Looking at Fremont County CO as possible retirement... (Denver, Colorado Springs: loft, lawyers)

[codreams]

My husband and I are looking for an affordable area in CO to retire to in four years. We currently live in MD and commute an hour each way to work in DC, so we are used to a long commute. When we retire our three children will be in their mid teens. We also have four horses. We are currently thinking about Fremont County as a good location. It seems to be close enough to CS and Pueblo for jobs and colleges for the kids to commute to when they are older. It also seems like a good place to get plenty of land at an affordable rate. We need acreage for our horses. Can anyone comment on this area? Is it suitable for horses? Can you grow grass in pastures? I also have several barn cats. Can you keep cats outside in this area? I am worried about coyotes. Any advice?

[jazzlover]

I happen to like Fremont County, but I'm not sure it would be exactly what you are looking for. First, the commute to Colorado Springs or Pueblo is about 40 to 45 miles one-way. US 50 to Pueblo is 4-lane all the way, so that commute is not bad. Colorado 115 is basically two-lane (with a few passing lanes here and there) from Penrose to Fort Carson. It gets a lot of traffic and can be nasty at times in the winter. To go Colorado Springs on occasion I wouldn't consider troublesome--to have to drive it daily would be a pain, in my opinion. As I have posted many times before, I think long commutes anywhere are going to be a real problem as fuel prices head for the stratosphere, and I see nothing that is going to prevent that from happening over the long term.

The Canon City area is arid. Unless you buy irrigated ground, which is getting very expensive, you will be supplemental feeding horses most of the year. For four horses, you would need a hundred acres or more to support them on dry graze--and that would be pushing it. People do try to have horses on less acreage, and the result is usually overgrazed pastures full of noxious weeds. Check with the CSU Extension Service on what carrying capacities are on dry graze and you will see what I mean. I believe that Nadine, who lives in the Canon City area and posts on this board, has horses and could give more insight.

People do keep cats outside, but there are predators--coyotes, mountain lions, eagles, and hawks. There are also plenty of rattlesnakes around Canon City--I have personal experience on that one.

Finally, though it is no deterrent in my mind for living there, Canon City/Florence is the "prison capital" of Colorado, with numerous state correctional facitlities located there, along with the "Supermax" federal facility south of Florence, where the nation's most dangerous criminals are housed. The good news about the prisons in Fremont County are that they are stable employers that aren't going to be going anywhere, no matter what the rest of the economy does. Given Colorado's increasingly "funny money" economy, that may be a big plus for the Fremont County area in the years ahead.

[mnaallen]

that might be of interest to you. We recently bought 35 acres in Custer county, (just south of Fremont county). I plan to have a couple horses once we get settled there and have been researching the grazing question myself.

http://www.coopext.colostate.edu/boulder/AG/GrazingStrategies.pdf (broken link)

Pasture Management for Horses on Small Acreage (broken link)

[jazzlover]

Here is a good synopsis on grazing in this region--this is from New Mexico, but range types in Fremont County would be pretty similar. http://www.nm.nrcs.usda.gov/news/pub...agegrazing.pdf . People moving to Colorado from wetter climates just do not realize how arid the region is. Much of the dry graze lands in Colorado require anywhere from 40 to 80 acres to support ONE animal unit (like a horse) for one year on forage available on the parcel! The amount of overgrazing in the state on 35 acre "ranchettes" is just pitiful. Those are the most prevelent sources of noxious weeds that are now spreading to bigger ranches and to the public lands. Rural "development" is not the benign creature than many think that it is. It is having bad long-term consequences.

[mnaallen]

I have been there and have seen the type of forage that is available. I have also done a great deal of research...and understand fully that having horses on our acreage will require supplemental feeding. Part of the reason that we settled on the property that we did is because it has two meadows that we can rotate for turn-outs to avoid any risk of overgrazing and/or erosion issues. The last thing we want is to turn the property into bare dirt and rock. Additionally, I wouldn't expect the existing forage to be adequate to feed horses for other reasons as well, including nutritional value.

[codreams]

Thanks everyone for the great input. We currently commute 56 miles each way to work, and I don't want to put my kids in that position. Since my husband and I are both cops, the prison thing doesn't bother me. Sounds like the community has a lot of fellow LE types. The pasture situation does surprise me, though. I found a map online that shows farmland in CO by county. Fremont County was one of the counties shown as farmland. What are y'all growin out there? HMMM...I was looking for the other type of grass, ya know, for my horses. LOL. Anyhoo, can anyone suggest an area where we could grow pasture, live within a reasonable commute of CS, say 45 minutes or so, and still have pretty mountain views. I'm not real interested in the plains. All I can think of is miles of nothing to look at and tornadoes. I have that here, something else I want to leave behind. Any ideas? Thanks

[jazzlover]

You are going to have trouble supporting very many horses on any small acreage that is not irrigated--anywhere in Colorado, period. There are two major limitiing factors to forage besides soil--precipitation and growing season. Good forage production requires adequate precipitation and a long enough growing season. In most places in Colorado, those two factors are exclusive of each other. Areas that get more precipitation are usually at higher elevations and thus have a shorter growing season. Lower elevation areas have a longer growing season, but get less precipitation. That is why irrigation is so important. Read the other threads on Colorado water rights and issues and it will help you understand why water is so important to ag in Colorado, and why there are more water lawyers here than anywhere else in the country. It ain't the East, or even the Midwest. If you're going to have horses anywhere on a small parcel of land in Colorado, you better get to know somebody who will sell you good hay--you're gonna need it . . .

[codreams]

Jazzlover, is hay a problem in CO as well? Do they grow it in the plains areas? We had a terrible hay shortage here in So. MD. I had to get hay from NY this year at $5.50 a bale. Last year I bought it locally for $3.25 a bale. I also had to buy enough for the entire winter, instead of buying it in smaller parcels throughout the winter. Then I had to buy a hay elevator because my husband was not about to toss 420 bales of hay in the loft at once. In all, it cost me $3500 this winter for the hay and the elevator. When we visited CO in 2000, we saw horses all over the State, from Divide to Durango. Does everyone have to rely on hay? Another thing that worries me is the mountain lions. Have you ever heard of people losing horses to mountain lions? Do you know anyone with horses in CO that could advise? Thanks

[jazzlover]

Most people with horses have to supplemental feed with hay, particularly in the winter. Colorado traditionally has been a pretty big hay producing state. There are areas in the mountains that are naturally sub-irrigated and produce excellent native hay. There is also quite a bit of hay produced in man-irrigated areas in the mountains. Both of these types of hay production areas, however, have been a favorite target of Front Range cities for water sources. Colorado Springs and Denver dried up one of the largest subirrigated pasture and hay areas in the state, South Park, starting about 35 years ago. Front Range cities also own substantial water rights on ag land in other irrigated areas--water that they have not chosen yet to divert--they will.

There is a lot of hay produced in irrigated areas of the lower elevations of Colorado--primarily alfalfa hay. Prices vary greatly from season to season and year to year. This website ( NASS - Colorado Reports and Statistics ) can give you a lot of information on Colorado hay and crop production.

As to mountain lions attacking horses, you should ask someone who has horses. I personally have not heard of very many attacks by lions on adult horses, but they can certainly take down a colt with ease. Over the years, I have lived in two different places in Colorado and Wyoming, both close to towns, where a mountain lion took down an adult deer in my back yard. Draw your own conclusion.

[codreams]

Thanks so much for the great info. Thanks to MNAALLEN as well. I checked out the links you both gave me and got some better ideas for managing the pastures I have now in MD. Coincidentally, I have the exact set-up they showed, with the barn, the sacrifice area and the fields, but what I learned from these links is that I am not using the sacrifice area enough. I call it my dirt paddock. If I keep going the way I have the past three years, I'm going to have fields of dirt. Thanks again for the great info.