Congratulations to all 2023 Fair Participants

And a big thank you to all the volunteers, sponsors & family members that support them from the Lost Creek Guide, ourtowncolorado.com and all our advertisers!

Morgan County Extension Says Thank You to All

The dust has settled on the 2023 Morgan County Fair, and as an Extension Staff we could not be more proud and grateful for the youth, families, and volunteers that we get to work with. Around 300 members of Morgan County 4-H participated in the 2023 Morgan County Fair through contests, indoor exhibits and livestock. These youth have spent months working on their projects to exhibit at the fair. Through 4-H youth develop life and leadership skills and we have witnessed these skills throughout the fair season. From building new friendships, supporting each other through both the hard and good times, helping show each other’s animals, and many more examples, the youth of Morgan County 4-H constantly remind us what amazing individuals they are. This all couldn’t be done without the support of their families as well. 4-H is a family organization, and it takes everyone being involved to get to meetings, get projects ready, spend time at the fair, and so many other events in between. Volunteers are the lifeblood of this organization, and they put in countless hours holding club meetings, project workshops and practices, sharing their expertise with the members, and helping make sure the county fair goes off without a hitch. The Morgan County Extension Staff are thankful that we get the opportunity to help our youth grow and for the families for becoming involved in Morgan County 4-H and the Morgan County Fair.

Thank you all!

Robin Halley, Marlin Eisenach, Aimee Kanode, Katie Seelhoff, Jamie Dixon, and Faye Klenda.

WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE

Page 2: Way of the World

Page 2: The Differences Between the Two Parties

Page 3: Hail Storms, Slim Margins and Regulations Challenge Farmers

Pages 4, 6, 11, 14–17, 20, 21: Morgan County Fair Results

Page 5: Wiggins’s School District Newsletter

Page 8: Denver’s Real “Emergency” is Crime Not Homelessness

Page 13: I Am Not Your Friend

Page 24: Break the Silence

Way of the World

by Bob Grand Fair season is about over, with the State Fair being the last for this season. It is awe inspiring to see the young people who have worked so hard all year to prepare and compete. They are all winners in the sense of participating. Some do better than others, but the important thing is that they participated. As a nation we should figure out how to duplicate that experience in our urban areas as young people miss an important opportunity in their development. Family participation is big part of the Fair experience and again, something many of our urban young people do not have the benefit of to the same level. We need to figure out how to get our urban folks more involved in our rural community and perhaps vice versa. We all can learn from it and, develop a better understanding of each other.

In America, we have permitted the creation of a political class that does not encourage change and improvement but the maintenance of the status quo, as it protects those in charge, be they at the city, county, state, or national level. Being in charge does not mean they have the general public’s best interest at heart. This coming year in Colorado, most home and business owners will see the largest real estate tax increase in their history. Colorado real estate taxes are calculated based on three pieces, the ratio established by the state in terms of the allocation between residential, business, farm and oil & gas, the applicable mill levy established by each taxing authority in each taxing district and the assessed value determined every two years at the local taxing authority level. Looking at 2024, the higher assessed values are based on the explosive increase in valuations. The Republicans in this past year’s legislative session attempted to introduce a bill to maintain the existing valuation levels, in effect, pause the stiff increases, assuming there would be a price correction in the next two years. The bill did not move forward. Other than an appeal on your assessment you will face the new assessment values in the calculation of your new real estate tax bill. That leaves only the adjustment of your mill levy at the local taxing authority level as hope. The question becomes whether your local elected officials will ask their local staff to examine the projected revenue increases, which in many cases will be significant and determine if they are reasonable compared to projected expenses, and if not so, they should reduce the mill levy to soften the blow to homeowners. It is like the discussion on who to vote for: the candy store owner who promises you sweets and good things or the doctor who tells you what is healthy for you. Most doctors do not win.

These elected officials are supposed to represent you the people. I am not optimistic that many will have the courage to stand up for you, their constituents. Is it unreasonable for us, the electorate, to expect the elected officials to look after our best interests? Many people have said you get who you elected. It is time to hold them accountable.

We are all facing a very uncertain economic picture in the country. This is contrary to many who hold the “soft landing” opinion. The Federal Reserve has focused on reducing inflation by raising interest rates. This affects all of us. An unintended consequence of this has been the effect on bank lending and corporate debt. Most of us deal with long term housing debt i.e., 30-year mortgages and credit card debt, which is now getting to the 25 to 29% annual interest rate level. Commercial real estate and corporate debt tend to have a much shorter time window. The stay-at-home workforce, which has reduced the need for corporate office space, has sparked an unpleasant series of events. Buildings with lower occupancy levels, because businesses require less space, have led to extremely competitive subleases being generated, meaning less rent revenue. You have commercial real estate debt coming due, since many are based on a five-year renewal period, which will see interest rates go from around 3% to 8% to 12%, and property valuations decreasing because of reduced rental revenue and higher interest costs. Sounds like the investor has to face the music, they gambled and lost. While true on the surface, there is another piece that effects all of us. The banks or pension funds that lent original mortgages because that is what the smart money did, right? Well, what the market is beginning to see is that many of these borrowers had non-recourse loans and are beginning to just hand over the keys to the buildings and walk away. The banks and pension funds that lent money on a property valued at one value, are now faced with having to write down the value of that collateral from its original value to reflect current market value. There have been some examples where the reduction has been at the 40% to 70% level. If the lender writes down to current value that reduces their asset base. This puts the lender into recognizing a reduction in value to their balance sheet. If you are a bank and you have too many of those, it could cause you to fail, if a pension fund, again if you have too many bad loans, not being able to meet your forecasted payments to retirees.

A complicated world that requires strong leadership. Are you really impressed by the leadership of our main political parties?

As always, your comments and thoughts are always appreciated: publisher@ lostcreekguide.com

Rosen: The Differences Between The Political Parties

by Mike Rosen, Complete Colorado Page 2

In a recent Denver Gazette column, Eric Sondermann offers a timely thoughtprovoking essay on the nation’s great divide between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, and intolerance for differing viewpoints. I respect Eric and found his piece wholly tolerable, agreeing with much of it except for some important definitions and degrees of distinction.

Eric is of the political center, albeit the left-center. He’s not a Bernie Sanders socialist or even a progressive. I’m of the right-center, and no fan of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a radical right-wing firebrand. Eric criticizes both Republicans and Democrats, although he tends to criticize Republicans more. (Disclosure: I criticize Democrats more.)

Referencing a phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, “liberty and justice for all,” he explains how Republicans and Democrats see and prioritize those two terms differently, describing Republicans as the party of liberty and Democrats as the party of justice.

I have a somewhat different take. When Republicans speak of justice, they lean on the Constitution’s preamble that seeks to “establish justice,” and the Bill of Rights that goes on to guarantee things like due process of law, property rights, and a speedy and public trial; while banning things like double jeopardy in criminal prosecution, excessive bail, and cruel and inhuman punishment. Our Department of Justice deals with matters of criminal justice.

When Eric describes Democrats as the party of justice, he redefines justice largely in terms of the left’s crusade for “social justice,” with emphasis on expanded government, redistribution of income, and confiscatory taxation. But the U.S. Department of Justice isn’t the Department of Social Justice. The left demands “equity.” While equity sounds like equality, it’s decidedly not equality of opportunity; it’s equality of outcome which is incompatible with capitalism and a free market economy. It’s egalitarianism taken to extremes, fulfilling Karl Marx’s (and Bernie Sanders’) socialist vision of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” To the radical “woke” left, capitalism and meritocracy are symbols of racism and white supremacy. As economist Thomas Sowell (a conservative black man) has wondered, “What is your fair share of what someone else has worked for?”

Eric labels Republicans as the party of liberty, in the sense of “opportunity, initiative, enterprise, motivation, less government intrusion, and allowing people to keep the fruits of their labor.” True enough. “On the flip side,” he writes, “Democrats prioritize leveling the playing field, lifting those lower on the ladder, relying on government for an expansive role, and requiring those who prosper to pay more of the load.” That’s also accurate. But, to Republicans this is a formula for dependence, entitlement, and confiscation rather than the concept of liberty as individual freedom and the protection of private property.

I join Eric in his frustration with extremists in both parties. But, here, he puts his left-center thumb on the balance scale with his choice of language when he declares, “the epicenter of the Republican Party has shifted ‘hard to the right’ and that of the Democratic Party has moved ‘discernibly’ to the left.” Yes, there are extremist Republicans in the party’s general coalition but they’re the outliers and have pushed the party’s center only marginally to the right. The Democrats’ leftward thrust isn’t merely “discernable,” as Eric puts it, it’s been decidedly “hard to the left” since the days when President Kennedy proclaimed, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

While both parties have radical fringes, the Democrats’ fringe is more extreme, more powerful, more influential and greater in number. The House Freedom Caucus consists of 45 ultra right-wing members out of 222 Republicans — that’s only 20 percent — including a handful on the lunatic fringe whose power is limited to obstruction on rules and legislation. By comparison, the House Progressive Caucus has 103 members (plus Sen. Bernie Sanders) out of 212 Democrats — 49 percent — including looney lefties like AOC and “The Squad.” The measure of their power is the party’s wholesale adoption of the radical progressive agenda, which is amplified in the liberal media, Hollywood, TV, public education and academia.

Eric rightly criticizes universities, no longer “bastions of free speech,” he says, where “Disagreeable speakers are uninivited and shouted down.” But it’s only conservative speakers who get this treatment by intolerant leftist students, faculty and administrators, while speakers on the left are welcomed with open arms.

Eric claims too many Republicans resist liberty and freedom for those with different lifestyles and social mores. I wouldn’t say Republicans “resist” their liberty and freedom; that’s protected by law. Republicans and even some Democrats are merely exercising their right to disapprove. By contrast, progressive Democrats have weaponized the cancel culture to silence and oppress those they disapprove of on the right.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.

Hail Storms, Slim Margins And Regulations Leave Colorado Farmers With An Uphill Battle

This year’s wheat harvest season has been particularly difficult.

And many farmers are saying it’s hard to stay profitable.

by Tracy Ross, The Colorado Sun

Out on the Colorado prairie due north of the town of Byers, Justin Lewton was keeping his eye on a group of clouds forming above the western horizon.

The clock was ticking as he motored across a field of winter wheat in a 20-ton cranberry-red combine harvester. He’d been out since dawn with his crew of six employees. They’d driven back and forth, back and forth across the field of wheat, attempting to cut it in straight, neat rows. But there were four rookies on Lewton’s crew, one only 16 years old. It takes a while to learn to cut crops in uniform rows, so in some there were islands of overlooked wheat, which meant Lewton had to backtrack and cut them himself.

But it wasn’t the imprecise cutting that put Lewton just the tiniest bit on edge as a late July afternoon crept toward early evening. Or the inexperienced farm hands needing his attention. It wasn’t even memories of a June packed with torrential rain and pulverizing hailstones. What kept drawing his eye were the clouds, which for most of the day had been white and puffy. Sometime in the last hour or so, they’d started to gather and now cement-gray rain clouds had taken over. They coalesced into a wall, with breakout clouds that crept across the land, wispy and wraithlike.

“Gonna keep a close eye on those,” said Lewton, 29, a fourth-generation farmer and president of the Colorado Wheat Growers Association. He knew those clouds, knew what they carried, knew their capacity for devastation in a season already upset by insects, drought, politics and weird weather.

Rain, hail and more rain

So far this summer, clouds full of heavy rain and hail the size of baseballs have flattened fields of corn, wheat and melons in some parts of eastern Colorado. Lewton wasn’t hit as hard as some of the other farmers he knows in the region. But he knew it could happen.

So he took action that afternoon, calling his crew of combine and grain-cart drivers off the field as a precaution. He sent the grain trucks out to the highway, because the dirt on the road accessing his fields turns to mud in heavy rain and driving a semi down it is close to impossible. He got the grain out of the combines and into a tarped cart. And then the crew started working their way out. Lewton knew this would take an hour when every second matters. But depending on the severity of the storm, the crew might save the day and still make up time later in another field the family owns, or return to this one.

A storm ended up arriving on a strong wind that kicked up dirt and shook the corn stalks, but it dropped only a small amount of rain and no hail. Lewton and the crew resumed working later that evening. To other, less cautious farmers — or people who know nothing about farming — their hasty exit under an angry-looking sky might have seemed excessive.

The region where most of Colorado’s wheat comes from experienced devastating drought from June 2019 until this spring. Hot sun with no rain relief cost farmers millions of dollars and cut the state off from lucrative national and international sales. Then, in June, the pendulum swung back harder in the last places where a way of life can’t hide from the weather. Rain fell in sheets, day after day, followed by hail compared to tennis balls, if the tennis balls were full of lead.

Lewton said on land he farms near Fort Morgan, “there were times when the weather service was calling for a half inch and we’d get 2 inches in 45 minutes.” Out in Yuma County, where former state Sen. Greg Brophy farms 250 acres of corn, sorghum and watermelon, “two utterly devastating storms came through at the end of June and on July 8,” he said. Similar storms pounded Kit Carson and Adams counties.

Some of the farmers had their corn, winter wheat and melons wiped out completely. Those who did lost income for the next season’s seeds, land and equipment loan payments, money for employee salaries and living expenses. A strip of corn along U.S. 36 near Bennett looks like a bulldozer drove over it. Brophy’s losses totaled $275,000. A farmer Brophy knows saw his entire corn crop flattened. “Every year, there’s a field or two that gets damaged by a hailstorm,” he said, “but I don’t recall ever seeing backto-back hailstorms.”

Yet something amazing has also happened thanks to the storms that continue to form over northeastern Colorado. Many say this year’s wheat harvest is the best they’ve seen in years. That means higher yields for the farmers whose wheat survived; more money for the Roggen Farmers Elevator Association, a cooperative of Colorado farmers that stores, ships and brokers wheat to commercial flour mills; and more wheat for Ardent Miltls, the largest flour producer in the country with two mills in the Denver area, to make the flour that goes into the bread products eaten by people from Colorado and the rest of the world.

If Lewton’s entire wheat crop on a typical year went into whole wheat bread, he said it would produce 32.4 million loaves. Assuming each loaf will yield 6.5 sandwiches, Lewton’s wheat could produce 211 million.

But stakeholders all along the Colorado wheat chain, from farmers to brokers to commodities experts, told The Sun that regardless of rain, hail, drought, bugs or “macro events,” like the COVID-19 pandemic or war in Ukraine, the reality of farming remains uphill battle to stay profitable — or in some cases afloat — in Colorado.

It’s something farmers say Coloradans should know about as they bite into their next slice of whole wheat ciabatta. Even if, as Lewton says, “farmers don’t want to be thanked. They just want to do their jobs.”

How a grain of wheat grows and gets sold

The main thing Keith DeVoe wants people to know is that “the farming industry isn’t in some conspiracy to ruin your food.”

DeVoe is the CEO of the Roggen Farmers Association Elevator, described on his LinkedIn profile as an agricultural cooperative that is half owner of Commerce City Grain, with the flour company Ardent Mills, and does about $90 million in annual sales. The four grain elevators in northeastern Colorado associated with the co-op are where farmers bring their wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum and other crops to be weighed, inspected for quality, priced and sold. The co-op also stores some of the different grains to be sold later, based on what a farmer bets will happen in the market.

DeVoe calls the agriculture industry a “high-volume, low-margin business” that must survive because it feeds the world. He also believes the industry is overregulated by the government, and that “anytime you bring on more regulations, or some special new energy program, you’re adding cost to a business that’s working on 1.5% or 2% margins.”

As he talked, semis loaded with wheat kernels pulled up to a machine that extracted samples from the front and the back of each trailer. Then two young women weighed the wheat, ran it through an analyzer and wrote down a number.

“Nine-point-three,” said one of the women, reporting the wheat’s quality score, based on factors like protein and moisture content.

“That’s all right,” said DeVoe, adding that 10.5 is this year’s average.

The Department of Agriculture says there are eight different types of wheat, but it would be overkill to list every one for this story. The important thing to know is that Colorado farmers deal in winter wheat and spring wheat. Winter wheat is planted in late fall, starts putting down roots and holding soil down over the winter, can grow quickly if there are good spring rains and can grow relatively well without irrigation in as little as 2 inches of annual rain in some parts of the plains, said DeVoe.

Still, despite wheat’s hardiness, all sorts of calamities can conspire to degrade its quality.

It’s not just hail and buckets of rain. For Lewton, it was a sawfly infestation that originated in Canada and made its way down through Montana and into Colorado in the 2010s. The flies burrow into the stalks of the wheat and lay eggs. When these hatch, the bugs chew through the stalks’ pithy centers, girdling them from the inside out. When they’re done, the stalk has lost some of its strength. It lays over and the combines struggle to scoop it up. Some of the grains in the wheat heads survive, but Lewton said this year, in crops hit hard by the flies, he lost 30% of his yield.

Heavy rains are the second-biggest scourge of wheat farmers, first, because rain is “the largest compaction factor of soil anywhere,” Lewton said. “Think about how much force is coming down and landing on the ground. It compacts the dirt on top of the row and even if the seeds germinate, the plants can’t make it up through the crust.”

Excessive rain at planting time means trouble getting into muddy fields with heavy equipment. And too much rain during seed germination can cause poor soil aeration resulting in seed diseases, lackluster germination rates and weak plants.

Heavy rains also trample standing wheat.

“But I’d rather have it wet than be in a drought any day,” Lewton said. “Having a crop get pummeled by hail is like watching a loved one have a heart attack. It’s ugly and painful but over quickly and you’re glad they didn’t suffer. You’re both able to move forward. But with a crop in drought, you watch something you love die a little bit every day and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

With three of the past four years being the driest on record, Lewton still managed to harvest 30 bushels of wheat per acre, per year on a 10-year rolling average. But it wasn’t the 45 bushels per acre he normally grew and that amounted to an average annual loss of just over $1 million in revenue. The family farm survived, “partly because we’ve amortized our cost over more acres,” he said.

Lewton Farms owns and operates 35,000 acres of land from north of Bennett to Fort Morgan to north and east of Byers. Until April, he and many other owners of the estimated 39,800 farms in Colorado that contribute $47 billion to the state’s economy annually thought they were in for another financially draining year, because the drought was forecast to continue.

So like many of the wheat farmers trying to survive another year of burning sun, blow-dryer-like winds and endless heat, Lewton destroyed 30% of his wheat crop to conserve water. Then the storms came and he lost half of two wheat fields to hail damage. “The next worst were between 20% and 25%. And if you go straight south from there, it’s gotten so that anytime a cloud pops up, a little bit of hail falls on the crops and they get more dinged up.”

Adding insult to injury, Lewton said, all of this is happening in an industry facing increasing obstacles from government policies.

Some farmers to Congress: Stop over-regulating our industry

Lewton said it, DeVoe said it, and Jeffrey McPike, a commodities expert, hinted at it. They all believe that farmers will suffer from increased farming regulations and the government’s push toward green energy.

Riding in his combine, in between helping to direct his other drivers by radio, Lewton explained how he thinks the government is over-regulating farmers.