Hundreds of thousands of sheep roll through Denver each year destined for a 60-year-old plant nestled in a part of town teeming with livestock history.
The fate of Superior Farms' 500,000-head capacity lamb plant, estimated to account for 15% to 20% of U.S. lamb processing capacity, will be in voters’ hands this November as they consider a referendum that would shut down its operations by 2026 and ban any future meatpacking businesses from entering the city and county.
Advocates of the ban see it as a chance not only to end animal slaughter in Denver, but also spark a nationwide movement to incite change through city ballot boxes rather than consumers' buying habits, which can at times be tough to influence. It also would affect nearly 1,000 growers in the central and western United States who supply Superior Farms.
In 2022, according to the University of Denver, ranchers from Colorado and surrounding states hauled around 300,000 head of sheep to the facility, the last meatpacking plant left in the city. It sits across from the South Platte River near the historic Livestock Exchange Building, once a buzzing market for cattle, sheep and swine, and the National Western Center, a complex where the annual National Western Stock Show is held.
These lamb producers now risk losing access to the market Superior Farms provides in 2026, as voters decide whether it should be unlawful to "construct, maintain or use" a slaughterhouse within the ci
ty and county. Pro-Animal Future, a group opposed to animal slaughter, secured the measure’s spot on the ballot last November after collecting 15,246 signatures, well above the 8,940-signature threshold.
Pro-Animal Future communications lead Olivia Hammond told Agri-Pulse that a ban would improve conditions for livestock, reduce waste from the facility and make it one less user of the region's precious water. She acknowledged "course adjustments" would be needed for producers who send sheep to the plant, but noted U.S. demand for lamb is already low and said she doesn't see its closure significantly affecting consumer food prices because "it's such a small drop in the bucket of a global supply chain."
“This is really more about Denver taking the lead on what we hope to be a gradual transition away from this type of industry,” she said. “We certainly understand that this sort of change can be uncomfortable in the short term, but we do believe a transition towards more sustainable and ethical practices will ultimately benefit the local economy.”
Faced with the threat of losing the plant, Superior Farms has poured $160,228 into a campaign opposing the effort, according to the Denver city and county clerk and recorder’s office. State and national groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, Colorado Livestock Association, National Pork Producers Association and United Food and Commercial Workers Union have also contributed
All told, opponents have pooled $645,392 into fighting the measure. Proponents, meanwhile, have spent $202,886 in their effort, with $191,396 of that coming from Pro-Animal Future.
Superior Farms operates another packing plant in California, so the company would live on if the Denver facility were to close, President and CEO Rick Stott told Agri-Pulse. But 160 workers at the plant would likely lose their jobs as well as benefits tied to their equity stakes in the employee-owned firm. The measure includes language directing the city to prioritize the workers for workforce training and employment assistance programs, which Hammond said is intended to help offset job loss impacts.
Rebuilding the Denver facility elsewhere wouldn’t be easy, Stott added. It would cost about $60 million, take three to five years, and require the company to rebuild both its workforce and customer base. Ranchers who sell to the plant would lose a market for their sheep, at least temporarily.
“The bigger concern is really the producers,” Stott said. “They don’t just disappear and then restart again — that’s not the way it works in lamb production.”
The U.S. sheep industry today is a shadow of what it was 100 years ago, with 5.03 million head remaining in a herd that once was 51 million. Per capita consumption of lamb, which was 5 pounds a year in 1960, has fallen to just over a pound, according to USDA’s Economic Research Service, and lamb now makes up less than 1% of U.S. livestock receipts.
Today, two-thirds of the the nation’s lamb herd is in the Great Plains and West, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Texas, the top producing state, contains 655,000 head, while California and Colorado followed with 500,000 and 400,000, respectively. Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, South Dakota and Montana all follow in terms of production.
While Superior Farms’ facility is one of 22 USDA-inspected lamb slaughter plants in Colorado, it is one of only two that can process more than 100,000 head each year. Capacity in the region was already stretched thin by the 2020 bankruptcy of a 800,000-head plant in Greeley, despite new facilities in Brush and San Angelo, Texas emerging to help fill gaps.
“It is like a big fish in a small fish bowl — that is what this plant is,” said Colorado State University Agricultural Economist Dawn Thilmany. “It is not what we consider one of the big grandaddies of the meat processing industry, but for this sector — which is small — it’s a very big deal.”
Thilmany, along with four other Colorado State researchers, wrote in a recent analysis that the closure “is likely to substantially impact the U.S.-based lamb supply chain.” Lamb prices are certain to go up if it shuts down, she told Agri-Pulse.
Processing options for sheep have been in decline nationwide. The number of slaughter plants required to submit data to USDA’s Packers and Stockyards Division because they purchase $500,000 or more in lamb annually fell to 58 in 2021, a 21% drop from the 71 reported in 2020 and a 28% decline since 2015, when 81 lamb slaughter plants submitted reports.
The lack of alternatives for large-scale processing has Jake Nelson, an employee of Harper Lamb Feeders in Eaton, Colorado, worried. Most of the 90,000 lambs the feedlot brings in each year from farms across Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Utah are sold under contract to the Denver plant. The feedlot does around $20 million in business with Superior Farms annually.
If the plant closes, Harper Lamb likely would scale down operations by 50% to 70%, Nelson guesses. The company would not only need to find alternate places for its lambs but also decide whether it can continue paying $75,000 in trucking costs and up to $10 million in feed costs each year. He fears the ban would leave only a market to support 15,000 lambs in the feedlot.
“There’s no question that I’d have to scale back,” said feedlot owner Mike Harper. “Especially since that’s really the only place I’m going with livestock currently.”
While Superior Farms’ Stott noted that the Denver plant’s size allows him to sell to large retailers such as Walmart and Kroger that smaller processors generally don’t have the capacity to supply, he said some customers have warned him that they will look outside of the U.S. for lamb and mutton if the measure passes. Imports (see chart) already make up more than half of the nation’s supply of these meats, according to USDA.
“All this is going to do is just disrupt American farmers,” said Peter Orwick, executive director of the American Sheep Industry Association. “It doesn’t shut down lamb consumption. It just shuts down, in Denver, one plant.”
The Denver plant is one of the few facilities that cut lamb carcasses into retail-ready pieces, a process known as fabrication. Colorado’s other major lamb plant, a 165,000-head-per-year facility owned by Colorado Lamb Processors, does not fabricate but instead sends carcasses elsewhere to be broken down into smaller pieces, according to the Colorado State report.
The Colorado State analysis isn’t without critics. University of Colorado Denver economics instructor Kyle Montanio, in an informal review of the report, wrote that it “fails the sniff test for reasonability” and “should be read in the context of industry propaganda,” according to a collection of his notes provided to Pro-Animal Future and later shared with Agri-Pulse.
The closure of a larger facility in Greeley in 2020, Montanio said, did not have the noticeable effect of causing the “majority of sheep ranchers” to lose their livelihoods. A potential rise in meat prices stemming from the possible closure of the Denver plant, he added, is “unlikely to even be noticeable.”
“This report reads as a heavily-biased opinion piece that ignores any and all benefits of removing the processing facility, most notably climate change is not even mentioned, and appears to drastically exaggerate costs,” he wrote.
Thilmany, the Colorado State economist, told Agri-Pulse the researchers worked on the report independently and received no money from any parties in the debate for doing so. She said it was motivated by many questions the university received about the measure and that the authors specifically focused on potential economic impacts in Colorado, since that is their area of expertise.
Hammond, with Pro-Animal Future, pointed to Superior Farms’ animal handling and environmental practices as reasons for a ban. She mentioned a 2017 lawsuit by the animal rights group Animal Outlook that accused the company of violating humane slaughter laws in its Dixon, California, plant after one of its members working undercover as an employee recorded video inside. Stott described the accusations as “blatantly false.”
A federal judge dismissed the case in 2019 after Superior Farms’ parent entity, Transhumance Holding Company, and USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service agreed to a settlement in which the company admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to designate a humane handling coordinator, provide refresher training on humane animal handling to employees, and ensure it is actively halal certified by a recognized, outside entity.
Hammond also pointed to an enforcement and compliance summary on the Environmental Protection Agency website that indicates a Clean Water Act violation has been “identified" at the Denver location but has not led to any enforcement or penalties. Stott, asked about the listing, called the EPA website “poorly designed” and said all the plant’s wastewater is managed by the city of Denver, so it “is not regulated under the Clean Water Act at all.”
If passed, the ban would go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, giving Superior Farms and producers a year to adjust. But for now, its fate is up to Denver voters.
Ranchers who depend on the plant, in the meantime, watch with trepidation as they await a decision. It could keep their main customer in business. Or it could force them to find a new market, scale back their herds or sell out entirely.
Only time will tell.
“It’s like a constant black cloud looming over the top of us right now,” Nelson, the Harper Lamb Feeders employee, said of the uncertainty.
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