Got Milk? Got Problems Too

The steel milking carousel in Ken DeGroot’s dairy barn is bigger than a carnival ride, allowing him to milk 54 rotating Jerseys in a matter of minutes. His neighbor, Rob Hilarides, has ordered one just like it, only bigger, accommodating 80 cows at a time.

By “super-sizing” their dairies and introducing such high-tech innovations as this monster milker, California dairy farmers have managed to thrive, even as federal price supports have eroded and milk prices have dropped.

But after years of rapid expansion, big has suddenly become a dirty word in the California dairy business, and expansion has hit a brick wall as neighborhood groups and environmentalists have banded together to block new projects.

At issue is the millions of pounds of manure these large dairies produce, which is flushed out of paddocks and pumped into what are euphemistically referred to as lagoons. The proliferation of these waste-filled ponds, which can be as large as several football fields lined up, pose a serious threat to air and water quality, critics say, and need to be strictly regulated.

“For years, dairy farmers have used the Valley’s air as their toilet bowl,” says Luke Cole, director of the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that has filed suit against both counties and dairymen across the state. “That’s been ignored by county and regional decision makers. That free ride is over.”

In Tulare County, which with its nearly 300 farms and more than 337,000 cows is California’s dairy capital, 60 dairy projects have been stopped in their tracks by a lawsuit from Cole’s group.

Cotton magnate J.G. Boswell recently shelved plans for California’s largest dairy project in Kings County that would have accommodated 45,000 cows on several farms. And Kern County, with just 30 dairies, has stopped rolling out the red carpet. After hosting a barbecue about six years ago for dairymen looking to relocate from Chino in southwestern San Bernardino County, Kern County has since appointed an advisory committee to consider additional environmental regulations.

Dairy industry officials say the opposition is forcing many dairymen to consider a move out of state.

“The people from Southern California that were thinking of moving to this area are now also looking at New Mexico and Idaho, with the idea that they won’t have trouble getting permits to build there,” says John Grimmius owner of Ranch Co., a land brokerage in Visalia.

Commissions are down more than 60% at his company this year, Grimmius says, mainly because county government has stopped handing out permits for new dairies.

Although most of the public debate has been centered on how to best regulate these large farms, dairymen speculate that the opposition’s real agenda is to scale back the size of their operations, which have been growing by hundreds and sometimes thousands of cows over the last decade.

Environmentalists and sustainable farming advocates say that the concentration of cows in such a small area is bad for the environment and cruel to the animals. Furthermore, they say that the growing concentration in the dairy business doesn’t benefit communities, because it doesn’t create a large number of well-paying jobs.

Cole, whose group represents the interests of low-income farm workers, says he’s not trying to chase dairy farms out of state or seek restrictions on their size. Rather, he says, he’s pushing for more responsible development.

Dairymen are skeptical.

“If it was really about finding ways to improve the situation, he’d be working with the dairy industry and there would be a solution by now,” says Hilarides, who has waited more than a year to expand his 2,100-cow dairy in Lindsay.

One dairy industry trade group, Western United Dairymen, has even filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request to determine whether the environmental campaign by Cole’s Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment is misusing funds from California Rural Legal Assistance earmarked to assist the working poor.

Cole’s is not the only group opposing new development. Grass-roots opposition also has sprouted among neighborhood groups in Bakersfield such as Parents for a Healthy Environment and Kern County Neighbors for Quality Air, Water and Growth.

Both recently challenged Chino dairymen George and James Borba’s plans to move their 14,000 cow dairies to the site of a proposed housing tract. The project, which had already been approved by the Kern County Planning Commission, was forced to a vote by the Board of Supervisors, and although the dairy was approved, the threat of litigation from Cole’s group still looms.

Some residents are even pushing for a dairy moratorium in the county.

“The ground water is my concern,” says Kirk Golding, a former Angeleno who headed the opposition against the Borba dairy. “If those manures and nitrates start percolating down and get into our aquifer and start heading toward our water bank, we’re in real trouble.”

City planning officials say this type of clash is inevitable as residential neighborhoods have expanded, touching the borders of large farms around Bakersfield.

Where once high-density housing development used to be the foe, smelly dairies now are seen as a far worse fate.

“There’s been a real turnaround in attitudes,” says Ted James, Kern County planning director. “The longtime residents are still pretty supportive of agricultural activities, but there’s been an influx of people from other areas that bring with them a totally different perspective.”

Ironically, as hazy as the San Joaquin Valley is, the air quality is only getting better, and has improved significantly during the last decade, according to data from the California Air Resources Board. Even in Tulare, where the number of cows has almost doubled in the last decade, air quality is improving.

Still, no one knows for sure what impact these large dairies are having on air quality. Emissions are not measured near big dairies, just from different points within each county.

And unlike other types of industry, there is no oversight of these big agribusinesses by local air quality boards.

That will change next year, when big agriculture’s exemption from regulation under the Clean Air Act is revoked via a 1990 amendment, says Joe O’Bannon, planner for the San Joaquin Unified Air Pollution Control District.

Dairymen say they use the manure to fertilize crops, but critics counter that what they use is only a small percentage of the vast amounts of waste produced.

It’s easy for anyone to understand Golding and Cole’s concern, driving past lagoons of liquid manure in Tulare County that are as big as four football fields laid end to end. The stench can be overwhelming and the flies thick on a hot day.

Problem is, no one seems to know exactly what’s needed to protect the Central Valley’s air and water from the millions of pounds of manure pumped into these huge ponds.

Even measures proposed by the Sierra Club, such as covers and liners for the huge pits of waste, aren’t foolproof. Liners crack and covering the pits produces more methane gas, which could actually be more dangerous for residents, O’Bannon says.

Many dairymen say they are willing to do the right thing and deploy safeguards such as buffer zones and underground monitoring wells, but they fear spending huge amounts of money only to have these mitigation efforts deemed inadequate.

“If you talk to the guys at the county, there’s no real road map for what they want,” DeGroot says. “It’s very frustrating.”

Because of this confusion, Hilarides, whose environmental documents fill a 4-foot-high file in his house, says he doesn’t know whether he’s two months or two years away from constructing his dairy. And time is running out.

A lease on one of his existing parcels is set to expire in October, the giant milker is en route from Australia and he’s borrowed more than $1 million against his property to acquire the additional 1,000 Jersey cows that are sitting on his property.

“I woke up in the middle of the night last night, thinking there’s just no hope,” Hilarides says. “I want to be a good steward of the land so I can pass it on to the next generation, but I still need to pay my bills at the end of the month.”

Hilarides’ plans for a 3,500-cow dairy and cheese-making facility were stalled last year when a suit by the state attorney general forced Tulare County to freeze the permitting process and come up with more stringent environmental testing requirements.

A year later, even after these requirements are on the books, a lawsuit from Cole’s group still challenges the adequacy of these rules.

Breaking this unofficial moratorium will require county officials to strike a compromise with Cole’s group, which also has filed suits against Kern County and other dairymen attempting to build a dairy with more than 1,000 cows.

Hilarides and DeGroot say that with milk prices declining and competition mounting, they have no choice but to spread their costs over a larger number of cows and become better at squeezing every bit of milk possible out of each animal.

Plus, they say, as business owners, why shouldn’t they be free to expand? “It’s hard to keep everything just the way it is,” DeGroot says. “When you own a business you always have growth in mind.”

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Too Many Cows?

The growing size of California’s already large dairy farms is stirring opposition from environmentalists and neighborhood groups across the state. New projects and expansion have been blocked as county governments try to deal with the huge amount of waste these operations produce. With 337,685 cows in 1999, herds in Tulare County alone produced 20,261 tons of manure per day.

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Although the number of dairies in California has fallen ...

1999: 2,214 dairies in state

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... Tulare County has gotten more dairies ...

1999: 293 dairies in Tulare County

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... and the state’s dairies are getting bigger, especially in Tulare, leading to increasingly troublesome waste problems.

1999: 664 cows per dairy in California

Source: California Department of Food and Agriculture

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Cow Counties

Kern, Kings and Tulare counties all have increased their milk production since 1997, and the state is producing almost 10% more. But Tulare is outpacing other areas, with an increase of almost 20% since 1997. Annual milk production for those areas in trillions of pounds:

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Kern County

1999: 1.2 trillion pounds

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Kings County

1999: 2.4 trillion pounds

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Tulare County

1999: 6.9 trillion pounds

Source: California Department of Food and Agriculture