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3. Farm Foundation's Meet Your Farmer Podcast with Steve Kaufman
27 Plays23 days ago
Farm Foundation’s Meet Your Farmer podcast featured Steve Kaufman in season 1, episode 3.
Steve Kaufman is a fifth-generation farmer. He returned to his family's Idaho farm full time in 2014 when his uncles and father were ready to retire. He and his two brothers farm 14,000 dryland crop acres, growing primarily winter wheat, spring wheat, peas, garbanzo beans, and canola. Prior to that, he worked at Northwest Farm Credit Services while also farming part time. Steve is an alum of Farm Foundation's Young Farmer Accelerator Program.
In this episode, Steve talks about how gratifying it is to produce enough grain for 30 million loaves of bread on his farm, the hard work of trying to balance life with young kids and farm life, and what the process was like to switch over to no-till.
Music: "Country Roads" by Sergii Pavkin from Pixabay
Reach us at communication@farmfoundation.org.
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Transcript
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello,
Introduction to 'Meet Your Farmer' Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
everyone. Welcome to Meet Your Farmer, Farm Foundation's new podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Mijan. If you don't know Farm Foundation, we're a nonprofit located in the Chicago area, working to promote understanding at the intersections of agriculture and society. We've been accelerating solutions for agriculture since the 1930s, but this is our very first podcast.
00:00:29
Speaker
The goal of this podcast is to help folks know just a little bit more about what the American farmers who are producing the food, fuel and fiber we all use every day.
Meet Steve Coffin: Fifth-Generation Farmer
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm very excited to welcome Steve Coffin to the show. Steve is a fifth generation farmer returning to his family's Idaho farm full time in 2014 when his uncles and father were ready to retire. Prior to that, he worked at Northwest Farm Credit Services while also farming part time.
00:00:59
Speaker
He and his brother are now 50-50 partners in coffin joint venture, farming 6,500 dryland crop acres, growing primarily winter wheat, spring wheat, peas, garbanzo beans, and canola. Steve is an alum of Farm Foundation's Young Farmer Accelerator Program. um Steve, welcome to Meet Your Farmer. Did I get that right? Or is there anything that I'm missing?
00:01:26
Speaker
Thank you, Naomi. Yeah, you you got it right as far as ah the last time I probably updated my bio with Farm Foundation since I went through the Farm Foundation's Young Farmer Accelerator Program.
00:01:38
Speaker
Here, I think we wrapped that up about a year ago. Pretty soon thereafter, um we my brother Jeff and I that we were farming together under Kauffman to adventure, we have another brother Phil who was farming on a neighboring operation and he was farming with a non-family member that decided to retire after the 2023 growing season. So we've combined their operation with ours. So the three of us brothers are farming together now. um The operation is fairly similar crops as what you'd stated before, since it's a neighboring operation, but ah our acreage has expanded quite a bit. So we're farming about 14,000 acres now.
00:02:19
Speaker
um with the the recipe and stuff that my brother and his partner had farmed. And then also at the same time last year, and another neighboring farmer retired and we took on some more acreage there. So um it's been a lot of change on the farm in the last year.
00:02:37
Speaker
Wow, that's double. That's more than double. It's good. Luckily, we've got my our third brother, the three of us, I guess, involved in the operation now. And and um yeah,
00:02:49
Speaker
We find out we need a little more help. It's generally been a very much family operation, but we have pulled in a first full-time employee this last year to kind of take the place of that partner that retired and and yeah some other part-time employees as well. So it's it's been a year of change and and growth.
Steve's Early Farm Life and Family Legacy
00:03:10
Speaker
For sure. And i know I know that I'm catching you in between kind of in a lull. So can you tell, can you, I don't know if it's a true lull, but um can you tell the audience like where, what you just wrapped up and what you're about getting ready to do?
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So farming here in northern Idaho, it's dry land acres. We're dependent on rainfall from the sky. and And the rainfall can vary on our farm quite a bit, depending on elevation. So we farm from 700 feet elevation up to about 3,700 feet elevation, just within about a 15-mile ah radius ah from down at some rivers along the Snake River up to some tree line getting into some mountains. So we we just... wrapped up harvest. We don't get much rain in the summertime, so we're kind of dependent on crops that mature sooner, so they they mature in July and August. um The wheat, the peas, the canola, things like that. So we just wrapped up harvest last week. Yay! And now we're getting ready to seed again. We start seeding again kind of mid-September.
00:04:15
Speaker
So I wanted to start the conversation with getting to know a little bit about kind of the early years for you as a farmer. And ah being a fifth generation farmer, especially, I wanted to know, ah I'm assuming you grew up on a farm. Is that correct? That's correct. So what was that like? I enjoyed getting to grow up on the farm. we ah lived lived on the farm. It was a ah farm that my dad and his brother actually bought in 1973 when they were in their 20s. I think my dad was 22 and my uncle was 25 and they bought it on 95% credit with the 5% down payment borrowed from their dad. So basically 100% credit, um took a leap of faith.
00:05:04
Speaker
And 73 was actually a good time to try to jump in and and do that because ah that was basically the year that commodity prices really increased. so um it was It was a good opportunity for my dad and uncle to do that. and they They bought it on a 40-year loan. They got it paid off in 20. They came from a big family, my dad and my uncle. There were eight brothers in that family and three sisters, so 11 kids. and so there were and A lot of them were interested in farming. so It wasn't like they just got to take over Grandpa's farm. it was They kind of had to start on their own. so They had to build up from there. and so that It took some risk and some hard work. you know they
00:05:46
Speaker
They were farming the 200 acres that they bought, but they also were doing custom harvesting for people. They were working other jobs, construction, um and so I think it was a lot of work.
00:05:58
Speaker
and supplemented by my mom and my aunt you know working off the farm sometimes part-time. They were also trying to raise kids and and keep things on the home front. so i just It was a lot of work for everybody on that front, but it was, I guess, fun for me growing up on the farm because it was a couple hundred years of crop ground. There's also a couple hundred acres of kind of, we call it outground around here that's kind of steep, rocky slopes down to creeks or whatever. um There were some cattle in the operation when I was young,
00:06:27
Speaker
Over time, as the farm operation expanded, the cows went away. um But there there was areas to play in Rome. We had forts kind of all over the place, whether it was in old abandoned equipment or under trees by the creek. And we just had kind of free room to roam and then also get to work with our dads and uncles out on the farm as we grew older.
00:06:49
Speaker
4-H animals, hunting, that kind of thing. so It was a lifestyle I appreciated, ah even if we didn you didn't have all the yeah comforts of maybe a high income going through the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, but it was something I always wanted to come back and do if it worked out. so so ah You always wanted to be a farmer then? Yeah, pretty much. I wanted to be involved in and agriculture. um I remember there was a a picture going through scrapbooks or something. I found a picture from kindergarten of where you draw a picture of what you want to be when you grow up and it was a picture of a tractor out in the field. That's what I drew because that's, well, that's what I knew at that age, but it was always something I was interested in. So I went to school at the University of Idaho and studied agribusiness.
From Agribusiness to Family Farm
00:07:40
Speaker
And when I graduated from there, I went to work for farm credit, agriculture finance for about 10 years. And then I had the opportunity to come back and farm after that. um So you're a fifth generation farmer. what What does it mean to you to be a fifth generation farmer? Yeah.
00:08:03
Speaker
So it's kind of crazy to just think back, you know, okay, it's not just what what I have in my mind and remember, you know, growing up but with my parents farming or uncles. It's also, you know, my grandparents before that, ah which I remember them. So I remember when I was pretty young, seeing grandpa come down off the tractor and just covered in dust back before cabs were so good or even existed and and seeing old pictures on the wall of their house of the way they farmed and how hard they worked. And so then it's then it's just me trying to imagine or relive through
00:08:37
Speaker
ah Great uncle stories and things of what it was like for the generations before that, you know, that kind of first came out here, they talk about, ah you know, Oh, yeah, great uncle, so and so he used to plow that with a two bottom plow with the horses and it took him two months. And now I'm like, I can go out there and get that whole field done in one day.
00:08:58
Speaker
not necessarily plowing, but something I can go over the field faster with with the sprayer or something. so and Then think back to right around 1900 when um that fifth generation du generation back before me first came out to Idaho and just thinking about what it was like when they came out and the the challenges they faced coming out on a train and and the communications and leaving their families behind. and They were in Illinois actually.
00:09:25
Speaker
ah before they came out to Idaho. And so having to get a start and getting getting things established and then going back and getting your family a couple of years you know later basically went until okay we got we got to, we got somewhere to live. We've got to start. This is going to work. Let's sell everything in Illinois and move out to Idaho.
00:09:43
Speaker
so um kind of crazy. And then then it kind of gives me in the current state, current day, a sense of some responsibility for life. I mean, they worked so hard to build this. I want to you know continue that tradition. you know i want I want to make sure that I'm a good steward of it currently. And then also looking at you know next generation, I have three boys, actually my wife, Christine, and I have three boys and the older two are getting of an age that they helped out at harvest this summer and did work and and they they have interest in the farm as well. So I'm kind of at that transition point now where ah we're kind of through the point of buying out the lat im not so we're through the point of buying out the last we're still making payments, but we're you know that my the price previous generation is kind of out of the management and out of the labor-accepted harvest when there we need that labor help for the most part, and sometimes questions that arise are in the shop. um But now I'm starting to look at, okay, the next generation, because
00:10:49
Speaker
they're they're now looking at is this a lifestyle that I would want to choose as as they look at what they want to do in life. So yeah. So now I'm going to shift questions to be more about ah the the operation um as it is today.
Crop Choices and Environmental Factors
00:11:05
Speaker
And ah the first question is, why do you grow ah what the crops that you do? Yeah, sure.
00:11:13
Speaker
So where we're at, we're on the edge of what's called the Palouse Country. Some people are familiar with that, but it's kind of a rolling ah sand dunes of topsoil, basically, windblown luss that stretches from just on the north side of Lewiston up to Spokane, Washington. And it kind of straddles the Washington-Idaho border up through there. And it's a really rich rich productive crop area. Really, the Whitman County, Washington, which is um just a couple miles from us immediately northwest of where we farm in Nez Perce County, Idaho. ah They're the consistently the number one wheat producing state in the United States year and in and year out. They produce way more wheat in that county than any other county in the United States in a year that you look at USDA ah records for.
00:12:04
Speaker
So that our climate and soils are just really well suited to grow wheat because we get a lot of rain in the fall, winter, and spring. And then about the time we were like, oh, I hope that rain shuts off so it doesn't make our crops sprout or cause damage at harvest. The rain pretty much usually stops and we harvest and then it starts raining again. So ah we're just really well suited to wheat and and wheat is generally the number one cash crop around here.
00:12:33
Speaker
yeah We have good export markets for it. Almost all the wheat around here is exported out to the Pacific Rim countries, so Japan, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia. Those are our major customers, sometimes on a swing year, some China business. um But we we have a series of locks and dams coming up from Portland, Oregon, up the Columbia River, and then up the Snake River.
00:12:59
Speaker
clear to Lewiston where we farm at. We can haul our grain and we do haul all of our grain to a grain terminal that's put directly on barges in Idaho, believe it or not. um We we we can have 465 miles of locks and dams to be able to get barges clear up in Idaho. and so we We have a transportation advantage basically for all of that police country for shipping our grain the most efficient, least cost way.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. I had no idea.
Transport Logistics and Economic Strategies
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of cool. Most people think about the Mississippi, you know, Missouri River system or whatever, I think, as the transportation hub. But the Pacific Northwest, we can, ah before they put in so many rail ah loader stations in across Montana and different places,
00:13:51
Speaker
They would bring a lot of trucks in from Montana and even sometimes North Dakota clear here to Lewiston and unload them to get on barges here. That was still the most efficient way at that point. Some of the other crops that we grow, besides wheat, yeah you have to grow something else for rotation purposes. ah the The two biggest ones are going to be ah peas.
00:14:12
Speaker
um and and that can We've grown green peas before. fall or spring types. We've also grown lentils. um Mainly lately we've been growing more garbanzo beans or chickpeas. There's a little better price for those and they seem to do pretty well in our climates and soils here. So quite a few garbanzo beans. The ones we grew this year actually we can haul ah right down to a cleaning processing plant here in Lewiston and those actually get put on rail and sent back east to for hummus production. They grant them up and make hummus with them.
00:14:46
Speaker
So that's kind of fun that we have a crop there that's a domestic type crop versus our wheat that all gets exported. Now the other rotation crop that we grow is canola. We've grown fall canola, mainly now we're growing spring canola. And we have a processing plant about a hundred miles from us, which is fairly close compared to in the past. There's not been any canola crushing in the Northwest. youre You had to haul it like back back to where they grow more canola in North Dakota or something. So it was really prohibitive to grow. And now we have a crushing plant in the greater Palouse country. We can grow that canola and ship it there and they'll they'll crush it for cooking oil. And then also where that plant's located, it's closer to feedlots and they'll use the meal for ah livestock feed supplement type stuff. So
00:15:36
Speaker
um What we grow, it's it's dependent on your weather and your soil, but it's also um dependent on your markets. What markets do you have that can accept those crops? So that's why we grow what we grow.
00:15:52
Speaker
Perfect. Thank you. um I'm curious with the hummus um example, like, do you know, like, would you be able to go to a store and be like, those are, I grew those, I grew those beans that are in this container of hummus, or is it just not that linear? Well,
00:16:13
Speaker
They're not that identity preserved because they're going to get combined with other farmers that are hauling in these specific garbanzo beans at the same time. They're kind of a specific small garbanzo that um our co-op that we're working through has a contract with basically, from what I understand, one major ah producer of hummus. They're working with Sabra.
00:16:35
Speaker
ah hummus. And so if I see saw, we usually buy Sabra hummus in the store if we're buying it just because I'm like, those those could be my chickpeas that are in there. Yeah, that's awesome. That would be a good feeling. So I know that you you're, you know, you're very you're young in in the ag world. I mean, in general, also, but um and you've only been on the farm as an operator for what what is it 10 years or so.
00:17:04
Speaker
um
Farm Expansion and Soil Health Innovations
00:17:06
Speaker
So this question might hit differently for you than for other people that I might ask it for, but ah how has your farm changed since you took over operation? So our farm has changed a lot more than I expected when I first came back. I'll tell you that. So it's been about 10 years. 2014 is when I came back full time and we just harvested our 2024 crops. So about 10 years. ah When I first came back,
00:17:34
Speaker
It was still my ah dad and one of my uncles on the farm. I came back when a third uncle kind of retired. And so I took on his acreage and I was farming myself about 16, 1700 acres. And then my dad had about the same and my uncle had about the same. So we were we were in that 5,000 acre range that we were farming per year. And it was a wheat factory.
00:18:03
Speaker
So we just grew winter wheat and fallow. And so half the acreage was in wheat each year and half the acreage was in fallow because it was all kind of the drier ground 12 to 16 inch rainfall. It didn't really so support having a crop every year. What we run into our area is we have deeper soils, but our rainfall isn't very high. And so it's beneficial to store up an extra year's worth of rainfall in your soils and then plant your winter wheat crop and then it does really well. You can harvest 75, 85, 100 bushel wheat, ah which is a really good wheat yield for on average, just because you can have that moisture stored up in the soil.
00:18:43
Speaker
And plus you have that extra year to kind of kill out diseases and weeds that would be there attacking your weed otherwise. And so that is had been the best way for us to farm to keep our costs lower. So you only had seed every second year or whatever, but you you had a really good yield whenever you put your inputs out there. And now on our operation, we've expanded to some higher rainfall areas and changed our our cropping systems quite a bit.
00:19:13
Speaker
So on our 14,000 acres, we have still have about 4,000 acres in fallow a year. So you know a third, maybe a little more than a third in fallow. But we're growing winter wheat is still our main crop. But we also have spring wheat. So we grow both types out here in our rotation.
00:19:33
Speaker
And we also are incorporating those alternative crops like the legumes and brassicas. So the legumes would be the peas, lentils, garbanzo beans, and the brassicas would be like your canolas or even mustard. We've tried mustard before also.
00:19:47
Speaker
um But I guess those are some of the biggest changes are the acreage is really increased. We've we've done it just by neighbors retiring and asking us to take on their ground. Basically, there's not a lot of young farmers where I'm at, which this is a little bit different. I think it's a little bit different situation here than some other places.
00:20:08
Speaker
but we we just don't have a lot of young people right in our immediate area wanting to get into farming. and I like to think that we're doing a good job and have a good reputation. We just try to be honest, open communicators, and and we try to work hard out there and and take care of everyone's ground like it was our own. and so We've had the opportunity to expand. Every single year since I've been back, we've had basically taken on more acreage, which is kind of uncommon.
00:20:36
Speaker
ah And then we've also changed our farming practices. We were very conventional for the most part. My dad and uncle did do some no-till, but they were still doing a fair bit of conventional farming as well, meaning more tillage out in the field. um And so we've converted the whole operation Over time, just in the last couple of years, we've been 100% no-till or direct seed, as they say out here, so we're not using moldboard plow and discs and chisel plows really much anymore. There's maybe a spot for those occasionally, ah but we basically are are are no-tilling the whole farm. That is better for soil health and erosion.
00:21:17
Speaker
yeah It also lets us get over the ground faster, honestly, because we don't have so many passes out there on the ground. It allows us to have bigger fields ah because we don't have to manage them for erosion as much. we When we were doing more conventional, we had to have we have some hills where we're at. And so we have to you'd have to break up the slopes into different crops to kind of catch any soil that would be trying to come down the slopes. So we're just trying to improve things and get get more efficient. and Yeah, lots of changes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Really briefly, ah really super briefly, since this is, ah you know, aimed at a general audience who might not know some of the terminology.
00:22:01
Speaker
Um, the the note switching over to no-till, um, I was wondering if we could just briefly talk about, you know, what does that, cause it sounds like to a lay person, it's like, Oh yeah. Like when you explain what no-till is, it's like, Oh, that sounds great. But I think people think that it's just like, you know, tomorrow I wake up and I'm doing no-till. Um, so like, what is, what does that mean when you're switching your, your process to this new process?
00:22:30
Speaker
its It is a process to switch from conventional tillage to no-till. Every farm is unique. The soils can vary not just on your farm versus your neighbor, but across your own field. And different soils and climates require different management. And different pests require different management. So it it takes quite a few years to to switch over. And I'm not going to even come out and say everybody should switch over. There there there is a place in some areas that you you need to do tillage. That's the the probably the best way to manage that ground.
00:23:05
Speaker
but we have tried to switch over and and have had good results thus far. its I would say my dad and uncle, bought a no-till drill. I think the first one that they bought was in 2007 or 2008, just as I was kind of getting interested in coming back to the farm. Prior to that, it was all conventional. and you you To go no-till, you have to have different equipment because conventional tillage, you can use the older tillage equipments, older tractors, things that you have,
00:23:39
Speaker
that are a lot less expensive that you know how to work on and you know how it works and you've done it for decades and you know, hey, if I do this, it's going to work and I'm not going to go out of business. You know, I can, I can spend very little money on equipment and I can keep doing it the way I've been doing it.
00:23:55
Speaker
and and it and it works, but if you want to if you want to look to the future, you kind of need to look at and see if you can if you can go no-till on your operation if it can be a fit. So if youre if you can generate the dollars either through, sometimes there's government programs that'll pay you to try no-tilling a certain number of acres. so I did sign up for an equip contract, Environmental Quality Incentives Program as a USDA, US Department of Agriculture program, and they paid me a certain amount per acre to try no-till on some of the first ground that I took on back when i went right about the time my dad and uncle were buying that drill. and so It helped them buy the drill, I think, because I paid them ah equipment or a custom higher rate for
00:24:40
Speaker
seeding my ground with that drill and so that helped pay it for the drill so they could try it out on some of theirs. They still had their conventional equipment that they were doing the majority of their acres with but they were going to give it a try to do no-till also because they could see that's kind of the future and So it was a smaller joe is a thirty foot drill and so a little bit smaller than the conventional drill that we had and it's slower going to you can see this fast cuz you're kind of ah you're you're putting down seed you're putting down fertilizer and and and going through the ground all at the same time so you have to stop and feel more and
00:25:18
Speaker
And you have to have a higher horsepower tractor. to buye When they bought the drill, they didn't have a tractor that would pull it. So they had to buy a higher horsepower tractor with it. So it's just a series of all these things that you have to do differently. When you're doing conventional, you can make it work with smaller, older tractors. But the no-till drill, it needed to have more hydraulic capacity. It had to have more power. And so it's just a series of a lot of things like that if you're going to go no-till. It changes one thing after another to where your equipment needs to be different.
00:25:47
Speaker
um One thing we ran into, the older combines didn't have as good a straw chaff spreader. So we figured out pretty quick ah when conventional wasn't a big deal because you're working that stubble under and spreading it out before you're seeding again. But in no-till, if you left long straw on the surface or chaff rows out there, you had a mess. You'd have piles behind the no-till drill. You wouldn't have as good a stand in streaks behind where the combine chaff got laid out. That's where all the weed seeds would be that didn't get incorporated in the ground.
00:26:16
Speaker
and so Once you seeded through it, and then all of a sudden they were in the dirt and moisture and then you'd have weeds in those areas. and so Then you had to learn to go no-till, you had to learn, okay, I've got to manage my straw different. i've got do more ah You can do harrowing. Harrowing just goes over the soil surface and sp spreads that out and chops it up, ah but you're not actually putting points of anything down in the ground. so you You learn, okay, I got to utilize a harrow a bit more ah before I seed with my no-till drill to spread out and size stuff.
00:26:45
Speaker
um if I'm not gonna be towing the ground. And then as soon as you can, you update ah your combine to something that's got a better chaff spreader straw, spreader that can eat more straw, and that can spread the chaff more. It's just a series of a lot of things. And that's just kind of getting started in going hotel on ah the equipment updates you need to do and the mindset and management updates. You don't have tillage as a tool anymore to kill the weeds.
00:27:13
Speaker
which in our area, if you're wheat fallow, you have over a year that you don't have crop competition out there on the ground. And so it's the weeds that are going to come. And back when you're doing tillage, we mechanically would kill those. And now in the fallow situation, you're doing chemical fallow. So you're In no tell, you're dependent completely on chemicals to kill the weeds out there. And if you have a mess where your chemical doesn't get the weeds, then you have a mess. And then you get to go chop them by hand or mow them off and try not to build a seed bank out there.
00:27:49
Speaker
So ah it's just a myriad of things. And I know you said, don't take too much time, but that's my five minute scoop of how we got started in no-till. And I think the benefits of it outweigh the cost, but there I kind of outlined a lot of the challenges in that it it it took us 15 years to make the whole conversion. Oh, wow. Okay. That's that's more significant than I had appreciated. We did it slowly. Well, yeah slow and steady.
00:28:24
Speaker
um So one question that I i want to share, get the audience to understand is ah an audience that doesn't grow up on a farm, an audience that doesn't maybe really know that side of ah the world at all, doesn't have an insight to what the the place of farms in their community and I just wanted to give you a space to talk a little bit about what does your farm mean for your surrounding area, like the physical land, and what does it mean for your community? Idaho
Community Impact and Growth Challenges
00:29:02
Speaker
has seen a lot of growth over the last couple of decades. and I would say especially since COVID, um people learned that they can work remote or decided they wanted more space.
00:29:16
Speaker
and we haven't Seeing the growth here where I'm at in Lewiston, in north central Idaho, as much as they've seen it in Boise, further south from us, where a lot of the farm grounds got eaten up around the towns, or north of us in Coeur d'Alene, where a lot of the farm ground has also ah rapidly been disappearing. But we farm right next to Lewiston. and Lewiston is one of the 10 largest cities in Idaho.
00:29:44
Speaker
It was the first capital of Idaho, but we're not on a main and we're not on an interstate. We're 100 miles from an interstate and we're we're not on a, besides the river transportation grid, which people aren't really traveling, we're just not on a main transportation corridor. And so we haven't seen the growth right here around Lewiston.
00:30:05
Speaker
as much in until the COVID times and the COVID times all of a sudden now we're seeing growth and we have lost 80 here and 160 there to development in just the last few years here as people have said, man, I can make more money developing houses on this ground than what I'm going to make having a wheat crop every second year on that ground is. So that is one challenge that we're facing I don't see it as ah such an imminent threat that my farm is going to completely disappear just because our growth is still slow where I'm at compared to the Boise's and Coeur d'Alene's where it's it's shocking. If I go visit those places ah once a year, I just go, where'd that field go? Where'd that field go? It's just growth like crazy. But for us here at Lewiston, we're still very much just ah farming next to town in fields where we maybe had done it for several generations.
00:31:01
Speaker
And hopefully that continues. I think we have a good relationship with our city and with our county. we're we We do have a lot of other industry here in Lewiston. There's about 30,000 people in Lewiston and we're right on the Snake River across from Clarkston, Washington. So combined, there's about 50,000 people in the town that we farm in. So it's not small town, but it's not metropolis either.
00:31:27
Speaker
Actually, until I came back to farm full time, one thing that I did from 2014 and prior for about five years with one of my brothers, as before we had enough crop ground to kind of farm and make a go of it on our own, where we said, well, what resources do we have that we could do some agriculture that um We could do unlimited acreage, but we maybe have time to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of capital, but where can we put our time in something that would be cool in agriculture? and so We actually found a couple little pieces we farmed that are irrigated. We have very little irrigated ground, but there is 10 acres here and 10 acres there that's irrigated around here. so We did a corn maze for five years. We partnered with the University of Idaho student clubs on that because the University of Idaho is only
00:32:14
Speaker
about half hour up the road from us and so there's their agriculture student clubs who come down to help us run that and we had a great time so in our community of 50,000 we would have 10,000 people a year come out to our corn maze uh for those years that we ran it and that was a really great thing for the community because they could come right out to the farm adjacent to town and it was fun and we had like you know a pumpkin patch and some games for the kids, the straw bale maize and it was a great fun thing to do. But it once once the uncle started retiring, like we kind of had a ah meeting where it's like, well, are you going to do that or are you going to be a full-time farmer? Because when you're doing corn maize stuff, you need to be doing wheat farm stuff. And I kind of had to make the decision that there's probably a better future to grow ah the wheat farm 10 years ago than there was going to be an opportunity to try to hang on to those last
00:33:06
Speaker
few 10 acre patches of irrigated ground that they've actually all pretty much been developed at this point. So it was just a decision that had to be made. But as you talk about the interface with the city, that's kind of, I guess, what it what it's like. I think we have a good relationship with the city government. We've worked with them, the Parks and Rec Department, as we were doing the corn maze too. And it's just the the challenge of where we're at in the Intermountain West, we've got a lot of growth that's happening that we're having to figure out how that's going to work with our are limited areas of crop ground, really. There's kind of pockets of crop ground in the Intermountain West. It's not like the Corn Belt, where it can be the whole state. It's just pockets. And once it's gone, it's gone around here. Yeah, that is a very interesting tension.
00:33:53
Speaker
um There. Thank you. Thank you for that. um Let's see. What is something? um I'm sure there's lots of things, but if you could pick one thing out, what is one thing that makes you proud about what you're doing on your farm?
00:34:12
Speaker
One thing that makes me proud of what we're doing on ah on our farm is I am just shocked with how much food we can produce. how we can, you know, on our farm, grow a half million bushels of wheat a year, and that's not even on a hugely productive year, probably, you know, more let's just say a half million bushels, and each bushel's 60 pounds, ah and each pound can make a loaf of bread, basically, just to kind of, you know, do some some rough math. But if if I crunch those numbers,
00:34:50
Speaker
that's it's It's hard to do all the numbers, but like 30 million loaves of bread, our farm can produce 30 million loaves of bread, then that that just seems crazy to me that you know three full-time brothers that farm and a full-time hire guy and a few other part-time people can produce that much food. and that's and then you know I don't know how many containers of hummus and how many quarts of canola oil, but it it adds up and so I guess that's something I'm proud of that like we can really produce a lot of food on really to do 30 million loaves of bread it it doesn't take a ton of acres that's you know six seven eight thousand acres a week a year and so it's just and then I look at what my neighbors are doing stuff too and it's just like wow we can we can just produce so much food and so
00:35:40
Speaker
ah I don't know. That's something that that makes me proud is just I like being productive. I like feeling like, man, we're really feeding the world here. That's a good one. That's a good one. And that that image of that many thousand like that's just like the tower. It's like um there's a joke in my family. I'm sure it's ah it's not just us, but like measuring things not in ah like feet or or meters, but in like how many bathtubs is that? How many swimming pools is that? So how many? I'm just imagining Olympic sized swimming pools full of loaves of bread um coming from your farm.
00:36:16
Speaker
ah Which is astonishing. you know like Most people in their daily life, like i don't have I don't have an equivalent experience for like my output, so that that is interesting. What is the strangest thing about being a farmer?
Farm Life: Entrepreneurship and Family Balance
00:36:36
Speaker
The strangest thing about being a farmer? I don't think I've ever been asked this before, but I think one of the strangest things for people who didn't grow up on a farm or haven't been around a farm is the hours. The hours are strange because you it' it's probably a lot like other ah small business, you know people that are business owners, that are entrepreneurs. It takes a lot of hours to do it right because if you're not spending the time out there doing it right, no one else is going to do it for you and your your paycheck or your business down the road isn't going to be there. So it's not an eight to five job. it's a When you're harvesting, when you're planting,
00:37:15
Speaker
when you're spraying more times of the year than you initially think it's going to be. You've got to put in long days, six, seven days a week, and it's just the way it is. I don't necessarily keep track of my own hours, but when I look at how many hours some of our employees are working, and I know they're out there, similar hours is me when those busy seasons, it's like, oh,
00:37:39
Speaker
You only worked 80 hours this week? You hardly put in any time compared to what we were last month or whatever. It just can take a lot of hours and it can take many days in a row. I know as when we were expanding or taking on new ground, sometimes ah sometimes that ground required a bit of extra work because that it we had to get it in shape for the way that we wanted to farm it.
00:38:01
Speaker
and there would be times when my brother's like, oh, yeah, I worked 63 days straight. and And when you say that many days straight, it's like, yeah, 12 to 16 hour days, and it can wear you down. So that's, that's the strangest thing to me is it at first, I thought it might be, ah I think we had a little more free time when I was younger, when the farm was smaller, when it was wheat fallow, when it was a little simpler. ah But you start doing more different crops on more acres, and And you have to do the economics of it and go, the price of wheat today is the same as it was 50 years ago. And the cost of producing that, you know of all your inputs have really gone up. So we've had to figure out how to be do more ourselves, I guess.
00:38:44
Speaker
and so um
00:38:49
Speaker
I don't know if strange is the best word, but the the thing that would that was the the most foreign, it'd be the most foreign to people, it'd just be the hours, I guess, is a challenge. And and I think I feel that especially as we've as we've grown and as my kids have gotten bigger and i and you try to balance that, you know the family time versus the the work time that's required to do it to the standard that you want.
00:39:15
Speaker
Is there balance? Is it is that even possible working those hours? Well, yeah it's a challenge. But we did take you know, harvest got done. We did last week and go camping, you know, we took we took some time we took the weekend off and went and played. And then you also have to look for those opportunities for like, oh, well, I'm going to be out on the farm working in the office.
00:39:40
Speaker
I have my kid just playing here with me with the farm toys on the floor, or my other boy can ride his motorcycle here at the farm while I'm working in the office, or they can work with me. you know the My older, so I have three boys, ah no girls for some reason in our family, just though our family has a lot of boys. um And the 14 year old drove combine, basically all harvest. He was out there with me all day. So it's work, but it's also family time. The 12 year old ran the grain bins.
00:40:09
Speaker
And so ah once again, and you get a seat seat you get to work with them, I guess. So you you end up combining some of that, ah but yeah you also try to have have some fun while you're doing it. I mean, it's not 80 hours a week all the time, it's but it is you know our harvest is six, seven weeks long. And so it's it's long hours then, and our seeding is a month in the fall. and and In the spring, you fight the rainstorms a little bit more, but it's ah it's a month in the spring. And so I guess in the in the winter, you try to have a little more time off. You're working in the shop, but you try to make it more eight to five in the winter. And and you try to you try to balance as best you can, but it's you you do work, if you're a full-time farmer, and unless, I see, I don't own a single acre. And so I have to,
00:41:01
Speaker
pay rent of some kind on every acre. And so ah it's a challenge, the hours you got to put in to make make it all work, make the dollars and cents work. That's real. ah Here's another question. If you didn't have to worry about yield per acre, how would that change how you farm?
00:41:23
Speaker
Okay. If I didn't have to worry about yield per acre, ah I would probably be just be growing whatever I thought was fun to grow. I, um you know, you would probably try more different crops. I mean, everyone's going to gravitate to what they can grow the best to make the most money, which means what yields best for them and what markets do you have in your area? And generally, I think a lot of times the markets follow what you can produce best. So everything's based upon, like in the Midwest, you can grow corn and soybeans really well. And so since they can grow a lot of those well, that's what people gravitate towards. And so then over time, you got ethanol plants, you got feed lots, you got, you know, things move in that are gonna use that corn or the transportation is gonna get built out to move that corn but if you didn't worry about yield I think you'd have a lot more probably diverse farming out there honestly I would try growing sunflowers because I think that I'd like growing them in the garden and I think they're fun you know I grow sunflowers but I don't know that they would yield very well where I'm at ah and
00:42:32
Speaker
I don't know what other implications there would be, but I just know I would probably be growing a lot different crops than just growing so many acres of wheat that just do so well here. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I was just curious about that. So how do you think people think about you as a farmer? And then
Modern Farming: Technology and Business Aspect
00:42:53
Speaker
I'll just ask you the second one. And how do you wish people thought of you as a farmer?
00:43:00
Speaker
Sure. but what I think people still think of farmers a little bit in the traditional sense of there they're hardworking, salt salt to the earth, ah and they want to do a good job you know out there for us. I think probably the general population doesn't necessarily realize how much of a business it's become or how specialized ah some of the farming has become, because it's still, you know, when I'm, I have a three year old, so he's our youngest. And when you're you read all the farm books, it's, you know, there's a cow, there's a horse, there's a dog, you know, there's a pitchfork. And it's, I mean, it's cute. And it's, it's, it's, it's fun. But that's not the reality of our of where the production agriculture is necessarily going on today. And so I i hope people still
00:43:49
Speaker
think of us as hardworking, salty earth people that care about you know the food and and our every acre and what we're producing because I feel that's the case. But I guess I wish people knew how much tech and we're using these days, were variable rate fertilizing and drones and automation and auto steer and auto boom shut off. We've got all sorts of tech we're trying to do to be efficient and just wish they knew that, well, any of these farms out here, they're producing millions of loaves of bread or the the amount of food that we're using and how amazing it is that
00:44:28
Speaker
you know, one, 2% of the US population can produce way more food than anyone in the US can eat. And so we still are exporting it. So I think that's just like an amazing fact that it would be, it's pretty interesting if if everyone realized that.
00:44:43
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah, for sure. um Definitely. Well, Steve, with that, I'm going to um I'm going to wrap things up. So thank you so much for taking the time to join us for this Meet Your Farmer podcast. I hope that the audience has gotten to know a little bit more about where their food comes from and what it means to be a farmer. And um I really appreciate you taking the time and being so generous with your with your answers.
00:45:11
Speaker
Well, thank you, Naomi, for having me on the show. I enjoyed getting to meet you and and visit with you today. And thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Meet Your Farmer podcast from Farm Foundation. Be sure to check out the other episodes in this season. If you have recommendations for farmers we should have on the show or have any other feedback, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.
00:45:36
Speaker
If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share the podcast with your network. Farm Foundation is all about creating trust and understanding at the intersections of agriculture and society. You can learn more about our work at farmfoundation dot.org. Until next time.