Put Out to Pasture: DISAPPEARING IDAHO FARMS
“Across the West, farmland is disappearing, and Idaho is no exception.” COURTESY OF BOISEOG.COM
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BY HEATHER HAMILTON-POST
In just five years, Idaho has lost approximately 100,000 acres of farmland. In areas of Boise, wells are drying up rapidly, a reaction to the accelerated development that cannot come close to satisfying the demand for housing throughout the Treasure Valley. Our agricultural landscape is different now, although you can still see our origins reflected in surprising places– the sun setting over a field adjacent to The Village at Meridian, a small dairy nestled amongst the houses, and a high school in once rural Kuna. Ray Nebeker, who pauses to step down from his tractor, has been farming since he was a kid in high school–over 50 years in total. His farm is 120 acres, but he manages someone else’s 1,000-acre farm too. Between them, he says he grows “every crop under the sun,” and also raises livestock. But today’s Kuna isn’t the same city where he began his career. “It started all of a sudden in 1970. The baby boomers started
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buying homes and then we started getting real subdivisions. And now? The Treasure Valley is rapidly changing,” Nebeker says. Across the West, farmland is disappearing, and Idaho is no exception. Researchers at Boise State University specializing in urban projections speculate that the state, now 22% farmland, will be largely converted to developed land use by 2100. The makeup is changing too–in a presentation through the Idaho Humanities Council, Boise State University’s Dr. Jodi Brandt and Dr. Rebecca Som Castellano explain that there are certainly fewer farms, but they tend to be larger. “Family farms accounted for 90 percent of farms with at least a million dollars in sales in 2015 and produced 83 percent of production from million-dollar farms,” explains Som Castellano. “But the term ‘family farm’ can be somewhat misleading.” She explains that, especially now, family farms tend to be large-scale, which is largely due to necessity.
