Growers who straddle state lines can empathize with David Hardy.
“We are blessed with the curse,” he said. “That’s what I call the state line.”
Hardy lives in Fairview, Mont., and owns or rents 15 farms spread out across 30 miles on both sides of the Montana and North Dakota border near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
“There are three farms on the North Dakota side and one farm in Montana, all irrigated from the Yellowstone River,” he said. “We live in North Dakota, but the town is incorporated in Montana. The remaining 11 farms are in Montana on the Missouri River with private irrigation.”
An Amity defoliator works the field with the Missouri Breaks in the background.
Interstate Avenue cuts right through the middle of Fairview and serves as the border for the two states. Fairview has a population of about 850.
“I’m required to pay income tax in both states, workers’ compensation in both states and state unemployment in both states; not to mention the International Fuel Tax Agreement permits on the trucks,” Hardy, 51, said. “It’s a bit of a paperwork nightmare.
WORKING THE LAND
Hardy Ag Inc. consists of about 4,000 acres of tillable land of which about 1,150 are dedicated to sugarbeets each year.
Rotational crops include malting barley, wheat, corn and alfalfa. The latter two are grown for the 500 head of Black Angus cattle owned by Hardy’s parents, Boyd and Shirley.
The malting barley is grown under contract and hauled to Busch Ag in Sidney, Mont.
“Malting barley has been both profitable and frustrating at the same time,” Hardy said.
Members of the Hardy family include Shirley and Boyd Hardy, who are seated. Standing are Alyx, Sherri, Kaitlyn, Hannah, David, Tim, who is holding Finley, and Lucas, Tim’s wife.
“They are picky. They want perfect. Mother Nature doesn’t always give you perfect.”
Hardy is philosophical about his profession. “I like to tell people I produce the three worst products for your body,” he said [laughing]. “No. 1 is sugar, No. 2 is beer and No. 3 is red meat [all good in moderation].”
Last beet harvest averaged 29.37 tons per acre with the sugar percentage content at 17.5, Hardy said.
“We had a hard time getting sugar content this year,” Hardy said. “Before Roundup Ready we would average 19 percent sugar consistently. Roundup Ready has definitely increased tonnage, but the sugar content is adequate— not spectacular.
“My goal as a grower is to always increase net revenue per acre,” he said. “To do that we can control tonnage somewhat by fertilizer, water and other inputs. We can fertilize to increase tonnage, but over-fertilization decreases the sugar content and makes extracting sugar tougher at the factory.
“Achieving high sugar content is a tough one. There are many vendors offering snake oil products to increase sugar content, but I have found over the years that N, P, K and fungicides are the basics that count with most crops. At the end of the day, we pretty much take what we can get when it comes to sugar content.”
Hardy is a member of the Montana-Dakota Beet Growers Association. Hardy’s beets go to Fairview’s Sugar Valley receiving station. The 50-acre pile ground has six pilers and employs 50 people during full harvest. The shortest haul for Hardy is one mile. The longest is 26 miles. Hardy runs two shifts (24 hours per day) during October harvest. The beets are re-hauled by Trans Systems and end up at the Sidney Sugars factory.
“Roundup Ready kept me in the sugarbeet business,” Hardy said. The industry needed genetically modified beets for better weed control which has eliminated the need for hand hoeing.
That’s why Hardy takes issue with critics of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
“I just wish the American public knew what we used to put on those beets before GMO,” Hardy said. ‘It is so much cleaner a crop now than before non-GMO—it’s incredible. Sugar from GMO sugarbeets has been scientifically proven to be molecularly indistinguishable from non-GMO sugar. The sugar is the same.
“Special interest groups who are screaming ‘If it’s GMO, it’s bad for you’ are irrational in my opinion. I’m guessing whoever named the improved sugarbeets GMO did not major in marketing.”
HELP WANTED
North Dakota’s Bakken shale region has had a big impact on Hardy.
“We’re right in the middle of the Bakken oilfields here,” he said. “Oilfields are begging for truck drivers, and they’re starting drivers at $25 per hour with little or no experience. I find it difficult to compete for truck drivers with that kind of wage.”
Hardy started looking elsewhere for help growing beets 12 years ago.
“Our full-time summer help comes from South Africa now,” Hardy said. The federal H-2A program allows agricultural employers who anticipate a labor shortage to apply for permission to temporarily hire foreign workers.
Hardy hires four South African workers between the ages of 21 to 28. About half of the young men return each year, which works well as there is a language barrier. Afrikaans is the local language in South Africa; however, all are required to learn English in high school.
“Like Americans, some speak more fluently than others,” Hardy said. “Having return employees is crucial as they are not only familiar with the farm; they also act as a liaison until new workers become accustomed to speaking only English.”
The South Africans are young and at a volatile age in their lives.
“They like to get married on me,” Hardy said. “I’ve had three workers marry Americans and have since become American citizens. Most get married in South Africa and then choose to no longer return.”
Hardy is worried about what impact a new immigration bill could have on the H-2A program.
“I’m afraid what those changes would be,” he said. “It’s very frustrating from a grower’s standpoint. Our current administration has seemed to only exacerbate the paperwork nightmare the H-2A program has become.
“What they want to do is hire more Americans. So they figure stop the foreign workers from coming in and the Americans will get jobs. But quite frankly I can’t get any Americans to do this job. They are either overqualified or consider the work too menial a labor for them. I would like to see the H-2A program become less encumbered by redundant government agencies.”
Hardy’s wife, Sherri, and their three daughters, Kaitlyn, 22, Alyx, 20, and Hannah Joy, 18, are an intricate part of the harvest operation. Sherri is the Truck Boss.
“That lady can drive a truck better than most men,” Hardy said.
She advertises, coordinates, trains and schedules the drivers for harvest. Since the majority of the drivers arrive from other parts of the country, most of them are housed at the farmhouses.
“You can be the most organized and well managed operation in the world, then weather comes along and you suddenly have 22 truck drivers and eight tractor drivers with nothing to do,” Hardy said. “That’s when Sherri really goes to work finding odd jobs to keep the drivers earning money while the fields dry out.”
Kaitlyn, who recently graduated from the University of Mary in Bismarck, N.D., took October off last fall to drive beet truck.
“She did a great job,” Hardy said.
All three daughters help prepare farmhouses and trucks for the arrival of the drivers.
FAMILY HERITAGE
“Without my parents preparing the ranch infrastructure for the previous 30 years, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do what I’m doing today,” Hardy said. “They ultimately developed the main ranch and made pastures into irrigated farmland, created the roads and cleared the land to be suitable for sugarbeet growing.
“My father, Boyd, 78, retired from sugarbeets in 1999,” Hardy said. “He handles the cattle side, and I do the farming operation.”
Boyd and his wife, Shirley, 79, remain active in the operations of the ranch.
“I have always appreciated the fact they never tried to micromanage, even when I first started out in 1989,” Hardy said. “My folks are mainly active with the cattle, and they still own the hay equipment.”
Hardy graduated from Montana State University in Bozeman in 1986 with a degree in business finance and a minor in economics.
“My parents knew I wanted to farm,” he said. “However, they encouraged me to get a job off the farm after graduating college, because they knew once I got here I would be tied down for life and they were right.”
Hardy worked as a credit officer at Northwest Farm Credit Services in Pendleton, Ore., for three years. He got a close look at the financial side of farming.
“Banking was a unique experience,” Hardy said. “I saw each operation from the inside out. I would review balance sheets and financial statements before I ever saw the assets, what the neighbors see.
“The people with modest homes were generally viable operators,” he said. “The ‘New Paint’ people were often in debt up to their eyeballs. My banking experience taught me to be very conservative with borrowed money.
I will never forget the saying ‘No one plans to fail, but many fail to plan.’”
After taking a view of the agriculture industry, Hardy was next set to work in the Windy City.
“I had an opportunity to trade on the Chicago Board of Trade,” Hardy said. “I quit my job, came home and thought I’d help my dad on one sugarbeet harvest.
“Then I bought a truck, bad idea,” he said. “The engine blew up and I never left. That winter I decided to become a farmer. That was 25 years ago. I have a ‘career moment’ each spring, but other than that, I’m happy doing what I do.”
STRIP TILLING PAYS OFF
Hardy started strip tilling three years ago. “Typically we’re conventional till for sugarbeets,” Hardy said. “On certain fields, where the topography is undulating I have a hard time keeping water on the tops of hills. The pivot water wants to run downhill into the bottom and drown out my best soils. I demo-ed a strip tiller the first year, and it seemed to work. Standing stubble from last year’s crop seems to keep the water on the hilltops.
“The second year we bought a strip till machine, and the third year we added a Montag Commodity Cart we now pull behind the strip till machine. We now fertilize, till and prep the soil in the fall all in one pass. Diesel’s expensive in the Bakken!
Hardy also found it worked better on lighter soils.
The heavy ground, by contrast, is better suited for no-till. Hardy discovered this by accident one season after grain harvest.
“I didn’t finish my strip tilling before beet harvest hit,” he said. “I tried to finish after harvest, but it was too wet. I left the remaining 30 acres of a pivot and burnt the field off in the spring.
“We use JD RTK guidance in all of our machines now, so I just kept planting until I was done,” Hardy added. “The firm soil was moist and good seed-to-soil contact gave me a nearly perfect stand. The stand was considerably better with no till.
“Some of the marginal ground we put into production in the last 10 years is too rough to be leveled, and we’ve found that to be the land where the strip tiller shines—light, undulating ground. The farm was in CRP 14 years ago, and today it’s one of our best fields.”
WATER IS PRECIOUS
“Beets simply do not grow without water in our area,” Hardy said. “Every sugarbeet acre needs water.”
Fairview averages about 12 inches of annual rainfall.
All of the farms are now under irrigation,” Hardy said. Four farms irrigate with water from the Lower Yellowstone Irrigation District. The other 11 have private water rights and irrigate out of the Missouri River using nine electric floating pumps and two diesel-powered floating suction pumps.
“We’re about 65 percent under pivot now,” he said. “We just can’t figure out how to put a pivot on a triangle. It just doesn’t work at current sugar prices.”
Flood irrigation takes care of those oddshaped fields.
“When I started in 1989, that’s all we had—flood irrigation,” Hardy said. “We’ve tripled the size of the farm since I started. Where we’re located on the Missouri River, in five miles the water flows into North Dakota. So for Montana, it’s a use it or lose it proposition.”
Twelve miles of Hardy family property, referred to as The Ranch, fronts the south side of the Missouri River, providing about 20,000 acres of exclusive private hunting for the family’s newest enterprise, Hardy’s HuntN-Camp.
Like most growers, Hardy is glad the new farm bill is in hand.
“Good or bad, at least we can plan now,” he said.