Potato Harvest in Egin, Idaho

We’re wrapping up our third week of potato harvest, and I continue to be amazed at what happens between March and August. You plant a crop, take care of it, and keep your fingers crossed that the weather will cooperate. Some days you wonder if it’s worth all the stress and hard work. But on days like today when the potatoes come out of the field looking fantastic, it’s a lot easier to focus on the positive and forget all those days we held our breath as the afternoon hail storms passed through.

I see something similar happening in our state. It takes a lot of hard work, investment, and oversight to make all the moving parts come together. Sometimes, things work really well, and other times, it looks like we’re holding things together with baling twine and duct tape. At those moments, it’s really easy to wonder if it’s all worth it.

But that’s a big part of why I’m running for the Idaho House — I want to help things work better in our community and state. You need to have confidence that your trip to the DMV will go smoothly. You need to feel safe driving on our roads. You need to know that your kids are receiving an excellent education.

All of those things are possible, but they do require that we make an investment and hold folks accountable for how they manage that investment.

Sometimes, success in farming includes luck, but luck alone won’t make much of a difference if we haven’t done the hard work of laying a solid foundation. The same holds true for our state.

With a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, we can make tomorrow better than today. I hope you’ll join me.