FAIRBANKS — The first year Frank Borman decided to grow potatoes at his u-pick farm in Delta Junction, he grew two acres and sold them all.
“The next year I planted four acres and sold them all and thought, ‘Maybe I’m on to something,’” said Borman, his blue eyes twinkling. “So the next year I planted eight acres, and man, that was a mistake. I left a lot of potatoes in the field.”
That was five years ago, and Borman is still trying to figure out how many potatoes to plant each year to satisfy his customers at his vegetable farm on Tanana Loop Extension Road just north of Delta. Borman has added vegetables to the mix, too. He sells broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, squash and beans.
This year, Borman planted about seven acres of potatoes and three acres of vegetables. While it’s getting late for some of the more frost-sensitive crops like squash and beans, Borman said he will have plenty of potatoes available into mid-September, as well as cold-tolerant vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli.
“This year has been a good year,” Borman said, talking about the growing season as well as sales at his farm.
Borman has been running his u-pick operation for seven years on the farm he carved out of the wilderness almost 30 years ago.
Despite having no real farming background, Borman bought one of the original parcels the state sold in a lottery auction in 1978 as part of the Delta Agricultural Project. The state auctioned 22 parcels totaling 2,700 acres. Borman got 72 of those.
“It was all woods here,” said Borman, sitting on a four-wheeler parked in front of rows of healthy-looking green cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower. There wasn’t a road out here. I remember flying the plane around looking at the place.”
Borman, 63, wore a dirty Carhartt jacket, baseball cap, blue jeans and tennis shoes. His neatly trimmed white beard and mustache stood out against his tanned face. A widower of 10 years, Borman’s constant companion these days is his red Shar Pei/labrador mix, Scooby, who follows him from field to field as Borman putts around on his four-wheeler.
As to why he bought the land, Borman chuckled and said, “I wanted to farm. I had no sense back then, either.”
Back then, Borman wasn’t a farmer. He owned an air taxi service in Hooper Bay, a far-flung fishing village in western Alaska where he flew everything from fish to firefighters in Cessna 206s, Piper Cherokees and Bonanzas.
Borman came to Alaska in 1970 after getting out of the U.S. Air Force, where he was a heavy equipment mechanic. He was planning to get a civilian mechanic’s job in Vietnam when a transition officer pointed him to Alaska.
“He said, ‘You want to go to Alaska. They just discovered oil up there and they’re going to be building all kinds of stuff,’” Borman said. “I came up right after they discovered oil and right before the pipeline.”
Borman never really did cash in on the pipeline boom. He made a little money working on a seismic crew up north but by the time they got around to building the pipeline, he had moved on to other things.
Borman took up flying shortly after moving to Alaska and got his commercial pilot’s license with the help of the G.I. Bill. He was living in Anchorage when the opportunity to buy an air taxi business in Hooper Bay came up in 1975. The previous owner crashed and died, Borman said.
“We found out his brother was a hippie in California, so we arranged for him to inherit it and we bought it from him,” Borman said of he and his partner, Mark Hiekel.
Borman eventually bought Hiekel out and operated Santa Fe Air Service for seven years. He sold it in 1982.
“I got tired of it and quit,” Borman said. “Hooper Bay was a tough place to have an air taxi.”
Even while he owned the air taxi business, Borman was chipping away at clearing his land in Delta. The state punched a road into the area shortly after the land lottery, and Borman bought a bulldozer and a little camper he parked on the land while clearing it.
In 1988, Borman landed a winter job as a heavy equipment mechanic at Eielson Air Force Base and “pretty much moved up here full time,” he said. He worked at Eielson for two winters, spending the summer clearing land and building. In 1990, he got a job as a mechanic closer to home at Fort Greely. He worked there until 1995, taking an early retirement, which allowed him to focus on farming.
“I tried all sorts of stuff,” Borman said of his early farming days. “I had a few cows. Lisa (his daughter) had horses. I tried to grow hay. Then I grew seed potatoes for China and Taiwan.”
But when the seed potato deal with China never developed, Borman said he “got fed up” and decided to experiment with dig-your-own potatoes.
“The Taiwan deal fell through and I had all this equipment so I figured I’d plant some potatoes,” Borman said.
In the seven years he has operated his u-pick operation, Borman said business has improved every year as more people hear about his farm and the movement to eat locally grown food grows.
Borman sells most of his potatoes — reds, whites and russets — for 16 cents per pound, a fraction of what they sell for in grocery stores, though some of the fancier brands like Yukon golds go for 50 cents per pound. Vegetables sell for 50 cents to $1 per pound. The potatoes and vegetables aren’t organic because Borman isn’t certified and he uses fertilizer, but he doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides or seed treatments on his plants.
Even at 16 cents per pound, Borman said potatoes are a profitable crop. This year, he expects to sell more than 100,000 pounds of potatoes.
Borman’s farm has a mom-and-pop feel to it. Customers dig and weigh their potatoes on a scale Borman has set up in a field. They leave their cash or checks in a jar next to the scale.
“Business is up every year, but it’s still real tough,” Borman said of the potential for turning a profit. “I’ve got quite a bit invested in it.”
For example, there’s the $10,000 wind machine he bought two years to help prevent frost. Then there’s the nine-acre electric moose fence he built a few years back to keep hungry moose away from his veggies. He bought a special planter that allows him to plant through plastic. He built a greenhouse last year. He’s in the process of building a warehouse to store seed potatoes with hopes of once again selling them to China.
Like a scientist in a laboratory, Borman is experimenting with different crops and looking for new markets.
Borman invested $20,000 in growing peonies the last two years, a project he plans to continue next year with the hope that peonies, which bloom in Alaska later than anywhere else, will be the state’s newest cash crop. The only problem is that it takes three years to grow a peony, which requires both a cash and land investment with no return for three years. Borman has planted 1,500 peonies each of the past two years.
“I planted them last year and sold like 30 this year,” Borman said. “I hope to have 300 next year.”
This year, Borman planted sweet corn and strawberries, neither of which were a success. The corn got too tall and spindly in the greenhouse and Borman was forced to plant it in early June, when it was still too cold for corn. As of last week, the corn still had not matured. As for the strawberries, Borman isn’t sure what happened.
“I think next year I’m going to drop the sweet corn and strawberries but I am going to grow more peonies,” he said.