Colorado Politics

Commemorating a 70-plus-year Colorado ranching legend | GABEL

Marlin Eisenach is an institution in Colorado 4-H and FFA circles. I assume the Colorado State Fair, National Western Stock Show and Morgan County Fair would, in fact, occur if he weren’t present but I don’t want to risk it.

Eisenach, who is the Morgan County Extension Livestock Agent, first entered the show ring when he was 8 at that very fair. He was, as most kids were, leading a Hereford calf. That was in 1951. For the following decade, he successfully showed livestock at the county fair, state fair, and National Western and served in every elected office in FFA.

He farmed alongside his brother for two years after graduation before he said his family insisted he attend college. He attended Colorado State University and returned once again to the farm with both an animal science and agronomy degrees in hand. When the high interest rates, low land values, and wild commodity prices of the 1980s created a domestic farm crisis, he applied for a job in town with the CSU extension service to ensure that the family farm could continue to operate with his brother at the helm.

In January, he will mark 40 years at his extension post and 40 years of cultivating kids in agriculture in that role. He began as the hog superintendent at the state fair in 1990, and at NWSS where he helped direct the lamb shows, catch it calves and pigs from 1992 to 2020. He will return this week to the state fair as a general livestock superintendent.

The Meat Quality Assurance program is a training for producers and employees that illustrates how good husbandry techniques can be paired with scientific knowledge to raise livestock in the most optimum conditions to produce the safest product for consumers. There are trainings specific to beef, hogs, transporters and youth exhibitors.

When Eisenach set out to bring training to young producers, he and the late Mick Livingston, also a longtime and legendary extension agent from eastern Colorado, created a mobile, hands-on, kid-friendly program where kids learn proper sites for vaccinations and medications by injecting water into an orange, to identifying on-farm hazards by inspecting a model farm. Not everyone can bring top shelf agriculture information from the experts at Colorado State University and boil it down to a toy barn and a thoroughly vaccinated citrus fruit, but these two did. Eisenach also served as the certifier for the Pork Quality Assurance program so his belief in raising healthy and safe protein for producers.

A portion of his role is bringing the information and experts and answers from CSU to producers, whether that’s a cattle producer trying to identify which noxious weed is causing problems in his cattle herd or bringing a private feedyard nutritionist together with a CSU nutritionist to solve a problem for a cattle feeder.

The other portion of his role, and probably the one that keeps him engaged, is the kids he works with year-round in 4-H and FFA. When he began, the kids showing livestock primarily came from production agriculture backgrounds, whereas today, many still do but many also are removed from commercial agriculture. He said getting good information into those kids’ hands, results in a good experience.

He said there are some youth exhibitors and families he sees only once a year, and it’s enjoyable to see the kids and see them have a good experience. In many instances, he’s now watching the second generation of 4-H and FFA kids come through the programs.

He said he’s seen his share of conflict through the years, but the lessons lie in the resolution and reactions. He said he’s also seen plenty of lessons learned by youth raising livestock and that is what keeps him engaged.

“I believe in competition, life is competition,” he said. “Those who work harder and know a little more about selection are going to place a little higher and I can’t condemn that. A lot of the kids that show don’t come from production and they need answers. The door is open, and they have a good experience when we can get them good information.”

Putting good information in the hands of kids came to fruition 30 years ago when he said he gave a program at a local elementary school and discovered how little the students knew about where their food came from. Today, the group speaks in every third-grade classroom in the county and then in January, they load the kids and teachers onto busses (on the cattlemen’s dime) and take them to the National Western. They also award more than $21,000 in scholarships to local kids bound for college and trade schools. In 1960, Eisenach was the association’s recipient of a catch-it calf and gave his update of the calf’s progress. Since then, he has paid that calf forward tenfold.

The Colorado FFA Foundation will induct Eisenach into the Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame on Feb. 26 at the annual Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame Banquet. Other inductees include Jennifer Gurr, Jon Slutsky and Dr. Tony Frank. The Colorado Agriculture Hall of Fame is presented by the Farm Credit Associations of Colorado.

The ceremony will also include a multimedia presentation that includes me speaking about Eisenach encouraging me at a livestock judging contest when I was 8 years old. There was ice cream involved. It’s an honor to be a recipient of his generosity for the past 40 years.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.


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