mid 1860s, cattle ranged on Whidbey from Crescent Harbor to Useless Bay.

Cattle remain a prominent feature on Whidbey’s current agricultural landscape, best known through the Muzzall family’s 3 Sisters Family Farm operation in Oak Harbor.

The Muzzalls, too, adjusted their practices over more than a century of farming, going from egg-laying hens to turkeys to dairy cows to organic beef cattle, hogs and sheep.

Focusing on the needs of livestock is a big part of the operation at Sherman Farms, run by Don and Deb Sherman, Roger’s son and daughter-in-law, over the 450 acres they farm.

However, aside from alfalfa and grass, the Shermans also produce an abundance of cabbage seed they sell to seed companies.

And on an island noted for its sugar hubbard squash, Rockwell beans, barley and berries, as well as an abundance of greens and other row crops grown by smaller-scale farmers, cabbage seed might be the most intriguing product of them all.

Roger Sherman said the cabbage seed produced on Central Whidbey accounts for about half of the world’s cabbage.

He recently asked his wife Darlene to guess if the cabbage head she was holding in her hands was from their son’s farm or not.

“She had a 50 percent chance (of getting it right),” he said.