Brief by Central Staff
Agriculture – May 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Those big corporate hog farms have been a major issue out on the plains, and in 1998 Colorado voters passed an initiative to regulate their emissions.
Now the pigs might be invading the mountains. At its March meeting, the Silver Cliff town board heard from Trustee Don Bishop, who said that a hog farmer from Nebraska had contacted him about opening a hog farm in Silver Cliff.
A hog farm in town? For reasons we hope someday to discover, Silver Cliff’s city limits extend well past sight of any street lights, and it thus has land zoned agricultural where a hog farm would be legal.
The proposed farm, Bishop said, would have 1,500 sows, as compared to 187,000 sows at the nation’s largest such operation.
The hog farmer likes the cool climate of the Wet Mountain Valley, Bishop said.
We suspect that the farmer wouldn’t like the cost of trucking in grain to feed the hogs, as well as the state requirement that a hog farm get written consent of the neighbors if its waste is stored less than a mile from the property line.