NORTH FORK'S NATURAL EDGE REGION TOPS STATE IN ORGANIC FARMERS PER CAPITA.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: AGRICULTURE REPORT

In the chill, dark days of winter, Steve Ela prunes tree limbs on his 100-acre certified organic farm near Hotchkiss, on Colorado's Western Slope. There, he grows Honeycrisp, Freyburg and 21 other varieties of apples, 14 varieties of peaches, five varieties of heirloom tomatoes, four varieties of plums and three varieties each of cherries and pears. Harvest here, in the North Fork of the Gunnison River Valley, lasts from June until almost Halloween.

Whether the fruit tastes good matters most to buyers, about 90 percent of whom live along the Front Range. "When we give you a peach, we want you to bend over, so the juice can run down your chin (not your shirt)," he says. Some customers also care that the fruit is locally grown, says Ela, a fourth-generation Colorado farmer, but it's very important to many people that the fruit is certified organic.

Ela bought the farm in 1987, when organic was still considered fringe, even weird. He began transitioning blocks of peach and pear trees in 1994, earning organic certification for the farm in 2004. The North Fork Valley has 17 farms certified as organic. Colorado has larger organic farms and, around Boulder, more of them. But nowhere are there more organic farmers per capita than the North Fork Valley.

The North Fork Valley is something of a sister to California's Napa Valley, except with more dramatic scenery. It's a place of narrow, winding roads and fences made of piled-up rocks amid the three small towns: Hotchkiss, Paonia and Crawford. Mount Lamborn and the West Elk Range stand tall to the east. One coal mine still operates. You can buy grass-fed beef, cheese, fresh-cut flowers, fruit and grapes plus a cornucopia of vegetables, all certified organic. No place else in Colorado has such variety.

The climate is temperate, even by Colorado standards, but not uniform. Microclimates matter, and the microclimate of Rogers Mesa, the location of Ela Family Farms, is exceptional. Fruit reeds heat but also nightly cool to produce sweet, flavorful flesh. "We're kind of in that sweet spot where we can grow lots of things," Ela says. "It's not too hot but hot enough, and not too cold but cold enough." Cold can be good because it limits pests.

Fruit growers like reliability. In recent years, the weather has been less so than usual. Warming springs have produced tree blossoms two weeks earlier than normal. Then came frost. Ela lost about half his harvest before he started in 2017. "It's warmer overall, and...