Save Our Soils
Idaho’s best farmland is rapidly disappearing - can land trusts save it before it’s too late?
Written by Riley Haun / Photos by Bridget Besaw/The Nature Conservancy & Wide Eye Production/The Nature Conservancy
Photo by Bridget Besaw/The Nature Conservancy.
Glenn Elzinga herding cattle on the Alderspring Ranch (formerly the Moen Ranch which the Conservancy purchased and later sold to conservation buyers) at May, Idaho. The ranch, located in the heart of the Pahsimeroi Valley consists of two parcels totaling 1800 acres and 45,000 acres of grazing allotments. The stretch of Pahsimero river that flows through the ranch often contains as much as forty percent of the chinook spawning areas for the entire river. The Conservancy sold the ranch to Glenn and Caryl Elzinga who now operate it as a privately owned cattle ranch that protects and conserves the river's habitat.
The scent of summer in Idaho’s Treasure Valley is undeniably one of the land.
Drive down Ustick or Highway 20/26 on a balmy July night with the windows down, and the cool, grassy smells of spearmint and alfalfa fields surround you. If you’re out particularly late, and the dewpoint is just right, the mechanical whir of harvesters and farm trucks provide an ambient soundtrack to the evening, their headlights illuminating their own dust clouds.
The scent of Idaho summer, of the rich soils and the rattling farm equipment and the feedlot manure and silage on the breeze, is disappearing.
Eric Grace has only lived in Idaho for two years now, but even he has noticed the dust clouds from combines and balers are being replaced by those from construction equipment. He’s seen countless real estate agents’ signs go up in old mint fields, big red “SOLD” banners hanging beneath them with dizzying speed.
Photo by Lemhi Regional Land Trust
“It's so disheartening to see what's happening here when you take the back roads and there's just one subdivision after another now where there used to be potatoes and dairies,” Grace said. “We're not against housing - people need places to live, we understand that. The problem is, there is no conservation balance to the development that's happening.”
Grace, who heads the Land Trust of the Treasure Valley, has spent the majority of his adult life in land trust administration, helping to protect public recreation sites and conserve wildlife first in western New York, then in Sandpoint, Idaho, before arriving in Boise. He realized as soon as he got to the Treasure Valley that farmland was being lost at exponential rates the likes of which he’d never seen - and the people who worked the land were crying out for help. Farmland protection became LTTV’s top priority.
As the Treasure Valley and other regions of Idaho rapidly expand, the land that built the state’s thriving agricultural economy is vanishing. Land trusts, which work at the grassroots level to protect lands from development, are vying against the steepest development market in decades to keep working lands working for generations to come - and with them, preserving the values and natural beauty Idahoans hold dear.
Farms Under Threat
The pressures eroding Idaho’s agricultural lands are many. In the Treasure Valley, as Grace has seen, urban sprawl and suburban development is the key threat - with Boise and its surrounding cities among the fastest-growing in the nation, the surrounding acreage is worth more now as subdivisions or strip malls than it is in fields, even if the soil there is some of the best in the whole state.
In the Lemhi Valley, a remote swath of rugged terrain in the state’s center, practically all lands are working lands, according to Jen Smith, director of the Lemhi Regional Land Trust headquartered in Salmon. The steep rocky canyons and desert bluffs aren’t much for farming, but provide thousands of acres of grazing land for cattle.
In fact, it was a small group of local ranchers who banded together to form the LRLT in 2005, recognizing early the problems that were coming. That inaccessible terrain is exactly what’s drawing hundreds of people looking for seclusion to buy ranchlands and turn them into vacation homes and hunting properties, Smith said.
Photo by Ilona McCarty/Open View Photography
The gradual erosion of working lands has been happening for years across the country, but Idaho finds itself in a uniquely difficult situation, according to Addie Candib, Pacific Northwest regional director for the American Farmland Trust. Other states in the region, like Washington and Oregon, are more used to population booms and have systems in place to keep growing cities from encroaching on ag lands. Their state legislatures and local organizers have implemented land use planning programs and farmland conservation funds that have mostly kept working lands from disappearing, Candib said.
Idaho, though, is new to the urbanization game. There is no land use planning program to ensure developers and farmers get even slices of the pie; there is no publicly-funded farmland conservation fund. The result is that, since 2001, over 68,000 acres of agricultural land in Idaho was converted to low- or high-density urban development by 2016, according to research done by the AFT. And once ag land becomes low-density development, like subdivisions and homes sitting on small acreages, it’s 122 times more likely to become high-density, urbanized development within the coming years, Candib said.
“That converted acreage is a very small fraction of Idaho’s total farmland, but we have to recognize that much of it is nationally significant - for seed farming, for crops that Idaho does better than anywhere else,” Candib said. “And the places that are being rapidly developed overlap significantly with Idaho’s best soils and farmlands. It’s safe to say development has grown in the last five years since our last data, and the small fraction may not stay so small.”
Stopping the Bleeding
The pressures are many, but most of the solutions to Idaho’s land loss boil down to one thing: money.
The simple fact is that it’s hard to turn down a hefty buyout from a developer when you’re a farmer looking to retire, even if you’d much rather see the land stay the way it is, said Eric Grace with the Land Trust of the Treasure Valley. Producers are a rapidly aging demographic, and farming and ranching are rarely high-paying professions. For young would-be producers, it’s nearly impossible to get into the business as land prices continue to skyrocket.
Photo by Ilona McCarty/Open View Photography
That’s where land trusts like the ones headed by Smith and Grace come in. In the Treasure Valley, Grace’s organization aims to acquire conservation easements on farmland at highest risk of development. Essentially, that means landowners sign over their development rights to the trust, which can then ensure developers don’t get to it first. Smith’s trust in the Lemhi Valley focuses largely on habitat protection for the endangered salmon and steelhead that call the area’s waters home, and that comes with the added bonus of protecting the working lands that surround the rivers too.
But it’s only fair that landowners are offered some kind of incentive for such a trade-off, and that means land trusts spend a lot of their time seeking funding to compensate farmers and ranchers who’ve given up the chance for a multi-million-dollar payday.
Luckily for the Lemhi Regional Land Trust, a good chunk of federal and other funding is dedicated to protecting endangered fish native to the region, Smith said. If a rancher’s land happens to be home to a dwindling species, there’s usually money available to compensate them fairly for their land rights.
But in the Treasure Valley, federal funding is harder to come by. There is a USDA program that offers grants for farmland protection projects, but the whole state of Idaho only receives about $7 million a year - for perspective, a piece of land near Caldwell, appraised at $9 million, recently went for $36 million at auction, Grace said.
Photo by Alex Sholes Photography
The only hope for saving these lands, Grace thinks, is getting elected officials and policymakers from the state capitol on down to municipal zoning commissions on board.
“It’s clear to me, from the chatter and discontent I’ve heard locally, that public will exists to do more about this problem,” Grace said. “The tricky thing about the next step will be getting the political will.”
A good first step would be a widespread information campaign to let Idahoans without a history on the family farm know about the problem under their noses, Grace thinks. Many land trusts in the state already do this locally with great success, and it would be likely to reach elected officials with the power to open the purse strings or get measures on the ballot.
Smith sees potential for an education campaign in her neck of the woods, too. Even in an overwhelmingly rural area, more and more kids are growing up in town and more families are impoverished. LRLT already has programs in place to teach local children about the food production cycle and the importance of good land stewardship, and Smith wants to see that work continue into the future, come what may.
But without getting Idahoans and their leaders to see the need for more funds, Smith and Grace don’t see much hope for future generations and the lands that will feed them.
“To be honest, I'm not very optimistic,” Smith said. “If we would have been thinking about these things 30 years ago, we may have been in a much different spot, but we are incredibly limited by funding. That's really what it comes down to. So until the state of Idaho is willing to acknowledge and put money towards farm and ranch land protection, I do not see it as being able to stop the current trajectory in a way that will actually have long term impacts.”
Grace doesn’t have a much sunnier view on things, but he knows that it’s better late than never to start working towards saving Idaho’s ag lands in any way he can.
“Just because we’re behind doesn’t mean we’re going to throw in the towel, say ‘too late, the cows have left the barn,’ literally,” Grace said. “The best time to plant a tree, they say, is 50 years ago. The second-best time is today.”
