By Mike Ashby

As we cruise about Boundary County, we’ve all observed the various bumper stickers relating to logging. Well yep, go “hug a logger,” then brush off the sawdust and go wrap your mouth around a juicy steak and some fresh bread, compliments of a farmer.

As with the local timber industry, farming in Boundary County has been adversely affected in recent times, what with sky-rocketing operating costs, more government regulations and land prices making it more profitable to subdivide than farm. But like timber, farming is a truly sustainable and renewable industry and one that mankind simply cannot do without. We must eat.

The Kootenai Valley has approximately 35,000 acres in tillage. About twenty families currently farm those acres, some of which are second, third and even fourth generation farmers.  This writer’s son-in-law has farmed valley ground that my ancestors worked in the early 1900’s.

These farm families are helping to feed the world. The grains and grasses they produce are shipped around the globe. To think a family in Japan, Malaysia or Viet Nam is eating bread and meat produced from Kootenai Valley grain and hay is a neat thought.

Boundary County is fortunate to have the Rae family at the heart of our local farming industry.

General Feed & Grain, currently operated by Victor Arthur Rae, his wife, Tess, and their three children, is one of our community’s oldest family-owned businesses. Victor’s grandfather started the business in the 1940’s. The current grain elevator was built by his father in 1954.

Now, when grain mills and elevators are becoming a thing of the past, Victor and his crew of ten men and women are filling an extremely important niche in the region’s farming industry.

Victor buys locally-produced grains, along with corn grown in the Inland Northwest, and mills them into thirty different types of animal feed. These 800 to 1,000 tons of feed produced each year are in demand not only by a large number of local “stump farmers,” but by farmers from as far away as Kalispell, Montana, and Coeur d’ Alene as well.

Even customers from British Columbia stop by occasionally for feed, but what Victor laughingly describes as their “goofy laws,” do not allow Canadians to take mixed grains back into their country. Instead, they purchase a sack of rolled barley and a sack of rolled oats and mix them together themselves at home.

General Feed & Grain also ships some two million pounds of locally grown seed annually. Besides large proprietary seed multiplication, they mix and market lawn seed, wildflower and pasture mix, all of which are especially formulated for Boundary County.  They blend and sell fertilizer, available in bulk for the farmer or by the bag for the home gardener.

With more and more emphasis these days on self-reliance in America, we are indeed fortunate to have these products necessary for a healthy, self-sustaining lifestyle produced in our community.

General Feed & Grain mills our local grains into the feeds which grow the animals that provide many of us with the meat we put on our table. Their fertilizers and seeds grow our hay crops, pastures, lawns and gardens. Because of our valley farmers and Victor Rae, we are able to truly “eat local.”

Victor’s brother, Brian, is planning to move back to Bonners Ferry in July of this year. He will be joining his brother in the family grain business. Victor thanks all who make living and working here so enjoyable.

We may not have the timber industry we once had in the county and some may think tourism is the answer to our economic woes.

But the truth of the matter is, farming is a very important, renewable and sustainable local industry.

Thank the good Lord for the rich soil of the Kootenai Valley, our hard-working farmers and folks like the Rae family who are meeting the needs of people in our region and around the world.