Bill Brewer Idaho Farm Bureau YF&R 09

So I grew up in Sonora, California. I decided to move up here to go to University of Idaho. My cross country coach talked me into it.

I have an interesting story for how I ended up here. I decided that I was going to go to the University of Idaho in the spring of my senior year of high school, and then I ended up, I enrolled in class and everything on line and talked to my advisor on the phone. I didnt actually come up here until class started. I drove all night from Sonora the same day. The other interesting thing is that I lived in this trailer, didnt even come up here until the first day of class, so it was a little bit of a shock to come almost a thousand miles from home and just move out.

I just moved up here, It was a good decision in hindsight, you dont know too many people and then I spent a month in solitary, by myself, so I started to gain friends, joined some clubs, agribusiness and collegiate Farm bureau and I was also running cross country. I walked on with the Vandals on cross country and three and a half years later, here I am.

I actually didnt grow up on the Farm, where I grew up mostly it was timber my Dad falls trees, theres some vineyard stuff and cattle in that area. The Central Valley in that area is really big, theres pretty much everything, corn alfalfa, fruits and vegitables, theres a little bit of everything. Basically where I got my roots in farming is that my uncle has an alfalfa farm in Nevada and I would spend the summer over there every summertime.

I pretty much got involved, I heard about it when some students came in and talked about in class on the collegiate farm bureau, I thought it might be a good idea and they were telling me about the YF and R convention in January, so I didnt have a lot of obligations

Did they offer you pizza?
They offered me a piece of it, yea. The first meeting I was kind of bummed out because it was $20.00 for dues, I thought, man thats a lot of money, but then again you get free pizza so the first meeting was like I got a free pizza this time, and I can get a free piece next time. After I went to the Young Farmers and Ranchers meeting in Boise, that was a pretty neat trip. I got to tour around the Capitol and I really learned a lot about the Farm Bureau that year, their lobbying power, and I got to meet a lot of real nice people.

The discussion meet, I think is something thats not necessarily hard, one of the nice things about it is that its usually a small group of people, its kind of like a conversation almost, to me thats kind of natural and I really enjoy doing that. And, I dont know it may not apply but there are different points of view and you may agree on the same level for Young Farmers and Ranchers that are a little older than me, they have a different take on stuff, certainly more experienced.

One of the things I like about my job is that id kind of like every day is different and not just the same routine all the time, and yes, I was talking to my uncle, he farms his alfalfa and hes telling me about, telling other people about being an alfalfa farmer and they aske what do you do and he says most of the time I just trap gophers, not a glorious thing but its definitely different and every day is a different day, you dont know what you are going to be doing.

To me whats going to change agriculture is technology, and theres going to be a lot of change, especially in bio technology. And then a lot of things you see changing just in the last ten years that I have seen, is technology like GPS, and doing a better job of farming is basically what it is. Instead of just going out there and guessing where you are at, you are getting it down to really technical and I really think that its going to help farming, is all the advances in technology. I hope people are adopting, I know they are adopting, I hope that everyone tries to adopt as much as they can, because they are going to do a better job.

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