BROADVIEW, N.M. – Just south of San Jon, a busy truck stop town on Interstate 40 not far from the Texas border, the New Mexico countryside rises sharply and unexpectedly some 300 metres
to a broad plateau.
As the road ascends, the cactus-filled, dun-coloured desert is left below and spread out ahead is a flat fertile plain of cultivated fields, grassland and pasture.
A few kilometres down the highway, an array of buildings suddenly appears and a wrought-iron archway alongside the road welcomes travellers to the town of Wheatland – or at least what’s left of it.
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The once thriving community is now just a cluster of abandoned and boarded-up stores and houses. The only residents of this ghost town are resting peacefully in the Wheatland Cemetery, a few hundred metres east of the highway.
But it was here, on this productive little piece of New Mexican real estate, that Stan Fury’s grandparents came to put down roots and seek their fortune in 1907.
And it’s a dozen or so kilometres to the southwest, near the village of Broadview, that Fury now lives and farms with his wife Cathy, growing wheat, sorghum and hay and grazing beef and dairy cattle.
In many ways the countryside around Broadview, N.M., isn’t a lot different from the countryside around Broadview, Sask.
And when Fury talks about farming in New Mexico, it sounds like he could be sitting on coffee row somewhere in Western Canada.
He talks about drought, about low prices, about rising costs.
He talks about looking for more efficient ways to farm, about relying on non-farm income to keep things going and about the challenges of passing the farm to the next generation.
He talks about the hard work and the stress, but he also talks about how much he loves the lifestyle and the wide-open spaces, how much he enjoys having his young grandchildren visit the farm and how he looks forward to retiring.
The affable and gentlemanly Fury does love to talk.
And he loves to tell stories. Just ask him how his forebears ended up in Wheatland.
It seems his Czech grandfather and Swiss grandmother originally homesteaded in Mustang, Oklahoma, but she came down with a serious case of tuberculosis. For her to survive, said the doctor, they would have to move somewhere drier, like New Mexico. But their infant son had pneumonia and the doctor warned that going to a dry climate might kill him.
“So Grandpa thinks about it and says, ‘she’s been with me a lot longer than he has, so let’s go,’ ” Fury said with a laugh. “Well, that was my daddy and he lived to be 91, so the doctor missed on that one.”
Fury could be forgiven if he sometimes wished they’d picked a friendlier farming environment in which to settle.
Farming anywhere is a challenge these days, but farming in New Mexico presents unique obstacles.
After all, New Mexico is all about mountains and deserts, not wheat fields
and pasture.
As Fury put it: “It’s always dry here. We’re used to it.”
Actually, the rainfall numbers for this particular area aren’t that bad, averaging about 420 millimetres annually. But it’s not uncommon to have years of serious drought, such as 2002, when Fury received just 125 mm of rain on his farm.
His crop rotation and management systems reflect that constant battle to conserve moisture and the reduced expectations farmers around here have in terms of crop output.
“If we get two good crops in three years we’re satisfied.”
Hard red winter wheat is planted in mid-September and the cattle are put out to graze on the young wheat plants from the first of November until the end of February.
The wheat is harvested in June, and the land is left until the following spring, when sorghum, a drought-resistant feed grain also known as milo, is seeded into the wheat stubble.
The sorghum is harvested in October or November and the land is then left fallow for an entire year, at which point another winter wheat crop is put into the ground and the cycle starts over again.
Throughout the rotation Fury tries to disturb the land as little as possible. He uses a sweep plough, which kills weeds while leaving the surface residue relatively intact, and chem-fallow, a management tool that not only benefits the land and the environment, but also saves money.
The normal crop rotation was thrown out of whack last year by the drought. With the sorghum crop coming to nothing, he abandoned it and seeded the land to wheat in the fall, leaving him with 2,100 of his 4,000 cultivated acres in wheat.
“We try for one-third, one-third, one-third, but it’s always a balancing act with the weather,” he said.
In an average year, his wheat will yield 23 to 25 bushels an acre, even approaching 40 if rain comes at the right time.
“The trouble is there are some years it’s literally zero, and that’s the killer.”
While Fury grows wheat every year – usually 13 percent protein milling wheat that is shipped by rail to Houston for export – he wouldn’t describe himself as a wheat farmer.
Wheat is an integral part of his farm, but its value is mainly as a grazing crop and the contributions it makes to the cattle side of the business.
Earning both wheat and cattle income from the same land is what keep things afloat, Fury said.
“If it weren’t for the cattle, if we were just strictly raising wheat and had the government programs, we would slowly
go broke.”
He generally has about 60 head of beef cattle, a holdover from the days when the four kids were at home and liked looking after the calves. But the farm’s moneymaker, year in and year out, is the dairy heifers, which are bought from local dairy farms at 300 pounds and then sold back to the dairies 18 months later as seven-month bred heifers.
While the cattle provide the bulk of his farm income, it’s the non-farm income that really pays the bills.
In the work yard on Fury’s farm, alongside the corrals, the machinery and the feed storage sheds, are piles of old highway guard rails, which Fury recycles and sells for the construction of cattle pens.
The guard rail business, which has its own website at www.usedrails.com, provides about 50 percent of the family’s net income. Cathy’s job as an educator in a nearby town also makes a vital contribution to the family finances.
Fury knows all about working away from the farm. After going to university, eventually earning a masters degree in animal science from Texas Tech University, he stayed away for eight years, teaching at colleges in New Mexico and Kansas.
But he never lost touch with the farm, returning in the summer to help out, and always had the desire to return.
“There were times when it was real iffy if I’d be coming back, but it worked out, mainly out of stubbornness. I just didn’t like doing anything else.”
In 1981 he got a job back home as the county agriculture director, a demanding job that eventually forced him to choose between a career as civil servant or farmer. That was really no choice at all, and in 1983 he bought land and began farming independently alongside his father.
Now, with the farm well established and their four children grown and gone, Stan and Cathy sometimes think about what the future holds for their farm.
They’re pretty certain that their son John, who is studying agricultural economics at New Mexico State University, will return to the farm. But they also want to him to use his education to work elsewhere for a while and gain some real-world experience.
And when he does come back, it will be to the same kind of arrangement that Stan had with his father.
“We’ll farm together but separately,” he said. “I might lease him some land but if he fails he’s going to fall on his own face.”
He worries about what he calls the “third generation syndrome” – the generation that has had things good and can lose touch with the values of hard work and frugality that went into building up the farm in the first place.
“It’s not that I don’t have confidence in my son, but I’m not going to just give it to him and say, ‘here it is. If it falls apart, I’ll put it back together for you.’ “
Fury sees himself staying on the farm for another dozen years until he reaches 65, then setting up a small ranch and becoming what he laughingly calls “a real cowboy.”
“Ranching has its work, but if you have to build a fence, you can build it this week or next week,” he said.
“With farming, if a crop needs to be put in or taken off, you’d better be out there now. There’s a real stress factor.”
But Fury’s life has taken enough twists and turns that he can laugh at himself as he tries to predict what he’ll be doing 10 years from now.
“You plan and plan your future, and then destiny comes along and happens,” he said.
