4-22 IAN Farm to Grocery

 You’re a farmer, you’re an entrepreneur, your  sitting on your horse or tractor, and realize that what you’re producing brings you a dime on the dollar in terms of what’s collected at the grocery store. You say to yourself  “that ain’t right”. I’m David Sparks and I might have an interesting solution in a minute. The University of Idaho’s Caldwell Food Technology Kitchen offers an interesting opportunity for farmers or ranchers to develop a business that can send their product farm to market. Here’s spokesperson Jim Toomey: “We have a commercial kitchen which is a limited access kitchen and that is available for people who go through our food product development course. When they go through we can help them get their FDA license, rent the facility on a sliding fee scale basis, do their work and there are no minimum requirements. It’s a limited run facility so they are not obligated to be producing at a certain level nor obligated to grow to a certain size. So we do a lot of work with farms on value added products, particularly fruit producers, people doing dry mix from grains, and then we do some work with restaurants and the people who are developing their own food product ideas. So he makes extra revenue? Exactly. Except he won’t come up with the idea, his wife will. It’s the farm wives who come up with value added ideas the farmer sits on his tractor and plays golf.