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Tag: ag

Taming Agriculture’s Energy Hogs 

Sam Anderson, energy specialist with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, oversees the state’s ACRE3 program that provides agricultural producers with grant funding for energy-efficiency projects and renewable energy. 

Return on investment depends on the type of operation. “Dairies and year-round greenhouses are incredibly energy-intensive,” Anderson says.  

READ — Colorado Agtech Hits Critical Mass

The program funds projects ranging from LED lighting to agrivoltaics—solar systems integrated with agricultural operations— to hydropower systems that can recover energy from runoff. 

“There’s no other state that has something similar,” Anderson says of the last project category, which he developed in 2014. “One of the interesting applications developed is a way we can allow farmers who have remote fields to irrigate to install center pivots, when maybe the nearest electricity is four or five miles away.” 

Some of the projects are not exactly high-tech, but they’re definitely tech. “Most of the irrigation pumps in Colorado are operating at very low efficiency, because they’re very old and weren’t maintained very well,” Anderson says. “Those pumps consume about half of all the electricity in agriculture in Colorado, so there are tremendous amounts of opportunities there.” 

A typical year of ACRE3 grants is $500,000, but that ballooned to $3 million due to an influx of federal funding in 2021. Anderson says he literally couldn’t vet enough projects to fill the timeline requirements of being implemented in two years, but he was able to award $1.6 million of the total. “That was quite a year,” Anderson says. “That was still three or four times what we normally spend.” 

 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]

San Luis Valley keeps Colorado near the top in fresh spud output

The San Luis Valley, the world’s largest alpine valley, is often associated with the Great Sand Dunes, UFOs and vortexes. But its potato industry is another big, if more mundane, calling card.

The wide swath of high desert flatland between the Sangre de Cristos and the San Juans is a massive alluvial plain. The sandy soil, in concert with sunny days and cool nights, makes it an ideal place to grow potatoes. The underlying aquifer, under strain since the 1970s, is another critical piece of the potato-growing puzzle. Its isolation, and the resulting low disease pressure, makes it an even better place to grow potatoes for seed.

In all, Colorado grows about 20 million hundredweight ⁠— or 1 million tons ⁠— of potatoes a year, ranking it sixth in terms of gross weight in 2017. The 2019 crop’s value was more than $200 million.

Jim Ehrlich, executive director of the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee in Monte Vista, likes to point out that Colorado is second to only spud king Idaho in one respect. “We’re the second-largest shipper of fresh market potatoes in the country,” he touts. “We don’t really have any processors in the state of Colorado other than some dehydration plants.”

That means Colorado-grown taters end up in home kitchens and restaurants, not in the frozen aisle. Ehrlich says sales of frozen potatoes had risen for decades before the ratio stabilized in the past five years.

“We’re growing around 50,000 acres,” Ehrlich says. “Our acreage base is probably where it needs to be based on water availability. We used to grow more acreage than we do now, but the water basin’s been over-appropriated since the 1970s.”

A pair of ancient aquifers under the valley floor supply the farms, wells and municipal water systems, and are replenished by snowmelt. “It’s cyclical,” Ehrlich says. “It’s feast or famine with weather. As long as we get good snow in the winter, that’s what we need – good snowpack.”

Supporting the state’s industry, Colorado State University’s San Luis Valley Research Center was established in 1888 near Del Norte and moved to its current location outside Center in the 1940s.

“We primarily focus on potato breeding and the study of diseases and how potatoes are stored,” says Zach Czarnecki, the center’s farm manager. The 20-employee operation also certifies potato seed grown by Colorado growers.

“Our breeding program has released quite a variety of potatoes here,” Czarnecki says. “This year, we just released three new cultivars.”

He highlights the new Rocky Mountain Russet as more resistant to potato virus Y, one of the industry’s most destructive pathogens that can impact yield by 40%. “Seed growers are very interested in this,” Czarnecki says. “To have a variety that is resistant to [potato virus Y] means quite a lot to growers here. That’s the main criteria the potato certification service is looking for when they’re certifying seed. They’re looking for how much virus is present in the seed.”

Czarnecki says that’s especially important in a seed-producing region like the San Luis Valley. “Potatoes are vegetatively propagated, basically meaning you cut up potatoes and plant pieces of them,” he says. “That’s how you get a new potato.”

Breeding a new cultivar starts in a greenhouse with about 200 varieties. “The first couple years are basic breeding, where you’re crossing parent plants and they’re producing true seed, and the seeds are put out in the field,” Czarnecki explains. “We keep producing seed for them. Each year is another cycle of field selection.”

Breeding a new potato is a long process, Ehrlich adds. “Potatoes are tetraploids – they have four sets of chromosomes – and it takes 14 to 16 years to develop a new variety of potato.”

The center’s greatest hits are largely specialty potatoes like Purple Majesty and Harvest Moon, along with a type of Norkotah released in the 1990s. “Their biggest success on the russet market has been the Norkotah,” Ehrlich says. “Purple Majesty is an interesting potato. It’s really high in antioxidants, meaning it’s really good for you to eat, but it doesn’t store well.”

CRISPR genome-editing technology could cut variety-development time in half, “but it’s not proven technology in potatoes yet,” Ehrlich says. “We’re trying to invest in newer breeding technology, not necessarily genetically modified but looking at molecular markers and things like that so we can identify genes. They know the potato genome now, so we can identify genes that would create better nutritional value and maybe resistance to disease. Breeding’s a big deal.”

Sheldon Rockey of Rockey Farms near Center is a third-generation potato farmer in the valley. “Our grandfather bought the first land that we farm now in 1938,” he says. “He actually made more income off of lambs than he did potatoes, but it’s always had potatoes on the ground since he bought it.”

Today, the operation plants 250 acres of potatoes very year, and rotates 250 acres as fallow to mitigate disease. Growing seed potatoes for other growers “from Maine to California” has been a big part of the business since the 1980s, Rockey says.

Because of this, Rockey Farms works closely with the research center on variety development and seed certification. “Variety development is their number-one output,” Rockey says. “It’s definitely been a good program. They’ve developed some good varieties,” highlighting Purple Majesty and Harvest Moon.

“Our biggest thing is making sure we establish good sustainability with the aquifer,” Rockey says. “It went down a lot in ’02, when we had the great drought or whatever you want to call it. It’s gone down, it’s come back, it’s gone down, it’s come back. We’re also pressured a little bit from outside to take water out of the aquifer and put it over on the other side of the mountains.”

He says Mexico represents an opportunity for Colorado’s potato growers, but the market is not open to U.S. exports. “If we can get past that, we would have another market we could ship to,” he says.

While potatoes have their critics, Ehrlich says much of the fault-finding is misguided. “They tend to be anti-french fry, which I get,” he notes. “Potatoes don’t actually make you fat. They’re actually a complex carb that you need in your diet. You need carbohydrates for brain health and for energy. Potatoes have more potassium than a banana and half your daily requirement of Vitamin C.”

And with the COVID-19 pandemic, he notes, “You’re seeing a definite appreciation for the food supply.”

How Tortuga AgTech is using automation to help farmers

Tortuge AgTech 

WHERE: Denver
FOUNDED: 2016

Initial Lightbulb: CEO Eric Adamson was working in consulting for “very large agribusinesses around the world” before co-founding Tortuga AgTech with colleague and automation engineer Tim Brackbill, now CTO. “We were both independently thinking about potentially starting businesses that ended up being similar in thought,” Adamson says.

Brackbill “had been thinking about how to bring more technology that he had seen and worked with and built in other industries to agriculture,” Adamson says. “Because of how difficult and risky a farmer’s job is, they haven’t adopted much technology just yet. Could we do more to bring advanced technology to the farm to improve food quality, reduce food waste, reduce water use, reduce chemical use, even reduce fertilizer use?”

The duo started Tortuga in early 2016 after collaborating on a business plan. The company now has 18 employees.

In a Nutshell: After three years of R&D, Tortuga has been “transitioning into a more operational model” for about a year, Adamson says. “We’re actually doing the job for the farmer every day, picking their fruit and this year getting paid to do so.”

Leveraging computer vision, sensors, machine learning, robotics and artificial intelligence, Tortuga’s harvesting robots represent a leap forward in the automation of produce harvesting, he says.

“It’s not a new idea to mechanize or automate harvesting. In many, broad-acre crops — wheat, soy, and corn for processing — people have been using large combines for decades and decades to automate all kinds of jobs on the farm,” Adamson says. “But for most fruits and vegetables, they’re delicate enough and require enough dexterity that they’re mostly still hand-harvested today. They’re often the most high-value crops, because they’re hard to grow and people want to eat them.”

Strawberry growers in California and Europe are Tortuga’s first customers. “Anything that is hand-harvested and grown in a structured or semi-structured environment is a target market for us,” Adamson says. In the pipeline: robots for other berries, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers. “It’s just a matter of chasing the right ones,” he says.

“To actually automate the harvest requires a pretty sophisticated level of technology,” Adamson says. “Only in the last few years has it become possible, particularly at the cost that is required [by the farmer]. That’s the biggest hurdle in most robotics applications. Robots these days can do a lot of really cool things, but at what cost?”

Tortuga also offers the ability to better leverage information. The robot collects data that can help with making decisions when and how to sell what they’ve grown, Adamson says.

The company is offering robotic harvesting services to farmers by contract. “A lot of companies are moving to this concept of robotics and other things as a service,” Adamson says. “It’s very helpful for the grower because they can adopt the service much easier than if they had to decide if they had to buy the robot and make a capital investment.”

Rancho Laguna Farms started a trial with Tortuga’s system this spring to harvest strawberries in Santa Barbara County, California.

Kevin Sage, a consultant with Rancho Laguna, says a looming labor crisis — spurred by a higher minimum wage and other factors — has pushed the operation to look at tabletop strawberries, grown in a structure about a meter off the ground.

“It makes it, in my opinion, much more favorable to machines,” Sage says. “In soil, it’s so hard to see the fruit.” He notes that robots will complement, not replace, human labor, dubbing it “a symbiotic relationship.”

Rancho Laguna went with Tortuga because the nascent system was more sophisticated than those from companies that had spent much more time in R&D, Sage adds. “I wanted to go with the companies that had really leapt ahead, and Tortuga was the tip of the spear with that.”

The Market: Huge. Adamson says the retail value of the target produce for Tortuga is about $1 trillion worldwide annually. Labor is typically a grower’s biggest expense, and the company can potentially reduce that cost for clients. “That has been attractive for the growers we are in contact with,” Adamson says. “Fifty percent or more [of their costs] is some sort of labor.”

Financing: “We are venture-backed,” Adamson says, citing “multi-million-dollar” investments in the company.

“The state and the city have helped tremendously,” he adds, citing about $1 million in grants and incentives from Denver and Colorado

State ag leader: Outbreak has exposed long-existing challenges

Even in the best of times, uncertainty is a fact of life for Colorado’s farmers and ranchers. The repercussions of COVID-19 are just an extension of perennial concerns like weather and fluctuating market prices. One of the most visible disruptions among many was the coronavirus outbreak at the JBS meat-packing plant in Greeley in early April, prompting temporary closure of the plant after 50 positive tests and two deaths were reported at the 3,000-employee facility. Other plants across the country were shut down.

“Colorado stock producers are dealing with a lot,” says Colorado Department of Agriculture Commissioner Kate Greenberg. “There’s a lot of uncertainty in the commodities markets as it is, and then you add this uncertainty on top of it – facilities either shut down or reeling in their operations due to outbreak. There’s only a limited number of options for livestock producers in terms of where they ship their livestock, and Colorado’s a big hub for that.”

COVID-19 has impacted producers of livestock and crops, large and small. Greenberg says the state’s direct-to-consumer market – local farmers connecting with consumers via farmers markets and community supported agriculture (CSAs), for example – have seen huge changes as a result of COVID-19 restrictions.

“In a lot of ways, they’re more nimble because of the scale and infrastructure of the local food system,” Greenberg says. “A lot of those producers have really been hustling to pivot their market opportunities. Those who are reliant primarily on restaurants, of course, lost the bulk of their revenue and have been looking at other models like CSAs – pre-boxed, direct to consumer.”

Greenberg notes that farmers and ranchers around the state are forming regional coalitions to exploit marketing opportunities at a time of mandated social distancing. One example is the Southwest Producers Directory formed by farmers and ranchers in the Four Corners area to connect directly with consumers at a time when farmers markets and many restaurants have been forced to close temporarily. Colorado Proud lists wholesale distributors statewide.

“They’re essentially building a whole new food system in the middle of all this,” Greenberg says. “There is an incredible amount of innovation and creativity going on. That does not mean we’re not dealing with all sorts of challenges left and right. But what producers are doing is thinking, ‘We’ve got product; we’ve got food coming out of the ground.’ It’s the marketing channels that are different.”

In pre-COVID-19 times, 40% to 50% of meals were eaten outside the home, according to some estimates. Now, about 90% of meals or ingredients are bought at retailers and prepared at home.

“The supply chain really can’t flip on a dime,” Greenberg says. “We’ve got ample supply. Our producers are doing an amazing job producing food. The question is, throughout our various supply chains, can we pivot to continue getting that food to the consumer? That’s what everybody across Colorado agriculture is doing in one way or another right now.”

In some ways, COVID-19 has merely exposed vulnerabilities that ag producers have been dealing with for years, if not generations.

“I think where the rubber’s going to meet the road is how we emerge from COVID-19,” Greenberg says. “We’re in this immediate crisis that has us marking time by days or weeks. But really, for our food system, it’s going to be a question of where consumers want to be putting their food dollars. Producers are getting creative and collaborating and cooperating to reimagine in real time Colorado’s food system at all scales. But I think what’s really going to be telling for us is to what extent consumers are in this with us.”

Perhaps consumers will emerge from these times of COVID-19 with a heightened appreciation for their access to good, safe, healthy and abundant food. That’s Greenberg’s hope.

“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that producers and consumers and all of us across the supply chain had the opportunity in this pandemic to recognize our inherent reliance on each other, and that, as the state moves through this, we’ll see that agriculture and the people who work the land – the farmers, the ranchers, the farm workers and the land itself – are all part of our identity as Coloradans. And I think that will help determine what market avenues and market infrastructure we need to keep agriculture thriving in Colorado.”

This article is part of the feature, State of Disruption, is which ColoradoBiz explores the impacts of COVID-19 on the state’s industries. The articles feature insight from industry leaders into what businesses throughout the state are up against, as new coronavirus numbers and strategies for reopening the economy are adjusted and reported daily.
Read more about the impact of  COVID-19, and see what the industry experts are doing and saying in the following industries:
Food & Beverage | Real Estate | Travel & Tourism