Riata & Sterling Meldrum – Young Farmers and Ranchers District 5 Chairs

Young Farmers and Ranchers District Chairs Riata & Sterling Meldrum tell us about what being a YF&R member means to them. The couple live in Moscow in District 5, which covers 10 counties in Northern Idaho.

Verbatim:

Hi, I'm Sterling and this is Riata. We're the Meldrums and we're the District 5 YF&R chairs.

I grew up in Farm Bureau and so I care a lot about YF&R and the opportunity that Young Farmers and Ranchers gives to us. It's a cool program because we're not having to compete with the older guys for these positions. It's for those of us that are under 35 years old. So it creates those opportunities for us to have leadership roles, but it's more of a low stakes leadership role, if that makes sense. We can have fun. It's really family oriented. It's just a good time. It's just a place to get young folks together and realize that we're kind of all in this together. I grew up on a commercial beef cattle ranch in western Idaho, and I've loved agriculture since I was just little tiny. I care a lot about it. My favorite animals are cows. They always have been my favorite animals. So I was an FFA state officer, bled blue and gold for four years, went to school, got an ag business degree, and now I'm here in law school and I'm trying to learn ag law so I can help our agriculturalists on that side. So I'm a pretty traditional, but Sterling's not.

Yeah. I grew up in North Texas at the edge of the Dallas urban sprawl, and so I got to see a lot of really pretty ag land go away. And so I think that is a big reason why I wanted to get into it and stay into it. I work for the Damon's for this farm up here, and we do wheat, garbanzo beans, and Timothy hay. And then they're very good to us and allow us to lease some of this pasture ground that they don't use. And so we're trying to do some cows on the side as well.

Just little, nothing fancy. They're just not happy.

Well, we've got to fit it in between law school and Riata's three jobs and this job. And I'm trying to finish school and also this and also wife and our and also church. So we do what we can, right?

We’re gonna have cows wherever we go because I love them because they're my favorite and he's really supportive of us. Yes, the emotional support animal.

But it also is emotionally not supporting.

It's not super supporting sometimes. Sometimes it's emotionally adverse, but that's okay.

It's been a really good opportunity. I like the networking part a lot. I like getting to know a lot of different people that I wouldn't have met otherwise.

I think every time we go to an event, we end up meeting somebody new. We always meet somebody new. I like to think we're super social and super fun. Maybe we're not. Either way, maybe. But we always meet somebody new. And especially just in Idaho, Idaho's a really diverse state. And so everybody tries different things. And where agriculture has so many barriers to entry, we're seeing a lot of these little niche programs, these little niche operations. And so somebody might say, well, I grazed this and this worked for me, or I do this and this worked for me. And it might not be what we want to do, but seeing that they thought outside the box helps us to think outside the box. We sit down, we have these conversations. And that's a huge benefit of Farm Bureau is we came up here, we didn't really honestly know that many people at all. And we had kind of a Farm Bureau family immediately.

It's just nice to, I don't know, have someone to bounce ideas off of.

And that's what, learn from other people. Yeah, there's a lot of things that they can tell you or successes. I mean, then we also have camaraderie in our mistakes. When something does go crazy, we're all kind of at the same stage in life. We talk about how we break down on the side of the road. We talk about all these things.

You have someone to call.

You have someone to call. Oh my gosh. Yes.

Really, I think at its core and what my goal with YF&R is, and I don't know if this is everybody else's goal, and that's the awesome part about YF&R is we don't all have the exact same goal, and that's what makes it such a well-rounded organization. But my goal is to just provide a place for people to come and feel welcome and feel like they have a seat at the table and we care and I need that and I hope other people realize that we want to give that back too.