Today is as close to winter as it gets at Kuhn Farms in California's Imperial Valley. It's dark and cold, and stormy clouds race across the platter-flat fields of alfalfa, oat hay, Sudan grass and Bermuda hay. Forty miles west toward San Diego, on top of Mount Laguna, it's actually snowing. I keep expecting rain, but here on the desert floor it rains less than three inches a year. The air at Kuhn Farms this February morning is agitated, nervous, dry, as if stirred by an invisible hand.
Jim Kuhn, third-generation hay farmer and president of Kuhn Farms, doesn't seem to notice. Built like a linebacker, concentrated and intense, he wears short sleeves all day and I don't see him shiver once. He's showing me around his fields, where tractors troll back and forth, cutting some of the first hay of the year. Large mowers consume wavy green alfalfa, strewing it behind like a rug. Other tractors drag wicked-looking circular rakes, gathering the fresh hay into orderly lanes. After the hay dries (a matter of a couple of days in summer, longer in winter), it will be gathered and pressed into neat, twine-wrapped bales. Kuhn Farms, one of the largest hay operations in the Imperial Valley, harvests 14,000 acres, which is just about as far as the eye can see.
There's more than hay growing here. Kuhn, '86, points out sugar beets, bell peppers and cotton. Drive a couple miles east, he says, and you'll hit Holtville, Carrot Capital of the World. The Imperial Valley is California's "salad bowl," a place where warm, dry weather and irrigation water diverted from the Colorado River combine for perfect growing conditions. Alfalfa does particularly well, producing about eight cuttings a year.
The Kuhns made their name with alfalfa, but they started with milk and cheese in 1915 when Fritz Kuhn Sr. arrived from Switzerland and began a 25-cow dairy. It was his son, Fritz Jr., who harvested alfalfa fields for nearby farms in the 1940s and then started growing his own in 1955. His sons, Jim and John, took over Kuhn Farms in 1985 just as Jim was finishing up at Stanford. When the older brother left to pursue a career in law, Jim stayed.
It wasn't a decision he made lightly. "I took fall quarter off my senior year to come back here and see if this is what I really wanted to do," Jim says. "I wanted to see if this was going to be a stimulating environment for me." He has worked hard to keep it stimulating over the last 16 years by expanding and diversifying the family business. These days, Kuhn Farms employs more than 200 workers and produces well over 100,000 tons of hay a year. Add to that a sizable dairy operation with 2,500 Jersey cows and the state's only cheese factory churning out Swiss and Muenster.
Kuhn has also discovered a niche in the "gourmet hay" business, exporting small bales of Sudan grass to Japan. Sudan is a roughage in the sorghum family, valuable to the Japanese dairy farmer who doesn't have access to other good roughages such as almond hulls and corn. Dairy farms in Japan are small affairs, buying only around 40 bales at a time, Kuhn explains. Such tiny batches require meticulous handling. "The farmers may only have 30 to 50 cows, so they're looking at every bale, and every bale has to be right," he says. Machines at Kuhn Farms compress the bales into roughly 2-by-3-foot blocks that the Japanese buyers can hoist by hand. These are then wrapped in plastic to preserve the healthy green color.
Kuhn has been up since dawn today, going field to field, checking the newly cut hay to see if it's dry and ready to bale. "You have to go and check it yourself," he tells me. "You just have to know. It's like a wine maker knowing when his wine is ready--it's pretty much an art. If you bale it too early, it'll get molded and damaged, and if you do it too dry, the leaves will fall off the stems and nobody will buy it."
His routine is a juggling act. On this day, for instance, he's not only checking fields but also meeting with a shipping company representative, processing soil analyses, worrying over the daughter of a local Mexican family who's gone missing, catching up with his 1-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter over lunch and, of course, teaching me about hay farming. His quality-control manager, Nelson Perez, tells me, "There's no way to impress him with hard work, because he's working all day, every day."
Hard work was a lesson learned in childhood. Kuhn grew up in nearby Seeley, a town without obvious entertainment. "We were always working. My dad had me driving a tractor when I was 8," he tells me. "Whenever we had time, we were taken to the ranch, even if it was for something as simple as sorting bolts or doing some minor tractor job. We had to work, so getting bored was definitely not part of the equation."
But his father, he says, never insisted he take on farming for life. "I think he recognized that it was important to be passionate about what you're doing. I think there was a burning desire for him to say, 'If you want to come back . . . ,' but the key word was want." When Kuhn headed off to Stanford, in fact, his father encouraged him to study something other than agriculture. Kuhn majored in Slavic languages and literatures, while also taking Russian, Spanish, French and German. "Turns out I should have taken Japanese," he says.
It was in his Spanish class that he met his wife, Heidi (Minch, '87) Kuhn, a native of Santa Cruz, Calif., who gave up the beaches for the endless emptiness of the Imperial Valley. "Well, Jim and I dated a long time, so I knew what I was getting into," she says, smiling. "Or maybe we dated so long because I knew."
Besides raising the children, Heidi puts her public-policy degree to good use, serving on the local water commission and farm bureau. "It's funny, because when I talk to my friends from Stanford, so few of them are using their majors, and here I am, a stay-at-home mom living in the middle of nowhere, but I'm using my major several times a week. The meetings are strictly public policy and politics, and I love it."
She has no particular expectations of her kids taking up where she and Jim leave off. "Every family has children that leave the valley for good, and in fact I don't know many families that want their kids to come back and are grooming them to come back, in the traditional sense," she says. "The kids who come back do so because they want to. One of the reasons, in fact the big reason, why you get into agriculture, I think, has to be that you appreciate the lifestyle. You can't be there for the money. You can't be there for the free time."
The energetic Kuhns clearly thrive on the challenge. Yet you can't help but notice a faint rueful air about them. Agriculture in America is depressed, Jim reminds me; there's a constant need for innovation and long-term strategies at the farm. These are the relentless demands of what he and Heidi call "ag life."
"People always say agriculture is a life, and that's actually true," Jim says. "Sometimes I wonder if it's really the life for me." He imagines things might have been simpler if he'd never left for college. "The problem with going away to school is that you're exposed to so many different things. It's the problem and it's the benefit."
He is quiet for a moment. "Of course, I don't regret having the exposure [at Stanford]. But when you try to apply it to what ag life is, it's difficult."
We're driving in his truck past a newly planted alfalfa field, where hundreds of birds pick at insects and worms in the ground. Kuhn pays special attention; the long days in the fields have turned him into a bird-watcher and photographer. More than 400 species migrate through the area, he tells me. We watch as this flock, caught in a powerful blast of wintry wind, suddenly takes to the sky.
Kuhn Farms, for them, is just a stopover on the Pacific Flyway. For Jim and Heidi, it is home.
Taylor Antrim, '96, is a senior editor with Wine & Spirits magazine in San Francisco.
