SEATTLE -- For nearly two months after Washington’s catastrophic flooding in December, Cathy Moul’s flower farm in Everett was still underwater. All the tulips, irises and daffodils she and her mom had just planted, along with their precious peonies that had been growing for years, were wiped out.

“We spent close to $30,000 worth on those flowers, and for it to be like, wiped away,” Moul said. “I was freaking out.”

Her mom, who had just handed over the business to Moul the year before, told her it might be time to quit. Part of Moul wanted to. Starting over seemed overwhelming.

The flood struck as Washington’s Hmong farming community was already confronting an existential question: Who will carry on the farms when the generation that built them can no longer do the work?

The community emerged in the '80s and '90s with help from the Indochinese Farm Project, a King County program that helped refugees from the Vietnam War access farmland and sell what they grew at local markets. Today, Hmong farmers make up nearly 60% of the farm vendors at Pike Place Market, specializing in the colorful floral arrangements that have become central to the Market’s identity.

For Moul, taking over wasn’t a matter of economic survival. It was a chance to work for herself and remain close to her family, community and culture.

Down the road from Moul in Everett is another Hmong farmer also deciding whether she can rebuild her farm on her own. Without any family members who want to take over, Yeng Lee Cha, 67, is finally considering selling part of her farm at the urging of her son.

For both generations, increasingly severe floods are making it harder for them to hold on.

No choice

When Moul’s mother Xee Yang took over the family’s flower farm more than two decades ago, she didn’t have a choice.

Her family had fled the mountains of Laos when Yang was a child, amid the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the communist takeover of the country. Through King County’s Indochinese Farm Project, her aunt and uncle started a farm in Woodinville, and Yang helped them part time throughout the '90s while working as a hotel cook. When they both passed away in 2000, her father instructed her to take it over so her siblings could have a place to work in the summers.

For a while, things were good. Her parents and grandparents and other relatives helped her in the field so she could focus on the market. But in 2010, both her mother and father died, leaving her to take care of her four younger siblings who were in middle school and high school. A few years later, she took in three nieces and nephews after their father died.

Suddenly, Yang was running a business on her own with a lot of mouths to feed.

“Oh my God, I was crying so much,” Yang said. “I was working day and night nonstop.”

As much as the farm demanded of her, it provided enough for her to feed her family, allowing them to finish school and for many of them to go to college. Over time, she helped cousins and extended family members start their own farms, showing them how to access land, order seeds and introducing them to markets where they could sell their flowers.

And the farm kept Yang connected to her family, past and present. Older family members would tell Yang stories of her parents’ lives farming in the mountains of Laos before they moved. And she spent countless hours with her siblings, cousins and children, all planting, weeding and picking flowers together.

She says the farm is the place that “brings everybody together.”

'We're not going to live forever'

Unlike her mother, Moul, 26, had other options. And after watching her mother work so hard while growing up, she had never expected to become a farmer too.

But a few years ago, she was working as a project manager at a smart home automation company, and she yearned for independence. At the same time, her mom, 50, was getting older and Moul could see that she wanted to keep the farm but it was beginning to be too much for her to run on her own.

“There is a little bit of an obligation,” Moul said. “She was really pushing for either my older sister or I to take over the business.”

It was her chance to return the favor to keep the farm that her mom loved going. She told her mom she’d try it out for a year or two, and if she didn’t like it, she could always go back to her office job.

It hasn’t been easy. First, try taking over a business from your mom who’s been in charge for more than two decades.

“She is very used to, how would I call it? Micromanaging,” Moul said. “She'll like, kind of watch over your shoulder, and if you make a little mistake, she'll call it out.”

For Yang, who decades ago found herself suddenly raising her children, younger siblings, nieces and nephews while running the farm largely alone, that criticism is an expression of love. She said she pushes her daughter to prepare her for the day she, too, may have to manage the farm on her own.

“You think I’m being too harsh,” Yang recalled telling her. “But one day, if I’m gone and you’re not ready, you won’t know what to do.”

That warning took on new weight in April, when Yang was hospitalized with severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion. Since then, Moul has taken her mother to doctors appointments several times a week while juggling markets and much of the farm work on her own.

“You see,” Yang told her daughter. “I told you, we’re not going to live forever.”

Xee Yang-Schell, who is writing a book about the Hmong farmers of Pike Place Market, said the growing burden on younger farmers, including from a changing climate, raises doubts about how many will continue once their parents can no longer help.

“Can we keep going year after year, each year with more and more challenges, and then less and less help as our parents become disabled or elderly or passing on or retiring?” Yang-Schell said. “I’m not sure.”

The winter floods have forced that reckoning sooner for some older farmers.

Letting go

With none of her six children planning to take over, Yeng Lee Cha is weighing whether to sell the flower farm she spent decades building.

The morning after the Snohomish River broke its flood record, Cha left before dawn to sell flowers at Pike Place Market. When she returned that night, roads were closed and the fields shone with floodwater with scattered hay bales floating on top.

By the time she assessed the damage, one greenhouse was gone and another was crushed. Buckets, trays and tables had floated away. A portable toilet had washed across the property. Across 1 or 2 acres, she estimated she lost about half her peonies, some 8 to 10 years old.

Among 36 Hmong farmers surveyed by the Hmong Association of Washington after the floods, estimated losses from destroyed crops, delayed planting and damaged equipment ranged from $25,000 to $150,000 per farm.

“At that time, I cried,” Cha said. “I said, ‘What happened? I cannot make it anymore.’ ”

Cha fled Laos after the communist takeover and arrived in Washington in 1979, around age 20, speaking no English. She worked other jobs while helping relatives farm, then eventually started farming on her own and began selling flowers at Pike Place Market.

Now 67, she still leaves before dawn for the Market and returns to the farm at night to pick more flowers, wearing a headlamp in the dark, to sell the next day. Her husband, who has Parkinson’s disease, can no longer help as he once did.

“I never tired,” Cha said. “Last year, this year, I’m very tired.”

Her son has urged her for years to sell some of the land. She has always refused. But her husband’s mobility has worsened and the flood has left her facing another round of cleanup and planting.

For now, she is clearing weeds, replacing peonies and fixing the damaged ground. She said it may take a few years before she sells. But for the first time, she believes she will.

Her story

Moul has decided to keep the business going. Farming has given her more independence than her office job did, but it has also drawn her deeper into the Hmong community. She exchanges seeds with farmers she calls aunties and uncles, translates for vendors at Pike Place Market and has improved her Hmong along the way.

“I feel more connected to my culture by doing this, and I think that kind of is what motivates me to continue,” Moul said.

She also takes pride in carrying on what her mother built.

“I think it’s very personal with a multigenerational business because you know that you’re continuing a legacy,” Moul said.

But she is also beginning to make the farm her own. She has introduced new flowers she noticed other farmers selling, started a social media page that has brought in new business and, with her mother’s encouragement, renamed the business Cathy’s Garden.

“My turn’s done,” Yang said. “I want her to take over, so she can take everything, make it her story.”

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