In 2018, Caleb Fletcher, a 34 year old man from Silver Ridge, Colorado, dreamed of escaping poverty by raising pigs. For years he had worked construction jobs that barely paid enough to support his family, and every winter the layoffs returned like a bad season that never truly ended, so when he heard that a piece of unused mountain land outside the town of Pine Valley was available for rent he believed he had finally found the chance to change his life.
The land belonged to an elderly rancher named Walter Grayson, who rarely climbed the steep road anymore because of his age, and he agreed to rent the remote property to Caleb for a small yearly fee as long as Caleb maintained the land and respected the forest around it.
The place sat high above the valley where pine trees covered the hills and a narrow dirt road twisted up the mountain like a long brown ribbon. To Caleb the view alone felt like a promise of a better future.
He poured every dollar he had into the project. He used his savings, borrowed money from relatives, and even took a loan from Frontier Agricultural Credit Union, a small lender in nearby Summit City that supported local farmers.
With that money he built wooden pig pens, installed a deep well pump to draw water from underground, and purchased thirty healthy piglets from a breeder across the county. The work took months, but when the final boards were nailed into place he stood proudly in the center of the mountain clearing and imagined the farm that would one day grow there.
The morning he transported the piglets up the mountain he felt as proud as if he had already succeeded. His wife Angela Fletcher, who was thirty one and expecting their first child, watched him load the animals into a trailer outside their small rented house.
Before leaving he placed his hand gently on her shoulder and said with a hopeful smile, “Just wait for me. Give it a year and we will finally build a house that belongs to us.”
Angela wanted to believe him because she knew how much this dream meant to her husband, yet life rarely follows the simple success stories people see on television. Only three months after the farm began operating a disaster swept across many livestock farms in the western states when a d/ea/dly strain of swine fever began spreading rapidly through the region.