AURORA — On Wednesday evenings at the edge of a wide parking lot in Aurora, there is a forest green pop-up tent with five large, scraped-up coolers stacked nearby. The coolers hold 27 bags of fresh produce, harvested that morning at Switch Gears Farm in Longmont. 

The arugula gets picked first, Vanita Patel, co-founder and co-owner of Switch Gears explained. The farmers chop the spicy leaves down early in the morning while the air is still cool, soak them in cold water for an hour then spin them dry, rinse again and bag it all up. The potatoes and shallots are pulled straight out of the ground and thrown into the bags — the dirt on their skin helps them keep fresh longer. There are heirloom tomatoes and two shades of beets. There are also a couple of plump, round Baingan eggplants that Patel is especially proud of. It took her four years to find the seeds, she said.

“We take our varietals very seriously,” she told a group of stakeholders and policymakers who were circled up next to the tent Wednesday, including state Sen. Rhonda Fields and a district leader from U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office.

The bags of produce were to be handed out during a two-hour window to people enrolled in the Women, Infants and Children federal food assistance program. That produce is paid for by Nourish Colorado, a food equity and advocacy group, using funds from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, known as the LFPA. 

These funds have bolstered local agriculture and supported low-cost food distribution for the past three years, but they’re about to run out with no replacement in sight. And that’s why the government workers were gathered in the Aurora parking lot, to hear from Nourish and the farmers about what comes next. 

What is the LFPA?

The LFPA is a pandemic-era relief program overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationally, the program has issued more than $900 million to state governments, tribes and territories for food banks, pantries and distribution sites to buy produce from local farmers.

Colorado was one of the first states to receive funding, and over the past three years has received and distributed close to $10 million in LFPA funds. The state has passed the money on to 35 grantees in the food supply chain.

Two things set the LFPA apart from other food security programs. First, its direct support of local agriculture. Grantees are required to purchase food from producers within 400 miles of the distribution site. 

Second, the funds are intended to support “socially disadvantaged producers,” which, according to the USDA, includes veterans, women, people of color and people with disabilities, among other groups.

According to the Colorado Department of Human Services, of the 220 producers who sold to LFPA grantees, 147 of them, or 67%, are considered “socially disadvantaged.”

The middle section

That 67% includes Patel, the Switch Gears farmer. Or, in her words, “I check a lot of the boxes, in terms of diversity.” 

One thing that Patel thinks needs to be reconciled between the LFPA grantees, like food banks, and the small, “socially disadvantaged” farmers is that these farms don’t always have the resources to provide cheap food to a large community in need.

“I can’t sell these boxes for $10 or $15. There is already so little profit being made,” she said. “But when food banks get these grants, there’s this comparison to big farms. They can give much more produce, and it’s like, ‘yes, because they’ve been in Colorado for 100 years, and they own their land, and they own their water rights.’”

The ability to scale doesn’t just require more land, it also requires equipment and infrastructure. Things like cold storage, packaging facilities and delivery vans.

“I don’t need my own delivery van,” Patel clarified. She thinks there’s a way for organizations and small farmers to collaborate when it comes to these improvements.

“Up in Boulder County, we’ll literally text each other, ‘storm’s coming your way,’ because we can see each others’ properties,” she said. “If I had access to a delivery van, or cold storage I could share it with other farmers. That would be so much better.”

This sentiment was echoed by Maggie Kinneberg, a researcher for the Donnell-Kay Foundation, a nonprofit that supports funding for food systems work. An area that is overlooked — in food systems in general, not limited to LFPA recipients — is what she calls the “middle” segment of a farm-to-fork journey.

“I think there’s a friction point not just for new farms, but also for those that are established and looking to scale, that they don’t have access to infrastructure,”  Kinneberg said. “And when I say infrastructure, I mean buildings and equipment, but I also mean some of the technical systems like inventory management, accounting, HR, some of those basic things that you need to run a functioning business.”

Two different models

Although the reporting process is standardized by the USDA — that is, reporting who and what the funds are spent on — pretty much everything else is up to the states and their grantees.

Colorado decided to use an open application system, inviting food producers and distributors to apply for the nearly $10 million to spend directly on food during three rounds of funding.

Nourish Colorado worked with their partner distributors, places like the East Denver Food Hub, to apply for separate grants, stretching the money further and using the established sites.

Another recipient, Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado, created an entirely new system to distribute nearly $1.8 million in LFPA funds.

Now in its 50th year, Care and Share has the traditional food bank model down pat. They buy in bulk from larger farms, like Yoder Family Farms in Trinidad, truck the food to one of three distribution sites, sort it, then ship it out to 293 food bank partners.

But with the LFPA’s emphasis on small, socially disadvantaged farms, Care and Share needed a way to buy food in smaller quantities from the often isolated farms around southern Colorado.

So they took the distribution centers out of the equation. Instead, they gave local food bank partners a budget to spend at the selected farms. 

For example, if Care and Share had $50,000 in LFPA funds for “Farm A” and there are five local food bank partners in that area, then each food bank will have $10,000 to spend on food at that specific farm, Nate Springer, president and CEO of Care and Share, explained. 

Not only does this cut down on infrastructure and transportation needs, but it also gives the food banks autonomy to decide which foods are culturally relevant to their communities.

“We work from Monument to New Mexico, and from Utah to Kansas. There is a lot of diversity in that area,” Springer said. “So when we find these farmers, I don’t want it to be up to Care and Share to figure out what our partners (the food banks) need. They know better than we do.”

What happens next

When and whether the LFPA funds continue depends on how the election shakes out in November, and what the House and Senate Agriculture committees look like (Colorado Rep. Yadira Caraveo serves on the House committee, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet serves on the Senate committee), and who the Secretary of Agriculture is in January, said Wendy Moschetti, executive director of Nourish Colorado. “There’s lots of different depends in there,” she said. 

The biggest “depend” of all is whether Congress is able to pass the updated farm bill, a bill that sets agriculture and food policy for five-year periods, and is currently in limbo at the Capitol. 

Meanwhile, grant recipients in Colorado have spent almost 70% of the LFPA funds, and with one more major harvest season in the fall, the state suspects the money will be gone by the end of the year. 

“Long story short is we need continuation of the current LFPA right now, that will last us until we have a permanent program,” Moschetti said. That’s why she invited the political group to hang out in an Aurora parking lot, watching mothers grab bags full of fresh greens and purple potatoes and tiny tomatoes, while their kids snacked on free peaches that a local farmer dropped off.

Springer, of Care and Share, is also eyeing the end of the funding, and has raised about $100,000 in order to continue Care and Share’s new partnerships. He would not name specific foundations that made donations.

Moschetti said that Nourish Colorado’s backup plan is similar to Springer’s: Look to philanthropy.

“I don’t think it’s philanthropy’s job to deal with things the federal government and the state government should be doing, but when there are gaps in government funding, that is exactly when philanthropy needs to step in,” Moschetti said. “And we’re facing a really big cliff right now.”

PUEBLO — Urban farmer Perdita Butler was ready to harvest her bok choy and fresh, crunchy kohlrabi outside her 1940s stucco home in Pueblo. It was early spring, and the nymph grasshoppers were already munching her crops, forcing her to cover her beds with protective gauze nets. She carefully peeled back the nets to reveal blue potatoes, golden beets, dinosaur kale and other vegetables erupting from the soil.

“What I love about farming is there’s always something new to learn,” Butler said, looking at the snap peas taking off on one side of the garden.

Later this summer, she’ll sell these vegetables and others she’s growing at a new farmers market on Pueblo’s East Side neighborhood—a community without a grocery store since the Safeway in the area closed seven years ago. Butler hopes to build community and improve nutrition in the neighborhood by selling fresh, affordable produce grown five miles away on her microfarm Quarter Acre and a Mule.

Federal, state and local programs that incentivize buying produce at farmers markets, including those in Pueblo, make them affordable to some low-income families and older adults in Colorado. In addition to increasing participants’ access to fresh fruit and vegetables, these programs support small farmers like Butler and boost local economies, especially during the summer and fall harvest cycles.

Three programs specifically help low-income older adults and women and their children in Colorado: Colorado Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, Boulder County WIC Farmers Market Program, and the Colorado Nutrition Incentive Program.

“It’s a win-win. You’re feeding people. You’re supporting farmers,” said Daysi Sweaney, director of healthy food incentives at Nourish, a nonprofit that helps implement and run some of these programs.

Consumers and growers have participated in farmers market programs in Colorado over the past five years, but barriers such as funding cuts and limited time, transportation and money remain challenges.

Farmers market programs

According to the nonprofit Feeding America, Pueblo is among 10 counties with the highest rates of food insecurity in the state. Still, efforts to help families afford local produce are growing in the area. At the other Pueblo Farmers Market location, in downtown Mineral Palace Park, redemption of incentives for fruit and vegetables by low-income families increased significantly from $9,000 in 2020 when it began accepting them to $25,000 last year.

Growth of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Double Up Food Bucks—a grant-funded program available in some states like Colorado that gives SNAP participants double the amount to spend on fruit and vegetables—and the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program has contributed to the increased use, said Marci Cochran, market director for the Pueblo Farmers Market.

“The WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program is explosive in Pueblo,” Cochran said of the program.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment program gives $30 annually in coupons for each participating family member to spend at 22 participating farmers markets (down from 24 last year) statewide before Oct. 31. For example, a pregnant or new mom and her two children over six months of age would have $90 to spend during the season, an increase of roughly 8% from their annual WIC budget of approximately $1,092 for fruit and vegetables.

Angelika Sunie, 25, of Pueblo, who has two children ages 1 and 4, has used the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program for the past two seasons.

“It really helped stretch my benefits,” said Sunie, who also uses SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks.

Sunie bought green beans, Pueblo chiles and Palisade peaches at the farmers market. She made a peach crisp and a simple syrup out of peaches for tea.

She said it helped her bring healthier foods into her home during the summer. Sunie added that she would have spent twice the amount allocated if it had been available.

When she was pregnant with her son in 2022, Sunie said eating more nutritious foods from the farmers market helped her pregnancy. However, she does not qualify for the program now that she has started a new job at UCHealth.

Sweaney said WIC families’ spending at farmers markets is highest along the Front Range corridor stretching from Pueblo to Greeley, but the redemption rate statewide is relatively low.

According to CDPHE data, the use of the coupons has risen from 17% in 2021 to 23% in 2023. (The program was first piloted in 2020.) Emily Bash, a nutrition and physical activity specialist at CDPHE, said she hopes to increase the rate this year by mailing coupons earlier, using text reminders and offering handouts in multiple languages.

Bash and her colleagues also received a $350,000 USDA grant to move from paper coupons to a digital system. It’s easy to lose paper coupons or forget to bring them to a farmers market, Bash said, and buyers can’t get change if their purchase is less than the coupon amount. She said these digital systems are already successful in Nebraska, New Mexico and Washington.

Nourish’s budget to help run programs like these was drastically cut this year by federal WIC funding. Sweaney said there is always fear that money for extra initiatives like these will dry up.

Sweaney and Bash noted that transportation is also a barrier for program participants. According to 2023 CDPHE data, families who live farther away from a farmers market were less likely to use coupons than those who lived in the same zip code as a farmers market.

Cochran said that proximity is why the Pueblo Eastside Farmers Market could be a game changer for residents. “We have a Dollar General and a Dollar Tree and a convenience store, but there is no real food access.”

Local solutions

Meanwhile, county governments like Boulder have created their own solutions. Making local produce affordable and accessible is the focus of a 7-year-old program that provides a punch card worth $80 for Boulder County WIC families and $160 for City of Boulder WIC families per month to spend at farmers markets, helping to supplement the federal money they receive.

Zhuldyz Tokbulatova, 32, a stay-at-home mom, bikes with her 3-year-old son in a bike trailer to the Boulder Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays to participate in the program. On one Saturday in June, she bought fava beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. Cherries were in season, along with her son’s favorite fruit, aprium, a mix between an apricot and plum.

“He’s a picky eater. He doesn’t eat everything. But he likes to come with me to the farmers market, and he likes to shop there,” Tokbulatova said. “He talks to the vendors and helps pick out vegetables.” His first solid food as an infant was squash from the market.

Tokbulatova, who has participated in the program for four years, said she would not be able to afford to shop at the farmers market without the program. The family’s income is low, and they are careful about their spending.

“It’s very important for me to be able to provide local, fresh produce,” she said. Tokbulatova did not grow up eating many vegetables in her native Kazakhstan, but the program allows her to make more salads or add extra vegetables to staples like beef stew. “It fulfills me as a mother.”

More than 1,000 Boulder County families bought $296,000 worth of farmers market produce from April to November last year—more than double the $116,000 spent by WIC families statewide. It is entirely locally funded by the county’s sustainability tax, the City of Boulder’s Health Equity Fund and the City of Longmont’s Human Services Fund. To overcome transportation challenges, volunteers deliver farmers market produce to families’ homes.

In Garfield County, the local WIC agency used extra funds at the end of the 2023 season to purchase produce from Early Morning Orchard in Palisade, then gave it away for free to 130 families who came in for height and weight measurements as part of WIC wellness checks in Rifle and Glenwood Springs. The hope is for this to become an annual tradition in Garfield County, said Christine Dolan, nutrition programs manager for Garfield County Public Health.

Community-supported agriculture

The Colorado Nutrition Incentive Program connects some of these families directly to produce from local growers — no farmers market required. Community-supported agriculture, or CSA, shares — which run through the summer months — provide weekly boxes of freshly harvested fruit and vegetables to Colorado WIC families and older adults.

For the past three years, Highwater Farm in Silt has provided CSA shares to WIC families in Garfield County. Families visit the 3-acre farm weekly to select harvested produce, with an option to walk into the fields and pick things like cherry tomatoes, snap peas, herbs and flowers. Alternatively, Highwater Farm delivers shares to pickup spots in Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, where families receive a curated share of produce.

Highwater Farm Manager Rebecca Gourlay said CSAs are a relatively new concept for some families along Colorado’s Western Slope. She includes familiar vegetables like lettuce, onions, garlic, beans and peppers in the boxes.

But it’s also an opportunity to introduce families to new vegetables like arugula or mustard greens. These are explained in a weekly newsletter in English and Spanish that includes new recipes. The farm has a part-time bilingual outreach coordinator who talks to families during pickups.

“She helps us connect with our Latino community in a more meaningful way,” Gourlay said.

Without subsidies, it’s difficult for low-income families to afford CSAs, Gourley said, because a person has to pay upfront in the winter for produce provided throughout the summer and fall seasons.

Despite successful partnerships like those at Highwater, overall funding for the CSA program in Colorado dipped to $320,000 in 2024, down from $1.2 million in 2023. Since the program’s inception in 2019, it has relied on state, federal and philanthropic funding. This year, its grant did not allow Nourish to pay farmers 100% upfront for the summer’s produce, and some small farmers, already operating on thin margins, could no longer afford to participate, Sweaney said. Fewer than 30 farmers signed up this year, compared with 115 last year.

Becca Jablonski, co-director of the Food Systems Institute at Colorado State University, worries about farmers relying on subsidies and venues that may not exist in the future. While more data points are needed to fully understand how nutrition incentive programs benefit farmers’ overall bottom lines compared to alternatives, Jablonski said the programs could make rural farmers markets more attractive to farmers if they significantly increase the overall amount of money spent. (Cochran, with the Pueblo Farmers Market, said that nutrition incentive programs kept the market afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Jablonski’s research has shown that incentive programs benefit local economies in states like California and Colorado.

“For every $1 invested in a healthy food incentive program, we can expect to see up to $3 in economic activity generated,” she and her co-authors wrote. In Colorado, conservative estimates for scaling these programs statewide would create 92 jobs, $4.3 million in labor income, and an economic contribution of $19.8 million, based on data from 2018 and 2019.

At the state level, there is some stability for these programs next year. In June, the Colorado legislature created the Healthy Food Incentives Program—a bill allocating $500,0000 for fiscal year 2024-25 to support Nourish’s work, including CSA produce boxes for low-income families.

But Sweaney said the appropriation is insufficient to meet the box demand. Nourish plans to work with the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee to secure more state funds and advocate for more federal funding for local food systems and food access in the upcoming U.S. Farm Bill.

Building community through food

On a Saturday morning in May, farmer Brett Mills of Sweet Valley Farm drove 45 minutes to sell plant starters for heirloom tomatoes as part of an early-season pop-up event at the Pueblo Farmers Market. Whatever he didn’t sell, he planned to donate to community gardens.

“We want to be helpful to people growing their own food in the community,” Mills said.

Community is something that advocates like Butler and Cochran say nutrition incentive programs can help build as part of broader efforts to create local food systems for families and growers. Eastside Farmers Market is the next step of a community redevelopment project in Pueblo that will eventually include a grocery store at the site of the former, now-abandoned Spann Elementary School.

Bringing fresh, local produce to Pueblo’s East Side at a farmers market is a first, said Monique Marez, a food systems practitioner who grew up in Pueblo and ran the Pueblo Food Project for three years. However, other treasures exist at the farmers market besides fruit and vegetables.

“The goal is to open up a conversation about how the community is doing,” Marez said.

The market is also an opportunity for families and children to connect with farmers and learn how food grows. “You never know when you might meet the next generation of farmers,” Cochran said.

Back at her urban farm, with railroad tracks several feet away and the Wet Mountains in view, Butler talked with reverence about a sweet pepper variety that she couldn’t wait to taste. She was eager to sell basil, beans, cilantro, tomatoes and 20 other types of fruit and vegetables at Eastside Farmers Market.

Butler said she fully supports nutrition incentive programs, but the idea is more significant than improving access to local produce. It encompasses nutrition, empowerment and agency, community and relationship building.

“The farmers market is the hub—the start, the seed,” Butler said.

Freelance reporter Kate Ruder wrote this story for The Colorado Trust, a philanthropic foundation that works on health equity issues statewide and also funds a reporting position at The Colorado Sun. It appeared at coloradotrust.org on July, 29, 2024, and can be read in Spanish at collective.coloradotrust.org/es. 

Story first appeared in:

OLNEY SPRINGS — From satellite view, the land north of the Arkansas River is a seemingly random checkerboard of vital green and desperate brown, quickly fading from a few thriving farm acres to the broad, water-drained desolation of northern Crowley County. 

From the cab of Matt Heimerich’s pickup, each alternating square of emerald corn or desiccated knapweed is a decision by a distant big city — to either share Colorado resources responsibly or toss rural Arkansas River counties to the fate of the hot summer winds. 

That square was reseeded with native grass after Aurora bought the water in the 1970s, Heimerich says. That plot, Colorado Springs dried up and it’s all weeds. That farm, Aurora wants to dry it up soon, but the water court referee wants a better reseeding plan. 

Heimerich’s family is one of the few farmers remaining in the 790 square miles of Crowley County after city water buy-ups shrank the county’s irrigated acres from more than 50,000 in the 1970s to fewer just a few thousand this year. He jumps down from the pickup to clear invasive kochia weeds from a pipe opening gushing cool canal water down a 1,500-foot corn row. 

This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.

Crowley is just the worst example of what can happen when nobody cares, and nobody pays attention.

Two miles away is downtown Olney Springs, population 310. Crowley County as a whole has only 5,600 residents, and more than a third of those are inmates at two prisons. The only retail operation left in Olney Springs is a soda vending machine against the wall of town hall.

As Heimerich clears his irrigation pipe, he pauses to jab a thumb over his shoulder 150 miles to the north at Aurora, where the population increased by more than 100,000 over 20 years. 

“When you build a new development, at the end of the day, you’re drying up a farm,” Heimerich said. “Where else is it going to come from?”

“Crowley is just the worst example of what can happen when nobody cares, and nobody pays attention,” he said. 

The tiny community serves as an enduring reminder of the cultural and economic ruin that occurs when big cities in Colorado and elsewhere purchase farms, dry up the land and move the water to urban areas. It gave rise to the term “buy and dry,” a practice now widely condemned.

The practice was supposed to end in the Lower Arkansas Valley in 2003 with a hard-fought federal court battle and settlement. Since then, state lawmakers and top water and farm agencies have changed laws and spent millions of dollars testing new protective methods for sharing water temporarily between rural and urban areas. They have also spent heavily to improve water quality for thousands of people living near the river who still don’t have clean water to drink.

The big cities insist they have learned their lessons from the Crowley County disaster.

“The results of what happened in Crowley County are unacceptable and widely recognized as a travesty,” said Colorado Springs Utilities spokesperson Jennifer Jordan. “We’ve taken those lessons to heart.”

But outraged Lower Arkansas growers and water districts say new efforts to protect their farm water aren’t working. At the same time, the big cities say new laws making it easier to share farm water don’t provide enough reliable water to grow their communities.

The cities also say big changes in the future water picture, climate-driven reductions in stream flows and threats to their Colorado River supplies leave them little choice but to draw more farm water.

This year they did that, inking deals in the Lower Arkansas worth more than $100 million to buy and lease land and water, raising alarms among local growers and generating big questions about whether the state is doing enough to protect rural farm communities and the water that keeps them going.

Buy and dry light

The cities say a lot has changed in the past 20 years and that these new deals represent innovations in water sharing. But critics in the Lower Arkansas Valley say these same deals signal that no one is doing enough to prevent “buy and dry” or the the latest tool in the water acquisition quiver, “lease and dry,” in which water is pulled from farmland periodically.

Aurora, for instance, spent $80 million in April to buy nearly 5,000 acres of farms in Otero County and the more than 6,500 acre-feet of water associated with that land. An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water, enough to irrigate half an acre of corn, or supply at least two urban homes for one year. 

Aurora plans to use the water itself in three out of 10 years, leaving it on the farms the rest of the time. Some 4,000 acres of land  will be dried up intermittently when Aurora is using the water, according to Karl Nyquist, a developer and grower who negotiated the deal with Aurora and who is operating the farms for Aurora under the lease agreement.

Colorado Springs has a different arrangement just downriver in Bent County, where it will permanently purchase up to 15,000 acre-feet of water from local farmers. Colorado Springs will also help pay local farmers to install modern center pivot irrigation systems that use less water, allowing the city to keep the saved water for its use.

FIRST PHOTO: Rows of corn are flood-irrigated in Pueblo County on June 23. Water for most farming in Pueblo County is delivered from the Arkansas River via the Bessemer Ditch. SECOND PHOTO: The view looking north from Olney Springs on June 26 shows how “buy and dry” practices have cut cultivated land in Crowley County from 50,000 acres to just a few thousand acres. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

In this deal, Colorado Springs and the farmers will be responsible for revegetating any dried up land. It will use the water in five out of 10 years, and it has agreed to make a one-time, upfront payment of $2.5 million to Bent County plus payments each year based on how much water is taken off the fields. The money is in addition to payments to farmers.

“We wanted to make sure Bent County was kept whole,” said Scott Lorenz, a senior water projects manager with Colorado Springs Utilities.

And in Pueblo County, perhaps the least controversial of the three deals, Pueblo Water agreed to purchase nearly one-third of the shares in the local historic Bessemer Ditch system for $56.2 million. Pueblo continues to lease the water back to the farmers for now. At the same time,  the Palmer Land Conservancy has developed a sophisticated new framework that measures farm productivity on land watered by the Bessemer Ditch and will eventually help direct water to the most productive farms as Pueblo takes its water. The hope is that the new system will increase overall farm productivity on the ditch system and help make up for anything lost when the less productive lands are dried up, according to Dillon O’Hare, Palmer’s senior conservation manager.

Palmer is also working to analyze the impact of the deals on water quality downstream and how to prevent further damage, O’Hare said.

Irrigated farm land is evaporating

The three projects come as new data shows Colorado’s irrigated farmlands are shrinking. Since 1997, the state has lost 32% of these lands, with areas in the Lower Arkansas Valley seeing losses higher than that, according to an analysis of federal agricultural data by Fresh Water News and The Colorado Sun.

Crowley County has lost 90% of its irrigated lands in that period. Pueblo has lost 60.2%, and Bent and Otero have lost 37.6% and 35.2%, respectively.

State agriculture and water officials are worried about the decline, but say they have few tools to prevent it because farmers are free to sell their water rights to whomever they want.

“Am I concerned? Definitely,” said Robert Sakata, a long-time vegetable grower near Brighton, and former member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who now serves as the director of water policy for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “We all talk about water being a limited resource, but prime farmland is also limited and it’s important to take that into consideration.”

Not all these losses are due to big city water prospecting. Climate change, market challenges and legal obligations to deliver water to downstream states are also fallowing Colorado farmlands.

Everyone is sympathetic. No one is in charge.

Still, more than 20 years after the intergovernmental peace accords, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The Lower Arkansas Valley region is part of the sprawling Arkansas River Basin. The river has its headwaters near Leadville and flows through Buena Vista, Salida, Cañon City, into Pueblo Reservoir and on over the state line east of Lamar.

Its counties were once a sweet spot in the basin’s agriculture economy. The river fed a bountiful chain of tomato, sugar beet and onion fields, as well as acres of luscious Rocky Ford melons, and chiles, corn and alfalfa.

Cities say these latest deals, which they call “water sharing” agreements, will bolster the agricultural economies and keep remaining water on farm fields forever. But the term “sharing” doesn’t sit well with some local farmers and water officials who have a deep distrust of the cities they blame for the region’s decline.

“I call it a charade,” said Mike Bartolo, a retired Colorado State University extension research scientist who farms in Otero County near Rocky Ford. “You dry up an acre, you’re drying up land that was formerly irrigated. That’s buy and dry.”

While the state’s highly touted Water Plan cheers for the concept of cities helping rural areas thrive after water losses, there is no mechanism or state law or bureaucracy to watchdog new sales. 

After the 2003 agreement in the Lower Arkansas Valley, state and local water leaders began testing new ways for cities and farmers to temporarily share water, something that had been almost impossible under older water law.

I call it a charade. You dry up an acre, you’re drying up land that was formerly irrigated. That’s buy and dry.

But Aurora and Colorado Springs say the early experimental programs didn’t provide enough water at reasonable prices to fulfill their fast-growing community needs permanently.

Lorenz, the Colorado Springs Utilities manager, said the city does lease some water in the valley, but it hasn’t been enough to ensure the stability of its long-term water supply.

“The major concern is that we would lease from a particular farmer, and then a different city would come out and buy those water rights and the farmer wouldn’t lease to us anymore,” he said.

And in fact that is what just happened in April, when Aurora purchased the Otero County farms, which had formerly leased water to Colorado Springs.

Colorado Springs Utilities formally opposes the latest Aurora water deal, as do the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District based in Pueblo, and the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District in Rocky Ford. 

But their anger has so far been expressed by passing resolutions, not filing lawsuits.

How Aurora Water and other cities have treated Arkansas River counties like Crowley after past buy-ups leaves nothing but suspicion about newly announced deals, local leaders say. 

Though Aurora says it is not attempting any more permanent dry-ups of local land, “I don’t think any of us believe them,” said Heimerich, Crowley County’s representative on the Southeastern Conservancy board. Heimerich also is a member of the board of Water Education Colorado, which is a sponsor of Fresh Water News. “They’ll do whatever they need to do and apologize later.”

Thornton and Larimer and Weld counties conducted a similar debate publicly — from the 1990s to this year — as Thornton bought up 17,000 acres of northern Colorado farms and their water rights and began drying up the land. County commissioners and other local officials brought their legal weight and bully pulpits to bear in demanding extensive concessions from Thornton. The Adams County city has been reseeding dried up land with native grass and backfilling lost property taxes, but gets mixed reviews from locals. 

First photo: Seasonal workers harvest cabbage near Vineland on July 6. Pueblo County farmers operate on some of most fertile land in the state and irrigate their crops from water taken from the Arkansas River. But water-rights sales have changed the way they manage their land. Second photo: Water flows in the Bessemer Ditch near Vineland on June 23. Pueblo Water acquired rights to one-third of the ditch, but has been working with local farmers to help ensure their farmland remains productive. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

The latest Lower Arkansas water deals are also pitting Colorado’s big cities directly against each other in conflicts not seen for decades. When the board of Colorado Springs Utilities passed a resolution earlier this year condemning Aurora’s Otero County deal, it was a direct shot from leadership of a city of nearly 500,000 — the Colorado Springs City Council is the utility board. 

“The idea is that there’s Denver, there’s a Denver metro complex and they’re going to just do whatever they want to do and the rest of the state has to go along with it,” City Councilman Brian Risley said.

But Alex Davis, a top Aurora Water official, said Colorado Springs’ ire is unwarranted.

“Aurora has worked in close partnership with Colorado Springs for decades and that will continue,” she said. “This is a case where we disagree.”

Peter Nichols, general counsel for the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District in La Junta,  said he is deeply concerned by what cities are proposing now. “We thought we were through with all of this. We thought we had it under control,” he said of the Aurora and Colorado Springs purchases. 

Nichols is among those who have spent much of the past 20 years creating a system, now known as the super ditch, that allows seven local irrigation companies to negotiate leases with cities.

Importantly, it also won the legal right to move leased water stored in Pueblo Reservoir out of the valley, via the federal Fryingpan-Arkansas Project and the Otero Pipeline, removing what had been a key barrier to leasing.

Nichols said local growers and water districts have worked hard to find ways to share water so that it doesn’t permanently leave the valley. That the cities are now jumping the line with these new deals isn’t OK with him.

A farmer’s — and a county’s — greatest asset 

Colorado Springs and the other thirsty Front Range cities want farmers like the young Caleb Wertz to be the new face of urban water agreements. 

On a recent 95-degree summer afternoon, Wertz high-tailed it across Bent County driving an ambulance to take an injured neighbor to the hospital. He had planned to be on his farm, but that’s life in the Lower Arkansas Valley. 

Colorado Springs is reimbursing the farmers to turn those corners into pasture land or to revegetate. … Even if it is not producing corn, it’s not just becoming wasteland.

The population is shrinking, and everyone has too many jobs to count. The local farmer is also a first responder. Your primary care provider is a farmer’s wife. 

Arriving back at the farm just after 5 p.m., Wertz talks about what is perhaps the most controversial decision he has ever made: Selling a portion of his agricultural water to fuel housing growth in Colorado Springs.

The deal will pay him enough so that he can install modern irrigation systems, drying up portions of the fields, known as corners, that won’t be reached by the new, center pivot sprinklers, and allow Colorado Springs to buy the saved water.

He is also planting cotton alongside his traditional corn, and he believes he is the first in the state to do so. A new modern variety is supposed to use half the water, just one acre-foot per acre, rather than the two acre-feet of water that older types, such as those grown in Arizona, use.

For Wertz, the agreement will give him enough money to keep farming and enough new technology to make his remaining agricultural water go farther. He will become a rarity in the area: A young farmer with enough land and water to continue the business his family started in 1919 and to expand it.

“The water purchase makes it a lot more doable because we can farm those acres so much more with pivots,” Wertz said. “That’s the case even though we’re drying up the corners. … That has a bad connotation to it. But Colorado Springs is reimbursing the farmers to turn those corners into pasture land or to revegetate. … Even if it is not producing corn, it’s not just becoming wasteland.”

But to some of his neighbors in the valley, Wertz has entered a hostile no-man’s land, facilitating yet another dry-up of farm land in a region that has already lost too much water and land to urban thirst.

“I know people don’t like it and people are entitled to their opinions, but a lot of those are the older generation who don’t like seeing it because of what happened years before I was even born,” said Wertz, who is 23. “I was glad to see the Springs come in and ask questions about working with us. 

“We were quite leery at first. But they have proved it to us. It is extending the water use for them and us, and allowing my brother and I to start taking over some of these acres that haven’t been farmed for awhile because there isn’t enough manpower.”

But can the land come back after fallowing? 

Another worry for Lower Arkansas growers is whether new methods that allow cities to take the water off the fields for one or more years and then return it at a later time, do more harm than good. They’re not sure farmland in the region is resilient enough to bounce back from cycles of city-caused drought.

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Perry Cabot, a research scientist and specialist in farming practices and farm economies, has spent years studying the issue. He says that there is hope for fallowing, after years of experiments and tests, but only with crops such as alfalfa and other grasses and sometimes corn.

“The programs we have done saw alfalfa return almost with a vengeance,” Cabot said. “Grass hay is the second-best candidate.”

Nyquist, the developer and grower who is leasing back and farming the land he recently sold to Aurora, agreed, saying fallowing programs do work, but they are not good for small growers who don’t have the cash to buy the necessary new equipment and nutrients that are needed to help fully restore the crops once water returns.

Still, Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District in Rocky Ford is wary of plans that take water from parts of farm fields over long periods of time.

“And I haven’t found a farmer yet that believes that that’s a viable farming situation, ” he said. “It’s tough to bring that land back.” 

For years, valley water hasn’t been drinkable

Anger aimed west and north from Lower Arkansas Valley towns extends to water quality issues, not just water volume. 

For many decades, groundwater wells and the river have been contaminated by farm runoff, mining operations and some naturally occurring pollutants.

The same federal Fryingpan-Arkansas Project that in 1962 created Pueblo Reservoir was also supposed to solve the drinking water problem for 40 communities downriver by building the 130-mile Arkansas Valley Conduit to move clean water from Pueblo Reservoir. But it wasn’t until 2023 that final funding for the $610 million pipeline arrived. 

Some downstream leaders are galled that Aurora can start taking more fresh water out of the Arkansas before serious pipeline construction has begun to serve the 50,000 people in long-suffering downstream towns.

“My whole life has been under drinking water restrictions, not being able to attain safe drinking water except to go buy it or to go through extraordinary measures to treat it,” said Dallas May, whose family ranches 15,000 acres north of Lamar. May also is on the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District board.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Water Quality Division, which tests Lower Arkansas water a few times a year, classifies most of the river below Pueblo Reservoir as not supporting drinking water or “aquatic life use.” The classification calls the Lower Arkansas suitable for “warm-water aquatic life” and recreation. The state did not respond to requests for more detailed assessments of Lower Arkansas water health. 

Asked if state efforts were improving water quality on the Arkansas, a spokesperson said in an email, “Trend studies require extensive data over a significant period of time. The water quality in watersheds is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including precipitation and weather trends that can highly influence the water quality from year to year.” 

Some Lower Arkansas farmers and officials are tired of waiting. They see the problem getting worse as, for instance, Aurora takes more water out of Otero County, “What happens is all of the bad things are concentrated into what is left,” May said, “and that is a huge problem.” 

First photo: The Catlin Canal winds its way through southern Otero County near Rocky Ford on June 8. Aurora Water earlier this year paid $80 million for rights in the canal. Second photo: A screen bubbler helps filter water for pivot irrigation operations like this one near Rocky Ford. Farmers in the Arkansas Valley draw water from the Arkansas River via a system of canals and ditches to irrigate their crops. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Silence at the state level?

The Colorado Water Conservation Board spent years writing the statewide Water Plan, convening forums and task forces, and conducting listening sessions on the tensions between city water needs and the survival of agricultural communities. They say they are concerned about new city water buys, but add they have no authority to influence any deals because water rights are private property rights and can be bought and sold at will. 

The board declined an interview request about Aurora’s water purchase or the broader water use questions. 

“The Colorado Water Plan sets a vision for meeting the state’s future water needs and was broadly supported by local communities,” Russ Sands, the board’s water supply planning chief, said in email responses to questions. “But the decisions that happen in local communities regarding their water purchases and planning are largely outside of the state’s control. Accountability for staying true to the vision of the Water Plan is a collective responsibility.”

The loss of irrigated farmland isn’t expected to slow anytime soon as climate change dries up streams and population growth drives cities to buy more. The Colorado Water Plan’s forecast shows the population of the Arkansas River Basin, which includes Colorado Springs and Pueblo, surging more than 60% by 2050, increasing the pressure to tap farm water.

Sakata, the state water policy advisor, who farms near Brighton, said protecting the state’s irrigated farmland will take more work. “We can’t just say lease the water for three out of 10 years. We need to have agreements so that water sharing will be really available.”

As an onion grower, Sakata can’t do interruptible water supply agreements because he has long-standing yearly agreements with suppliers that require him to deliver vegetables. If he fallows his land for a year, the money he would likely be paid wouldn’t be enough to compensate him for the loss of onion sales and the need to support his employees during the break.

Farm research scientist Cabot would like to see the state begin buying irrigated farms, using conservation easements to protect them from development or purchase, and then leasing that land and its water to young growers.

What else state leaders can do to preserve what’s left of Colorado’s irrigated land isn’t clear yet, but Alan Ward, a Pueblo native who is also director of water resources for the Pueblo Water, said the state needs to reexamine its policies and goals.

“There is only so much water available, and I don’t think it’s realistic for the state to continue to think that we can control our urban areas and grow them fast without impacting agriculture.”

Clarifying that he was speaking as a private individual, rather than a water official, he said, “I’d rather have the farms continue and not have the urban growth, but I am probably in the minority on that.”

Where does the battle flow next? 

Water veterans such as Cabot said the state is likely doing everything it can right now to protect irrigated ag lands. But like Sakata, he says more work needs to be done to shore up farm markets and to create easier, more lucrative water sharing arrangements.

“I don’t want to oversimplify this,” Cabot said, “but the simplest way for cities to get this water is to go to farmers and say ‘How much did you make last year?’ and then offer them 10% more. … These are not just fields. They are farm enterprises.”

Kate Greenberg, Colorado’s agriculture commissioner, is overseeing multimillion-dollar efforts to protect farm lands by improving soil health, solving market challenges and making farm water use more efficient. She says the people of Colorado are on board with her agency’s efforts.

“We did a study last year that showed over 98% of Coloradans believe agriculture is an integral part of our state. If we’re taking water out of agriculture, where are we putting it to beneficial use?

“Are we conserving it to grow urban developments and do we want to see that over preserving agriculture and biodiversity. We need to answer that question as a state.”

Bartolo, the retired CSU researcher, hopes the answer comes soon, before any more of the valley water is siphoned off for urban use.

As news of the deals spreads, Bartolo’s sense of deja vu is growing and his fears for the future of the valley’s irrigated ag lands is growing too. No one knows yet what will happen when Aurora’s contract to use the Fryingpan-Ark to deliver water expires in 2047.

“Having lived through it in my lifetime, I have seen the drastic changes,” Bartolo said.  

What worries him, and other growers too, is “what happens if they come back after 2047? What happens then?”

Parker Yamasaki

Reporter

Note from this newsletter’s usual author: After meeting Roberto Meza at this 528-person dinner table, I connected him to my colleague Parker Yamasaki to dig into how his little farm in Bennett became a founding leg of the East Denver Food Hub and more. Enjoy! ~ tamara

Roberto Meza doesn’t need to close his eyes to visualize a changing food system anymore, he’s watching it happen week to week. The latest evidence: 600 containers of microgreens delivered to the Aurora Public Schools for the district’s “Farm Fresh Fridays” program.

“That is awesome,” Meza said. “What once was just a garnish in upscale fine dining is now replacing lettuce for students. They get way more nutrition and crunch and flavor. Now I know that’s possible. The goal is to replicate it.”

When Meza talks about changing the food system, he really means the whole system, including government subsidies that drive prices and guide institutional decision-making. Decisions like what schools are going to feed students.

The Colorado Sun first visited Meza and his cofounder, David Demerling, five years ago, as the two fresh-eyed, first generation farmers were gaining traction with their microgreen farm, Emerald Gardens.

Then the pandemic ripped through the restaurant industry. Until that point, Emerald Gardens was sustained by the food industry, so Meza and Demerling shifted their focus. They’d always had an eye on social justice and food equity, but the sudden vulnerability kicked them into high gear.

Filling the food system gaps

It started with food boxes for shelters and WIC recipients — a federal program that subsidizes healthy food for women, infants and children.

They prototyped the program in a shipping container on their land, and quickly realized “this is a whole separate thing,” Meza said. In March 2021, they moved into a 14,000-square-foot warehouse in northeastern Denver and opened the East Denver Food Hub.

A “hub” is the perfect way to describe their venture. The warehouse is currently a headquarters for three food supply businesses: Meza and Demerling’s Food Hub, their new nonprofit, the Ag and Food Lab, and a Mexican grocery store distributor, Altitude Produce. There are also rows of shelves reserved for Ela Family Farms, a back wall used by Ekar Farm, a room stacked high with sacks of beans (about 100,000 pounds by Meza’s estimate, from a farmer in Boulder), and a side room occupied by the Village Exchange Center.

“It’s kind of like this food ecosystem,” Meza said, standing in the middle of the warehouse, while two men loaded pallets of onions into the back of a semitruck. “That’s partly what has allowed us to understand the full food system so well. So our work moves forward through the gaps that we see.”

When they started the Food Hub in 2021, that gap was connecting underserved populations to fresh food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture noticed this gap too, and in December of that year authorized more than $400 million in American Rescue Plan Assistance, or ARPA funds, for states to procure local food —food grown within 400 miles — for underserved communities. The USDA strongly encouraged states to spend their funds on “socially disadvantaged producers,” which they defined as a group whose members have been discriminated against due to race, sex, age, disability or a number of other factors.

Colorado was the first state to sign onto the federal program, a mouthful known as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFPA for short. The state received nearly $4 million in funds during the first round of handouts. As the program expanded over the past two years, the federal government sent out close to $900 million total, and Colorado received close to $12 million.

Those funds were distributed to 34 applicants in the state and have been used to purchase food from over 100 local producers. The money also had a huge impact on places like the East Denver Food Hub, which received funds directly and through the purchases by food banks and shelters that received LFPA money.

But the funds are set to expire in April 2025, and according to the Colorado Department of Human Services, there is currently no way to continue the program.

“We don’t have a pandemic, but we didn’t solve hunger”

With the federal funds receding, Meza and Demerling are getting ready to pivot, again.

“We don’t have a pandemic, but we didn’t solve hunger,” Meza said. “What we learned during that time is that local procurement, investing in local infrastructure and workforce development, that’s how you solve hunger. It’s not just through donations of food.”

Meza envisions a system that addresses food insecurity and equity while also accounting for the health of “all beings” along the supply chain, he said. But that requires a big shift in cultural attitudes toward food and a heavy lift from government subsidies. It’s a project that the LFPA started, but it still has a long way to go.

“Whether we like it or not, we’re competing against a highly subsidized industrial food system,” Meza said. “It operates on low costs at the expense of labor practices, sustainable operations and animal welfare.”

In fall 2023, Meza and Demerling founded a nonprofit organization, the Ag and Food Lab, to help new farmers incubate their businesses. The farmers work on the Emerald Gardens land in Bennett and receive infrastructure and business help through the Lab. When the crops are ready to go, they become part of East Denver Food Hub’s procurements, heading out to pantries, shelters, schools and hospitals, as well as high-end restaurants like The Wolf’s Tailor, which received one of Colorado’s first Michelin stars last year.

Farming can be isolating, Meza said, and part of the incentive for starting the lab was to make sure new and immigrant farmers have a support network and access to chefs who can showcase their products.

But it is also about economics. When Meza and Demerling shifted from solely growing microgreens to running a full food hub, they focused largely on food justice initiatives. And the initiatives, “as necessary as they are, can’t affect our bottom line,” Meza said.

“The world is not prepared for the food system that we’re practicing, so we kind of have to do both at the same time,” he said, about operating for-profit and nonprofit businesses alongside each other. “This is our time to really rebuild the foundation. And there’s no reason why we can’t adjust our economics to accommodate that, knowing that it’s actually going to benefit everybody.”

Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter

If you’ve benefited from the LFPA, or know producers or distributors that are working to make local food more accessible, please email Parker at parker@coloradosun.com.

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ The Colorado community of Stagecoach is paradise to its residents. A luxury resort could turn it upside down. The same developers that turned Big Sky, Montana, into a resort town for billionaires are moving ahead with plans to bring luxury homes and a golf course to northwestern Colorado. Those who live there are raising concerns. >> Read story

➔ A new Colorado hospital opens this weekend. It’s built with the lessons of COVID in mind. Lutheran Medical Center is moving from its longtime home in Wheat Ridge to a new campus near Interstate 70 and West 40th Avenue. >> Read story

➔ Alarming reports about PERA’s finances spark questions about future of the state’s pension. A legislative oversight panel is considering whether to recommend further reforms to the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association. >> Read story

➔ Colorado water officials dream big, team up after feds drop $450 million for water projects. The surge of funds paves the way for large, multibenefit projects addressing drought and water conservation in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. >> Read story

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Other working bits

➔ Denver’s minimum wage increasing to $18.81 in January. The city of Denver just released how much its minimum wage is going up in 2025: 52 cents. That’s 2.8% higher than the existing $18.29. While this is expected because the city’s wage is based on inflation, this also translates into a 69.5% increase since 2019, when Denver broke away from the state to set its own minimum wage. Colorado’s wage next year is set to go up as well, though officials have not announced the new amount. It’ll likely be similar to Denver’s increase, which would put Colorado’s minimum wage in 2025 at around $14.82 an hour. >> Denver’s wage update

➔ Denver airport traffic up 9.2% in first six months of 2024. Numbers-wise, that translates into 39,937,380 passengers who came, went or just passed through Denver International Airport, aka DEN. Each month also set a record, airport officials said. International traffic also grew, up 17.2% compared with the same period a year ago. But DEN does expect growth to slow for the rest of the year because it may be hard to top 2023’s huge travel year (remember the passport delays that even had a Colorado senator asking for answers?). Based on the first five months of this year, Denver ranked as the nation’s third busiest airport by the Airports Council International, and sixth busiest in the world.

• Related: The airport has 300 job openings. And there’s going to be an in-person job fair to fill them. Scheduled for Aug. 13 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., around 50 airport-related employers are expected with openings at airlines, airport food and restaurants, rental car companies and more (massage therapists!). To check it out, take the RTD A Line, which will lead right to the job fair, located on the plaza between the Westin Hotel and Jeppesen Terminal near the south security checkpoint. Otherwise, airport parking is $7 an hour. >> Details and registration

➔ LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman headlining Denver’s AI event. The upcoming DenAI Summit, a first city-led conference on artificial intelligence, just named more speakers who will be at the Sept. 19 event at the Colorado Convention Center. Besides Hoffman, who will join Denver Mayor Mike Johnston in a fireside chat, there’s also Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Promise, a California payment processor for utilities and governments, and two CEOs from Denver companies: Bryan Leach, with retail app Ibotta, and Bijal Shah, with Guild, which connects everyday workers to educational opportunities. >> Details

➔ Disaster prep? SBA shares guide for small businesses. The guide includes best practices and templates to help small business owners plan and recover from disasters. >> Find it here

➔ Want to paint a mural along Denver trails? Denver Parks & Recreation has an open call for mural artists to paint something cool along the city’s trail system. Three artists will be chosen based on how they’d interpret Denver’s natural resources when it comes to water, urban forest, landscape transformation, habitat protection and environmental stewardship. Commissions pay $6,000 each. Submit a proposal by Aug. 25 because the installations start “Summer/Fall 2024,” which is … now! >> Details at denvergov.org/nature

Section by Tamara Chuang | Business/Technology Reporter

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Colorado top-paying and lowest-paying jobs
• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment
• Why Colorado could start attracting more filmmakers
• New broadband laws to help Colorado streamline distribution of $800+ million

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

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Corrections & Clarifications

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The Colorado Department of Agriculture this week stepped up efforts to stop a runaway outbreak of bird flu cases on dairy farms by issuing an order requiring testing for the virus on all commercial cow dairies licensed by the state.

But, separately, new information about the bird flu virus that infected a Colorado farmworker provides reassuring evidence that the virus remains a low risk to human health.

The state has seen at least 51 cases of bird flu on dairy farms since April, meaning nearly half of all commercial dairies in Colorado have been affected. Of those cases, 30 have happened in the past 30 days.

Colorado’s outbreak continues to surge even as others have dwindled nationwide — no other state has seen more than four cases in the past 30 days, and some major dairy-producing states like Wisconsin and California have never reported any cases.

In issuing the order, state veterinarian Dr. Maggie Baldwin said the virus, while not causing deaths of many cattle, has still been a devastating disruption to Colorado’s dairy industry — resulting in quarantines and loss of milk production.

“We have been navigating this challenging, novel outbreak of HPAI in dairy operations for nearly three months in Colorado and have not been able to curb the spread of disease at this point,” Baldwin said in a statement, using a shorthand term for the virus, which is also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza.

The order does not apply to farms that produce raw milk, which are not regulated by the state. Pasteurization kills the virus in milk sold in stores, but raw milk is unpasteurized, meaning there is the potential for it to contain live virus.

Spillover cases

Baldwin noted that, as the dairy outbreaks rage on, they are also generating spillover cases in other animals. Most notably, Colorado has begun seeing infections again in commercial poultry operations. 

There have been two major, confirmed outbreaks at egg-laying operations in Weld County, while a third, suspected outbreak is also under investigation. Those outbreaks have resulted in the culling of more than 3.2 million chickens just in July, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Colorado has now seen 33 commercial poultry flocks affected since 2022, with more than 6.3 million domestic birds culled.

Then there’s the human toll. One of those poultry outbreaks led to an unprecedented cluster of cases among workers who were doing the culling. Six workers were confirmed positive for bird flu, though their symptoms were relatively mild and none required hospitalization.

Meanwhile, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced Thursday that it has identified three new human cases of bird flu — these tied to culling operations at a different poultry farm. The workers, likewise, have mild symptoms and have been offered antiviral drugs for treatment.

Searching for genetic changes

Including the new cases, the state has now identified 11 out of the 14 human cases nationwide since 2022, placing Colorado at the center of the nation’s bird flu epidemic. And the burst of human infections in Colorado has raised questions about whether the flu virus has mutated to make it more capable of infecting people.

But a new CDC analysis eases those concerns. The CDC took a virus sample from one of the Colorado poultry workers and sequenced its genome.

Among the findings:

• The sample’s genetics are closely related to those of viruses found in animals from other recent outbreaks at poultry and dairy facilities. Among human cases, the Colorado worker’s virus is most similar to the virus that infected a dairy worker in Michigan earlier this year.
• The Colorado virus “maintains primarily avian genetic characteristics,” according to the CDC, meaning it isn’t especially adapted to infect people or spread person-to-person. It does, however, have one mutation that makes it better at infecting mammals. That mutation has been found in more than 99% of infections among cattle.
• There were no mutations found that indicate the virus is developing resistance to existing antiviral drugs.
• There are also no changes to the virus suggesting it is more capable of causing harm to humans.
• The virus is closely related to a couple bird flu samples available to vaccine manufacturers, meaning companies could start producing a bird flu vaccine quickly if needed.

So, to recap: Nothing about the Colorado case suggests the bird flu virus has become better able to infect people, hurt people or spread to other people. The CDC said the analysis “supports CDC’s conclusion that the human health risk currently remains low.”

No evidence of silent spread

The CDC also reported some more good news last week: Blood tests of Michigan dairy workers were boring.

Michigan’s public health department conducted what is known as a seroprevalence study of workers with known exposures to infected cows. The goal was to see if workers who showed no symptoms of bird flu actually had antibodies against the virus. If they did, it would suggest that they had been silently infected and that human cases might be more common than known.

Instead, the results from every nonsymptomatic worker tested came back clean — no antibodies against bird flu.

“This is an important finding,” the CDC wrote in a weekly update, “because it suggests that asymptomatic infections in people are not occurring.”

That means the risk remains primarily to farmworkers who have direct contact with infected animals. And that puts the focus on efforts to provide information to farms and to ensure workers have access to — and are able to wear — protective equipment.

“Ongoing cooperation is key to supporting workers’ health and safety, protecting animal health and welfare, and minimizing the spread of the virus,” Kate Greenberg, Colorado’s commissioner of agriculture, said in a statement.

The outdoor temperature flirted with 100 degrees and heat advisories blanketed the region earlier this month as workers arrived at a commercial poultry operation in Weld County to start killing chickens.

Of the 1.8 million egg-laying hens inside the operation’s barns, at least some were infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza — bird flu. The strain of the virus that is now circling the globe has shown a remarkable ability to infect all kinds of animals, from seals to skunks to mountain lions. But it spreads most rapidly and lethally in wild birds and domestic poultry.

When a commercial flock is infected, standard practice is grim but efficient: Kill all the birds at the farm, devastating one operation in the hopes of stopping the virus and sparing the rest of the industry. By the time the workers in Weld County were done, though, some discovered that the virus had survived at least for one infection longer. It had found a new host: Their own bodies.

The unprecedented cluster of six cases of bird flu reported this month in Colorado is the largest outbreak of human cases in the United States from the current strain — in fact, it is the only time in this country that more than one person has been confirmed to be infected from a single incident. And there is a possibility the outbreak may be worse than the headlines.

Colorado health officials tested at least 69 workers who showed flu-like symptoms, out of more than 150 workers who were at the farm. Of those, only six have tested positive — three of those cases were confirmed initially by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while three others were confirmed later, most recently on Friday.

Combined with another human case reported in the state this month — a dairy worker who had contact with infected cattle — as well as the state’s worst-in-the-nation outbreak of bird flu cases on dairy farms, Colorado has become the epicenter of bird flu in the U.S.

A state health official last week said public health agencies are monitoring more than 700 people who may have been exposed to bird flu, looking for signs to see if they were infected. A team from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Colorado to help track the epidemiological evidence.

But the outbreak has also shined a light on a much more mundane factor in the infections: Those soaring temperatures.

Why extreme heat contributed to the outbreak

The CDC says that workers who have contact with infected animals should wear a thick suit of personal protective equipment, or PPE.

Head covering, goggles, mask, water-resistant coveralls, apron, gloves and boots. In a drawing of the outfit on the CDC website, only slivers of a worker’s forehead and cheekbones are uncovered.

But there are no requirements for workers to wear PPE. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued only recommendations. The state has no requirements, either.

The result is that workers may not be wearing PPE in bird flu hot zones.

“My understanding is that PPE is available to workers, but there’s not been 100% uptake in the use of PPE,” Dr. Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist, said in an interview last week. “We’ve been working very closely with the producer to ensure improvements are made in uptake of PPE in workers. There’s been significant work to train workers on the use of PPE.”

This is where the weather comes in. All that PPE — designed to be fairly un-breathable, in order to keep pathogens out — is hot.

While temperatures outside were scorching, it was likely even hotter inside the barns where the workers were culling birds. Workers may have chosen to forego PPE or taken it off. Sweat running down faces made goggles fog up and masks slip. Large fans pushed around air, likely laden with virus, and ruffled PPE.

Every crack in the protective armor provided an opportunity for the virus to slip through.

“It’s really difficult to try and control the weather right now,” Herlihy said.

Criticisms of the response

While the difficulties of working in extreme heat might explain the outbreak, they don’t offer an excuse for not better protecting workers, some experts said.

“That’s absolutely crazy to me,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a nationally recognized epidemiologist who is the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island. “Putting people into a situation where they are culling birds that are known to be infected without sufficient protection is just gambling with their lives.”

Nuzzo said officials could have considered waiting to do the culling until temperatures subsided. Or they could have sent workers in for shorter shifts.

Bird flu has not resulted in any serious infections in humans in the United States — so far. The workers in Colorado who tested positive had symptoms ranging from eye redness all the way up to classic flu symptoms of fever, chills and cough. All were offered the antiviral drug Tamiflu and told to isolate themselves. None required hospital treatment.

Herlihy, the state epidemiologist, said her agency takes seriously the health of workers who have contact with infected animals.

“I’m certainly concerned about workers that have exposures,” she said.

There is no evidence of the virus spreading person-to-person. Wastewater testing and data from hospital emergency department visits do not indicate that the virus is silently spreading. This means the risk to the general public remains low and mostly confined to contact with infected animals.

Nuzzo said this is all important for the public to keep in mind.

“My concern for a potential pandemic is growing,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it high yet.”

But, despite the mild illnesses, Nuzzo said flu viruses should not be taken lightly. In the wrong circumstances, they do have the ability to cause severe illness — as this bird flu virus has in other parts of the world. And every infection of a person is a chance for the virus to evolve and crack the code on more efficiently spreading to other people.

Nuzzo said that makes it vitally important to better protect farm workers, for their own health and for the health of others. She pointed to the example of Finland, which is offering bird flu vaccinations to farmworkers as a precaution.

“I think we’re maybe a little bit naive about the potential of this virus,” she said. “There’s a thought that it’s going to whip through and be gone. But I’m here to tell you, flu viruses don’t disappear.”

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In a farmyard on the western outskirts of Palisade, a distinct odor seeps through the sweet scent of ripening peaches, the yeasty aroma of fermenting wine, and the perfume of lavender.

It doesn’t take a vampire to recognize that punchy smell. It is allium sativum — garlic — and it is wafting from the Green Acres U-Pick farm.

Green Acres U-Pick is the most prolific grower of garlic varieties in Colorado. In five acres that neighbor a handful of wineries, bulbs of Montana Zemo, Russian giant, Georgian crystal, Killarney red, rose de Lautrec and dozens of other garlic cultivars are waiting under the soil for farmer Bob Korver’s digging fork. 

About 1,500 pounds of bulbs will be liberated within the next several weeks.

Bob and his wife, Elaine, still have fruits and vegetables dotting and fringing their small farm, but it is the half-acre spiked with the spear-like leaves of 40 garlic varieties that has bumped up the Korvers from garlic growers to garlic geeks.

If the Korvers were to put pins on a map showing where their garlic cultivars originated, the dots would be sprinkled to the far reaches of the world.

This year’s garlic crop originated in Siberia, the Republic of Georgia, the San Juan Islands, Uzbekistan, Russia, Italy, Spain, France, Transylvania, South Korea, Vietnam and Romania. There is also garlic that was first grown in California, New Mexico and the Colville Indian Reservation in Washington.

“I don’t think you will find anyone that is crazy as I am,” Bob admits about his garlic enthusiasm.

Elaine puts that obsession into more sensible terms: “We like to experiment.”

How to grow (and sell) garlic by hand

All the work of planting and harvesting garlic at Green Acres is done by hand except for the initial field preparation. Bob does that by putting around on his little orange Kubota tractor to create furrows.

Halloween is planting season. That’s when Bob hunkers down over those rows poking each garlic clove into the ground. For the next seven months, if all goes right, those single cloves will expand into a fist-sized bulb made up of many cloves.

Shortly after each Fourth of July, Bob starts the harvest by aiming his trusty garden fork with uncanny accuracy into the weed-choked rows. He digs and hauls in the early mornings and the evenings because the hot sun can leach some of the flavor from garlic.

He lays out the newborn allium bulbs in his well-used wheelbarrow and hauls them one load at a time up the road, past the revelers on the patio of Red Fox Cellars winery, to the Korvers’ little garlic-colored house.

There Elaine sorts it, with nothing more than an appraising eye and a quick heft in the hand to determine the size of each bulb.

In a couple of weeks, this same patio will become the sales floor for Green Acres garlic.

The Korvers don’t waste any time or money on advertising. Those in the know watch their Facebook page for Elaine’s posts that the garlic is ready or that different varieties are running out.

Right now, the Korvers’ earliest harvest is undergoing a two-week curing rest in their four-car garage (which has never had a car in it). They fill it with garlic four times each season.

Bob is responsible for nipping the leaves and stems from the rested bulbs before Elaine takes a cheapo toothbrush to them to banish clinging dirt. Bob helps out with that task, too, when he is waiting for dinner or hiding from the heat.

Last year, there was more scrubbing to do. The Korvers had 50 cultivars of garlic. A few of those didn’t do so well in the increasing heat of western Colorado.

Bob could easily have replaced those with some of the new allium cultivars he ogles in seed catalogues during the winter, but “she said enough,” he explains while cutting his eyes toward Elaine.

She levels a hard stare at him over a grin: “Enough is right!”

Trading the classroom for the field

The Korvers, both in their early 70s and married for 37 years, never saw garlic taking over their lives back in the day.

Bob moved with his third-generation agricultural family to a farm just down the road from Green Acres when he was 4 years old. He grew up picking peaches and trying to listen to his father who warned him: “If you want to make a million dollars in farming, start out with $2 million.”

He went off to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, then on to Colorado State University where he earned a master’s in guidance counseling. He taught English and journalism and coached volleyball and track as well as serving as a counselor at schools in Columbus, Nebraska, on the Eastern Plains of Colorado and eventually in Steamboat Springs.

Elaine first met Bob in Greeley where she was attending college to earn a degree in library science. She describes herself as a city girl. She had grown up in Omaha, Nebraska, and after college aspired to teach in larger places like Denver and later Grand Junction.

The two came together like garlic and bread when Elaine was doing a librarian stint in Rifle during the oil shale boom. Friends invited her along to watch a volleyball game in Steamboat.

In between games, she spotted a guy in the bleachers who was busy grading papers, oblivious to the hubbub around him. His briefcase was beside him. Bob!

Their conversation led to a connection and eventually to Green Acres after they both decided they would retire from their professions and farm together. They would grow fruits and vegetables without using pesticides and herbicides and showcase rows of lavender.

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They proved they could master lavender when their oils won two first-place prizes in an international lavender competition last year in Australia.

Neither one remembers exactly how they came to decide that the fragrant lines of waving lavender could be neighbors to a garlic plot. It has something to do with saving water. Garlic does not require much water.

Bob’s years of classroom planning made him well suited to garlic farming. Garlic is an easy thing to grow. Home gardeners can plunk cloves in loose soil and create a bulb. But the way Bob does it requires complicated charts and graphs and timing schedules. Locations, planting dates, size of cloves, names are all neatly printed out on papers spotted with sweat and dirt, and snapped onto a clipboard that resides in the garlic field while Bob is working there.

His colored charts correspond to brown, pink, blue, red, green, orange and yellow flags that flutter at the end of rows in the recent air-fryer heat.

“We wouldn’t want anyone to think they were getting one kind of garlic and get another,” Elaine explains about all that paperwork. She is, she admits, “the queen of handouts.”

Each garlic bulb sold or given away at Green Acres comes with one of Elaine’s cheat sheets of information about that particular cultivar. Elaine staples the info to the brown paper bags that she stresses are the only proper receptacles for storing garlic. Her slips include information on variety, taste, storage, cooking, how many cloves should be in one bulb, where the garlic originated and where the seed to grow it came from.

Elaine’s taste descriptions require a passel of adjectives, including mellow, complex, spicy, musky, hot, full-bodied and even explosive. 

Beyond supermarket garlic

“I never knew there were that many varieties. It’s insane,” says Katie Henderson, a dedicated garlic customer at Green Acres who claims to cook with garlic every day.  When she runs low on Green Acres garlic, she asks the Korvers to scrounge around for scraps. Even a couple of cloves will do, she says, to keep her from having to buy grocery store bulbs that she now writes off as bland.

Julie McSherry of Omaha waits every year at this time for a box of garlic from Green Acres.

“I get about 15 types. The variety is exceptional,” she says. “Pungent is a good word for it.”

Pungent is a good word for it.

— Julie McSherry, an Omaha resident who gets a yearly box of garlic from Green Acres

Jarrett Nelson says Green Acres garlic has become a favorite at the Gypsum Fire Protection District where he works with the Korvers’ son.

“I am not a garlic taste-tester expert, but I can definitely tell the difference,” he says of the many varieties he has tried and used in his firehouse meals of lasagna and carne asada. This year, he has found more recipes to showcase garlic. He also plans to roast it, store it in olive oil and turn it into a butter.

Sherrie and Scott Hamilton who own Red Fox Cellars say they also cook with it regularly. They welcome garlic wafting over to mingle with the top notes of cabernet franc and merlot at their winery.

“A lot of my customers see Bob out there working in his field and they ask us, ‘What is it that he’s doing?’” she says.

A crop with deep roots

If wine tasters wander over to talk to Bob, they can get a garlic lesson.

Garlic is one of the oldest crops tended by humans. It is believed to have evolved and spread from south central Asia and was carried around the Mediterranean and European continents by nomadic tribes.

Garlic appears in the oldest written language, Sanskrit, in writings from 5,000 years ago. The Egyptians used garlic with its loads of sulfides for food and medicine. They revered it so much they entombed garlic with their dead.

There are two subgroups of garlic — hardneck and softneck. The hardneck varieties send up a flower stalk that is known as a scape (a tasty morsel on the grill or in a pickle jar). Hardnecks do better in colder climates, and they often pack the spiciest punch.

Softneck garlic (the kind you will see in those fancy garlic braids) has no tough stem.

Beyond those neck differences, there are 13 sub-varieties of garlic. Bob holds up one called an artichoke. The name comes from the fact that the cloves resemble artichoke petals. The cloves on the outside are large, and they get smaller toward the center.

Bob has also grown sub-varieties of porcelains, purple stripes and creoles.

He didn’t do great with the latter, he says, because he failed to figure out that something called creole would do better in Southern climates.

 “I’m kind of slow sometimes. I learn some things the hard way,” Bob says, garnering an indulgent smile from Elaine.

Garlic’s future 

There are other vegetable farms around Colorado that grow garlic. The Rocky Mountain Garlic Farm near Salida grows about a quarter-acre on an agricultural operation that has gone in the opposite direction of Green Acres and pivoted to more vegetables. Several other small Colorado garlic farms have closed in recent years.

Trisha Nungester with Tagawa Gardens in Centennial says Tagawa sells about 40 varieties — mainly for seed. Their garlic comes from multiple sources, including the motherlode of U.S. garlic, Filaree Farms in Washington state. When Tagawa announces that garlic is ready for sale, there is always a line out the door with people clamoring for favorite varieties.

In terms of homegrown variety in Colorado, the Korvers take the odiferous prize.

They grouse about maybe wanting to plant less. They both have had health problems in recent years.

But their seed-saving practices say cutbacks won’t happen soon.

They are already at work picking out 300 pounds of the fattest bulbs that will be saved to seed next year’s crops.

And there is always one new garlic variety to try, one more wheelbarrow load to sort, one more giant bulb to marvel over, and one more group of kids who come to Green Acres to get a farming lesson from a librarian and a teacher who can’t drop those old habits.

Bob won’t tell many of them one of the deepest, darkest secrets of Green Acres: He really doesn’t like to eat garlic.

Three poultry workers tested positive for bird flu and more who showed symptoms of infection are being tested, state health officials announced Friday evening.

The outbreak of human cases, if confirmed, is the largest in the United States from the strain of bird flu — also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza — currently circulating across the globe.

The workers who tested positive were responding to an outbreak of bird flu at a commercial egg-laying operation in Weld County, where nearly 1.8 million chickens were being culled following the virus’s discovery. None of the workers required hospitalization. Their symptoms ranged from pink eye to what the state described in a news release as “common respiratory infection symptoms.”

Samples taken from the workers tested positive at the state lab. They have now been sent to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for official confirmation.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment wrote in a news release that “additional samples from symptomatic workers” will be tested over the weekend.

Before Friday, there had been only five known human cases of bird flu in the United States since 2022. One of those, the first discovered in the country from the current strain, was in a worker at a poultry farm in Montrose County in 2022. Another was identified last week in a dairy worker in Weld County. There have also been three other infections discovered in dairy workers in Texas and Michigan.

So far, every person infected in the United States has experienced mild symptoms and recovered with the help of antiviral medication.

Colorado has emerged as the epicenter of the bird flu epidemic in the United States. In addition to its at least five human cases, Colorado now has the nation’s worst outbreak of bird flu among dairy cattle.

State agriculture officials identified eight new infected dairy herds this week, bringing the state’s total number of cases in dairy cattle to 35 since April. That places Colorado first among states, seven cases ahead of Idaho, which like most other states with large numbers of outbreaks has a far larger dairy industry than Colorado. About a third of Colorado’s dairy herds have now been infected.

Bird flu, as the name indicates, typically circulates in birds, and it can be particularly devastating if it infects domestic poultry. But the current strain circulating the globe has distinguished itself by its ability to infect a wide variety of animals. Bears, mountain lions, seals, skunks, cats and more have all died from bird flu in recent years.

Humans have occasionally been infected by bird flu in the past — with some strains carrying a high fatality rate — but there has never been sustained person-to-person transmission of the virus. Instead, infections tend to occur following close contact with infected animals, which is what state health officials speculate occurred for the newest human outbreak in Weld County.

There has been no documented instance in the U.S. of person-to-person transmission from the current bird flu strain, and health officials believe the risk to the general public remains low.

“Where we need to ramp up the level of concern in the population is when we see those … workers get infected and spread it to their families,” Elizabeth Carlton, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health, told The Colorado Sun earlier this month.

Eating poultry, eggs or beef remains safe, so long as they are cooked to the appropriate temperature. Drinking milk is also safe, so long as it is pasteurized.

People who work with cows or poultry should be especially vigilant about hand-washing and other good-hygiene practices. If they start to feel sick, they should seek medical attention or call CDPHE at 303-692-2700 or 303-370-9395 after normal business hours.

The Colorado Livestock Association is pushing back on a Denver ballot measure seeking to ban slaughterhouses within city limits, saying it targets a single business that employs more than 150 people who have worked in the industry for decades. 

If the measure passes, the largest lamb packing plant in the U.S. would have to close by Jan. 1, 2026. Employee-owned Superior Farms’ slaughterhouse near the National Western Stock Show complex processes about 300,000 animals a year, sending millions of pounds of packaged meat across the U.S. and generating as much as $861 million in economic activity for Colorado’s second-largest industry, according to a Colorado State University report.  

It is Dixon, California-based Superior’s largest facility. Only it and Colorado Lamb Processors, a family owned processing plant in Brush, are capable of packing more than 100,000 sheep per year in Colorado. Colorado currently has the third-largest sheep and lamb inventory in the U.S. and ranks second in the nation, behind California, for slaughter-ready lambs. Total capacity of Colorado’s 21 USDA-inspected facilities is 400,000 sheep per year. Superior’s facility in Denver accounts for 15% to 20% of lamb processing capacity in the U.S.

The group behind the ballot measure, Pro-Animal Future, says slaughterhouses are “inhumane to workers, animals and the surrounding communities they pollute,” and that the proposed ordinance would “promote community awareness of animal welfare, bolster the city’s stance against animal cruelty, and, in turn, foster a more humane environment in Denver.”

The Humane League, A Pro-Animal Future affiliate, says animals killed in slaughterhouses are “‘stunned’ by electrocution, gassing or having a metal bolt shot into their skull before being hoisted upside down or shackled as their throats are slit.” Citing a 2013 study over a five-day period in Sweden, the group claims only 84% of cattle are adequately stunned before slaughter.

Zach Riley, chief executive officer of the Colorado Livestock Association, said the USDA “would certainly not allow multiple failed stunning attempts” at the Superior slaughterhouse or others. Jessica Lemmel, Colorado Livestock Association spokesperson, said that fact that Superior is USDA-inspected “drives home the point that this is a facility that needs to continue to process the lambs in the industry rather than smaller processors that aren’t USDA-inspected.” 

The measure was approved for the November municipal ballot this spring, as was a second measure from Pro-Animal Future that seeks to ban the creation and sale of fur products in Denver starting July 1, 2025.

Olivia Hammond, communications lead for Pro-Animal Future, said, “Rather than placing the burden of change on individual consumers, this measure allows voters to lead a collective change away from a harmful industry. We believe that a transition towards more ethical and sustainable practices will build a legacy for Denver as a leader in responsible food production.”

What would happen if it passed?

In June, the Regional Economic Development Institute at Colorado State University released a report outlining the far-reaching economic implications of the ban should it pass in November. 

It says the total annual output of the animal processing in Denver County currently exceeds $382 million, provides nearly 600 jobs and creates nearly $45 million in employee compensation. 

But closing the Superior facility would likely “substantially impact the U.S.-based lamb supply chain and would severely strain existing facilities, thus reducing the volume of Colorado lamb available for purchase in Colorado and the rest of the U.S.,” says the report. 

In the “most pessimistic” scenario, all economic activity related to Superior Farms leaves the state, for a loss of $861 million in economic activity and 2,787 jobs “after accounting for multiplier effects.” 

If half of the economic activity moves to an existing plant outside of Denver, $430 million and 1,394 jobs would be lost after accounting for multiplier effects. And the report says even if 80% of Denver’s lost economic activity is retained elsewhere in Colorado, the state would still lose 697 jobs and over $215 million in economic activity. 

Rick Stott, chief executive officer of Superior Farms, told Meat + Poultry magazine he believes Pro-Animal Future’s goal with the ban is “to eliminate animal ag in the state of Colorado.” 

Riley agreed, adding the past five or six years in Colorado “have been peppered with a litany of anti-ag sentiment.” 

MeatOut Day, when Gov. Jared Polis encouraged Coloradans to collectively ditch eating animal products on March 20, 2021, springs to mind for Riley. “It was like, why? What is the necessity? Why are (producers) under fire?”

That same year, a measure that would have declared basic veterinary procedures, including artificial insemination, acts of animal cruelty, did not make it to the statewide ballot.

The CSU report says “economic spillovers will reverberate throughout the regional economy, because of the transport of goods and services to and from the Denver location.” It adds “the meat slaughter and processing sector in Denver County is intertwined with other value-added food businesses who rely on the meat slaughter and processing sector for inputs.” 

The ordinance “runs counter to demonstrated consumer preferences and choices,” the report continues. The ban would “reduce the resilience of the meat supply chain,” by increasing costs for small and medium livestock producers “who are unlikely to find alternatives,” it says. And the authors of the report conclude closing Superior Farms will make it harder for new startups in the growing local food industry, “because they will not have nearby access to Denver retail markets, and investment capital may be restricted or come at a higher cost.”

Pro-Animal Future’s position

Pro-Animal Future’s website says  “banning a cruel practice in Denver won’t defeat the industry immediately” but shutting down Superior Farms “would be a major disruption for a company and industry that are profiting off harm to animals, workers and our environment.” 

Hammond added, “CSU’s report acknowledges that its headline numbers are the ‘most pessimistic potential scenario,’ rather than the most likely scenario,” and said experts the group has consulted with “have struggled to understand the vague models used to land on such substantial numbers with the closing of just one plant, while noting that the findings exclude any potential benefits of the ban.”

The proposed measure contains a provision directing the city of Denver “to prioritize any affected workers in its employment assistance programs, including those provisioned by the Climate Protection Fund.”   

And Pro-Animal Future’s website suggests that should Superior Farms close and its operational facilities be bulldozed, “any developer who buys (the lot) would be expected to develop it according to Blueprint Denver, the city’s long-term plan, which designates that by 2040, the area of 80216 where the slaughterhouse is will become a ‘Community Center.’” 

As far as Riley is concerned, the future of one of Colorado’s leading agriculture businesses shouldn’t be left to a vote, “but it’s a playbook for special interests,” he said. “They can’t get their way because the elected body of officials recognizes the importance of the industry, so let’s run it in a misinformed-type ballot situation where people vote with their emotions.”  

Hammond said Pro-Animal Future believes “Denver voters recognize the need for a more humane, sustainable food system.”

Nearly 1.8 million chickens will be killed after bird flu was detected at an egg-laying operation in Weld County, a major resurgence on a commercial farm of the disease that has already seen more than 6 million birds culled.

Gov. Jared Polis verbally declared a disaster declaration for the facility over the long holiday weekend. The move activates the state’s emergency operations plan and makes additional resources available to respond to the outbreak.

A spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Agriculture declined to name the facility.

The mass culling — or “depopulation,” as the state described it — is the second-largest in a commercial flock since bird flu was first detected in Colorado in early 2002. In June 2022, an outbreak at a commercial poultry facility, also in Weld County, resulted in more than 1.9 million birds being culled.

The strain of bird flu, also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, is the same as the one currently circulating through Colorado dairy herds. But the infections in cattle have rarely been fatal.

The same is not true of infections in birds, hence the “highly pathogenic” part of the virus’s name. Since its discovery in Colorado, part of a worldwide bird flu outbreak, the disease has killed untold numbers of wild birds, as well as some mammals such as bears, mountain lions and skunks.

When bird flu infiltrates a poultry farm — whether it’s a commercial one or of the backyard variety — standard protocol is to kill the entire flock and destroy any eggs to prevent the disease from spreading. Producers may be entitled to compensation from the federal government for their losses.

Those large commercial cullings peaked the second half of 2022 in Colorado, and in 2023 the state saw a relative trickle of reported cases, mostly in backyard or small commercial operations, as well as in wild birds.

But in February of this year, 67,000 chickens were killed in an outbreak at a farm in Delta County, marking a grim resurgence.

Colorado has also identified two cases of avian influenza in humans. Both cases were mild and in workers who had close contact with infected animals. The workers recovered, and bird flu is still considered a low risk to humans.