Meet a Fifth-Generation Colorado Farmer Balancing Information and Innovation

On this episode of the 15 Minutes With a Farmer podcast, Asia Kalcevic shares her experience as a young woman in agriculture and how her family’s eastern Colorado farm uses regenerative farming practices and the latest technology to care for their soil and reduce the cost of inputs. She also highlights the evolving role of social media in promoting sustainable agriculture and the farm’s brand. 

Kalcevic joined me for a conversation from the Successful Farming booth at Commodity Classic in Denver.

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Meet Asia Kalcevic

Kalcevic Farms is a multi-generational operation on the eastern Plains of Colorado, growing corn, wheat, milo, and millet.

As admin and operations associate, Asia Kalcevic handles social media and marketing, developing a cohesive branding strategy and sharing the farm’s story. She also tackles data entry, accounting, and payroll tasks, working closely with her sister, Tabor, and other family members. 

One of her favorite parts of working on the family farm is running the grain cart during wheat harvest. “I love it,” she said. “That’s my favorite time of the year.”

Episode Highlights

• Kalcevic Farms spans 165 miles east to west. It shares a border on the west with Denver International Airport.
• Regenerative farming practices and the latest technology help the Kalcevics to care for their soil and reduce the cost of inputs.
• Kalcevic works closely with her sister, Tabor, on accounting and data entry for the family farm.
• She manages social media and marketing efforts to build the Kalcevic Farms brand.
• One of her favorite parts of working on the farm is running the grain cart during wheat harvest.
• Kalcevic credits FFA with helping grow her confidence with public speaking.

Links and Resources

Read about Kalcevic’s participation in the Female Producer Panel at the Women in Agribusiness Summit and meet one of the other panelists:

Transcript

Please note: This transcript has not been edited.

Lisa Foust Prater: Welcome to the 15 minutes with the farmer podcast from successful farming. I’m your host, Lisa Foust Prater. My guest today, Asia Kalcevic, joined me for a conversation at Commodity Classic. A fifth-generation farmer from Eastern Colorado, Asia shares her experience as a young woman in agriculture and how her family’s farm uses regenerative farming practices and the latest technology to care for their soil and reduce the cost of inputs.

She also highlights the evolving role of social media in promoting sustainable agriculture and the farm’s brand. In each episode, I have a quick 15-minute conversation with a farmer to hear their story and share their experience, expertise, and life lessons.

Asia, thank you so much for joining me on 15 Minutes With a Farmer. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, so I first heard you speak at the Women in Agribusiness Summit here in Denver, and you were on a producer panel, which was so much fun. That was like a highlight of the summit for me. It was so fun to hear the different types of producers talking about, you know, being a woman in agriculture. So that was fantastic. So what was that experience like for you? 

Asia Kalcevic: It was extremely nerve wracking. That was my first ever big public speaking event. But at the end of the day, I was relieved to kind of be able to work through that. And I attribute a lot of my calmness to FFA. I did extemporaneous speaking and public speaking a lot in FFA. And that really made a difference for me.

Lisa Foust Prater: I love that. Well, you did such a good job there. But you know, that’s one of the things about FFA that I think people don’t think about. You know, you think about showing pigs or cattle at the fair, you know, doing those kinds of things. But really, the speaking is so key for confidence and just learning how to talk to people. It’s such a good skill. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yes, absolutely.

Lisa Foust Prater:  I love that. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about about your operation and your family?

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah, absolutely. So we are a fifth generation family farm located in Eastern Colorado. We are Kalcevic Farms and we grow wheat, corn, milo and millet. We range about 165 miles east to west from the border of DIA (Denver International Airport). And so we cover a little bit of ground but we’re very proud of what we do and we’re gonna keep doing it. 

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s a huge expanse, 165 miles, know, hours to get across the whole property, that’s amazing. I think some of those big operations, like especially in the West, those of us in the Midwest and out East, it’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around that much land. So tell us about your role.

Asia Kalcevic: So my role is admin and operations associate. That includes a lot of different hats. It definitely varies by day. One of my main tasks is working with AR, AP stuff, making sure people are getting paid. And then I work very closely with my sister on additional accounting tasks, a lot of data entry. We track and manage our data very strategically and very closely.

And then during wheat harvest, I’m in a grain cart. And so that’s what I do. I’m in the field and I’ve been doing that for seven years. And I’m, I love it. That’s my favorite time of the year. 

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s so fun. It’s, I, it’s nice. I’m sure to, you know, get out of the office and sort of get out there in the fields and, do your thing. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yes, absolutely. 

Lisa Foust Prater: So is, is joining the family operation something you always knew you would do or did you have other aspirations growing up?

Asia Kalcevic: I knew I was always going to go back to the farm. I went back a little earlier than I was expecting though. Life with COVID hit. I was in college. I took some time off and then I finished up college, looked for some additional jobs outside of the industry because I wanted to see what kind of information I could bring back to the farm that maybe other industries or other jobs are doing. And but yeah, I came back. I’ve loved it. I don’t regret it. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, so what’s it like working with your family? mentioned you work pretty closely with your sister and you know sometimes working with family can be amazing and sometimes it can be really tricky. So tell us about that. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah So there’s your good and bad days I’d say there’s definitely more good than bad, but it’s the dependability that we have on each other and because we are family, know each other’s limits a lot better. But it’s also a lot harder to say no. Like, no, I don’t have capacity for that right now. Instead, it’s, yeah, sure, I’ll make that work. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. And you know, it can also be tricky at the end of the day, leaving work behind you and like, now you’re not my coworker, now you’re my sister or my mom or my dad sort of thing. So how do you kind of manage that?

Asia Kalcevic: We do typically try to say, this is a strictly family event. If we’re just hanging out after work and it’s just the four or six of us, we’ll talk shop. But not at the same caliber as if we were in the office. We do try to have a good barrier and more of that work-life balance with each other. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah. That’s so smart. It can be really tricky. So I’m glad that you found a way to sort of navigate that. Talk to me a little about being a young woman in agriculture. We talked, know, at the panel, at the Women in Agribusiness panel, you talked about some of the challenges that just kind of come with that territory. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah. I would say one of the biggest challenges that comes with being a young woman that is a producer is probably recognition. You walk into a room and you’re not as recognized per se as even a young male. Networking is a little bit harder too. You’ve got to push for a conversation a bit harder. Because again, people are like, oh, you’re a young woman. They don’t expect you to maybe have quite the expertise.

And yes, I understand that sometimes our generation has put that on everyone, but it’s like you just need to keep your mind open and say, yeah, I’m going to engage in this. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, that’s great. And you know, I think once you start to talk to someone and they can see from just talking to you that you know what you’re talking about, that you have knowledge of your business and your production, then, you know, hopefully that that kind of opens things up a bit. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah, it definitely gets easier after a couple sentences and a couple questions that they’re like, okay, yeah, let’s sit down. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, yeah. that’s good. That’s good. Yeah, so talk to me about what’s going on at your place this year. Do you have anything new or different that you’re trying out on the farm? 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah, so we work with John Deere Equipment and we’ve got some of their new equipment coming in this year that we’re super excited about. The combines are all the new style. And then some sprayers as well are going to be the See & Spray sprayers. And so they’re more cost effective for us on our chemical and some of our other products like that. Yeah. 

Lisa Foust Prater: That’s amazing. And you know, with like, the cost of inputs and everything, anything you can do to sort of minimize what you need is really important. How have you dealt with those kinds of rising prices? It’s so hard. 

Asia Kalcevic: The rising prices of just like fuel and chemical and then the markets aren’t going up for the seed we’re selling and it’s made it really hard. We’ve had to find additional revenue streams and I mean we’ve been doing that for a while because unfortunately you can’t just farm. But there’s been other programs like through the NRCS and Nutrien that have provided us to continue to do sustainability on our ground and get paid for it. 

Lisa Foust Prater: It’s always good to you know, have something in your back pocket, some sort of options. So tell us about your endeavors as far as like sort of branching out a bit with your business. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah, so I’m really, I do our social media and our marketing as well. So I manage our Facebook and I built our website and everything. So I would love to continue to push our story out there and share with people where their food is coming from and just that we’re not here to hurt you, we’re not here to hurt the environment, we’re really just trying to do everything right and never can. And so I want to continue to branch out in that and that’s why I’m here today, I wanted to share my story and so there’s that and then there’s the small little things I’ve always thought it’d be fun to do like flour – like mill our own wheat and do flour for like our family. That’s something I’d like to do. I don’t know if I’ll have the time though. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, well, it’s, mean, geez, doing the social media and the web and all those things, I mean, that’s a full-time job, you know? And it’s really such an important part of your business. And I know that for a lot of folks who are looking at getting into that, if you don’t have that sort of background or training, it’s a lot. And so that just feels like such a good role for you. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yeah. It wasn’t encouraged at the beginning. It took some motivation and some talk through, say, no, we do need this. And at the end of the day, it’s been really impactful. We have a lot of people that are like, thank you so much for sharing these photos. They love to follow along during wheat harvest. So it really gets a lot of people involved without them actually having to be on the farm, which during harvest could be a risk because of all the stuff that’s going on. 

Lisa Foust Prater: So how has that been just like interacting with the public? 

Asia Kalcevic: I think it’s been primarily positive. We’ve had a few obvious negative comments, but you know that they can do that. Yeah, we can’t do anything about it. But it’s been really good because it’s allowed us to, again, expand that. I always think that people see a farmer as maybe someone with a pitchfork and in bibbies. We do have a wonderful gentleman that works for us who wears bibbies every day. 

Lisa Foust Prater: I love that. 

Asia Kalcevic: Yes. But it’s good for them to see we are just those regular human beings and we love to share our sustainability practices and our regenerative ag practices as well with using stripper headers and no-till practices and really just trying to produce earthworms and have good soil health and the things that we’re doing is really to benefit everyone. 

Lisa Foust Prater: How do you guys kind of go about those practices? 

Asia Kalcevic: Well, we so we’ve been doing them for a long time. You know, minimal moisture in Colorado. You kind of can’t till the soil all the time otherwise it’s blowing everywhere and you’ve got erosion. And so that was a practice that was kind of enforced for like a generation already. And so we’ve been taking that and saying, okay, you know, let’s share that we’re doing this. Because before it was like, my God, why are you not tilling your soil? Or, my gosh, there’s residue in your field from your stripper headers. Before it was like you cut everything down. So we’ve really just been sharing that story the same as a lot of people have. And again, working with those additional programs with third-party vendors. 

My sister Tabor is the one that’s super involved in the CRP programs, the organic certifications, and some of that stuff there with the soil health.

Lisa Foust Prater: We talked a little bit about what’s going on this year on the farm. So I’m just curious, like, what’s next for you? 

Asia Kalcevic: Oh man. What’s next for me is continuing to build our brand. You know, again, farmers are probably one of the least represented industry on social media. And so it’s building our brand, who we are, what are our color schemes, what are the fonts, all that fun stuff. So when we create presentations, when we’re out and about, what are our business cards look like? It’s all those little things in the background that make it look more, you know, we’re a business and then we’re a farm. Right. Is how we’re kind of structured. Right. And so how do we make that business look unified and structured?

Lisa Foust Prater: Yeah, that’s a big job and it’s really important. I love your website and what you’re doing on social. You’re doing a really good job.

Asia Kalcevic: Thank you very much. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Well, Asia, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been so fun to talk to you. And again, you did such a good job in Denver at the Women in Agribusiness Summit. So I was so happy to get to talk to you today. 

Asia Kalcevic: Thank you so much for having me. And maybe we’ll see you in Orlando then (at the next Women in Agribusiness Summit). 

Lisa Foust Prater: All right.

Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Open the latest issue of Successful Farming and visit us online at agriculture.com for more interesting features and news for your farm. Join me next week for another episode of 15 Minutes with a Farmer.