Prime Dining

It may seem unusual, but look closely and you will see a hog farm, in sin city!

Bob Combs is the owner of R.C. farms. It’s small by Heartland standards — just 160 acres. But wedged into the suburbs of this growing southwest city, it stands out.

Ask Bob how many hogs he’s raising and he points to his pens, "When we are running full capacity, 6000 hogs. That’s counting everything, the little bitty ones to the sows."

But raising thousands of hogs in a desert city creates a problem, and it’s not a small one. There are no cornfields here to provide food. But Bob Combs is no fool. He knew that when he started R.C. Farms 40 years ago. Who needs corn, when there is plenty of food just on the other side of town!

"Yes, that’s my cornfield out there in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas strip. When the tens of millions of visitors pack up and go home, they leave behind lots of leftovers! About a pound per tourist or per person per day.

So Las Vegas casinos, hotels and restaurants pay Bob to sort their leftovers and haul off the food scraps to his farm. Most of it gets cooked again to kill off any possible bacteria, and within hours it ends up as feed in pig pens.

Bob says, "When we are up full capacity we’ll haul a thousand tons a month of food waste, of food scraps." Bob considers himself a farmer, but most of his business actually comes from the sorting and hauling of trash. Hotels pay thousands of dollars a month for waste recycling services. It’s a lucrative line of work, but Bob Combs insists it’s not just about the money. Recycling and conservation are his strongly held beliefs, and he sees this farm as a way to advance that mission. Even expired milk doesn’t go to waste.

Bob says, "Waste not, want not is one term my mother always told me when I was growing up. And she was from hard times in Kentucky back in the depression."

If you look around Bob’s farm, almost everything has had some prior use, Bob points to a field piece from an old World War Two landing strip. "This is an example here. This is old WW2 landing strip. It’s used as fencing in our operation now-most of our fencing as you will see throughout the ranch. I guess we could have gone out and bought fencing."

Bob believes in the three "R’s", reduce, reuse, and recycle.  But Bob’s wife, Janet, has come up with a fourth R. She says, "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle and ridiculous! And there’s quite a bit of that around here too. I have to really get after him to get some new things every now and then."

Want more proof of his conviction to the conservation message?  Bob’s had many developers knock on his door offering to buy his 160 acres.  He’s turned them all down including 70 million dollar offers! His response?

"Yeah, they flash some pretty big numbers in front of me. If that was my purpose or endeavor was to make money, I would have, should have took that and run. But that’s not my purpose. I feel I want to preach to people on conservation of resources."

But as homes have been built closer, he’s faced complaints about the odor from the farm and increased pressure to shut it all down.   For the record, Bob was here decades before the stucco tract housing. And he says he’s trying to be a good neighbor. "We had to put in a certain amount of concrete; we’re still putting some in, to cut the odor down. Because our neighbors are getting close. They sure are getting close. You work at getting the odor down and they keep moving closer!

For now, Bob is practicing what he preaches. The leftovers are flowing, the hogs are hungry.

Some Pork Particulars
People around the world eat more pork than any other meat. In the United States, pork is third behind beef and poultry. By the way, animal experts say pigs are very smart. When it comes to animal intelligence only chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are smarter.