Report From Downwind

The past dies more slowly than we think. Most of us, for example, no longer connect the Los Angeles Basin with farms and cows, though Los Angeles County once led the nation in agricultural products. In our minds, those days are gone, kaput.

Did we not, several weeks ago, give ourselves the new moniker of Digital Coast? Doesn’t our economy--and future--rest with the flickering images we create for movie screens and television sets? Yes.

But occasionally we hear a knocking sound. It is the past knocking, reminding us that it’s not quite dead. Yet.

Such a knock occurred last month, when the news broke about cows fighting for their lives just 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Dairy cows they were, slipping and sliding in the muck created by El Nino. Some of them had succumbed already, and others were awaiting rescue by forklift.

If you drive east on the Pomona Freeway from downtown, you’ll never see these cows. You’ll see, instead, a landscape of red-tile roofs, big-box retail and nifty office parks. Southern California on the march.

But the cows are there, beyond the red-tile roofs, just east of Chino. And maybe I’m being sentimental, but I think they have a tale to tell. I’m not talking about a remnant group of cows, some nostalgic hobby herd operated by gentlemen farmers.

No, I’m talking about the largest concentration of dairy cows in the United States, and probably the world. That’s right. These unseen cows number more than 300,000. They are squeezed onto 17,000 acres of what is known as the San Bernardino dairy preserve, and I guarantee that you have drunk milk from these cows unless you are a dairy phobic.

“It’s really a beautiful place for cows,” says Harold Stueve, a founder of Alta Dena Dairy and one of the pioneers in the preserve. “In the summer you get cool mornings and then a cool breeze each afternoon. Cows don’t sweat, so they need a cool breeze.”

If you can imagine a mid-size city populated entirely by cows, you can imagine the dairy preserve. The topography of the preserve is flat, so you can stand at one end and stare over a bovine landscape that stretches to the horizon. Many, many cows. The offices of individual dairies poke above the landscape and lend it a sense of order.

Its essence is concentration. Other regions, like the Midwest, may contain more cows. But they are spread over several states. Here the cows are jammed into an area roughly the size of, say, Hancock Park.

So rare is this configuration that inevitably it produces a sense of mystery in visitors. How did so many cows get put into one place? Who started this cow city, and how has it survived for so long?

Stueve knows many of the answers. He came to California in 1939 as a young man and worked in several dairies, with his brothers, until they saved enough to start Alta Dena.

Their first herd was located in Artesia, which was known in the pre-World War II years as the “milkshed” of Los Angeles because it contained many dairy farms. But it would not last.

“The subdivisions came in,” says Stueve. “So one day I was out looking for a new place and came across the valley [preserve]. The main attraction was cheap land. It was later that we noticed the cool breezes.”

The Stueves moved to the valley in 1950. Soon many others followed, most of them emigrant families from Holland. The Hollanders constituted the largest group of dairy owners in Southern California, and names like De Vries and Bootsma still occupy many mailboxes of the preserve.

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“The migration to the valley created certain advantages,” says Nyles Peterson, the UC dairy farm advisor in San Bernardino. “It was easier to get feed and equipment when the dairies were all close to each other. Everyone thrived because the others were there.”

In effect, the valley became an agricultural downtown, each business benefiting from the others’ proximity. The concentration also encouraged experimentation, and the valley grew into a hotbed of innovation.

Stueve, for example, was one of the first to try and overcome one of the dairy business’ old bugaboos, the laborious process of milking. Even with milking machines, it often took so long to reach the last cows that they would “drop” much of their milk before the machines were attached.

“One day this guy comes by with a system he called Milk-O-Matic,” says Stueve. “It had this conveyor belt that took the machines all around the barn. I said, ‘We’ll try it.’ ”

It didn’t work, but eventually other techniques did succeed. By the 1960s, the valley had become the mother source of milk for Southern California. Dozens of tanker trucks left the valley each day for bottling plants. The dairy farmers grew wealthy, and San Bernardino County named the valley a dairy preserve, meaning it would be protected from development.

And it is still protected today. But farm stories rarely have happy endings in the L.A. area, and the valley is no different. It turns out that the huge concentration of cows has a downside as well.

In short, the cows turn out to be one of the major sources of air pollution in the basin. The AQMD has studied the cows’ emissions not once, but several times, and has concluded that they constitute a menace. People usually laugh when they first hear of the cow problem, but the menace is real.

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It seems that cow manure and cow urine contain large quantities of ammonia. It also seems that when a major component of smog--namely, the nitric acid pouring from cars, trucks and power plants--comes into contact with ammonia, the two bond together and form tiny particles known as PM10s.

In 1995 the AQMD sent a squad of researchers into the valley. They put little dishes over cow pies and measured the ammonia. The results suggested that each cow produces 11 to 20 pounds of ammonia per year.

With a population of 300,000, that means the valley is pouring out as much as 60 million pounds of ammonia annually. “It is the largest single source of ammonia, and the most concentrated source, in the basin,” says Julia Lester, who headed the cow study for the AQMD.

The impact of this ammonia is dramatic. Just upwind of the valley, particulate levels run about 48 micrograms per cubic meter. Downwind, in the town of Rubidoux, particulate levels hit 77 micrograms per meter.

For the record, the Rubidoux level is the highest in the nation. And these tiny particulates are now estimated to produce 275 premature deaths in the basin each year.

Combined with other factors, this means that the valley’s history as dairy central will likely change, probably within the next decade. Just as the bean fields, the truck farms and orange groves of old Southern California succumbed, so will the dairy herd.

“For a long time, the prospect of leaving the valley made me sad,” says Stueve. “But now I realize you can’t carry on this business when you are surrounded by houses and schools. You need open land to run a dairy farm.”

Early this year, the cities of Ontario and Chino proposed that the preserve be abolished over the next couple of decades and the land converted to subdivisions.

Most of the dairy farmers support the plan. The reason is simple enough: Land values have hit $100,000 an acre, meaning that a 600-acre dairy farm could be worth $60 million.

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That’s enough to console the most dedicated dairy farmer as he sips mai tais in Tahiti. And even for the cows, the news is not so bad. The dairy business will move to the San Joaquin Valley, where newer, bigger farms offer more comfort and shelter from the rain.

The only sad part will be the drive out the Pomona Freeway. You will pass that spot in Chino, watch the red-tile roofs pass by and know that they conceal nothing except more red-tile roofs.