While attending the August 2025 International Certified Crop Advisers meeting in Denver, Colorado, our group (including CCA’s from Mexico, USA, and Canada) toured the Colorado Sate University Research Farm. Special thanks to Department Head of Soil and Crop Sciences, Chris Pires and Research Farm Plant Sciences Manager, Karl Whitman. Along with manager of the livestock unit Christina Nash, Seed Lab manager Randy Crowl, and Foundation Seed division manager Barry Ogg, for welcoming us to their amazing facility and answering our all of our questions.
The research farm, known as ARDEC (Agricultural Research, Development & Education Center), is located a little over an hour north of Denver, at Fort Collins. They are unique in that the research farm has both a livestock and plant science component on one farm. Also, they only receive funding for the salaries of the full tine employees and the rest of the operating expenses for the research farm must be paid for from the proceeds of their crop and livestock sales. The plant science portion of the research farm focuses on corn, sugar beets, wheat, and dry beans. The Fort Collins area only receives 12 inches of annual precipitation and half of that comes as snow. They utilize irrigation and focus on tillage research.
Lucky us, they just happened to be harvesting dry beans the day we were there!
We watched them harvesting Pinto beans, and the variety was named Poncho, with a 87-91 day maturity. They were hoping for a yield of 2200 lbs/acre. On irrigated plots they aim for about 3000 lbs/acre and the best yields they can obtain on later maturing dry bean varieties under irrigation is around 4000 lbs/ acre. These pinto beans were grown on 30 inch rows and they didn’t receive any fungicide. Barry commented that their dry beans always respond to applied nitrogen and encouraged me to take a close look at some of the newly developed dry bean varieties in North Dakota that have been bred for upright growth.
Dry beans have limited acres now in Colorado due to marketing difficulty and more dry beans are grown in Nebraska. Dry beans are a great crop but corn has dominated in Colorado. In the mid 90’s, Colorado had 200,000 acres of dry bean production but now only has between 30,000- 40,000 acres. Dry beans are sold by the hundred weight and most end up in Mexico.
They are active in growing dry beans for seed production on the Western Slopes of Colorado because this area has no disease.
Also, they do research on Cow Peas (black eyed peas) which is an African crop which has bean types and forage types. In Colorado, they are growing cow peas so that its stubble can catch snow. Dry bean fields grown here have no residue left after harvest.
Kochia is their biggest weed and water robbing problem. They use sweep blades to attempt to kill the kochia as dicamba or 2,4-D no longer have an affect on controlling the herbicide resistant kochia in their research fields. They do use pre emergent herbicide and then Basagran as an in-crop herbicide application for other weeds.
The pinto beans were undercut using a Pickett machine about 7-10 days prior to harvest. This Pickett machine handles 6, 30 inch rows at a time.
Important Fact: Dr. Henry Thompson, a Professor and Researcher at Colorado State University, and the Director of the Cancer Prevention Laboratory promotes beans as a health food and researches how beans can revolutionize your health & well being.
Bean Interview: Dr. Henry Thompson – A Legume a Day
Fun Fact: The Research farm also does research and seed production of garden flowers
Interesting Note: We got to met “Cam the Ram”, the mascot for Colorado State University who attends parades, pep rallies, and football games.
