What are we going to eat when the New West gets filled up?

A Sentimental Ode to Farmland

By Marjorie Smith, 3-06-06

	photo by Chris Lombardi

Two weeks ago the Bozeman City Commission annexed the “Mr. Clean Farm” to the city and approved initial municipal zoning on its 75 acres ranging from single-household low density to residential high density and offices. Although I’d abandoned my spectator’s chair at the meeting long before this vote took place, when Mayor Jeff Krauss mentioned it to me, I felt that I should have been there.

The Mr. Clean Farm is a part of my earliest childhood memories. It’s located three miles west of “historic downtown Bozeman” on Highway 191 on the way to Four Corners. We used to pass it whenever we drove to Gallatin Canyon or Virginia City or other favorite family haunts. It was (still is) the perfect farm with bright white buildings trimmed in red, close to the highway, with well-kept fields stretching to the south and west. It was the neatest farm in the valley – hence the name, which I thought for many years was used exclusively by our family but wasn’t surprised to hear other people use in recent years.

Growing up in this valley I was taught by my agriculture economist father that the Gallatin Valley possessed the best agricultural land in Montana. The evidence he presented included the claim that Gallatin County had the highest ratio of registered livestock per acre in the entire United States. This image of fecundity was reinforced by my Miles City-born mother’s tales of falling in love with the valley and determining that she would live here when she was 13 and first came to Bozeman for the annual high school week program at (then) Montana State College. Plus there was the tale of her trek with her father in drought-haunted 1935, in search of hay for their cows at the Miles City Dairy. After driving 300 miles westward through the scorched Yellowstone Valley they came over the Bozeman Pass and found what they needed in the Gallatin Valley.

In the past 20 years we’ve pretty much run off all that registered livestock although there are still quite a few fancy riding horses in the fields near town. These days we seem to be competing for the highest ratio of bloated ersatz craftsman bungalows on former rich pasture acreage.

I’m not bemoaning growth and rapidly expanding population here. I frequently say that life in Bozeman today with all its cultural amenities suits me far better than what was here in my childhood and I recognize that without all the newcomers, we couldn’t support an opera, a symphony and several dance and theatre companies let alone a quite amazing range of restaurants and a darn good bagel bakery.

But I can’t help harping on this: what are we going to eat when the entire country replaces its best farmland with subdivisions?

Yes, there’s still scads of space for development here – but does it have to be on the most fertile land? The same evening that the city commission annexed the Mr. Clean Farm, they turned down a “sub area plan” and annexation of a property called Churn Creek in the nearest foothills of the Bridger Mountains where developers proposed building clustered houses with lots of trail access and wildlife corridors right below one of the city’s water reservoirs and treatment plants. This development was proposed on land described by one of its nearest neighbors thusly: “It’s dry, rocky and usually brown. We’ve farmed it since 1971 and it’s bad agriculture land.”

Mayor Krauss, an accountant who once served as Gallatin County treasurer, objected to the evening’s proceedings on both agricultural and fiscal grounds. “What was most significant about the decision to turn down Churn Creek but annex Mr. Clean,” Krauss told me, “is that the subdivision to be built (on Mr. Clean) will have a negative effect on the tax base of the city, adding small homes whose taxable value won't cover their demands for city services, while the very high end Churn Creek would have had a positive effect on the tax base.”

At the public hearing that night, most of the objections to the Churn Creek project came from uphill neighbors in a development called Grandview Heights which to my mind may be the ugliest example of exurban sprawl in our county: a hodgepodge of stark houses of the “look at me, I’m taller than you” school of architecture, jutting up out of the hillsides with very little softening landscaping -- trees might spoil the view, don’t you know. They remind me of the old mining headframes sticking out of the barren hillsides above Butte, Montana, except the view in Butte had a certain charm bestowed by its fascinating history.

One member of the public who testified against the Churn Creek annexation that night, a woman who, in her own words, “fled Silicon Valley,” a year or so ago, confided, “Last summer I smelled wet hay for the first time in 40 years.” In later correspondence she told me she simply wanted to offer her experience watching the paving-over of the farmland around San Jose as an argument in favor of planning – which apparently she is not aware is something city and county government have been wrestling with for some time.

But just to keep us all a little confused about what sort of land the city commission believes should be turned into housing and become a part of the city, a week after they turned down Churn Creek in the arid Bridger foothills but annexed Mr. Clean on the fertile valley floor, the city commission unanimously approved Bozeman Deaconess Hospital’s plans for a huge development on the hills it owns on both sides of Highland Boulevard on the eastern edge of the city. Neighbors to this proposed development objected loudly, but the commission decided that putting as many as 2160 dwelling units on the hospital’s 581 acres while reserving 188 of those acres for parkland represents appropriate infill development (there are several non-contiguous developments further east in those hills).

As to what kind of agricultural land those fields represent, I get mixed signals. My mother pretty much had to create her own soil for her wonderful gardens on her acre at the southern end of Highland Boulevard (she used to go to town and cadge discarded Christmas tree and rake people’s leaves in order to get mulch for her planting beds.) My parents built what was only the second house on that particular hilltop nearly 40 years ago. My father aspired to the stunning view across the valley but their house crouches back into the hillside rather than screaming “look at me.” They had a very deep well dug and he promised my mother she could use as much water as she wanted in landscaping. “His justification for building here is that it was not good agricultural land,” my mother tells me. Yet I’m told of a farmer who is said to have made a bundle raising wheat on shares on the hospital’s lands just to the northeast of my mother’s rocky hillside.

I remember the tears in my mother’s eyes when I first bought my house in town and she brought her roto-tiller in to churn up a vegetable garden for me in my backyard. “This is such mellow soil,” she said, handling it with envious tenderness. “You can grow anything in it.” Well, not quite, but that’s because the beautiful old trees along the streets on my corner lot provide too much shade, and I do not begrudge them at all. I discovered in my first one or two gardening summers that I am personally not a very good farmer – I tend to resent the narrow window of perfection vegetables have, and often postpone my harvest chores until things are past their prime.

But my need to see land be productive remains urgent. Many decades ago, when I was 21 and my now ex-husband and I moved to Guam, I was appalled at the lack of agriculture. Seeing the empty hills of the southern part of the island I fantasized about setting up a small, subsistence farm to show folks what could be done with all that wonderful rainfall. In an effusive editorial I wrote in a Guam newsmagazine I edited all those years ago, I exhorted Guamanians to “give agriculture its proper respect” and not depend solely on tourism as their economic salvation. I warned that tourism might be just a passing fad but “eating has never gone out of fashion.”

Perhaps I inherited my passion from my grandfathers – the Virginian who homesteaded to raise wheat on the dry, windy Highwood Bench north of Great Falls, and the Swiss immigrant dairyman who morphed into a beef rancher outside Miles City. Or perhaps it comes from growing up in Bozeman. It wasn’t just that one-time dean of agriculture father of mine and my compulsive gardening mother. The namesake of our town, that handsome rapscallion from Georgia, John M. Bozeman, saw the Gallatin Valley back in 1863 and recognized immediately that raising food for the miners over in Alder Gulch was a lot surer way of making a living than panning for gold. John Bozeman, as I learned when I wrote a play about him last year, was also among the first real estate speculators in the valley – and he was definitely our earliest developer. What else was he doing down there in Wyoming camped beside the Oregon Trail, trying to persuade wagon trains to follow him back on his newly discovered Bozeman Trail.

The fact that Bozeman’s trail was completely illegal according to all then-existing treaties between the U.S. Government and the Indian nations may have blazed the trail we’re still on. Only now we’re flying in the face of that very first law of nature: everybody has to eat.

Where are we going to raise that food? Not in the Gallatin Valley, not for very much longer.

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