Denver voters elect to keep city’s only slaughterhouse open
share
Nov. 5, 2024 update: Denver voters elected to keep the city’s only slaughterhouse open, a blow for the organizers of Ordinance 309.
The 160 workers at Superior Farms, in Globeville, will be able to keep their jobs, and business will go on as usual for Colorado’s lambing industry. Seventy-five percent of the lamb at Superior Farms Denver comes from local ranchers in the state.
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” Gustavo Fernandez, General Manager of Superior Farms Denver, said in a press release from the opposition campaign. “I and the workers at this facility just want to do our jobs and provide for our families. Now we can get back to that without this huge weight on our shoulders.”
Natalie Fulton, a spokesperson for Pro-Animal Future, the animal rights organization that got the measure on the ballot, said she doesn’t see the defeat as a loss.
“The fact that the meat industry is terrified of us, that they've spent over $2 million against our campaigns — we know that we are on the right track because of that,” she said.
In total, “Stop the Ban, Protect Jobs (No on 309)” spent almost $2.5 million in opposition to the ordinance, dwarfing the $339,000 raised by the campaign in support of the ordinance.
You can read our original reporting on this story below.
This is the first article in a series of articles and videos covering Colorado’s sheep industry.
Original article:
DENVER — In the middle of Denver’s most industrialized and polluted neighborhood,
more than 100 workers in green hard hats and white smocks stand in assembly lines, slicing slabs of meat, loading ground meat into automated machines and preparing boxes for shipping.
Largely hidden in plain sight near the Platte River and I-70 in Globeville, Superior Farms is the largest lamb slaughterhouse and processing facility in the country.
Every week, workers at the 6-acre facility process about 5,000 head of sheep, with trucks regularly offloading them from feedlots in Northern Colorado.
Superior Farms has operated its Denver plant since 1996 and handles almost one-fifth of the nation’s lamb — including 70% from local Colorado ranchers. They also have a plant in Dixon, California, which processes similar, though slightly smaller quantities of lamb.
But the Denver facility would no longer exist if Ordinance 309 passes this November.
One of the more controversial measures on this year’s ballot, Ordinance 309 asks Denver voters whether or not to prohibit slaughterhouses within the city limits beginning in 2026. It would, by default, ban Denver’s only existing slaughterhouse, Superior Farms.
The measure was brought forward by a grassroots group called Pro-Animal Future, who also placed Ordinance 308, a proposed ban on the sale of fur, on Denver’s ballot. Their goal: end industrialized animal agriculture.
“We want to see a world where there is no factory farming,” said Natalie Fulton, a spokesperson for Pro-Animal Future who was invited to the campaign after amassing a social media following with her vegan content.
“If there's animal farming, it would be done at a much smaller scale,” Fulton said. “But what we eventually want is for the world to evolve away from using animals as resources.”
There are some indications that there is support for shutting down slaughterhouses. In a 2021 survey of more than 1,500 Americans conducted by the Sentience Institute, a think tank researching social and technological change, 49% of respondents said they were in favor of banning slaughterhouses and 53% said they were in favor of banning factory farming.
Pro-Animal Future is starting its campaign in Denver with Ordinance 309 and hoping to eventually get a statewide factory farm ban on the ballot.
“We haven't run a campaign before, so we wanted to start smaller,” said Fulton.
“You need a lot more signatures to work up to a statewide ban. And we don't feel we have the experience or the training or the volunteer power yet.”
When Rocky Mountain PBS accompanied Fulton as she canvassed Denver’s Washington Park with her team in early September, most people she spoke with expressed support for their efforts.
Natalie Fulton, a spokesperson for the “Yes on 309” campaign canvassed in Denver’s Washington Park in early September, explaining the proposed slaughterhouse ban and asking Denverites about their views on the treatment of animals. Video: Andrea Kramar, Rocky Mountain PBS
The initiative is one of a small but growing number of similar efforts gaining steam across the country. California’s Prop 12, which voters passed in 2018, established minimum square footage requirements for certain livestock operators; voters in Boulder banned fur in 2021; and voters in Sonoma County, California will decide this November whether to ban large factory farms within its county limits.
To understand how the proposed slaughterhouse ban could affect the state of Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with members of the “Yes on 309” campaign, employees of Superior Farms, Colorado sheep ranchers, animal behaviorist Dr. Temple Grandin and political scientists.
An industry already in decline
Colorado is the third-largest producer of sheep and lamb in the U.S., trailing only Texas and California, according to the American Sheep Industry Association. But the industry has declined dramatically over the past several decades, from producing a high of 56 million head in 1945 (when wool was in high demand during World War II), to 7 million head in 2000 to 5 million in 2024.
The two main reasons for the decline in sheep production in the U.S. have been decreasing demand for wool and lamb meat, according to the Animal Agriculture Alliance.
Wool, once a strategic commodity, is now often replaced with synthetic materials. Since the 1960s, lamb and mutton per capita consumption has declined by about 5 pounds per year to 1 pound per year, as poultry, pork and beef gained greater popularity.
Ranchers and industry fights back
John Field, president of the Colorado Wool Grower’s Association and a fourth generation sheep rancher living in Montrose, said he wished it were harder to get items on the ballot.
“We have an onslaught of these things that are aimed at taking agriculture out of the picture,” he said, citing the trophy hunting ban (Prop 109 on this year’s ballot), the fur ban (Ordinance 308 on this year’s ballot), and the reintroduction of wolves to the state (Prop 114, passed in 2020).
“I don’t know if the industry will recover,” he said of the slaughterhouse ban ordinance. “All my lambs historically have gone to that [Superior Farms] farm.”
Rancher John Field drove up to Lizard Head Pass near Telluride to visit one of his sheep herds in mid-August. Video: Cormac McCrimon, Rocky Mountain PBS
“It seems a little crazy that the only people that can vote are the people in Denver. But the ones that it really affects are the people outside of Denver — the ranchers and farmers,” Field said.
“It’s a matter of choice, if you don’t like to eat meat, don’t eat meat, it’s pretty simple. But don’t force the rest of us to close everything down.”
Ernie Etchart, another sheep rancher in Montrose who grew up ranching sheep with his dad Martin and brother George, worries the ban will raise his costs.
“I fear it's really going to decrease competition and force us to have to go further hauling our lambs to a processing facility,” he said.
Etchart sends his lambs — he raised about 4,800 this year — to both Superior Farms in Denver and Colorado Lamb Processors in Brush, the two largest lamb processing facilities in the state.
“Everybody's concerned. There’s no doubt,” Etchart said. “These initiatives are kind of hard to fight, especially when we can't vote on it. We'll do what we can to promote a “no” vote on it, but I don't know how much impact we can have.”
Pro-Animal Future, the organization who placed the measure on the ballot, did not consult with ranchers or the slaughterhouse prior to bringing the measure forward, Fulton said.
The “Stop the Ban: No on 309” campaign held a press conference in early September. Workers from the plant, Denver city council member Darrell Watson, chef Jose Avila and Paul Andrews, President of the National Western Stock Show, all spoke expressing their dismay over the proposed ordinance. Video: Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
The “Stop the Ban: No on 309” campaign has received financial contributions from ranching and livestock associations across the U.S., including Iowa Pork Producers, the Kansas Livestock Association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association .
They’ve also received support from local labor unions, including UFCW Local 7, SEIU Local 105 and the Denver Labor Federation. While Superior Farms is not unionized, it operates under an employee ownership model that grants workers stock options.
As of October 22, the “Stop the Ban: No on 309” campaign’s funding far eclipsed funding by supporters of the bill, based on Denver’s campaign finance disclosures.
A total of $1.93 million has been raised to oppose the ban, with the biggest contributions coming from the Meat Institute based in Arlington, Virginia; Superior Farms and the Colorado Livestock Association.
Proponents of the ordinance have raised $307,000, with money coming from animal-rights and environmental sustainability groups from outside the state, including the Phauna Foundation, the Karuna Foundation and the Craigslist Charitable Fund.
Pro-Animal Future has been campaigning at the grassroots level. Unlike some groups that hire outside professionals to gather signatures for their ballot measures, the team at Pro-Animal Future collected their own signatures — amassing about 15,000 for the slaughterhouse ban and another 15,000 for the fur ban.
About 150-200 people have been volunteering with Pro-Animal Future the past few months – 20-30 of whom have come in from out of state. “One of the great things about the animal rights movement is that people are so passionate,” said Natalie Fulton. Photo: Andrea Kramar, Rocky Mountain PBS
Employees worry about their future
Superior Farms in Denver employs 160 full-time staff in divisions including harvest (slaughter), case ready (cutting and prepping meats) and shipping and receiving.
The meat produced at Superior Farms — 12.7 million pounds in 2023 — is distributed to large retailers including Walmart, Kroger and Whole Foods and to local restaurants and pet food distributors.
If Ordinance 309 passes, those currently working for the plant, 80% of whom are Latino, would lose their jobs.
While the ordinance requires the city to “prioritize residents whose employment is affected” through “workforce training or employment assistance programs,” many of the employees Rocky Mountain PBS spoke to were skeptical.
“I'm having a little hard time believing that the city's going to provide 160 jobs for my employees and myself,” said Gustavo Fernandez, general manager of the plant who started working at the company in 1993 as a floor sweeper.
“It’s not easy to go find another job, especially one with benefits like a 401K and ESOP [employee stock ownership program],” Fernandez said.
Employees who have worked for the company for three years — or 1,000 hours in one calendar year, whichever comes first — can become an employee owner and receive stock in the company. Superior Farms is one of 124 companies in the state that offer this plan, a benefit several employees highlighted to RMPBS.
Isabel Bautista, operations manager for Superior Farms, said the company pays at the lowest rate, $19.50 an hour, and offers different pay scale levels up from there.
Employees receive two 10-minute rest breaks and one 30-minute meal break throughout their 10-hour work day. Video: Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
Paulina Herrera, another employee who has worked with the company for more than two decades, lives a 10 minute drive away from the plant and leaves for work each morning at 4:30.
When we visited the plant in early October, she was in an assembly line trimming skin off slabs of meat.
“This job means everything,” Herrera said in Spanish.
“It’s how I pay my bills, how I eat, how I pay for my house, my car and my kids,” she said.
Herrera said she worries she won’t be able to find another job if the plant closes.
Advocates for the ordinance have also enlisted the help of former slaughterhouse workers to call for their closure.
Jose Huizar, who in the 1980s worked at a Denver slaughterhouse owned by a different company, has been featured in the “Yes on 309” campaign.
In a Denver Post op-ed, Huizar said that his 10-hour shifts “slitting throats, stepping in guts, [and] ripping the skin from the spasming bodies,” led him to start using cocaine and other drugs to numb himself.
A 2023 study conducted by researchers at the University of Kent found that slaughterhouse workers have a higher rate of mental health issues, in particular depression and anxiety, “in addition to violence-supportive attitudes.”
While the work is often gritty and monotonous, one in six of Superior Farms’ employees have been with the company for more than 10 years, and one in four have worked there for more than five years, said Bob Mariano, a spokesperson for Superior Farms.
“People who apply to work at the facility get the full tour so they can understand exactly what these jobs entail and see if they are comfortable doing this kind of work,” Mariano said.
“Ultimately, this kind of work is not for everyone, and that’s ok.”
When Rocky Mountain PBS toured the plant in October with cameras, Bautista instructed the workers, in Spanish, to smile.
The message that workers and managers routinely shared with Rocky Mountain PBS was the fear of losing a job they wanted to keep.
Temple Grandin finds no major abuse in recent undercover video
In July and August, anonymous activists from Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) placed hidden cameras inside the Superior Farms facility.
Advocates for the ordinance published the two minute video in early October, saying it was an example of “horrific violence and unlawful animal cruelty.”
In the video, lambs hanging upside down on the slaughter line thrash about including one whose head bobs around in circles; one lamb appears to be injured or sick and is shoved up a chute by one of the workers; a worker grabs a lamb by its neck and kicks it to get it to stand up and walk up the chute; and one sheep leads other sheep into the slaughterhouse and is rewarded with treats and pets by the workers.
Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University with a 50- year career advancing the humane treatment of animals, analyzed the video for Rocky Mountain PBS. The following video contains graphic imagery, including the killing of animals.
By law, animals must be electrically stunned before slaughter, said Grandin, who consulted for Superior Farms in the past but not in recent years.
“What you do is pass an electric current through the brain, and it instantly makes them unconscious,” Grandin said. “That’s an approved method under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.”
The humane practice after stunning, Grandin said, is to cut their throat and let them bleed out.
In one of the clips, a group of hanging sheep with their throats slashed can be seen flailing about, their bodies convulsing.
“If I cut the head off a lamb, the body will still kick and move,” Grandin said, noting that
does not mean the lamb is conscious. “The kicking will continue until the muscles run out of oxygen which can continue for five minutes, sometimes.”
One lamb’s head, however, appears to move erratically, which Grandin said could be a sign it was still conscious, though she said it was hard to tell just from the video.
“If it was conscious, the correct thing to do would have been to take a handheld captive bolt and shoot it,” she said.
In another one of the clips, a sheep known as a “Judas sheep” leads the rest of the sheep off the truck and through the processing facility, where they will eventually be killed.
“That’s common practice,” Grandin said of the use of Judas sheep, which are sheep that work at the plant and herd the rest of the sheep through the slaughterhouse, and are generally rewarded and treated well by employees. “[Judas sheep] make the handling of sheep really easy for the unloading.”
“[Some people] don’t like the idea of a Judas sheep — they call it betrayal. But that’s a philosophical concern, it’s not a welfare concern,” Grandin said. “It’s actually good animal welfare.”
Grandin said she saw some handling that could use improvement, including a clip of an employee taking a downed, weak sheep and forcing it up a ramp.
“It was probably too weak to ask it to do that. The employees shown need some training on how to handle compromised animals,” she said, and noted that particular animal shouldn’t have been sent to the plant to begin with.
“That sheep should have been shot out in the feed yards.”
She also said that a clip of an employee aggressively grabbing a sheep by its head was not good handling. “I’d use that in a training video of what not to do.”
“I think what I would recommend to this plant, if they were my client, is they need to tighten up their procedures,” she said. “But I’m not going to call it egregious acts of abuse.”
Grandin said slaughterhouse regulations have been the same since 1978, and that in the 1980s, things were “really bad — that make this video look good.”
The future American diet
Fulton said she’d like to see more ranchers move away from animal agriculture, and hopes this measure could help with that transition.
“We know that we have to evolve past animal farming if we want to reach our climate targets. And we know that the plant-based food sector is growing,” she said. “I would tell them there are better opportunities [outside of ranching.]”
Colorado had 1,480 sheep farms and ranching operations in 2022, according to the USDA’s Census of Agriculture. Video: Andrea Kramar, Rocky Mountain PBS
Organizations such as The Transfarmation Project and the Rancher Advocacy Program help ranchers transition away from industrial animal agriculture into raising crops. The projects tout stories of Texan chicken farmers becoming hemp growers, and Iowa hog ranchers becoming mushroom operators.
But Grandin argued there is not enough water in areas of the U.S. to support a full transition to crops, due to lack of rainfall and limited aquifers.
“What do you do with the Sandhills of Nebraska? What do you do with Flint Hills in Kansas?” she said. “You’ve got eight inches of dirt and then you have rocks. As far as I'm concerned, there's a place for the grazing animal.”
Grandin said she believes there is a need for both small and large animal processing facilities in the U.S. Bigger facilities can have economies of scale on resources such as power and water and can produce food cheaper, she said.
But they are fragile. “When it breaks, you're really in trouble,” she said.
“I think we do have a need for more small local plants. But we should not be increasing that business by shutting down a bigger plant. We need both,” she said. “And one thing about having that plant in Denver, it is a local supply.”
Addressing Superior Farms violations
In September, Superior Farms agreed to pay a $119,000 penalty to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as half a million dollars in compliance costs for failure to identify hazards and maintain safe handling of anhydrous ammonia, a toxic chemical used to refrigerate meat.
Over the past four years, the company hasn’t filled out or hasn’t properly filled out its water discharge monitoring report, which it is required to do under the Clean Water Act. It has also been subject to several penalties by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“The broader concern I have whenever these questions come up in the context of this campaign is I don't think that means that the facility should be shut down and everybody should be fired. They're working within the regulatory process,” said Manny Gidfar, a spokesperson for the “Stop the Ban: No on 309” campaign.
“I think it's wrong to single out one business in a part of town that has many other industrial businesses, many of whom have similar settlements that are not being singled out with a ballot measure, and aren’t having all of their workers threatened with joblessness,” Gidfar said.
Superior Farms packing plant in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood. Video: Jeremy Moore, Rocky Mountain PBS
Like all plants engaged in livestock slaughter activities, Superior Farms is required to have USDA inspectors on site and currently has four inspectors at its Denver facility, said Isabel Bautista, operations manager at Superior Farms.
The USDA inspectors examine all the carcasses, looking for signs of pathogens and other diseases that would be unfit for human consumption, and examine all equipment to ensure it is properly sanitized.
All the meat processed as edible items are Halal-certified at Superior Farms, and the company employs three Muslim employees who oversee that process. Those employees are tasked with making the first cut of each animal and blessing the animal, and auditors come announced and unannounced throughout the year to ensure proper Halal compliance, Bautista said.
But animal rights and watchdog groups have pointed to at least one lawsuit that alleged the Denver location did not abide by proper Halal standards.
In 2021, a former Muslim employee of Superior Farms in Denver, Mohammad Syed, filed a complaint in Colorado's district court alleging racial and religious discrimination and alleged he was terminated in retaliation for making complaints about the company’s Halal certification protocol, which he said was not being properly followed and led to mislabeling meat.
When it’s up to the people, anything can happen
While it’s not common for measures to target specific businesses in Colorado, it is not unprecedented.
In 2018, Prop 112, which did not pass, would have restricted where new oil and gas development could occur, placing strict limitations on how a few businesses in the state could operate. Amendment 68 in 2014, which also was defeated, would have imposed a new tax on horse racetracks and allowed additional gambling at certain businesses.
When measures do pass by voters, it’s not always without friction.
“Sometimes they go to court and somebody challenges it,” said Paul Teske, dean of the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Public Affairs.
“I would guess if this [slaughterhouse ban] passed and the American legal system being what it is, that maybe the owners sue,” Teske said.
Teske said the implementation of the measures is another challenge.
“When these things pass, they're not always 100% clear what happens next and who does what, so there's definitely some negotiation,” he said. “There's just always a lot of implementation rules that may or may not be spelled out in the proposal.”
Natalie Fulton hand-writes postcards to voters in Denver, urging them to support Ordinances 308 and 309, the fur ban and slaughterhouse ban. Video: Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
If the ballot measure passes, Fulton said she will take a little vacation, and then get back to work on campaigns in Portland, Oregon and future campaigns in Denver.
“It would probably look like laws that require animals to have access to [the] outdoors or the ability to experience more natural behaviors,” she said.
If it doesn’t pass? “Then we are going to keep trying until we win,” she said. “We've seen that ballot measures are [an] effective way to change public opinion and policy.”
To learn more about Denver’s Initiated Ordinance 309, read more about it here.
Colorado allows voter registration through Election Day. More information is available here.
The deadline to vote by mail in Colorado has passed. If you have not voted yet, you can return your ballot to a drop-box, vote early at a polling center, or vote in-person on Election Day at a polling center. If you don't know where to return your ballot, click here for information from the Colorado Secretary of State's Office. November 5, Election Day, is the last day to vote.
Colorado allows voter registration through Election Day. More information is available here.
The deadline to vote by mail in Colorado has passed. If you have not voted yet, you can return your ballot to a drop-box, vote early at a polling center, or vote in-person on Election Day at a polling center. If you don't know where to return your ballot, click here for information from the Colorado Secretary of State's Office. November 5, Election Day, is the last day to vote.