ROCKY FORD — As sleepless as a new parent, Josh Proctor tended the rows of tiny shoots poking from his cornfield at all hours of the early summer night, picking his way through the dark to check on irrigation channels easily choked by trash and weeds in a season of unusually abundant rainfall.
This is his baby: 160 acres, a quarter-section, just outside of town that he purchased in the spring of 2016, when his late grandfather’s parcel went up for sale. Proctor, now 23, figured to be a bystander at the auction until the last moment, when circumstances unexpectedly aligned to answer the burning question of his young life.
Could I be a farmer?
For most who have grown up potential heirs to agriculture in the Lower Arkansas Valley, the answer to that question looms in the declining number of farm operators in the region, as young adults leave to find better or more varied economic opportunity elsewhere — often in urban centers. It also holds a key to the sustainability of agriculture, and a cherished way of life, in a region that has for decades been a battleground over water rights needed to nourish expansion on the Front Range.
Anecdotal observation frames the exodus: Proctor can think of only four of his 22 high school classmates who stuck around to farm. Statistics also paint a portrait of a graying demographic. The average age of farm operators in Otero County jumped about a full year, to 55.8, in the 2012 Census of Agriculture, the most recent numbers since the 2007 count.
The increase also reflects trends in most neighboring counties in the Lower Arkansas Valley, where the Arkansas River meanders across Colorado’s Eastern Plains, and in the nation, where the average age of principal farm operators has stair-stepped steadily upward since 1982. Those national numbers also show a precipitous decline of about 20 percent in “new farmers” who have worked their operation 10 years or less.
More than ever, farming in the region has become a calculus of scale, equipment and water — a daunting barrier to entry for new operators, notes Kim Siefkas of Las Animas, who has farmed in the area for more than 40 years. With low commodities prices, farmers need more acreage to remain viable and the cost of equipment to work it has skyrocketed. More recently, he adds, young would-be farmers find themselves competing against big-money investors for land and water, while new water-leasing mechanisms have made water rights a “cash crop” that encourages would-be sellers to keep their parcels.
“What I see happening is the older people hanging on to farms a little longer and pretty soon there aren’t going to be any young people to buy them,” says Siefkas, 68. “That’s the kind of thing you look down the road at and kinda wonder what’s going to happen.”
Some have bucked the trends.
Just a few miles from where Proctor plants his crops as newly minted owner of a small spread, Chris and Jodi Tomky returned from college to farm some family land in 2002 — in the jaws of the area’s worst drought in 300 years. Boundless optimism, resilience and aggressive acquisition pulled them through to continue a century-old family farming tradition.
Across the river and several miles east, in neighboring Crowley County, a once-verdant expanse rendered a mini-Dust Bowl after water rights were sold off to quench the Denver suburbs, Matt Heimerich brought a New York born-and-raised attitude out West for a post-college adventure. He married into an agricultural family and, 30 years later, tends about 300 acres while leasing some land to a young nephew. He senses a farming “renaissance.”
Though spanning generations, all have been drawn to farming by family, by affinity for the rural lifestyle, by faith — and sometimes a little bit of each.
“All I can say is the Lord put it in my heart to be a farmer,” Proctor says. “There’s always days I doubt it, hard days, when it’s not the funnest. And I think, dang, did I get in the right occupation? We’re a dying breed as far as I can tell.”
* * *
When he arrived at the auction in May 2016, buying his grandfather’s farm was the furthest thing from Proctor’s mind.
He and his dad had worked the land on a lease arrangement, and he had been living in the small house on the property. But after his grandfather died a year earlier, the property was scheduled to be sold.
“At that point in my life, it didn’t look like farming would work out for me,” Josh says. “I was praying to God what he’d like my life to be like, praying to him to open or close doors as he sees fit.”
And then, a door opened. When the auction bidding stayed relatively low, Josh saw a chance to stake his claim — and a short while later, he had submitted a successful bid. Next, he had to put together financing to close the sale.
The Palmer Land Trust, which works to protect the regional landscape, earlier had proposed working on a conservation easement if Josh were ever to buy a place. He took them up on the deal: In return for ensuring that the water rights stay with his land permanently, Josh received money he put toward his down payment.
Among the many challenges of launching his own venture, where he grows corn, hay, wheat, sorghum, oats and milo, water hasn’t been one of them — not this year. More than 12 inches fell last spring, keeping the river and area canals high and keeping Josh awake at night making sure the heavy flow doesn’t gum up his irrigation with debris.
As he navigates the dirt roads that wind through his acreage in his battered flatbed truck, he recounts the nightly routine: at 11 p.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 6 a.m. he rises and checks the water flow. If debris were to choke off the irrigation, especially on the valley’s 100-degree days, it wouldn’t take long to find himself in a bind.
There were some anxious moments in the early spring, when a late snowfall blanketed his newly emerging corn. But nature smiled on him: The snow served to insulate the plants against the freeze that followed.
“A week later,” Josh says, “it popped right back up.”
He runs a few dozen cows because “cattle and farming complement each other, and I just like animals.” This, like most of his agricultural knowledge, he learned from his father, Joseph, who counseled that growing feed and raising cattle provide the kind of diversification that can serve as a useful hedge against tough times.
Josh’s tour of his property takes him past a loader with a broken transmission, a large equipment shed whose roof was torn off in a windstorm and what he calls some “crappy old buildings and corrals that need work.” Projects, as he call them, fill the time he isn’t tending to the fields.
“I can make a living as long as I’m not buying equipment — my dad is letting me use his,” he says. “That’s how I can make it work.”
Adding to his life-changing events, Josh in April married Miranda, a classmate at Otero Junior College who now works in the office of a local livestock sale barn. And soon, the farm won’t be their only baby — the couple is expecting their first child in January.
“I’m getting it all in one year,” Josh says.
He spends some of his time working for his dad on acreage about six miles to the north, work that helps pay the couple’s “monthlies.” He leases another 200 acres nearby. Yet, already, he’s craving more land, maybe another 50-100 acres of his own, although he knows firsthand how scarce that can be.
That’s why his dad supported his venture to buy the family parcel.
“You get these overinflated land values forcing out the middle-class farming families,” Joseph says, noting that the price his son paid was reasonable but not cheap. “If you’re not passing that land on, how’s the next guy ever going to start?”
Joseph, a preacher with a nondenominational Bible church, considers himself an evangelist at heart whose calling has taken him and his family “in and out” of farming, as well as around the world to places as far away as the Philippines. But he always returned to the valley, always returned to farming, so it’s not difficult to see where Josh’s deep-seated love of the land originates.
“I can point out every field around here and tell you a different memory,” Josh says. “That makes this where home is. You’ve got all the memories of growing up, then your dad and grandpa and you have got that generational history that makes it special — to me, anyway.”
And perhaps, someday, it will be special to his own kids. He allows that a lot can happen in the next 20 years, but it’s his intention to pass his farm on to the next generation. He understands now how difficult it can be for young people to gain a farming foothold in the valley, yet he also sees a glimmer of divine providence in his own circumstance.
“For this to go the way it did, I think that’s just God answering my prayer that he wanted me to be here,” Josh says. “At least, that’s the way I was praying.”
* * *
In the fall of 2002, Chris Tomky went hunting for elk and brought home a big one, big enough to provide meat for months.
Eventually, that supply came in handy, when his first crops withered in the dust.
His first year back from college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, newly married to Jodi and excited to launch his own farming operation on land rented from his parents, he never saw disaster coming. He had spent the winter using borrowed tractors to plant corn, alfalfa and wheat on about 300 acres and took it on faith that the rain would come or that there would be sufficient water to irrigate.
But the epic drought of 2002 rendered his first solo venture a total failure that spread beyond his fields to the livestock that can serve as a hedge against lean years.
“It just ended miserably,” Chris recalls. “We didn’t have any feed for our cattle and had to liquidate most of our herd that year. It was just one giant step backwards, right out of the gate.”
He never figured that farming in the valley would be easy, or that it would last amid the sell-off of water rights that had gathered momentum in the 1970s. His grandfather had farmed in Crowley County, and Chris saw, firsthand, how the water was sold off to the Denver suburbs and left the much of the area parched and barren.
“I saw a series of water sales growing up,” Chris says. “I figured by the time I was out of college there wouldn’t be any water left. If you told me 20 years ago that I’d be farming in 2017, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. I didn’t think the water would still be in the valley.”
That first winter after his brutal introduction to the precarious risk/reward balance, Chris took odd jobs with other area farmers to make ends meet. Jodi, who earned her degree in accounting, got a position in town that came with health care benefits and gave her a sense — through working on tax returns of long-standing operators — how agricultural finance works.
And together, they tried again, planting on his parents’ land and renting acreage from others as well. At one point, the Tomkys dealt with 10 different landlords. He still rents land from his parents, who grew produce on a small scale until his father’s bad back steered him into banking.
Now, their roughly 2,500 acres includes a patchwork of parcels around Rocky Ford. Chris did a rough calculation recently and figured that 20 years ago, 15 different farmers worked the land he cultivates today.
“It’s happened that rapidly, the consolidation,” he says, describing not only his own operation, but many others. “It’s just so hard to make a living on a small acreage now. Fifty years ago, a family could survive on 80 acres or 150 acres. Now, there’s no way.”
Prices are so low and margins so thin, he explains, that the only thing that makes sense is volume. Then there are the costs: a tractor that used to go for a couple thousand dollars now runs six figures — and the Tomkys operate several of them, as well as employ two full-time mechanics. A rising minimum wage also figures into his six-employee calculations.
He has sought efficiency by devoting large swaths to a single crop. Once, 100 acres might have been sliced into a few acres of tomatoes, a patch of watermelon, a strip of wheat, some corn and some hay. Now, he devotes the whole parcel to a single commodity prepared, planted and harvested by technological behemoths — equipment double or triple the size that once worked the fields, powered by larger horsepower tractors and guided by GPS that enables round-the-clock operation.
The Tomkys grow primarily grain and forage crops — corn, wheat, alfalfa, sorghum silage — and sell mostly to the local beef industry, with a lot of alfalfa shipped to dairies all over the country. They’ve had a recent run of good years, but in the back of their minds looms the possibility that the weather could always turn on them.
“I’ll get stressed out, but he’s so optimistic,” says Jodi, who now applies her accounting skills solely to the farming operation. “Chris is willing to take risks where a lot of times I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, you’re going to do that?’”
“That” usually describes a decision to purchase rented land that suddenly comes up for sale. Jodi cringes at the cost. Then Chris takes a step back and frames the big picture.
“My biggest fear of renting ground is that it’s year to year, with no guarantee you’ll have that (parcel) next year,” Chris says. “You’re still going to have to make your tractor payments and everything else. If you get somewhat aggressive in buying land, it offers security from year to year that you’ll have the land to farm.”
Aside from cobbling together a viable agricultural business, the Tomkys also are building a legacy.
With twin 11-year-old boys, another son who’s 10 and a 6-year-old daughter, the parents have cultivated family values through shared responsibility and, for the older kids, shared labor. This summer, Chris says, the boys have reached an age where they can almost do a man’s job.
And when their daughter recently graduated from kindergarten, she stood before an auditorium full of people and announced that she, too, wants to be a farmer when she grows up. The moment made Chris proud, although his daughter’s concept of farming more closely tracks her mom’s role in an expanding business enterprise.
After the ceremony, people asked the girl whether she wanted to drive the tractor.
“No,” she said. “I want to do the payroll.”
* * *
Matt Heimerich moved to the Arkansas Valley on Labor Day of 1987, when he was 30 years old, a transplanted New York native with a Boston College pedigree and absolutely no clue about farming.
He remembers only a handful of young operators, maybe four or five guys in their late 20s or early 30s, working Crowley County’s diminishing arable soil, which gradually turned to dust as water was siphoned off to quench the Denver suburbs. Most saw little reason to stick around.
“Kids that grew up as late baby boomers, as I guess I would be, were encouraged to leave and go get an education and take a good job in the city, because there’s no hope here,” recalls Heimerich, 59. “Think about the mid- to late-’70s: There were water sales, gas crises, interest rates were 21 percent, farms being foreclosed on — there was some gloom and doom out there.”
His arrival in the wake of all that was an anomaly — a city-bred guy who married a local woman and, with help from her family, cultivated a successful livelihood in agriculture. Heimerich also served years as a county commissioner and now helps preserve the area’s agricultural legacy as Lower Arkansas Valley conservation director with the Palmer Land Trust, which helped Josh Proctor pull together the resources to buy his first parcel.
Meanwhile, he continues to work his land and watch another generation bring new technology and advanced agronomy to bear in revitalizing the area’s agricultural heritage. His nephew David Tomky, 29, is in the third year of leasing about 220 acres of his land after pursing a crop science degree at CSU.
“Now, I believe, there’s actually been a renaissance,” Heimerich says. “There’s a lot of young men and a couple women, around Christopher (Tomky’s) age and even Josh, many of them have gone to college, got their crop-science degrees or ag management, and they’ve come home.”
Heimerich, the son of an electrician, didn’t come home, but in the Arkansas Valley he found a new one — though unexpectedly — while following his father’s advice. “I will profess to having no life plan,” he says. “All I know is that I wanted to leave New York and Long Island, where my parents eventually settled when they had a family. My father’s business was in Brooklyn, and he did a lot of work in Manhattan and all over the five boroughs. He said, ‘This is a crazy place to live. You should go to college and leave here.’”
After finishing school, Heimerich headed to Park City, Utah, planning to hang out with friends for the Christmas holiday. After stretching their stay into the spring, he and his buddies decided to chart their future in the West.
“We were sitting around the table having breakfast,” Heimerich recalls, “and somebody said, ‘Are you going home? I’m not going home.’ Everybody started looking for jobs.”
Although Heimerich majored in history at Boston College, he had a knack for math that got him a job in surveying and drafting. He met Karen Tomky in the summer of 1984 and married her a year later.
The couple moved to Crowley County after Karen, a family nurse practitioner, was recruited by a local doctor. Heimerich figured he could handle living anywhere.
“I guess I was ready for a change,” he says. “A pretty radical change.”
Heimerich worked with a local surveyor until his father-in-law connected the newlyweds with a 100-acre property that suddenly became available. And Heimerich became, that quickly, a young farmer.
That first year, 1988, he used equipment borrowed from his in-laws and learned how to irrigate his fields. He proved a quick study and soon realized that he liked farming, in part for the entrepreneurial aspect but also for its intrinsic rewards.
“There’s something kind of magical about stuff growing,” he says.
He was paying his bills, putting some money away in a string of prosperous years and starting to put together a cattle herd. In 1999, he also began a 12-year run as county commissioner. Three decades after his arrival, he still owns or leases more than 500 acres for farming or grazing.
“My father thought I was crazy,” Heimerich says, noting that his dad visited on several occasions before his death seven years ago. “But I think eventually he got it. He did tell me to leave the rat race, but I think he was hoping for something a little different. But at the end of the day, he realized that there was some self-satisfaction and virtue in having something you could call your own.”
Now, Heimerich has begun to transition some of his ground into more grazable crops that require less tillage. He’s no longer interested in owning cattle, but there’s always demand for pasture.
Heimerich sounds optimistic when he talks about a “pretty good cadre of young farmers, all the way from Pueblo to the lower valley,” revitalizing the region.
Perhaps, he says, a recharged agricultural economy will also begin to attract people from other sectors drawn to the area for its quality of life — telecommuters and others who can “reinvigorate Main Street and mix it up a little bit.”
“Maybe that’s wishful thinking,” Heimerich adds. “But look at Christopher — he’s got three boys and a beautiful little girl. He’s got a family. They’re making it work. I’m hoping that we can adapt and still be viable and have a decent enough long-term future.
“If I didn’t believe that, I think I would’ve left a long time ago.”
