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Potatoes are mostly grown in SE Idaho. Places like Blackfoot and outside Idaho Falls. Sonewhere I heard the acreage might be declining. Prices and / or market size.
The big valley that you crossed west of Soda Springs before you climbed up is good for grains but I could not tell you what. That area was a Mormon settled area in the 19th century. If I had known, I would have told you where to find an old Mormon settlement called Chesterfield, which is being partially preserved.
As noted, the potatoes in that part of ID are going to be further north of Pocatello and on up past IF to the areas around Rexburg, Ashton and over into the Teton Valley (Driggs). Interestingly, I was told by a long time Teton Valley resident that the potatoes grown there are for seed potatoes; the higher elevation there (6000' +) and its cold winters kills the fungi and other potato killer 'bugs' in the ground, so seed potatoes from that cold area are not going to take such bugs to other potato growing areas.
Yes, all because of a song people think they are antelope. Similar in looks at first sight but not of the same family. And yes, I have done that with a few people. They grow a lot of hay around here always passing long hay trucks on I-15. Idaho does grow a lot of onions too; as per Gov. Little on the Stu Varney show about six months ago.
I grew up in a wheat farming family. Before the first deep-water irrigation wells were dug, the only potatoes that were grown in Idaho were in the low fields, close to streams, where canals could be dug to divert the water needed for potatoes.
All the higher farm ground back then was always planted to only wheat. It made a lot of early 20th century farmers millionaires. But once those wheat fields became irrigated, potatoes made even more money.
Since the potato prices collapsed last year, there's a lot more wheat being grown in S. Idaho this year.
The wheat doesn't demand as much irrigation, so while it's not as profitable as potatoes, it's cheaper to grow and much cheaper to store. It's also more price-stable.
The virus demand for wheat has also brought the prices way up, as millions of home-bound people turned to baking as a way to pass the time.
Idaho was big wheat country before deep well irrigation began; the climate and soil is perfect for the grain, and it was a much more important crop than the spuds were for decades asa dry crop that was never irrigated.
There are 2 types; hard wheat and soft wheat. The hard wheat is higher in protein and is used for flour, bread, and cereals.
The soft wheat is used for pastries, brewing, and pasta. It makes a more delicate flour that's sweeter in taste.
Hard red winter wheat has the highest protein of all, and was once a huge Idaho crop.
The wheat is planted in the fall so that it can germinate and form a root stool. The winter freeze kills the stalk and leaves, but the stool survives, and as soon as the ground thaws, it shoots up new stalks and heads out. The kernels of this wheat are reddish brown colored.
When it was wild, this wheat was a perennial grass, but after 4000 years of human cultivation, this variety has been domesticated to put it's energy into making heavy heads full of kernels, and has lost it's ability to self-seed perennially.
If a crop isn't cut, it will seed back voluntarily one year, but that's all. It is one of the oldest domesticated food sources of humanity.
All the others have white kernels and are annual crops that are planted in the early spring. There is one variety of hard white spring wheat, but the others all have much softer kernels.
Other grain crops are grown here widely as well. Barley is a growing crop here because our climate makes excellent malting barley, used in brewing beer. (Idaho also produces the best hops, another essential ingredient in beer).
Oats are grown mostly for animal feed, along with several varieties of dry peas. Moscow grows the best split-peas in the country along with good lentils.
A combination of oat/pea/ trefoil/alfalfa is often planted to depleted potato soil to rest and rejuvenate it. This combination is baled like hay, and is particularly prized as dairy cattle feed.
While it was once only a great-even crop, planted as a necessity, it's also become unexpectedly profitable due to the milk shortage the virus created.
Rye was once a major grain crop, but rye has faded in its popularity a lot over the 20th century. Rye is hardier than wheat, and will grow perennially, and it also is harder, so it stores better.
Rye was once used for baking all the dark breads, as it's also high in protein, but those breads are no longer very popular in the U.S.
Trust Mike to know all the grains! I also grew up in grain country, so I can recognize them!
Wheat: fat, tight seeds on the stem (sorry if I don't know what the plant parts are called!), short "hair."
Barley: Seeds on the stem with long "hair." The Internet calls them spikelets! Looks like ocean waves when the breeze blows. It's beautiful--and it makes beer!
Rye: Tight seeds on the stem, hair a couple of inches long. Not quite as wavy as barley. Makes great dark bread...
Oats: Seeds like little bells on the stem. Looks lovely in the breeze.Stays green longer than the other sorts. Oat cookies! Oatmeal!
I tried to post Internet pictures, but instead it posted endless script. So you'll have to imagine the grains...
That's one of the things I love when driving down 95. All the grain fields I used to know from back home.
Last edited by Clark Fork Fantast; 09-09-2020 at 06:15 PM..
Thank you so much for the amazing history of cultivation in Idaho! I really thought much of the crop looked like hard wheat! I bake bread so know a thing or two about the difference in flours/grains. I saw so much of this type of crop from Boise up through the canyons into N ID and in MT as well and then around Pocatello or below it. Recognized the onions, corn, grass and alfalfa. I bet oats was the other crop I noticed although I guessed hops because I saw a beer truck with Idaho grown insignia on it lol.
So I had no idea Idaho was the bread basket of the Mountain West. Must be the combo of that volcanic soil and all the water!
Also-I didn’t get to see a moose , but don’t regret the lack of Grizzly Bear sightings.
Thank you so much for the amazing history of cultivation in Idaho! I really thought much of the crop looked like hard wheat! I bake bread so know a thing or two about the difference in flours/grains. I saw so much of this type of crop from Boise up through the canyons into N ID and in MT as well and then around Pocatello or below it. Recognized the onions, corn, grass and alfalfa. I bet oats was the other crop I noticed although I guessed hops because I saw a beer truck with Idaho grown insignia on it lol.
So I had no idea Idaho was the bread basket of the Mountain West. Must be the combo of that volcanic soil and all the water!
Also-I didn’t get to see a moose , but don’t regret the lack of Grizzly Bear sightings.
Idaho was only part of the breadbasket; Montana and E. Washington also grew a lot of wheat.
The moose are still up in the high country, but as soon as snow falls, they'll come down and be spotted. They typically hang out in willows next to streams.
No one sees grizzlies. They are a lot shyer than black bears and tend to avoid humanity unless they're old, sick, or really hungry. You don't ever want to see one of those bears, for sure. In my life here,
I've only seen 2 in the wild; one was miles away, and the other was in the Park, just out of hibernation and didn't want to be messed with. I spent a very nervous few minutes in a line of cars at an entrance, with the Park ranger waving us through as fast has he could just to get us out of the bear's way.
Boise is in the heart of the Treasure Valley, and that's the valley that can grow anything that can be grown in Idaho. Most of the state's corn, onions, hops, and wine grapes are grown there. That's mostly due to the combination of soil, hot summers, and the water from 2 rivers, the Snake and the Boise.
Malting barley is relatively new here; while barley was always grown as animal feed, it wasn't until an agronomist from Anheuser-Busch, who was looking for a location in the U.S. that could grow barley as good as the Austrians chose S.E. Idaho as an experiment and got some farmers here to plant a couple of crops.
The quality was so good the big brewer built a malting plant in Idaho Falls, and that really started it as a major crop. All of the barley originally went to Budweiser, but after the Mexican beer giant that owns Corona bought out Bud, the barley demand in the Upper Snake River Valley doubled, as all the Corona products now use it.
Barley has never paid as much as potatoes in a good spud year, but the brewers always contract with the growers, and the contract price is always high enough to ensure a good profit for the growers, so it's a sure bet.
Potatoes were once contracted similarly, but that system fell apart as consolidation took over in the grocery industry. The spud prices are now all futurities on the open market, so a boom year makes really a lot of money, but over-production always makes the following couple of years a bust.
For the past 18 years or so, the spud prices leveled out to steady profitability due to the steadily increasing demand from China; the Chinese love French fries, along with most of the Far East.
But the embargoes for the past couple of years knocked a huge hole in the potato market, which had really increased to meet the Chinese demand. The past 3 crops have been money-losers.
Covid-19 also hit the spud producers very hard, as they need a lot of labor. Since Covid hit the entire world, it collapsed the potato market, as its a crop with a limited storage life. There were far too many left unsold from last year's crop, so the big farmers had to cut down their crop overhead as much as possible, and hope to break even growing something else.
That's why you saw so much grain. It only needs one good irrigation in the spring, so all the pumps can be turned off, and it needs about 1/4 of the labor.
That's why you saw so much of it. If you had come last year, all those fields would have spuds in them, with the big circular sprinklers shooting water on them.
This year's grain crop wasn't expected to be profitable. It was planted as a last resort, hopefully with just enough profit to keep farms from going under.
No one ever predicted baking bread would ever become such an enormous past-time this year. Home bread making was almost a dying art until the pandemic set in.
It's going to be very interesting to see if home baking really takes hold again as a hobby. Back when I was a little kid, women were still making bread commonly, not so much for the savings as for the enjoyment of it.
I'm no baker, but I know how to make sourdough sheepherder's biscuits in a dutch oven. I need to make me a mess of biscuits one of these days, just to see if I can still remember how to do it.
King of off topic, but blame Mike for bringing it up! I have been baking up a storm since the lockdown started--when I could get yeast and flour, that is. We've had shortages of both in SoCal, and it's only recently that those items haven't been rationed! I've been thinking so much about my family in Scandinavia during WW2 and the rationing of everything. Anyway, I've dug up old family recipes, and created some of my own. One recipe came from my great-grandmother, and I don't think anybody had used it in 70 years until last week. Lots of margarine! A bit too much for modern tastes! We're alternating between three different bread recipes right now, plus biscuits, pound cake, and cookies. Nothing like having fresh-baked stuff from the oven. So thank you, Idaho grain growers! (That makes it Idaho relevant! )
Idaho was only part of the breadbasket; Montana and E. Washington also grew a lot of wheat.
I'm not allowed to rep you any more for a while I guess, but I just wanted to say thank you very much for sharing your insights - I've sincerely enjoyed reading your posts here.
I've spent plenty of time in the Teton Valley driving around the potato farms and am saddened that they're having such a challenging time.
Challenging times are nothing new in agriculture.
I actually see a brighter future ahead for agriculture; for the first time in many decades, there are a lot of young adults who are looking at the life of a farmer as something that appeals to them very much.
Since the average age of a farmer is now somewhere in the mid-60s, that's a very hopeful sign for me. There's really a lot of obsolescence in the farming practices that are in use today, in thought much more than in technology.
One of the big ones is the thought of maximizing the most profit possible from he soil. Potatoes paid so well when they paid at all they were consistently over-planted.
This depleted and degraded the soil in many farms to the point that the soil was nothing but tiny rocks that needed constant artificial fertilization to grow anything.
When our soil loses its balance, we lose a lot of things that go too. Healthy soil makes healthy people. Sterile soil can only feed us for a short time before it's so shot it cannot sustain us.
So while the combination of Covid and price collapse was severe, it forced a lot of old farmers to do the right thing and grow something that gave the soil back some potency, a start of a return to returning our precious soil back to it's normal, fertile state.
Old farmers become set in their ways. But they do know about new trends and new practices. So if forced, they will adopt some, especially if they help a farm break even. For many, that's enough to keep going one more year, and that's all a lot of farmers need.
I also think huge corporate farms aren't good in the long run, both for the soil or for our nation. If these calamities break them up some, that's good, as I see things. I don't believe stockholder profits should ever rule over good basic farm practices. but they have for too long and too often.
In ways, things here could be much worse. There's always opportunity hidden somewhere in a disaster, so I think this is a time when many good changes will come that could have come much slower.
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I also grew up in grain country, so I can recognize them!
, but don’t regret the lack of Grizzly Bear sightings.
