Audio By Carbonatix
part 1 of 2
Most working ranchers and farmers would find tending to the Colorado Farms spread a respite. The foreman of the ranch, Delbert Jenkins, is 33 years old and owner of a bushy horseshoe mustache and a droopy Stetson. He runs about three dozen cattle on just over 1,000 acres of stubbly grassland south and east of Colorado Springs.
“The rest of the time,” Jenkins explains, “I just keep up the fences and try to keep the neighbors’ cattle off the rest of the ranch.” In fact, he points out, it would be illegal to graze a cow or run a tractor across the vast majority of the 17,500 acres that make up Colorado Farms.
The reason most of this land must be left alone is that it is being leased by the federal government. And that has made Colorado Farms one of the more profitable ranches in the state–particularly considering what goes on there. It generates an average of $500,000 in annual income, all of which is taxpayer money and all of which is paid to Colorado Farms for doing nothing with the land except staying off of it.
Generous farm subsidies are not new, and government money has sustained more than one struggling farm community across the country’s bread basket. Yet this is different.
For starters, the owners of Colorado Farms are neither Coloradans nor farmers. They are money managers and bankers and, in one case, the owner of a string of nursing homes based in a small Missouri town. One of the partners visits his spread once a year in the autumn to hunt the antelope and deer that have moved in since the government began paying the Missouri money men not to work the land.
Some time in the next couple of months Congress will likely pass the latest version of the Farm Bill, updating work it did in 1985 and 1990. Legislators say they intend to make deep cuts in the dozens of programs that set agricultural policy and help farmers.
One item that probably won’t shrink much, though, is the Conservation Reserve Program. Although its ten-year existence was to expire this fall, six months ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture extended the program for another year–until the end of 1996–to give lawmakers time to decide whether to keep it for another decade. It seems they will.
The Conservation Reserve Program has good intentions: to prevent soil erosion by paying farmers to plant grass and trees instead of crops. But CRP is also one of the most expensive programs in farming policy. Between 1985, when it was started, and the end of 1995, when it was originally scheduled to end, CRP will have cost taxpayers $19 billion.
Colorado farmers have received at least their fair share of that money, a little over $910 million. Baca County landowners alone cashed government checks worth nearly $114 million, the second-highest amount for any county in the country.
And the largest single CRP contract in the United States, originally worth $5.6 million to its owners, straddles the boundary of Lincoln and Crowley counties, about a ninety-minute drive from Colorado Springs. That’s where Delbert Jenkins works.
There is little question that CRP has conserved tons of soil on the sprawling Colorado Farms ranch. But if ever there was an example of how various government agricultural subsidies have turned the business of working the land into a scramble for taxpayers’ money, Colorado Farms is it.
Over the past twenty years the government has paid ranchers to improve it as grazing land, and then paid people to tear it up for farmland. When that project failed, the government picked up the bill to repair the land back to grassland.
Today the Department of Agriculture still pays the Missouri businessmen generously to keep the land out of use. Even more incredibly, it writes separate checks to the same investors so that they won’t be tempted to grow crops on the land that never could sustain them in the first place.
Indeed, after one bankruptcy, two foreclosures and various federal investigations into murky money deals made possible by the lucrative subsidy payments–the vast majority of them through CRP–the property has more than enough history to show what can go wrong when the government meddles too much on the range.
The land, nearly 2,000 acres larger than the entire city of Boulder, unrolls and spreads like a dusty carpet from southern Lincoln County into Crowley County, crisscrossed by dirt roads and broken only by short rises and a handful of abandoned windmills. Several miles inside the northern border, in one of the rare groves of trees that break the horizon, two ranch houses face each other across a road.
The abandoned brown-and-white stucco house on the west is nearly 100 years old. Across the road is the green wooden-slat house built by John Beaty, whose father bought the property from his cousin in 1932 and turned it from a sheep ranch into a cattle operation.
“The thing that attracted my father to it was that it had a lot of natural springs on it,” the younger Beaty recalls. “The place was watered by about four or five springs. Over the years we tripled the water by putting about a half-dozen windmill pumps on it.”
“It was a good ranch, with plenty of good sod on it,” says Jim Mannis, a soil-conservation technician who has worked in the Hugo office of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, for thirty years. And Beaty ran it well. By the late Seventies he was running 500 head of cattle on the ranch.
Despite the vastness of the spread and the rich cropland lying just to the north, he never considered breaking the ground. “It’s just not farming country,” says Beaty, who now lives in La Junta, a little over an hour’s drive to the south, in Otero County. “It’s too dry.”
“People have tried to raise wheat here since I was a little boy,” says Paul Jenkins, Delbert’s father and a Beaty ranch hand for a dozen years until he purchased the property directly to the north, where he lives today. “But this is the driest part of the county. You don’t have to go very far north to find places that raise pretty good wheat. But here, we only get seven inches of rain a year.”
When Beaty’s father died, John’s brother and sister, who were part owners of the ranch, decided they wanted out. So in 1979 Beaty reluctantly sold the ranch that had been in his family for 45 years. The buyer was Tom Price.
Price was no stranger to cattle: He was running nearly 1,000 head on his 14,000-acre Stratton ranch to the northeast. He says he bought the Beaty place to use as summer grazing land for his herd. Although he only owned it a short time, he recalls that “we improved it a bunch–put up a lot of sheds, corrals.”
Price is proudest of the nearly four miles of water pipe and tanks that he and his son Nick laid to pump water across the former Beaty ranch so that the cattle wouldn’t overgraze one place. He says he wouldn’t have been able to complete the project without some help from the government, specifically the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service.
The local office “paid for up to 70 percent” of the installation cost on some of the pipelines, Price says, adding, “You got to have those programs. You’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.” (According to Mannis, Price received “several thousand dollars” of federal assistance for his ranching improvements.)
Price quickly ran into trouble, however. Beaty admits that the Stratton rancher paid him a premium for the land; another neighbor recalls that Price’s cattle became sick. County records show that Price and his wife quit-claimed the deed to the property in November 1981. The purchaser was a ten-partner Saskatchewan farming concern, Four MVR Farms.
Between 1979 and 1981, a depression in Colorado’s farming and ranching industries lured numerous out-of-state investors to the area, many from Canada and Germany. In 1979 and 1980 alone, the number of acres owned by foreigners increased by more than 37 percent. And despite what locals knew from hard experience, many of the outsiders came to Colorado convinced they could urge wheat from the dry ground.
In 1981, then-Lincoln County assessor Bill Mowry predicted that 42,000 acres of grazing land in his county would be torn up the following year. And by 1982, 440,000 acres of what had once been Colorado grassland–700 square miles–already had been newly plowed under.
Many of the out-of-staters were unabashed speculators. A savvy investor could plow up rangeland and, two years later, sell it as farmland, which commands two or three times the price. But Four MVR Farms’ partners insisted they were different.
The corporation’s attorney, Ken Cook, now lives in Denver. “My clients were successful dryland wheat farmers in Canada, and they came here to farm wheat,” he recalls. “This was all on the up and up. They bought this land as an investment.”
At the time, Lawrence Moxley, a Four MVR partner, explained to a local newspaper why he was so confident. “Nothing’s ever been done [here] to conserve any moisture,” he said, adding that new farming techniques “hold a lot more moisture.”
“Just give us a chance to prove ourselves,” he concluded.
Today, many locals say they tried to warn the Canadians. “We told them the soils weren’t suitable,” says Dave Sharman, a soil specialist who now works for the Natural Resource Conservation Service in Greeley. “But they were sure it would work. They said the climate in Lincoln County was similar to where they came from.
“The difference,” he adds, “is that the farther south you go from Saskatchewan, Canada, and past Limon, you get a higher evaporation rate.”
“The problem,” says Harlan Fletcher, who works for the federal Consolidated Farm Service Agency in Lakewood, “is it doesn’t rain out there. And it couldn’t even be irrigated if there was water there, which there isn’t. All the Canadians had to do was watch the weather reports.”
Four MVR was certainly aggressive in its attempts to farm. “They showed up with big four-wheel-drive tractors,” remembers Paul Jenkins. “They had new planes, new pickups, new combines. They plowed up everything. If they couldn’t get a tractor up a hill, they’d drive around to the back and plow down it.”
They tore up the water pipes that the local ag agency had helped pay Tom Price to install. “The wells were in a plastic casing about so far off the ground,” Jenkins says, holding his hand a couple of feet off his kitchen table. “They just drug their plows over it.”
“Mr. Price got a lot of money to put in pipes and tanks,” says Ernie Hammer, executive director of the Otero/Crowley County field office of the Consolidated Farm Service agency. “And then two years later the Canadians plowed it up. Now the tanks are filled with dirt. That was a really good grass ranch, and they ruined it. They were going to show us how to farm wheat.”
It is still a matter of local debate whether Four MVR Farms ever got a decent harvest off the old Beaty ranch. Cook insists they did. “My clients got a year and a half of good crops off it,” he says. Neighbors say the opposite. “The wheat at harvest time was only a foot tall, with heads only an inch long rather than three inches long,” remembers Fletcher.
What is not disputed is that the Canadian corporation released the fine soil that had been held down for years by the grasslands. “It was scary to look at, all that dirt,” says Jenkins. “After they plowed it up, it blew so bad here that it was dangerous to drive. You couldn’t see as far as my refrigerator over there.”
“Under grass, the land generally held,” says Fletcher. “But as soon as they plowed it up, it became highly erodible. I saw some of the land when it was plowed up, and a lot of it was like sugar sand.” Adds Sharman, “It blew so bad that there were some drifts down there fifteen feet high.”
In 1984–whether because it was a good time to divest (Cook’s version) or because they were retreating from Lincoln County’s unforgiving climate (the neighbors’ account)–Four MVR Farms decided it had had enough of Colorado. In June of that year, after less than three years of ownership, the partners sold the Beaty ranch to James R. Davis, a farmer out of Seminole, Texas, for $1.2 million.
Davis did not return phone calls. But he is well-remembered in Lincoln County, mostly for his unique way of seeding the land.
“He broadcast the seed from a plane,” recalls Sharman. “I think they were real short of time,” Mannis adds. “They were just suitcase farmers. They flew over the land to seed the wheat on it, and then they’d just disk it into the soil.”
The seed didn’t get planted deeply enough, so none of it took, and the erosion continued. At one point, neighbors to the south of the acreage complained of so much blowing soil that Crowley County commissioners hired a custom farming company to plow the land again. The cost of the operation, $1,600, was billed to Davis. But the local government got stuck with the tab when it was unable to collect from him.
That’s because it turned out Davis was clean out of cash. “Within three or four months after he bought the property, Davis filed for bankruptcy,” recalls Four MVR attorney Cook. “So instead of receiving a first payment on the land, Four MVR got a notice of bankruptcy.”
Four MVR quickly repossessed the farm from Davis. “Four MVR got the land back near the end of 1985,” says Cook. “But my client didn’t want the land back. So they tried to figure out something to do with the land. And that’s when they heard about the Conservation Reserve Program.”
end of part 1
