What happens when the farm next door goes ‘way over the line’? Eagle finds out

It was the first 10 minutes of the Eagle City Council meeting, and audience members were already grimacing. Black flies swirled around Steve Booth’s backyard in a video on the monitor as he spoke from the podium. “What we have is a pretty unhealthy situation,” Booth told the council, “for us and for the animals.”

Booth was the first of seven speakers to raise concerns about a plot of agricultural land adjacent to the Crossley Park subdivision, where most of them live, just across Highway 55 north of Eagle Island State Park. The land is an overcrowded cattle pasture in a wispy meadow on West Flint Drive with a house, a barn and a corral.

“It’s a dustbowl in the summer and a mudhole in the winter,” said another speaker, Donna Gerber, at the March 24 meeting. She and her neighbors had “hoped to resolve this issue one neighbor to another,” Gerber said, but things had gotten out of hand.

Trying to keep things upbeat, Gerber implored council members to address an issue that “flies in the face of the desire of your residents to maintain Eagle as a nice place to live.”

The house and meadow were uninhabited for years. Then, in 2022, Tom Ricks purchased the property, according to several residents who spoke to the Statesman. They described how Ricks’s family set up a small farm stand and struck up a friendship with some of the neighbors.

What began as a horse pasture quickly evolved into a home for a small but growing herd of cows. Neighbors said the cows overgrazed and flies proliferated. When neighbors tried to talk to Ricks, they said, he was uncooperative.

An Idaho Statesman reporter was unable to reach Ricks for comment by calling a number believed to belong to Ricks and by visiting the property several times, knocking on his door and leaving notes.

The Eagle city code covering animal husbandry does not regulate the number or type of livestock on properties so long as the animals are not being kept for profit, such as by keeping goats for selling cheese. Boise and Payette limit the number of livestock animals over 1,000 pounds to two per acre.

When the Statesman visited the pasture, there were 28 head of cattle living on about two-thirds of the 5-acre property, as well as four full-sized horses in a separate corral. Residents of Crossley Park and neighbors adjacent to the property say they’ve seen as many as 70 cows there.

City code does say that livestock cannot become a nuisance. Residents told the Statesman about incessant mooing during late-night calf births and the loss of their ability to barbecue in their own backyards because of the flies and manure-scented dust.

At the meeting in March, Jane Oliver asked the council to investigate the health risk of the flies coming from the manure and the irrigation ditch on the edge of the property. “[The flies] prohibit people who are retired – most of us – from enjoying our little backyard and our little time left on the planet,” Oliver said.

As the weather warms up, the flies coming from the pasture will become more attracted to humans and animals. More sun means more skin exposure, and more places to get bitten. A single fly serve as host to millions of bacteria, making it easy to spread diseases.

Studies of flies found on dairy farms and cattle ranches have shown that these insects are major spreaders of pathogens like salmonella, Moraxella bovis (pinkeye), and spreadable pathogens of bovine respiratory disease. In fact, the houseflies carry potentially dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria they pick up from cows being treated with antibiotics.

The land, which is designated by Eagle as agricultural-residential, hosts the single-family home, a large barn for four adult horses, staging areas for large farming equipment, and holding pens with several dozen cattle.

In Idaho, land zoned as A-R (Agricultural-Residential) typically serves as a buffer between nonintensive, noncommercial farming operations and residential developments. In Eagle, A-R land requires a minimum lot size of approximately 5 acres per single-family unit. Satellite imaging shows the entire plot is just over 5 acres.

When the speakers were through, Mark Butler, a former City Council member and the chair of Eagle’s Urban Renewal Board, rose unprompted to join their cause. Butler cited the “very clear” guidance around A-R land in the city code, noting the need for any existing agricultural activities not to impede on the surrounding developments.

“I know there’s a fine line between what’s compatible with agricultural uses,” Butler said, “but this is way beyond that line.”

On Tuesday, Booth returned to the City Council to remind members of the need for action, and to emphasize the commercial aspect of the property doesn’t meet the legal purpose of the land. He produced a petition signed by 42 neighbors in the immediate area, urging officials to do something.

Eagle’s public information officer told the Statesman that Mayor Brad Pike and the City Council are exploring options.