Barley Big in Idaho

Barley Barley Everywhere which means a drop to drink…of beer. There’s an old adage about tough times…when the going gets rough, the rough get drinking. I don’t know if that’s really true but I do know that there’s a bumper U.S. crop of malt barley and Idaho is right in there with North Dakota as a major producer. In fact, Coors, Budweiser, Modelo and about 10 craft breweries look to Idaho for a majority of their malting barley, making it the nation's second-largest producer - surpassed only by North Dakota.

In the fall of 2009, southern Idaho barley growers planted their first contracted crop of winter barley, which allowed them to grow year-round. This year, as in every year, moisture played a huge roll in the size and health of the barley crop as Karen Hertsgaard, spokesperson for the Institute of Barley and Malt Sciences explains: “It was just ideal conditions for barley to develop. We started the year, the whole state started off with an excess of moisture, the whole state had a huge amount of snow cover and so everything was quite saturated so everything got started quite late and we did have issues with people actually not even getting into their fields.”

But all’s well that ends well in Idaho Barley.