Organic farmers fight Idaho for land they thought was theirs

SANTA, Idaho — Nearly a half century ago, Greg and Leah Sempel began scratching a living out of land that almost nobody wanted. Now the state of Idaho has made their simple life awfully complicated.

The Sempel homestead is situated at the end of what had been a glorified trail located along Pokey Creek on a ridgetop to the east and uphill from Santa. For the first 15 years, the Sempels hauled in supplies and packed out their laundry on horses.

“I call it mountain farming,” Leah Sempel said. “All of our work and life and our dreams are tied up into that.”

They raised four children, most of whom had to walk 4 1/2 miles to the nearest bus stop. For a decade, they lived in a 12-by-15 -foot cedar cabin that Greg Sempel had obtained, disassembled and rebuilt on their property.

The couple carved out roads with an old Allis-Chalmers bulldozer, which doubled as the primary snow remover. They harvested local tamarack and red fir trees for 10 years to build their existing log home.

They converted a former fire truck into a dump truck to haul in loads of manure to improve the soil.

After years of effort, they eventually turned rocky forest ground into an organic-farm operation that now fuels local farmer’s markets, an organic grocery store and restaurants.

They also built green houses and two cabins that often become temporary homes for University of Idaho students.

“Idaho students come and help. They dig potatoes and plant garlic,” Leah Sempel said. “They come, work, stay and learn about the simple life.”

All the while, the couple paid their taxes, their bills and followed all the rules as they knew them.

Then in 2018 they received a letter from the state of Idaho accusing the Sempels of trespassing on public ground and stealing timber off about 6 acres the couple believed was theirs.

State officials initially threatened to file criminal charges and ordered them to vacate the disputed area, which just happened to be where the Sempels had placed most of their growing operation.

The state also demanded the Sempels pay about $136,000 in damages for the loss of leases and timber. The letter gave them about two months to pay up.

“It’s an undoing of our life’s work. That’s how it has felt,” Leah Sempel said. “It is very emotional to me to have to give that piece up.”

The state has also demanded the Sempels remove the greenhouses and cabins. But, as with everything in the dispute, moving buildings would not be simple.

Leah Sempel explained that the family placed most of the structures on the flat ground of the ridgetop. It would be nearly impossible to put greenhouses and cabins on the surrounding adjacent slopes.

“They have not even talked to us. There was no criminality. Why would they do that?” she said of the state letter in 2018. “I don’t know why they go so aggressive about it. This one guy got the ball rolling and I don’t think they know how to stop it.”

As that legal fight with the state continues to rage, the couple learned that Greg Sempel’s recent gravelly voice had come from an ominous source.

On July 4, Greg Sempel, 74, was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer at the same time the organic farmers faced mounting legal bills.

The family has sent Greg Sempel, to stay with son, Teva Sempel, in Seattle so the patriarch can have easy access to medical care.

It’s left Leah Sempel, also 74, to manage the organic farm alone amid a tsunami of uncertainty.

“We’ve developed all this stuff,” she said, pointing to green houses, outbuildings and cabins that are the heart of her business. “Now they say it’s not yours. I don’t know what is going to happen.”

The fence

Originally from New Orleans, Leah met Greg Sempel, a former University of Montana football player, at a barter fair in 1978 in Washington. She had been working as a fruit picker and Greg as a contract tree planter.

He had earlier scouted out some land east of Santa and Greg Sempel’s parents initially helped pay for several acres at the end of Pokey Creek Road that the couple later repaid. Eventually, their small off-the-grid estate would grow to about 23 acres.

“Forty-six years ago, there was nothing here,” she said. “We are just back-to-the-land people. We got the land really cheap.”

As part of the court records, Greg Sempel explained how the previous owner in 1979 walked him to a barbed wire fence and told him that it marked the northern boundary of the acreage. Remnants of that fence remain, with some of the rusty strands having grown into area trees.

Later that same year, Greg Sempel also spoke with another previous owner, Chester Henning, who explained how he built that fence to mark the property line between what is now the Sempel’s land and land owned by the timber company now known as PotlatchDeltic.

In 1979, the Sempels lived in a tepee for a year before moving into the small cedar cabin.

For money, Greg Sempel would bid on reforestation projects on private and public timber cuts. He would hike from the homestead all the way to Santa, push a quarter into the payphone and call in his replanting bids.

Once jobs were obtained, the family would travel and camp with the father, often sleeping under the stars, at replanting projects all over the Northwest.

“We all were tree planters,” Leah said. “Then we would live off the money we earned” for the rest of the year. “He’s probably planted a million trees.”

As their children started to get older, the family transitioned from a small garden that sustained the family to an organic farming operation that became their business, Pokey Creek Farm.

“I’m not getting rich, but … we made a living,” she said.

New neighbors

Then in 1996, PotlatchDeltic did a land swap with the state of Idaho on the lands north of the Henning fence.

“That’s when we started growing,” Leah Sempel said of the green houses and structures that now are in dispute. “Nobody came out and said, ‘What are you doing. This is ours.’ “

Over the years, the Sempels also received a grant from the state of Idaho to plant elderberry bushes — on land the state now says is public ground.

The family raised horses, goats, sheep and chickens that roamed on the land that the Sempels had cleared of underbrush and a few trees.

Somewhere about 2004, the state harvested the timber on the land north of the Sempel’s fence. An employee came out and marked the Sempel’s fence as the boundary for the timber sale.

“He didn’t say, ‘Leah, I don’t think this is yours,’ “ she said.

In the meantime, the organic farm grew.

Eventually, the Sempels would send one produce truck to the farmers market in Moscow and another produce truck to the farmers market in Hayden. They also began selling produce to several local restaurants and to Pilgrim’s Market in Coeur d’Alene.

“We grew about 1,000 pounds of garlic, two tons of potatoes,” she said of this year’s crop. “We also grow gold and purple cauliflower which we sell to local restaurants.”

The couple grows beets, broccoli, peas, carrots, kale and Swiss chard at the homestead.

For warm-weather crops, like peppers, tomatoes, corn and beans, the Sempels plant on a plot of land near St. Maries as part of an agreement with another private landowner.

“We work every day,” she said. “There are no weekends.”

On Tuesday, two women were helping hang recently harvested garlic plants in a shed that Greg Sempel built out of pre-used, rough-cut timbers and tin roofing.

Hattie von Ranson just moved to the Santa area a year ago from California with her husband, two kids and a tortoise named “Rock.”

She found out about Leah Sempel from an “organic starts” note posted at the local post office.

“We wanted land. We looked at Oregon and Washington, but we fell in love with the area,” von Ranson said. “It’s a very different pace of life.”

Caren Millikin, of Fernwood, was also helping hang garlic. Her father and Greg Sempel have been friends for decades.

“I’ve known Leah since I was a little kid,” Millikin said. “I’ve always liked gardening. I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s one of the strongest, hardest-working people I’ve ever met. And one of the kindest, too.”

Millikin doesn’t appreciate what the state is trying to do.

“I feel like it’s very wrong,” she said. “The state says they own it after (the Sempels) have been here for 40-plus years? It’s heart breaking, really.”

Off the grid

The Sempels now have electricity and a propane stove. But for years, Leah cooked all the family meals on a wood stove.

After their four children moved out, the couple purchased a television and got Netflix. The couple shares a cellphone. “I still don’t know what an app is,” Leah said.

Teva Sempel, 38, was born in 1986 when the family still lived in the cedar cabin, which was lit with candles and kerosene lamps.

The daily 4 1/2 -mile walk to the bus was just what the kids did, he said. The family used a hand-crank water pump and heated water for several hours to provide “garbage can baths.”

“I didn’t have any concept how other people really lived,” said Teva Sempel, who now works as an attorney in Seattle.

His parents now say “they feel bad you guys grew up really tough. But I have no bad memories growing up. I love being outdoors to this day. I’m a super-driven person … because of my upbringing,” he said.

With no television, the Sempels provided lots of books to their children.

“I had these world history books, a high-level summary of all the world history,” he said. “I read those books a million times at night.”

Greg Sempel would sometimes read a chapter of J.R.R. Tokien’s “The Hobbit,” to the children after they went to bed.

“Because our house was always filled with love and laughter, it didn’t feel like anything out of the normal,” Teva Sempel said. “We played a lot of cards. But if you were to ask me about TV shows that were big for kids of my age, I have no idea what they are talking about.”

As the kids have moved away to start their careers, the parents continued their dream at the edge of the wilderness.

Pokey Creek Farm is one of the last homesteads for a stretch of timberland that runs north all the way to the St. Joe River and Avery to the northeast.

“To live out there like they have is a tougher life but it’s really rewarding,” Teva Sempel said. “It’s really admirable.”

The dispute

The letter in 2018 from the state has threatened that way of life.

According to arguments filed by Deputy Attorney General J.J. Winters, the state argues that the Sempels illegally occupied state endowment lands, which are used by the state for logging and grazing leases to raise money for state-funded education.

“There is no question that after 1998, the Sempels have encroached into State land, slowly expanding their farming operation over time,” Winters wrote.

Although the Sempels said they first learned of the dispute with the 2018 letter, Winters wrote that the state was aware of the problem in 2016 after the Sempels sought to acquire a permit to install their second water well.

“The state made several attempts to resolve the trespass with the Sempels without success,” Winters wrote.

Efforts to reach Winters by phone and email last week were not successful.

Teva Sempel disputed Winters’ court filing.

“We are willing to compromise. We would pay the state the fair market value,” he said. “They have refused to even consider something like a land swap. What’s the harm there?”

Sempel explained that while he is helping his parents, he does not have a license to practice law in Idaho.

His family’s case is being handled by Coeur d’Alene attorney Nathan Ohler, who has made a counter legal argument that the Sempels own the disputed land because the records clearly show that the boundary had been honored for years in several interactions even before the state acquired the land in 1996.

Ohler pointed out in a filing from November 2023 that the state had earlier ruled on another “nearly identical situation” involving a disputed property line next to state land and determined it should honor the historical boundary line.

He further argued that the state should not be able to make the claim that the Sempels were trespassing — 22 years after obtaining the adjacent land.

“The fact that the State of Idaho sat on its laurels before it ignored its own precedent, threatened the Sempels with criminal prosecution, and then brought its lawsuit should offend the citizens of the great State of Idaho,” Ohler wrote.

First District Judge Barbara Duggan ruled in February that she did not believe that the Sempels had provided enough evidence for her to decide the case in their favor by summary judgment.

The case had been scheduled for trial in October, but Teva Sempel said that date has been postponed while his father receives medical care.

Sempel said if the state prevails in the case “they will build a big fence across that property, tear all the work down they have done, leave it and never come back.”

The son, who for years walked 4 1/2 miles twice every day to and from the school bus, vowed to keep fighting for his parents.

“Hopefully we win,” Teva Sempel said. “But it doesn’t need to be a win.

“We are willing to compromise. It ends well with my parents being able to keep their property, to live the rest of their days with a little bit of dignity.”