Whitni & Hunter Hesselgesser – Young Farmers and Ranchers District 3 Chairs

Young Farmers and Ranchers District 3 Chairs Whitni & Hunter Hesselgesser tell us about what being a YF&R member means to them. The couple live with their four children in the small town of Malta in Southern Idaho.

Verbatim:

I'm Hunter Hesselgesser.

And I'm Whitni Hesselgesser.

We're the District 3 YF&R chairs.

We live in Malta, Idaho, in Cassia County.

The population is, it's actually, the number is different every direction you come into town. So we really don't know how many, but we know it's not very many.

We have four kids. Our oldest is Heston and he's six years old. Then we got Quaid and he's four. Monroe comes next and she's two. And then our little Opal is almost four months. I grew up in southern Utah in St. George. My family has a ranch south of St. George, about 40 miles, and we call it the Arizona Strip. It's in between the Grand Canyon and the Utah-Arizona border. And my second to oldest brother is still running it, and we're the 7th generation.

I grew up in northern Utah. I'm from a town called Pleasant View, so it's just north of Ogden, about half an hour. When we first moved to Idaho, we were running some cows in northern Nevada with my brother-in-law. And then now I work on a ranch down in Snowville. Went to school in Logan, Utah, and that's where I met Whitni.

Yeah, he met the tall, dark, and handsome criteria. No, he was just himself wherever he was. He just always wasn't afraid to be who he was with whoever he was with and down to earth and funny. He was fun to be with. Still never a dull moment.

She's just really, she's just better than me in every way. So I just knew that she's just dependable, reliable. She has really pretty blue eyes. And I just thought she'd be, she's just a good woman. And so I tried to snatch her up.

We've lived in Idaho for five years. And we've been in Malta for four of those years.

It's important for me that kids have space to be a kid. We have that here. We're grateful to be here.

I am currently buying and then I buy and then I sell. So it's kind of hard to build a herd right now with cattle prices. So when I can't buy a few, I buy a handful and then when the market changes, I sell them and then I wait for a dip and then I buy some more. Her brother that's running their family ranch and our sister-in-law were pretty involved with YF&R and they really pushed us to start going to some YF&R stuff in Utah.

It's definitely fun to meet people your age that are like-minded, have similar goals as you in agriculture that want to have something for their kids to grow up with and it's cool to be around people that want that, to want to raise their kids and that type of lifestyle. And you just gain friendships.

The YF&R people, we're all kind of in the same boat, trying to start something or trying to keep something going. And it's not easy, but I've seen that it's just a really good community where we've got each other's back, we know each other's problems. And it's really motivating to go to YF&R events and talk to people your age that are struggling with the same things you are. It kind of fills your gas tank up a little bit when maybe you're feeling a little discouraged. And not only the YF&R aged people, but as Mitchell Searle always says, the old F&R. The mentorship from people who have been in our shoes. It's fun to go do activities, but I think the people and the relationships you build are what are really the most important.

We'd like to ranch full time for ourselves, I guess is the end goal. And so we're just trying to do what we can with what we have at the moment. And so really our end goal is we just want to raise good kids that know how to work hard. And if we do that with our own stuff or working for somebody else, as long as we can do that, I think we'll have succeeded.