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Did You Know That Colorado Has A 'Milkshed'? Thanks To Leprino It's A Booming One Too

Luke Runyon
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KUNC, Harvest Public Media
A curious Brown Swiss dairy cow peers over Casey DeHaan's rotary parlour outside Ault, Colo.

It’s no secret Northern Colorado is growing. Weld, Larimer and Boulder counties are welcoming thousands of new residents each year. People are flocking to the area, and population numbers are on the rise.

The same thing is happening with dairy cows.

Weld and Larimer already sport high numbers of beef and dairy cattle, buttressed by the region’s substantive feeding operations. But an expansion of a Leprino Foods-owned cheese factory in Greeley will require even more cows to churn out the milk needed to produce bricks of mozzarella cheese and whey protein powder.

Leprino’s cheese is ubiquitous, on everything from Papa John’s pizza to frozen dinners. The whey it extracts and processes can be found on shelves in nutrition stores. The privately-held company, based in Denver, is the largest mozzarella manufacturer in the world. You’ve likely eaten their cheese without knowing it since they sell their cheese wholesale to other brands.

Credit Luke Runyon / KUNC, Harvest Public Media
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KUNC, Harvest Public Media
Leprino Foods' headquarters sits in Denver's Highlands neighborhood, on the same block where the company first started making mozzarella cheese.

“There’s a good chance that if you go buy a bag of shredded mozzarella in the grocery store that it’s our cheese,” says Leprino executive Mike Reidy.

To make those products they need a ton of milk. Already, their Greeley plant, which started operations in 2011, takes in more than 5 million pounds of milk a day. Now, it’s about to expand. To do that, the company needs a lot more cows nearby.

“Generally the number we’ve been sharing with folks is about an incremental 30,000 cows,” Reidy says. “It’s a lot.”

Credit Luke Runyon / KUNC, Harvest Public Media
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KUNC, Harvest Public Media
Farmer Casey DeHaan is looking into expanding his herd, in part to meet Leprino's growing thirst for milk in Northern Colorado.

Casey DeHaan is one of those dairy farmers beefing up operations. His farm near Ault, Colorado looks pretty standard from the county road it sits on. There’s a big red barn, and a few pens full of cows. But inside that barn, those cows are filing onto a huge, metal merry-go-round.

“This is called a rotary parlour,” DeHaan says, while standing in the middle of the spinning apparatus. “It’s always moving and the cows get on and off.”

DeHaan’s been up and running here for eight years, after moving to Colorado from his home state of California.

“We went from 3,000 cows to 4,000 cows, and at that time Leprino was wanting more milk as well. Ultimately we’re shipping more milk down the road to the plant,” DeHaan says.

The Greeley facility takes in nearly all the milk DeHaan’s 4,000 cows churn out. Plus, the milk produced at his brother’s farm outside Fort Lupton. And much of the milk his neighboring dairy farmers produce. If you’re a large-scale dairy farmer in Weld, Larimer or Morgan counties there’s a good chance that you’ll be shipping your milk to Leprino.

Credit Luke Runyon / KUNC, Harvest Public Media
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KUNC, Harvest Public Media
Cows are milked using a rotary parlour on Casey DeHaan's dairy farm outside Ault, Colo.

The new factory has turned this once relatively modest dairy region into a growing milk production hub. In less than 20 years, from 1997 to 2015, the number of dairy cows in Larimer, Morgan, and Weld more than doubled.

Tom Haren helped make that growth happen. He’s the CEO of Ag Professionals, a consulting group in Northern Colorado that helps farmers expand their operations, or find locations for new farms. In the mid-2000s, his team worked with Dairy Farmers of America, the co-op that purchases milk for Leprino, to assess the area’s potential to be a thriving “milkshed,” a place capable of churning out vast volumes of milk.

“Does it have the water? Does it have the land? The regulatory environment? The political will? The interest in the farmers and the people? Does it have a market?” Haren says.

"We're dealing in agriculture, particularly with milk, with a perishable commodity. How long can you sit on it before it becomes something unusable?"

Most new dairies in Colorado are popping up within an 80 mile radius of the expanding Leprino plant, Haren says. Because milk can spoil quickly, and shipping it in big refrigerated trucks is expensive, dairy farmers want to be close to the companies who are buying their milk, and the people in cities who drink it.

“We’re dealing in agriculture, particularly with milk, with a perishable commodity,” Haren says. “How long can you sit on it before it becomes something unusable?”

In many ways, our food system is regional. Big cattle feedlots stake a claim near companies that produce hamburger meat, and large hog barns near bacon factories. Farms cluster around the factories that process their products, and processors move close to their suppliers.

When a big food company builds a factory, it doesn’t just bring in new industry and added jobs. Farmers change what they grow, expand their herds, and buy new land. The addition, or expansion of a new meatpacking plant or dairy company can quite literally change the landscape around it. Those changes don’t come without costs either.

The growing dairy region of Colorado is also seeing dramatic population growth. Water is limited. Many of the new and expanding dairies are finding themselves positioned near or within suburban communities.

You can see some of those rapidly growing neighborhoods from Casey DeHaan’s dairy farm. When he was designing his operation he tried hard to cut down on odors from manure and muddy pens. He has to if he wants to expand to meet Leprino’s thirst for milk.

“Eight million pounds of milk a day? They’re knocking on the door now wanting to get to that point,” DeHaan says. “I think the Colorado dairymen will do everything they can to help make that happen for them.”

As KUNC’s managing editor and reporter covering the Colorado River Basin, I dig into stories that show how water issues can both unite and divide communities throughout the Western U.S. I edit and produce feature stories for KUNC and a network of public media stations in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada.
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