Yuma: Wheat Capital of the Colorado Plains

Yuma, the largest town in Yuma County in the far northeast corner of Colorado, shares its name with the Arizona border city, though the two places could hardly be more different. The Colorado Yuma sits on shortgrass prairie at about forty-one hundred feet, a landscape shaped almost entirely by wheat farming and cattle ranching. The town was platted in eighteen eighty-six when the Burlington Railroad extended its lines across the plains, and it incorporated the following year.

Yuma County regularly ranks among Colorado's top agricultural counties by crop value, producing winter wheat, corn, and sunflowers across terrain that stretches unbroken to Kansas. The Yuma area also sits above the Ogallala Aquifer, the same vast underground water source that sustains farming across eight states. Like other high-plains towns, Yuma has watched its population slowly decline as farming mechanized, but its grain elevators and feedlots remain in steady operation.