BOZEMAN — “We’re just professional gamblers!” Ty Kraft said, “we’re risking it all every year and just hoping it works out! And in reality, it always seems to work out, I mean a lot of things end up less than ideal, and then in some other areas they’re more than ideal, but we live to fight another day – and that’s the goal at the end of it…we get to keep doing what we love!”
It may be a gamble, but it’s a game that the Kraft family in Bozeman have been in for a long time… and like Ty said, they love it!
As a fifth generation farm, Kraft Hay and Grain in Bozeman have seen just about anything in the agriculture market; however, the drought in 2021 even left them concerned about the future.
“You know luckily for us, the price sort of offset, because it would have been such a loss, we wouldn’t have even—I don’t know if we would have even survived it if the prices didn’t do what it did.” Ty Kraft said.
WATCH: Every season’s a gamble for this fifth‑generation Bozeman farm — see why they keep rolling the dice
Kraft adds that a couple years later, in 2023, the conditions dramatically changed and the market was soon flooded with hay!
“It was hard to get rid of hay!” Kraft said, “Then we had a similar year in 2024, everyone was carrying over hay. And this year it’s sort of nice. it’s sort of balanced out and everything’s --I don’t know if there’s a normal-- but it’s more normal for supply and demand.”
