Whoever nicknamed Montana “Big Sky Country” wasn’t kidding. Looking up, the sky really does seem deeper and bluer and somehow bigger than anywhere else. It’s not just the sky, either. The mountains, valleys, pine forests, prairies and vistas just feel grander, even as one ends and blends into the next.
It is here, in northwestern Montana’s picturesque Flathead Valley, that the Lake family has lived and produced high-quality grain and seed potatoes for the past eight decades. Today, brothers Dan, David, Patrick and Tim Lake operate the farm in Ronan that their parents, Don and Bernadine, have been on their whole lives.
While Lake Seed, Inc. farms some 2,800 acres—around 500 of it dedicated to potatoes—it is perhaps the work done indoors that the family name is most associated with. Since the early 1980s the Lakes have operated an on-farm seed plant to market seed grains. The enterprise is an officially certified seed grain dealer and seed cleaning and conditioning plant. Also starting in the mid-‘80s, the family began growing nuclear potato seed in on-site greenhouses using tissue culture plantlets.
The brothers credit their innovation and success with the educations each received by leaving the farm for a while as young adults. “I went to college, and there were just so many opportunities,” says Dan Lake. “Each one of us brought certain new components back to the farm.”
In fact, it was while taking classes at Montana State University that Dan first got the idea to use plant tissue culture to grow seed potatoes. He brought the idea home, and in 1983 Lake Seed became one of the pioneering on-farm tissue culture facilities in Montana.
“There was a real need to produce the really clean seed that we need to have in Montana,” says Tim Lake. “It’s really been a success for us.”
“We first implemented it at Montana State’s certification lab,” says Dan. “We thought, Why not do it on the farm? It doesn’t just have to be at a university. So we came up with ways growers could implement it on their own place; there were only three or four in the state who grabbed a hold of it.”
Thirty years later, Lake Seed is esteemed across the potato industry as a trusted supplier of good, clean seed. The vast majority of their seed potatoes—mostly Russet Burbanks, Ranger Russets and Umatillas—is sent to commercial growers in the Columbia River Basin, with about 10 percent heading east to Wisconsin and Minnesota. “We’ve grown our nuclear seed in the greenhouse since the ‘80s,” says Tim. “It keeps us clean, and our growers have come to rely on a consistent crop. We take care of them and they take care of us.”
“The beauty of tissue culture,” adds Dan, “is that they’re all identical clones of each other.”
The brothers serve on various boards and trade associations, including the Montana Potato Advisory Committee, the Montana Seed Trade Association, and the Montana Seed Grain Growers Association. Dan Lake has worked extensively with the National Potato Council and is currently serving as NPC’s vice president of environmental affairs. “It’s so valuable to the industry to have that voice in D.C.,” he says.
“We all have our certain areas,” Dan says, speaking of each brother’s respective area of expertise. “Tim’s our agronomist. David does all our crop spraying. And Pat runs most of the planting and grain marketing.” As for Dan, he and his wife are the primary managers and caretakers of the greenhouses and adjoining tissue culture lab (a convenient 30-foot walk from their back porch), where all the magic for the potato business begins.
The Lake brothers have no intention of ever leaving the Flathead Valley, and it appears that several of the next generation harbor designs of sticking around as well. And why wouldn’t they? The family has built a proud legacy and wildly successful business working the ground they love in absolutely breathtaking country. Lake Seed isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Anybody would envy that.