“Last year was the toughest I’ve ever seen,” says Mike Wilkins, but he is taking it in stride. “Sometimes you have to pay for the lifestyle. We’re gonna have some pretty tight budgets this year – there ain’t gonna be no frill on them.”
Wilkins is a third-generation farmer in Minidoka County. “I’ve wanted to farm since I was 6 years old,” he says, and for 42 years he has been doing just that. He raises malt barley, sugarbeets and alfalfa.
Wilkins started farming with his dad and brothers. His dad eventually retired, and the brothers separated their operations when Mike’s only son, Dusty, returned to the farm 20 years ago. Now it’s just father and son and their wives, Jana and Gina, with family and friends filling out the crew during harvest.
“You get to the point where you think you can’t get more efficient, and there will be some new technology,” says Wilkins of keeping a small labor base. Sometimes that meant bigger equipment, like transitioning from two 12-row beet planters to one 24-row so “one person can do the work of two.”
Other times, it meant transforming the way they farmed. GPS was one of these technologies, a system change that improved efficiency all around – and came with a learning curve. “I don’t know how much more I can learn,” Wilkins laughs. “I was born 20 years too late – I should be done farming now.”
Irrigated waves of grain
As a Snake River irrigation water user, Wilkins served on the Minidoka Irrigation District Board for 18 years. Shortly after he stepped down from that role, the governor appointed him to serve on the Idaho Barley Commission (IBC).
Idaho became the nation’s top barley producer a few years ago. Although Montana and North Dakota still plant more barley acres, irrigation gives Idaho an edge in both production and consistent quality. Even with the drought, Idaho barley growers averaged 89 bushels per acre in 2021 and yielded 37% of the nation’s barley.
“The Barley Commission does a lot for people that they don’t realize,” Wilkins says. Though IBC cannot lobby the Idaho legislature directly, it partners with the Idaho Grain Producers Association for that purpose. It also funds research, including an endowed barley agronomist position at the Aberdeen Research and Extension Center.
Advances in genetics (including new barley varieties) and improvements in practices are among the research the IBC supports. Although barley yield on the Wilkins’ operation was down 30 to 40 bushels last year, test weights were surprisingly good. Wilkins believes at least part of the credit goes to improvements in malt barley genetics in the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, local processors keep malt barley a profitable option on the Snake River Plain. The big players are Coors, Budweiser and Great Western Malting, but a number of alternatives are also available. Notably, the recently opened Scoular plant in Jerome is producing a barley protein concentrate for aquaculture and pet foods.
A sweet rotation
Wilkins says the farm’s diverse cropping system allows “a pretty good rotation” from a human resources standpoint as well as an agro-ecological one: Dusty harvests the barley and Mike operates the sugarbeet harvester. “That’s my favorite thing to do,” he says.
Mike has always liked growing beets, but Roundup Ready technology has been a game-changer. They used to till at least three times and also hand weed; they now cultivate once, plant and spray. “It’s kind of amazing how much fuel we save – it’s about 25 percent less,” Wilkins says.
Typically (at less than $20 per gallon), Roundup is also a less costly option than traditional sugarbeet herbicides, but Wilkins suspects he may see less savings this year. He recently heard a quote for $105 per gallon. “The prices are bad enough, but even with high prices, we might not be able to get it,” he says.
Mike anticipates nationwide labor shortages will affect all aspects of farming in 2022, from fertilizer and herbicide to tractor parts. “We’ll cut back this year and do what we have to do – cut back on fertilizer, cut back on spray – but you can only cut back so much before it starts affecting yields,” he says.
Poor air quality is another emerging challenge that will likely present itself again this year. “Sugarbeets need a lot of sun,” Mike says. “In the last five years, with all the wildfire smoke in August, they thought the days were getting shorter and went into sugar production mode.”
In 2021, those dark August days cost the Wilkins farm 4 to 5 tons of beets per acre, but they gained about 2% sugar content. With a 1% sugar increase making up for about 3 tons of beets, Wilkins says they came out about equal. “We lucked out,” he says.
Diversity and efficiency
Although the Wilkinses irrigate alfalfa, they sell the crop to a custom forage harvester. This relationship allows them diversification without the cost of haying equipment. They also trade ground with a potato grower to work another crop into the rotation.
While the farm has grown quite a bit over the years, they have focused on improving efficiency – such as converting to sprinkler irrigation – rather than size. “We’re not one of the big players. That’s how come we don’t have a bunch of hired guys,” Wilkins says.
He questions the wisdom of snapping up more acres to justify larger equipment because farming all those acres wears that equipment out faster. “It gets to be a vicious cycle,” he says.
With labor shortages looming and a poor production year in the rearview, the Wilkinses’ strategy may be just what such times demand. “It’s gonna be tough,” he says of farming in Idaho’s future. “They’re not making more farmground and they keep building houses. But there are always opportunities out there – you’ve just gotta find them. Sometimes they fall in your lap and sometimes you’ve gotta work a little harder for them.”
And producers are tough people, he says. “You’ll never break a farmer because he’ll just send his wife to town to work and keep going,” Wilkins laughs. “If you’re determined to farm, you’ll find a way.”
