In the fiscal year 2021, the U.S. issued 258,000 H-2A visas to seasonal farm workers. That number is roughly double the visas issued in 2016.Even though demand and wages are up, supply is still stretched pretty thin, with an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent labor deficit in agriculture nationwide. For these reasons, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) introduced the Affordable and Secure Food Act (ASFA) in the lame-duck session in December 2022.
It failed to garner the necessary votes, despite initial support from Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), to make the final spending bill.
If passed, the Affordable and Secure Food Act would have streamlined the H-2A program and established a path to citizenship. It also included a freeze on the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), the state-by-state pay scale for H-2A workers. The AEWR rose to $16.34 in Colorado for 2023, up from $10.08 in 2013.
Representatives from Sen. Bennet’s office say he remains focused on the issue.
“It is obvious to everyone that our H-2A visa system is completely broken. America’s farms and ranches are short more than 100,000 workers to do the essential work of feeding this country,” Bennet explains in a statement to ColoradoBiz.
“At the same time, hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers live in the shadows of our economy. The status quo is terrible for farm workers, it’s terrible for businesses and farms, and it’s terrible for American families who’ve seen their grocery bills skyrocket as a result of the farm labor crisis. Fixing our immigration system is a matter of economic security, food security and national security — and I will pursue every opportunity to pass my bill to reform the H-2A visa program, support undocumented farm workers, and secure our food supply.”
Many agriculture organizations backed the Affordable and Secure Food Act, including the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union (RMFU). “Not only would it have created a lot more flexibility within the H-2A program, like having staggered entry and an allowance for some year-round visas and some other important changes, changes to the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, but it also created essentially a path to citizenship for folks as well,” says Dan Waldvogle, RMFU’s director of external affairs. “We want to make sure they have a path forward to contribute to society, to raise a family, to make a better life and to pay taxes.”
Waldvogle thinks the window has closed with the current 118th U.S. Congress. “Speaker McCarthy has voiced there likely won’t be immigration bills being brought forward, but it’s a critical question that needs answers and needs reform,” he says. “I was really hoping that we would get the support of some other Western Republican senators. Access to labor is a pretty universal problem in agriculture right now, especially in the West.”
It comes down to money: Only 14 percent of the food dollar goes to producers. “There’s less for keeping a farm or ranch in operation, there’s less for compensating their employees for the work they do,” Waldvogle says. “The big fear we have is we’re going to see some of the folks doing produce now, they’re going to go toward more mechanized production processes. So we’ll see more alfalfa and corn and less fruits and veggies.”
While Waldvogle says the problem needs a federal answer, the state’s enactment of Senate Bill 21-087 (SB21-087) into law two years ago has been met by pushback from many producers for what they term a one-size-fits-all approach.
David Harold of Tuxedo Corn Co. in Olathe recalls asking his banker if SB21-087 was going to make it harder to recruit seasonal workers. “He said, ‘This is the least of your problems. It doesn’t matter what law they pass, you’re going to have to raise your rates and redo how you think about labor, because Mexico’s middle class is growing.’”
Founded by John Harold, David’s father in 1986, Tuxedo Corn harvests sweet corn from 1,500 acres in the Olathe area with the help of 150 seasonal H-2A workers, largely from Mexico, every year.
John’s reputation “for being a fair guy,” David says, has made it relatively easy to recruit workers to harvest sweet corn. Many people have worked for Tuxedo Corn seasonally for more than 30 years.
The sweet corn Tuxedo Corn grows is too tender to be mechanically harvested. The operation could switch to a different cultivar to automate the process, but that’s not on the table. “We’d rather work with people than machines,” David says.
As the AEWR increases, “It’s getting harder and harder,” David says. “I’m surviving. I’ve raised my price.” The price of a box of corn has increased by about 50 percent since the AEWR was $9.88 in 2009, he notes.
Now growing peaches and wine grapes on 550 acres, Bruce Talbott’s family has farmed in Palisade since 1946. Labor is currently about 80 percent of Talbott Farms’ costs using H-2A workers primarily from Mexico and Honduras.
Talbott says the business left the H-2A program for three years after an audit he terms “a witch hunt” about a decade ago, but it could not rely on the local labor pool and re-entered the program circa 2015. “After three years, it didn’t matter how big a target we had on our back,” he says. “If we don’t do H-2A, we’ve got to quit planting peaches. We can’t get them harvested.”
Talbott Farms needs 40 workers for the growing season and another 20 for the harvest. A family-owned packing shed is not eligible for H-2A workers because it packs for other producers as well. “If we don’t pack for anybody else and maroon our neighbors, we are allowed to bring H-2A into the shed. We really hate to do that, but in the end, we may have no other choice.”
Talbott says the time for federal action is now.
“We need to update the [H-2A] program,” he says. “We’re going to have one shot at this. It’s taken 30 years to have the discussion at this level. If we get a Band-Aid, we’ll probably not hear about it for another 10 or 20 years.”
Talbott highlights a schism that makes reform difficult. “California’s highly diversified: There are 200 crops in the Central Valley and the San Joaquin Valley, and you have contractors that go around to work on citrus to stone fruits to lettuce to strawberries,” he notes. “Colorado and the Eastern United States, we don’t have a year-round ability to keep people, so they have to come and go seasonally.”
“The East Coast wants a good program. The West Coast wants legalization of the current workforce. I’m grossly oversimplifying it, but that’s the battle that’s gone on in agriculture, and if agriculture can’t come to an agreement, then everybody else says, ‘Why should we support this?’”
Marc Arnusch’s family has farmed in the Keenesburg area for more than 70 years. “Our family’s been in this area since 1952, when my grandparents came here from Austria,” Arnusch says. “Ironically, they came to this area as farm labor. They worked in the sugar beet fields, they worked on dairy farms, and livestock operations, and were able to buy their own farming operation in the late ‘50s.”
In 2012, Arnusch Farms’ 4,000-acre operation pivoted from onions to wheat and barley, largely for the state’s booming craft brewing industry, along with alfalfa and corn silage. The move was largely motivated by labor, or lack thereof. While onions required hand labor from about 300 seasonal workers to plant and harvest, grains can be mechanized and computerized.
“We had lost a number of crops that sat out in the field because we simply didn’t have workers to help harvest the crop,” Arnusch says. “We were simply looking for a skill that didn’t exist then and doesn’t appear like it exists now in the workforce, and that’s the skill of endurance. Doing something over and over and over again, for weeks and sometimes months on end.”
He adds, “If I had a more reliable supply or access to labor, I would definitely change my crop mix back to more value-added agriculture, but one that was more dependent on labor.”
Arnusch says the Affordable and Secure Food Act “makes sense,” and sees a disconnect between Washington, D.C., and the realities of the rest of the country. “We have a lot of workers who are making their way to the Denver metropolitan area — by the busload,” he notes. “How can we start targeting or directing some of those people to build positions here in rural Colorado? We need it.”
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]
In an era of a rapidly changing climate, achieving agricultural sustainability is critical to ensure the health and well-being of our planet. With limited resources and an ever-increasing population, traditional farming practices can no longer support a sustainable food system.
Fortunately, the current technological advances in machine learning offer a promising path toward more sustainable agricultural practices. By leveraging computer vision and predictive analytics, farmers can reduce water usage, control pests with fewer resources, and optimize fertilizer usage to lessen their negative environmental impact. In this article, we will explore the environmental benefits of using machine learning in agriculture and how it can help achieve more sustainable farming.
An Overview of Challenges Agriculture is Facing Today
One of the major challenges facing agriculture today is the increasing demand for food to feed a growing population that will reach 9.7 billion people by 2050, according to IMF. Given that agricultural land is already stretched to its limits, there is an urgent need to find new and more efficient ways to produce food while preserving and protecting the environment. Climate change is also a major threat, with extreme weather conditions such as floods, droughts, and storms causing widespread damage to crops and livestock. Finally, there is the challenge of dwindling natural resources like water and soil fertility, exacerbated by unsustainable farming practices.
How Machine Learning (ML) can help agriculture
Reducing water usage
Traditional farming often consumes excessive amounts of water, and this has had a devastating impact on the environment. For instance, decades of over-irrigation in California’s Central Valley have caused hazardous levels of salt accumulation in the soil and made certain areas incapable of growing crops. In other parts of the world, such as India and China, farmers have resorted to over-pumping groundwater that is not replenished quickly enough, leading to water shortages and degraded soil.
In addition to causing natural resources like water and soil to be depleted, excessive water usage also has an economic impact. Farmers are often forced to pay high prices for irrigation systems or use inefficient methods that require a lot of water with minimal yields.
With machine learning-enabled remote sensing technology in place, farmers can monitor soil moisture levels or set up automated sensors that detect when crops need additional water. These strategies can help make water usage more efficient, reduce overall farming costs, and ensure that natural resources are not wasted. In addition, machine learning can be used to detect drought-resistant crops and find optimal planting patterns based on soil type and climate conditions. All of these measures can help make agricultural production more sustainable in the long run.
Pests are a major problem for most farmers, as they can cause considerable damage to crops and significantly reduce yields. Traditional solutions to this problem involve the use of pesticides which have negative environmental impacts and are not considered sustainable.
Machine learning presents an alternative solution that enables farmers to better monitor and control pests with fewer resources. By leveraging computer vision and predictive analytics, farmers can automatically detect pests and monitor crops in real-time. This allows them to take an effective, targeted approach to pest control and dramatically reduce reliance on pesticides. Additionally, machine learning algorithms can be used to monitor water levels and soil conditions, which enables farmers to accurately determine when pests are most likely to appear and take preventive measures.
Optimizing fertilizer usage
While extremely beneficial to crop yields, the use of synthetic fertilizers in agriculture is detrimental to our environment. In general, most farmers apply synthetic fertilizers equally to the whole field, meaning that in areas where the soil already has a high nutrient content, fertilization is applied excessively. This often causes nutrients to overflow into the nearest rivers, lakes, and oceans, which causes algae to bloom excessively. This, in turn, significantly decreases the oxygen levels in the water and can cause fish and other aquatic organisms to die.
Moreover, fertilizers often cause soil acidification, which can negatively impact biodiversity. What’s even more daunting, the production of synthetic fertilizers is also the cause of 2.1% of annual CO2 emissions, according to a recent study by the Greenpeace Research Laboratories.
Machine learning can help lessen the negative environmental impact associated with these practices. By using precision agriculture techniques such as automated data collection and analysis, farmers can monitor soil conditions in real-time and apply fertilizer only where it’s needed and in optimal amounts. This helps reduce nutrient overflow into rivers and lakes and promotes a healthier aquatic ecosystem and preserves biodiversity.
Machine Learning to the Rescue
It is clear that machine learning has the potential to revolutionize agriculture and make it more sustainable. By leveraging automated technologies such as computer vision and predictive analytics, farmers can conserve natural resources while boosting crop yields. This can help reduce the negative environmental impact caused by traditional farming practices, including water usage, pesticide usage, and fertilizer usage.
As machine learning technologies become more advanced and mainstream, there is no doubt that these methods will become a staple in the agricultural industry. Ultimately, through the help of modern technology, we can ensure better administering of our planet’s natural resources and create a more sustainable future for generations to come.
Andrey Koptelov is an Innovation Analyst at Itransition, a custom software development company headquartered in Denver. With a profound experience in IT, he writes about new disruptive technologies and innovations.
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.
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]
A third-generation Colorado farmer, Marc Arnusch grows barley and other grains on 2,200 acres in the Prospect Valley east of Keenesburg.
His son, Brett, joined Marc Arnusch Farms after he graduated from Colorado State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences in 2018. “We didn’t know if he’d come back to the farm or not,” Arnusch says.
But Brett did come back to the farm, and as the chief technology officer implemented soil moisture probes and drone imaging. He also helped develop proprietary software to manage the farm’s operations.
“Halfway through college, he discovered there was a whole new environment in production agriculture on the tech side,” Marc Says.
Brett has implemented precision technology in the farm’s irrigation system while integrating a wide range of data on planting schedules, weather and crop protection into the farm’s decision-making process.
“He’s really helped us find next-level efficiencies,” Marc says. “We’re just making decisions quicker, and decisions are made easier.”
One example: Soil moisture probes revealed some hail-stricken crops were not going to survive in summer 2018, so the farm turned off the spigots and other inputs. “We knew the crop was giving it up, and that saved us a significant amount of investment that ordinarily we would have put into the crop,” Marc says.
Marc says he likes to be a smart adopter instead of an early one, but notes that the farm—and agriculture as a whole—is often on the cutting edge. “We’ve had autonomous, self-driving tractors since the early 2000s,” he notes. “Adopting the right technology on our farm has rewarded us so far.”
The operation is currently beta-testing a sensor-driven irrigation system to more efficiently water the crops. “It’s basically looking inside the plant we can’t get inside of as farmers and agronomists.”
“Without question, I would say technology has reduced our dependence on labor, and we’re coming up with better quality,” Marc says. “We have to continue to adopt these technologies to survive, evolve and innovate.”
He adds, “Sustainability starts with having a profit, because if we can’t meet our obligations to others, we’re not going to be here.”
Arnusch Farms is not unique. “Agriculture’s always been technologically sophisticated, it just doesn’t look like it to the outside observer,” says Gregory Graff, who has been researching the rise in investment in agtech at Colorado State University for nearly a decade. “People see lots of mud and broken-down equipment and stuff like that.”
Annual worldwide investment in agtech was hovering around $200 million until it took off starting in 2007 and exploded when Monsanto bought weather modeling startup The Climate Corp. in 2013 for about $1 billion.
“Suddenly, cha-ching!” says Graff, a professor in CSU’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “Venture capital more or less drank the Kool-Aid, whatever analogy you want, but they really bought the storyline that agriculture was an undiscovered behemoth of an industry ripe for disruption technologically.”
While noting there was “a bit of hubris” in the investment community’s mindset, Graff points to AgFunder’s 2022 report as a sign of the times: It pegged foodtech and agtech investments at $52 billion worldwide in 2021, up a whopping 86% over 2020. Agtech is about a third of that, give or take.
The numbers depend, of course, on what you count: Most agtech can be categorized as biotech, chemistry, software or mechanics, but some analysts lump in B2C platforms and other food-centric models. “It’s so diffuse, nobody understands how big it is,” Graff says. “And the venture capital investment has absolutely surged since that 2013 shot over the bow. These last 10 years have seen a runup of enormous scale.”
How has all of this investment affected farmers and ranchers? “It’s given them password anxiety,” laughs Graff.
Passwords aside, he adds, “I think what you’ve seen the farmers doing is adopting piecemeal and pretty conservatively relative to what the tech optimists would have liked—or even would want you to believe, especially if you’re a VC investor thinking about putting money into them.”
Regardless, Colorado is at the forefront, with an agtech cluster that’s gaining international attention. Startup Genome ranked Denver-Boulder fifth in the world for its agtech and food startup ecosystem in its 2022 report on the sector. “I can say confidently we’re one of the leading hubs in the country,” notes Graff, who tracks 110 active agtech companies in the state. “Silicon Valley always wins, no matter what, but they’re winning by less and less lately.”
Saving labor with wireless cameras
And many of Colorado’s ag-focused startups are gaining traction. Take Barn Owl Tech in Colorado Springs. Founder and CEO Josh Phifer was raised on livestock ranches in Wyoming and Nebraska. “I grew up with the problems of having assets spread out over dozens if not hundreds of square miles,” he says.
After Phifer served in the U.S. Air Force, he saw the possibility of using wireless cameras on farms and ranches during his military experience and launched Barn Owl in 2016.
“At a large farm or ranch, they spend about 30% of their labor literally just checking on things, driving around and checking on things,” Phifer says. “If you have a fully deployed set of cameras, you can cut that down by more than half, so you’re saving 15 to 20 percent of your overall labor. If you grew up in ranching, you know there’s always more work to do, so it’s not that we’re replacing labor, we’re just giving the time back to do more effective and efficient things.”
Revenue has been increasing at an annual clip of 250% in recent years, Phifer says, with about 60% of sales going to agricultural customers.
“Farming has become very technology-dependent, everything from automated tractors to GPS-guided fertilizing and planting,” Phifer says. “The livestock side tends to be a little more old-school. Just by the nature of raising young animals, it has to be a more hands-on operation.”
Not that livestock operations don’t have increasingly innovative options: Australia-based AgriWebb, offering livestock ranchers a cloud-based platform to manage their operations, chose Denver over Austin, Dallas and Salt Lake City for its North American headquarters in 2020.
Denver “is the confluence of all of the things we were looking for,” says AgriWebb CEO Kevin Baum. “It’s got a great, thriving and growing technology scene, it is a regional headquarters for so many ag businesses and partners, it is geographically near where our market is in the middle of the country, it has a hub airport, and it’s a great place to live. It ticked all of our boxes, and it wasn’t much of a competition.”
Baum says livestock ranching has historically been “largely run by anecdote, which is a theme we’ve found all around the world. Most farms are managed on pen and paper.”
AgriWebb has gained traction since launching the platform in Australia in late 2015. “There was rapid adoption,” Baum says. “We’ve got about 12,000 users today. Right now, we’ve got about 17.5 million animals on the platform, which is eight times our closest competitor.”
The first employee in Denver, Coby Buck is a fifth-generation rancher. His family’s Wray Ranch in northeastern Colorado became an AgriWebb user soon after he joined the company, and it immediately paid dividends.
“They realized they were overfeeding their cattle in winter,” Baum says. “It was just bang! $80,000 in annual savings.”
That sort of anecdote has been part of the industry for millennia. “Agriculture has been developing technology since the beginning. It’s the original technology. That’s how you keep up,” he says.
“The next wave of that is digital adoption. Data is a tool. It is not a replacement. You still need that farmer, you still need that expertise, you need someone who knows what to do with the data.”
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]
A new state law designed to expand labor rights for people who work on Colorado farms and ranches requires agricultural businesses to pay their employees at least the state’s minimum wage.
The law also provides provisions for overtime pay, but some workers’ rights groups say the measure doesn’t go far enough.
Until now, Colorado farm workers have been exempt from the state’s minimum wage. But since the law went into effect in January, the state’s farms, ranches and other agricultural businesses are required to pay their workers at least minimum wage, which is $12.56 per hour.
Farms and ranches also must begin paying workers overtime in November — a month that most agriculture work typically slows.
But the way overtime pay is structured is complicated. Overtime — equivalent to time and a half — will be phased in over a few years. Farm workers will receive overtime after working 60 hours a week, while workers in most other industries are entitled to overtime pay after putting in 40 hours.
The first phase will last until Jan. 1, 2024, when overtime will kick on after 48 to 56 hours depending on the size of the employer and whether the employer is considered “highly seasonal.”
“Agricultural work is highly seasonal,” said Hunter Knapp, development director of Project Protect Food Systems, an organization that fights for the rights of food system workers. “People work for 56 hours a week for up to 22 weeks during planting and harvest time, but other parts of the year, it’s at 48 hours per week. Imagine being a worker trying to track which week is a peak week.”
Colorado Jobs with Justice, a coalition that fights for workers’ rights and economic, racial and gender justice, filed a lawsuit against Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment challenging the rule. The organization claims the rule is contrary to the guarantee of equal protection of the law under the Colorado Constitution.
“It is a monumental disappointment for workers who have long been excluded from overtime and other basic labor rights enjoyed by other workers in the state,” said Pamela Resendiz Trujano, executive director of Colorado Jobs with Justice.
(THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN COLORADOBIZ PRINT MAGAZINE SUMMER EDITION – PUBLISHED JUNE, 2022)
It’s mid-May, and Max Fields is planting peas in the magnificent Animas Valley north of Durango. It’s a tedious task, done by hand, one seed per inch for 1,000 row feet. But there are perks, not least of which is working outdoors surrounded by the San Juan mountains of Southwest Colorado, and the satisfaction of working for oneself.
“Being able to reap the fruits of our labor is a huge thing for me,” Fields says. “You build something up every year, and you either see the success or you don’t. But if you’re good at what you do, then you do see success and you can look back on a lot of hard work and feel good about it.”
Fields and business partner James Plate are good at what they do. (And yes, Fields and Plate are their real names.) Friends since kindergarten, they are first-generation farmers and ranchers (they also raise sheep). Little if anything in their backgrounds suggested they’d pursue careers in agriculture, much less succeed at it. Both grew up in Denver, attended East High School and then enrolled at Fort Lewis College in Durango.
Fields to Plate Produce
“James was studying agriculture when we first got here, and I started taking some ag classes,” Fields says. “We met some farmers and started farming with them and just kind of fell into it. We saw some gaps in what other farmers were doing in this area and felt like we had a good chance to fill those gaps. And we really have. We’ve become one of the more reliable organic farms and probably one of the larger small-scale organic farms in the area.”
Fields credits Beth LaShell, an instructor in the ag department at Fort Lewis College and current coordinator of Old Fort at Hesperus, the site of an ag incubator program where Fields and Plate got some early firsthand experience on how to run a farm and make it work financially.
Fields to Plate Produce
Fields and Plate have operated Fields to Plate Produce since 2013. They’ve been on their current site in Animas Valley for four years where they lease 120 acres, 10 of which is used to grow certified organic vegetables, the rest for raising about 300 sheep and growing hay.
Their main crops are carrots, beets, parsnip, potatoes and winter squash. They also produce a lot of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage. To compensate for a high-altitude (6,600-foot elevation) and a frost-free season of fewer than 100 days, most of the harvest takes place in the fall. Vegetables are kept in a cold-storage root cellar and sold throughout the winter. Fields and Plate, who both turn 30 this year, work with two wholesalers – one in Montrose, the other in Aspen – who distribute their produce throughout the Western Slope and as far east as Colorado Springs.
Fields to Plate Produce
The business is profitable and continually evolving. This year, Fields to Plate Produce is experimenting with on-farm dinners. “We’re on the river, and we have all the farm-fresh ingredients,” Fields says. “We can butcher our own sheep and do a straight farm-to-table dinner experience. We’re doing it for friends and family now, to get it dialed in to the point where we can charge a premium for a ticket.
“We’re always reinvesting,” Fields continues. “We only have one employee, so we’re just trying to make our processes as efficient and mechanized as possible so we don’t necessarily have to hire a whole lot more people to maintain a productive farm.”
Breaking Barriers
Colorado is among the top states for first-generation farms and ranches, with 31% of ag operations categorized as “beginning” producers. That makes Colorado tied for fifth among all states for percentage of farms and ranches in the state that are startups.
Kate Greenberg worked with young and first-generation farmers and ranchers all over the West before being appointed Colorado Commissioner of Agriculture two years ago, and she continues to work with them. What attracts someone to this life?
“A lot of the commonalities I’ve seen over the years are the desire to run your own business, basically to be your own boss; and a desire to not just know where your food comes from but be the one who’s growing and raising your own food and the food for your community,” Greenberg says. “A lot of the first-generation producers I’ve worked with are actually multi-generation producers who have skipped a generation or two. So a lot of them can remember grandparents who had farms or ranches or stories of their families’ farms or ranches. And they’re looking to get back, not to what it was, but back to a sense of that connectedness with the ground, with the earth, with the natural world and all the factors that allow us to eat on planet Earth.”
But the barriers to making a living off the land can be steep. “The top barrier across the country, including Colorado, for first-generation producers, is access to land and capital,” Greenberg says. “And access to land is typically a capital question – having the cash to buy the land. Those are challenges we’ve faced for a long time, and we’re not seeing substantial alleviation, just based on the market for land in Colorado. But there are efforts, certainly at the policy level, to try to alleviate some of that. I think beyond that, training and education is often a barrier. There are ways to minimize that barrier. We’re trying to do that with our ag workforce development program, which is a paid apprenticeship program. So they actually get their hands dirty on an ag operation, and then they can say after a six- or nine-month internship, ‘Actually this isn’t for me; I’m going to do something else,’ or they can say, ‘Oh, man, this is absolutely for me, and now I have an “in” with an ag family or an ag business, and I have a resource hub where I can access more tools for taking the next steps.’”
From Film Maker to Western Slope Orchardist
Harrison Topp and his wife and partner, Stacia Cannon, own and operate Topp Fruits, a 40-acre certified organic orchard operation divided between 15 acres in Paonia and 25 acres in Hotchkiss. As with Fields and Plate, there was nothing in Topp’s upbringing that would have suggested a livelihood in farming. He grew up in Evergreen, then attended New York University, graduating in 2009 with a double major in film and television production and anthropology.
Topp Fruits’ Stacia Cannon and Harrison Topp
He then spent three years working on a film project in Western North Carolina about Appalachian culture that resulted in the feature-length film, “If I had Wings to Fly.” It was during that immersion in agrarian culture that he became interested in farming as a livelihood.
“I love the intersectionality of agriculture,” Topp says. “I love how agriculture exists at the intersection of the environment and the economy and society and culture, and simultaneously you can hop in a new GPS-driven tractor, yet use a shovel that your great-great-great grandpa used. We’re first-generation, but for most people, farming contains both this incredible heritage and tradition as well as this very modern future. It’s an extremely intersectional industry, and I think I’ve always loved the opportunity and challenge that provides.”
Topp spent a few years farming mostly vegetables for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in North Carolina before returning to Colorado and making plans for cultivating the 15-acre orchard in Paonia that his family owned but was not operating. The tenants who were leasing the property were going to be vacating it, making it available to Topp. His first harvest in 2013 was a success. But farming fortunes are nothing if not fickle. The next year, a spring freeze hit just as his trees were in full bloom, ruining his crop.
Still, he says, “There’s a lot of things about orcharding that I realized are really advantageous, including our ability to participate in federal programs.” Among them: “Loan programs, resource management programs. Those became accessible to me with a slightly more to-scale commercial orchard than when I was doing the smaller-scale vegetable growing.”
Topp explains that while 40 acres would be very small for a commodity vegetable operation or livestock ranch, it’s about mid-scale for a commercial orchard.
He continues, “And beyond the logistical pieces of it, once I really learned what it was like to grow a fresh, wonderful juicy peach and see other people eat that and enjoy it, there was nothing else that felt that good. It was just the most fun thing in the world to grow.
“It’s a rewarding but extremely challenging enterprise,” he says. “But one that we’re really dedicated to. We’re dedicated to being a part of the food system.”
Topp Fruits
Topp and Cannon both have jobs off the farm. Topp works full-time as membership director of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union; Cannon is on the board of directors for the Delta Montrose Electric Association.
Asked how his education at NYU has come into play in agriculture, he says, “I think the thing that has translated from film school, both to the farm and to my work at the farmers union, is developing a vision and having the project-management skills to execute that vision. When we made our film in Western North Carolina, we worked with 50 to 100 volunteers and cast. If I took away anything from my experience learning how to make films, it’s about how to realize the final vision of a project. There’s the creative side and there’s the project-management side. And I’d like to think I bring a little bit of both of those to what I do. You definitely need the ability to work with people, the ability to work in systems, the ability to coordinate and plan projects.”
Topp, 34, has no shortage of reasons why farming appeals to him. One is family. Topp’s parents are both actively involved in the operations; his brother is a part-owner.
“We’re running the farm as a business, we’re running it for the values we want to bring to agriculture and our food system,” Topp says. “But also, though it’s not the purpose of the farm, we’ve learned that the farm really challenges us to have a deeper and more important relationship.”
Pueblo Enterprise Started as Teen
Shane Milberger’s start in commodity agriculture began in 1986 when he was a 17-year-old high school student. Encouraged by his father, he leased several acres from a neighbor, grew vegetables on it and soon after that, bought a small tractor.
“We grew everything you’d see at a farmers market or flea market, because that was where I sold them,” Milberger says.
Today, Milberger Farms encompasses 280 acres, much of it certified organic, on St. Charles Mesa near Pueblo. Milberger likes to say that his crops span the alphabet from asparagus to zucchini, but his specialty crops are pinto beans and a variety of chiles.
His primary customers are produce markets, restaurants, retail grocery stores throughout Colorado, wholesale produce distributors and commercial food manufacturers.
Milberger Farms
In 2009, Milberger and son Dalton opened a small produce stand on Business U.S. 50, east of Pueblo. Over time, they built that into a deli-style restaurant with a salad bar and bakery.
The latest development on the farm is a line of fire-roasted chiles, vacuumed packed and flash-frozen in a commercial processing plant built specifically to process chiles throughout the harvest season.
Milberger runs the farm and the store (including the restaurant) as separate businesses. The store employs 25 people at its peak.
“On the farm, if we could find them, we would employ up to about 35 people,” Milberger says. “But at the moment we only have 20 people, and we’re actually short-staffed. We can’t keep up with the harvest at the moment.”
Milberger says in his younger years he was running with the wrong crowd. He credits his father for steering him away from that, toward agriculture.
“The group of guys I was running around with – three of them ended up in prison out of the four of them,” Milberger says. “I always have to show my dad gratitude for seeing what was going on. He sort of pushed me into farming. What it did was allow me a lot of freedom. More freedom than what a 17-year-old should have. On the other hand, it gave me a lot of responsibility. And I enjoyed it. The older guys who ran all the roadside stands actually took me in under their arms and kicked me in the ass when I needed it and told me I did a good job when I did. And they sort of helped me out with marketing some of my products, telling me why I shouldn’t have grown this and why I should have grown something else.”
Asked to assess the current state of farming, Milberger responds, “It’s just really a tough game. I was raised not to give up. I should have given up farming two or three times, but I just couldn’t do it. And I’m glad I didn’t.”
Milberger’s son Dalton, now 24, is interested in continuing the family farming tradition that Milberger started.
Asked if he still sees farming as an attractive livelihood, Milberger says, “Half the time yes and half the time no. It is a good career. It’s fun. You’re with your family. His (Dalton’s) wife is our bookkeeper. He had a son a couple years ago, and now he’s on the farm every day, running around. You can’t go get a job and have your family with you like that. So for those benefits, it’s awesome, it’s great. My other son runs my store. Financially, it’s very stressful and very hard. We worked our tail off this spring; we’ve got our crops ready to go. They’re ready to harvest and I can’t find enough people to harvest. So we’ve actually abandoned part of our fields already that should have been harvested. It’s sort of heartbreaking because we worked so hard to get this ready to go, and it’s a beautiful crop – asparagus. It’s a very hot commodity. Everybody wants it. That’s why we grow it, because we can sell it. And we couldn’t because we didn’t have the help.”
Sarah Gleason: Marketing Guru-Turned Bison Rancher
After 10 years as a marketing specialist for companies that included Whole Foods and the Savory Institute, Sarah Gleason got into bison ranching full-time a little more than a year ago. At the Boulder-based Savory Institute, she worked with farmers and ranchers worldwide and learned about regenerating grasslands through holistic land management. Now she’s one of those ranchers.
Located 15 miles southwest of Durango, Gleason Bison is a holistically managed, grass-fed bison operation. “Our desire is to weave together the relationship between the animals, the environment and the community resulting in an intimate knowledge of where your meat comes from and the essential role the animals play in creating a healthy ecosystem,” says Gleason, 35.
Gleason Bison operates on just under 900 acres. Gleason has a 10-year lease on the property, with a right of first refusal if the owners decide to sell it.
As with other first-generation farmers and ranchers profiled here, there was little if anything in Gleason’s upbringing to indicate she’d develop an interest in working on the land. A Division I athlete, Gleason swam for Texas Christian University and earned a degree in political science. She grew up in Colorado Springs where here father was a health-care executive. Her father-in-law is a lawyer, and her husband is a physician. “I’d have to go back generations to find the last farmer or rancher in my family,” she says.
In a cold Sunday afternoon, Colby Townsend is feeding 3,000 Rhode Island Red hens that lay 14,700 brown eggs each week at Hayden Fresh Farm south of the small town of Hayden in northwest Colorado.
Small business co-owners Townsend and his wife, Michelle, have not been able to take a day off since mid-March last year when pandemic-related restaurant restrictions hit their wholesale accounts hard. In a rollercoaster business year, the couple worked 12 hours a day reacting to the changes necessary to keep the farm aloft.
“The pandemic was the best thing/worse thing that happened to us,” Townsend said in December, with hens softly clucking in the background. “It definitely stressed us out. But we diversified ourselves so much we feel that we can survive other closures.”
During the pandemic, some consumers turned to local farmers and ranchers as a purchase point, so businesses such as Hayden Fresh Farm had to diversify quickly. The Townsends set up two roadside farm stands, increased fivefold eggs sold locally through the nonprofit Community Agriculture Alliance’s Marketplace and prepped to sell every week at the local Saturday farmers ’market. Their egg sales moved from 10% direct to consumer and 90% to restaurants and stores instead to 70% direct to consumers.
“The diversity has allowed us to stay in business, and while it’s more work in the short run, it will allow us to have increases and always have the capacity to meet our break-even over the long term,” Townsend said.
Increases in staff time were countered by a 20% higher profit margin for direct sales, Townsend said. However, the owners also needed to beef up equipment by buying a delivery van, procuring mobile credit card sales technology, improving their e-commerce website and scrambling to buy more individual egg cartons instead of reusable bulk crates.
Townsend believes some reasons the farm experienced direct sales success are customers who wanted to know where their food was coming from, have fewer layers of people handling their food and stay away from crowds at grocery stores.
At the Community Agriculture Alliance storefront in Steamboat Springs, local food sales and customers quadrupled the first pandemic week in March 2020, said CAA Executive Director Michele Meyer, who then added refrigerators, freezers, store hours and part-time staff.
“When people couldn’t find eggs and meat at the grocery, they found us,” Meyer said.
Becca Jablonski, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University, said 7 million additional U.S. households turned directly to producers in 2020. Experts say that growth in direct agricultural sales across the state could benefit the industry long term due to the increase in consumer knowledge and appreciation of local food production.
“Based on a national survey of 5,000 households, at least 6% reported purchasing direct from farmers and ranchers for the first time during the pandemic,” Jablonski said.
Resources connect farmers, ranchers directly to consumers
State agencies, nonprofits and supportive volunteers stepped up during the pandemic to help local farmers and ranchers reach more consumers directly. Some online resources include:
ColoradoProud.com – Colorado Department of Agriculture staff created an updated, categorized directory to link consumers more easily to small businesses. The site lists 184 vendors. “Meat, Poultry and Eggs” is the most visited category.
Facebook.com/ShopColoradoFarms– A Loveland digital marketing professional created this Facebook group in May, modeled after Shop Kansas Farms, as a community service effort and an educational and networking forum. In the first eight months, the group added 11,743 members.
CoFarmersMarkets.org – The nonprofit Colorado Farmers Market Association based in Fort Collins lists 60 member markets including summer, winter, year-round and online markets across the state. Experts say more than 100 markets take place across Colorado.
ColoradoProduce.org/colorado-grown – The nonprofit Colorado Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association links to a variety of produce resources across the state.
Colorado Farm Fresh Directory (found on https://ag.colorado.gov/publications) – The CDA updates this annual consumer guide to farmers’ markets, farms, ranches, u-picks and roadside stands.
Sure, Colorado is the highest state in terms of mean elevation and sees the most skier days and has the highest per-capita economic impact from craft brewing.
But one superlative flies under the radar in the Centennial State: growing proso millet.
Proso millet is a drought-resistant grass that produces a small cereal grain after a 60-day growing season. That makes Colorado perfect for it.
Millet thrives on the Eastern Plains. Farmers grew it on 320,000 acres in Colorado – or about 1% of the state’s farmland – in 2019, with a harvest of more than 11 million bushels, or $61 million.
Those numbers represent about two-thirds of the total U.S. acreage (506,000) and production (16.6 million bushels) for the year, up from about 50% in 2015.
Chris Stum sees potential for more. He grew millet on about a third of his family’s 4,000-acre farm near Towner, Colorado in 2019. When his grandfather started growing millet in the area in 1960s, Stum says, it “wasn’t his first option. Wheat didn’t make it, and it was our spring crop option.”
The increasing severity and regularity of droughts in the past 25 years has made millet even more attractive for dryland farmers who, like Stum, operate without irrigation. “Around 2002, we shifted over from primarily wheat to primarily millet,” he says. “It really came down to water.”
The market has been somewhat volatile. Millet prices spiked to nearly $50 per hundredweight in 2012 before slumping to $5.50 in 2013. “That really shook up the market bad,” Stum says. “You want a more stable price [for retail].”
To help steady the ship, Stum has served as president of the High Plains Millet Association since it launched in 2017. The organization now has about 100 members, 80 of them in Colorado.
A checkoff program, where a small per-bushel fee would go back to fund millet marketing and research initiatives, narrowly lost a vote among Colorado millet producers in 2018. “I really wanted it,” Stum says.
The next quinoa?
In places like China and Egypt, millet has been part of culinary traditions for millennia. “It’s an ancient grain,” says John Addison, marketing specialist with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “It’s been around 7,000 to 10,000 years. In India, it’s basically a staple.”
But it’s not close to that level in the U.S. About 80% of Colorado millet is exported; Asia is the top market.
When it stays at home, most of Colorado’s millet is used as bird seed, much of it by way of Seattle-based Global Harvest Foods’ plant in Akron, Colorado.
“Some of the millet guys are like, ‘How come quinoa is booming? Why can’t millet do this?'” Addison says. “If there was more demand for millet in the human food chain, especially in the United States, the price would go up. But it’s not so easy.”
It should sell itself. “Millet is the most nutritious, least allergenic crop,” says Jean Hediger, president of Golden Prairie in Nunn, Colorado. “It’s a fabulous grain. Tastes great, very versatile — it can be used for so many different things. It’s a Colorado grain. It helps support American agriculture, which I think a lot of consumers care about how.”
Why import quinoa from South America, she argues, when millet is a more sustainable, less expensive food that’s grown locally?
Golden Prairie is one of the largest suppliers of organic millet in the country. Hediger says the company sells more than 1 million pounds of millet a year in 25- and 50-pound sacks. “If you buy organic millet almost anywhere in the United States, it’s coming from Golden Prairie,” she touts.
The Hediger family has been growing millet as a spring crop for more than 15 years, and plants it on about 800 acres in a given year. Golden Prairie also works with other farms that grow
organic millet on about 30,000 acres in all in Colorado as well as Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and the Dakotas.
Bay State Milling processes Golden Prairie’s millet in Sterling. Grocery stores sell the finished product in bulk, and a wide range of food manufacturers as well as breweries and distilleries use it as a raw ingredient.
Millet is already in Kind Bars, whiskeys from Feisty Spirits in Fort Collins and Chicago-based KOVAL Distillery, beers from Holidaily Brewing Co. in Golden, flour from Denver-based Ardent Mills, and Millet Tots from Boulder’s RollinGreens. Some chefs, like Erik Skokan of Boulder’s renowned Black Cat Bistro, have embraced it as well.
“Millet’s really been discovered in the last year, very much so,” Hediger says. “Remember, 10 years ago nobody knew the word quinoa, and now it’s the hottest thing.”
To further elevate millet, innovation is needed, Hediger says, noting that universities develop new wheat varieties every year as they’ve neglected millet since the early 1990s. “New varieties that benefit agriculture and consumers need to be developed, but there’s not funds to do that,” she notes.
Processing is another issue. Dehulling capacity is “a bottleneck in Colorado,” Addison says, noting that Bay State is the only large-scale operation geared toward human consumption in the state. “We have to have facilities to dehull our millet. When you take it into human consumption, you’ve got to take the hull off the millet. It’s too hard – you won’t digest it.”
While she’s “really happy” with Bay State, Hediger says the millet industry as a whole would benefit from more dehulling capacity in Colorado. The catch? “It’s a big deal to build a millet facility. There’s a reason why there aren’t a lot more of them in the country, because it’s a complicated process.”
Stum says he looked into going into millet processing himself but hit several roadblocks. “I’ve pursued it, but I ran out of time and I ran out of money and – the bigger thing – I ran out of personnel. You need somebody to run it.”
He adds, “You need more people in the U.S., preferably locally but in the U.S., who are processing and FDA-certified to sell into human consumption. That’s probably the biggest hurdle, all of the inspections. That takes a lot of money.”
It’s supply and demand, Stum says, with sky-high dehulling demand and limited capacity. “Maybe people will see opportunity there and that can balance itself out.”
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
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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]
