Colorado’s hottest winter on record is threatening this family’s wheat farm
HUGO, Colo. — On the Poss family farm, portions of fields typically lush with wheat and other grains are dry and cracked. Many of the plants that did emerge are wilted and parched.
“It’s depressing. It scares me. I don’t even want to harvest this summer because I don’t know if we’ll have any at all,” said Laura Poss, who has been operating the farm with her husband Kevin since 2011.
The Poss family has deep roots in Lincoln County, smack dab in the middle of Colorado’s Eastern Plains. Kevin, whose family has farmed the land for four generations, dating back to the 1940s, manages 1,000 acres with Laura and the help of their seven children, ages six to 17. About a third of the land — 330 acres — is dedicated to dryland grain farming, including triticale, millet, rye and 10 varieties of wheat. This year, the family expects to lose about half of their normal grain yields due to the unseasonably warm temperatures and ongoing drought across the state.
Video: Chelsea Casabona, Rocky Mountain PBS
Farmers across Colorado are expecting similar losses. According to assistant state climatologist Peter Goble, this year marked Colorado’s warmest and one of its driest winters and resulted in the lowest snowpack since records began in 1895.
“If we look at the temperatures over winter, it's the warmest October through March, so not even just those three winter months, but kind of the last six months are the warmest that we've seen over the cold season,” Goble said.
Warm conditions are worsening drought across western Colorado, as well as in the northeastern and southeastern corners of the state near the Nebraska and Oklahoma Panhandles. In Lincoln County, where the Poss family farms, Goble said satellite data show vegetation is drier than normal and soils have dried out significantly.
“The last couple of weeks, we could see our wheat is really starting to struggle. Normally in November, the wheat will turn brown … it goes into dormancy. It’s been such a warm year, it did not go dormant. Our wheat was green all year long,” Kevin said. “My dad who’s 82 years old has never seen that happen before, so we’re not sure what our wheat is going to do.”
Dryland grains like wheat and triticale need a cold period after being planted in early fall to shift from leaf growth to seed production. The Poss family worries that the warm winter prevented their crops from becoming cold enough. Low rainfall during the critical late-spring growing stage could further reduce yields, they said. The family practices organic methods and avoids pesticides, which makes the farm more vulnerable to drought. The soil is so dry that some crops they planted were blown over by the wind, Kevin said.
“It’s unpredictable. Whatever God sends is what we have for moisture. We have no way to irrigate,” Laura said.
The most important months for precipitation in eastern Colorado are April through July. Unlike western Colorado, where the key moisture period has passed, farmers in the eastern part of the state still have a chance to improve their crop conditions, Goble said.
“But right now, the odds are kind of showing us the other direction,” Goble said.
The Climate Prediction Center is projecting an increased chance of below normal precipitation in eastern Colorado from April through June.
The Poss family sells their grains directly to consumers, with a little more than half of their clients in Colorado and about 20% in Texas. While they are currently selling last year’s harvest, this year’s potential crop losses could affect next year’s supply and profit. If all their wheat fails this year, Laura said, they will have to save some unsold seed from last year to replant, since they won’t have this year’s crop for seed.
“We’re real people with a real family. It’s not like shopping at King Soopers or Walmart. We have a very strong connection to our customers,” she said. “Without water in Colorado, we won’t be able to eat in the future because if you don’t have water for dryland crops like ours or for irrigated crops, we don’t have a food source … and that’s scary.”
The worst year the family has had on their farm was about a decade ago in 2013, when they didn’t harvest any wheat from what they planted in September 2012. That year was so dry that they had a grass fire in their pasture that burned about 30 to 40 acres, Laura said.
“The fire was very close to our house and very scary,” she said.
Goble said weather patterns like this can keep happening in the future. The planet is warming and that's largely driven by human activity and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, he said.
“But when you look at things on a more statewide or even local scale ... if we just look at the temperatures, our state is pretty unambiguously warming on long time scales, each decade being warmer than the one before it,” Goble said. "A bet on a warmer future is, in a sense, a bet on a drier future.”
Even if total precipitation stays the same, Goble said, at higher temperatures, more of that precipitation will evaporate, sublimate or transpire, reducing the amount that reaches deep soil, groundwater, lakes and reservoirs.
Climate models estimate that for every 1 degree that Colorado warms, streamflows in the Colorado River basins could drop by 2 to 5%. Precipitation would need to increase by 2 to 5% to maintain a steady water supply amid rising temperatures..
“And that's not impossible, but it's pretty unlikely, especially given that our observations over the last number of decades do show a drying trend,” Goble said. “Climate models … they form a very clear consensus… the level to which we continue to warm is directly proportional to how greenhouse gas concentrations change in the atmosphere.”
Despite rising temperatures this past winter, Kevin and Laura Poss are hopeful about passing the farm down to their children, some of whom have expressed interest. They remain optimistic that the farm can continue on the plains, even if it means adapting their practices.
“I’m carrying on a tradition that my family had,” Kevin said. “Once we get into our regenerative practices, I think this could go on forever.”
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