Over the past 10 years, there has been a shift back towards growing food in urban spaces. But building a high-production farm right outside the back door of a grocery store is as urban as you can get. 

Since 1999, Pilgrim’s Market in Coeur d’Alene has been offering healthy, local and sustainable foods, supplements and lifestyle products. In 2015, they decided to take their values a step farther by establishing a market garden directly behind the store to bring fresh produce directly from farm to shopping basket.

Many Boise-area families in the early to mid-1900s bought their produce from Garden City—a hub for Chinese immigrants whose gardens gave the municipality its name. Learn their stories in our Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month feature.

Rising land prices have put the cost of farming outside the reach of many young farmers, but a program taking root in Idaho is helping.

Idaho farms—including Peaceful Belly Farm in Canyon County and Full Circle Farm and Nedrow Farm in Teton County—are using conservation land easements that can reduce the cost of permanently preserving farmland by up to half. Here’s how an easement works.

Keeping farmworkers safe from heat-related illnesses is getting harder every year. 

Without serious action on climate change, reports state, extreme heat and weather may make it impossible to grow food — or work outside safely to harvest it.

Idahoans saw signs of this future in the brutal summer of 2021. Now, as the 2022 harvest season approaches, farmers, farmworkers and the organizations that advocate for them are gearing up for another heat wave. 

For many women like wine educator Kathryn McClaskey, innovating in food and agricultural fields where leadership and prestige tend to skew male has meant finding a voice and using it to make a path for themselves and others where few examples existed before. 

From farming to fine dining and coffee roasting to winemaking, female entrepreneurs and creatives have been part of Idaho’s thriving food scene from the beginning and are leading the way as it grows. 

Eugene Settle was 5 years old when he and his family moved from Oklahoma to the Pacific Northwest in 1899. His father, who grew up in Mississippi and was a descendent of enslaved people, had visions of hunting, farming and settling a homestead of his own. 

Learn the Settle family story and more in our Black History Month feature.

As record-breaking heat, smoke and wildfire plagued the Pacific Northwest this summer, many of Idaho’s agricultural businesses were affected by the enduring summer, droughts and long fire seasons of the past few years.

The summer of 2021 was an especially hot, smoky one with July being the hottest month in recorded human history and an unusually early start to the smoke lingering in the air. While some places hadn’t seen any serious effects, local growers and ranchers at the base of our food chain were dealing with lessened crops, wildfire, lack of rain and smoke exposure.

Written by Anteia McCollum