The vast, flat landscape of eastern New Mexico's High Plains provides a canvas for the annual creation of farmers and ranchers.

Agriculture drives the rhythm of work and life here, reflected in the seasonal palette. Cattle grazing on a verdant carpet of winter wheat are replaced by farmers plowing and planting the red earth, sprinklers making slow circuits over the growing crops and golden-brown fields of grain waving in the wind.

One of the last portions of the western frontier, the High Plains was settled only a century ago. Ranchers were attracted to the grassy prairie, while homesteaders pinned their hopes on the promise of water. Through drought and difficulty, a stubborn contingent of settlers succeeded in making a living on the land.

Today, the culture and economy of the High Plains are firmly rooted in agriculture. In 1997, Curry, Roosevelt and Quay counties ranked third, fourth and 10th in the state, respectively, based on agricultural cash receipts. As just three of the state's 33 counties, they generated 20 percent of New Mexico's farm and ranch sales.

The area's agricultural strength shows in the landmarks of grain elevators and milk plant towers. It is celebrated in community events like rodeos, Pioneer Days, county fairs, the Ag Expo trade show and the Peanut Valley Festival.

Most importantly, agriculture is lived by the farming and ranching families at the heart of the High Plains. Their work chronicles a year in the life of High Plains agriculture.

Winter

On a wintry Wednesday, the Clovis Livestock Auction does a brisk business, carrying on a 50-year tradition at the current location on Hull Street. Long touted as "cattle capital of the Southwest," Clovis once was a major rail shipping point for livestock. Today, it's home to major feedlots where cattle are fattened for slaughter.

Local farmers and ranchers looking for cattle to graze on winter wheat are joined by buyers from Oklahoma and Kansas.

The crowd might include ranchers decked out in ostrich boots, nice hats and neatly ironed shirts. Farmers wearing their DeKalb caps and coveralls have interrupted work to come to the sale. On horse sale days, traders dress in bright colors and silver jewelry.

"We're able to stay in business because of the small operators who come from all around the area," says Nancy Rogers, wife of owner Charlie Rogers. "We also get order buyers at every cattle sale who buy in quantity for the industry."

For auctioneers Steve Friskup and Tommy Williams, the day may stretch until midnight as 5,000 head of cattle pass through the sale ring. A scale in the floor weighs the animals. Their numbers, average weight, total weight and price per pound are displayed above the ring.

"This one's got hair like a bear," Friskup cracks in between rapid-fire prices, drawing a few chuckles from buyers.

As cattle are sold, paperwork sails overhead to the main office in a cylinder similar to the one at a bank's drive-up window. Outdoors, workers swiftly sort the sold animals into pens by buyer, using a system of tag numbers.

In one year, the auction moves about 100,000 head of cattle through the ring, generating $40 to $50 million in economic activity. The auction's six annual horse sales, among the nation's largest, generate an additional $5 to $6 million in economic activity and attract buyers from as far away as California and Canada.

As a middleman, the auction depends on volume, charging a 2-percent commission based on sale price.

In 1997, the auction won the business of the year award from the Clovis Chamber of Commerce, given for bringing in the most out-of-town dollars.

"We're nothing new, but maybe we made them aware we were here," says Rogers, a former dental hygienist and "town girl," who gives auction tours, beef jerky and bumper stickers to everyone from visiting dignitaries to elementary students.

Before the rush of spring field work, volunteers team up to hold a major agricultural trade show at the Roosevelt County Fairgrounds in Portales.

Ag Expo, New Mexico's largest and longest-running farm show, was born six years ago from a conversation. "A group of us were talking about the strength of agriculture in eastern New Mexico, and we decided if anyone was going to do a farm show, it should be us," says Floyd McAlister, Ag Expo coordinator and agent with NMSU's Cooperative Extension Service in Roosevelt County.

Held in late February, Ag Expo attracts about 5,000 visitors, drawing mostly from a 100-mile radius that includes the Pecos Valley and West Texas. Vendors hawk everything from hydraulic squeeze chutes to Dairy-opoly games.

A total mixed ration feed wagon traveled all the way from Europe. "Right after it got off the ship from Italy, they hauled it all the way from California just for this show to expose it to the dairy producers of our area," McAlister says.

The High Plains, the state's fastest-growing dairy region, is home to nearly 50,000 dairy cows in Roosevelt and Curry counties.

Besides buying equipment, Ag Expo visitors could attend classes about dairy management and weed control or watch horse training and herding dog demonstrations.

Children found the combination of animals and big machines hard to resist. Elementary classes were spellbound by a milking demonstration. Four-year-old Mitchell Bennett of Portales carried his baby chick gently in a lunch sack, while brothers Craig Baize, 8, and Kevin Baize, 14, clambered into the cab of a bright blue Landini tractor and pretended to drive.

Spring

After a winter spent repairing sprinklers and equipment, Wayne Baker plants corn in April. On his sandy land, typical of the area, he uses minimum tillage, planting into stubble to hold soil in place against the gusty spring winds.

Next, he breaks ground for peanuts with a traditional moldboard plow, planting in May. Looking at the land he farms in Curry and northern Roosevelt counties, he sees both its great potential and its glaring weakness.

Curry, Roosevelt and southern Quay counties make up the southern Llano Estacado, or staked plains, which encompasses some eight million acres in western Oklahoma, the northern Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico.

The region takes its name from Spanish explorers who came in search of gold and found only a sea of grass. Legend has it that the Spaniards, disoriented by the lack of landmarks, put out stakes to mark their way along the prairie.

"The High Plains, including the West Texas area, is great farming land," Baker says. "With water, we could feed the whole world."

Irrigated growers like Baker depend on the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground water deposit. High Plains farmers are alarmed by a dropping water table for good reason.

Baker believes irrigated agriculture has survived here largely because of the Valencia peanut, his mainstay and the area's major cash crop. He also raises irrigated wheat and alfalfa.

Each season passes in a blur of fertilizing, cultivating, spraying peanuts, irrigating, cutting alfalfa, harvesting and hauling grain, and taking cattle on wheat for the winter.

Even as a teenager, Baker had a passion for farming, starting full-time 38 years ago with help from his father.

"During the summer, you work from sunup to past sundown," he says. "To have a family life, you have to have your family be involved with you on the farm."

The Bakers have four children, three daughters and a son who plans to become a veterinarian. A son-in-law, who did not grow up on a farm, is working with Baker this year as a tryout.

"If a person likes it, it's a good life, but it's not an easy life," Baker says. "If you're successful, the farm controls you instead of you controlling it."

Every year, dryland farmer Gene Massey hopes for May showers that bring summer sorghum. At his farm near Rogers, southeast of Portales, Massey relies entirely on natural rainfall because he cannot draw on the Ogallala Aquifer for irrigation.

"The water here is spotty," Massey says. "You have to hunt for windmill water. We drilled our eighth hole before we found well water for our home place."

To make a good sorghum crop, Massey needs an initial shower and two to three rains during the 100-day growing season. Though the region averages 16 to 18 inches of annual rainfall, this year measurable rain didn't fall on the High Plains until July.

Almost none of the dryland sorghum in the region came up, though it had to be planted to collect catastrophic insurance. Dryland cotton suffered a similar fate.

The late rains did give Massey hope of moisture for planting winter wheat around the first of September. Though the drought cost New Mexico farmers an estimated $60 million, it's not the worst year Massey can remember.

"One year, we planted the same land three times, trying to get one crop," he recalls. "When the grain sorghum didn't come up, we planted haygrazer so we'd have round bales of hay, and it grew a foot tall and died. In September, we put in wheat."

With grain prices as low as they've been in nearly 40 years, Massey's work won't end with the harvest. Two years ago, he hauled 30 loads of grain all the way to Deming in search of the best price.

"It took me all winter," he says. "I'd leave home at 9 o'clock at night, get to Deming at 2 or 3 in the morning, then sleep until they'd knock on the door of the truck at 6 to unload. On the way home, I'd have breakfast with my youngest son, Craig, in Las Cruces and get back here at 3 in the afternoon."

Despite the challenges, Massey's older sons Kevin and Kyle are farming, and his oldest grandson is interested. "Land is something you hand down if you can," he says.

In any case, finding a buyer for a 4,000-acre, all-dryland operation with elevators and barns would be nearly impossible, Massey says. He hopes instead for rain and better prices.

"I'm ready for some good years, about five big ones," Massey says with a chuckle. "So is my banker."

Summer

East of Clovis, Donnie Helmer and his son Chad check the sprinklers on the green bean crop on a hot August day.

"The beans had a hard time with the heat this year, but they look good," Helmer says. Besides raising cotton, milo, wheat and cattle, Helmer grows green beans and spinach for Arkansas-based Allen Canning. High-value contract crops have the advantage of a guaranteed buyer.

"Green beans fit in well because they're a short crop," Helmer says. "It gives you time to think about your options."

High Plains farmers grow 10,000 to 15,000 acres of vegetables, including green beans, black-eyed peas, melons, sweet corn, potatoes, spinach and other greens.

Helmer's Blue Lake beans mature in about 60 days, going from bloom to harvest in about three weeks. Allen Canning company crews harvest the crop, which is shipped to Arkansas for processing.

Though vegetables require more water, their higher value allows growers to plant fewer acres, for an overall water savings, says R.D. Baker, acting superintendent of NMSU's Agricultural Science Center at Clovis. "Instead of planting 200 acres of wheat, they may grow 50 acres of vegetables."

Down the road from Helmer's bean field is a crop that breaks with tradition. Gala and Fuji apples ripen in a high-tech orchard under the August sun. The semidwarf trees are supported by wire trellises, watered with drip irrigation and shaded by black mesh hail nets.

The 6.5 acres of apples belong to business partners Doug Harrison and Barry Williams.

Harrison, owner of Southwest Commodities, farms and ranches in addition to his day job. Well-versed in low grain and cattle prices, Harrison sees several advantages to branching out with an apple co-op of 17 growers. At full pro-duction, 10 acres of apples could bring in as much gross income as 400 acres of corn.

The apple co-op, brainchild of local vegetable packer Randy Ware of Ware Produce, sells to Wal-Mart, supermarkets and other chain stores.

"We're in the infancy of trying to develop those markets," Harrison says. Apples fit in well with Harrison's traditional crops, requiring the most attention during the winter.

"Apples also allow us to use idle land on the corners of circles under center pivot irrigation," he points out.

The downside to growing a new crop is the risk.

"It's pretty stimulating mentally," Harrison says. "You only have one shot at learning something every year." This year, he believes a mistimed spray cost him half of the Gala crop.

In the long run, Harrison is betting on consumers' taste for sweeter, juicier Gala and Fuji apples.

"They're the kind of apple that, if you give a 10-year-old child one, he'll probably ask for another."

A farmer's son, Harrison and his wife Lisa have two children, Holly, 7, and Mitchell, 5. "They're one reason I'm looking into apples," he says. "It's something you could pass on if there's some interest."

Fall

Wheat, hay and corn harvest consumes the life of Johnny Jimenez from April to November. A partner in Feed Bag Inc., Jimenez oversees the field crews and an array of swathers, choppers and trucks.

Crews cut the green forage and pack it into airtight, three-layer plastic bags, where it ferments into nutrient-rich ensilage to feed the expanding dairy industry. The giant white bags, 12 feet in diameter and up to 250 feet long, can hold up to 400 tons of feed.

Compared with ensilage piles and pits, bagging cuts down on shrinkage and preserves more of the nutrients in the feed.

The idea for the bagging enterprise stemmed from farmers' frustration with having their hay rained on. Bagging allowed them to green-chop the crop and get it out of the field fast.

Last year, Feed Bag did 222,000 tons of business, bagging haylage, corn silage, wheatlage, corn earlage, cottonseed and cotton burrs with whey.

Originally, partner and cofounder Lester Merrill bought forage from farmers, bagged it and resold it to dairies. Now, dairies are buying farmland and growing their own forage crops, says Gary Ross, the third Feed Bag partner.

A few years ago, many dairies bought farmers' wheat. This year, only a handful will. "That market has dried up," he says.

Ross, who grew up on a Roosevelt County dairy, works with the industry as part of another Feed Bag venture: composting. He has 40,000 tons "cooking" right now.

Dairy manure is mixed with cotton burrs or peanut hulls, treated with bacteria, raked into windrows and watered down. The mixture reaches 140 to 150 degrees, getting stirred repeatedly with a strange-looking compost turner.

"After 7 to 9 months, it's fully decomposed," Ross explains. "There's nothing left but good fertilizer that smells like real rich dirt."

Between cutting and composting, work at the Feed Bag is never finished. "We bag feeds that go to dairies, where cows make manure that goes into the compost, that goes back onto the field, where we cut the crop and bag feed again and take it back to the dairies," Ross says. "The cycle never ends."

Nor does the work and innovation of High Plains farmers.

Ross, a farmer as well as Feed Bag partner, has more than enough to keep him busy.

"I have nothing to do between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.," he jokes. "The rest of the time, I've got all I want to do."

Dairy Dynasty