Life Essentials

Kathleen Smith is CEO of a company called life essentials. This company provides many different services to farmers and ranchers. She feels very strongly that many farms and ranches are disappearing for a variety of reasons and I had one in mind.

Kathleen Smith is CEO of a company called Life Essentials. Now, this company provides many different services to farmers and ranchers. She feels very strongly that many farms and ranches are disappearing for a variety of reasons, and I had one in mind from personal experience. I'll give you an example of my neck of the woods. I'm in Boise, Idaho. And when I arrived here 15 years ago just outside of Boise and, you know, little suburban towns, there was so much farmland. It was all farmland. And Boise is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. And as such, the amount of farmland has disappeared to developers. Well, that's very true. And even on our farm, since my mom and my dad both needed a lot of health care, we ended up having to sell housing lots off of our farm to support all their medical bills. We were able to keep about two hundred acres after it was all done. We had about 500 acres total, but we had to sell that. You get more money per acre than you do for farmland. You've got to think about it if you want to keep the farmland or you want to have more money for your retirement. And then I found out on our farm that the county had actually put us into a category of industrial, which we didn't even know had happened. And we have industrial growing all around our farm, and that's what's taken up a lot of this farmland. Speaker1: Also, her company travels all over the country trying to mitigate problems for farmers and ranchers.