Our Spotify Wrapped list just isn’t as exciting as most.
Stuck on a tractor for days end, Todd’s playlists veer much more toward podcasts than music, and until people get as worked up about hour-long talks on soil health as they do their own personal top five artist lists (“Bro, have you heard that new banger on mycorrhizal fungi? It is dope!”) we’ll probably be the outliers.
That doesn’t mean we don’t keep track of our own Wrapped list, though. It just has more to do with bushels of barley and liquid cow manure than it does with bluegrass tunes or gangster rap.
So grab a beer, settle in, and get ready for Root Shoot Wrapped: your top five farm hits of the year.
One heck of a harvest
If we had to make a song of this, it’d probably be an old-school country tune all about sitting in the tractor petting the farm dog (at least when Thompson’s not barreling through the corn rows, howling his head off.) But it wouldn’t be one of those mopey tunes - despite some storms and hail, we had a pretty solid harvest this year! The deets:
Total acreage farmed: 1,914 acres (that’s up 117 acres from last year!)
Genie Spring Barley: 627 acres netting 62,700 bushels which comes to 3,009,600 pounds of barley! We need 3,000,000 pounds to run the malthouse for one year at full capacity, so….nailed it!
Thunder Winter Barley (experimental variety): 15 acres netting 1,188 bushels or 57,000 pounds. That’s about 20% lower per acre than we’d like to see due to hail damage.
Lightning Winter Barley (experimental variety): 15 acres, netting 791 bushels or 38,000 pounds. Hit even harder by hail, Lightning’s production was almost 50% less than we’d hoped for. Dang thunderstoms. Trial #2 of Lightning is in the ground for next year!
Guardian Rye: 55 acres, 60 bushels, 160,920 pounds
Helix Hard Red Winter Wheat: 288 (dryland) acres, 320,820 pounds
Huffman Soft White Winter Wheat: 50 acres, 210,000 pounds
Monida Oats: 48 acres, 172,356 pounds. These oats are going to be making a lot of your hazy IPAs hazy!
Non-GMO distillers’ corn: 27,000 bushels or 1.5 million(ish) pounds.
Silage Corn (food for cows!): 93 acres. 2,232 tons
Alfalfa: (also food for cows…and sheep!) 584 acres, 3,504 dry tons (~400 3'x4'x8' Bales)
Odds and ends: Barley straw: 700 Bales,Corn stalks: 550 Bales, Grass hay: 80 Bales
cows (and compost!)
This song’s easy. As Corb Lund knows, Life is better with Cows Around. Mostly, that’s because they regenerate our fields with some chewin’ and poopin’. We only keep a very small herd (18 cow pairs and Billy the Bull) so it takes some wheelin’ and dealin’ with local ranchers to keep our rotational grazing going.
Webber Cattle: 186 cows that will graze about 120 acres of sorghum and cover crops including legumes, cowpeas, hairy vetch, buckwheat, clover, turnips, radishes and more.
Larson East Farm: 103 pregnant cows will graze 130 acres of volunteer barley, buckwheat, cowpeas, turnips.
Billy and his ladies: will be grazing 40 Acres of corn stalks that were interseeded with annual ryegrass, cow peas, and radishes on our home property.
So Much Manure: While the cattle we graze are just left to…do their business…in the fields, it actually takes more manure than they produce to apply to our fields, so we’ve had some longstanding agreements with local dairies. Manure can actually be environmental issue for dairies, so by partnering with them, we’re able to take their waste and turn it into delicious craft beverages. (Admittedly, with a few steps in between.)
This year, we brought in hundreds of loads of raw manure and liquid manure (that’s one heck of a visual, right?). The liquid manure went right on the fields. The raw manure gets mixed with our cornstalk bales to get the right mix of nitrogen and carbon, and we form piles that we turn multiple times per week until it breaks down into compost. We’ll apply that to fields throughout the winter to up the quality of our fields.
collaboration:
Hmmm…if we had to turn this into a Harvest Hit, it would maybe be…an impeccable acapella tune, with all singers in perfect harmony? Cheesy, we know, but every year we seem to work with such an amazing group of people and organizations, and this year was no exception!
Zero Foodprint Partnership: We received a $25,000 grant from Zero Foodprint to work on our composting projects, and nutrient management and no-till practices. Using some of those funds we also joined forces with Red Dog Soils to assist us with soil and plant tissue analysis during the growing season. We plan on continuing to work with both organizations to keep our regenerative push moving ahead!
Turn It Up Media: This amazing crew assisted us with our rollout of Root Shoot Spirits, one of our biggest projects of the year! But more on that in a minute.
Local Family Farms and Ranches: Farming is not a solitary endeavor, and in addition to the aforementioned cattle operations we worked with 5 other local farmers to harvest barley and corn.
conservation
In our world, conservation is sort of like that tune that takes an unpredictable turn or two. (Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, perhaps?) We never really know how things will turn out, and we’re always listening intently for the next notes…or the next available acreage for lease.
This year, we gained 140 acres on the Waggener Farm property, land that’s conserved by Colorado Open Lands. We also gained another 211 acres with a lease on the Little Thompson property owned by Larimer County.
However, we’ve long farmed the land that was where the new Bucee’s is and while we still have maybe 80 acres there, we know we’re probably going to lose it, soon. When a farm lease includes language like, “farm at your own risk,” well…
We’re not holding our breath.
And our newest hot Harvest hit…spirits!
Aided by the marketing prowess of Turn It Up Media, Root Shoot Spirits launched its inaugural American Single Malt Whiskey: 2500 bottles (10 barrels) aged 5 years and ready for you to pour into your favorite snifter.
This isn’t a one-time thing. There are future batches of Root Shoot Whiskey coming, and if you’ve read this far, here’s your reward:
You’re the first to know that our next small batch whiskey release will be coming in August of 2024. Go ahead, mark your calendars!
All in all…
This was a tough year to beat. A strong harvest, lots of rain, a team trip to Germany, a tasty whiskey release and…
An amazing team
Perhaps not every year can be a fantastic year, but when ones like this come, we’ll certainly take them.
Wishing you and yours all the best in 2024. As for 2023 on the farm…
We’re calling it a wrap.
Happy Holidays and all the rest,
—Olander Farms
