The growers: Lewis and Andy Grant, Grant Family Farms, Wellington.
Their products: Cabbage, lettuce, spinach, summer greens and herbs, broccoli, summer and winter squash, and wheat.
Their story: Twenty eight years before the federal government began labeling food “organic,” 14 years before the state of Colorado began certifying farms as such and a decade before anybody was using the term, Grant Family Farms was organic.
The farm started when Lewis Grant, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University, had a small hobby farm in his backyard. Grant’s son Andy grew interested in agriculture watching his father “play in the mud on the weekends.” He took that interest to CSU, where he earned a degree in agricultural business. In 1975, when Andy decided to make his father’s hobby a commercial enterprise, the concept of organic was still in gestation.
“I didn’t think ‘Oh, I want to farm organic,”‘ Andy said. “I just knew about farm chemicals, and I didn’t want to put them on my vegetables.”
From that simple premise, Grant Family Farms has grown into Colorado’s largest organic farm. The farm grows more than 100 varieties of vegetables on 2,300 acres north of Fort Collins in Wellington. In 2004 they shipped more than 450 truckloads (nearly 12,000 pallets, or more than 400,000 cartons) of different varieties of beets, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, squash, spinach, cilantro, lettuce, pumpkins and onions. The farm exports winter squash, pumpkins, onions and greens to Mexico, Canada and overseas.
With trucks lined up both to drop off freshly picked produce and carry it away after it has been cleaned and packed in ice, August is a busy time at Grant Family Farms. Andy takes a short time out to sit down and talk about the organic farming market.
“It’s been 30 years of ups and downs,” he said. “Some of that has been the weather, but we’ve also had to deal with a market where people don’t properly pay for the food they eat.
“Consumers are demanding organically grown vegetables more and more, but we still have a ways to go.”
The farm produces more organic vegetables than the marketplace needs. While Owl Canyon is Grant Family Farms’ organic brand and Colorado’s Finest is the farm’s conventional farming brand, the vegetables are all grown organically.
“There’s only a certain demand for organically grown vegetables,” Andy said. “Beyond that we sell our organic product as conventionally grown.”
Grant Family Farms also produces the “Colorado Sweet” brand. The “sweet” isn’t only on the label. Located at 6,000 feet, the farm experiences days that are five to 10 degrees cooler than lower elevations, where vegetables typically are grown, and where night temperatures average about 10 degrees cooler.
“The cooler weather at night really sets sugars and proteins,” Andy said. “In lab tests, our vegetables have repeatedly proven to have 50 percent more natural sugar.”
Things such as sugar content are noticeable to the true vegetable-phile, points out the elder Grant, who has just joined the conversation.
“People who are connoisseurs of squash taste it like some people do wine,” he said. “They judge it according to its varying sugar and dryness.”
Lewis, who at 83 is not required to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the farm, gives tours that explain the different management techniques that replace the need for chemicals.
“We were practicing sustainable farming in the ’70s – even though we didn’t have a name for it,” he said. “Recently a lot of farms have made a transition to organic or sustainable farming. It wasn’t much of a transition for us, because it’s the way we’ve always done things.”
For example, to be certified as organic, a field has to be pesticide-free for three years. None of the fields on Grant Family Farms have contained pesticides since the 1980s, some have been pesticide-free since the 1970s, and one of the farm’s fields has never had a chemical on it.
“The difference between conventional and organic farming is that growing things without chemicals requires more management,” Lewis explains.
Outside of the weather, which is beyond management, pests and disease are the biggest threat to farmer – organic and conventional.
“Because pests and diseases are monocultured, they adapt to one crop, getting stronger and stronger each season and requiring more and more chemicals to control,” Lewis says. “We simply change what’s grown in each field. Ninety percent of pest and disease control is in crop rotation.”
For the other resilient insects, organic farmers enlist the help of predator insects. They plant habitat for predator insects in the pasture around the field so that these “good insects” can control their “bad” counterparts.
Because they use cover crops that can be plowed under to nourish the soil, fertilizing is often less expensive in organic farming than in conventional farming. Where organic farming often costs more is in weed management.
Grant Family Farms uses a weed control method known as “flaming.” A tractor with a row of small flames is driven across a seedbed before the vegetables have sprouted but after the weeds have.
“If flaming doesn’t work, we’ve got to get a guy in there with a hoe – and that’s where the costs go up,” Lewis said.
All the vegetables at Grant Family Farms are handpicked. The farm employs about 300 seasonal employees. Workers painstakingly harvest the vegetables, weeding out the less-than-perfect specimens in the process.
After being transported to the packing area, vegetables are rinsed with cool water to remove the “field heat” and packed in ice.
“We think it’s important for the vegetable to be treated well every step of the way,” Lewis said. “And that starts by treating the earth well.”
Where to buy: The farm is at 1020 Weld County Road 72, Wellington, 970-568-7654; call Val Manning to schedule a tour or send an e-mail to info@grantfarms.com. Grant Farm Store, 2120 E. Lincolnway, Cheyenne, 307-635-2676; grantfarms.com.
