Farm Futures
Dwarfed by five stainless steel grain-storage bins outside the Root Shoot malt house in Loveland, Emily Olander gestures toward the horizon. A two-story cookie-cutter house with a white fence peeks out from the rolling green land. “See that?” 38-year-old Emily asks. “That’s what we don’t want.”
The Olanders, who farm nearly 2,200 acres in northern Colorado and run a malt business that regularly supplies 150 breweries in the state, have nothing against the homeowners, of course. It’s the big-picture development they’re wary of—an encroaching sprawl that’s gobbling up farmland along Colorado’s I-25 corridor faster than older farmers can devise ways to affordably retire without selling their fields to the developers behind the ubiquitous mixed-use retail and residential enclaves.
According to land conservation nonprofit Colorado Open Lands (COL), the Centennial State lost 7.4 million acres of farmland between 1950 and 2010. A northbound drive from Denver along the interstate reveals one reason why: Pocket after pocket of tract-housing subdivisions have been plunked in the middle of open space and ag land. Perhaps it’s necessary to accommodate Colorado’s population boom. Our state’s population has swelled by nearly 4.5 million people since 1950, with about two million more projected to
