Rye 2.jpg

Giles Clasen

Rye requires far less water than crops like alfalfa or potatoes, making it a promising option for farmers facing water shortages across the West.

The Grain That Could Help Save Agriculture in the West

Rye lacks mainstream market demand in the United States. But a group of family farmers in Colorado are banking on its potential to help combat the area’s water shortage.

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Jason Cody, a fourth-generation farmer and cofounder of the Colorado Malting Company, believes that ignorance is holding rye back.

“People don’t know what it is or what it tastes like,” he says. “They don't know its potential.”

In Southern Colorado’s San Luis Valley, where farmers track rainfall and snowpack like stock prices, alfalfa and potatoes bring in the highest profits. But those crops strain the alpine desert valley’s limited water supply. Rye, by contrast, requires far less water—and it’s hardy, resilient, flavorful, and versatile, for good measure. 

But there’s one major problem: Almost no one is buying it.

“People think rye tastes like molasses and caraway because that’s how they’ve had it in rye bread,” Jason says. “But that’s not the grain. Rye on its own is sweet, a little nutty, super complex.” Still, its unsung merits have yet to translate into a profit for those who grow it in the valley.

But Jason and his family see rye as the key to remedying the dire straits caused by the area’s water shortage. Toward this end, they've helped support the Rye Resurgence Project, a bold initiative aimed at increasing the production of rye in the San Luis Valley with the hope of limiting water usage and restoring the valley’s soil. The project’s proponents believe that rye has the potential to save local family farms on the brink of collapse, while helping to build a more sustainable farming ecosystem in the valley. But in order for this experiment to succeed, they need to find a way to increase the demand for rye.

More than a decade ago, the Cody family, who has lived in the San Luis Valley since 1936, came close to losing their farm. At the time, they grew barley for Molson Coors Beverage Company, which dictated contracts that Cody says were underpriced. By 2006, the Codys found themselves at such a financial impasse that they felt they had no choice but to sell the farm.

But that August, as the family sat together at their dining room table with pen in hand, ready to finalize the sale to their neighbor, Jason’s grandmother offered to pull out the last of her savings to fund the farm for one more year—just enough time to allow the Codys a chance to pivot, and possibly save them from having to sell off the land their ancestors homesteaded.

“I argued with her and said, ‘No, it’s not going to work,’ ” Jason says. “And she said, ‘I don’t care.’ ”

But Jason’s brother, Josh Cody, floated an idea. While working and travelling in Scandinavia, where rye has been a staple crop for more than a millenium, Josh saw rye being used in breads, beer, and whiskeys to achieve flavors he’d never tasted in the United States. Rye, he proposed, might also have potential here.

The Codys soon began growing rye and developing their system for malting—the process of soaking, sprouting, and drying the grain to prepare it for brewing and distilling while developing flavor profiles that will shape the eventual taste of the beer or spirit. In 2008, the Codys launched the Colorado Malting Company to sell their product directly to brewers and distillers.

They’d never malted a grain in their lives, but like many farmers, they trusted their own resourcefulness and gumption. Jason’s dad, Wayne, built the company’s first malting machines from items they already had on the farm, including scrap metal, old pivot sprinkler motors, and leftover augers. The improvised machines were cheap and reliable, and Wayne knew from experience how to maintain and repair the machinery. 

After Wayne sustained a traumatic brain injury in an accident on the farm in 2012, Jason’s younger brother, Josh Cody, returned to help run the business. At the time, Josh was a professor of graphic design at Concordia University Wisconsin and an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Education, as well as a mentor of student teachers for the Milwaukee Public School District. He left his life and career in Wisconsin behind to return home to the San Luis Valley—a personal and professional sacrifice that marked a turning point for the family.

Jason and Josh have since helped found the Craft Malters Guild to help other small upstart malting companies nationwide, and to expand the opportunities for rye farmers. In 2018, Josh and Jason opened the Colorado Farm Brewery on the same land as their malting company, with the hope of showing off the brewing potential of rye, which when added to a wheat or barley beer creates what Jason calls a “delicious complexity that you can’t get from anything else.”

“Most brewers wouldn’t use more than 5 or maybe 10 percent rye in a beer,” he says. “We’re brewing beers that are 30 to 40 percent rye. So we’re trying to showcase the complex flavors of rye.”

But the Codys are far from the only farming family who have found themselves in financial peril amid the San Luis Valley’s ongoing water supply issues. The valley has the oldest water rights in the country, but much of the surface water that flows down the Sangre de Cristo mountain range to the northeast is required to travel down the Rio Grande into New Mexico and Texas, while the aquifer—a layer of rock or sediment that holds flowing groundwater—is in decline and increasingly unable to sustain agriculture in San Luis Valley. 

“You can look at the valley as a kind of microcosm for things that are happening across the West,” says Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District. “Everybody’s fighting for water. And now we’re trying to figure out how to do more with less.”

Dutton’s role involves balancing the needs of farmers, businesses, and local communities to keep water usage within the limits of the aquifer flow and rainfall, as well as ensuring that water regulations are followed. In a region dominated by water-based markets, she is tasked with keeping the economy from drying up amid growing demand and shrinking supply, while ensuring that new projects don’t negatively impact existing ones.

The state of Colorado has already forced farmers on its Eastern Plains to cease farming the land following a dispute with Nebraska and Kansas over water rights in the Republican River Basin. But Dutton feels it’s unrealistic and unfair for water managers to attempt to force farmers to adapt to a drier future without offering any alternatives. That’s why she cofounded the Rye Resurgence Project alongside San Luis Valley-based family farmer Sarah Jones in 2024, with the hope of educating farmers on the benefits of growing rye and working to build new markets and opportunities to sell it.

“We’re not just telling farmers, ‘Use less [water],’ ” Dutton said. “We’re trying to build a market they can grow into. Of course, farmers, they’ll try anything. They’ll grow anything if there’s a market for it.”

Despite its current lack of market value, many farmers in the area have turned to growing rye during the winter because it helps preserve topsoil and needs only limited irrigation. Patrick Brownell, a farmer near the northern edge of the valley who plants rye across his family’s potato farm each fall and sells it in small quantities to the Colorado Malting Company, says he doesn’t do so to create profit: He’s trying to keep his soil from blowing away.

“This place would be a dust bowl without winter ground cover,” he says. “We’re not trying to make money on rye. It costs us more than we make. But the soil cover is valuable.”

Brownell’s family has worked the land since the 1940s, back when sheep outnumbered tractors and the aquifer was so full that water flowed just a few feet beneath the surface. Today, he says, he has to drill down thirty to forty feet to find water in the aquifer. Some farms in the valley have had to drill 1,000 feet or more to find water. With the aquifer flow declining and rainfall in the valley averaging only ten inches per year, much of Brownell’s land is left fallow due to water limits—recently, he says, he’s farmed just 40 percent of the total acreage.

“Some of the cuts are by choice,” he says. “Some aren’t.” 

Brownell grows fresh-market potatoes—the kind that have to look good and taste good in order to sell. But their short growing season at nearly 8,000 feet of elevation amid heightening water insecurity makes each season feel like a roll of the dice. Rye holds down the topsoil and locks in the moisture beneath, preventing catastrophic conditions from forming. But since the market for rye isn’t yet viable, most of his crop is tilled back into the soil before he plants the next season of potatoes. 

Brownell also serves on the board of Subdistrict 1 of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, where farmers are trying to self-regulate how much water they pump. There are fees for pumping, which act as guardrails against overuse. But some farmers are happy to pay higher fees so they don’t have to abandon profitable practices.

“If everybody would comply, we would be in a different situation,” Brownell says. “It’s hard to watch. Hard not to be angry about it. I'm so busy worrying about water—it’s our number one concern. It’s a gift and a curse.”

The Codys hope that by promoting rye through education and advocacy, they can change consumer behavior, forcing corporations to meet an increase in demand. But they face an uphill battle: The American farming economy is built on corn and wheat, which have higher yields per acre and have built up market efficiencies over decades, supported by federal subsidies and large-scale production. Changing that system will take effort at every step of the process.

“We’re stuck in the industrialized system,” Josh says, “where virtually all of the bread made, all the cereal grains used in the brewing industry, is monopolized by just a few huge corporations.”

Jason agrees. “The goal of major conglomerate corporations is not saving the environment or helping preserve the water,” he says. “It’s making money, and they’ll make it however they have to.”

The disconnect between what is sustainable and what sells isn’t lost on Dutton, who says she doesn’t believe that the work needed to create change should fall solely on farmers. 

“We ask a lot of farmers,” she says. “We ask them to innovate, to conserve, to take on risk. But we don’t build the markets they need to make those changes pay off. That’s the goal of Rye Resurgence, to meet them halfway.”

So far, the group has worked with local mills, brewers, bakers, and distillers to create a variety of products, such as rye beer, rye whiskey, rye bread, and rye cookies. While the results have been encouraging, the market is still niche. If the market for it were to expand, Josh says, rye could become a viable crop in water-starved communities across the country, including Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, Montana, Utah, Idaho, California, and Texas.

But changing the public perception of rye is a slow process. Consumer habits are hard to shift. And in the meantime, the market continues to favor familiar grains backed by decades of marketing and massive corporate breeding programs. Still, Dutton believes that rye is a key piece of the solution. “Right now, it’s the only crop that checks all the boxes,” she says, in reference to competing sustainability factors. “And if we can’t, as a community, figure out ways to keep agriculture profitable while using less water, our future is way more uncertain.”

As is often the case in rural communities, residents of the San Luis Valley tend to wear many hats, and the Cody brothers are no exception. In addition to his farming work, Jason is a Lutheran pastor in Alamosa, Colorado, while Josh is finishing his seminary training and serving as a pastor at a Lutheran Church in nearby Monte Vista. Both are raising large families in the valley—Jason and his wife Patricia have ten children, and Josh and his wife Sarah have seven. Josh is also vice president of the Adams State University Foundation, a public college in Alamosa. The brothers have become leaders within their community: They sit on community boards; they teach and mentor other farmers who are branching out into rye; they brew their rye products.

On top of their other responsibilities, Jason and Josh travel around Colorado to convince independent brewers and distillers to give rye a chance. It isn’t uncommon for the two to drive over a mountain pass at 4 a.m. to deliver rye. “It’s not a job,” Jason says. “It’s a life. You don’t punch out at 5 p.m., and it never stops.”

Dutton believes the future of water in the West depends not only on farmers like the Codys, but also on corporations and consumers. “We need a shared ethic,” she says. “Everyone who eats is part of this. It’s not about feeling guilty. It’s about seeing the power we have in our daily choices.”

Dutton has adopted this mentality in her own life: Recently, while visiting her brother in Grand Junction, Colorado, she stopped him from buying a bottle of Tanqueray gin at the liquor store. “I was like, ‘No, no, get Mythology,’ ” says Dutton, “because it’s out of Steamboat [Springs], and the guy who runs it, Scott Yeates, he and I are talking about a collaboration with some San Luis Valley rye.”

Jason thinks back to the moment, now more than a decade past, when his grandmother refused to let the Codys sign away their farm. “She gave us one more year,” he says, “and we made it work.” Having saved their own farm with rye, he now hopes that it can save his community’s way of life, and bring greater security for other farmers like Brownell.

Brownell, for his part, is cautiously optimistic. “This is my livelihood,” he says. “My sister and I have a lot at stake. I don’t know if rye’s the answer, but it’s something. As long as folks are trying, I think there’s still hope.”