Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Don Oppliger, one of the region’s largest agribusiness operators, has been killed in a helicopter crash in Castro County, Texas.
Parmer County Sheriff Randy Geries said Oppliger was piloting the helicopter and was its only occupant. One of Oppliger’s employees found the crash site early Sunday morning, but Geries said Oppliger may have been killed as early as Saturday afternoon.
“My office was contacted early (Sunday morning), about 6:30 or 7 Texas time,” Geries said. “Mr. Oppliger’s son reported him missing.”
Geries said Oppliger family members began looking for him “in the middle of the night,” after they realized he’d gone missing.
Geries said Parmer County deputies and dispatchers “got busy trying to ping his cell phone,” but an Oppliger employee found him soon after deputies began their search. Geries said Oppliger died at the scene of the crash, about a mile inside the Castro County line.
Cause of the crash was not immediately known.
The Oppliger Companies started with a feedlot outside Farwell and “have grown rapidly in size and now include six large-scale feedlots, over 55,000 acres of irrigated farmland, a dairy and thousands of acres of ranch land,” according to the company website.
The Farwell feedlot started with 15,000 head of cattle, the website states. Oppliger then acquired a 35,000 head feedlot near Clovis in 1991 before expanding again to Lincoln County, Nebraska, in 1998.
