Matt & Kristie Dorsey Profile

Meet Matt & Kristie Dorsey. He’s the President of the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation, and she’s the Idaho Farm Bureau Promotion & Engagement District 4 Chair.

Verbatim:

I'm Matt. This is my wife, Kristie. We're the Dorsey’s. We live in the Sunny Slope area, about 35 miles west of Boise. We farm and raise cattle and kids here. I currently serve as the president of Idaho Farm Bureau.

And I'm Kristie Dorsey and I have the chance to serve as the Canyon County Farm Bureau Secretary as well as the District 4 Promotion and Engagement Chairman. I grew up north of Soda Springs, Idaho, and lived there my entire life until I started going to college.

I grew up here just a couple miles upriver and went to school and met my lovely wife. And then we moved back from Logan, or Utah State, go Aggies. We moved back here.

I worked on the farm whenever Matt or Weston or Wyatt needed my help, and I worked on the farm a lot more when we were first married. And then during the school year, I am the academic counselor or college and career counselor at Homedale High School. So I help manage about 400 students every day and help them better themselves and move on to their future after graduation.

We've raised, of course, corn, hay, small grains. We've raised small seeds, radish, carrot, turnip seeds. We've raised mint, recently sugar beets, the most recent crop… um… what else have we tinkered in?

Kids. We've raised kids. We have three kids. Wyatt is our oldest. He's married to Kim. Kim came to us from Shelley, Idaho. Then we have Weston and Delaney. Weston's here on the farm with us, helping us while Matt does his work for Farm Bureau. And then Delaney is married to Kyle, and Kyle is from the Snake River area.

It just seemed natural for us to raise our kids in that environment. And it meant we got to work together as a family, whether it was setting hand lines, which is everybody's favorite job, or watching that last row of corn get eaten up by the combine and celebrating because we were done with harvest for the year. We've been able to spend our time with our kids. And to me, that's Those are my most cherished memories, working together.

So this is an artist, Don Greytak. My grandpa had a lot of these pencil drawings in his house and at the ranch. And so this top one is really what Kristie and I started out doing. She would be in the truck and I would be in the combine. And you can see the frustration or the determination in both participants' faces. And this one, of course, we've all been there where we just really like to get a hold of somebody and tell them, hey, your back gate's open.

Some of my favorite ones are this one with the mama cow getting after the rancher because we've all been in those situations where that mom is a really good mom and protecting her baby and doesn't want anybody messing with her new baby. And that's what I grew up doing, helping my dad. This is a picture of my dad feeding cattle. He fed with the team horses every winter because he would tell us the team will start when it's 30, 40, 50 below, but my tractor won't.

So this is a photo of my great-great-grandpa, Vearl Clifford Staker, in the Newdale area. This was his best sets of teams. This very tractor I rode with my grandpa on feeding and sat right there on that step. So that's why that one's so good. And then this is kind of what our kids did growing up. And the cool thing about this too is it reminds us of the history of our previous generations going through those real life situations and hard work that they did.

Good morning. Thank you, guys for coming to the legislative conference.

Farm Bureau is just everyday life. It's just dealing with our local members, doing local things, trying to help out. The producers get to share their perspectives or how policies and how things are affecting them. And as the organization, we can bind together and support each other throughout. It's been very humbling and very encompassing and just kind of a free-for-all in a sense, like just trying to make sure that I get to everywhere. The humbling part is that you have to be the one to step up and talk for your members and for our industry. I want to make sure that I'm representing them. We can be Farm Bureau members and leaders in our community, but we're just doing our thing as folks of our community, trying to help our community, and Farm Bureau is just intertwined in that.