This is the third of a three-part series for The Colorado Dream: Growing a Future. The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream. The podcast is available for download wherever you may listen to podcasts and on KUNC.org.
It's a hot July day, and Chase Buoy walks through a cornfield on Colorado’s Northeastern Plains, looking for Western Bean Cutworm eggs on the crops.
“They'll look like little brown and white dots all over the leaf in a circle like right there,” Buoy said, pointing to a leaf. “Right there, see? Those baby worms are hatching out of those eggs.”
Buoy is an intern at Simplot Grower Solutions, which provides technology and expertise to farmers in the U.S. and Canada. Most days the 20-year-old visits local farms in Yuma County. He walks their fields, scouts plants for pests, pulls tissue soil samples and does other tasks. He passes this information to his manager, a crop advisor.
“It’s an easy way for me to get experience in the farm industry seeing it from the corporate world, and not just the grower side of it,” he said.
Buoy has interned at Simplot for the past two summers, but he’s been preparing for this work his whole life. He grew up on the grower side, on Lenz Farms, a farm that’s been in his family for four generations. Buoy hopes to work at the family operation one day, but he’s not guaranteed a job just because he’s blood.
As family farms have steadily disappeared across the country for decades, Lenz Farms has survived and thrived. Building a business off the land is hard. But with thoughtful planning, determination and a sense of its place in the community, the family has navigated the pitfalls that felled other family farms, and it is preparing for the next generation.
A farm’s legacy
Lenz Farms sits on 12,000 acres of rolling prairies and grasslands near the small city of Wray in Yuma County. It’s mid-summer, and this time of year the cattle are grazing in the pastures or fattening up in the feedlot. Many of the farms’ fields are green, filled with potato, corn and bean crops.
“I guess you get bit by this, I guess you call a farming bug when you're little and you just, there's nothing else you want to do,” he said.
Lenz Farms was founded in the 1970s by George Lenz and four of his sons, including Buoy’s grandfather. Early on, they created a simple agreement that evolved over time into a business model that’s kept management and ownership in the family for three generations so far.
Today, the third generation is running the operation – a cycle that will continue with their children. The Lenz family spans four generations with about 100 members. So, it’s a fine line between having enough help and too much.
“You have to be willing to sacrifice your time and your efforts, to take a little back so the farm could grow,” he said.
Buoy’s dad, Marty Buoy is the CEO of Lenz Farms and one of six owners and partners. The other five are their relatives. Growing up, the younger Buoy worked on the farm a lot. As his experience grew, so did his responsibilities.
“I started off sorting nuts and bolts in dad's shop, where he was working on trucks. Now, I just got back from running a tractor by myself on a field,” he said.
Buoy lights up when he talks about going crop scouting with his brothers and cousins.
“It's just a learning moment that we have every year. Because when you farm, there's nothing the same. You get hailed out one year, and you have to do crop counts and see how much your yield loss is. And then other years you have 320 bushels of corn,” he said. “It's awesome to look at.”
Over the decades, Lenz Farms has been able to achieve something that has eluded many other family farms: Longevity.
Community ties
Since the 1980s Farm Crisis, the U.S. has lost around 600,000 family farms and over 150 million acres of farmland. Despite this, the U.S. is still one of the top ag producers in the world.
The focus of our system in recent decades has been encouraging larger and larger farming operations. The benefits of that approach have included extraordinary productivity, the advancement of technology, and the development of incredible equipment that allows massive farming operations.
The downside is fewer farm families,” said Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa who also served as the U.S. secretary of agriculture under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Vilsack is teaching a course at Colorado State University this fall on how to help small farms survive and thrive.
Farm families are the bedrock of small town, rural America. When you lose these families, Vilsack said, you lose a lot. Like young people.
“Which means fewer students in rural schools, and so that puts a strain on your rural education system,” he said.
Vilsack also points to the loss of patients who support the local healthcare system and the customers who shop at neighborhood stores. When local businesses close, Vilsack said big box stores move in and pull money out of the community.
“All of which has an impact on the vibrancy of a community and the capacity of that community to make the case to the next generation that this is an opportunity. This is a place you want to stay,” he said.
Wray is a typical small rural city with about 2,300 people. There’s a Main Street lined with businesses and restaurants, a hospital and Friday night football. Lenz Farms is an integral part of this community. Not only does it employ local workers. Dozens of Lenz family members worship and serve at a local Catholic church.
Lenz Farms CEO Marty Buoy is a volunteer firefighter and sits on the school board.
“For both Marty and I, it's a joy to give to others,” said Yvonne Buoy (née Lenz), Buoy’s wife. They have four sons who are teenagers and young adults. “It's a way of life. If you want to be successful and to be a well rounded person, you've got to give back.”
Yvonne Buoy grew up on the farm along with many siblings and cousins, and she is now a local 4-H leader. 4-H is the nationwide youth development organization with four values: head, heart, hands and health.
“We do a lot of community service projects. We do six throughout the year. And then in August, we have a big fair,” Buoy said.
At that fair, young people sell cattle, pigs, sheep or other animals they’ve raised.
“We're very blessed in our local community that business members always show up and give back to the youth,” she said. "It's what paid for my college, and it's what's paying for my kids’ college.”
Buoy works at an accounting firm in Wray, but she also helps out at the farm, overseeing food safety. So far, the partners of Lenz Farms have been men, but their wives have been involved since the beginning.
“I choose to take the time to raise our children,” she said. “Marty is the full-fledged partner, and then I am just in the background, doing what I can do to make everything go around.”
Lenz Farms is a large-scale family farm that grosses over a million dollars annually. Potatoes are the farm's cash crop, generating the most income per acre.
Harvest time
It’s mid-September, and the Lenz Farms’ potato harvest has been underway for a week. The crop needs to stay cool. So, during the warm fall days, they start around 3:30 or 4 a.m., and they work until the temperature is in the low 60s. The crop is planted on roughly 850 acres of land, and it takes five to six weeks to harvest all the potatoes.
After the potatoes have been dug up, they are transported to farm headquarters. Then they are offloaded to a system of conveyor belts that keeps them in constant motion from the truck to the storage shed so they don’t get damaged.
The first of five sheds is almost full and already has millions of potatoes stacked 16 feet high. It’s chilly in the shed, about 45 degrees. Buoy stands towards the front, on a catwalk 25 feet in the air.
“I love that smell, the smell of the dirt,” he said. “It's a smell that you get used to, kind of like cut grass to smell a potato harvest.”
The potato harvest takes a lot of hard work and can get monotonous at times, Buoy said as he watches as a steady flow of potatoes move up the conveyor and then drop into the pile.
“But the harvest is the funnest part, even though it's probably the most stressful, because there's just so much to get done in a short amount of time,” he said.
The potato yields have been really good this year, about 20% higher than expected, Buoy said. But this is also true for a lot of other farms. When the volume goes up, sales go down, and he hopes they won’t have to lower the price too much.
The potatoes will sit in storage for about a month. Then get transferred to the farm’s packing shed, where they are sorted, washed, and put into 5-pound bags or 2,000-pound poly totes. These spuds will be shipped to grocery stores and warehouse clubs in Florida, Chicago, Texas and other states.
It’s all hands on deck during the harvest, and retired Lenz Farms partners and founders will help out. This includes Rod Lenz, who drives one of the trucks that goes back and forth, collecting potatoes from the field and bringing them back to headquarters.
This is Lenz’s 48th potato harvest. But these days, he’s consumed with helping the region conserve water.
“Every business, every entity, every farmer, wants to make money,” Lenz said. “Your most valuable resource bar none is water here, bar none.”
Water shortages
Agriculture is the economic driver on Colorado’s Northeastern Plains. But the land wasn’t really meant for farming because it’s dry, and rainfall is minimal.
For decades, farmers like the Lenzes have irrigated their crops by pumping water directly from the vast underground Ogallala Aquifer. The aquifer sits far beneath Colorado and eight other states. Lenz Farms has 40 high-capacity wells that use its water.
“(The) Ogallala Aquifer, that was what provided us the opportunity to turn what was considered pasture land, dry land farming into highly productive irrigated ground,” Lenz said.
However, the Ogallala is also the primary water source for the Republican River Basin. The river flows from Yuma County 430 miles east to Nebraska and Kansas. In 1942, the Republican River Compact was signed to split the basin’s water between the three states.
Today, the river doesn’t get enough water from the aquifer because farmers have been using too much of it.
In 2004 the Colorado legislature created the Republican River Water Conservation District (RRWCD) to help the state comply with the compact. Lenz is the president.
The RRWCD assesses local ag producers a fee that is based on how many acres they irrigate. Some of that fee money is used to buy farmers’ water rights. The water is then pumped from the wells to the Compact Compliance Pipeline, which dumps it in the Republican River.
This system helps keep Colorado in compliance with the compact. But every year more wells must be purchased because the aquifer continues to go down.
Growers also are asked to voluntarily retire their wells for payment.
“If we would cut our acres by 20%, it would make a big difference. By 40% we may be able to talk about sustainability, but no growers are willing to do that,” Lenz said. “That's a big deal to ask somebody to say, ‘Okay, you've been irrigating for 50 years. You need to quit so we can stay in compact compliance’.”
Colorado is required to retire the wells on 25,000 acres of irrigated farmland by 2029, and they are about 65% of the way there, Lenz said.
“If we don't get it by then the state engineer will, likely, he said he will shut off all the wells, which is 5,000 wells, which would be nothing short of catastrophic.” he said.
Next generation
Marty Buoy is 47 years old, and one day he and the five other current owners and partners of Lenz Farms will hand the family operation over to the next generation. Buoy’s son Chase Buoy can’t wait.
“I was just sitting in the tractor one night, like two years ago, just, I think I was just doing bean tillage. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do the rest of my life but to do this’’” the younger Buoy said.
Chase Buoy is a junior at Kansas State University, majoring in agronomy and entomology. He likes plant biology, soil sciences and insects. He plans to study abroad in Brazil, where there are huge corn and soybean markets. He wants to learn new techniques that will hopefully land him a job back here at Lenz Farms.
“Watching my dad and grandpa and all my uncles do this, it takes a different mindset to invest what you have into something that has a chance not to make you any money,” he said. “It's just a different mindset you need to be able to keep pushing through generation (after) generation, just to keep the farm growing.”
Lenz Farms turns 52 next year. To get to 100 years old, it will need innovative ideas from Chase Buoy’s generation and the next one and the next one after that. But the future of this farm, and all the others on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, will ultimately come down to one thing — water.
Credits
The Colorado Dream, Season 5: “Growing a Future” is a production of KUNC News. This episode is hosted, reported and produced by Stephanie Daniel with editing by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Digital editing and social promotion by Alex Murphy. Photos by Jennifer Coombes. Artwork by Alex Murphy and Jenn de la Fuente. The music is from Epidemic Sound. Alex Murphy is the digital editor.
Special thanks to Leigh Paterson, Brad Turner, Kim Rais, Desmond O’Boyle and Christina Cooper. Tammy Terwelp is KUNC’s president and CEO.
