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On a late May morning within the city limits of Hayden, Idaho, Barbara Arnold, proprietor of Nothing But Herbs, is harvesting edible chive blossoms, lavender-colored and mildly oniony, for her popular chive-blossom vinegar. She’s also potting up her greenhouse-raised basil and readying to plant her field crops: an acre of annual herbs and two acres of perennial herbs, 220 kinds in all—culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic.

Before the year is done, she will have sold her herbs fresh; dried in teas, herb mixes, and arrangements; and steeped in herbal vinegars. She will have sold to area nurseries, at Kootenai County farmer’s market, and straight from her 5-acre farm, where she also will have thrown a fall “herb fest” to further market her goods and a “rural Christmas” gala where she sells evergreen wreaths.

“I’m a full-circle kind of person,” Arnold says. “I don’t want to be doing one little niche thing all the time.”

In this, as in the diversity of her crops, development of value-added products, and direct-to-the-consumer marketing strategy, Arnold is fairly typical of Idaho’s small-acreage farmers.
“They have the qualities of an entrepreneur,” says Vickie Parker-Clark, UI extension educator in Kootenai County, who has worked with the area’s growing ranks of small-acreage farmers for 14 years.

Some want to support their families outright, others aim for supplemental income, and almost all seek a high quality of life. They want to live close to the land, work with their hands, and be their own bosses, says Parker-Clark.

“At the scale I do it, it doesn’t make you rich, but it’s a pretty good second income,” says Arnold, whose husband teaches at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene. She started herb farming 15 years ago so she could work at home while raising her two children, both of whom are college graduates.

Arnold’s farm, like others in the area, have benefited in recent years from an influx of new residents who bring cosmopolitan tastes in food and an interest in healthy eating, including a preference for organic food and a desire to know who grew it.

“We’ve got a consumer base that is ready to buy locally,” says Parker-Clark, and many of them have the money to pay a premium for what they buy. She points to the success of the Kootenai County farmer’s market, which in 16 years has swelled from six vendors to more than 60, and to Rural Roots, a nonprofit organization formed in 1999 to support local agriculture in the Inland Northwest, for which she is a co-founder and advisor.

“I’m a full-circle kind of person. I don’t want to be doing one little niche thing all the time.”

Parker-Clark has presented workshops to aspiring small-acreage growers the past four years, including an overview that helps individuals decide whether farming is really for them at all. This fall, her overview will become the first part of a three-module course on small-acreage farming being piloted by UI, Rural Roots, and Washington State University. Business planning and an on-farm internship will follow the introductory module.

Parker-Clark also is working on two “how-to” videos—one on small-farm blueberry production and one, with Arnold, on herb production.

And in small-farm research, Parker-Clark has compared living mulches with rototilling for weed control in herbs and is working with 10 small-acreage growers to test the value of using growing-degree days to predict the timing of pest infestations. “I pick her brain all the time,” says Arnold.

To evaluate the extent of, and potential for, small farms in the Northwest, the University of Idaho joined Washington State University, Oregon State University, and Rural Roots in acquiring a $1.3 million, three-year USDA grant. UI agricultural economist John Foltz will lead a team developing case studies of 12 small farms in the three states and evaluating four common small-farm marketing strategies: farmer’s markets, community supported agriculture, on-farm sales, and direct-to-retail. The team also will develop tools that small-acreage farmers can use to help decide among marketing channels.

Arnold herself is looking into the possibility of banding together with several growers to market their products cooperatively, thus freeing up some of her marketing time for growing.
She hasn’t finished growing her business, she says. “I just have to wear too many hats.”
 

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