This Colorado operation may have faced adversity, but Marc Arnusch’s willingness to reinvent his family farm is why he’s been named the 2025 Top Producer of the Year.
As he checks last year’s crops and thinks about the future, Colorado farmer Marc Arnusch and his team are excited about what’s ahead.
“At the end of the day, this is about family,” stresses Arnusch. “It’s about growing an operation. It’s about growing a community. It’s about helping others lead and that’s been the greatest reward.”
Getting to those rewards has been a journey for this operation located in Prospect Valley about 35 miles northeast of Denver.
“My family immigrated to the United States in 1952 from Austria,” he explains.
It was the sugar beet that lured them to the Colorado climate and it was a key part of the farm until the late 2010s.
“I couldn’t control my market and I couldn’t control my destiny. There were so many variables that I had no impact on,” Arnusch says.
His wife Jill remembers, “I was doing all the finances and telling him we just we can’t do this anymore. I was telling him that this is uncomfortable for me, but I don’t feel right about this. We’ve got to change. We’ve got to move.”
Ultimately, Jill’s warnings won out and Marc broke the news.
“That was hard when I had to tell my dad that I grew my last sugar beet crop,” he said. “You can imagine he wasn’t very happy about that.”
Like so many others, it was one of the family decisions Marc and Jill made together. Early on, there were plenty of thin margins.
“I wanted to raise our son at home and we made it work,” Jill says. “You can make a pound of hamburger stretch for three meals for three people if you really try hard.”
Diversification Becomes Key
Today, they grow seed wheat, seed barley, grains for the craft beer and spirits industries, black-eye peas, alfalfa and food grade corn.
“We grow a lot of things that my grandparents and my father would never even consider,” Arnusch says. “Growing a grain for a distillery or taking on a new crop like a black-eyed pea that had never even been grown in this region of Colorado, there’s certainly some risk but there’s also the reward.”
It’s a way to control their own destiny and de-commodititze a commodity. Diversification has been the key to weathering the challenges of Colorado.
“We don’t always get along with Mother Nature,” Arnusch says. “Hailstorms are frequent here in this area, and we’re a very dry climate.”
Which is why they’re constantly looking for other ways to de-risk their business. It’s a lesson they learned a few years back while growing onions.
“We were growing 600 to 700 acres a year, and we acquired a packing shed where we shipped our crop to over 30 different states and four foreign countries,” Arnusch says.
However, he soon found access to steady labor was a constant challenge.
“There was a morning where I came out into the field and I had 250 workers helping transplant a crop out of Arizona into a field here in Colorado,” Arnusch says. “The following day I had nine.”
Join Them, But Do It Better
Despite the investments and the market, he walked away from the onion business because he couldn’t control those variables. Instead, he found other ways to supplement the farm beyond the field. Good snow melt and a good aquifer means excess water is available for other uses during certain times of year.
“Weld County has more oil and gas wells in it than all of Saudi Arabia combined and part of that development process requires a large amount of water,” Arnusch says. “We had it in the right place, in the right time, in close proximity to where it needed to be delivered and so Ag Water Alliance was born.”
It was a collection of farmers selling water together to the oil and gas industry and that helped bulletproof the Arnusch balance sheet. They also started a captive insurance company to help take catastrophic risk off the table. Soon, they’ll continue to expand on their family motto, “We Grow Things,” as they look to grow their community.
“We’re getting ready to develop my grandfather’s farm,” Arnusch says. “I would imagine you’ve not heard too many farmers say they plan to build on top of their family’s legacy.”
Jill adds, “When New York investors and people from overseas start calling you every day and asking if your farm is for sale because it is the most prized piece of property in town, we decided if you can’t beat them, maybe you join them and do it better.”
The goal is to bring resources, services and amenities back to their small town that were common just 50 years ago. Things like healthcare, assisted living and a place for new businesses.
“Rather than just selling the property and letting somebody else develop that farm, we’re doing something that’s very hard,” Arnusch says. “We’re going to do this ourselves. We’re going to do it with a purpose and it’s about putting people and our community first.”
With their son and his new family by their side along with a newly hired farm manager, the future is bright for the Arnusch operation.
“Farming goes beyond just the seed that you plant in the field, the crop that you grow, the equipment that you have,” Arnusch says. “It’s about investing in tomorrow. Our future at this farm is one built on tomorrow.”
They recognize all of it is a gift for them to steward.
“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t really know your business and you can make good decisions on bad numbers and bad advice,” Jill says. “It can all go away very quickly.”
This Colorado operation may have faced adversity, but the willingness to reinvent the farm is why they’ve been named the 2025 Top Producer of the Year.
Source: AG Web News