BERTHOUD, Colo — Todd Olander and his wife were out working on their Northern Colorado farm fields Saturday night when an unexpected storm rolled through that would prove costly.
The wind and hail from Saturday’s evening storm destroyed more than 500 acres of the couple’s crops, including the barley that drives their main business – Root Shoot Malting.
“It was destroyed on Saturday night from a 30-minute hailstorm that came through here,” Olander said. “We were really just about two days, three days away from harvest.”
The storm pummeled acres of alfalfa, distilling corn and the farm’s trademark barley variety. Olander said when he surveyed the barley last week, he noticed it was nearly ready for harvest.
“We were just trying to give it a couple more days, and there was like a 20% chance of rain, so we thought we were pretty safe,” he said.
The field of barley alone cost about $70,000 to plant. Once it was harvested, it would have gone to the company’s malthouse in Loveland for preparation to send to craft breweries across the state and the country.
Insurance will likely cover some of the costs – but won’t cover the revenue losses projected by the Olanders.
“This is a huge, huge loss for us like this,” Olander said. “We have about 300 acres of barley this year that was planted. And [the field that was destroyed] was a 70-acre field.”
Luckily for beer drinkers and brewers, Olander said Root Shoot stores a year and a half’s worth of barley in grain bins at the malthouse.
“We plan for this,” he said.
Olander, whose family has farmed in Northern Colorado for generations, said he doesn’t want any pity over the lost crops.
“I don't want people to feel sorry for me because there's lots of other farmers that are getting it worse than we have,” he said. “We're definitely not the only ones that are impacted by this. These types of storms, like there are thousands of farmers throughout the country that have huge losses like this all the time.”
“It's just part of farming," he said, "which is a bummer.”