Agriculture CEO Roundtable execs say they are continually squeezed by growth

Area ag representatives have a lot on their minds in an era of continued reduction of farmland and available water coinciding with increases in regulations that they say make their livelihoods more difficult than ever.

Ten area agriculture representatives from farming to Colorado State University joined BizWest Tuesday morning to discuss the issues they collectively face as an industry.  The CEO Roundtable, sponsored by Plante Moran, Elevations Credit Union and Berg Hill Greenleaf Ruscitti, is a monthly meeting of industry executives discussing their most-pressing concerns.

Overwhelmingly, those on the farming and ranching side lamented the population growth squeezing them out of their livelihoods by taking over farms and water; those on the periphery must contend with regulations made by those who don’t understand the ag industry and consequently make it harder and much more expensive to run their operations.

Many in the industry are counting the days until the next drought, when living in an ag-friendly community will mean nothing compared with residents’ need to keep their lawns green.

“We’re fighting all the time trying to save our irrigation water, and the city of Johnstown building another 1,000 houses,” said Bill Markham of M&M Farms in Berthoud, which grows barley for Coors, among other crops. “The first time we have a drought, they’ll condemn our water for human consumption. You mark my words, down the road, when we have a drought and people can’t water their lawns, the first place they’ll go is to take ours away.”

The pressure on water continues, said Brad Wind, general manager of Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which is building Chimney Hollow reservoir west of Loveland to alleviate some of that pressure, though it likely will not end.

“Northern Water is doubling down on the threat from metro areas,” Wind said. “We have concerns from metro areas, looking north as they do so well. There’s been a lot of news in recent acquisitions in the Arkansas (River), fears of those large acquisitions could occur here in our backyard.”

Bubbling beneath the surface, however, is a growing concern of a lack of understanding of the importance of agriculture in and outside of local communities. It’s left farmers with little faith that the government will do what’s right by agriculture.

“There used to be a philosophy, if you moved into an ag area, you accepted it,” said Joyce Kelly, executive director of the Colorado Pork Producers Council. “We’re seeing people wanting to actively change the ag industry. A perfect example is people who move by DIA and gripe about airplanes.”

Another example is the recent federal cuts by the Trump administration to climate initiatives started under former President Joe Biden, which stand to affect the Colorado research community in a big way, said Gene Kelly, director of the Colorado AG Experiment Station at CSU.

“What’s challenging to the university is how fast this is happening,” Kelly said. “Climate Smarts Commodities, that will probably go away, but we haven’t had time to prepare for that. I think the way we plan our years out, have grants that were supposed to be funding that are  now being held back or eliminated. … We rely on grants from the state, private industry and the feds, and it impacts our programs, we support lot of researchers on grant money.”

CSU’s research in the area of climate smart commodities  — research funded by about $30 million in grants — is designed to help farmers adopt climate-friendly practices, such as soil health that not only helps conserve water, but helps farms survive on less water.

“We have $65 million a year (in total research grants). At least a third to a half is in jeopardy now,” Kelly said. “I get it, but there doesn’t seem to be any method to the madness.”

But the ag industry also is being held back by our own communities, farmers said.  Glade Reservoir has been on the books since the early 1980s, and would be a way to store water for this increasingly thirsty region’s growing population.

“It’s some 40 some years now, and it … it’s the people of Larimer County and Colorado that have stopped that project,” said Richard Seaworth of Seaworth Farms. “They’ve already spent double on what it should have cost, and they haven’t moved any dirt yet.”

As more people move into agricultural areas, farmers are getting squeezed in their own operations, Seaworth added. County planning departments are becoming less tolerant of agricultural operations, and county regulations make it increasingly difficult for farmer organizations to expand on their own land.

“I work with a lot of people in differ segments of government, but you find in every one some people who have an agenda to stop everything that’s going on,” said Bruce Johnson of Bruce Johnson & Associates. “No matter where it is I go, the old squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it takes only one person out of a 10-20 person staff to stop” a project.

Lucinda Womack, principal of Hazel Dell Mushrooms in Fort Collins, harvests a half million pounds of mushrooms a year from her indoor operation. County regulations on building have kept her from expanding her operation.  With the high energy costs that come with her operation, she said she at one point considered solar power.

“In the county, there’s so little incentives,” Womack said, “It would be so insanely expensive to put up solar, it would take me 60 years to pay it off.”

Womack said she would like to grow her operation, but said she doesn’t have the resources to hire people to advocate for her to the county.

Troy Seaworth of Seaworth Farms in Wellington, said the many regulations he and his father face on their farms made their recent grain bin three times more expensive than it should have been “because the county didn’t know what they were doing.”

“We’re not allowed to haul our beets down certain county roads,” his father, Richard Seaworth, said. “People call me and raise hell. People move in next door and everything’s got to be serene all the time and it doesn’t work that way.”

As population moves into ag areas, it affects not just the farmers.

Bob Pemberton, who runs the feed division of Northern Feed and Bean in Lucerne, said if the farmers are being pushed out, he will go out of business.

“If more houses take up land, take up water, and we see that we have to go get beans farther away, have to go to Nebraska or Wyoming. … We have one facility, to expand it, our real deal is boiled down to the fact that we need the Seaworths and the Markhams to stay in business. If they don’t have land to grow crops, we’re out of business. I need these guys in business.”

What it all boils down to is education, from the farmers in the field to the commodity groups, and the university. Those in the industry need to do a better job of educating people about the industry and its importance, said Clinton Sander, marketing manager for A1 Organics.

“We are all educators, and we continually have to educate and when you have high turnover at cities, in planning and zoning departments, all these departments have high turnover, and we start back at the beginning and have to bring them back to level of understanding of our industry,” Sander said.

Carolyn Lawrence-Dill, dean of CSU’s College of Agriculture, agreed: “What I see in this room is a bunch of people describing a gigantic system where you tap one thing and it has an unintended consequence. Each of us has to talk about what it looks like where we’re going to see how this system will work. That’s what I see. None of us is 22 anymore, and we’ve seen it, we need to educate people so earlier in lives they know what’s going on.

“What’s most important is information,” she said. “Our goal is to make sure we’re providing the right information so those conversations can happen.”

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