Gallatin County
Turn county initiatives into short asks residents actually see and act on.
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When you're sitting here and look out, you got the mountains, you get to watch your crop go from springtime just planting to turning green. It's beautiful, but it's challenges. I've been amazed in the last 15 years as this next generation is getting excited to stay in ag, talk more amongst themselves, come up with different ideas, different thoughts, always looking at that next opportunity. You think a lot about, you know, kind of the future of agriculture and the real need to get more young people into agriculture, but the inability to obtain ground. I would love to see that become more available, some form of farm preservation program or somehow to allow young people access That really is an incentive to keep working, keep striving to build the farm and to keep it headed in a good direction. I like to see just the people understand where their food comes from. There's not a better place to raise a family than on a farm.
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May and Tom Haraisa, and we own Four Daughters Farm here in Bozeman, Montana. And we are a flower farm, and right now we're in raspberry season. And we primarily serve the community by having a u-pick. We grow a few vegetables as well, some garlic. Cows. Cows, pigs, mostly for our own consumption. We live near a community that seems to be really supportive of agriculture. huge participation in the markets. We had, you know, large crowds to come out. We try to create a space that people can just explore nature and slow down their pace. I think just that educational part of it too has been really helpful to kind of give them an idea about what it takes to, you know, grow the things that we do. And I think they just, they love having their kids, you know, come out and feed a pig or pick a flower or a raspberry.
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My name is Sherwin Leap, part of a family farm called Leap Hay and Grain Company, and we are in the hay and grain business. One of the things that's challenging is the right-of-ways, actually, especially with a fast-developing place like Gallatin County. A lot of these ditches have been in here since the 1800s, and they go through people's backyards. When a lot of folks move into our area that are new to our area, so they don't have quite that historical perspective. of what we do in farming. So we have to kind of educate people of the good and the bad. So it's just, there's challenges with farming in an area that's growing as quickly as a Gallatin Valley, which is probably inevitable as time goes on. But I think it's one of the things that makes this county and this area so beautiful, is the open land is very important. And the reason is that we want to protect the opportunity for our kids to continue in agriculture. It's not an easy thing. You need to be very proactive about protecting it.
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I'm Walt Sales, I'm a fourth generation farmer rancher and I've seen the importance of agriculture being able to stay in the valley but work with growth as it comes. Our water is probably one of our biggest challenges right now. There's only so much water that we've got that moves through. We're basically reliant on the snow path. And now as we see the expansion of our municipal areas, our canals and laterals and the way we move water can be more of a understanding of one, agriculture needs that to stay alive, and two, what it brings not just for us and being able to grow our crops in this valley, but the availability of water for domestic and residential use. It's truly important how we manage the water for both the existing user and then the new use.
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My name is Martin Kim and I farm here in the Gallatin County. If you want to grow alfalfa hay and corn and potatoes, you have to have irrigation. And without irrigation, you're just not going to do that here in this valley. Water and farming goes so far back on our other farm. The water rights on that farm are dated 1869. The canals and ditches were all put in, even back then, most of them with a 60-foot easement. Technically, nobody is supposed to build anything on that easement so that it doesn't impede our cleaning of the canals and the water flow for everybody, recreation and everything else.
Gallatin County needed its Good Neighbors to Ag message — how to live well next to the working farms and ranches that surround Bozeman — in a form residents would actually watch.
We built it as a series of short social reels: one ask at a time, told by the farmers themselves, cut for the feed. No lecture, no county-PSA feel.
Let's make something worth watching.
Tell us what you're trying to make. We'll come back with how we'd do it — same day, no pitch deck.