{"id":290,"date":"2011-05-31T13:34:37","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T17:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.environmentalriskmanagers.com\/erm\/?p=290"},"modified":"2011-05-31T13:34:37","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T17:34:37","slug":"new-mexico-dairy-pollution-sparks-manure-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/new-mexico-dairy-pollution-sparks-manure-war\/","title":{"rendered":"New Mexico Dairy Pollution Sparks Manure War"},"content":{"rendered":"
The picture on many milk cartons shows cows grazing on a pasture next to a country barn and a<\/div>\n
silo \u2014 but the reality is very different.<\/div>\n
More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds<\/div>\n
live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm with 2,000 cows<\/div>\n
produces as much sewage as a small city, yet there’s no treatment plant.<\/div>\n
Across the country, big dairies are coming under increased criticism for polluting the air and the<\/div>\n
water. In New Mexico, they’re in the midst of a manure war.<\/div>\n
Manure Management<\/div>\n
Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure. New<\/div>\n
Mexico has 300,000 milk cows. That totals 5.4 million gallons of manure in the state every day.<\/div>\n
It’s enough to fill up nine Olympic-size pools. Every single day.<\/div>\n
Dealing with the waste \u2014 so-called “manure management” \u2014 is the dairy industry’s greatest<\/div>\n
environmental challenge.<\/div>\n
Farms dispose of waste in two ways.<\/div>\n
First, workers hose the muck off the concrete floor of a milking barn, and it flows into a plastic- or<\/div>\n
clay-lined lagoon where the liquid evaporates.<\/div>\n
Second, waste from the feedlot where the cows live is collected and used as fertilizer for grain<\/div>\n
crops.<\/div>\n
But the New Mexico Environment Department reports that two-thirds of the state’s 150 dairies are<\/div>\n
contaminating groundwater with excess nitrogen from cattle excrement. Either the lagoons are<\/div>\n
leaking, or manure is being applied too heavily on farmland.<\/div>\n
“As we get more and more monitoring data, what we see is that more and more dairies have<\/div>\n
contamination underneath them. So something isn’t working about those facilities,” says Marcy<\/div>\n

The picture on many milk cartons shows cows grazing on a pasture next to a country barn and a\u00a0silo \u2014 but the reality is very different.<\/p>\n

More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds\u00a0live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm with 2,000 cows\u00a0produces as much sewage as a small city, yet there’s no treatment plant.<\/p>\n

Across the country, big dairies are coming under increased criticism for polluting the air and the\u00a0water. In New Mexico, they’re in the midst of a manure war.<\/p>\n

Manure Management<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure. New\u00a0Mexico has 300,000 milk cows. That totals 5.4 million gallons of manure in the state every day.<\/p>\n

It’s enough to fill up nine Olympic-size pools. Every single day.<\/p>\n

Dealing with the waste \u2014 so-called “manure management” \u2014 is the dairy industry’s greatest\u00a0environmental challenge.<\/p>\n

Farms dispose of waste in two ways.<\/p>\n

First, workers hose the muck off the concrete floor of a milking barn, and it flows into a plastic or\u00a0clay-lined lagoon where the liquid evaporates.<\/p>\n

Second, waste from the feedlot where the cows live is collected and used as fertilizer for grain\u00a0crops.<\/p>\n

But the New Mexico Environment Department reports that two-thirds of the state’s 150 dairies are\u00a0contaminating groundwater with excess nitrogen from cattle excrement. Either the lagoons are\u00a0leaking, or manure is being applied too heavily on farmland.<\/p>\n

“As we get more and more monitoring data, what we see is that more and more dairies have\u00a0contamination underneath them. So something isn’t working about those facilities,” says Marcy\u00a0Leavitt, director of the department’s Water and Wastewater Division.<\/p>\n

The problem is worsened by the tendency of large dairies to cluster together.<\/p>\n

Dairy Row<\/strong><\/p>\n

On Dairy Row along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, more than\u00a030,000 cows live in 11 farms located one after the other.<\/p>\n

In the past four years, the EPA has repeatedly cited these dairies for violating the Clean Water\u00a0Act because manure-laced stormwater was washing into tributaries of the Rio Grande.<\/p>\n

“You hear it often in community meetings. People describe that maybe five, six, seven years ago\u00a0they could go out in front of their home and enjoy the afternoon, eat some food,” says community\u00a0organizer Arturo Uribe, who lives in Mesquite, Texas, which is in the middle of Dairy Row. “But\u00a0now what these folks are saying is when they go out there, there’s too many flies.”<\/p>\n

Even more serious than odor and flies is the threat to the watershed. In the town of Dexter, in\u00a0southeastern New Mexico, a dozen residential homes are surrounded by sprawling dairies on\u00a0three sides.<\/p>\n

Homeowner Herbie Rodriguez says he has been buying five-gallon bottles of water to drink and\u00a0cook with, though his family still washes with contaminated well water.<\/p>\n

“We were told that we couldn’t drink the water because it’s contaminated,” Rodriguez says. “On\u00a0a white, brand-new T-shirt, you can wash it in the water, brand-new, it would come out brownish,\u00a0beige. That’s how you could tell how bad the water was.”<\/p>\n

The trend in the dairy industry, like the rest of commodity agriculture, is toward fewer and larger\u00a0farms, which concentrates more manure in smaller geographic areas. Citizens are reporting\u00a0dairies contaminating ground and surface water across the nation \u2014 in the Yakima Valley in<\/p>\n

Washington; Brown County in Wisconsin; Hudson, Mich.; and now Dexter, N.M.<\/p>\n

The Winds Of Change<\/strong><\/p>\n

Among state regulators, there’s no question who’s to blame for fouling the groundwater in Dexter.\u00a0The water table is shallow in this part of the state, and monitoring wells downgradient of the\u00a0dairies all clearly show excess nitrates. The dairies are under state abatement plans to control\u00a0manure runoff.<\/p>\n

New Mexico’s dairy industry denies the New Mexico Environment Department’s figure that two-thirds of its farms are polluting groundwater. Robert Hagevoort, a dairy extension specialist and\u00a0industry spokesman, suggests that critics are too quick to blame dairies.<\/p>\n

“They may have a septic tank that’s leaking. That is the No. 1 reason why domestic wells in New\u00a0Mexico are contaminated,” Hagevoort says. “With that, I’m not saying there’s not issues and we’re\u00a0not working on some of these dairies. Dairymen are very adamant about being a good steward\u00a0to the environment. They want to make sure that their families that live on these dairies can drink\u00a0that water, can bathe in that water and their animals are healthy as well.”<\/p>\n

And no one wants to drive the milk cows out of New Mexico. Dairies contribute an estimated\u00a0$1.2 billion to the economy in a poor state with little private industry. Even Rodriguez, whose well\u00a0water is contaminated, works at a dairy.\u00a0But after decades of acceptance, there’s a sense here in the state that the dairies’ free ride is\u00a0over.<\/p>\n

“Public sentiment is clearly shifting towards wanting to see more protection from the groundwater\u00a0pollution that follows CAFO dairy operations,” says Dan Lorimier of the Sierra Club.<\/p>\n

New Mexico is currently in the process of rewriting and tightening regulations for dairy discharge\u00a0permits. This year \u2014 for the first time ever \u2014 the state rejected a proposed dairy in the town of\u00a0Caballo after citizens protested that it would pollute the Rio Grande watershed.<\/p>\n

‘The Right Thing To Do’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pro-dairy billboards have sprouted around the state. One shows a family watching cows graze on\u00a0green pastures with the message: “Caring for our land isn’t easy. But it’s the right thing to do.”<\/p>\n

Jana Hughes, a homemaker who lives next to a dairy near Hobbs, N.M., and recently formed a\u00a0group called Citizens for Dairy Reform, was shown a photo of that billboard.<\/p>\n

“False advertisement,” Hughes says. “I mean, as someone who lives around dairies and knows\u00a0dairies, that is not how it is. We’re talking 2,000 cows confined in a small area, living in their own\u00a0feces and urine.<\/p>\n

“Some dairymen try to site their farms as far from civilization as possible. John Woelber built\u00a0his $5 million, 2,300-cow operation in remote high desert in Valencia County, 10 miles from his\u00a0nearest neighbor.<\/p>\n

“The reason we’re out here in the middle of nowhere is so we have no complaints; we have no\u00a0neighbors that will come up and say, ‘You’ve got too many flies,’ or, ‘It smells,’ ” Woelber says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The picture on many milk cartons shows cows grazing on a pasture next to a country barn and a silo \u2014 but the reality is very different. More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm… Continue reading New Mexico Dairy Pollution Sparks Manure War<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-risk","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/estrategist.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}