AgKnowledge » Number 80

Slumping Economy Threatens Idaho Family Farms

ignals are prominent that the family farm in Idaho has shifted to survival mode and that “some producers will be forced to leave production this year,” said Neil Meyer, University of Idaho extension economist who travelled the state last fall for meetings on “Coping with the Current Ag Economy.”      Factors threatening the farm lifestyle are production at record levels worldwide, declining demand mostly caused by Asian economic problems, excess reserves that drive commodity prices below production costs, and continuing effects of the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act that reduces “market transition payments” over seven years until gone in the year 2003.      Stress is everywhere, many are leaving for jobs off the farm, equipment purchases and maintenance		Steve Berglund found employment off his rural Moscow farm to help support his family. Photo by Jerry Adams
are deferred, and generations who have earned their living from the farm are getting out while they still have resources.      “It would be child abuse to give him the farm now,” says a discouraged Melvin Harris. He and Diana Harris’s son Ryan graduated from Utah State University last spring with an ag business degree. Harris chose to sell all 275 head of cattle to pay off debt and to rent his 1,200-acre potato, grain, hay, and cattle ranch near Teton City.      “I wanted to get out while I still owned my land.”      Aware of the pessimism in agriculture, Idaho is joining many states that offer free stress management training to ag producers and their families. A team including Arlinda Nauman, state 4-H director, held workshops that featured a checklist of stress indicators and ideas for coping. All Idaho counties have received a copy of “Rural Stress Survival Guide.”      Nauman said people under stress are accident prone, antagonistic, fatigued, don’t communicate, and disagree on how to get out of the dilemma. Some states have reported increased farm suicides that were made to look like accidents.      Meyer said some producers who have the option grow crops for niche markets, start alternative enterprises, or transfer risk of fluctuating prices to the futures market.      “Idaho is an ag-driven state,” said Jamie Wood, who has a fifth generation farm east of Rexburg. “When agriculture suffers, the whole state suffers.” Wood raises elk and winter hardy apples and his wife Lyn went to work recently in the local school system.      “I was amazed at their complacency,” Wood said after a pre-election meeting among 15 to 20 farmers with two federal office seekers. They don’t realize that two more years of low prices and declining markets means, “there won’t be anybody in this room that will be farming,” he said. “We’re struggling.”      Linda Kirk Fox, UI extension family economist, gives the advice to live within your means and communicate about spending. Let things such as cars and appliance wear out instead of replace them, she said. Fox advises doing serious evaluation of farm family finances and creating a spending plan using such resources as Power Pay in the Money 2000 Program from your county extension office or the Internet (www.uidaho.edu/fcs/money2000).      “Everyone’s situation is unique, although we are all in it together,” said Steve Berglund, who temporarily left fulltime farming near Moscow to work on special projects for the UI Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology. He’s had two of the worst of 15 years of farming in the past three years.      “We need to get through the pessimism.” Berglund said. “Everything works in cycles. It will get better.”

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