Foster Farms finds Northern Colorado not that interested

WELD COUNTY – The feathers have settled, but the chickens won’t be coming home to roost.

After months of courtship with Northern Colorado communities, Livingston, Calif.-based Foster Farms decided its idea of building a chicken-processing facility in the region was not going to hatch.

The company, founded in 1939 and one of the nation’s largest providers of poultry products, was looking for a site in Northern Colorado to grow and process fresh chicken for Rocky Mountain region consumers. The company held out the tantalizing possibility of a $300 million investment in the construction of a processing operation and up to 1,200 jobs.

But some large hurdles – including water availability, labor and grower interest – eventually combined to be insurmountable, said Don Jackson, Foster Farms president.

“No one single thing decided it one way or the other,” Jackson said. “When you take all of the multitude of factors, the economics did not justify the investment.”

Jackson said Northern Colorado was viewed as a location of interest for the company as it continues to expand. “The foremost attraction was our brand stands for locally grown chicken and the target market is the Rocky Mountain West, so Colorado was a logical location for that,” he said.

Jackson said he believed meetings held with local farmers this spring indicated there was sufficient interest in getting between 60 and 75 to each invest a couple of million dollars or so to build chicken houses and become part of the Foster Farms team.

Jackson said he also felt enough water could be obtained for the water-intensive operation, although at a higher cost than had been anticipated. As for labor, again Jackson said he believed there would be enough local workers to staff the feed mill, hatchery and processing plant that would be the core of the operation.

“Labor was challenging, but in the end we determined we could get that done,” he said.

How much those 1,200 jobs were going to pay eventually became a sticking point in the minds of some local officials, who worried that an expected pay scale of less than $10 an hour would not be attractive to the local labor pool.

At least not to legal residents – although that’s a point that most don’t want to publicly expound upon.

Jackson said he did not know how much workers in Northern Colorado would have been paid had an operation been set up. “Until you begin hiring people, you don’t know where that’s going to end up,” he said. “The closer you are to a large population, the less you have to pay and more when it’s a smaller population.”

No request for support

Sarah MacQuiddy, president of the Greeley-Weld Chamber of Commerce, said her organization never officially weighed in on the Foster Farms possibility even though Weld County was a prime contender for the operation.

“The chamber really did not take a position one way or the other on Foster Farms,” she said. “We did not get a request for support from Foster Farms. I think it might have been a very interesting discussion had they brought it to the chamber because the pay was so low and they would have had trouble getting any incentives from the city (of Greeley).”

MacQuiddy said whether the eventual result of Foster Farms coming to the area would have been a positive development remains an open question. “We want to see a healthy business community grow, and that happens at a faster pace if the jobs are higher paying,” she said. “It could have been a good addition to agriculture, but would it have been the best thing for the region especially with wages and water? I don’t know.”

MacQuiddy said Foster Farms may have been one of those companies that don’t quite make the cut when it comes to advancing the area’s economic base. “If you asked what kind of industry we’d like to attract, I’m not sure this would have been on the list. Economic development is something every community is hungry for, but we want to make sure it’s the right match.”

MacQuiddy said there was no shortage of opinions about Foster Farms while it was considering the area. “Some said this complements the agricultural base, while others said we don’t want any more low-paying jobs here,” she said. “We heard from both sides, and quite loudly.”

Even though Foster Farms has packed its bags and gone back to California, MacQuiddy said she thinks the possibility remains open for another round of talks with the company if it continues to be interested in a Rocky Mountain presence.

“Who knows, they may want to come back and revisit this at some point in the future and we would welcome that discussion,” she said. “Never say never.”

But Jackson, perhaps still smarting from spending months in the region without a successful outcome, is in no hurry to make a return trip.

“We’ll continue to look at how to grow our business but we’re not actively looking anywhere at the moment,” he said.

Steve Porter covers agribusiness for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 225 or at sporter@ncbr.com.

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