Spring 2019 Edition
Salute to
Agriculture The Heartbeat of the Plains
1221 Main Street, Ft Morgan CO 970-867-JEEP EhrlichCDJR.com SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 3
Inside
Incubator study to be released....5 Targeting topsoil health..............6 Tech holds the line on ag input costs.........................................7 Auctioneer to community advocate..................................10 Andy Bartlett: Preparing the future of ag........................................15 Everybody’s talking: Mental health on the farm .............................. 20 Sue Hodgson conquers media far and wide..................................24 For Don Brown, agriculture is personal...................................29 On the cover: John Deere 9520RX tractor. Photo provided by 21st Century Equipment.
4 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
SHS FFA welcomes 37 new members..................................33 County cattlemen’s association gathers for a cause...................36 Love of nature inspires Bruce Bosley ..................................... 39 Merino FFA keeps busy with activities ................................. 44 Caliche FFA active in new year.. 45 Ryan Dreitz: All about ag...........46 Treating animals of all kinds......50 There is no ‘try’........................54 County resident conserves 1,200 acres of land ............................ 57 On this page: Corn planting. Photo by Jeff Rice, of the Sterling Journal-Advocate
Staff
This publication is brought to you by the staff of the Fort Morgan Times and the Sterling Journal-Advocate.
Publishers Brian Porter, Fort Morgan Times Julie K. Tonsing, Journal-Advocate Advertising Executives Steve Buxton, Journal-Advocate Kim Francis, Journal-Advocate Andrew Ohlson, Fort Morgan Times Teresa Roberts, Fort Morgan Times Project Editors Geoff Baumgartner, Fort Morgan Times Sara Waite, Journal-Advocate Editorial Staff Jenni Grubbs, Fort Morgan Times Callie Jones, Journal-Advocate Kara Morgan, Fort Morgan Times Jeff Rice, Journal-Advocate Lisa Young, Journal-Advocate Support Staff Sherrie Hunter, Fort Morgan Times Heather Thomas, Journal-Advocate Project Design Kristen Zoellner
Incubator study to be released Demographic profile released, annual meeting in March
By Kara Morgan The Fort Morgan Times
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Morgan County Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Greg Thomason speaks at a gathering of business and economic development leaders in November 2018 at Elaine’s Place.
Morgan County Economic Development Corporation is evaluating whether or not the county is ready for an agribusiness incubator. MCEDC hired consultant Jim Greenwood to conduct a feasibility study about introducing an agribusiness incubator in the county. Greenwood was introduced at an MCEDC event held at Elaine’s Place the end of November 2018, where he discussed his experience as a small business and incubator consultant and his goals to connect with and interview community members to get an accurate picture of the county. Executive Director Greg
Thomason said the survey was released this week. They have had a strong initial response and the results are expected to be compiled by the end of March, after their annual meeting.
Demographics
Thomason also announced the Morgan County 2019 Demographic Profile has been completed. The profile includes demographic information from across the county, including location, climate, employment, housing, population, community and education information, among others. Thomason said the profile, printed in a convenient flyer format, can be utilized by See INCUBATOR, 6
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Targeting topsoil health
Conference looks at ways to improve yield and nutrition
By Jeff Rice
Journal-Advocate Staff Writer
Topsoil was the word of the day at the 2019 Farming Evolution conference in Holyoke Feb. 20-21. In a rain simulation demonstration, Steve Tucker, a Perkins County, Neb., farmer and Claudia Stevenson of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resource Conservation Service demonstrated the damage a half-inch of rain can do to tilled, bare ground. Tucker and Stevenson displayed six metal pans filled with various kinds of soil ranging from tilled, bare soil, tilled soil with stubble, untilled soil with stubble and harvest waste, cov-
er-cropped no-till soil and raw rangeland. When water equivalent to a halfinch of rain was sprayed on the soil samples, some predictable things happened: The water washed the bare soil away, producing a bucket of mud, and the soil samples with greater amounts of cover and vegetation produced less muddy water. But the real lesson was when Tucker upended the soil samples on a tarp and the audience could see that almost no water had penetrated the bare soil while the raw rangeland had little runoff and significant water penetration to the root zone. Dr. Christine Jones, a world-renowned soil scientist from Australia, told the producers and other agribusiness attendees that the key to building new topsoil is to let nature take its course. She laid out the scientific evidence that the food
today’s farmers are producing is less nutritious than the food produced in the 1940s. The reason? Man-made fertilizers don’t provide the plant nutrition needed because crops can’t access the nitrogen in a useful way. “The nutritional value of today’s food is lower than any time in history,” Jones said. “There is a significant mineral depletion in meats and vegetables (including) up to 70 percent depletion of copper from our food supply.” The cause, according to Jones, is planting the same crops over and over in bare soil. With no diversity in plant types in the soil, microbes in the soil cannot access the carbon they need to break down the minerals in the soil and make nitrogen naturally available to the crop plants. “This problem isn’t seen in biolog-
ically active soil,” she said. Dr. Raj Khosla of Colorado State University told the group Wednesday that plowing — once the signature action that precedes a growing season — is actually harmful to soil nutrition. “Ever since the plow was introduced, we’ve been disrupting the soil and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” Khosla said. He explained that maximizing “biodiversity” — a variety of plant forms in a field — is needed to keep the carbon dioxide in the ground where it can be do some good for crops. Cover crops are one key to that, Khosla said, and precision application of seed, water, fertilizer and pesticides is the other. He said he uses a rule of Five Rs — the right inputs, in the right place, in the right amount, at the right time and in the right manner.
from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 12 at the Lincoln County Fairgrounds in Hugo. The forum will feature a keynote address from Executive Director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade Betsy Markey. Markey is also a former U.S. Representative for Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District. Thomason said one topic to be discussed at the forum – an update on ‘opportunity zones’ – may be of particular interest for investors, business owners and homeowners. He said the county includes two census areas, in Brush and Fort Morgan,
with opportunity zones. The Internal Revenue Service describes an opportunity zone as an “economically-distressed community where new investments, under certain conditions, may be eligible for preferential tax treatment.” According to Thomason, the zones were implemented as part of the changes to the federal tax laws in 2018. He explained that the zones can allow investors or businesses tax breaks for their capital gain investments within the zones. He said the forum will also discuss how to foster innovation and how to utilize precision agriculture.
INCUBATOR from page 5
employers interested in attracting employees to the area or businesses interested in investing in the county. The information was compiled by MCEDC from a variety of local, state and national sources, Thomason said, from the census, Colorado Department of Local Affairs, local offices and other sources. Copies of the profile are at the MCEDC office, 300 Main St., Fort Morgan, or call 970-467-7100.
On March 21, MCEDC will hold its annual meeting from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Country Steak Out in Fort Morgan. The theme is “Creating High Performance Communities,” and will focus on the building blocks of a community – from education to housing to new business development. The featured speaker will be Tom Johnson, associate director of community and economic development at Colorado State University. Events ahead Thomason said residents, busiThomason said their office is cur- ness owners or homeowners should rently focused on a couple of events consider attending the Regional in the next few months. Economic Development Forum
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Courtesy photo / Deere & Co.
An array of ExactApply sprayer heads in action at night.
Tech holds the line on ag input costs By Jeff Rice
Journal-Advocate Staff Writer
Darrell Nickal picks up an oddshaped piece of molded plastic and turns it around. About the size and shape of an old car motor distributor, it doesn’t look like much. But when Nickal gets finished explaining what it does, it’s readily apparent he’s holding a piece of the future of agriculture in his hand. Nickal is the tech support manager for 21st Century Equipment’s 16 locations across Eastern Colorado, Western Nebraska and Eastern Wyoming. What he’s holding is John Deere’s ExactApply® nozzle body for liquid sprayers. In simplest terms, the ExactApply controls the application of liquid inputs — fertilizers, pesticides, etc. — in pre-determined amounts depending on the applicator’s needs. It’s all part of the move toward technological innovation as producers work to stay on the land and it’s a move Nickal said equipment man-
High-tech equipment applies only the chemicals needed, where they are needed
ufacturers are keenly aware of. “One of the pressures driving technology is the necessity to feed the world with fewer producers, who have to do more with less,” he said. Lesson No. 1 in any agricultural classroom is that farming has to make money at some point, if not this year then maybe next year; eventually yield has to exceed inputs or you can’t afford to farm. Technology, from selective breeding to genetic modification, has pushed the known crops pretty much to their maximum possible yields for the foreseeable future. Increasingly, farmers are trying to find ways to cut inputs, thus cut costs, in the pursuit of profitability. Precision agriculture, a gee-whiz innovation a decade ago, has become the norm for profitable fam-
ily operations. There’s no point in wasting seed and chemicals on swaths of less productive ground, Nickal said, so a producer needs a way to plant in a population density that optimizes the conditions for that piece of ground. Fields now are mapped using yield measurement during harvest and farmers study seven years or more worth of data to determine proper plant density on any given square foot of ground. “Here on the side of a hill, where you have good soil nutrition, you may want to plant 32,000 to 34,000 (seeds) per acre, but up on the top, where the soil isn’t quite as good, you only want to plant maybe 28,000,” Nickal said, sketching a field on a white board in his office. “But down here, where there’s a washout, you may not want to plant
anything because it won’t grow there.” John Deere’s ExactEmerge® and Ag Leader’s Seed Command® are just two of the planters that producers use to produce maximum possible yield with minimum inputs. Farmers can even plant in straight rows in a circle-irrigated field without wasting seed on the row ends. The planter, which always knows exactly where it is in the field, will selectively shut off planting as individual sections leave the circle. Once the producer has saved money on seed, he also wants to save money on fertilizer and pesticide application. Nickal points out that variable rate application of liquid inputs is crucial for two reasons; obviously for financial reasons, but also to minimize ecological impact on the field. “The land that grows the crop is the farmer’s livelihood, and he wants to take care of that land,” See EQUIPMENT, 8
SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 7
EQUIPMENT from page 7
Nickal said. “You don’t want chemicals leaching into the groundwater or running off the field because that’s your drinking water, or your neighbor’s water. So you want to apply only the chemical that’s going to benefit the crop.” Enter the ExactApply. The device is a six-nozzle array mounted on a turret that can be rotated to bring two nozzles into line at a time. When set up ahead of time, the device can activate either or both nozzles to give the producer an array of application options. “You can open a large nozzle that applies a lot of liquid or a small nozzle right behind that applies half that much, or you can open them both for maximum application,” he said. And like the planters, the nozzle bodies turn on and off depending where they are in the field, so chemicals aren’t wasted on bare ground. The nozzle arrays pulse, too, up to 30 times a second to assure uniform droplet size. To truly maximize efficiency, some applicators will spray only where there are weeds or only where there are crop plants. John Deere’s Blue River Technology® and Trimble’s WeedSeeker® are among the machines equipped with what is called “see-and-spray” technology. Miniature cameras and weed-recognition software identify individual weeds and spray only the weeds as the machine moves through the field. The same technology can be used to selectively apply fertilizer to the crop. According to Ben Chostner, vice president of business development for Blue River, producers can cut their herbicide use by as much as 90 percent with see-and-spray technology.
Courtesy photo / Deere & Co.
The ExactApply sprayer head with color-coded nozzles attached.
“Suppose you’re spraying three fields in one day,” Nickal said. “You can push a prescription to the equipment in the field while it’s being driven down the road from one field to the next, so you don’t have to stop and set everything up.” It’s not just the planting and application equipment that uses wireless downloading of data. Warning light on the tractor engine? Use your cell Randy Williams / Deere & Co. phone to call the technical support MTG 4G Telematics module enables folks and a technician in a call center “machine health monitoring,” can use a monitoring system on logistics, controls, wireless your tractor to check the light. programming and remote “If the engine starts to run too diagnostics. hot, for instance, software on the tractor may turn the engine off or The technology can be “pushed to lower the RPM, and then send the field” remotely as well. codes from the engine to a techni-
cian who can check the background parameters,” Nickal said. “It may be a faulty sensor or something that’s not affecting your operation at that moment, so you can keep going and correct it later. It saves having to wait for an hour for a technician to get there.” Other technology keeps the tractor aligned with the implement it’s pulling, which is especially important when working along the contour of a hill or when harvesting sugar beets. The key to success in using all of this technology is being able to store and access the data. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you have to have access to those measurements,” Nickal said. That’s why data nowadays is stored in the cloud. Accidents do happen, and if a tractor or implement is destroyed or stolen, the data gathered by all of those monitors and silicon brains is safely stored on servers only the producer and his technical support people can access. “The data is really more important than the equipment,” Nickal said “We are very concerned about customer data security, and of course we respect the customer’s privacy.” Nickal and his technicians already are looking forward to more innovation in the ag equipment industry. A YouTube video produced by The Daily Conversation suggests that drone-mounted field mapping, driverless tractors, robotic harvesters and weed-zapping lasers are on the horizon as agriculture industries in developed nations try to feed the world’s growing population. “It’s pretty exciting stuff, really,” Nickal said. “Very exciting.”
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Auctioneer to community advocate
Chuck Miller’s is a familiar face – and voice – in Morgan County By Kara Morgan
The Fort Morgan Times
It’s as if everyone in Brush knows Chuck Miller, and rightfully so. He’s approaching 40 years leading Auctioneers Miller & Associates, specializing in auction and farm and ranch real estate businesses. Raised by his parents on a farm in Hillrose, Miller has been learning how to make things work since he was a young child. He thanks his parents, colleagues, friends and community for working with him and teaching him along the way. Part of his process is questioning how the world works around him, working with others and sharing the wisdom he has gathered. During the Brush Beet interview, Miller shared some of his “wisdom” he has picked up through the years. Miller said a colleague, a used equipment dealer, asked him one day what his secret was for building his business. Miller explained to him that he has stuck to one principle for a long time that has made a huge difference. “We were sitting under that shade tree over there after a sale in the month of June,” Miller explained. “I turned to him and I said, ‘Farmers are the most important thing to all of us. The people that actually produce the food, from the ground up. They’re the most important thing.’” “We have always catered to the agricultural production person.” For himself, Miller says he loves
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Chuck Miller sits in his office in Brush working on his real estate and auction business. This year he will be in his 40th year in the auction business.
this work and takes pride in it. “I take a lot of pride. I have every real estate file I’ve ever closed — in 40 years.” To this day, he says he still refers back to some of them. “There’s absolutely nothing else in my life I would do, other than what I’m doing.” “It isn’t work; it’s fun,” Miller said, smiling. “An unbelievable amount
of fun.” “Every time you close a deal, I feel like, I just assisted somebody in doing something that was very important to them, and I feel so honored that they asked me to be a part of it.” “And guess what, they paid me at the same time,” he added, laughing. “That’s the remarkable thing, I get paid to do this.”
Growing up
Chuck Miller was born on March 21, 1959, “My mother’s best day of her life,” Miller says, laughing. The third child out of four in his family, Miller said he and his siblings grew up on a “self-sufficient family farm” in Hillrose. They had chickens, rabbits, hogs, milk cows, beef cows, sheep and See MILLER, 11
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MILLER from page 10
more. For almost everything the family ate and drank, they grew on the farm. “No food went to waste,” Miller added. Scraps went to the pigs, carrots and other vegetable peelings went to the rabbits. “We actually did live off of the farm. We milked the cows and gathered the eggs. We sold eggs and cream every Saturday morning in Sterling, that was for the grocery money.” One of his earliest lessons in the value of the “essentials of life,” Miller said, happened one day when it was his job to collect the eggs. “My brother and I played basketball after dark and then we went and did our chores. My job was to gather the eggs that night. I had a whole basket full of eggs, sitting on the roost, and I stood up and hit the roost with my head and dumped that basket of eggs all on my head.” “Broke every one of them,” he added. “I went to the house with only four eggs. ... I learned a big lesson.” That was the most trouble he ever got in with his parents as a kid, he said, and he learned a lot about the value of even small actions can make
in your life. “A basket of eggs. Walk into the grocery store today, a dozen eggs is $1.29.” “Think about what $10 dollars was in 1969. It was a lot of money.” Miller thanks his parents for teaching him a lot of important lessons about life. The Millers lived on the farm in Hillrose until he was 12 years old. After three bad hailstorm years in a row, Miller said they could no longer afford to keep up the farm and his parents decided to move the family into Brush. While he made the adjustment of joining a new school in fifth grade, his parents made the shift from running a family farm to running the Best Western in Brush. Miller said it was a “big adjustment” moving from Hillrose to Brush, but they found their way. After being heavily involved in 4-H while on the farm, Miller said they no longer had the room to raise a farm animal for a project. Instead, they decided to raise rabbits for 4-H and built a place for them to live See MILLER, 12
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Chuck Miller of Auctioneers Miller & Associates, right, stands with Marlin Eisenach of the Colorado State University Extension as the auctioneer at the Morgan County Cattlemen's Association's 80th annual banquet Feb. 9 at the Country Steak Out in Fort Morgan.
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MILLER from page 11
behind the Best Western. Along with 4-H, Miller said he was very involved in sports, including baseball and basketball. In his summers, Miller found a way to stay connected to agriculture production by working on a farm. During the winters, Miller found work waiting tables. Miller said he had planned to go to college on a scholarship to play baseball, when he realized that it was not what he wanted to spend his time working toward. “When I visited the colleges, I realized, I’m probably not good enough to make the pros, so why would I spend that amount of time?” Miller explained. “I wasn’t going to college to get an education, I was going to college to Jenni Grubbs / The Fort Morgan Times play baseball.” “On my way home on my last visit Auctioneer Chuck Miller, right, is in his element while calling the auction of to college, I made up my mind, I the services of Wiggins FFA Adviser Rockie Ernst at the 2015 Wiggins FFA might as well go to work.” Hired Hand Auction and Steak Sandwich Supper.
Adulthood
and then he began working in cattle Once he got started, Miller said Miller has been in the auction auctions the next year. “there was no doubt” that this was business 40 years this year. In 1978, “Luckily, a local auction company the work he wanted to continue. he went to school for his real estate came to talk to me, and here we are, Miller said he worked for OdleCumberlin for six years in auctions license first, went to auction school 40 years later,” Miller laughed.
and farm sales, when he decided to branch out on his own. “It came time that I needed to make a decision to continue to work there or to reach out on my own.” “One day I decided to reach out on my own, went to work and worked very diligently ever since,” Miller said. Now owning multiple businesses, Miller said it has come together with “hard work and a little bit of luck.” He said he is really thankful for the opportunities he has had, and grateful for those in the community he has worked with and who were willing to work with him. Miller said it has been a lot of work along the way. Building his business in his 20s, Miller said he always wanted to be in his 40s then. “Everybody I was dealing with was 40 years older than me. I thought, if I can just get to 40, then we’re kind of on common ground.” “They didn’t know if this kid knew what he was talking about or not.” As he “paid his dues” and worked his way up, Miller said too he is grateful for the mentors who helped See MILLER, 13
If you’re doing what you love, with the ones that you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. 12 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
MILLER from page 12
him along the way, from those in the auction business and real estate business and from the customers he worked with throughout. “You don’t get anywhere in life without having tons of mentors around you, that you not only learn what to do, but you learn what not to do.” Miller shared one piece of wisdom an auctioneer taught him about humility, just when he was starting out in the business. “The day you think you’re smarter than the guy writing the check, is the day you probably ought to quit,” Miller explained. Miller says he’s “not that smart,” but he has plenty of common sense. It’s clear that he does have plenty of smarts, to ask the questions to understand the world around him, learn from his community, and to return the favor. These are just some of his qualities that made it possible for him to build the multiple businesses he has today.
Career
Miller describes a typical day for him at Auctioneers Miller & Associates. AMA is made up of several businesses, including real estate, auctions and consignment. Miller runs the real estate and outside auction sides of the business, while his son, Bryson, runs the consignment business. After a bright and early start around 5 a.m. each day, he usually begins his day with a workout. “Work out a little bit, some days more than others. “Some days not at all,” he added, laughing. He gets to the office around 6:15 a.m., brews his coffee and gets ready
to talk on the radio for KSIR. “Five days a week, I get ready for a live radio program at 6:45,” Miller explained. “We talk about our business or whatever we want to talk about, it all relates to our business.” Miller said he got into the radio work about 25 years ago, when he decided to try doing their advertisements for the radio himself. Today, he still “cuts ads” for the radio for their business, along with the live radio shows he does twice a day, five days a week. Miller said he enjoys having that outreach in the community, and hearing back from friends and other community members when they hear him on the radio. Miller has not limited himself on the work he focuses on, from real estate to auctions to property rights to radio to many, many more. He joked that it would take six hours to explain everything he is working on. “I’ve had many unique experiences and I help lots of people with lots of things,” he explained. For his range of work and interests, Miller says he approaches a challenge in the similar way, by first asking why something is the way it is, trying to understand it, then figuring out what would happen if it changed. Miller says he questions the world around him “everyday.” “If we change, what are the outcomes? What are the positives, what are the negatives?” “Why is it the way it is, and what happens if we change it?,” he asked. “What could happen?” “But you first got to find out why it’s that way,” he added. “There must be a reason.”
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Miller says he is fortunate to be very busy in his work, so much so that each day he has to prioritize what’s most important. “Honest to God, I take care of the fires that are burning the hottest,” Miller explained. “I am very blessed to have many jobs to do every day, and I can only do what needs to be done that day. I try my best.” “I am blessed to have way more to do than can ever be accomplished in a day.”
Miller says he applies these questions to every property he considers or every situation he approaches. “When I go out and look at farms and ranches, I always look at why things are the way they are. How long have they been that way, what’s the trademark of this particular piece of property?” “Every piece of property is different. Every one. There’s no two alike.” Miller added, too, that this idea applies to the community, that things are run the way they are for a reason, and before a change can happen, it is important to understand how things came to be today. “That’s where you rely on people in a community like this, there’s people who will tell you that,” he explained. “Around our whole community, why things are the way they are and what was the reasoning behind them?”
the agriculture business, as an ag lender for Premier Farm Credit. Bryson, meanwhile, runs the consignment business of Auctioneers Miller & Associates. Like his father, Chuck says Bryson began working in the family business from a young age. Miller described Bryson’s first auction all on his own, at 10 years old. Miller set up Bryson to sell in a ring by himself, but only to sell items that his grandfather first asked the crowd if they wanted to buy. “I had a row of just little stuff carried over from numerous sales and I put it all on pallets and I said, ‘OK, Bryson, you’re going to sell this row today.’” Miller said he had Norma clerk for Bryson and had his own father assist Bryson with managing the items of the sale. Chuck, meanwhile, sold in a different ring. “Pretty soon I had maybe five peoSee MILLER, 14
Morgan County resident Chuck Miller Family addresses the Morgan County Chuck and his wife, Norma, have commissioners during a public hearing March 27, 2018, concerning two children, Bryson Miller and Jocelyn Knutson. the adoption of floodplain Jocelyn is in a different aspect of regulations and definitions.
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MILLER from page 13 ple around me. Everybody else was over watching Bryson, ‘cause they just wanted to see him.” “Then my dad got all into it and was excited, and just started picking up things, and Bryson said, ‘Woah, woah Grandpa, now I’m in charge here, dad put me in charge, we’re only going to sell the things that people want.’” “They were just bidding to hear him auctioneer,” Miller added, laughing. “It was quite a deal.” Today, Miller said Bryson now owns the consignment business of AMA. Beyond his siblings, spouse and children, Miller is now also a proud grandparent.
Community
Miller said Brush is the place he wants to spend the rest of his life. Like the other areas of his life, Miller tries his best to take ownership of his role in the community, what he can do to help the city or to work together with others when a change may be needed. From serving as an auctioneer at the Cattleman’s Annual Banquet or
speaking up about property rights on the local, county, state or national level, Miller is not afraid to speak truth to power. Miller truly believes: “If you want to make a difference, you have to start in your own backyard.” Part of that, he says, is “lending your talent to your peers.” “If your own backyard is clean and operating properly, then that immediately will venture. “We all have got to take care of our own backyard first, and get it proper.” Miller is not naive about how much work that takes and the conflicts that can sometime arise, but he believes it is worth the effort. “That will probably take five lifetimes to do but that’s my whole deal,” he added. He applies this philosophy to his business, his family and his community. Though he says he has never wanted to go into politics himself, he realized that one way he could make a difference is to research the challenges he sees around him and bring that information to the
14 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
government officials himself. As an experienced auctioneer and advocate, Miller says it’s in his nature to be a “spokesperson.” “No one person could know everything about everything,” Miller explained. If he has taken the time to get to know the property rights and challenges in the community around him, then he might as well share that information. “If not you, then who?” Miller says. He said for about seven years he worked with several colleagues on a property rights organization, when he would research property rights almost every day and present his findings to others. Though the organization dissolved, Miller says his work continues, though he misses having the push to work on it almost every day. After decades of work in this community and with decades to come, Miller said he hopes to leave a legacy as an “honest, hardworking man.” “Nothing else matters,” Miller said. “What more could you want?”
Still learning
Miller said one of his upcoming projects he is excited for is in organizing the 3 Rs symposium — Range, Rights and Resources — in mid-April this year. Though the logistics are still coming together, this year’s theme is “Don’t be naive about the essentials of living” and they plan to hold it in Windsor. The focus of the conference will be about the interconnection of food, water and energy and the sharing of perspectives between folks from both rural and urban areas in Colorado. As Miller has this chance to bring together folks from all walks of life and to put his years of experiences and connections to use, he said he looks forward to learning a lot himself from this experience and hopefully it making an impact on other participants. The additional effort Miller puts into this and other projects goes back to his philosophy of making an impact on the community around him. “We all should expect to leave something better than when we started with it.”
Andy Bartlett: Preparing the future of ag Merino native takes lessons from the field into the classroom at NJC
By Sara Waite
Journal-Advocate Editor
It was almost inevitable that Andy Bartlett would end up in an agriculture-related career. The son of the late Agriculture Hall of Famer Charlie Bartlett and longtime Logan County Treasurer Patty Bartlett, Andy is the fourth generation to live on the irrigated family farm outside Merino — a family that descended from farmers on both sides going even further back. That’s where he and his wife, Megan, are raising the fifth generation: son West, 3 and a half, and daughter Coralee, 4 and a half. Growing up, Bartlett added his own bona fides to his agricultural pedigree. He was an active member of the Merino FFA chapter before going on to become the Colorado FFA president. As an honor student at Northeastern Junior College, he was a member of the Aggies, an officer with the Associated Student Government and was named an NJC “Rising Star” student through the Colorado Community College System. After graduating from NJC, he continued his education, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Colorado State University in soil and crop science. As luck would have it, there was an opening in the Northeastern ag department, and
Andy Bartlett is an agronomy professor at Northeastern Junior College.
four years ago he returned home to become an agronomy instructor during the school year while farming in the summers. Bartlett said his interest in soil and crop science started early. He recalls having conversations with his dad about possible career options, knowing that the farm wouldn’t support both of them, and meeting one of his dad’s friends who was a crop scout. The man explained what he did, and Bartlett
agreed that it would be the kind of job he’d enjoy. He flirted with a dual major in ag education, and had a lingering desire to teach. “I’ve always loved NJC, so it was perfect timing,” he explained — about the time he was finishing up at CSU, his ag advisor from NJC was retiring, leaving an opening he was happy to fill. “I get a little bit of both worlds — I get some education and soil and crop science and farming, so it’s
Sara Waite / Sterling Journal-Advocate
kind of everything I could have dreamed of.” Bartlett said his focus was always on an ag-related career; although he’s had other interests, they were always tied to ag. “I enjoy weather, which obviously has a huge impact on ag; numbers, accounting — I think I would have been an ag accountant,” he said. “I always knew I was going to be involved in ag one way or another, but I ended up likSee BARTLETT, 16
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Andy Bartlett, a Northeaster Junior College graduate who now teachers soils/agronomy at the college, speaks about how scholarships he received through the NJC Foundation impacted him during a luncheon honoring outgoing foundation board members.
BARTLETT from page 15 ing the sciences the best.” With his deep roots in agriculture and as a producer himself, Bartlett is able to relate to the spectrum of students in his classroom. He has a mix of those who are looking to get a two-year degree before going out into the field as well as those who will continue their education and approach ag from the more academic side. He also knows some of the challenges facing the next generation of producers: A lot are fortunate to have a family farm they can return to, he said. Others may come from a family operation that will not be able to support an additional person. Still others may have an interest in being a producer, but don’t have those connections. Having those resources — the money, land and water — is a struggle, particularly for the newcomers to ag, who Bartlett said “may be the most intelligent, hardest working student out there,” but will have to find a different way into the game. A lot of students, regardless of where they fall on that list, end up working in other jobs to build up equity in hopes of eventually being able to return to ag full-time. And, Bartlett added, it’s important to
keep in mind that the livelihoods and retirement plans of established farmers depends on those same resources. NJC is working to help students overcome some of the obstacles with the development of alternative cropping programs, which can provide another entry into production ag without requiring the same kinds of resources as more traditional crops, he said. His interest in the science of farming puts Bartlett on the forefront of agriculture, where he thinks the technology available has actually outpaced producers’ understanding of it. Bartlett recalls his grandfather sharing stories about picking corn by hand or using equipment that would harvest one row at a time, but production techniques have come a long way in the last two generations. Today, producers are increasingly reliant on precision agriculture, which breaks down individual fields into much smaller units and uses data points to make decisions like how much seed to plant, when to irrigate and what kinds of fertilizers to use. Bartlett said he believes that there will be further advancements on the scientific side, where agronomists will learn more about how to See BARTLETT, 17
Jeff Rice / Sterling Journal-Advocate
Andy Bartlett examines a student's corn crop in a tub in the NJC greenhouse for a class in 2017.
BARTLETT from page 16
best utilize that data to its fullest extent. That information will help farmers fulfill their mission of “feeding the world.” “We need to produce more food, more calories in general,” he said. “Now we’re realizing we’ve pushed some of the ground to its fullest extent for the time being, but there’s some ground we’re underutilizing, and it’s hard to know where that line is. That’s where that precision side comes in.” But there’s a balancing act, Bartlett pointed out. The data can identify how to maximize yield and even the nutritional value of crops, but farmers also have to consider the business impact of those decisions. “As a producer we can get so caught up in, we want to be the best, we want to produce the most, and a lot of times we can overlook the economic repercussions of that,” he said, emphasizing the importance of weighing the costs of the inputs to ensure that the farm can continue to operate as a business. And right now, that can look a little bleak, with the drop in ag markets and dry weather conditions. “Farmers are persistent and tough,” Bartlett said, “but there’s only so many years of that that anyone can handle.” As an irrigated farmer, he said he’s less concerned with the weather — a big spring rain can make up for the months of dry winter. But thin profit margins on the grains grown in northeast Colorado mean
farmers have to be extremely cautious about their costs — just like any other business, he said. Bartlett said he tries to remain optimistic, and when times are tough, “you make jokes about it.” Bartlett said a lot of what he learned as a student at NJC are things that he can apply directly in the field. His classes at CSU were more of a mixed bag, with some having obvious practical applications, while others were more esoteric. But he said one of the things he enjoys best about teaching is finding ways to connect the science and classroom lessons to information his production ag students can use immediately on the farm. It’s something he tries to provide by using his own experience as a producer to form the basis for what he teaches. And it’s part of the push behind a new certificate program the college is working on for precision agriculture. Jobs in agriculture are evolving, with automation and sensors replacing some traditional farm labor jobs. But the new technology also opens the doors to different kinds of work, Bartlett said, whether that is collecting data, translating the information so it is useful, or even repairing the high-tech equipment when it inevitably breaks down. “There’s a lot of opportunity,” he said. Bartlett thinks that agriculture will continue to be more technology-driven, but it can be tough to preSee BARTLETT, 18
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dict what will be adopted on a wide scale. That can present a challenge for educators who are trying to prepare students today for careers 30 years from now, as jobs evolve to match the technology. A grant that will allow NJC students to work with soil moisture sensors in the greenhouse is part of meeting that challenge, Bartlett said. And NJC has a team competing in a farm management competition through the University of NebraskaLincoln where they will make the production decisions for a small plot in North Platte. The students will be judged on efficiency, profit and greatest grain yield, to allow them to put those soil and crop science lessons to the test. Bartlett said he’s excited about the new opportunities Northeastern is exploring for its ag students. Not only does it provide some new challenges for him professionally, but it gives his students some hands-on experience that they can add to Jeff Rice / Sterling Journal-Advocate their resumes. Colorado Agriculture Commissioner Don Brown, right, and Colorado FFA President Augustus Bill present the Sara Waite: 970-526-9310, Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame plaque and medallion to Andy Bartlett on behalf of his late father, Charlie, in swaite@journal-advocate.com 2017.
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Everybody’s talking: Mental on farm health the Producers’ self-reliance can prompt denial of emotional struggles By Jeff Rice
Journal-Advocate Staff Writer
Suddenly, everybody is talking about mental health and agriculture. When Sterling High School graduate Riley Meisner earned a Boettcher Scholarship last summer, he decided he wanted to attend the University of Colorado to study psychology. He used a widely-touted finding by the Centers for Disease Control that showed suicide among farmers and ranchers was occurring more often than among military veterans. And when hundreds of Coloradans involved in agriculture gather in Denver at the end of February for the Governor’s Forum on Colorado Agriculture, former ag commissioner Don Brown and Centennial Mental Health Executive Director Elizabeth Hickman will be on a panel to discuss mental health among ag producers. Certainly, the CDC finding, which has since been walked back because of confusion over how ag producers were classified, has had something to do with what appears to be a sudden interest in mental health in rural America, especially among farmers and ranchers. It’s about time. See HEALTH, 21
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HEALTH from page 20 A world of worry
If concern over the mental health of ag producers is relatively new in the United States, it certainly isn’t elsewhere in the world. Research papers on the topic have been published in peer-reviewed journals in France, the U.K., Australia and Canada as early as 2002. Each country has its own circumstances, based on geography, climate and culture, but the problem has become especially acute in the U.S. because of this country’s unique relationship with agriculture. For one thing, American farmers are constantly reminded that they are, quite literally, feeding the world. According to the World Atlas, the U.S. is the largest exporter of food and food products in the world, sending almost $73 billion worth of food overseas annually. That’s twice as much as Germany, the secondlargest food exporter. American agriculture has developed over the centuries in a culture of fierce independence and survival. From the earliest settlers at JameJeff Rice / Sterling Journal-Advocate See HEALTH, 22 Dr. James Craig talks about mental wellness on the farm during a recent AgrAbility workshop in Sterling.
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HEALTH from page 21
stown to the homesteaders on the High Plains, farming in America has been a struggle to wrest an existence from the soil, often under brutal conditions. Dr. James Craig, a rural rehabilitation specialist with Colorado AgrAbility, said the farming culture can lead to a feeling that the producer is all alone with his problems. “Working 80 hours a week on the farm, your sole identity becomes ‘a farmer’ — it’s what you’ve known your whole life,” Craig said during a recent AgrAbility workshop in Sterling. “Then stress that is beyond your control becomes unmanageable; changes in weather, economics, technology, and you start to feel overwhelmed. But you don’t have the option to not get out of bed. The well-being of crops, animals and family depends on you, and you can’t show that you are at all impacted, so you feel completely alone.” Also, in the 21st century, American ag producers are faced with some painful realities. Family farms that have been handed down for generations are up against a “grow or die” dynamic caused by slumping commodity prices and rising production costs. Farmers and ranchers have always been caught in that squeeze, but there just isn’t any more land to bust open to plant crops. With urban expansion creeping out across some of the most productive cropland in the country, farm expansion has become less than a zero-sum game; when one farm grows by 1,000 acres, another shrinks or disappears altogether and yet another is swallowed by pavement and rooftops. Then there is the fact that, while some inroads are being made to
keep younger people on the land, America’s farm population is aging, and with age comes a natural change in the body chemistry that keeps human beings optimistic about the future. Clinical studies show that, with age, the production of the hormone serotonin decreases, and this decrease has been linked with depression. Researchers found that, when serotonin levels are restored, stressful information can be processed in the brain with greater optimism. And if there were ever a group of people whose stock in trade is optimism, it’s farmers. Thus, market conditions, the American can-do culture and human physiology have created a veritable stewpot of emotional stressors in the farming and ranching community.
Prevention and intervention
Maranda Miller knows all about those stressors. Miller is the Prevention Services Manager for Centennial Mental Health, headquartered in Sterling. What Miller tries to prevent is suicide, and the idea that the mental anguish, and sometimes even physical pain, has gotten so bad that sudden death at one’s own hand is actually a solution to the problem. But preventing that, as with any disease, means early intervention, and that’s often the hardest part. A family farm usually depends on its patriarch for direction, stability and motivation. When that person starts to give up on life, it can sometimes be easy for him and his family to ignore the warning signs.
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“It’s hard, sometimes, for people to ask for help, especially among men,” Miller said. “But nobody deserves to suffer.” Ending the suffering, or at least helping the sufferer cope and move forward, can be especially difficult in a rural community. Although all Americans eat, almost none have any idea what it takes to produce the food they eat. The urban-rural divide means very few people understand life on the farm, and nobody knows that better than farmers. That leads to the question: How can you help me if you don’t know anything about me? It’s what Craig calls “cultural incompetence.” “A very high number of survey respondents strongly felt it was important that, if they saw someone regarding mental health, that the person … be knowledgeable of agriculture,” he said. “Compared to others, agriculture is such a unique industry, and not easy to understand as an outsider. It’s is a very niche area for health care providers.” Miller agrees. “If we hope to engage the ag community, we have to make sure our message is appropriate and accurately reflects the ag community,” she said. To that end, Centennial Mental Health has developed a series of programs and references to help other health providers and community members spot and intervene in mental health issues. Question, Persuade, Refer is a two-hour course that teaches a three-step suicide prevention program. Working Minds is a two-hour program dedicated to preventing suicide in the workplace. Training programs like Applied Suicide Intervention Skills and Adult
Mental Health First Aid last anywhere from eight hours to two days. Then there’s Man Therapy, an online education campaign that highlights, sometimes with a dollop of humor, men’s mental health issues.
While discussion about mental health tends to gravitate toward the tragedy of suicide, ag producers can be lost unintentionally as well. Farmers distracted by depression and anxiety can fail to observe the safety measures necessary when working around powerful machinery and chemicals. Nobody knows how many on-farm injuries are caused by stress, but it takes only a moment’s forgetfulness to lose a finger, a limb or a life. Even if an injury isn’t crippling, it can require days, weeks or months of recovery and rehabilitation; meanwhile, fields need to be tended and livestock needs to be fed and treated. AgrAbility’s Craig said here is a tendency for ag producers to try to “power through” the pain and get back to work as soon as possible. All too often, he said, they fall back on painkillers to get them back to work, and that has brought the opioid dependency crisis home to rural America. When the pain doesn’t go away with one pill, Craig said, the sufferer will reach for a second and a third just to get through the day. Soon the prescription is gone and the pain is still there. “You’d be surprised what doctors tell me they hear when these guys come back for another script,” Craig said. “I’m not kidding, doctors have actually heard men tell them the See HEALTH, 23
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HEALTH from page 22 dog ate the pills. Or they had the bottle in their pocket and lost it in the field.” Craig emphasized the importance of recognizing symptoms of degrading mental health and being willing to intervene. Some red flags to watch for include increased misuse of alcohol and pain medication, sleep changes, withdrawal from hobbies and favorite activities, aggression and irritability, mood swings and rejection of affection or friendship. “Farmers, by their nature, are
people of routine; the chores have to be done every day, the crops have to be planted every spring and harvested every fall,” he said. “I would say any significant change from that routine should be a red flag.” The key to intervention, Craig said, is sensitivity and compassion. “You don’t want to ask leading questions like, ‘You’re not thinking about killing yourself, are you?’” he said. “You want to show caring concern. Tell the person, ‘I’ve noticed you’ve been upset lately. Have you ever thought about harming your-
self?’ Be sensitive, but be direct. Ask about how things are going, how they’re coping with what’s going on in their life.” Centennial’s Miller has an even more indirect way of bringing up the subject. Centennial Mental Health distributes cards that list the Ten Commandments of Gun Safety. Prominently displayed on the front, outlined in red, is the notice to “Check out the newly added 11th Commandment on the back page.” Turning the card over one finds, also outlined in red and with a red
arrow, the instruction that it’s a good idea to store guns outside of the home during an emotional crisis. “We think the message is pretty clear,” Miller said. “At least we hope so. You know how, when we talk about things like cancer, we talk about (the disease) being at Stage 4? Mental illness can get to Stage 4, too, and that’s when (suicide) happens. We don’t want mental health to get to Stage 4.” Jeff Rice: 970-526-9283, ricej@journal-advocate.com
“Working 80 hours a week on the farm, your sole identity becomes ‘a farmer’ — it’s what you’ve known your whole life. Then stress that is beyond your control becomes unmanageable; changes in weather, economics, technology, and you start to feel overwhelmed. But you don’t have the option to not get out of bed. The well-being of crops, animals and family depends on you, and you can’t show that you are at all impacted, so you feel completely alone.” Dr. James Craig, Colorado AgrAbility
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Sue Hodgson conquers media far and wide Marketing skills allowed for building up Livestock News Network
By Jenni Grubbs
The Fort Morgan Times
Many folks may not realize it, but Morgan County has its own queen of all media. For many years, Sue Hodgson has been working to build a diverse media empire that is based in Brush. She typically stays in the background at Hodgson Media, letting husband Gary Hodgson have the spotlight for his Livestock News Network radio broadcasts and Under the Wire newspaper column. But it has been Sue, using her media savvy and well-honed marketing skills, that helped get the radio show and column the public reach that they now enjoy. It may be Gary’s words that people hear or read, but it is Sue who makes certain the radio shows get broadcast, the columns get sent to publishers and editors, and the bills all get paid. And much of that happens right in the basement offices she and Gary have in their home a little southeast of Brush. After all, Sue has spent much of her life learning and mastering the ins and outs of business management, media, marketing and advertising.
Growing up
Sue was born in Joplin, Mo., but she counts herself as from Riverton, Kan., where her father still has his farm. She recalls him raising soybeans and wheat there, as well as dairy and beef cows. “Dad always had a few head of cattle,” Sue said. “Later he worked for the electric company in town and did shift work. So I would help with the cattle when he wasn’t able to, especially the Holstein dairy cattle.” She also was active in 4-H and Junior Achievement programs as a youth growing up in a rural area. “Where I grew up was right on the tip of extreme south Kansas,” Sue recalled. “It touched the other states. All the things that were ag
Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times
Sue Hodgson stands beside husband Gary as he records a Livestock News Network radio broadcast in his office/ studio at their home south of Brush.
related, it was just my life.” She lived with her family, including two older sisters, two younger sisters and one younger brother, on the farm throughout her youth, graduating from Riverton High School in 1968.
Work life begins
After graduation, Sue decided she wanted to give cosmetology a try. “I went to Cosmetology College of Missouri,” she recalled. “I graduated and was a cosmetologist for a short time. It was hard to make a living doing hair back then — I mean, really hard.” After a marriage did not work out, Sue found herself living in Tulsa, Okla., and seeking work. She found a job in an office with four chiropractors. “I ended up being the manager of it,” she recalled. That was not all the chiropractors she met through this office had in mind for her, though. “Then other chiropractors wanted
24 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
me to set up their office, so I travelled the state and helped set up their offices,” she recalled. And yet another opportunity soon popped up as a result. “Then the state chiropractic association gave me a scholarship and sent me to chiropractic college in Kansas City,” Sue said. “I didn’t graduate, but it was really cool. I wish it had been a full ride (scholarship). I might have graduated.” But at this point she was a single mother, and going to school full time at Cleveland Chiropractic College while also working and caring for young David proved to be “too much” for her. Sue is proud of her time at the chiropractic school in the early 1970s, though, since she only knew of two other women at that college at that time. And all the while, she kept up her ties to the chiropractic clinic in Tulsa that she had worked at. “I would travel back to Tulsa to help with the clinic,” she said. “I had
a full load.” But it was a route that took her through a familiar area. “Fortunately, my parents were about halfway, so I was able to stop and see them on the farm,” Sue recalled. She also had family in Kansas City, where the chiropractic college was located. “I had a sister who lived in Kansas City at that time, so that was good,” Sue said. “She helped me with David.” When her time at the chiropractic college ended, Sue wound up going back to Tulsa and working at the clinic again for a while.
Moving around
After falling in love again, Sue got married. That led to a move to Colorado, since her new husband was working in Greeley. She initially lived in Fort Morgan and then in Greeley. In 1976, Sue gave birth to a daughter, Jessica. See HODGSON, 25
HODGSON from page 24
Over about the next nine years, Sue would move to several other states, including California, Arkansas and back to Colorado, with her then-husband and two young children. But the marriage ultimately fell apart. “He moved us lots of places over nine years,” she said. “I know why that marriage didn’t work out.” In the meantime, Sue had taken on a variety of jobs, including at a weight loss clinic, as a headhunter in Greeley and as a bookkeeper for a trucking company. That last job was something she had actively sought to gain the skills to be able to do, having gone to night school for bookkeeping over a few years and in several states. “I went to classes when I could,” Sue said. “It took a while, but it was very interesting.” And bookkeeping and business were not the only areas where she was gaining work experience over that period. “During that time, I worked in media, too,” Sue said. She was referring to work with sales and marketing for newspapers
milestone to set for women. “I was a divorced woman who got a credit card,” Sue said. “The chiropractic college had to sign a bunch of papers saying I was reliable and had a job.” These were among the challenges she faced and overcame as a working mother. “Back then for women my age and older, there were so many who opened doors,” Sue said. Her own mother had given her the strength to take on these challenges. “My mother was a strong role model,” Sue said, pointing to her creativity and the strength she showed in raising six children. “The ones before us paved the way.” Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times
Sue Hodgson types on one of the multiple computers in her home office.
and cable TV networks, including CNN, ESPN and MTV. This was another job that gave her an entrance into a world where not very many women were working in the same capacity as Sue. “I was one of them that opened so
many doors,” she recalled, sounding proud. “There were three women at chiropractic college. I was the first woman to pump her own gas in Missouri. They started having selfserve stations. It was a big deal.” And she had at least one more
Life-changing day
Even though she had not lived on a farm in some time, Sue kept her ties to her agricultural roots. “During all these years, every chance I had I rode horses,” she recalled. “I lived close to ag and I loved rural America, so I had to get my ag fix.” See HODGSON, 26
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SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 25
HODGSON from page 25
Finding herself back in Colorado, recently divorced again and with her son in middle school and her daughter in elementary school, Sue’s next job was at the agricultural radio station in Brush. “They hunted me down and offered me a job,” she recalled. “It was very good, and it just so happened I was available, so that’s how I got back to this area.” Upon moving her family to the Fort Morgan/Brush area, Sue “met lots of nice people” and wound up staying and working here for several years. But there is one specific day from that time and meeting one specific person that she will never forget. “Thirty-two years ago, I met Gary Hodgson,” she said. “He was the manager of the sale barn, and I raised bucket calves. I called on him for the local media. He wouldn’t tell me how to market my bucket calves at the sale barn.” When Sue showed up at the sale barn (aka Livestock Exchange or LEI), she recalls Gary “kind of laughing” at her and not taking her seriously about wanting to market her own bucket calves. “I had long nails, I was dressed up and I was only 100 pounds soaking wet,” she recalled, acknowledging how she must have appeared to the cowboy. But Sue had the last laugh with these calves. “I put an ad in the newspaper and sold them all,” she said. Amazingly enough, Gary recalled almost the exact same things as Sue about the day they first met, albeit from his perspective. “She came into my office with these long nails, not a hair out of
Courtesy poster
"Double Exposure" featured photography by Sue Hodgson and paintings by Jan Gibson.
place, dressed up very professionally and started talking about raising bucket calves,” he said. “I thought she was just being condescending to this cowboy. I wasn’t impressed.” But he was only thinking about her cowgirl bonafides at that point. “I was impressed with her,” Gary said. “She was a knockout.”
On the move again
Sue did not realize it at the time, but that cowboy at the sale barn who laughed at her would one day change the course of her life forever. But first she would chase a media job opportunity in North Carolina. “I was single and got offered a job in Chapel Hill,” she recalled of the gig in TV and radio in that state.
Before she made the move, Sue visited her media and advertising clients in Brush and Fort Morgan to let them know she was leaving. “I went into Gary’s office, and he said, ‘If I’m ever in North Carolina, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee,’” Sue recalled, pointing out that he was going through a divorce at that time. “I didn’t think anything of it.” So leaving her children to stay with relatives, she made the move to North Carolina and tried to acclimate herself to that state. “I didn’t like the job,” Sue said, also calling the state “not my cup of tea.” She recalled how on the Fourth of July, she told some friends she was visiting that they should “go out on the porch and watch the fireworks,”
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a perfectly normal thing to do on the plains in Colorado. “They said, ‘You can’t see the fireworks. Look at all the trees,’” Sue said. And they were right, she quickly noticed, immediately feeling suffocated by the dense, leafy trees all around her in North Carolina. “I felt closed in,” she said, deciding, “I can’t live like this.” So she moved back to Colorado, finding a media job in Greeley and living with her children again. Not long after returning to Colorado, Sue’s best friend encouraged her to start dating again. “I said, ‘I don’t want a man. I don’t want to get married,’” she said she replied. But the best friend suggested not seeking a relationship, only a dinner companion. “I thought of Gary because I didn’t like him,” Sue said. However, she knew he had a job, so he might be someone who could afford to buy her a nice meal. “So I called Gary at his work from her house,” Sue recalled. “He said he didn’t get to Greeley much, but he took my phone number. He was pretty nonchalant.” His reaction left her feeling a bit hurt. “I told my girlfriend, ‘Men are a bunch of jerks,’” she recalled. A few hours later and now at her home, Sue heard her phone ring. “It was Gary. ‘Just so happens I’m going to be in Greeley tomorrow night,’” he told her. “So he asked me out for dinner.” The next evening, he picked Sue up in a “brand-new vehicle, a GMC car, and took me to dinner in GreeSee HODGSON, 27
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HODGSON from page 26
ley at Potato Brumbaugh’s,” a finedining restaurant in Greeley. After they finished dinner, Sue said Gary told her, “I need to get this car back,” since he had been test driving it. His own vehicle, a dirty farm pickup that he used for hauling cattle for the Livestock Exchange/Sale Barn, was “a far cry” from the fancy car he had driven to pick her up. “You can imagine the odor,” Sue said. “He was needing to get a new car, but I’m not sure how he scheduled it. And then taking me home in a stinking pickup. It was funny.” But that overall evening certainly was memorable for both Sue and Gary. “We’ve laughed so many times from all of it,” she said. “We just really enjoyed our conversation and talked until the wee hours. And the rest, I guess you can say, is history. That’s where my life began.” “I think the significant thing for me that came out of it,” Gary said, “was she was familiar with the lifestyle, took the smells in stride, which impressed me. This was a country girl, even though she was
still pretty easy to look at.”
Settling down
That night led to several months of dating for Sue and Gary. “He got me to move to Fort Morgan,” she recalled. “I went to work for Mel Lanphear, a CPA in Brush.” But that job put a damper on any plans Sue and Gary had to further their relationship. “We couldn’t get married until after tax season,” she said, laughing. That came quickly enough, though, with Sue and Gary getting married on April 25, 1987, at their home in Brush. Sue continued working for Lanphear for a while, but then her media skills led her to another venture, this time with her new husband and his sale barn job. “Gary and LEI wanted to start a newspaper to deliver their sale results,” she recalled of Cattle Country News. “I worked for it.” The couple also did some rodeoJenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times ing together around that time, Sue These are a sampling of the framed photography by Sue Hodgson and recalled. “He did calf roping and team rop- mementos of the rodeos days for her and her husband that are featured on See HODGSON, 28 this wall in the basement of her home south of Brush.
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HODGSON from page 27
“After a couple years, he came home to work full time.” “It was possible to quit because the radio network Sue had put together had really started to take off,” Gary recalled. “I was excited about what it might become.” So Gary continued to put out the radio broadcasts while also raising, marketing and selling calves on their small ranch. “Early on, his dad and I connived and purchased a few heifers from his parents,” Sue said of her and Gary’s calf operation. “That’s what started the herd we have now. So we ranch, and I do all the books for that.” But it was about the time that Gary was looking to quit the sale barn that he heard that cowboy poet Baxter Black had declined to put his column in the newspaper Sue and Gary had been running. Sue said Black had told Gary to write his own humor column, “since he was funAnother new venture ny.” In 1990, Gary was ready for someGary took up that challenge, and thing other than managing the sale Sue got to work marketing “Under barn in Brush. the Wire” and getting it syndicated “Gary quit LEI,” Sue recalled. at various newspapers.
ing,” she said. “I did the ribbon roping with him. We did that for the senior pro circuit after we turned 40. We made it to the finals in Reno, Nev., many times.” Meanwhile, they also had the sale barn’s newspaper up and running. This was about 30 years ago. And then a short while later, Sue had another idea for something they could do. “I brought the radio program home to develop it,” she recalled. “For the first couple years, I worked out of home getting it going.” Sue was selling advertising on “Livestock News Network,” the radio broadcast Gary still does to this day. The couple also “put on calf-roping events at the fairgrounds in the indoor arena,” Sue said. “People came from all over. We supplied the calves. Gary would buy them and go get them from different sale barns.”
“I do all the marketing and bookkeeping,” Sue said. “I receive his columns on a legal size pad, type them up and send them out. I do all the billing.” Putting out the newspaper columns, broadcasting the radio program and handling their cattle has been a love of labor for Sue and Gary now for 31 years. Today, the radio broadcast is fed out to 40 signals in 12 states, as well as on the internet. It has 3 million daily listeners for the Monday through Friday programs. Almost no one who listens to Livestock News Network knows the role Sue plays in the program. Yet without her, very few of them would be able to hear it as it likely would not be syndicated so widely. “With Sue’s expertise, we’re able to syndicate it ourselves,” Gary said. And it continues to be something the couple loves to do. “Very few couples can live and work together 24/7,” Sue said. “We do. We’re living our retirement.” That started at their first house together, with Gary using half of a bedroom and Sue using the dining
room as their offices. Over the years, they grew their media operation and moved to the house that they had built a little over 20 years ago specifically to accommodate their lifestyle and businesses. “I designed it to try to meet our lifestyle,” she said. Sue had several spaces built into that house just for all the things she does. That includes a small photography studio, an art area, her office with multiple computers for business and both graphic and web design work and more. She has won accolades for her art photography, with “very eclectic” subjects that include cowboys, landscapes, birds, flowers, rodeos and “anything to promote agriculture.” This is just another example of Sue’s broad range when it comes to understanding and using media to her advantage and always broadening her interrelated skill sets. And even if you do not hear her name nearly as often as Gary’s name, know that when it comes to media in Morgan County, Sue Hodgson is definitely the queen.
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For Don Brown, agriculture is personal Former ag commissioner worked hard to open new markets
By Jeff Rice
Journal-Advocate Staff Writer
When Don Brown talks about his tenure as Colorado’s Commissioner of Agriculture, it’s clear he takes personally the welfare of the state’s second-largest industry. “I thought my commodity groups were very cooperative, and I made sure I was there for our producers,” he said during an interview at his Yuma farm. Throughout the conversation, which ranged from accomplishments and challenges to the future of farming, Brown talked about “our farmers” and “my governor.” Brown was appointed ag commissioner by Gov. John Hickenlooper in early 2015 to succeed John Salazar. It wasn’t a job he sought but, according to two previous commissioners, Brown’s knowledge, reputation and standing in the ag community made him a natural. He said he didn’t hesitate to seek advice from his predecessors, most notably Don Ament of Sterling, John Stulp of Springfield, and Tom Kourlis of Craig. “They were always helpful, always willing to give advice when I asked for it,” he said. Not that he needed to ask much. Brown grew up on the farm he and his family now operate southeast of
Courtesy Photo
Don and Peggy Brown pose with former Gov. John Hickenlooper in the Executive Residence in Denver.
Yuma, and he’s been involved knee-deep in agriculture all his life. After graduating Yuma High School he served as Colorado State FFA President. At Northeastern Junior College he was elected president of the student body, and he
earned a vocational agriculture education degree from Colorado State University. Being a “corn and cattle man,” Brown understands the importance of opening markets for Colorado’s agricultural products. Any
time he was asked to speak in public — and he was asked often — he invariably talked about the need to pursue export markets for Colorado ag. “I would like to have gotten more markets open,” he said. “It was exciting to go to Myanmar and have them ask how they could get Colorado lamb imported. And, of course, we were working on Cuba and the whole Caribbean basin.” Brown said it’s hard to know yet the impact of federal policy on Colorado’s agricultural exports, especially the U.S. pullout of the TransPacific Partnership and rewriting of the North American Free Trade Agreement. “It’s hard to measure. We know what happened to prices, we saw a 20 percent drop in market prices from June to sometime in August (2018) in commodities such as corn,” he said. “We know that had to have a big impact on our state. So it’s a big deal, it does matter. We need NAFTA (because) a lot of our potatoes go south, a lot of our pork goes south. We’re a straight pipeline, so we need a form of NAFTA in Colorado.” At least some of the impact of those moves on agriculture, both in Colorado and across the country, has been softened by work done by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Purdue. Brown praised Purdue, calling him a “wonderful secretary of agriculture.” “He’s done a good job of navigating those (political) waters,” he said. Federal policies continue to be See BROWN, 30
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SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 29
BROWN from page 29
something of a frustration for Colorado’s ag producers but Brown said one of his most satisfying achievements was installing a Conservation Services Division director who could influence federal lands policies in Colorado. “I looked around and nobody was looking after the farmer and rancher on our federal lands, and that drove me to change the director’s position to a federal lands focus,” he said. “I did not know how federal lands worked until I went to a regional meeting in New Mexico. We got to 22 acronyms I’d never seen before in the first hour!” It was at that meeting where Brown met Les Owen, then directing federal lands policy for the New Mexico department of agriculture. “I stole him from Jeff Witte (New Mexico’s agriculture secretary) because we needed to bring in somebody who spoke that (federal lands policy) language,” Brown said. Owen’s task was to keep federal land policy in Colorado focused on Jeff Rice / Sterling Journal-Advocate keeping farmers and ranchers on See BROWN, 31 Former Colorado Agriculture Commissioner Don Brown stands in his office near Yuma.
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the land, and it’s a task he’s accomplished in a big way. “His contribution is to help steer federal land policy in Colorado ‘toward the center’ so we can keep those producers on the land, and he’s done that very well” Brown said. Another achievement that can be credited to Brown is the addition of millet to the commodities list. In May 2018 Gov. Hickenlooper signed Senate Bill 18188, which amended the Colorado Agricultural Marketing Act of 1939 to add millet to the definition of an agricultural commodity. That change allowed Brown, as agriculture commissioner, to conduct a referendum of millet producers to determine whether they wanted to assess themselves to self-fund education, research and marketing programs, commonly referred to as “checkoff programs.” The move is in line with the priority Brown gives to opening new markets. However, in September 308 millet growers voted against a checkoff program by a narrow margin, despite earlier polls that had showed support for the issue. Brown said he isn’t disappointed in the vote because it wasn’t his place to secondguess the growers. “That was why we do those things, that’s why we have those elections,” he said. “We couldn’t even have the election without legislatively adding it to (the commodities) list, so it was important to me to get it added ... so they could vote on that. This was up to them; if they want to vote it was my job to make sure we had a clean and democratic election.” Brown pointed out that, should the winds blow a different direction in the future, millet growers can still ask the Department of Agriculture for another referendum. One job the Department of Agriculture needs to continue with is educating the 80 percent of Coloradans who live in urban areas about the realities faced by the 20 percent who live in the vast stretches of rural Colorado. When asked about the “urban-rural divide” Brown said it exists but not the way most rural people think of it. “I’m sure there’s a divide; they just don’t think about us,” he said. “None of this is deliberate, they Courtesy photo just don’t think about us. We (need to) tell them, talk to them, educate them. I’ve found (urbanites) to be Don Brown appears as comfortable with the heavy equipment of farming as he is in a See BROWN, 32 government office.
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BROWN from page 31
good listeners. When I would explain what we were about, why we needed their help, they were more than willing to help.” It’s a lack of knowledge that tends to be lopsided, however. Rural Coloradans know a lot more about getting around in Denver than Denverites know about getting round the High Plains or the Western Slope, and that’s something Brown isn’t hesitant to point out to urbanites. “I often told them, I know far more about you than you know about me,” he said. “And usually, they’d just grin and nod, because it’s true.” One of the toughest education jobs that needs to be done is to convince quality-minded urbanites, often swayed by internet bloggers that the output of modern production agriculture is somehow unhealthy, that their food supply is safe. “We often don’t let science get in the way of our emotions,” he said with a laugh. “But seriously, we need to address this concept that (urbanites) can feed themselves. I think growing a vegetable garden is wonderful; it gets you close to the land and that’s always a good thing. We need to use every tool in the toolbox, and that includes organic gardens and free-range chickens, and all of that. But we can’t feed the world — which is what we do — without using the science that we use. We have to use all of the tools in the toolbox.” Four years can be a long time to spend away from home, and while Brown was ready to turn over the reins to someone else, he left the post with some goals unrealized.
For Brown, one of those goals was to quantify surface water non-point nutrient issues — the possibility of pollutants running off of fields and ending up in watersheds. Brown said it’s common knowledge that producers are doing well in this area but there’s no data to back up that assumption. “We just don’t have the data to prove that farmers are doing a good job,” he said. “The idea was that we would have that legislation in place before I left office, but that’s something I hope can be carried forward.” Brown also is cautiously optimistic about the future of industrial hemp. There are several varieties of hemp that are ideal for Colorado’s naturally arid growing conditions, and with more than 30,000 acres of hemp registered with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, it looks like a viable crop. “The world changed when the (2018) Farm Bill was signed,” he said. “Now we’re going to find out how viable (hemp production) really is. While Brown is more focused on running his own farming operation these days, he said he’ll still be connected to the public sector. He is frequently asked to talk about agricultural issues, and he remains available to the current state administration and to legislators who seek his input. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. “I’m really proud of our new labs and I’m proud of my people at the Department of Agriculture. They work hard.” Jeff Rice: 970-526-9283, ricej@journal-advocate.com
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Sterling High School's newest FFA members stand as they are welcomed into the organization at the chapter's Greenhand Induction Night.
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By Callie Jones
Journal-Advocate News Editor
Every year new FFA members are welcomed into the organization with a special ceremony that highlights the importance of agriculture
and encourages the new members to strive for the top accomplishments possible in this organization. Sterling High School recently welcomed 37 new students, all enrolled in Introduction to Agriscience Technology, into its chapter at a Greenhand Induction and Chapter Speaking Night held last month. Inductees included: Chase Albrandt, Victoria Alexander, Con-
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FFA from page 33
member. After it was confirmed that each of the students met the requirements to receive a Greenhand FFA Degree, they were asked to stand to be recognized. As they were standing, Maker reminded them that they are now members of a national organization that expects them to enter a career in the industry of agriculture. They were also asked to acknowledge that they would strive to further develop their abilities through active participation in FFA. Chapter officers went on to tell the Greenhands that career development is a lifelong process and “your activities in this organization will help you acquire the ability to cooperate with others for the benefit of all. A good attitude and respect for the rights of others are essential for success in life.” It was mentioned that the vast agricultural complex forms the foundation of the American economy and the newest FFA members were told they have chosen well by their expression of interest in a future career in this, the nation’s largest field of endeavor. “By your enrollment in agricultural education, you have taken an important step toward becoming a useful citizen in our democracy,” chapter officers told the Greenhands. “May you, like George Washington, use your talents and training for the betterment of yourselves and your fellow man.” The officers noted success in a career and in life is largely the result of a sound education and a willingness to work, “without labor, we accomplish little, and unless our labor is directed by intelligent
Callie Jones / Sterling Journal-Advocate
Sterling High School FFA advisor Kasey Anderson presents a Greenhand pin to Jack Kreuger, one of the newest members of the FFA chapter during Greenhand Induction and Chapter Speaking Night. Looking on are chapter officers Thomas Rutherford, executive committee, and Jace Maker, president.
thinking, we accomplish nothing,” they said. Chapter advisor Kasey Anderson spoke about the pin worn by Greenhands. It is made of bronze, which because of its hardiness and endurance has been used for ages for those who sought a better substitute for crude stone instruments. “May those qualities of hardiness and endurance carry you far in our organization,” she told the Greenhands.
She also told them that while they have done well to merit recognition as Greenhands, there are accomplishments they have yet to obtain, including the silver pin of the Chapter FFA Degree and the golden charm of the State FFA Degree. “In order to attain these higher degrees, you must possess rare and golden qualities. You must be malleable, but never crushed; ductile, but never drawn into anything base or dishonorable; glowing with
enthusiasm, but unaltered by the heat of conflict,” Anderson said, telling the Greenhands that it is her wish that some of them will eventually be awarded the golden key of the American FFA Degree. She pointed out to the students that their future is before them, and through hard work and wise decisions, they can attain the highest place in the FFA organization. Maker noted that the FFA organiSee FFA, 35
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Sterling High School FFA officers welcome new members into the organization at the Greenhand Induction and Chapter Speaking Night. From left; Kasey Anderson, chapter advisor; Braadon Anderson, treasurer; Devin Bernatchez, reporter; Zach Bowen, sentinel; Thomas Rutherford, executive committee; Jace Maker, president; and Jessica Swanson, secretary
FFA from page 34
zation practices agricultural leader- may become a leader in the FFA. At the conclusion of the ceremo- of their journey with FFA. ship, citizenship, and cooperation “We need you, and the country ny, each new FFA member was and told the Greenhands that if needs strong leadership,” he said to invited on stage to receive their Callie Jones: 970-526-9286, they develop their abilities, they his classmates. Greenhand pin, signifying the start cjones@journal-advocate.com
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Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Eisenach, right, presents Makenna Sneddon, left, the winner of the MCCA’s annual heifer donation, at the annual banquet on Saturday.
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By Kara Morgan The Fort Morgan Times
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36 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
It was a packed house comprised of ranchers and community members honoring and promoting the cattle industry. The Morgan County Cattlemen’s Association held their 80th annual Banquet on Saturday, March 9, at the Country Steak Out in Fort Morgan. With a steak dinner provided by Cargill and a live auction called by local auctioneer Chuck Miller, near-
ly 200 attendees enjoyed a lively event. President Cody Millar said they raised about $14,000 at the banquet. Millar said this is the main fundraiser for the association, and the money raised goes to support their scholarship programs; agriculture education programs; and other activities they sponsor throughout the year. For the live auction, Millar estimated they had between 50 to 60 donated items up for sale, from agriculturally-themed paintings to seed bags to movie theater tickets. Colorado State University Livestock Extension Agent Marlin Eisenach presented awards and information about those activities See CATTLEMEN, 37
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
CSU Livestock Extension Agent Marlin Eisenach, center with microphone, highlights some of the Morgan County Cattlemen’s’ work at their 80th annual banquet.
CATTLEMEN from page 36 this past year, including the 2019 heifer recipient; the cost of buses to send students to the National Western Stock Show; and eight scholarships. After highlighting the association’s different education programs, Eisenach reminded the audience to the importance of those programs for local youth education. “You don’t have to go to Denver to find students who don’t know where food comes from,” he said. As a livestock educator at CSU
extension, Eisenach said they really appreciate the effort the MCCA puts into agriculture education programs each year. Eisenach recognized the Association’s scholarship recipients, including Blake Boyer and Caleb Baker at Northeastern Junior College; Whitney Mount at West Texas A&M University; Melissa Hawkins at the University of Wyoming; Adam Parachini Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times and Jared Wacker at Morgan Com- CSU Livestock Extension Agent Marlin Eisenach, left, introduces some of munity College; Tyler Christensen the scholarship winners the MCCA sponsored this year. The funds from the See CATTLEMEN, 38 annual banquet help sponsor scholarships each year.
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at Chadron State College and Courtney Griffith at Butler Community College. Eisenach also acknowledged Makenna Sneddon as the 2019 winner of the MCCA’s annual heifer donation. Millar said the vast majority of the attendees at the banquet are sponsors and supporters who make the association’s work possible. With about 200 total members, he said the association is excited to put on the event to thank them for their support. “We like to offer a nice evening for all of the people that do support us,” Millar explained. “We’re glad that we can provide them a nice steak dinner and a nice atmosphere, as part of a thank you for all of the support that they do.” Millar said their next event and fundraiser is the annual Feeding Contest Calcutta. Each year they partner with the Washington County Livestock Association for the event. This year the event will be at the Washington County Event Center in Akron. Both Millar and Eisenach felt this was a successful year for the ban-
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Morgan County Cattlemen’s Association Member Matt Kalaus explains several of the MCCA’s programs, including the annual feeding contest, at the cattlemen’s annual banquet.
quet and the fundraising. cessful one. ers.” Millar thanked those whose sup“It only goes that way because we “Can’t do it without them,” he port helped make the event a suc- have so many sponsors and support- added.
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Love of nature inspires Bruce Bosley Retired CSU Extension agent pursues his many hobbies
Time will tell how many more new plant specimens the 69-yearold Bosley will collect while he is “botanizing” in Morgan County over the course of his retirement years. “If I have a passion, it’s helping people appreciate things in nature,” Bosley said. “When I worked with farmers, it was helping them understand how they could improve (their crops). But I’m kind of an introvert, so it’s easy for me to spend time with myself collecting plants or with another botanizer. But mostly it’s just me.”
By Jenni Grubbs
The Fort Morgan Times
Bruce Bosley never gets tired of plants and the outdoors. As a boy, he spent as much of his free time as he could outside. In college, he studied environmental biology, followed by crops horticulture in grad school. His jobs had him consulting on crops and working as a Colorado State University Extension agent, Morgan County Extension office director and field cropping systems agronomist for multiple counties. Now in retirement, the Brush resident is picking up many of the hobbies he had neglected for years because of focusing on family and career. But nearly all of those hobbies still involve both plants and the outdoors. One of those hobbies he is focusing on in particular is botany. In 2011, a few years before retirement, Bosley collected and was credited for discovering a fourpoint evening primrose just east of Brush. The U.S. Department of Agriculture lists this flower as being native to many midwestern states, including Kansas and Nebraska, but not Colorado. “It was growing wild between the east and west lanes of the interstate just east of Brush,” Bosley said. “‘Colorado Flora: Eastern Slope’
Growing up
Jenni Grubbs / The Fort Morgan Times
Bruce Bosley stands in his home garden in Brush in July 2018.
recognizes me as the only one who has collected it. It’s new to Colorado, but it’s frequently seen in the Sandhills of Nebraska. It’s just kind of a ‘gee whiz, I happened to be in the right place at the right time’ thing.” About four years later, he was ready to retire from his job as a CSU Extension agronomist. “After I retired, I realized I really wanted to study the botany of the area out here,” Bosley said. “It was already one of my hobbies, but I
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could never have enough time to do it.” And with grown children and no full-time work to keep him busy, he dove into looking for different and interesting plants to collect. “Since I retired, I have collected 169 new specimens from Morgan County,” Bosley said. “The way it works, if it’s not in a herbarium, pressed and preserved, it doesn’t register for that county. That’s the whole key of doing this is just collecting them.”
Bosley was born in May 1949 in Grand Junction “at a little hospital over there.” He arrived on a special day for his family. “I was born on my father’s birthday,” he said. “We celebrated birthdays together. He lived to be 52, so I figure every year I live after that is borrowed time.” Bosley is a third-generation Coloradan, as his grandfather also was born in Grand Junction, albeit on a different day of the year. Still, he sometimes has a hard time selling his Colorado heritage to those around him in the northeast Colorado community he has made his home for nearly three decades. “What I found here is as long as they don’t know my grandparents and parents in Morgan County, I’m still an outsider,” Bosley said. “But that’s all right.” As a boy, he did not always live in Colorado. See BOSLEY, 40
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BOSLEY from page 39 “We moved around a lot when I was a kid,” Bosley recalled. That included: a move to Oregon; back to Colorado in Glenwood Springs; next off to Goodland, Kansas; then a return to Colorado in Longmont; then out east to Lincoln, Nebraska; and then settling down in Loveland, Colorado. Bosley recalled being the middle child of three brothers. “You can love your brothers and also hate them,” he said. “We played together. That’s what kids do.” While he was in high school, Bosley recalls struggling with asthma. That disease kept him out of any organized sports, but that did not mean he did not get any exercise. “When I was in high school, I just hiked,” he said. “I used to shoot rabbits and kill rattlesnakes. I loved being in nature.” He graduated from Loveland High School in 1967. All these years later, he has a pretty good excuse to return to that city more often than for class
Courtesy photo
Bruce Bosley, center, is shown in China in March 2012 with a group of Chinese farmers. Bosley went with to China in both 2012 and 2016 through Colorado State University Extension as agricultural ambassadors.
reunions. “My family’s still in Loveland,” Bruce said. “My mother’s still alive in Loveland. His younger brother lives there, too, but his older brother died in 2013.
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he said. “Where we lived on the hill, we got tear gas” floating up through the air. The same asthma that kept him away from participating in sports while in school also kept him out of Vietnam after high school. “I was out of the draft because of asthma,” Bosley recalled. “I also had a high draft number, but I would have gone to Vietnam” had his number been called and he had been medically qualified for service. He points out that he was not one who was against those who did have to serve in Vietnam. “I respect the people who served our country a lot,” Bosley said. “I would have gone to Vietnam, probably, but asthma was a real factor in my life. I didn’t protest against the Vietnam War.”
College days
After high school, Bosley went to college in Boulder at the University of Colorado. He was studying environmental biology with a focus on plant ecology. “I learned a lot about life in Boulder in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Bosley said. It was a colorful time with the country and college campuses going through some interesting phases. For a while in college, he lived in what he described as a “clothing optional house” with some of his buddies. But something else happened to Bosley while he was in college that would have a lasting effect on his life. He met and went on a date with a gal whose name he could not remember when he first asked her out, but it was a name he would never forget once he learned it: Cathy. “I met Cathy in fall 1971, we started dating in 1972,” he recalled. “Before our first date, I had to ask her what her name was.” Bruce ran across her at a liquor store in Boulder. He was getting a bottle of wine, but he had been having a rough few days having ended a relationship. A woman he recognized but did not yet know saw him and could tell he was feeling blue. “I was rebounding from a break up,” Bruce recalled. “Cathy came out and gave me a big hug.” See BOSLEY, 41
BOSLEY from page 40
That led to him asking her out. “She had the best smile. I didn’t know her name was Cathy,” he recalled. Bruce then learned that she had a research project she needed to do, but she did not have transportation to get up in the foothills for it. He said he could drive her, and she agreed. “Cathy and I went out at 9 o’clock the next morning,” Bruce recalled. “It was an October day. We spent the rest of the day together. That was our first date.” That one long date turned into something that would last a very long time. “She was looking for a boyfriend. I was looking for her,” Bruce said. But they did not rush making their relationship official legally. “After being together for three years, her grandmother said, ‘What are you waiting for?’” Bruce recalled. “I said I was trying to save up my pennies. She came out with a big sock full of pennies and said, ‘It’s time to get married.’” With no counterargument to make, Bruce and Cathy made wed-
Courtesy photo
A 7-year-old Bruce Bosley, left, is shown with his two brothers in about 1956.
ding plans. “We finally got married in 1975 in Burlington, Iowa,” he recalled, with that city being where her family lived. After the wedding, they returned to Colorado and settled in Boulder. “We stayed in Boulder County for
do State University. “I worked with onions,” Bruce recalled of the graduate in crops and horticulture program he was in. “I worked on water management with the onions.” He was researching whether onions could still thrive if put under stress from access to more or less water. “For years, I was doing research at CSU,” he said. “I had to take my onions and dry them.” Bruce was doing that inside the CSU Horticulture Building. “It smelled like onions, and then I had to move them,” he recalled, wrinkling his nose at the memory. He graduated from CSU in 1983, the proud holder of a master’s degree in crops and horticulture. Now the challenge was putting that degree and the knowledge behind it to work.
another seven years,” Bruce said. During that time, he was working for the city of Boulder with the Working years parks and open space departments. Still living in Fort Collins, Bruce But Bruce was drawn back to and Cathy welcomed their first school, and he and Cathy moved to daughter, Alicia, in January 1983. Fort Collins in 1979 so he could In 1984, Bruce found a job in pursue a master’s degree at ColoraSee BOSLEY, 42
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Wray as a field crop consultant for Servi-Tech. He did that for two years and then became an independent crop consultant for another two years in that area. Over those four years, Bruce was helping farmers with their corn, dry beans, alfalfa, sunflowers and potatoes. “I was field checking for water stress, nutrients, bugs, diseases... all aspects of crop production,” he said. While living in Wray, Bruce and Cathy’s second daughter, Betsy, was born in October 1985. Having grown up in a family of boys, Bruce was not entirely certain what to do with two young daughters at first. “As a father of girls, I realized pretty quickly that they’re different from raising boys,” he said. “Corporal punishment seemed to backfire. Between my wife and my two daughters, my job was to challenge them, support them, encourage them into making something of their lives.” Bruce’s plan for he and his wife to support and encourage their daughters was a successful one. “They both went to CSU, worked with my entomology friend, and now they’re both professionals and successful,” he said, proudly sharing that Alicia is teaching at a university on Long Island and Betsy is a dietician at a hospital in Denver. “They’re both pretty happy with what they’re doing.” But when they were still young girls in the late 1980s, their family would be on the move, just like their father’s family moved when he was little. Their moves would be not nearly as drastic geographically, though. In 1988, Bruce got hired on by CSU Extension to be an agronomist in Logan County, and he went to work as an extension agent. He had been doing that for about three years when he got called to be the director of the CSU Extension office in Morgan County. That management position lasted about a decade. “In 2001, I was liberated from being an executive to being a field cropping systems agronomist for Logan, Morgan and Sedgwick counties,” Bruce recalled. Another 14 years later, he was
ready to retire from being a CSU Extension agent. He said his fellow agents would refer to that as another type of “graduating” from CSU.
Hobbies, interests
Bruce has many hobbies and interests beyond the botany he has found a focus on during retirement. Quite a few of those, including botany, he enjoys pursuing with Cathy. “Cathy and I have always shared an interest in nature,” Bruce said. “We bird together; we botanize together. We host the Christmas Bird Count, and occasionally we lead field trips. We take people out and help them understand nature, to find birds and get excited about learning about birds and plants.” He also likes to garden, raising an assortment of vegetables and fruit in his and Cathy’s home garden in Brush. That includes corn, tomatoes, peppers, raspberries, cherries, plums and more. “Cathy raises flowers, and I help by raising wildflowers,” Bruce said. All those flowers, particularly the wildflowers, help attract bees, butterflies and other natural pollinators, which certainly is to the benefit of his fruit and vegetable plants. “With raising wildflowers, the native bees are really attracted to our yard,” he said. “We’re giving refuge to the native pollinators. Earlier this week, we even had a hummingbird, which can be a pollinator.” Bruce also enjoys is camping and hiking, particularly in the Colorado mountains. In fact, his favorite picture with Cathy is of them backpacking in the mountains as a relatively young couple. Another of Bruce’s hobbies is one he began pursuing before retirement, but now it is something he can put more energy into. “I like to make home brew,” he said. That was something he first tried while he was in college, but it went by the wayside while he was working full time and raising daughters. He has gotten back into it over the last 11 years and raises the hops in his home garden. “Most of them are ales,” Bruce said. “They’d all be considered lager.” His most recent efforts netted a See BOSLEY, 43
BOSLEY from page 42 wheat ale, a stout, a brown ale and a raspberry ale. “I’ve tried other ones, but those are the ones I like best,” he said. Bruce also is a Democrat and is somewhat active in the local party. He and Cathy one hosted a caucus at their home, and he continues to serve as an election judge. “I like to get along with Democrats and Republicans and believe we need more talk across party lines,” Bruce said. “I work with people regardless of party. When I’m working with a farmer, that never comes up.” He also is a Presbyterian elder and is active in the regional Presbytery.
Agricultural ambassador
Through his connections with CSU Extension and as a professional agronomist, Bruce has had the opportunity to travel internationally as an agricultural ambassador to China. The first trip happened in 2012 and the second in 2016. Both were done as a volunteer, with him not getting paid to go or for what he did in China. “I’ve been to China twice for CSU to talk with them about Extension,” he said. “We were ambassadors with the United States’ way of doing things and with Extension.” He recalled one of his experiences in China in 2012 quite clearly. “We had three groups at a wheat field site at a crossroads,” Bruce said. “One group was the Colorado agricultural scientists/Extension personnel, one group were the Chinese agricultural university professors and their graduate students.
The final group, all by themselves, were Chinese famers who had tiny plots of wheat that they were raising together in one field. The farmers were not engaged with anyone else. All the university people, Colorado and China, were talking about the large educational signs that the Chinese grad students had put along the roadside to teach the farmers. Being a person who is easily bored by seeing such signs and hearing university and researchers talk on and on, I stooped down to inspect the wheat growing in the field to look for its condition and insects and diseases.” The farmers saw Bruce doing that and were curious about what the agronomist was seeing in their still-growing crops. “That broke the ice with the farmers,” Bruce recalled. “They gathered around me to ask what their 3-inch-tall wheat would yield. Their spokesperson was a grumpylooking man, and he had many questions about wheat and farming. He finally asked about their future as old farmers in China where all their children left their homes to pursue higher pay in the cities. ‘Who will farm this land when we old farmers are all gone?’ the farmer asked.” That was a question that farmers in America certainly could empathize with, Bruce recalled thinking. He found many other commonalities during that trip, as well as the one in 2016. But there were lots of cultural differences, as well. “The thing that blew them away most was hearing the things I did day to day as an Extension agent where I designed things and set
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them up,” Bruce recalled. “I could design my own programs and focus. That was the beauty of the Western way of doing things: We could design our own plans. That was very alien to them, deciding what to do this month, this day.” Something else that was foreign to the Chinese farmers and educators was the idea that Bruce and his CSU colleague were volunteers. “We both went there and worked there for 14 days as volunteers,” Bruce recalled. “We weren’t paid. That surprised them. In a communist system, why do more than you have to do?” But for Bruce and his colleague, the answer was simple. “We loved what we do,” he said. “That was an eye opener for them.” It was a chance for Bruce to share a glimpse of a different way of doing things while also absorbing a bit from a very different culture, himself. “That’s just exciting, exchanging cultures,” he said. “You see how to work with them and learn from them along the way.” A take-away for Bruce from his trips to China was how hard the farmers and agricultural industry have to work to feed the enormous population in that country, as well as just how many farmers there are in China as a result. “I couldn’t fathom in an area as big as Morgan County, you could have 12 million farmers,” he said. “How would I reach them? How do you make an impact? That was baffling to me.” All he could do was share his own agronomy knowledge with those he encountered with the hope that they would “learn and
adapt it with their culture” and pass it on further.
Volunteerism
Retirement has given Bruce the time to volunteer his time with even more of the things he cares about. He currently works with One Morgan County’s Wayfinders Initiative and volunteers to teach English and local customs to two men from Eritrea living in Fort Morgan as refugees and hoping to pass the U.S. citizenship test. “I’m delighted being with those guys,” Bruce said. “They know me as the fix-it man. I come over, sometimes with tools, and fix a table, a bicycle, get the cross breezes going between windows... Really what we do with Wayfinders is help them integrate.” Both men are in their 40s and have families. “There were times when I was at CSU I met a lot of foreign students,” Bruce recalled. “It’s a joyous thing for me to be doing now.” Another of his volunteer efforts gave him the opportunity to share his love of the outdoors, nature and even plants with other people, in this case tourists visiting the Rocky Mountains. “In summer 2016, I worked as a volunteer at Rocky Mountain National Park driving a tour bus,” Bruce recalled. “I assisted the naturalist in helping people know what they were seeing.” While the tourists mainly wanted to know what type of large animals they could expect to see or had already spotted, he managed to get in some information about birds, wildflowers and other plants, as well.
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Merino FFA keeps busy with activities Chapter attends conferences, stock show, visits local businesses
By Brooke Mertens
Merino FFA chapter reporter
The Merino FFA Chapter has been very busy this past school semester. The freshman class went to the BIG (Being Involved as a Greenhand) Conference at Northeastern Junior College and are learning the FFA creed to compete at the district level. The sophomores are starting to work on welding in the classroom and they competed at the district and state level for range judging. The junior class has visited many surrounding businesses to learn about agriculture around the area. The class is also starting to make a shed that they will sell at the end of the year to raise money for our chapter. The seniors have starting welding and metalworking projects that they will complete at the end of the year. As a chapter, we have gone to the District Leadership Conference at NJC and the National Western Stock Show in Denver. We also had our annual oyster fry in November, as well as, fruit and meat sales to help raise money for our chapter. Some upcoming events that Merino will be participating in will be
Merino High School FFA members recently attended the National Western Stock Show in Denver.
Courtesy photo
FFA Week where the whole school will participate in various activities throughout the week, including dress up days, an FFA fun night for the members, and a school-wide petting zoo. Another upcoming activity is the Career Development Events, where the whole chapter will compete at the state level in events from floriculture to horse judging. The Merino FFA Chapter is lookCourtesy photo ing forward to our upcoming events and is excited to see what the rest Merino High School FFA members pose for a photo during one of their visits to surrounding businesses. of the year will bring!
44 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
Caliche FFA active in new year
Courtesy photo
Caliche High School FFA members Correy Derr and Asa Bogie are pictured working at their SAE (Supervised Agricultural Experience) placement station over the summer.
Students participating in speaking contests, filling out record books, completing resumes By Caliche FFA Chapter
As the new year gets underway Caliche High School FFA is off and running. Our officer team is busy working on the POA (Program of Activities) and making sure our committees work well. The officer team consists of: President — Kinlie Lewis; Vice Presidents — Brooke Stromberger and Bryce Hill; Secretary — Talor Devie; Treasurer — Jamie Kielian;
Sentinel — Clayton Funkhouser; Reporter — Traevin Jones; Parliamentarian — Howard Dedrickson; Executive Committee — Correy Derr We started the year off with a Student Teacher. Her name is Miss Lena Haun and she comes from Grover. Currently she is finishing her Ag-Ed degree at Colorado State University. The Ag-Ed I class has been busy
Courtesy photo
Pictured is the Caliche High School Ag-Ed 1 Class. From left: Coy Waitley, Nevada Mitchell, Harley Kochler, Brandyn Hill, Trista Hernandez, Zach Ralston and Kaiden Imhof. Kneeling, Baylonna Bievens, left, and Haley Marick.
preparing for the District FFA Creed Speaking Contest. Our local contest was Jan. 30. All the students did a great job, but the top two students to represent us at Districts are Brandyn Hill and Nevada Mitchell. Along with Creed Speaking the students are participating in power tool demonstrations and taking safety tests. The Ag Business class has been working on balancing their AET (Agricultural Experience Tracker) records and filling out balance sheets, and together with that information they are completing FFA
Proficiency Award Applications and resumes. The Ag Mechanics and Technical Systems class started the semester with balancing records and filling out FFA Proficiency Award Applications. Along with this each student is to build a resume that can be used for awards as well as applying for a job. In the shop we are going over small gas engines as well as repair and maintenance of farm equipment. Talor Devie is rebuilding a 1936 John Deere tractor. The Ag-Ed II class and the Ag III See CALICHE, 46
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Ryan Dreitz: All about ag
By Kara Morgan
same opportunities that I got,” Dreitz said. “It’s kind of a challenging job sometimes, but it’s very humbling to know that they’re going to be doing something that they enjoy and that they know that at a young age.” Dreitz does not take the responsibility of his job as an agriculture educator lightly. “I like to think that I’m producing the workers of tomorrow, the kids that are going to be feeding us all.”
The Fort Morgan Times
Brush High School agriculture education instructor and FFA Advisor Ryan Dreitz has loved the outdoors and agriculture since he was a kid. “I was kind of a different kid,” Dreitz explained. “I wasn’t one to sit inside and watch TV and do that type of stuff, I loved being outside.” Growing up on a farm with three siblings and active parents, Dreitz said he loved working with animals and outdoors from the beginning. “I grew up in the country, loved being a part of agriculture. Funny now that I teach it,” he said. “I loved being around animals, gardening, helping my dad mow the lawn, just being outside.” “I’ve grown up continuing to be an outdoor kid,” he added. Part of being an “outdoor
Kara Morgan / The Fort Morgan Times
Ryan Dreitz is an agriculture education teacher at Brush High School.
kid” was getting involved in 4-H throughout his childhood. “I’ve shown from pigs to goats to sheep to cattle to dairy heifers to chickens, all kinds of stuff,” he explained.
“It’s been a lifelong journey.” Today, he still raises show goats that he started raising as a high school student. “I’ve really enjoyed that part of my life. Now I raise show goats for kids to get the
Growing up
Dreitz was born in Fort Morgan and has lived in Brush almost his whole life, aside from school and a couple of years of working in Fort Collins. “I have lived in Brush my whole life. Grew up here, went to school, from kindergarten all the way through See DREITZ, 47
CALICHE from page 45
and IV classes are working on personal shop projects as well as re-furbishing a trailer for a community member. These students are also balancing AET records and filling out FFA Proficiency Award Applications for recognition in their respective Supervised Agricultural Experiences. (SAE’s) We just completed a RIF (Reading is Fundamental) program at the Iliff Head Start in conjunction with the Caliche FBLA. Both the preschool students as well as the high school students really enjoyed the annual experience. Lastly, please look forward to our Annual Caliche FFA Rocky Mountain Oyster Fry and Labor Sale on April 12.
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DREITZ from page 46 graduating,” Dreitz explained. One of three siblings, Dreitz was the middle child with an older brother, Nick, and a younger sister, Christine. Only a couple of years apart in age, Dreitz said all three of them were close. “We were all really close, we’d play together and hang out together,” he said. Dreitz’s mother is Connie Dreitz, Brush Middle School principal, and his father is Randy Dreitz, another long-time Brush educator and former Brush High School football coach. Dreitz said he always enjoyed the outdoors as a kid, which worked out well growing up in a rural part of the county. He said he and his siblings were all heavily involved in 4-H and sports. “We showed livestock ... and each of us were three-sport athletes,” Dreitz explained. Dreitz’s sports were football, wrestling and track. They were in a range of sports, but all three of them were “track-letes.” For 4-H, Dreitz said he often showed sheep, but he worked with a range of animals. Dreitz graduated from Brush High School in 2009.
Adult life
From high school, Dreitz went next to Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, where his brother and sister went to school. He realized it was not the right fit for him, and he decided to transfer to Northeastern Junior College in Sterling. “I decided to move back, and follow my own path,” he explained. At NJC, Dreitz said he had the
Courtesy Ryan Dreitz
Brush High School Agriculture Educator Ryan Dreitz stands with his students in front of a giant John Deere truck. Dreitz says he loves getting students out of the classroom.
chance to be on the livestock judging team and ended up having a very good experience there. “It was the perfect size, I met a ton of people there, ton of friends. I wouldn’t change that decision for the world,” he said. After NJC, Dreitz was selected to be a Colorado Future Farmers of America state officer. As a Colorado FFA state officer, Dreitz got to travel across the state and the world. “Got to travel around the whole state for an entire year, to meet members across the state and really see what agriculture looks like across Colorado,” Dreitz explained. The agriculture-learning experience did not stop at the Colorado state lines, however.
“Then I also got the opportunity to go to Europe and visit agriculture over there and loved it,” Dreitz said. As the experience came to a close, Dreitz said he and his nine fellow officers put together presentations to show what they learned in their whirlwind experience. “We put on a state convention at the end of our year. There’s 10 of us and it’s a big production,” he explained. Dreitz explained a little bit of what he learned in that transformative year. “Agriculture is a family. Even though agriculture is so broad, in theory, it’s really not as big as you think it would be,” he said. “I know people all across the state now because of my experiences.”
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Dreitz said his experience taught him that his ‘agriculture family’ was with him when he left his hometown, from across the state and across the world. He explained too the importance for him to stick to his values of honesty and integrity, even once he left the place behind, for a little while, where he learned them. “You’re all connected somehow. You start networking with everybody, and everybody kind of starts to get to know everybody,” Dreitz said. “That’s the beauty of agriculture.” Dreitz says it was one of the best experiences he has had. “Best year, I would probably say, of my life. Met some of my best friends, some of the best people. I really loved it, every minute of it,” Dreitz said. After his time as a Colorado FFA State Officer, Dreitz returned to college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He earned his degree in agriculture education in 2014.
Career
While at CSU, Dreitz completed several teaching training experiences at multiple schools. During his college years, he also spent some time working at a dairy in Loveland, and decided to complete his teaching placement hours at a school in Fort Collins, Poudre High School. Since none of the high schools in the city had agriculture education programs at the time, he went to Poudre since they at least had a hands-on wood and metal shop classes. When he arrived, Poudre High did not have any agriculture education program, and they put him in a “discovery” course. See DREITZ, 48
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“When I got there, they actually put me into a discovery class, which consisted of kids who are a little bit challenged in terms of social norms and what that looks like,” Dreitz explained. “So I brought some of my leadership workshops that I did as a state officer into those classes and got them motivated and excited.” When he brought some of the leadership workshops and techniques he had learned as Colorado FFA state officer into the class, the dean of students took notice. “The dean of students who was coteaching that class said, ‘What do you teach?’ and I said ‘Agriculture.’” “’He asked, ‘Is this what you guys do?’ and I said, ‘Yeah this is part of it.’ He said, ‘I wonder if we could get that here.’” Dreitz said he thought the students would benefit from such a program, and was encouraged to bring the idea to the principal at the school. After explaining the models of agriculture education to the principal, Dreitz said she responded very positively. With the help of colleagues, Dreitz said he came up with a proposal and brought it back to the principal. “Then, by golly, there’s the program,” Dreitz laughed. After he completed his student teaching and bachelor’s degree, Dreitz applied for the job at Poudre to implement the program. He got the chance to return to Poudre High and put his plan into action. “I hit the ground running. Building a program is always, you know, challenging — went from 40 kids to 140 kids in a year,” he said. “Taught them about the ‘oyster fry’ and what all that entails.” Though he is very glad to work in the community he grew up in today,
Courtesy Ryan Dreitz
Brush High School Agriculture Instrutor Ryan Dreitz and his students at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Ill.
Dreitz said he feels fortunate he had the chance to get to know a high school and education system different than the one he was used to. “I decided that it was a better fit for me, at that time ... I needed to experience a job and career outside of my hometown,” he explained. “My dad works here, my mom works here. I would be put in the same kind of atmosphere. I was a little bit afraid of being in that shadow of ‘Randy and Connie Dreitz’s son’ and not ‘Ryan Dreitz,’” he said. So he decided to branch out on his own for a little while and Dreitz said he was glad he did. “I’m so thankful for the experiences I have had,” Dreitz explained. Dreitz worked at Poudre High for two years before returning to Brush, after his engagement to his now-wife and fellow ag educator, Mollie. Before coming to Brush High School, Dreitz taught sixth-grade students. Though he enjoyed his experience there, he says he confirmed that high school is his fit for teaching.
Agriculture teacher life
Dreitz explained the range of work that goes into his day as an ag educator at Brush High School. From teaching a freshmen-level “Beetdigger Academy Class” to agriculture economics that he co-teaches to agriculture mechanics, Dreitz has a full day of teaching. As an ag educator, Dreitz explained the “three circle model” that’s used widely and that he follows. One part is the classroom, where students learn about a range of agriculture, from wildlife to livestock to plant growth. Another is the FFA section focused on leadership, where students learn about public speaking, how to run meetings and other valuable life and leadership skills. The third is “supervised agriculture exposure” or SAE, where students build on their classroom learning, outside of the high school. Each student completes SAE proj-
ects as part of their ag education. At BHS, Dreitz says they have a designated SAE hour for him to work with students on their projects. For Dreitz, he says it’s really important for him to “get kids out of the classroom.” In their own agriculture education lab, Dreitz said they have a giant fish tank and a rabbit, among other interactive education opportunities. “I try to get students out into the community and doing things that isn’t sitting in the classroom, ‘cause those are the types of kids they are,” he explained. “They’re not that type — we call it ‘sit and get’, sit, take notes, take a test.”” Speaking for himself and the field, he added, “We don’t do that very well in ag.” Though the bureaucracy of being an educator is not his favorite, Dreitz says he loves being able to introduce some students to agriculture and foster the interests of those who have been in agriculture their whole lives. He really enjoys being able to take students on field trips, most recently to an animal artificial insemination or AI class. Part of his job is raising funds for these additional trips or projects for students, which they do each year through a big fundraising event around March. Last year, Dreitz said, they fed 700 people Rocky Mountain Oysters and raised $30,000 dollars through the event and an auction. This year, now that they have 83 students in ag education, about 20 more than the previous year, Dreitz said they hope to make the fundraiser bigger and better. See DREITZ, 49
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DREITZ from page 48 Building a family
A lifelong outdoor kid with a fondness for agriculture, Dreitz married Mollie Dreitz in 2017, a fellow agriculture educator. Dreitz explained some of their life parallels. “She and I became first-year ag teachers at the same time. We graduated high school the same year, we went to college, graduated there the same year. She was a state officer before me.� “We’d met each other a little bit, here or there, and were friends through college; we were at NJC together.� Ryan and Mollie went their separate ways for college, Ryan at CSU and Mollie at Oklahoma. When Ryan started his first year of ag teaching in Fort Collins, Mollie started ag teaching in Holly, in southeast Colorado. As part of their training, they both went on a week-long tour for firstyear ag teachers in the state and reconnected. “We really hit it off, and became close friends,� Dreitz said. “She’d call me about what I’m doing in my classes and how that looks like, my strug-
gles and my successes, and I’d call her about the same things.� After reconnecting again at an ag teachers’ association meeting, they decided to try dating. “Valentine’s Day is coming up and we laugh, because we both hate Valentine’s Day,� Dreitz said. But a couple of years ago, they came together over a Valentine’s Day weekend and started a long-distance relationship. Today, they are coming up on two years married and excited to have moved into their first home. Around when they got engaged, they decided to move back to northeast Colorado “My wife and I got engaged. We were pretty set on eventually some day we want to raise our family in a small town,� Dreitz explained. “She’s from Akron, I’m from Brush; it just makes sense to kind of move and settle where we’re from,� he added. “So we moved back here, we got married. This last year we bought a house.� Mollie Dreitz teaches agriculture education at Akron High School. The couple just bought their first home, where Dreitz said they are excited to build their own agriculture base
there. “My wife Mollie is really into cattle, so we just bought our first house, in between Brush and Akron,� Dreitz explained. “She’s originally from Akron.� “We bought our first house, with some acreage, so we’re working on building our cattle herd,� he added.
Lifelong Beetdigger
Dreitz says some students can be ornery from time to time, some students come in with a high level background in ag and keep him on his toes, and some students are very excited to learn. Overall though, he says he enjoys his job and getting to work with kids to help “fulfill their dreams in agriculture, whatever that looks like, and how they can better themselves,� he explained. Dreitz says too he is excited to be teaching in Brush, his home, and to put his years of experience and connections in the area to use. As one of the offspring of two wellknown educators in the area, he says he makes sure he treats each student the same, no matter their back-
ground or connections or the ‘box’ they are labeled in. “If you’re not an ‘ag kid,’ it doesn’t matter,� Dreitz explained. “Never leave anybody out.� As a teacher, Dreitz says his philosophy is to “Teach every student with respect, honesty, integrity and character.� Dreitz says his work is not just making sure students understand the agriculture science, but helping them as they consider and work through decisions on their projects and longterm ag goals. For himself, his agriculture background and his pastime of raising goats helped him support himself through college expenses, and he still raises goats today. “Ten years later, I still have my goats,� he added. After the AI class he recently brought students to, Dreitz said he loved seeing students who enjoyed the work and consider it for their own career. “I had a couple of kids come back and say, ‘I found out what I want to do for my career. This is it. I love that aspect of my job.�
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Treating animals of all kinds A history of veterinary medicine in Morgan County
By Community History Writers
Editor’s Note: The Community History Writers are a group of area individuals committed to documenting and writing about local history and the people, places and happenings that created the various communities within Morgan County. During Morgan County’s earliest years, there were no college-graduate veterinarians available to care for ailing animals. In fact, veterinary medicine as a profession was extremely limited in the United States. There were only 392 veterinarians in the whole United States in 1860, according to “Chiron’s Time,” a history of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University by J. Dennis McGuire and James E. Hansen II.
No standards
Book cover image courtesy Jo Ostwald The Fort Morgan Times
"Practical Home Veterinarian," by Dr. David Roberts, offered information on the treatment of the diseases of farm animals.
horse ailments. Books on the subject of treatment of the diseases of farm animals were available to aid anyone interested in pursuing the knowledge. One such book was “Practical Home Veterinarian” by Dr. David Roberts, D.V.S. Its original copyright is 1913, with a 15th edition revised in 1923 and a listed price of $1. It is a small book that covers the diseases and treatment of cattle, horses, swine, sheep and poultry in 184 pages and includes photos. Gayman Drug Co., a Fort Morgan pharmacy that was located in the 200 block of Main Street, was an agent
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No educational standards regulating veterinary medicine existed in Colorado in those early years. Almost anyone could style himself a “veterinary surgeon” and set up a practice. Many of the veterinary practitioners of that time were farriers (blacksmiths who shod horses), who also possessed an aptitude to treat some of the more common
book, “Spotted Pride” by Frank Holmes. It states that the nickname ‘Doc’ was given to Edwards due to the fact that he was a highly respected local ‘country vet.’ When he first purchased the stallion around 1947, Edwards and his wife were schoolteachers at Woodrow who also farmed and raised cattle and horses. David Wood, who personally knew him said, “Doc Edwards was just sort of one of those guys that had horses, and sort of was the local expert on anything horse related.” Woods related that the Edwardses moved from Woodrow to a farm east of Fort Morgan on Early veterinarians County Road 22 north of U.S. HighChris Koenig, the father of Fort way 34. Morgan’s Chris Hobbs, was one of the non-college educated veterinari- More livestock means ans who treated farm animals in more demand Morgan County. According to “Chiron’s Time,” Koenig grew up in the Grover the population growth of the mid area on his father’s homestead and 1800s in the United States increased developed an aptitude for treating the demand for food, which includailing animals. His wife supported ed animal products of meat, eggs his efforts by purchasing three and dairy. Much of this population how-to-treat sick animals books to growth was leaving the family farms use as references. for jobs in the cities. His personal success on his own Since man’s physical well-being is cattle led to his being called upon to affected by the quality of the food treat his neighbors’ ailing animals. he eats, as animal disease specialOne of these clients continued to ists, veterinarians also influence call him whenever he had sick cattle human health. Thus was created even after moving to the Fort Mor- the need for competent veterinarigan area. ans to assure the soundness of aniP. S. Edwards, known as “Doc” mal products for human consumpEdwards, was another self-educated tion. The education of these trained Morgan County horse doctor. Being the owner of Sundance veterinarians was delegated to the F-500, a prized Appaloosa stallion, land grant colleges. Edwards is briefly mentioned in the See VETERINARY, 51
for Dr. Roberts and offered for sale the prescriptions noted in the book. Some of the book’s suggested treatments wouldn’t hold up today. In discussing parturition under “Diseases of the Horse” the following treatment is recommended: “After colt is born, the mare should be washed out with a solution of Antisepto (two quarts), then place one pound of lard (in chunks) into the womb. Do this once daily until she has recovered.” Antisepto was just one of almost 200 of Dr. Roberts’ prepared prescriptions that Gayman Drug Co. made available for purchase.
VETERINARY from page 50
The Morrill Land Grant Act passed by U.S. Congress and signed by Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1862 created a unique system of education, research and service in agriculture and the mechanical arts. Most states took up the option of accepting a grant of federal land in return for creation of an institution of higher education.
College set up in Colorado
Colorado Agriculture College (today Colorado State University) was founded in 1870 in Fort Collins under the Morrill-Act. Actual college instruction didn’t begin until Feb. 16, 1880, with 42 students (18 were women) and three professors. All of the students at the time were required to take the one veterinary class offered in the curriculum. A full-fledged three-year degree veterinary program was not established at the college until 1907, one year after the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. According to “Chiron’s Time,” the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was the result of Upton Sinclair’s novel, “The Jungle.” The book’s gruesome description of meat-packing practices greatly aroused public opinion and prompted Pres. Theodore Roosevelt to demand Congress do something. The Meat Inspection Act created a demand for veterinarians to oversee meat inspection, and thus elevated the profession’s value and esteem in the public.
Image courtesy Jo Ostwald / The Fort Morgan Times
This label inside Dr. David Roberts' book, “Practical Home Veterinarian,” states that Gayman Drug Co. in Fort Morgan was the agent for the book's prescriptions.
First college-trained vets
It is possible that the first college-trained veterinarian in Morgan County was Dr. George Teeple. “Looking Back – A Pictorial History of Morgan County, Colorado,” compiled by Roy G. Robinson and Darlene Doane in 1997, has a photo in its 1910s section of a Dr. Teeple taken in front of his home in the 600 block of Ensign Street in Fort Morgan. He is shown with his horse that he hitched to a two-wheeled sulky to make his veteri-
nary calls. His daughter, Georgia Teeple, is pictured as a junior in the 1912 Fort Morgan High School yearbook. Since his name does not appear in the Fort Morgan Museum’s Obituary Files or the cemetery listing, it is assumed that Dr Teeple later moved elsewhere. A well-known local veterinarian was Dr. Cecil Port Lamb, a 1912 Fort Morgan High School graduate. He graduated from Colorado Agriculture College with a three-year Doctor of Veterinary Science degree in 1915. (Beginning with the new enrollees in 1913, the college’s veterinary course required four years, and the Department of Veterinary Science became the Department of Veterinary Medicine.) Following his graduation in 1915, Dr. Lamb immediately set up a veterinary practice in Brush. (It could be that he did not choose to practice in Fort Morgan because Dr. Teeple was already established there, although that is not certain.)
Vets needed for war effort
In 1917, the United States became involved in World War I, and there was a dire need for veterinarians – not only to care for the horses and mules used to transport munitions to the Allied trenches, but to assure the wholesomeness of the food for the soldiers. The first Veterinary Corps of the U.S. Army was established in May 1917, and Dr. Lamb was See VETERINARY, 52
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VETERINARY from page 51 one of over 10 percent of the graduate veterinarians in the United States who enlisted and served. Following his military service, he returned to Morgan County, and from 1923-24 he managed his wife’s (Josephine Girardot) family ranch in Orchard. In 1925, Dr. Lamb returned to his Brush veterinary practice, which he kept going until he was forced to retire in l952 after developing an allergy to animal dander.
Vet enters politics
Having been exposed to politics when his father, Silas C. Lamb, served several terms as Morgan County sheriff, Dr. Lamb ran a successful campaign to be Morgan County’s representative in the Colorado legislature. He served 20 years in that capacity. He told The Fort Morgan Times that his hardest personal battle during that time was revising the Colorado Veterinary Practice Act and getting it passed into law. He introduced his bill during his first term, but it wasn’t passed until almost 16 years later in 1968. With a predominately rural representation in the Colorado legislature at that time, the ranchers and farmers were not eager to accept state regulations regulating them in the care of their animals.
Family memories
Tom Chesney, Dr. Lamb’s grandson, offered some wonderful memories of his grandfather: “Doc always wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a gray Stetson cowboy hat. I remember a specific time when he took me to lunch at a restaurant near the capitol. This was a
popular eat-place for the legislators, capitol staff and lobbyists. We were seated near the cash register. I was about 12 or so, and I observed someone standing at the register to pay, and the hostess would say, ‘Mr. so and so picked up your tab.’ The individual would say, ‘How nice,’ and look around the room to spot someone else, and then say, ‘Well then, pick up old Joe’s tab for me.’ It seemed as though they all paid, but never for their own bill. The lesson I learned then was that sometimes it is who you know that is every bit as important as what you know. “Since Granddad was a veterinarian who often made house calls to farms and ranches, he ate very quickly so he could get a meal in before he headed out on calls. I was a senior at Fort Morgan High School and was seated across from him at Sunday dinner. As he was shoveling in the food, he paused for a moment and asked me what my plans were for college. I told him I really liked Colorado College because they had this neat block system where you took one course at a time, immersed yourself in it for about three weeks, and the course was finished. Doc fixed me with a steely-eyed glare and said, ‘I’ll be (expletive) if any grandson of mine is going to a private college when I’ve been paying taxes all my life in this state!’ Needless to say, I was redirected to the University of Colorado, where both my parents had graduated. “Now fast forward one year and I am a freshman at CU. I had let my hair grow a little long. We were seated again at Sunday dinner, and the only thing Doc said to me the whole time was, ‘My god, you look just like
hell!’ I had to return the following week for some reason, so I got my hair cut. I was seated again across from him. As he quickly ate, he looked me over, and then said, ‘Now you look like my grandson. I want to buy that haircut,’ and he handed me a ten-dollar bill. “My point in telling these stories is, that was a generation that spoke candidly. They weren’t worried about being politically correct, and if you didn’t like what they said, or the way they said it, that was your problem to deal with, not theirs. There was nothing personal about it. They just expressed their feelings and you knew where you stood. Both of my grandparents were larger-than-life characters to me.”
Another veterinarian in Fort Morgan
Dr. Robert C. Swallow was 13 years older than Dr. Lamb, but he didn’t begin his veterinary practice in Fort Morgan until 1917 – about the same time that Dr. Lamb left the county to serve in World War I. The Fort Morgan Times reported that Dr. Swallow was a graduate of a veterinary school in Chicago. According to the book “Veterinary Medicine,” by Robert H. Dunlop and David J. Williams, the Chicago Veterinary College was one of five significant private veterinary schools among the 26 that existed during the Era of Private Veterinary Colleges between 1852 and 1927. Most of these private colleges had a short life span of 14 years, due to their failure to attract students. Of the 26 in existence during that time, the Chicago Veterinary College produced the most graduates.
In the early days of operating a veterinary practice, the Fort Morgan veterinarians maintained a small business office in town. Most of the early calls were rural. They traveled with their medical equipment and supplies first by horse and buggy and later by cars and then pickups to the farms requesting their assistance. Dr. Swallow’s office was in downtown Fort Morgan on the second floor of the First National Bank located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Kiowa Avenue.
Getting medical help
Dr. Swallow became a very close friend of one of Fort Morgan’s early medical doctors, Dr. Alfred Frederick Williams. According to Dr. Williams’ biography in “One Hundred Eleven Trees,” after graduating from Fort Morgan High School in 1899, he attended CU for his pre medical training and then entered Denver and Gross Medical School (later known as CU Medical School) and graduated in 1903. At that time it took a total of only four years to become a medical doctor. Dr. Williams had the only X-ray machine in Fort Morgan in those days. He was very generous to occasionally let Dr. Swallow bring in a dog or cat patient after hours to use the machine. There is also a known incident in which Dr. Swallow assisted Dr. Williams with a tonsillectomy on a Sunday morning in Dr Williams’ office. The two were driving together down Main Street when Dr. Williams spotted a paperboy whom he had previously examined and had told the boy’s mother that his tonSee VETERINARY, 53
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sils were in dire need of being removed, but he hadn’t seen them since. They decided to pick the boy up and took him to Dr. Williams’ office. Dr. Swallow was experienced in administering anesthetics to animals and apparently had no difficulty doing the same on the young boy while assisting Dr. Williams in the surgery. The lad was returned to his home following the surgery, and there apparently were no repercussions.
Occasionally, tragedy would strike, such as the time two of the animals strayed into a cane patch and after munching a few mouthfuls, promptly dropped dead. (Cane was grown in Morgan County as cattle feed but was a poisonous crop until a hard freeze had cured it.) This experience could possibly have influenced Harry to become a veterinarian. Following his graduation from the four-year veterinary program at Colorado Agriculture College in 1921, Harry returned to Fort MorFort Morgan native gan and practiced in association becomes a vet with Dr. Swallow until 1929, when Another early Fort Morgan veter- he moved to Fort Collins. He coninarian was Dr. Harry P. Scott, who tinued to practice there until his was born in Fort Morgan in 1895. retirement. An interesting account of his Fort Morgan childhood appears in “One Fort Morgan’s first vet Hundred Eleven Trees” in the biog- clinic opens raphy of his father, Samuel MontAnother associate of Dr. Swallow’s gomery Scott. was Dr. John W. Smith, who graduatFollowing in the footsteps of their ed from Colorado A&M veterinary two older brothers, Harry and his school in 1936. (The institution had a younger brother, John, spent their name change in 1935 to Colorado boyhood summers operating a “cow State College of Agricultural and pool.” Each morning after the vari- Mechanical Arts.) ous family cows were milked, the After first spending time in the Scott boys made the rounds gather- army in New Zealand, where he ing them into a herd and driving became a captain, and then becomthem north to the river bottom west ing a meat inspector in Denver, he of the South Platte River bridge. moved to Fort Morgan in 1944 and (The older brothers had driven the joined Dr. Swallow’s practice. cows several miles to the short bufShortly thereafter, he opened Fort falo grass west of Fort Morgan. As Morgan’s first veterinary clinic, a homesteads were taken up, the facility west of Fort Morgan on Highgrazing area was moved to the way 34, where farmers and ranchers south until the younger boys took could bring their livestock for treatover.) The cows were returned to ment and save the veterinarian a their owners in time for the evening county call. He practiced until his milking. It was an all-day job of cow untimely death from a fall in 1969. watching, and their pay was $1 each month, per animal. (Of course, the Unusual experiences Most country veterinarians have grass the cows consumed was free.)
tales of remarkable and sometimes very unusual experiences with their animal patients. In the 1960s, when the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic was housed on Dr. Richard Simmons’ property located on South Main Street just south of Landmark Trailer Park, a local dog owner whose dog was terrified of firecrackers would bring his dog out to board every year on the Fourth of July. One Fourth of July morning, upon arrival at the clinic, the doctors were very surprised to see the dog sitting at the office door all alone. Recognizing the dog, the animal was put in a cage where he could feel secure, and then the clinic staff tried to call his owner, but to no avail. Later in the day, they learned that the dog’s owner had taken ill during the night and was in the hospital. Obviously, at the sound of the first firecracker, the dog had somehow found his way on his own to the veterinary clinic that morning.
Animals of all kinds
Rural veterinarians learn to deal with a wide range of animals, each of which has its own specific characteristics. Pet turtles have been brought to the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic with cracked shells. It didn’t take long to realize that super glue does a great job in mending turtle shells. In 1987, being equipped with the steel pipe corrals needed to contain rather wild bison, the Fort Morgan Veterinary Clinic was called upon by the University of Colorado to TB test the new CU mascot, Ralphie III. Federal law requires most livestock to be tested before they can
travel across state lines, so the CSU-educated veterinarians had the privilege to house CU’s Ralphie III for the three days required for the test. Bob Spencer, a CU alumnus and publisher of The Fort Morgan Times, was invited to come see his alma mater’s newest mascot. He brought along a photographer, and consequently Ralphie III’s photo appeared in The Fort Morgan Times. In the early days there was not much offered at veterinary schools on treating birds. A classic bird experience of a local veterinarian involved a pet parakeet that was brought to his clinic with a huge lump on its rear end. The first question the veterinarian asked the client was whether the bird was male or female. The client proceeded to point out all the features making it a male. The veterinarian decided to probe the lump, and yellow fluid began to drip out. He told the client that it was the first male parakeet to lay an egg.
Moving into the future
Veterinary medicine today has come a long way from the late 19th century and its horse-and-buggy days; and it continues to change and grow. One example is that CSU recently announced it has received $77.8 million to build a Translational Medicine Institute. Its purpose is to bring together veterinary and human medical professionals in regenerative medical research that will benefit both humans and animals in the future. How times have changed in just a little more than 100 years!
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SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 53
There is no ‘try’ Randy Danielsen firmly believes in community volunteerism
By Jenni Grubbs
The Fort Morgan Times
Brush native Randy Danielsen has been involved with the Brush Rodeo for a long time, even serving as the president of the Brush Rodeo Board in 2018. His involvement with the rodeo is only one aspect of his community involvement and volunteerism. Being a part of such things and pitching in where needed was something that was instilled in him as a child, and it is what he continues to set as an example for others. “I was always taught, ‘You may not get paid, but you always get paid back,’” Danielsen said. In this regard, the longtime Morgan County resident, who lives near Hillrose, is a wealthy man. Danielsen also has a wealth of experience because of the variety of jobs he has held, the family he has raised and his involvement in the local community. He does not believe in trying to do things, only in doing that thing — and to the best of one’s ability. That was what his uncle told him both as a boy and as a man, and it’s something Danielsen took to heart.
“I was raised on the family farm,” he said. “My family did honey bees.” Danielsen attended Thomson Primary School, Brush Central School and Brush Junior High School. As a boy and young teen, he was active in 4-H. He raised pigs, sheep and horses and was part of the Midway Hustlers 4-H Club. “I enjoyed it,” he said of his 4-H years. While going to Brush High School, he continued his agricultural education. “I was in FFA all four years of high school,” Danielsen said, adding that he was a member of Brush High School’s rodeo team. He also played football his first three years of high school. “I went to work that summer between junior and senior years, and the money was more fun than football,” Danielsen recalled of working as a pump jockey at the Tomahawk Truck Station in Brush. He graduated from BHS in 1982.
Working life
After graduation, Danielsen said he “went to work for Pepsi Cola as a warehouse personnel loading trucks.” Before long, he became a route deliveryman for Pepsi. He also got married in 1985, which resulted in the births of daughter Pamela and son Austin. The marriage did not last, though, ending in divorce in 1992. Growing up Job wise, driving for Pepsi also Danielsen was born in Brush in did not last, especially when his 1964. agricultural roots came calling his
Jenni Grubbs / The Fort Morgan Times
Randy Danielsen wears a white hat for this picture in July 2018.
name. “I started working in agriculture at 3T Feedlot,” he said of his job there as a driver and mill operator. Also during this time, he continued his involvement with his family’s honey bees, and he joined the Morgan County Sheriff’s Reserves and became peace officer standards and training (POST) certified. Danielsen worked his way up to commander of the sheriff’s reserves. In 1989, he left 3T Feedlot to pursue an opportunity at High Plains
Youth Correctional Center, which was the name of the former juvenile detention center in Brush. “I was trained as a sex offender counselor, a drug and alcohol counselor and a violent offender counselor,” Danielsen recalled. “I’ve always been busy.” When an opportunity came up with the city of Brush, he changed jobs again. He went to work as a code enforcement officer for the Brush Police Department. That See DANIELSEN, 55
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DANIELSEN from page 54 lasted about three years, and then he went back to High Plains Youth Center and worked there until that facility closed for good in 1998. It was a time of transitions for Danielsen. He married Jackie, his “best friend,” in 1998, and became father to their daughter, Briana. He also gave up the commander role with the sheriff’s reserves around this time. Plus, he needed to find a new job. It was back to agricultural work for Randy, who got a job as the assistant manager of CattlCo Feedlot in 1999. He stayed there until 2013. That was when Erker Grain in Fort Morgan hired him as that company’s general manager. Randy left that job before too long, though, and he next went to work at Dinklage feed yard southeast of Fort Morgan as the feed been major influences on Randy’s manager. life, and he decided he wanted to Prioritizing family find a job that would let him spend The problem with agricultural what time with them that he still jobs, Randy had realized, was that could. they required long hours with little He found that job in the mainterelief or flexibility. nance department at Colorado “It was six or seven days a week, Plains Medical Center in Fort Mor12-hour days,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I gan. don’t want do this. I want to spend “That’s been a different job for time with my family.’” me,” Randy said. “I’m used to workHis father, Robert Danielsen, and ing with cattle, and now I have to his uncle, Ray Danielsen, were both stay clean. I’m learning lots of new in poor health, and Randy wanted to stuff, new challenges.” be able to have time to be with them And the job at the hospital and help care for his ailing relatives. brought him closer to working near “Dad fell and broke both hips, and his wife and one of his daughters, as he was just giving up,” he recalled. they also were working at CPMC. “He had a bout with cancer.” Being not far away from them was And his uncle was affected by an especially nice thing over the last dementia toward the end of his life. year. Both his father and his uncle had “Dad passed away Jan. 3, 2018.
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Randy Danielsen and three of his grandchildren watch a competition at the 2014 National Western Stock Show. Courtesy photo
My uncle passed away Jan. 26, 2018,” Randy recalled. “The first part of the year was rough. I’m still dealing with the aftermath, dealing with estates and everything now.” But his family members have been there to support him through that tough time. “I’ve got a good family,” Randy said. “Cousins, wife, kids... everyone’s helping out, so it’s working out.” And he also credits his employer.
Community involvement
One of Randy’s wife’s passions is raising horses and participating in horse shows, so that quickly became something he was involved with, as well. “Jackie and Briana are involved in
lots of horse shows,” he said. “I usually end up running them and they show in them.” That led him to take on an official role with these shows and the organization that puts them on. “I was the president of the Northeastern Quarter Horse Association for 15 years,” he said, of the post he left just this year. His wife and daughter travel for a “a lot of the ranch competitions,” including ones in Wyoming, Loveland and Nebraska. “I bought her a trailer with living quarters so she could go these shows,” Randy said. “We’re always in them. Every weekend there’s something going on.” He also has taken a leadership role with the local county fair. See DANIELSEN, 56
The City of Sterling salutes and thanks the ranchers and farmers for their perseverance and love of the land.
(970) 867-9071
SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 55
DANIELSEN from page 55
“I was the president of the Morgan County Fair Board in 2016-17,” Randy said. But when he got tapped for the Brush Rodeo Board presidency, he knew he had to make a choice. “Between the rodeo board and quarter horse association, I just decided I’ve got to give one of them up,” Randy said. “This is only my second year with rodeo president, but I’ve been involved with them for, holy mackerel, I started with them for 30-plus years.” Over those years, he helped out with things like parking cars, working security, helping in the livestock area. “Then they convinced me to join the board,” he said. “Then they suckered me into the presidency.” But it has been something Danielsen has found to be worth volunteering his time toward. “It’s a good organization,” he said. He plans to be involved with the rodeo board “until they kick me out,” and he can be the board president for three years before term limits take effect. “I’ll continue to be involved with it
as long as I can walk,” Randy said. “I work the exit gate with the rough stock, the horse and bulls.” He also spends time volunteering with his grandchildren and their 4-H and school activities. “One of the reasons I’m so active in community events is you may not get paid, but you always get paid back,” he said, repeating a phrase he frequently uses. “When my kids were younger, we always participated in setting up school activities, Halloween carnivals, things like that.” Now he volunteers with the horse shows, 4-H projects, school activities, the Brush Rodeo, the Morgan County Fair and more, and Jackie also donates a lot of time to these and other projects, causes and organizations. Now he is seeing his grandchildren participating and even competing at the fair where he volunteers.
Rodeo, rodeo, rodeo
As of spring 2018, the Brush Rodeo became an even bigger part of Randy’s life than it had been before, and that’s saying something. “The reason I’m involved with the rodeo is it’s a good organization that does a lot for the Brush community, but for Morgan County as a whole,” he said. “I still get a lot of encouragement from past presidents, like Steve Treadway, who was president forever, and Jeff Osuch.” He also credited all the folks whose names are not widely known or publicized but help make the annual rodeo happen. “We have several volunteers who are not on the rodeo board who help make the rodeo happen,” Ran-
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Randy Danielsen is with his daughter, Pamela, at the Brush Rodeo in 2017.
dy said. “They cook the barbecue “(In 2018), the county commisand serve it, serve concessions and sioners have granted us larger leeway with a larger beer garden,” more.” Randy said. “Beer (was) able to be And the Morgan County commistaken up into the grandstands and sioners also got a shout out from on the food court. People (could) sit the 2018 rodeo board president. and drink beer and watch rodeo, instead of standing around. We wanted it to where they could release and enjoy the rodeo.” He expected that rodeo would continue to a good community event for many more years. “We’ve had some faithful sponsors, and we’re getting new sponsors every year,” Randy said. “We’re looking for new activities. This is the second time the dance was put on by the Brush Police Department with the live band. We have princess rides. We’re doing a bigger grand opening, and trick riding and mutton bustin’.”
Kim • 719-232-0142
56 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
County resident conserves 1.2K acres of land John Yocam donated development rights to Colorado Open Lands in Dec. 2018
By Kara Morgan
The Fort Morgan Times
Morgan County resident John Yocam and Colorado Open Lands ended 2018 with a deal. Yocam decided a bit more than a year ago that he wanted to conserve his family’s ranchland to make sure it stayed the thriving ranch land and habitat site that they had worked for many years to maintain. He approached Colorado Open Lands, a nonprofit land trust, to figure out how best to ensure the land would continue on as it has. “We are thrilled that John Yocam decided to donate a conservation easement on his 1,218 acre ranch just outside of Orchard,” said Carmen Farmer,
Colorado Open Lands (COL) conservation project manager. Yocam said in the past his land has been a site of interest by outside parties, and he wanted to ensure that it stayed the ranchland it has been. As both Yocam and Farmer explain, the land is both ranchland and an important habitat site for local and migrating wildlife. “It’s that way because we’ve kept it that way for all these years, and that was the same thing they liked about it,” Yocam said. Now, the land is legally bound to stay conserved. “It stays as-is — as a ranch forever,” he explained. Farmer explained how the process had gone so far. “John approached us a about a year ago with interest in conserving his ranch to ensure it would be maintained as productive ranchland in perpetuity for generations to come,” she said. Yocam explained some of the history of his land and why a con-
servation easement made sense for him. “It’s been a long time coming actually. It started back in the ’70s when they were going to put in Centennial Wildlife Refuge here,” he said. Yocam said the land has been in his family for about 70 years or so, since the mid-1950s, and he himself has lived there since 1976. “Pressure has just got to so much here from different water projects, recharge projects. I’ve been in court about three times and so I just got tired of fighting off everybody,” he explained. “So I donated it into a land trust.”
What’s a conservation easement?
Leslie Volkar, COL director of communications, explained how Image courtesy Google Maps the land trust and Yocam entered A Google maps image of the area of John into the conservation easement Yocam's ranch, which he has placed into a agreement, which meant Yocam conservation easement, which will protect See YOCAM, 58 crucial wildlife habitat from development.
SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • 57
YOCAM from page 57
had donated to COL the development rights to the land. Yocam still owns and manages the land, she explained. “A conservation easement is essentially an agreement between the landowner and us, where they will extinguish certain development rights, essentially subdivision and development rights and in some cases, oil and gas rights,” Volkar explained. The goal for COL with such conservation easement agreements is to “protect the certain conservation values that are on the land, whether that’s agricultural production, scenic views, wildlife habitat,” she said. Volkar explained that their end of the deal includes checking and making sure that the land is staying as outlined in the conservation easement contract. “...because he’s gone into a contract with us, it’s our job to make sure that those values are being upheld,” she said. Volkar explained what COL’s “check-in” process is like for all their easements. “We visit the property once a year — we do this with all of our easements — and just make sure that no one has subdivided the property, no one’s built new roads or built new barns without talking with us about it first,” she said. Yocam said the estimated value of the 1,218 acres of land is about $2.333 million, and he would be receiving about $300,000 in state tax credits and $650,000 in federal tax credits for this donation. Farmer said they also worked with Ducks Unlimited and U.S. Fish & Wildlife to cover some of the transaction costs of the process. “We partnered with Ducks Unlimited to get some funding from U.S. Fish & Wildlife, which is a federal agency, to help with transaction costs, because they prioritize that South Platte River area,” she explained. Yocam said the transaction closed on Dec. 28, 2018.
‘Rare and Unusual’
Describing the recently conserved land, Yocam said with some pride, “It was deemed rare and unusual and must be protected,
was the rating they gave it.” Farmer explained how this land is valuable in many ways, more than ranchland. “In addition to being highly productive, the ranch also provides excellent waterfowl habitat with its wetland and upland features,” she said. The land is located outside of the town of Orchard, Farmer sid, and it plays an important role for the wildlife living in the area, especially birds. “Occurring within the ‘Golden Triangle,’ an area in Morgan and Weld counties defined by Empire Reservoir, Jackson Reservoir and Riverside Reservoir, the ranch and surrounding agricultural lands provide populations of ducks and geese with important upland/agricultural foraging grounds during their migration and over-wintering in the South Platte Basin,” Farmer explained. For bird migration in the area, this location is critical, she said. “This region is one of the most important wetland complexes in the South Platte Basin along the Central Flyway Migration Corridor,” Farmer said. Yocam painted a picture of the land diversity across his property: “It’s river bottom, into a riparian habitat. I’ve got a large sub-irrigated meadow. It’s got a big chunk of wetlands on it and then it goes into the uplands.” It is not only the birds that will benefit from the continued conservation of the land. “The entire spectrum is here and
58 • FEBRUARY 28, 2019 • SALUTE TO AGRICULTURE
it’s teeming with life,” Yocam added. “The entire spectrum from the river bottom to the uplands just doesn’t happen everywhere.”
What is Colorado Open Lands?
Both Volkar and Farmer emphasized that Colorado Open Lands’ conservation easement process is entirely voluntary for the landowners with whom they work. “These are only done with the express permission and desire of the landowner,” Volkar said. “We write them with the landowner in mind, to make sure they can accomplish their goals for the property.” For Yocam, that meant setting aside land for his family to build a new barn and home. As part of the process, he said they set aside about 4,000 square feet to build a new house on the land and about 5,000 square feet to build a new barn. Farmer explained a little bit more of the land trust’s mission: “Colorado Open Lands is committed to working with farmers and ranchers who are interested in exploring conservation options for their properties,” she said. Farmer continued on to describe their evaluation of and goals in Morgan County, in particular: “Morgan County has a rich agricultural tradition, particularly as one of the top producing counties in the state, and Colorado Open Lands looks forward to helping landowners who are looking for ways to keep their land in productive agri-
culture while providing important habitat benefits, as well.” Volkar said they have currently conserved about 3,230 acres in the county over four properties, including Yocam’s, and about 68,000 in northeast Colorado overall. For those trying to picture what Yokam’s 1,218 acres look like, Volkar provided the following visual comparison for the size of an acre: “A football field with both endzones included is about an acre.” Farmer said that there already has been quite a bit of conservation work around the county and the Golden Triangle area, from Legacy Land Trust and Ducks Unlimited. Legacy Land Trust and COL merged several years ago, she said.
Why land conservation?
Yocam explained why he decided to go through this process to protect the development rights of his land: “I just didn’t want to see it destroyed.” This is an important part of COL’s mission, which Volkar and Farmer described. “We do this to benefit the people of Colorado by making sure, in 50 to 100 to 200 years, Colorado still has agricultural lands, wildlife habitat, water, scenic views,” Volkar explained. “As our population continues to grow, we want to make sure that we save what’s really good.” Volkar said Yocam’s goals were very similar. Colorado Open Lands, which was founded in 1981, works across the state in around 50 of Colorado’s 64 counties, Volkar said. Farmer said she believes they are conserving more than 500,000 acres in Colorado. Volkar said one word to describe COL’s goals is “foresight.” “Essentially we just want to make sure that Coloradans in the future have the same opportunities to access all the wonderful things Colorado’s lands give us today,” she said. “We want to make sure in a hundred years or further out, our grandkids can have beautiful views, so they can see elk and moose and deer and bears, even, running around on the land. So that they’ll have clean water that’s conserved for them.”
A MESSAGE FROM ALLEN BOELTER, GENERAL MANAGER, CARGILL FORT MORGAN … Agriculture truly is the “Heartbeat of the Plains.” When I start thinking about all the ways in which ag plays a part of our everyday lives, it is beyond amazing. I cannot think of even one activity that we do every day that does not have its roots in ag. That is how it is for us here at Cargill, too. Our very existence relies on the agriculture producer. Without them, our circle of life would be broken. We work together, hand in hand. They supply the cattle, we supply the venue for that beef to find its way on to your table. Together, we can then help better the lives of our friends and families, as well as our community. Cargill values community, of giving back. We are proud supporters of people and events in our community in order to make things better. Cargill values agriculture and its farm and ranch producers for helping create the quality of life that we all hold so dear. They work so hard to produce those commodities that we have come to rely upon and cherish. On behalf of the 2,100 employees of the Fort Morgan Cargill, Thank You, to these producers and suppliers of cattle. They grow the finest quality beef and have forged a strong working partnership with Cargill that is meaningful and profitable for all.
Thank you Northeast Colorado Beef Producers – You are Quite Simply – the
BEST!