Farm406

33 farm406 Shauna is right about "value-added" and "local" not being much of a thing back in the mid-2000s. e United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) didn't even begin asking farmers and ranchers questions about value-added agriculture until 2017. However, fieen years aer her initial aempt at selling beef directly to consumers, Shauna and her family are puing Scobey on the map for local, value-added agriculture in eastern Montana. ey're selling beef, lentils, and other products from Farver Farms all around the state and the country. "When my kids told me they wanted to come back to the farm, we were thrilled," Shauna told me. "I started looking around and wondering, what could we do to make that a viable option, with the land and the resources we already have available? How do you support three families with the same amount of land and same amount of natural resources? Luckily, Shauna happens to have creativity, inventiveness, and drive in spades. And energy in spades. Lots of it. Shauna and her husband, Terry, are the fourth-generation to farm the land that Terry's great-grandfather, C.K. Hanson, purchased in 1926. ey also farm another piece of land that has been in Terry's family for generations. e Farvers raise a variety of crops: spring wheat, winter wheat, field peas, lentils, corn, and barley. ey also grow some hay and have a cow/calf operation. Until about four years ago, most of what they grew went directly to the commodity market. She wanted to pursue a value-added enterprise but knew there were many challenges. Accessing processing facilities and selling direct to consumers in eastern Montana isn't as straightforward as it is in western Montana, where farmers and ranchers are geographically closer to larger towns. Shauna pointed out that they live in such a rural area, that they wanted to do something that wouldn't require a ton of processing. ey were interested in a more community-based solution. e 2017 USDA Census showed that value-added sales are much higher in the western part of the state than farther east, with Flathead and Ravalli counties reporting the top sales by far. ese two counties make up approximately half of the value-added sales for the entire state. Direct-to-consumer sales follow a similar paern as the value-added sales. Lake, Ravalli, and Pondera counties reported the highest sales— together they represent over 65% of the state's total sales. e 2017 Census showed that 292 farms across Montana sold $9.8 million in direct-to-consumer sales and sold $9.2 million in direct-to-retailer, institutional, and food hub sales (with some overlap between these categories). When Shauna started trying to figure out a way that her kids could also make a living from the farm, she told me, "I was thinking, what do we grow and what can we do with it? at was my obsession. It was one of those three a.m. ideas. at's where the ideas for the mixes came from." ( l to r ) Terry and Shauna Farver with their son Martin and their son-in-law Ryan Switzer who both work on the farm. Shauna Farver works in her kitchen in their new restaurant, Farver Farms Cookhouse, in Scobey, Montana. Shauna and Terry's son, Martin, works on the farm during the summers while he attends college. His hope is to come back and permanently work on the farm.

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