COEUR d ’ALENE — Linda Rider believes agriculture and storytelling go together. With many farmers and ranchers being more private individuals, it’s up to Rider and others in the farming community to help everyone be a little more mindful about how food is grown and made.

“It’s a challenge to get that story told. They’re usually very humble people and they don’t want to tell the stories, so it falls to us women sometimes having to do that,” Rider said.

Rider comes from ranchers in the Spokane/Davenport area, and is the secretary of the Kootenai-Shoshone Farm Bureau. She and her husband, Rob, run the Rider Ranch, which is now a venue for weddings and other events. 

In the last few months, the couple were awarded the President's Cup Award, and Linda received the Heritage Award from the International Association of Fairs and Expositions. 

She served as the North Idaho State Fair Chairman and has been involved in the fair industry for more than 60 years. In a press release announcing Rider’s Heritage Award, Rider was commended for “working tirelessly” to make the fair successful. 

She was selected as the Beef Industry Leader of the year with the Idaho Cattlemen's Association for all of her efforts with the Farm to Table event at the Kootenai County Fairgrounds.

Her “partner in crime” for the Farm to Table events, Joy Crupper, is a retired educator from Lakeland School District and said that Rider’s passion for teaching comes through in all of her work.

“Linda is a Tetris champion when it comes to organizing skills, and her whole life has been centered around agriculture and she’s just driven to share her love and knowledge of agriculture with people,” Crupper said. 

Over the last decade, the program has built up a base with local schools, increasing from about 350 students for the first event to 1,800 local kids last year.

Kids from Post Falls, Lakeland and Coeur d’Alene public schools and church schools attend short interactive lessons with about 20 experts. 

“At the dairy station, they learn about cows and they shake cream and turn it into butter, and there’s usually cheese snacks there or something they can relate to that came from this cow,” Rider said.

Farmers show produce in different stages to show how it grows. Kids also get to learn a little about how to keep the soil and water healthy. Animals big and small are brought in so students can meet farm animals face to face.

There are more teachers than the students have time to rotate through, so everyone will have a slightly different experience. That’s something intentional Rider hopes students will take back and discuss with their classmates to keep the conversations going after the field trip is over.

“She’s able to pull the whole thing all together because she has so many contacts in agriculture around the whole state. We have people who come from the Idaho Falls area, we have people from University of Idaho, and the Boise area who come just to volunteer their time and teach at this event,” Crupper said.

The recent accolades for her work have been a little overwhelming for Rider, but she said she tries to keep them framed in her mind as reminders of the importance of agriculture to everyone.

“It’s just a passion that I have. We need to share what we do with people, how important food production is and taking care of our natural resources and being able to produce, and how important cows are as a holistic way of managing forests and grasslands. There’s a lot of grazing under the trees and they keep the brush down, the fire hazards down.” Rider said.

Linda and Rob Rider spent 30 years running a trail ride business. Linda found solace in the fact that after riders spent time bonding with the horses, they could learn enough to keep an open mind when agricultural topics would come up in the news.

“We would ride for an hour, an hour and a half, and we’d have lemonade and cookies on the porch. A lot of times, people would stay for another hour and talk about issues, whether it be why we log to have healthy forests or about the care of cattle or horses," Rider said.

The International Association of Fairs and Expositions said in a news release about Rider's Heritage Award that Rider believes when policies or laws are made about natural resources or issues affecting farmers or ranchers, "there needs to be someone sitting at that table that has dirt under their fingernails, someone who lives that life for a way to put food on their table, as well as those of others." 

For those visitors sitting on the Riders' porch, discussing these issues after a trail ride, Rider said, "My hope was that when they would go home to Chicago, or someplace in Florida, and if there would be something in the media that talked about those subjects, they would take a step back and say, ‘Well, that wasn’t what we talked about in Idaho.'"