Chris Florence and his two partners did exactly the opposite of what most young Idahoans were doing a decade ago.
They started a farm.
Florence, 33, left his career as a chef and joined two friends to start Sweet Valley Organics on 27 acres near Sweet. There they raise 10 varieties of specialty crops, including tomatoes and cucumbers, for wholesale.
They add value to increase their profits by canning tomatoes, making tomato sauce and pickles, and gathering and cultivating mushrooms.
“You can’t just do one thing and feed three families,” Florence said. “The season is too short and the audience is too small.”
Florence is one of thousands of rural Idahoans who have changed the way they live and work to adjust to the dramatic changes taking place in the past few decades. Ten years ago, the Idaho Statesman joined partners like the Spokesman Review in Spokane, the Post Register in Idaho Falls, the Lewiston Tribune and Idaho Public Television in a yearlong examination of Idaho’s troubled rural landscape.
The series found that fewer people in rural Idaho had jobs, and they were paid less, were growing older and were attracting lower commodity prices. A third of farm income came in the mail in the form of government checks. Young adults were forced to leave their small communities to find work.
Some of the trends continue. The rural population is getting older, and unemployment is far higher in rural Idaho than in urban Idaho, which also has suffered during the recession.
But farm income is up. Rural Idaho’s 24-to-35 population actually grew by a higher percentage than did urban areas. Federal farm subsidies dropped by more than half and in 2010 represented just 1 percent of net Idaho farm income of $1.4 billion.
Silver and gold prices also are up, helping North Idaho’s Silver Valley. But the housing crash struck another blow to the state’s once-thriving timber and building-products industries, and forest communities continue to struggle the most.
Still, people willing to change have found ways to survive and even grow in the face of hard times.
Mark Mahon was a 30-year-old logging company owner in Council in 2010. “I’m scared to death of the future,” he told us then. With timber supplies down, he worried he’d have to follow private timber harvests to the Oregon coast — and take his 15 jobs with him.
But in 2011, Mahon is still in Idaho and still has 15 people on the payroll. Today he not only logs but also builds roads and has 12 independent truckers working with him. With three mills still operating in the area and the Idaho Department of Lands still offering timber, he has been able to stay alive despite the recession and the collapse of the building economy.
“We were really doing good until this recession hit,” he says today.
A NEW DOMINANT FARM PRODUCT
Dairy has replaced potatoes as the driving force of Idaho agriculture, with revenues of $1.95 billion. Potatoes, at $690 million, are now third, behind No. 2 cattle.
That change, along with a national ethanol-subsidy program, has transformed the landscape. Thousands of acres of corn and hay grown to feed thousands of dairy cattle have displaced other crops. The economic effects have spread to larger communities as makers of dairy products have followed the herds. Greek-yogurt maker Chobani, for instance, formally broke ground Monday on a Twin Falls plant that will employ 400 people.
“The impact it will have on the whole Magic Valley is tremendous,” said Celia Gould, Idaho Department of Agriculture director.
A decade ago, ethanol used 5 percent of the national farm crop. Today it consumes 40 percent, driving the price of corn from $1.50 a bushel in 2000 to more than $7 in 2011.
Increased competition for all feed crops has driven the cost for dairy-grade hay, for example, from $50 a ton to $250.
But Gould said the income figures are deceiving. The costs of fuel, fertilizer, property taxes and energy are also up, she said.
“I don’t know how much of that translates to Main Street,” Gould said.
The dairy industry has been bitten by the bounty it spawned. Feed prices are high, but dairy prices remain below costs, said Bob Naerebout, director of the Idaho Dairy Association. Farmers get from $14.40 to $17.25 a hundred weight for milk, depending on where it’s being shipped. But they need more than $18 to break even.
At least one cheese producer is paying farmers more for milk if they sign a one-year contract to ensure they have supply. Demand for milk for Chobani’s yogurt is the catalyst.
“As we increase the amount of processors in the state of Idaho,” Naerebout said, “that increases the pay price to producers and that spreads through the community.”
SOME COMMUNITIES STILL HURTING
Idaho’s rural communities are not bouncing back, even if the farm economy is. The trends that set them on a downward path at the end of the past century continue.
A fourth-generation timber worker, Mahon, now 39, is saddened that there aren’t enough kids in his son’s junior high classes for a basketball team.
Efforts to replace the Boise Cascade mill in Council with a call center a decade ago failed.
“The dilemma for a lot of rural communities,” said Gould, “is that even when people have money to spend, the car dealer went out of business or the implement dealer went away.”
Paul Romrell of St. Anthony told the Statesman in 2001 that his family farm in eastern Idaho’s Fremont County was getting $2 for a bushel of wheat and 90 cents for a sack of potatoes in 2001, the same prices his grandfather got during the Depression.
Today, at 72, Romrell has quit most of his irrigated farming and rents out his 200 acres.
But wheat has been going for as much as $9 a bushel and potatoes up to $9 a bag. He plans to sell off his cattle in 2012 and live off his pensions, his Social Security and his rent.
His daughter is married to a farmer near Idaho Falls. His son is an economics professor at Utah State. With farmland prices strong, his land is now a good investment.
“The farms keep getting bigger up here,” he said.
Meanwhile, St. Anthony, the county seat, continues its shift from an agricultural town to a bedroom community to Rexburg, the home of BYU-Idaho and its growing student body 10 miles to the south.
St. Anthony has found new people to fill its homes and shop in its remaining stores.
“We have students now that come here to rent apartments, young couples,” said Romrell, a former county commissioner.
CHALLENGED TO COLLABORATE
Ultimately, the Idahoans and communities who stepped up to meet the challenge to change are the ones who are holding on.
Bob Cope, a Lemhi County commissioner from Salmon, stood up and challenged speakers at a Rural Idaho conference co-sponsored by the newspapers and the Andrus Center for Public Policy at the College of Idaho in November 2001.
He expressed anger over restrictions on timber and threats to ranching from endangered species like wolves. During the conference, he made connections with other community leaders who were moving past the resource wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
Over the course of the past decade, Cope has worked with the Sonoran Institute on planning, and with the Salmon Valley Stewardship group and the North Fork Collaborative to get some timber contracts moving.
“Once you get on the ground with people and they can see what we’re up against,” he said, “it makes a big difference.”
LEARNING TO ADAPT
Council’s Mahon also sits on a collaborative panel with environmentalists, planning for the future. Through the stewardship-contracting program, the federal government is providing more timber.
Working together has required both sides to compromise, Mahon said. But he remains frustrated that more can’t be done with all the timber available in the national forests — for timber or biomass energy.
Instead of cutting more wood for timber products, the driving force behind the federal logging is improving wildlife habitat.
The habitat and forest-restoration work, which has grown in the past decade, fits one of the recommendations experts made a decade ago: That to survive, rural industries must adapt to provide services that urban America wants.
Organic farmer Florence and partners Chance Morgan and Geoff Neyman are doing just that in Sweet. They started raising 40 varieties of crops, but that’s down to eight or 10, Florence said.
If conditions change, however, these self-described “new age” farmers are prepared to adapt, he said.
That’s good advice for all rural residents today, said Gould.
“They need to look at every option and take opportunity as it comes,” she said.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
