CIBOLA – When Ron Swan first found this tiny riverside town in 1970, he was struck by its remote beauty and fertile lands. The jagged Trigo Mountains loomed off in the distance, and wild ponies and burros would soon roam freely in a wildlife refuge nearby.

Swan took one more look at his life in arid Casa Grande and never looked back.

“Water,” he says simply. “There’s a river here and an opportunity to really farm…In June, I’ll have been here 35 years, so I guess I like it.”

Today, Swan is 74. He runs one of the largest businesses in town, River Bottom Farms. It grows alfalfa, cotton, corn, wheat and Bermuda grass on the Arizona side of the Colorado River.

But Swan, like most of Cibola’s 200 residents, unknowingly face a colossal public health hazard.

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