Another Boise Harvest
Each year the crisp autumn season kicks off with the fall harvest. This time of year has long been celebrated to mark the end of an often toilsome growing season. Those final weeks of summer warmth were spent in the fields day after day for two to three weeks after the first hard frost. They were up before dawn, working hard out in the fields everyday until the very last of the day’s light, until the whole harvest was picked.[1]
As soon as settlers came to the Boise Valley with the intention to stay they began claiming riverside properties that could be irrigated for food. The Valley’s farmland was able to produce enough food and supply to keep locals fed and mining towns supplied in the years leading up to the 20th century. Very early Boise grocers offered “an agreeable variety in the dietary department.”[2] Families relied on their kitchen gardens each summer for easy to grow and store foods. At the turn of the century private and federal irrigation projects helped multiply the amount of viable farmland that could be developed much farther from the river banks. Since that time the Boise Valley has multiplied the fruits of its labors, lucky to be both consumer and producer of fresh berries, fruits, and vegetables, wines, ales, corn and wheat, potatoes and onions; all grown in the outlying farm towns and regions along the Boise River.
Technology has changed the face of the family farm over the years; in the 1950s school children were dismissed from class for at least two weeks every fall so they could help in the fields. Janie Burns, of Meadowlark Farms in Nampa said that “before mechanization, human labor was extremely important in a community supplying its own food as well as food for export. There were many seasonal and full time jobs. No doubt the hand labor was very physical, dirty, and dangerous in some cases.” She also notes that “humans have long known shared labor” and that ties of kinship were developed in the “rhythm of work.” Fruit wagons gave way to trucks and then refrigerated rail cars, which made it easier to ship local produce away to nearby metros. Today commercial and family farms have machines to do much of the work that men, women, and children did before.
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