“The farmers need information on new technology, new ideas, farming methods, since we are an agricultural country and about 70 percent of the population’s involved,” Dastan TV Company journalist Aigul Batirova said.
She and producer Mamir Abdullaev talked with winery owner Keith Read as he explained the irrigation system and cultivation techniques used on the 52-acre farm. The segments will air on part II of a documentary titled “Farming in agribusiness.” Olathe is part of a two-week tour including Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas and other Colorado areas.
  
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Before Olathe, the crew visited the Colorado Department of Corrections in Canon City, where inmates conduct farming and dairy production.
“The tour was great,” Batirova said.
Kyrgyzstan is a Central Asian country of about 5.3 million people that is slightly smaller than South Dakota. It is bordered by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and China. The terrain includes mountainous and expansive farmland.
The unemployment rate was 18 percent in 2004, with 40 percent living below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Web site at www.cia.gov.
The economy is predominantly agricultural with cotton, tobacco, wool and meat as the main agricultural products, according to the site.
Following Wednesday’s winery tour, the TV crew returned to the tasting room to interview Tuxedo Corn Company owner John Harold. They asked how he marketed his sweet corn to achieve its widespread appreciation.
Harold responded:
“We didn’t do a market study and so forth... When we went to the Phoenix market, we set up little tasting areas in the stores and a lot of our wives of the growers went to the stores and gave away free samples of the roasted corn or the boiled corn to get people used to what we were selling.”
He said the company’s contract with Kroger, one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, started after someone from a local City Market — part of Kroger — sent a box of the corn to a social event at the headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio and “they got interested in it.”
Harold said the cooling techniques his company uses to preserve the corn and its flavor help sell the product.
“And so whatever you do in the farming, the key (is) getting it to the marketplace so it tastes as good as it does on the farm.”
He explained the guest worker labor issues facing his and several other businesses nationwide.
“We don’t have willing workers here anymore. We’ve become a society of information. Everybody wants a job at a computer, wants to work 40 hours a week, wants to make sure they get half the year off on vacation and the rest off on sick, so it’s a huge problem.”
Batirova said that with the high unemployment rate in Kyrgyzstan, the demand for jobs is higher than the supply. She asked whether Harold would consider hiring hands from her country to work on his crops.
Harold said he would be open to it, but that because of the visas available, he must pay workers’ transportation costs. It costs $300 to transport someone from Mexico, but $2,000 to transport someone from Kyrgyzstan.
He also said many families in Mexico depend on work in the U.S. to support their families.
Contact Robert Allen at roberta@montrosepress.com
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