'To market, to market' is valley's ag mantra

Chamber of Commerce hosts panel discussion about the future of Flathead farming

Few deny that agriculture is a challenging, often frustrating, business in Montana. But that doesn't mean business can't be done.

That was the message delivered Tuesday at the Kalispell Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon, "The Changing Face of Flathead Agriculture: Business Opportunities in Ag." Three panelists described how they have managed to compete on local and national levels through entrepreneurial approaches.

Mark Lalum, chairman of the Chamber's agribusiness committee, served as moderator.

Brad Brown owns Glacier Nursery in Creston. His market covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Idaho, and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Washington.

To reach all of these customers, Brown is very aware of their individual needs.

"To survive in this valley, we've had to be kind of proactive in solving all our customers' problems," he said.

This means he contracts all his shipping and tries to grow plants that other nurseries hesitate to grow.

It also means he sells large, well-developed plants. Landscaping has really taken off within the past 10 years, he said, and people are not willing to wait for something to grow on their property.

"Many of our customers now want an immediate effect," he said.

The challenges Brown has faced include shipping expenses and rising land prices that limit how he might expand. The biggest hurdle, though, has been difficulty finding workers with agriculture or timber experience.

This didn't used to be the case, he said. There used to be many people who'd grown up bucking bales or who had done some milking. Today, though, things are different.

"There just aren't a lot of kids out there who have done a lot of work on the farm," he said.

About 20 percent of Glacier Nursery's business is contained within the Flathead Valley. Of the products that go beyond the valley, most of them stay in Montana. But 20 percent of Brown's business goes to areas outside Montana, he said.

In contrast, just 10 percent of T.S. Laurens' business is local. Laurens owns Stampede Packing Company, best known for its Redneck brand pork products.

Laurens' business used to be much more local, he said. When in 1979 he moved to the Flathead Valley, he wanted to support the people who made their living from the land and wanted to use local animals for his business.

At first, Stampede Packing supplied food services with high-end beef steaks and roasts. They purchased most of their product from other packers, Laurens said, because they had no use for the other parts of the carcass.

That changed when the company switched to pork. A much larger portion of the hog can be processed, he explained.

For a time, there were nearly 4,000 head of hogs each year in the Flathead and Mission valleys. Then the Montana Department of Environmental Quality discovered a problem with the legumes that the swine were eating.

Laurens doesn't fault the department; he's glad they enforce laws and ensure quality.

"But frankly," he said, "I found the timing inconvenient."

Before the quality regulations, two or three semi-truck loads of hogs were shipped from the Flathead Valley each week.

"Today, I don't think we could source a semi load of hogs in the Flathead Valley if we wanted to," Lalum said.

He discovered there were pigs from Hutterite colonies elsewhere in Montana and was glad to use in-state hogs. But now he had shipping costs to consider, and Laurens was back to buying only the parts he could process into branded products.

Today, all of Stampede Packing's pork comes from Oklahoma and the Midwest, and Laurens no longer is in the slaughtering business.

"Sure, I'm still clearly in an ag business," he said, "but it's no longer local."

Of the three panelists, Randy O'Connell's business focuses mostly on the Flathead Valley. Almost all of his business lies between Eureka and Polson, and 90 percent of that is confined to the valley.

O'Connell owns and operates O'Connell Hay Service. His primary customers are horse owners who need high-quality hay for their animals.

"Anything that doesn't go into the horse hay market, of course, has to go to the cattle hay market," he said.

Not many cattle are in the valley, though, so O'Connell focuses on the horses.

O'Connell is a fifth-generation Flathead Valley farmer. He remembers his grandfather musing when he began farming full-time in 1980, "Boy, you can go broke a whole lot faster now than you could when I was farming."

O'Connell grinned. "I wonder what he'd say today."

The key to success, he said, is going to be staying small enough to be competitive. Better to own a few acres, he said, than to lease large amounts of land.

"Losing money on rented ground is probably going to be a person's demise," he said.

Aside from raising quality hay, O'Connell says the primary focus of his business is something foreign to farming: dealing with people. Instead of doing his own thing, like many farmers do, he constantly is dealing with customers.

"The biggest thing for us is the quality and service," he said.

The business aspect of agriculture is important to keep in mind, Lalum said.

"Agriculture is a business," he said. "Yes, it is a way of life, but it is also a business. For agriculture to prosper, a profit must be made."