News & Events - Archived News

Production agriculture, a way of life

"I grew up in farming," Joe said.

"The farm (east of Hudson, Colo.) is a combination of dryland and irrigated," he said.

Raising sugarbeets, corn, irrigated wheat, pinto beans, malt barley, sunflowers, alfalfa and dryland wheat, Amen is following in the footsteps of his father, Harry, and his grandfather, John.

John Amen moved to Colorado's Prospect Valley in 1936. Between then and today there has only been one year the Amens haven't raised sugarbeets.

The only year without beets was 1985, the year Great Western Sugar Company went bankrupt. The next year Tate & Lyle purchased the Fort Morgan and Greeley factories and beets were again planted on Amen's farm east of Hudson, Colo.

"Sugarbeets have been our main cash crop," Joe said. "They've been our most consistent crop - they are the first in and the last out - not always the easiest to grow, but they have been a good crop."

"Once you get them up, it's hard to kill them," Sandi, Joe's wife, said.

Over the years, the Amens have seen hail, early freezes, and snow try to do in their beets.

"I remember '69," Joe said. Amen was a Senior in high school and during the homecoming game "it started snowing. When the game ended there was two-feet of snow on the ground. In December, I missed two weeks of school trying to get the beets out. Pulling trucks through the mud - it was ugly. We finished harvest around Valentine's Day that year."

In 1986, after going a year without beets, a major hail storm almost wiped out everything. "It was the first year we had crop insurance," Sandi recalls.

Joe and Sandi have been farming since Joe graduated from Colorado State University with a major in Ag Engineering in 1974.

"There is something about watching a crop grow," Joe said when asked why he returned to the farm. The newness of everything in the spring time. It is something special that is hard to describe.

"The challenges facing the farmer are different every year because the weather is not the same every year. Along with these changes come challenges. The other facet of farming that I enjoy is the fact that you are required to be a jack-of-all-trades. You are a producer, marketer, bookkeeper, chemist, irrigation scheduler, mechanic, operator, manager, etc.," he added.

Amen farmed one year with his father near Longmont and then moved to Hudson in 1975.

Over the years, the Amens have gone to planting everything in 30 inch rows. They began bedding about 10 years ago and irrigate their sugarbeets up on a regular basis.

Bedding and irrigating the beets up have become common practice in "this country", Amen said. The beds make it easier to get the water started (Amen has two pivots, 80 acres uses a side roll and the rest is flood irrigation). "It's the way things are done."

When controlling nematodes, he uses his Bushhog row till machine and puts on 1/2 to 2/3rd's the rate of fungicide through the tube stocks. "It puts $50 to $60 back into your pocket."

Two years ago the Amens purchased a 16 row sprayer and went to 100 percent post emergence weed control. "So far I've been pleased." Emer-gence has improved, as has weed control.

Laborers still goes through the beets on an average of once a year to clean them up.

"We plant to stand since we went to 30 inch rows and do our post emergence spray, but you still have escapes here and there," Joe said. The laborers clean those areas up.

Amen uses minimum tillage practices on all his ground except for the beet ground. "Most of the beet ground is conventional till."

Living near the Metropolitan area of Denver, Amen has seen some signs of development around him. There is a housing development within a mile of his house, land values have climbed and the farming that is in the area is changing.

"People have taken some production ag land and shifted it around," Amen said. There is a new sod farm, a new farm, and a number of smaller hobby farms where there were once traditional row crop farms. "It's just a different type of farming."

The metro area has also opened up new possibilities as well as challenges for the Amens. Every fall the Amens have begun selling small bales of straw and corn stacks for decoration to the city dwellers around Halloween time.

New arrivals from the city, Sandi said, have made the chemical guys (those applying fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides) a little gun-shy, but for the most part they (the new arrivals) haven't been too bad."

With the changes in agriculture along Colorado's front range and nationwide, Amen sees farmers having to get bigger and/or "looking for new sources of income". Sources such as the wife working off the farm or value-added products.

Along the front range, more farmers are looking at growing herbs, pumpkins, vegetables and other crops. "I trade land with a neighbor who grows pumpkins," Amen said. "He grows pumpkins on my land and I grow sugarbeets on his."

Right now, sugarbeets have gone the way of the other major commodities, Amen said. However, he refuses to let the tough times get him down. "I've been hearing that beets were on the way out ever since I started farming. We're still in business."

As a group, Amen, who is the President of the Colorado Sugarbeet Growers Association, added, "we're resourceful enough to keep this industry alive."

Alive, possibly for the next generation of Amens.