 Sheep-Feeding Farm of Mr. Peter Anderson |
Stock Raising
"The encroachment of new settlers who took up the land for farming purposes so lessened the grazing grounds that flock-masters were impelled to move into Wyoming and Montana to find pasture for their flocks so that but a few range sheep, comparatively speaking, are now kept in the county (Watrous, 1911, p. 151)."The first lamb raising in the South Platte River Valley was in 1889, when Bennett Brothers shipped 2,400 lambs to Larimer County from New Mexico. Alfalfa was plentiful in the Valley, and the lamb industry took hold ten years prior to the beet sugar industry, which then provided by-products for lamb feed (Steinel, 1926, p. 150). The people in northern Colorado could boast that more lambs were fed there than any other district in the United States.
Beef cattle production came into the Valley in the late 1870s, but did not become a significant enterprise until the beet sugar industry was established and provided the necessary by-products for cattle feed (Steinel, 1926, p.151).