11/01/05 Urban growth threatens ID seed industry

What's happening in Canyon County, Idaho is what happened to neighboring Ada County when Boise started growing. Farmland vanished, houses, stores, malls and streets replaced dairies, fields of wheat, beets and potatoes. It's happening on the Rathdrum prairie, it's nothing new to America. In Canyon County the thriving seed industry is threatened by growth. Take sweet corn seed for example. CLINTON " There's a small production area up in the Moses Lake area and there's a little done back in the Midwest. 85 percent is probably produced right here in this valley, world wide production." Terry Clinton is vice president in charge of production at Crookham Seed company in Caldwell. This 94 year old family owned business will hire from 85 to 100 Boise valley growers each year to produce the sweet corn seed that will eventually be shipped to buyers on every continent except Antarctica. CLINTON "Our growers are either selling their land because of developers offering exorbitant amounts of money for their land or we're losing it because we can't isolate the crop. Sweet corn seed production is a very specific crop. It has to be isolated away from say garden corns or field corns, that type. So along with the development that's going in its also creating isolation problems." Crookham has many fourth generation growers living within the 50 mile radius of their processing plant but now with urban growth they're expanding to a 75 mile zone and Clinton says 100 miles won't be too far off. It means going outside an area that has the right climate and conditions to keep the seed disease free. Farther away means more expense to the farmer to get his crop to Caldwell. For that reason Crookham Seed just invested one million dollars in a fleet of new trailers. CLINTON " The grower will supply the semi or the tractor, and then we supply the trailer. What that does is we get more crop in because we went to larger transport vehicles and it also allows us to go farther out." Clinton says the multi-million dollar Canyon County seed business is also in jeopardy because of another factor. CLINTON "More and more of these farmers are selling to developers. A lot of them don't want their children out on the farm anymore because its not as economically rewarding as computers or something like that so our age base for our farmers keeps going up because we're not getting young people into it."