The state's trade representatives to China, Japan, South Korea and other markets have included grass seed and hay farmers. Wheat is the leading product, by bulk, shipped from the Port of Portland.
It goes both ways, as an international influence cuts through Oregon farming. Thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants work in Oregon's fields, orchards and food processing plants, of course, but a closer look shows key research, education and production positions also are filled by people who weren't born here.
Sonny Ramaswamy, the Indian-born dean of Oregon State University's College of Agricultural Sciences, may be the most visible example, but he isn't alone.
When the Oregon Legislature funded a honeybee research position in 2009, OSU hired Ramesh Sagili, a promising scholar from Texas A&M by way of India.
Sagili has impressed beekeepers and farmers with his energetic research, which began with establishing a baseline of bee health throughout the state and branched into intriguing nutrition experiments.
The stakes are considerable.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates bee pollination increases crop values nationally by $15 billion a year. Oregon growers say yields would drop by 70 percent in some cases without the pollination work of bees. Oregon blueberry farmers alone require about 25,000 hives annually, trucked into fields during a short spring pollination period.
Other foreign-born experts, most of them at OSU, are engaged in equally important work.
Vaughn Walton (South Africa) is part of an OSU team assembled to fight off the spotted wing drosophila, an invasive fruit fly with an appetite for Oregon's berries and cherries.
Helmuth Ropp (Germany) supervises the state Department of Agriculture's insect pest prevention program.
Nick Andrews (England) advises beginning farmers out of OSU's North Willamette Research and Extension Station in Wilsonville.
Silvia Rondon, (Peru) helps eastern Oregon potato growers battle tuberworms from the OSU research center in Hermiston.
Back on the OSU campus, James Osborne (New Zealand) specializes in wine microbiology, including fermentation, spoilage and the interaction of wine yeast and bacteria.
Sam Doane (Canada) is a production horticulturist at one of Oregon's largest plant nurseries, J. Frank Schmidt & Son in Boring.
At OSU's Food Innovation Center in Portland, Qingyue Ling (China) works on product formulas, packaging, shelf-life testing and sensory evaluation. He's developed a Radio Frequency Identification system to tag, track and trace food shipments.
Why are they here? Most came to the U.S. as graduate students and stayed on as ambition and energy intersected with opportunity.
It's not an unusual situation -- higher education and economic niches such as the high-tech industry have long been a "brain gain" for the U.S., but the international influence on Oregon's farms is remarkable for its understated depth and for the apparent ease with which it has been received.
Wheat researcher and agronomist Stephen Machado (Zimbabwe), who works at OSU's Columbia Basin station in Pendleton, was surprised by the reception when he took the job in 2001.
"No one even questioned me about what I'm doing here," he says. "When I'm doing field trials, I am the only African talking to white farmers. They just want the information, and don't care about anything else."
Pankaj Jaiswal (India), a microbiologist involved in a plant genome tracking project at OSU, likewise found easy acceptance in the U.S.
"My face itself is my passport," he says. "If you are able to communicate well, those international and racial barriers go away."
Jaiswal says his OSU salary, access to resources and a "cool and calm life" make working in Corvallis attractive. The family speaks Hindi at home, but his sons were born in the U.S. and correct his English idioms.
Foreign nations are eager to lure their brightest agricultural researchers home. Chinese researchers in particular are under pressure to return. Jaiswal says he gets offers to return to India, but believes he does more good educating Indian students who come through OSU.
Machado says political instability in Zimbabwe gives him pause about returning. The government hassled him so badly -- insisting he travel to its embassy in Washington, D.C. to renew his passport -- that he renounced his citizenship and became an American.
Ling, of the Food Innovation Center, says the Chinese government's massacre of protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989 caused him to stay on in the U.S., where he was pursuing graduate degrees. He visits and lectures in China now and sees himself as a "bridge" between the two countries, but does not plan to return.
Oregon benefits greatly from international experts, ideas and contacts, says Katy Coba, who grew up on a Pendleton wheat ranch and is director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. The state's farmers, she says, will listen to anyone who can help them.
"The bottom line for farmers is, if you have a new, better way to do something, to save us money or improve yields -- bring it on," she says.
Still, some observers worry American students are turning away from agriculture at a time when soil, water, crop diversity and sustainability issues are becoming critical. Others say American students who might fill more of the agricultural research and teaching jobs have been drawn away by business, engineering and computer science.
About 5 percent of OSU's ag students are from other countries, compared to 6.5 percent of the broader university student body. In the Oregon University System, 6 percent of the total faculty were listed as international in 2008, the most recent figure, compared to 7 percent in 2006.
At the University of California at Davis, another highly regarded agricultural school, nearly 11 percent of its agricultural students and about 13 percent of the ag faculty are international.
The experts working in Oregon say the state offers a chance to work in relative peace in a beautiful place, with a mild climate, accepting people, established research infrastructure and wildly diverse agricultural products.
The rest of it is an old story.
"If you look at the history of the U.S., it's built on immigration," says Vaughn Walton, the South African fruit fly researcher.
"People strive to have a better life," he says, "and they put every ounce of energy into that when they're here."
Fred Ziari emigrated from Iran at 17 and helped transform Eastern Oregon's Umatilla basin with advanced irrigation systems and a wireless Internet connectivity "cloud" used by farmers. His engineering firm is working on an aquifer recharging project that will draw water from the Columbia River in the winter and store it underground for summer use.
He laughs a little, kindly, when asked what draws international experts here. Because he thinks it's pretty obvious.
"It's called America."