Seed Potatoes and Barley Fields

The green and gold fields around you are the working heart of Teton Valley, and for more than a century they have grown some of Idaho's finest seed potatoes. This is high, cool country, and that turns out to be an advantage. The elevation and hard winters keep many of the insects and diseases that plague potatoes at bay, so growers here specialize not in eating potatoes but in seed potatoes, the certified, disease free tubers that farmers elsewhere plant to start their own crops.

All of Teton County, Idaho is designated a seed potato crop management area to protect that purity. Local farmers learned to ship their seed potatoes out by rail, and they organized together to certify and sell the crop. Alongside the potatoes, the valley's deep soils have long grown barley, wheat, and hay, some of it raised without irrigation in the early years.

Farming still shapes this landscape, even as new houses press against the field edges, and the tension between the valley's agricultural heritage and its future as a mountain resort community is one of the defining stories of Teton Valley today.