Its planting time for another year. We are mainly a potato farm - that's where we get most of our income. We raise certified potato seed and size off the bigger potatoes for food for the fresh potato market. We still grow mostly Russet potatoes, but are slowly diversifying to yellow flesh, purple flesh and fingerling potatoes. In the off years we plant brew Barley for Coors, certified grain seed and cow pasture. We grow crops on 4,080 acres with 1,700 to 1,800 potatoes and the rest grain, pasture and alfalfa. A video detailing our operation was produced for the 2010 NPC Environmental Stewardship award.
This highlights some of our activities on the farm to protect the environment. We as farmers need to publicize these activities. We live on the farm and raise our families on the farm and thus protect the land and water. Farming is a very unpredictable business and you need to watch your expenses very carefully, especially on low price years like this one or you won't stay in business. Thus we use field monitoring, traps, soil and plant samples and scientific models to monitor the crops nutrition and pests to only apply products we absolutely need. We have some fields we grow organically and others that we try our best to limit crop inputs and still maximize crop yields. Other accuss us of being "factory farms" but we are still families that care as much as anyone about each other as anywhere else and wouldn't do anything to harm our backyard.
I'll get off my soapbox for awhile and back to the farm. The farm is big. Located in the San Luis Valley of Colorado a valley 100 miles long by 50 miles wide at an altitude of 7,888 ft and is very flat among 14,000 ft peaks surrounding. Precipitation is very low and everything here is grown under irrigation. You can't grow decent weed here without irrigation.
Spring is planting time. The potatoes all already in the ground. It takes about a month to plant the potato crop and 60,000 100 lb sacks of potato seed. Its complicated by this being a certified seed farm and seed lots need to be separated and equipment cleaned and disinfected between lots which slows things down. Shipping was late this year with a glut on the russet potato market so we were shipping markets and seed to other growers heavy during planting. We had a crew of 35 to do this job.
The grain on the other hand is much less labor intensive and needs a crew of 1 1/2 people. This year its been tough. The spring winds have been fierce and since we are in a 3 year drought the corners not irrigated by the center pivot irrigation systems that make those green circles you might have seen from an airplane are struggling with moisture. In the last 3 years the farm has had less than 3 inches of total rainfall. Thus the corners are dying and the wind is tearing them apart and then spreading to the grain fields. Today the wind is just howling and sand is hurling across the young grain fields slowly killing them. I'm applying light irrigations to try to save the crops, but it does not look good.
There is a joined cattle ranch of 8,700 acres. Some of it dryland pasture and some of it irrigated with surface water from the runoff from the surrounding mountains. We run a cow calf operation which means we have mother cows we breed and they give birth to calves in the early spring (really Feb/March). The calves grow up with their mothers running around the ranch's pastures or on the farms fields planted to grass crops. In the fall they are weaned and the calves are sold off at around 500 to 600 lbs to feed lots to fatten them up to around 1,000 lbs for slaughter. A few are selected for new mother cows and breeding bulls to stay on the ranch. So now there are lots of young calves running and jumping around. In the afternoon their mother can join in in the calf play. Its surprising how nimble a big 1,000 lb mother cow can be when they want to be playful. We raise a balancer herd or a mixture of Gelbvieh and Black Angus.
