OUR HISTORY
Our family farm is here because of one crop; the sugar beet. When Andreas Arnusch and his wife Katharina decided to pack up their 3 boys and leave their life behind in their home country of Austria, they were looking for what they called “golden opportunity,” that was still alive in America. With just $11 dollars to their name and only a few English words in their vocabulary, they arrived in the United States in 1952, boarded a train west, and stopped in Keenesburg, CO. In fact, it was the one and only time the train stopped in town to let passengers off.
A neighboring town to Keenesburg, Prospect Valley, grew over 5,000 acres of sugar beets in the 1950s. Andres had extensive knowledge and experience in growing sugar beets from his time in Austria, so he was able to find work right away upon their arrival in Colorado. There were five sugar beet piling yards in the area: Krauss, Johnson, Shehan, Sloan and Roy. During harvest, hundreds of small farm trucks lined up daily at each yard to add to the enormous beet piles and for four years, the Arnusch family contributed to those piles while they worked as farm laborers. By 1956 they had accumulated enough capital for the down payment on their own 40-acre farm and a line of credit to purchase machinery. They grew their operation to a 200-acre irrigated farm by 1961 and continued to thrive growing their own sugar beets.
The three Arnusch boys, Nik, Hans, and Franz were not far behind in starting their farming careers. Nik started in the mid-60s, Hans, Marc’s dad, started farming in ‘73, and Frank started farming when Andreas retired in ‘77. As most know, farming through the decades with all the highs and lows was not for the faint of heart. Mother nature was clearly the Arnusch family’s biggest nemesis. Hail, wind, and lack of rain were easily the greatest threats, but in 1969 a blizzard on October 9th left feet of snow on an unharvested sugar beet crop. Just about every old timer in the area has their own story to tell about hardship and improvisations from the blizzard of 1969. Utilizing every unconventional tactics from burning tires underneath farm equipment in an attempt to thaw the ice to pulling trucks through the snowy field, it took the Arnusch family until Valentines Day in 1970 to finally harvest the deteriorating crop.
Our History Cont.
Pinto beans, sugar beets, barley, and wheat were the family’s staple crops until about 1983, when Hans started growing corn and alfalfa. When Marc began his farming career in 1992, sugar beets were still in the crop rotation. However, at the end of the 2017 growing season, the farm moved away from growing sugar beets altogether because of the lack of growers returns from Western Sugar. Since Western Sugar is a grower owned cooperative, losses suffered on the sugar extraction side of the cooperative are shared among the growers. For several years, the company only paid for 65-70% of the crop due to losses suffered on the milling side of the production line. When this happened, Western Sugar chose to retain 30-35% of the returns to keep the company operational. Couple this with the crop demands of two new dairies in the Prospect Valley area, it was an easy decision to exit the beet business and use the capital from the sale of our specialized beet equipment to pivot our farm in a new direction.
It’s pretty cool for Brett, Marc’s son, to say, “My father grew sugar beets, and his father, and his father before that”, and even though we have diverged from the crops that were originally produced on the farm, Brett plans to become the next name on the family list of growers. Few farmers in the area carry on the tradition of a multi-generational family farm, persevering through unfavorable conditions and evolving with markets to remain profitable. Marc and his family would tell you there’s always a part of them that misses the smell of the overturned soil, waiting in line at the beet dump, and the sounds of a successful sugar beet harvest. But we must remain innovative, hungry, resilient and true to our goals of keeping the family farm in the family. That means growing consistently profitable crops given the finite resources we have, especially water. We look back fondly at our beet growing days and know that because of one crop, we are where we are today.
