As a boy I spent trips with my dad between ag warehouses throughout southern Idaho, from Mountain Home to Shelley, seeing where Gem State products were stored and about to be shipped.
Whether it was sugar, dried potatoes, wheat, dehydrated milk or fresh spuds, Dad scouted products to bid for storage in his warehouses in southeast Idaho. Then on the ride home, he would explain how it was all so vastly different from his days cutting alfalfa and storing it short term for a small dairy herd.
Fast forward to today and Idaho’s ag infrastructure is growing faster, larger and more technically superior each year, and I don’t think my old man could keep up with the pace.
The most current opening was the True West beef processing plant, owned by Agri Beef of Boise and co-operatively owned by a network of local and regional cattle producers across all segments of the beef industry. February’s open house provided more than 3,000 locals the opportunity to see the design of a 270,000-square-foot modern processing plant, and the new efficiencies making it a premium facility.
Once it begins operation in late spring, True West can work toward its full-scale goal processing 500 head of cattle daily. The plant has easy proximity to the interstate for incoming cattle and outgoing boxed beef. Upon startup, True West will have at least 200 employees, and can grow up to 400. The procedures and equipment will highlight quality and safety, while being an aesthetic structure that fits appropriately in the heart of ag country. Even the view of the Sawtooths and Wood River Valley from the cafeteria top anything I’ve seen.
The Jerome facility marks the fourth beef processing plant to arrive in Idaho in recent years, following the openings of CS Beef Packers in Kuna, Ida-Beef in Burley and Intermountain Packing in Idaho Falls. These expanding footprints for the beef industry follow all we have seen in the previous three decades with booms in milk, cheese and yogurt production, and the grain and barley growth for national breweries and grain mills.
More recent is Suntado LLC’s newly announced construction in Burley on a shelf-stable milk and alternative beverage manufacturing facility. This facility will process between 800,000 and 1 million pounds of local milk daily when it opens next spring. Suntado’s plant can go from six to 18 production lines on a wide variety of dairy beverages and products. Additionally, Lamb Weston is spending $415 million to modernize its french fry facility in American Falls, bringing in an additional processing line expected to produce 350 million pounds of potato products annually, and add 130 more facility jobs.
Finally, the planned arrival of the University of Idaho’s Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment – with a dairy research site in Rupert, an outreach and education center at Jerome County’s crossroads area, and a food processing and workforce training facility at the College of Southern Idaho’s Twin Falls campus – proves that the technical growth of Idaho’s ag infrastructure also enables opportunity for learning and scientific improvement.
We are no longer dreaming of a technological age for innovation in Idaho agriculture – we’re well into its dawning reality. It’s good to know that as more people from urban areas come to this state, the identity we have with agriculture becomes more prominent and lasting. We aren't just remembering what our parents and grandparents did with agriculture, but we’re striving to make it even more profitable and redeeming for many years to come.
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