Buying Land in Sherman County, Oregon

Oregon's original wheat county, and still mostly EFU farmland

Sherman County sits on the Columbia River plateau between the Deschutes and John Day river canyons, and its identity has been built on dryland wheat since the 1880s, when it became the leading wheat-producing county in Oregon on rolling hills of wind-deposited glacial silt. That agricultural character persists in the zoning: outside the six small towns that hold the county's roughly 1,955 residents -- Biggs, Rufus, Wasco, Moro, Grass Valley, and Kent -- nearly all private land is zoned Exclusive Farm Use under the statewide Goal 3 framework, and the county's economy still runs primarily on wheat, barley, and cattle.

Moro, the county seat, is a useful illustration of just how small this county is: it's the smallest county seat in Oregon by land area (under half a square mile) and has never recorded a population above roughly 420. A land buyer should treat any of these town names as marking a genuinely small rural service center, not a suburb-scale town -- and should confirm with Sherman County Planning, rather than assume, whether a specific EFU parcel qualifies for a farm or non-farm dwelling before making an offer contingent on building a home.

Wind energy now shares the wheat ground

Sherman County is also a real center of Oregon wind-energy development, hosting two major utility-scale projects on the same land historically farmed for wheat. The Biglow Canyon Wind Farm, owned by Portland General Electric, has been operating in the county since 2007. More recently, the Golden Hills Wind Project was commissioned in 2022 with a 200-megawatt nameplate capacity. Both projects reflect a pattern common across the Columbia Plateau: wind turbines and continued dryland farming coexist on the same EFU-zoned tracts, since Oregon's farm-use zoning rules permit utility-scale wind facilities as an allowed use rather than treating them as incompatible with agriculture.

For a land buyer, that coexistence cuts both ways. A parcel with an existing turbine lease can carry a meaningful, long-term income stream in addition to farm income -- but it also means checking for recorded easements, access-road rights, setback restrictions from turbine locations, and the specific terms of any lease already in place, none of which show up on a simple zoning map. Confirm the details directly with the seller, a title search, and Sherman County Planning rather than assuming a nearby turbine automatically benefits (or burdens) a specific tract.

Septic permitting runs through a two-county health district

Because Sherman County is one of the 33 Oregon counties that doesn't have DEQ handling septic permits directly (that direct arrangement is limited to Curry, Jackson, and Josephine counties), onsite wastewater systems here are permitted through North Central Public Health District (NCPHD), which serves as DEQ's local agent for both Wasco and Sherman counties. Any parcel not served by one of the small towns' limited municipal systems will need a site evaluation and septic permit through NCPHD before a home can be built -- budget time for that step, and don't assume a neighboring parcel's approved septic system says anything about your own site's suitability.