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(bright orchestral music) - [Narrator] Travels and Traditions with Burt Wolf is a classic travel journal, a record of Burt's search for information about our world and how we fit into it.

Burt travels to the source of each story trying to find the connections between our history and what is happening today.

What he discovers can improve our lives and our understanding of the world around us.

(bright orchestral music) - The word sustainability describes an action that does not reduce the opportunities of future generations to enjoy the level of wellbeing that we have today.

It's very simple.

Try not to do anything that will make life difficult for people in the future.

While I was researching the subject, I was introduced to a young man who's devoted to the idea of sustainability, and he's built a company committed to the concept.

His work is based in the Midwest.

So I decided to go to Colorado and take a look at what he was doing.

(bright orchestral music) Stefan was born and grew up in New York City.

His father was a successful real estate developer.

- Dropped outta school my sophomore year and I went back to New York.

My father was wanting me to work with him.

I had started working with him after high school for about five hours a day.

This stuff looks really good, though.

- [Burt] He didn't get along with his father, so when he turned 21, Stefan and his wife moved to Phoenix where he began trading commodities.

- And I was going to either survive on trading commodities or stocking grocery shelves at a supermarket.

Now, I think it was because I always had that in the back of my mind, like, "Okay, if the commodity trading doesn't work out, you know, you'll stock shelves".

- [Burt] He had been trading stocks since he was 12, but now he began to focus on grain markets.

He soon realized that to be fully successful in trading grain futures, you had to have control over the grain.

So he bought about 300 acres in Sumner County, Kansas.

(harvester rattles) - It gives you an advantage, you know, physical, having a physical commodity, you can put these spreads on these different types of hedges, you know, and different types of trading strategies.

You only had to put up $300 to control maybe a $15,000 contract.

- [Burt] Being a New York City kid, he knew nothing about farming.

However, he was lucky to have met a group of local farmers who took him under their wing and showed him how things worked.

- Bought my first field in Wichita, south of Wichita, near Wellington, Kansas, in Sumner County, Kansas, 309 acre field, and learned farming from the farmers there.

And the farmers there, you know, nice people, taught me everything.

- He worked, he enjoys not only, you know, just the land that he owns he enjoys what we do.

I mean, all the farming and everything, how it goes together.

I mean, he utilizes what he buys.

I mean, not just, you know, where a lot of investors just come in and buy the land and have somebody else farming it.

So, he supports the local community.

I mean, everybody together.

I mean, he supports everybody around here.

(indistinct speech) - [Burt] His first crop was sorghum, which is a cereal used to feed cattle.

All his farmland is on the far western edge of the high plains where there's very little rainfall.

You plow as little as possible and leave the stubble to retain the moisture.

- By keeping our header this high and babying this stubble with spray, we're keeping all our moisture in the ground.

If we were plowing, like everybody used to do back in the dust bowl, the moisture comes out of the ground.

If I was to dig down here after the moisture we received this summer, our sub moisture is phenomenal.

It's probably better than it's ever been right now.

We're relying specifically on the rainfall we receive.

We're not draining any aquifers, and it's a perfect sustainable agriculture.

(bright orchestral music) - [Burt] Stefan's company is called Crossroads, and it's involved in four specific areas.

No-till farming, minimum till agriculture, (harvester rattles) dry land fields, and grazing cattle.

- I'm trying to start the first vertically integrated food company to where we're literally growing from ground that we own and taking it to our facility, going to the train, train takes it to the port.

Right now, I give it away to the port, to a major exporter at the port.

Eventually we're gonna move into vessels and we're gonna deliver ourself to Pacific Rim countries and Europe maybe.

- [Burt] Crossroads is a leading agricultural company, the 26th largest landowner in the United States.

It owns over 500,000 acres, of which 175,000 are in cultivation.

- Well, today we're on a 1,200 acre field out here, in Eastern Colorado, and we're harvesting our milo.

It looks like we got some pretty good results making between 70 and 80 bushel milo right here.

And we're quite pleased with it, especially for dry land.

We cut the milo, I mean, it goes through the combine.

It's got a big rotor in it, threshes everything, and just, you know, all the thresh comes out the back, clean grain goes up in the grain bin and gets dumped into this grain cart right here.

And from here it gets dumped into the semi and it gets taken to the elevator.

- Stefan's devotion to sustainable farming is based on his belief that it's the right thing to do and done properly it's quite profitable.

- It all comes with success.

You know, you gotta be profitable, that's our most important thing.

And sustainability comes along with profitability.

- [Burt] Stefan is a highly skilled and financially successful businessman.

He's doing well by doing good.

- I really do believe in 20 to 30 years from now, if I can get this where I wanna get this, this is gonna be some special company.

- I'm really proud of that.

I'm proud of sustainability getting as sustainable as we can.

I know we have other projects that we're looking at as far as like hydro power in Canada and stuff like that.

But right now, like sustainability out here.

(bright orchestral music) - No-till farming is a technique that goes back for about 10,000 years.

It's a way of growing crops without disturbing the soil.

Sadly, no-till farming was given up in Europe during the 1700s when there was a new approach to agriculture.

No-till farming was replaced with tilling.

(machinery clatters) Tilling is the practice of turning over and breaking up the top six inches of soil before planting a new crop.

It works surface crop residue and weeds into the soil.

It also aerates and warms the soil.

However, it also removes any plant matter covering the soil, leaving it bare.

Bare soil, especially soil that is deficient in rich organic matter is more likely to be eroded by wind and water.

Tilling also displaces and kills off the millions of microbes and insects that form healthy soil.

The long term use of tillage can convert healthy soil into a lifeless growing medium, a medium that is dependent on chemical inputs for productivity.

Farmers started tilling the soil because it allowed them to plant more seeds with less effort.

- Every time you till your ground, it takes moisture out, and out out every time.

And so there is farmers around, they plow their fields every time the weeds come up and for the most part, so some of those guys, they don't raise much.

(wind blows) - [Burt] Fortunately, a growing number of farmers are realizing the importance of preserving and improving the soil.

They do that by adopting no-till practices.

Stefan is one of them.

- Basically, our operation is a minimum till, so we just, you know, plow a field about every three to four years.

You know, we try to keep the moisture and reserve the most amount of moisture we possibly can.

And by not tilling it is the way to keep the moisture in the ground and, you know, yeah, this field would've been plowed probably four years ago.

- [Stefan] This is the western edge.

This is the very edge of farmland in the United States.

So if you see what we're doing right now is we're harvesting and we're leaving a residue on the field.

So that residue over there is what keeps the moisture in the ground.

And moisture here is very important 'cause some years we don't get much.

- [Burt] Fertilizer is another issue that Stefan and his team had to deal with.

Fertilizer is essential because it provides nutrients to the crops, but the use of large amounts of chemical fertilizer can be detrimental to the environment.

Using a natural alternative is becoming a common practice.

When harvesting milo, the headers of the combine are kept high.

This leaves 5% of the berries to fall to the ground and also leaves a longer stalk.

Once the harvest is complete, cattle are left to graze the fields.

The cattle's waste acts as an organic fertilizer that provides nutrients for the next harvest.

This ecofriendly approach isn't just good for the planet, it's also cost effective.

(bright orchestral music) Dry land farming allows farmers to grow crops in dry regions without additional irrigation.

Costs are lower than traditional farming techniques and more sustainable.

- We're dry land farmers.

We don't irrigate.

We'll use less fertilizer and chemicals because it's not irrigated.

We have larger acreage, we're relying solely on rainfall.

And then when we harvest this, we keep our stubble, we also put cattle out on it.

We graze it on the milo stalks, and that's the next cycle in the cow's life for at least the way we do it.

- [Burt] Dry land farming allows farmers to grow crops in dry regions without additional irrigation.

- I mean, our soils, they hold the water really, really well.

I mean, they, whatever moisture you get, I mean it doesn't evaporate much at all.

And so we try to keep it that way by not tilling, - Keeping your stubble like we do here after we harvest this is important because it keeps our moisture in the ground.

And again, every bit of moisture we get, we need to keep in the ground.

(harvester rattles) - [Burt] Costs are lower than traditional farming techniques and more sustainable.

- [Quintin] That's kind of the backbone of the Soloviev group.

We're very environmentally friendly.

It's all about sustainability.

- [Burt] Quintin is Stefan's son and his primary job is to do everything that his father doesn't get done on time.

Booking airlines, renting cars, designing websites.

- I've been doing this since I was like five years old.

He'd always pull me outta class.

So certain years I missed a couple weeks of school and he's taught me more than I think I could have learned in school.

Just about life, about how to run a company.

- Quintin is Robin to Stefan's Batman.

- So I try to give my creative input in things.

I help my dad kind of manage everything he's got going on, so he'll gimme certain things that he'll delegate to me to get done.

'Cause he's got a lot going on in his mind.

I don't think his mind ever turns off.

(bright orchestral music) - [Burt] October is when the crop is brought in.

(bright orchestral music) Giant harvesters roam through the fields cutting the stalks and stripping the grain, which goes into the massive grain silos.

- Good looking corn this year.

You know, and we're all rain in June and July.

- [Burt] Will Bramblett is the director of operations in Eastern Colorado.

He's responsible for moving the grain from the farm to the end user.

- So when the trucks come in out of the field, they come in and they stop at that probe.

That probe goes down into the truck and gets a representative sample of what is in the truck.

Once that sample comes in it gets conveyed to this scale house right here.

And they have various machines in there to sample the moisture content, test weight.

They're looking for any foreign material in it.

That truck gets scaled in.

He'll have a readout that shows him his weight and then once the scale operator's done it gives him a green light and tells him to proceed.

There's several options to dump the trucks.

One of them is down there.

There's 2,000 bushel hopper pits, that truck will dump in there.

The other option is to put the excess grain out on what we call just either bunkers or ground piles.

And so right now the majority of what we're dumping, because we're getting full of grain in the tall silos, what we're doing right now is dumping it out in these ground piles, in these bunkers.

They would open the hoppers and then that grain just conveys up and dumps it in that pile right there.

Whether they dump down at the silos or they dump right here, they would exit, come around and then they would weigh out.

- [Stefan] The trucks have a real easy route in here.

Older elevators, very inefficient.

We're now pushing 100 trucks an hour as far as unload speeds go.

So basically cater to the farmer, cater to the local farm, 'cause look, when you're in harvest, you wanna get going, and if you're close to here, you know, bring your trucks here if you're not going to storage and not wait in lines and go.

- [Burt] To make the movement of the wheat, milo and corn more efficient Stefan built a series of state-of-the-art grain elevators.

(door opens) - So today we're mainly dumping milo.

The field straight north of here we were cutting milo and a lot of that milo yesterday got dumped out into that pile right there.

That pile will be reclaimed.

You'll pick it up with that pay loader that's sitting down there, you'll pick it up and haul it back to the elevator to put on a train to go to whatever destination it needs to go to at that time.

We take in grain from our own production that is owned by the Soloviev Group, but we also take, we're a commercial grain elevator, and we also take grain from other farmers in the area.

(wind blows across mic) (grain whooshes out) Trucks come in, they get dumped down in these pits.

So this is what is going on down below with the truck unloading.

Those are your two hoppers where the truck's dumped upstairs.

They get conveyed in a chain conveyor over to the bucket elevators.

And these bucket elevators are just a belt with an electric motor up top on a pulley, driving a belt with a bunch of cups on it.

And those cups just take that grain, elevate it to the top and distribute it.

I'll let you go in first.

It's kind of a little bit of a tight fit.

- [Burt] There are four grain elevators and each elevator can hold 1.5 million bushels of wheat.

That means that a single elevator can make 60 million loaves of bread.

- But I think anyone from New York that spends a day out here wouldn't really understand how the food industry works.

I don't think people really understand how bread gets to your shelf at the end of the day.

- So those are bucket elevator systems.

There's two of them.

They can unload a truck in about 60 seconds.

These bucket elevators are elevating that grain.

It goes through a distributor.

That distributor currently is set to this spout and that spout is unloading it into this conveyor.

And this conveyor is taking it to the very far bin on the east side down there.

(grain whooshing through) So very, very high speed, fast process.

It's all about keeping the farmer moving and harvesting grain in a timely fashion.

- [Burt] The grain is stored in the elevators until it's time to move them to the market.

- Yeah, the reason they're called elevators is because you're elevating grain.

And so once that grain is elevated, then it gravity, just gravity is what draws it out of those bins.

On the outbound side, when we're loading a train, this is underneath the big silos up above.

It brings it down here and it drops it into these two bucket elevators and elevates it and then goes through a automatic weighing system that weighs the grain and drops it into a rail car.

Much like Stefan wanted for his own production, he wanted speed and market access and that's what he got when he built this.

But that also benefits all of our other producers in the area because you have speed and market access and this facility does it and it does it very efficiently and fast.

And that's kind of the name of the game when you're trying to move tonnage.

(bright orchestral music) - [Burt] One of the most important parts of Stefan's organization is their railroad.

(train horn blows) (up-tempo music) The railroad was built during the 1880s by the Missouri Pacific Railroad to serve local residents between Pueblo, Colorado, and Kansas City.

- This is some memorabilia that came out of the museum, I think in Eads.

There used to be a town here called Stewart and there was actually a grain elevator here.

It was actually on the other side of the railroad tracks between the tracks and the highway.

And it was an old wooden elevator I believe.

This is just pictures of them building the railroad and then operating some manual movers or little train cars on the railroad there.

So probably around the turn of century, I'm guessing.

Long history of moving grain and trying to bring, keep that tradition going and being successful at it so far.

- [Burt] In 1998, it was sold to the Colorado Department of Transportation in hopes of setting up a short line to serve the local farmers.

In 2004, VNS Railway took over the line with the intention of scrapping it.

But Stefan had a different idea.

- So I had acquired large tracts of land in this area in 2006, started to operate here, and noticed that this line was being condemned and looked into it a little more.

And a company outta Utah called VNS Railway, which is really just a fancy name for a rail scrapping company.

Meaning all they do is rip up rail line, salvage the steel, flip it, make a lot of money, - [Burt] Not good for the community.

- They were hurting the communities here, you know, obviously hampering competition.

And I started an injunction in front of the Surface Transportation Board in Washington.

It was a pretty big legal fight there.

We became awarded the rail line.

(train horn blows) (air hisses) - [Burt] Now they have their own railroad.

- So that sample comes from that.

When you load that train, that sample comes down that line - I got it.

- Goes into there.

(bell clangs) - People are just looking at the train like, "What is this?"

People grow up here that are my age and have never seen a train on the line and now they're seeing this massive train come rolling down.

And it was, I think my dad was really happy about that and I think it was a big achievement for my dad.

- So this is the Colorado Pacific Railroad.

Just east of here is where the Colorado Pacific Railroad property begins.

And then west, 127 miles at NA Junction, is where we join the BNSF and the Union Pacific Railroads.

- [Stefan] Move it west about 20 feet.

This line allows us to purchase grain and move it in the same efficient terms and ways as the biggest companies in the United States do.

(engine throbs) (grain hisses) So our 110 car train can go anywhere in the United States at the same rate that the massive grain companies are paying for them.

(door clangs) - [Burt] The silos are essential to the operation.

- Our facility's state-of-the-art, it is probably the most efficient grain facility in the United States right now.

It takes us four people and 10 hours to load 110-car train.

If you're looking at a lot of other grain elevators, older grain elevators around here, you're talking 20 employees, a 24-hour period to load a 110-car train.

(harvester rattles) - [Burt] Stefan in cooperation with the local farmers plans to expand the operation and integrate all aspects of sustainable farming.

- We wanna have a terminal at a port.

We wanna have vessels one day.

We wanna take their grain to the end user and make them the most amount of money that we can, along with our own grain as well.

- [Burt] Nice to see that there are farming techniques that are sustainable and don't damage the planet.

And people like Stefan, who are proving that they are also profitable.

Well, that's Travels and Traditions.

Please join us next time here on your local PBS station.

But wait, there's more!

(bright orchestral music) For daily reels featuring interviews, stories, and recipes filmed during these shows visit Nicholas Wolf TV on Instagram or Burt Wolf TV on YouTube.

(soaring orchestral music) - [Announcer] Travels and traditions is made possible by Chemex coffee makers.

Makers of scientifically designed coffeemakers and filters since 1941 Pure design, pure flavor, Chemex.

And by Artrepreneur, a global platform for artists, empowering artists to succeed, and connecting art lovers, designers, and collectors with curated works.

Artrepreneur.com.

And by YP Foundation, helping those in need through education and improving life skills.

Guided by the principles of good deeds, charity, and public welfare, YP Foundation.

And by Five Star Travel Inc., in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Since 1985, Five Star Travel has been developing and delivering detailed itineraries for trips, cruises, and vacations to destinations around the world.

Five Star Travel Inc.

(strumming guitar)