Big stakes for rural Colorado in Denver's ballot measure to ban slaughterhouses

view original post

This Election Day, voters in Denver will decide whether animal slaughter belongs in their city. Initiated Ordinance 309 would prohibit the construction, maintenance or use of slaughterhouses within Denver city limits starting in January 2026.

Superior Farms, a lamb processing plant, is Denver’s only slaughterhouse, making it the sole facility that would be directly impacted by the ballot measure. If it passes, Superior Farms would be forced to shut down.

It’s hard to picture a shuttered Superior Farms. Inside, the plant is a cacophony of constant noise and movement: blue conveyor belts snake past hard-hatted workers busy cutting, cleaning and packaging cuts of lamb – their only product. Vacuum-sealing machines exhale and pop over the constant whir of refrigeration.

According to operations manager Isabel Bautista, about 1,500 young sheep come through the plant each day. They’re slaughtered – “harvested” in industry-speak – then skinned, chilled, and butchered, exiting the shipping department as standard cuts of halal-certified meat, packaged and labeled for store shelves. Kroger and Walmart are their biggest customers, but they also sell meat to several local restaurants and smaller retailers.

In fact, Superior Farms is the biggest lamb slaughterhouse in the country. Accounting for between 15% and 20% of the country’s total lamb slaughter capacity, it’s a major hub for the domestic lamb meat industry – a relatively niche pocket of the red meat industry dominated by three states, including Colorado – and Weld County in particular.

“75% of the lambs that we process here are from Colorado local producers,” Bautista said.

And that’s why the potential footprint of Denver’s Initiated Ordinance 309 extends beyond the boundaries of the city. Rural Colorado is home to a robust network of local lamb producers that have a lot at stake in this big city ballot measure.

The view from rural Colorado

Mike Harper owns and operates Harper Feeders, one of Colorado’s biggest sheep feedlots, in rural Eaton, just about an hour’s drive north of the Denver plant. He feeds up to 65,000 head of sheep on his premises at any given time and does a lot of business with Superior Farms.

“Currently we’re selling all of our fat lamb inventory to Superior Farms in Denver. 100%.” Harper said. “They’re just a very integral part of what we do. It’s our outlet. It’s our sales point. It’s our paycheck. It’s how we keep going.”

According to Harper there really aren’t any good alternatives to Superior Farms in Colorado. Another lamb slaughterhouse in Morgan County doesn’t butcher the carcasses for market like Superior Farm does and doesn’t have the capacity to absorb all their business.

If the Denver plant closes, Harper said he’d have to look at sending lambs out of state to Texas or California for slaughter.

“It’s just not the ideal,” Harper said. “Having that plant in Denver, they can harvest the lambs, run them right through the wall to their cutting facility, break them down into cuts, and have them out to the retailer in two days or three days. Anything you do somewhere else is another day, another freight bill to haul them in.”

Harper said that would tighten his already thin margins, and he’d be forced to cut back.

“You take Superior out of the equation, I’ve got to shut the door on production,” he said. “That’s the reality. We’re going to shrink, and we’re going to shrink substantially.”

There wouldn’t be work for his 13 employees. And the loss would touch everyone he does business with – the many truck drivers who haul feed, and the ranch families across Colorado and the greater West who raise lambs from birth on their pastures and rangelands before selling them to Harper. If the plant closed, the whole industry would feel it.

“(Superior Farms is) really a benefit for the whole Intermountain West, because a lot of states ship into here as the only major plant,” said Dawn Thilmany, an agricultural economist with Colorado State University and director of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rocky Mountain and Northwest Food Business Center.

Thilmany and her colleagues published a study last spring looking at the economic impact of Initiated Ordinance 309. They concluded that it would upend regional meat supply chains and, depending on whether and where Superior Farms ultimately relocated, could cost the state between $215 million and $860 million dollars a year in economic activity.

“For the economic story, I think it’s a pretty easy cost benefit analysis,” Thilmany said. “It’s going to be more of a challenge than it’s going to have any benefits.”

The initiative would not only put the plant’s 160 employees out of work but could eliminate 697 to nearly 2,787 jobs in Colorado, as fallout from the plant’s closure ripples out to rural parts of the state.

“What people don’t think about is how many people it affects,” Harper said. “Like, we were with a 6^th 7^th generation ranch family yesterday. Well, there must have been 10 or 12 people there, all tied to that ranch. It’s just a snowball effect when you start thinking about the economics of things.”

The animal rights argument

That snowball effect might be just the outcome Initiated Ordinance 309’s proponents are hoping for. The measure was introduced by Pro Animal Future, an animal rights group based in Denver. Spokesperson Natalie Fulton said closing Superior Farms is just the first step of a much broader goal: to end factory farming.

“We want to ban industrial slaughterhouses because they’re part of that same factory farming supply chain. We started in Denver because we’re from Denver, and Superior Farms is the face of factory farming in Denver,” Fulton said. “If there were more slaughterhouses, we would be banning more slaughterhouses. There happens to only be one slaughterhouse in Denver. This would ban that one as well as future slaughterhouses from being built.”

But Fulton said closing Superior Farms is an important first step in that plan.

“We’ve been aware of this particular slaughterhouse for a very long time,” Fulton said. “They’ve been violating environmental regulations as well as animal welfare regulations.”

Over the years, Superior Farms has been cited for a few environmental violations, including one last month that led to a $120,000 settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency to resolve a Clean Air Act violation related to handling of anhydrous ammonia, a refrigerant that can be hazardous to human health.

Pro Animal Future also claims that the slaughterhouse, which certifies all its products as halal, is dishonest about its slaughtering practices. Earlier this month, the group released video footage alleged to come from hidden cameras inside the plant, showing lambs being slaughtered by methods they say violate halal protocol.

The group also alleges that Superior Farms subjects its employees to inhumane and “punishing” working conditions. They say the work inflicts “psychological damage” on slaughterhouse employees and reject the idea that employees are well paid. Their campaign argues that workers there would be better off if the plant closed. To that end, Initiated Ordinance 309 includes a provision to prioritize former slaughterhouse workers in municipal workforce training and employment assistance programs to help them find “safer, healthier” work.

What the workers say

But Superior Farms employees might not recognize that characterization of their work and aren’t so eager to leave their jobs.

“My plan is to work here until I retire. I love my job. I love the group I work with,” said Frank Sabedra Hernandez, a 26-year-old maintenance lead at Superior Farms, a job he describes as fulfilling. “I never think, oh, I don’t want to go to work today. It sounds too good to be true.”

Sabedra started at entry level and worked his way up to his current $35 an hour position in just a couple of years. He said he is well paid and feels lucky to have a job that allows him to support his young family without having to work a second job.

Adolfo Arce, a Cryovac operator in the fabrication department of Superior Farms, felt much the same way.

“For me, it’s one of the best jobs I’ve had,” he said. “I tell my son proudly that I work here at Superior Farms.”

Making the jobs even more appealing is the benefits package employees enjoy.

“It’s the whole package: the medical insurance, dental, vision,” operations manager Bautista said. “They have vacation, paid sick time. We also receive 401k. And one of the biggest things is Superior Farm’s employee stock owner program. We became owners of the company once we work 1,000 hours or 3 years, whatever comes first. We start getting stocks from the company and we don’t have to put a penny out of our pocket.”

For Bautista, who has worked at the plant for more than 20 years, the thought of losing her workplace to a voter-approved ban is unimaginable.

“This is my house. I’ve been here for the longest time. I love what I do here. Superior Farms has offered me many, many, many opportunities,” she said. “I don’t see myself trying to find a job somewhere else.”

And she has a message for Denver voters:

“We want them to support us so we don’t lose our jobs and we don’t lose our financial security.”

Urban ballot measure, rural stakes

As both sides chase votes in Denver, rural lamb producers like Mike Harper can only look on nervously. They have a lot at stake in this ballot question, but only urban voters in Denver can decide their fate.

Harper hopes Denverites keep rural folks like him in mind when they cast their ballots on November 5th.

“They walk out of their apartment or ride their bike down the street to the local market and it’s full of produce and full of red meat, and they don’t think about it,” Harper said. “It’s all there until it’s not.”