Trouble brewing for area barley growers

Bottomed-out barley prices are forcing more area farmers to turn to booze — not for kicks, but as a new commodity.

Feed-barley prices hit a 20-year low in 1999, hovering at little more than $2 a bushel, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting no recovery this year, predicting prices will remain steady in the $1.95 to $2.15 range.

The price for feed barley in Denver has already dropped to $1.64 a bushel, or $4.10 a hundredweight, according to Farmsource, an Internet agricultural data service.

Farmers have an alternative to bad feed-barley prices — growing malting barley — but it’s not an easy one.

The attraction is obvious. While the glutted grain market continues to bode badly for feed crops, including wheat and corn, malting barley has a base price of $6.60 a hundredweight. Plus, farmers can get a bonus of .30 per hundredweight if the barley is premium quality and .25 per hundredweight if they meet or exceed their allotment.

It sounds great, and for many farmers, it is: Larimer and Weld counties are already home to at least 184 malting barley growers with 13,046 acres of land in production, said Allen Matsuda, area manager for Coors Brewing Company’s grain elevator in Longmont.

However, the malting-barley route has some downsides. For starters, Colorado doesn’t offer many markets for the crop. In fact, Coors is the only one.

The Anheuser-Busch plant in Fort Collins doesn’t contract with any growers in the state, and neither do microbreweries, such as New Belgium Brewing Company, also in Fort Collins.

“We buy barley from Canada and the Midwest and do our malting out of state, in Wisconsin, because we need a malting-barley plant,´ said Alex Dwoinen, a brewer and malt purchaser for New Belgium Brewing Company.

The job of a malting facility is to plant individual barley kernels under precise temperature and moisture conditions, allow them to germinate and then halt the germination process at the point where a brewer can capture the energy and sugar being built up inside the kernel. The brewer takes these “power-packed pellets,” extracts the sugar and combines it with hops and yeast to make beer, Dwoinen said.

If someone built a malting plant in Colorado, microbreweries would have more incentive to buy the crop from local farmers, he said. But such facilities are expensive and take a while to establish.

Finding a market, however, is only half the battle for a malt-barley grower. The malting process puts strict requirements on crop quality that don’t apply if the grain’s headed for a feedlot.

In Coors’ case, the moisture content must be less than 13 percent, and the grain must have a protein content of 8 percent to 13.5 percent. Plumpness, a measure of how well the barley will sprout, must be greater than 80 percent, and the color, related to how much mold is present, must be greater than 40 points.

And that’s just the “major criteria,” Matsuda said. Coors also looks at whether the barley is cracked, damaged or diseased.

“It’s so hard to meet those protein specs,´ said Weld County extension agent Jerry Alldredge. “If you don’t hit the protein right, they won’t take it, and you have a field of feed barley.”

Randy Schwalm knows just how hard it is.

He and his father grew malting barley for 25 years on their farm near the Larimer-Weld county line, along U.S. Highway 34. But they stopped in 1985.

“We never could get it to pass,” Schwalm said. “The protein count was always too high.”

The ideal growing conditions for barley are cool, wet springs followed by a hot, dry harvest. A few afternoon thunderstorms at the wrong time of the year can encourage mold growth and, thus, throw off the color just enough to turn a valuable crop into feed, Schwalm said.

“But there are lots of people who grow malting barley successfully around here,” he said.

And despite the challenges that come with the crop, more Colorado farmers are starting to explore the malting option, said Coors’ Matsuda.

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