NIWOT, Colo.—Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy founder Jim Schott had what he calls a “very bad experience” the first time he tried to get a large grocery chain to offer his cheese.
The former college professor, who started the dairy with a handful of goats in Boulder County about 20 miles northwest of Denver, set samples on the cheese buyer’s desk, hoping she would open a box for a taste.
“The response I got was, ‘This is really ugly packaging, do you have a UPC, do you have nutritional information,'” Schott recalls. The buyer shoved the package back across her desk and told him the chain would think about it.
Today the dairy’s sales span several states, white-tablecloth restaurants and that same big chain, and the dairy is growing. In fact, cheesemaking operations are moving to a new site to accommodate up to 300 goats with the help of a public-private deal to take over roughly 80 acres once used by another dairy.
The city of Boulder and Boulder County paid $950,000 for about 50 acres that it will lease to the dairy. The dairy chipped in $650,000 for the rest of the land.
Schott said that decades ago Boulder County had several dairies, but now his is believed to be the only goat dairy left. Haystack Mountain almost didn’t stay either. If it hadn’t been for the deal with the city and county, Haystack may have had to move to cheaper land in nearby Weld County, Schott said.
Boulder County has been working to preserve land even as developers work on housing and commercial projects to serve a growing population in the Denver metro area.
In 2006, Colorado had an estimated 30.7 million acres of land in farms, which includes pasture, ranches and idle land, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. That was down from about 32.5 million in 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Like the rest of the Denver metro area, Boulder County has grown in the past decade. “What’s different is we’ve also preserved land as open that’s never going to get developed,” said Ron Stewart, county director of parks and open space. “What you see now in Boulder County is substantially what you’re going to see in the future.”
Between 1959 and 1974, Boulder County led the state in consuming agricultural land for other acres, the county said. It had 287,466 acres of farmland in 1959. That acreage was 157,493 in 1992.
Preserving farmland meets wishes of county residents, who love the look of open land but also land where food can be produced locally, Stewart said.
The county adopted a comprehensive plan in 1978 to manage its land.
“One of the major goals of the plan is to preserve farming, the rural flavor in the county, and not just have constant development from one end of the county to the other,” Stewart said.
“If you have a lot of land preserved, one of the really great ways to take care of it is to have farmers continue to take care of it.”
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USDA farm figures:
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