Taking 'Factory' Dairy Farming to the 'Mega' Stage

By MARTHA GROVES

Feb. 14, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CORCORAN, Calif. —

J.G. Boswell Co. likes its agriculture big.

A cotton titan reputed to be the world’s single largest farming entity, Boswell is busily promoting an immense “planned dairy farm community” in Kings County. At capacity, it would house a total of more than 55,000 cows on 7,000 acres now known as Chamberlain Ranch.

The prospect has frightened a small band of Central Valley watchdogs at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, who contend that the tons of muck--to put it delicately--the dairies would generate could taint the region’s ground and surface water.

The group is also concerned generally that Central Valley counties are rushing to approve a slew of such “factory” dairies without adequate environmental review or supervision. A project of this scope, the group argues, demands a full-fledged environmental impact report, which would be much more detailed than the proposal Boswell has filed.

“There has been a massive explosion in the number and size of dairy farms in the southern San Joaquin Valley,” said Luke Cole, the center’s San Francisco-based director. “Planners don’t have the will or the comprehension to adequately process all these applications.

“Boswell’s projects,” he added, “are a stalking-horse for environmentally unsound dairy farmers’ coming in to Kings County.”

For California, the nation’s leading dairy state, with $4.1 billion in sales to farmers last year, the Boswell proposal is a sign of the times. For decades, large commercial dairy farms have been on the rise in the Central Valley. But the prospect of bunching several together is something new.

After several rough years of high feed prices and stricter regulation, many dairy farmers without space or capital to expand are calling it quits. Much of their land is being snapped up by developers, but other farmers are also buying.

As a result, individual dairy operations are beefing up, and there are fewer of them.

Squeezed by urban encroachment and increased pressure from regulators, farmers in Southern California are scouting for greener pastures in the San Joaquin Valley.

“Farmers are selling out or increasing herd size to make [their dairies] more marketable,” said William R. Zumwalt, Kings County’s planning director. “There’s no such thing as a 40-cow dairy anymore.”

Boswell’s aim is to sell the properties to farmers looking to move out of the crowded Chino Valley, 42 miles east of Los Angeles.

Challenges of Keeping Watch

In recent weeks, Kings County planners have granted permits for five mega-dairies on the sites, but the center has challenged four of them as an environmental time bomb.

Planners maintain that they are imposing stricter rules and requirements and are starting to more closely monitor dairies, which have gone essentially unregulated for decades. But most counties are woefully understaffed to handle those ambitious new goals. And California has just a handful of inspectors to watch more than 2,000 dairy operations.

Their job is especially tough in the Chino Valley, where the nation’s largest concentration of dairy cows--more than 300,000--is packed onto 17,000 acres of the San Bernardino dairy preserve.

Herds there have tripled in size since 1972, to an average of 750 milking cows, and the preserve has become a hotbed of air- and water-quality problems and urban-rural clashes. In summer, residents of apartment complexes that abut dairy farms complain about smells, flies and dust; when it rains, manure-laden runoff rushes across their driveways. The problems also threaten Orange County water supplies downstream.

A costly water treatment effort is underway, but meanwhile, most of the region’s 300 or so dairy facilities remain technically in violation of environmental laws, said Robert Holub, a senior engineer with the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Riverside.

The Milk Producers Council, an Ontario association representing the area’s dairy farmers, has alerted its members to the likelihood of surprise visits--with the threat of fines and legal action--by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inspectors.

The local, state and federal crackdowns are intended to force farmers to be more environmentally responsible. In recent years, farms--in particular dairy and other livestock operations--have surpassed factories as the chief threat to the nation’s waterways.

Against this backdrop, many Chino Valley farmers are looking for new homes on the range. California’s vast midsection is a popular destination, but states such as Texas, Idaho and Wisconsin are also doing their best to woo Chino farmers, with promises of tax breaks, good land prices and plentiful feed and water.

Boswell’s brokers are talking up the planned bovine community, emphasizing Kings County’s wide-open spaces and rural sensibilities. The cash that Chino farmers can get for their land--as much as $100,000 per acre--makes them just the sort of equity refugee that Boswell needs to makes its project fly. The company has said it has “multiple offers” and will begin serious negotiations once permits are in place.

Contrary to rumors whirling around Kings County late last year, after Boswell made its dairy plans public, Boswell itself does not plan to get into the dairy business.

Dairy, unlike most other farming in California, still consists of family-run operations. San Joaquin Valley farmers fretted that Boswell’s sheer heft and outsize political clout could upset the industry balance, forcing up the price of feed and skilled labor.

Not so, said Ed Giermann, Boswell vice president and general counsel. “We’re just developing the property for people who want to build out dairies,” he said.

The tight-lipped company, which owns about 250,000 acres in the Central Valley, normally does not unload farmland. But with California’s cotton business in decline, Boswell expects to profit in several ways from the dairy deals--not only by selling productive acreage just a few miles northwest of its Corcoran headquarters, but also by peddling water, feed and farming assistance to the buyers. In return, Boswell vows to buy manure from dairies to fertilize its extensive fields, cutting down on the need for costly synthetic fertilizer. Kind of a you-swat-my-flies-I’ll-swat-yours arrangement.

According to the Kings County assessor’s office, the land varies wildly in quality, with values ranging from $200 to $3,000 an acre.

The dairies would run from just under 4,000 milking cows at capacity to more than 10,000, for a total of nearly 30,000, a 30% increase over Kings County’s current total. They would house an additional 26,000 in support stock (that is, pregnant or young cows and calves). At full strength, the largest farm would rank among the nation’s top 10 dairies.

By the estimate of one water-quality engineer, the cows in the Boswell community could put out as much pollutant as a city of 800,000.

That’s a lot of dung.

However, noted Sandy R. Roper, assistant zoning administrator for Kings County, there’s a difference between the waste produced by a city, which includes a troublesome melange of bleaches, solvents and garbage, and the more predictable waste from a dairy operation. Properly managed, he added, “a dairy is a recycling facility.”

Project Could Create Hundreds of Jobs

Although the land for the proposed dairies is productive, it contains poorly drained soil with shallow ground water that is already of low quality, said Lonnie Wass, a senior engineer with the Regional Water Quality Control Board in Fresno who would monitor the Boswell development. The water is salty, in part from farming but also from overlying coastal sediment, and for that reason, Wass added, “the actual threat to the ground water is relatively minor.”

Wass said he has no problem with the county’s approval of the project based on Boswell’s detailed engineering reports, rather than on an environmental impact report. Even so, “I’m going to make sure I’ve got a monitoring program on the dairies,” he said.

As a job creator, the project appeals to Kings County, which, like many other rural counties, is plagued by high unemployment and poverty. Five mega-dairies could create potentially hundreds of year-round jobs that pay well by farm community standards.

“A dairy brings a huge economic base to a city or county,” said Bob Feenstra, executive director of the Milk Producers Council.

Key to Boswell’s plan is securing dairy permits, and that seemed within the company’s grasp until the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment filed its challenge. The Kings County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hear the appeal on Tuesday in Hanford.

Four of the five supervisors have direct ties to agriculture. One is Jon Rachford, a civil engineer who has consulted for Boswell and for that reason plans not to vote. But he favors agricultural development, and dairies in particular, as long as they’re properly run.

So does Tony Oliveira, a cotton and dairy farmer who is a newly elected supervisor. He figures that any dairies moving onto Boswell’s land would expand slowly.

“I don’t think mega-dairies work,” he said. “I’m not against them, but if you look at the efficiencies of cow care and managing nutrients [farmers’ preferred term for manure], I think 1,500 to 2,000 milking cows is the most efficient.” Other farmers suggested that farmers buying the Boswell parcels could subdivide their herds to make them more manageable.

Rural planners rebut any suggestion that they are sacrificing a clean environment for economic development. Kings County and its neighbor, Tulare, the nation’s largest dairy county, say prospective builders of large dairies must satisfy rigorous requirements. Boswell, for example, filed elaborate engineering plans to demonstrate how farmers could build and operate the dairies to minimize environmental degradation. Included in the design were several large lagoons to contain waste water.

In particular, Boswell reassured planners that the five dairies in question would be large enough that they could tolerate the huge amounts of nitrogen and salt that would be byproducts of the herds’ waste.

And many farmers and water-quality engineers agreed that big, state-of-the-art operations often make better land stewards. Older dairies, many of them quite small, tend to cause the biggest problems because of outmoded equipment and practices.

Still, environmental challenges and stepped-up government scrutiny are prompting serious change. Borba Dairy Farms in Chino, for one, decided to rethink its strategy for its move to Kern County.

“We’re taking the extra step of getting an EIR,” said George Borba Jr., who plans to go 50-50 with his cousin, James, in a huge operation near Bakersfield with a total of 14,400 milking cows.

Suit Threat and Environmental Report

Kern County officials had granted the project an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act. But after the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment threatened to sue, the Borbas chose to take the apparently unprecedented step of seeking an EIR, at a potential cost of $150,000 for the detailed paperwork and an additional year of waiting time.

George Borba finds it ironic that the center--an offshoot of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a Sacramento group that lobbies on behalf of farm workers and other low-income rural residents--would challenge his dairy, since the land was originally approved for a 4,300-acre city of 19,300 homes complete with golf courses.

“Luke Cole is saying he’d rather have a city than two dairies,” Borba said. “But it’s a perfect place for a dairy.”

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Down on the Farms

As California dairy farms have consolidated or gone out of business in recent years, the number of cows per farm has grown. A look at the trend, in five-year increments:

Number of Dairy Farms

1988: 2,433

1993: 2,426

1998*: 2,298

Cows Per Farm

1988: 444

1993: 499

1998*: 609

Other California dairy statistics

1998*

Milk production, in billions of pounds: 27.58

Dairy cows, in millions: 1.40