The new gold in Alaska agriculture – corn?

Alaska businessman Tarn Coffey is betting big on agriculture.

Coffey owns an automobile service and repair business in Anchorage but lives in Nenana, a small community on the Parks Highway southwest of Fairbanks.

He commutes by air to Anchorage to run his business, but his heart is really in Nenana.

Coffee moved his family there about 10 year ago. It’s a quiet town that reminds him of his early days in Talkeetna where he grew up, and where everyone knows everyone.

Nenana was once a busy Interior Alaska river port from where steamboats carried freight and even passengers to Yukon River communities. It is probably best known these days for its Nenana Ice Classic, where people bet in spring on the day, hour and minute the ice breaks up in the Tanana River.

A tripod tips over when the ice moves, triggering a siren. There’s usually a big jackpot. It’s one of Alaska’s few forms legalized gambling and it dates from the Alaska gold rush.

Coffey has his eyes on another kind of gold: Corn.

He was one of 24 bidders in a state agricultural land sale held last year near Nenana. The state Department of Natural Resources put 27 tracts out for sealed bid on about 2,000 acres in the first phase of its long-planned Nenana-Totchaket Agriculture Project. Bidding was brisk, with most tracts getting multiple offers. Coffee won three tracts in the sale and picked up two more when tracts not sold were later offered “over the counter,” by the state DNR. His five parcels total about 225 acres.

Nenana has long been known for its agricultural potential and small gardens are common. There is one small cattle-growing enterprise and local peony growers who raise flowers for export.

The Nenana-Totchaket Project west of the community was envisioned decades ago and a 100,000-acre tract was set aside for agricultural development. For a period Nenana was a rival to Delta to be home for the major state agriculture project envisioned in the 1970s by former Gov. Jay Hammond.

Nenana was considered superior to Delta because it had good soils but is also lower in altitude, which makes for a longer growing season. Access was a problem, with a need for a bridge across the Nenana River and roads. Delta won out to host Hammond’s agriculture project, and after a bumpy start there are working farms there.

The access issue for Nenana-Totchaket was solved when Doyon Ltd., the Fairbanks-based Alaska Native regional corporation, built a road to support oil and gas exploration and then donated it to the city of Nenana when the exploration proved unsuccessful. A bridge over the river was then built, funded with a state capital appropriation and federal tribal infrastructure money raised by the Nenana Native Association, the local tribe.

Coffey is no stranger to the state’s land sales program. He and Andrea, his wife, purchased land on the Kantishna River 30 miles west of Nenana, where they have a cabin. Earlier, his father obtained land through the state to farm near Talkeetna. It allowed him to raise his family in a small town. Growing up, Tarn got valuable farm experience.

Coffey now has the distinction of being the first farmer to clear land and plant in the new Nenana-Totchaket project (a second farmer is now clearing land). What are his plans now?

Corn, for starters.

In farming circles, Alaska is known for potatoes in the Mat-Su and barley near Delta, east of Fairbanks. When people think of corn thet think of Iowa and Nebraska but not Alaska because they believe the growing season to be too short.

But Coffey is an entrepreneur who looks for opportunities others miss. In doing research, he found Gaspe, a hardy, little-known northern variety of corn grown in eastern Canada’s Nova Scotia. “It’s the most northern corn grown in North America. It was in eastern Canada when French explorers came. We’re lucky because people there kept this variety alive for over 300 years” Coffey said.

Gaspe was being cultivated by indigenous people in what is now Nova Scotia when French explorer Jacque Cartier came in 1534. It’s now considered a heritage corn and Coffey obtained 75 seeds of it from a source in upper New York. He planted them as a test in his home garden in Nenana. The results were encouraging.

The ears of corn are small and not for human consumption and the stalks typically grow to about two feet, so this isn’t Iowa. But the corn is packed with nutrition and good as animal feed. Coffey is gradually expanding production in small plots – he is planting a tenth of an acre or less this year as a test in one of his state tracts. If it works there’s plenty of room to grow.

Barley, grown near Delta, also makes for good animal feed but barley farmers always risk an early snowfall and freeze that can ruin a harvest, Coffey said, where corn can be harvested by machine even after the first snowfall.

Coffey is also experimenting with other vegetables like peppers, and is even planting varieties of melon, including a fast-growing 49-day variety he found in Canada. He’s also planting a more common, fast-growing 62-day hybrid variety of corn, Early Sunglow. About three thousand seeds of Early Sunglow are planted this eyar, and Coffey expects to be harvesting in mid-to-late August. The Gaspe corn will come in a little later, he said.

Meanwhile, the state is meanwhile proceeding with the Nenana-Totchaket project in stages.

The next Nenana-Totchaket land sale is planned in 2024.

Land parcels are of different sizes from 20 acres to 40 acres, suitable for vegetables, and up to three hundred acres-plus that are suitable for grain and livestock. Soil quality varies but it is basically glacial silt similar to that around Palmer and accumulating in ancient dunes.

The phasing is important, said Erik Johnson, the state’s manager for the project. Lessons were learned from the 1970s Delta project and another state agriculture project in the Mat-Su.

A key mistake made in the early Delta project was that large areas of tracts were offered all at once, which strained the capital resources of bidders. “This is a slow rollout, which gives people the opportunity to learn,” and bid for more acerage as the land sales are held, Johnson said.

Coffey said Canadian farmers have a lot of experience in northern agriculture and Alaskans should take advantage of that. He would like to see more contact and information-sharing between Alaska and Canada’s farming provinces.

He was surprised to learn, for example, that Canada is one of the world’s major producers of lentils, a protein-packed food plant. Canada grows 45 percent of the world supply and is the number one supplier of lentils to India, where it is a food staple. Much of it is grown in Saskatchewon, which has a northern climate.

Why can’t Alaskans do this? Coffey has grown lentils in a test plot in Nenana “Lentils row great here,” he said.

Alaskans are underestimating the state’s farming potential, Coffey said.