Coloradans love their beer — especially when it’s brewed in the state using crisp Rocky Mountain water and fresh local ingredients. So in 2010 when AC Golden Brewing Co., the craft arm of MillerCoors, put out a call for locals to help the company grow hops for its Colorado Native Lager, volunteers were quick to hop to it (pun intended) and plant themselves a garden. The way the program works is that AC Golden invests in the plants and mails them out to participants along with instructions on how to grow them. At the end of the season, the volunteers give whatever crop they yield back to the brewers to use in their beer. In the program’s first year, about 50 or 60 amateur gardeners got involved. Since then, the number of volunteers has ballooned year over year. Jeff Nickels, AC Golden’s head brewer, told Modern Farmer that in 2013, 750 volunteers signed up, yielding enough hops to brew 120 barrels — about 1 percent of the company’s yearly output. That may sound like small potatoes, but the Colorado Native Hops Grower program wasn’t exactly created to fulfill the company’s hops needs. It was built to promote the beer — which incidentally is the only lager brewed with 100 percent Colorado ingredients — while also showcasing a concerted effort to bring more hops crops to the state.
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While the interest for locally produced hops is there, high entry costs and lack of knowledge has kept Colorado gardeners from trying to compete with states like Washington, Oregon and Idaho. According to Ron Godin, a hops specialist from Colorado State University, farmers would need to invest about $20,000 per acre and about three years to get a hops farm going. That’s a lot of time to be waiting to brew. In the meantime, AC Golden has brought in experts to help farmers get their hops crops hopping. But it’s not easy. Some crops have been unsuccessful, as the potential for pests, mold and mildew is high. If a crop is harvested, AC Golden is paying a premium for it. Colorado hops are selling for about $15 per pound, about five times the USDA’s reported average price in 2012.
Volunteers in the Hop Grower program have faced some of the same challenges, of course on a smaller scale. Participant K.C. Dunstan remembers his first harvest — eight hours of picking the cones led not only to raw and irritated skin due to the plant’s thorny nature and three ounces of product. Still, the volunteers enjoy contributing, even in a small part, to the local beer scene. “It’s really impressive to me that people like our company well enough and like our beer well enough to help us out and grow for us,” Nickel says. “If helping us means they enjoy it more, we are doing our job.”
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Tag: Farmers
His Family Lost Its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate
Farmers can’t take sick leave, so when an emergency comes up, they’re sometimes in danger of losing a year’s crop, putting their entire livelihood in jeopardy. That’s when Farm Rescue steps in. Farm Rescue’s founder Bill Gross worked as a pilot before returning home to North Dakota, where his family had lost the farm he grew up on after a financial setback. In 2005 he started the nonprofit to provide help to farmer’s struggling with illness or natural disaster.
Farm Rescue has helped 250 families in North Dakota, South Dakota, eastern Montana, Minnesota and Iowa. The non-profit provides donated equipment and organizes its over 700 volunteers to make use of the seed, fertilizer, and fuel the families provide. Families can contact Farm Rescue for help, but half of the time concerned farmers hear about a neighbor’s troubles and anonymously recommend them for help. “We provide the equipment and manpower, and we get it done for them,” Goss told David Karas of the Christian Science Monitor. “We are basically a big, mobile farming operation.”
“We are helping to make it more likely for future generations of family farms to be able to continue,” Goss told Karas. “That is what I actually find the most satisfying.”
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