On Tuesday, the University of Idaho’s ambition to establish the nation’s biggest research dairy and experimental farm overcome a major obstacle.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little and two other statewide-elected officials on the Idaho Land Board authorized the university’s proposal to spend $23 million purchase 640 acres of farmland in south-central Idaho, the state’s dairy heartland.
That would be the primary emphasis of the planned Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, or CAFE, at the school.
Idaho’s dairy business is the third-largest in the country, after only California and Wisconsin. However, the business in Idaho – and in general – confronts a number of issues, including greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, land and water contamination, and waste systems from dairies with thousands of cows producing tons of manure.
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Scott Green, president of the University of Idaho, said the decision was a significant triumph for the state, the university, and the dairy business, but the school hasn’t been able to perform the large-scale research the industry requires to discover answers to those and other complicated challenges.
“The research that we perform there will help us enhance the water quality across the state,” Green said after the decision. “It will assist us in using waste products from the dairy sector in an environmentally and agriculturally advantageous manner.”
Green said that students would get the knowledge required to work at the forefront of agribusiness and dairy sciences. He also said that CAFE allows the institution to earn millions of dollars in research grant money, possibly leading to new ideas and innovation.
If CAFE is successful, it will contain an experimental farm and a 2,000-cow research dairy in Minidoka County. Classrooms, laboratories, and faculty offices would be built in Jerome County near the intersection of Interstate 84 and US Route 93. The College of Southern Idaho campus in Twin Falls County would include a food processing pilot plant as well as a workforce training and education facility.
According to state authorities, the state’s dairy sector has backed the idea by providing more than $8.5 million to far.
Specifically, the board voted on Tuesday to use $23 million from the 2021 sale of 282 acres of endowment land in Caldwell benefiting the University of Idaho’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to purchase roughly 640 acres of farmland owned by the university in Minidoka County north of Rupert and convert it to endowment land. The endowment land and funds will now be used to construct the research dairy.
Endowment land is land that Idaho obtained at statehood and that the Land Board administers to create the best long-term return for beneficiaries, mostly public education.
Members of the Land Board had alternative possibilities for the money. It may have invested the $23 million in a fund. It might also have saved the money for future investments in forestry, the most reliable income producer for state property.
The university option was unusual in that it acknowledged research as a valuable asset.
“If this were more inexpensive research, private enterprise would undertake it,” Little remarked after the conference. “These are the types of things that the government must accomplish, these long-term, low-return projects” (investments). If we can get research out of this that leads to a more sustainable, cleaner dairy sector in Idaho, it’s a win-win situation for everyone.”
Applause erupted in the Statehouse meeting room immediately after the vote, an uncommon event for a Property Board meeting that generally deals with staid financial management choices regarding the state’s 3,900 square miles (10,100 square kilometres) of endowment land.
