Sid Freeman

“I’ve been farming on my own since the early eighties, and since the early eighties I have never, ever seen a situation like what we have now," said Canyon County farmer Sid Freeman, who farms 250 acres just outside Middleton in southwest Idaho.

“I grow sugar beets, onions, seed beans, and wheat and grain corn.” “And each and every one of them has a slate of inputs that we use in those.”

Sid’s concerned that supply chain problems and cost increases for fuel, fertilizer and other chemicals will have a big impact on next year’s season.

“You’ve got many different types of synthetic chemicals that we use for herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and all of that. And one element that misses for us to be able to put that on after we’ve put everything into it, and if we are not able to get our fungicide on and we have a situation there it could destroy that crop after we have already put all the input costs into it.”

“Our whole scheme is to control all the variables that we can, and in order to do that there’s all these elements of inputs at the right time, at the right amounts, and if you get the timing wrong or the amounts wrong you may have wasted your whole year on that crop.”

“And I’m pretty worried about whether we’re gonna have all the inputs that we normally need to grow the crops in the manner in which we normally grow them.”