Roscoe Caron, former member of the Hoedads, reflects in Eugene's  Register-Guard. 

"At this moment of high unemployment, it may be instructive to look back on an earlier hard time in Oregon. In the early to mid-1970s, Oregon’s unemployment rate ranged from more than 6 percent to close to 9 percent. Yet during this time, a Eugene worker-owned company was born and within a few years was among Lane County’s top 10 payrolls. It became a private sector version of the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

The Hoedads began in 1971 as a 20-person partnership. Two years later, when it became Hoedads Co-op Inc., it had expanded to 13 work crews employing close to 300 people — all during a severe recession. The Hoedads did reforestation work in every state west of the Rockies, including Alaska. In addition to planting trees, Hoedads fought forest fires, built hiking trails, restored watersheds, performed technical forestry work, collected seed cones, did precommercial thinning, and built campgrounds, fences and bridges.

Hoedads advocated for the right for women to work in the woods, formed a crew of Mexican-American workers and an all-women crew, and fought in the Oregon Legislature against the rampant use of herbicides. The Hoedads also lobbied extensively at the national and state levels for increased funds for reforestation, for worker safety and for the promotion of sustainable forestry practices.

In Eugene, Hoedads provided loans and grants to many local alternative businesses — from providing initial operating expenses for the WOW Hall to providing startup money for cooperative businesses — including restaurants, auto repair shops, wholesale food suppliers and construction companies. Hoedads also provided financial resources to environmental groups and a number of new community-based agencies.

Additionally, Hoedads spawned a dozen other forestry cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest, providing the business management and forestry skill training ground for many of those other worker-owned enterprises. The Hoedads also served as a role model for the national worker cooperative movement of the 1970s. Hoedads earned the respect of people throughout the United States for putting their ideals into practice.