National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture

What Price New Mexico Milk?

By Mark Winne

Got Milk? Eat Taco Bell cheese? Slurp Yoplait Yogurt? Chances are increasing every day that the main ingredient for these products comes from New Mexico, now the nation's seventh largest and fastest growing dairy state. A drive through eastern New Mexico's Curry and Roosevelt counties provides ample evidence of dairy's phenomenal expansion. But the closer one looks at dairy's impact, the more this growth looks like a two-edged sword - one that gives economic hope to a region threatened by a military base closing, and one that carries the threat of fouled air and water, declining public health, and rising cost of community services. And if you are a milk consumer, New Mexico's prevailing method of factory dairy farming may also raise concerns about nature's most perfect food.

Long a traditional agricultural region, Curry and Roosevelt counties had 21,000 dairy cows in 1992, hardly noticeable in a place where miles of open road often separate one homestead from the next. But by 2002, according to United States Department of Agriculture statistics, the number of dairy cows had reached 115,000, and the number of farms tending those cows had grown to 77. By most accounts, these numbers will double within five years.

To sop up all this milk (only about 30 percent is used for fluid consumption), the Glandia Cheese Corporation, an Irish firm, joined with four dairy co-ops to build North America's largest cheese plant in Curry County. It is now producing one truckload per hour of processed cheese. The economic impact of the dairy industry in New Mexico is something well in excess of $2 billion - not an insignificant sum, especially in rural counties where good business opportunities are few and far between.

But to turn an old adage on its head, every silver lining has its dark cloud. To understand the downside of boom times in dairy land, it's necessary to start with the front end, or should we say, rear end of the production cycle. Every cow produces four tons of manure a year. Multiple this times 115,000 bovines (a number that doesn't include tens of thousands of beef cattle also raised in the region's feedlots) and you have as much excrement as the city of Los Angeles produces in a year.

This much manure spawns swarms of flies, which pose both a nuisance and a disease risk to people. Several area residents told me that they cannot have outdoor picnics during warm weather because the food is covered by a black cloud of flies before the potato salad is unwrapped. For some who live particularly close to dairies, they often can't leave food out on their indoor kitchen counters. Manure is also responsible for groundwater nitrate contamination. According to a former employee of the New Mexico Environment Department, the state agency charged with granting and monitoring groundwater discharge permits, nitrate levels exceeding the limit of 10 parts per million have been found under most dairies in New Mexico.

As with large poultry, hog, and cattle farms, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has labeled most of New Mexico's dairy farms "concentrated animal feeding operations," or "CAFOs" for short. Referred to more despairingly in some circles as "factory farms", a dairy farm with at least 750 cows will be considered a CAFO for government regulatory purposes. The American Public Health Association (APHA) and numerous health and environmental agencies across the country have associated unhealthy air quality and, in some places, higher levels of asthma with the proximity of human populations to CAFOs. Indeed, one reason for the growth in dairy farms in New Mexico is that many Southern California dairy farms were effectively forced out of the Chino Valley when environmental and health officials determined that they were a major source of air pollution. Low-density populations, a relatively lax regulatory environment and cheap land brought many of those same California dairies to eastern New Mexico.

Due in part to the rapid growth in the state's dairy industry, but more significantly the industry's political and financial clout, little research has been conducted on its environmental and health impacts in New Mexico. One exception was Dr. Stephen Arnold of New Mexico State University's Health Sciences Department. In 1998, Arnold gathered air and water data from dairies in the southern part of the state and found an association between proximity to dairies and an increase in the rate of diarrhea and asthma among children. In addition, all dairy wells that he monitored "exceeded water quality standards for nitrate, ammonia, chloride, and TDS [total dissolved solids]."

When Arnold's findings were published in the journal Environmental Health and later presented at the American Public Health Association 2001 conference, dairy industry representatives deluged New Mexico State University with phone calls, e-mails and letters berating the university for its support of this kind of research. According to Arnold, the university stood by him, but the pressure was sufficient to cause him to curtail his dairy-related work. When asked if he thought this subject needed more attention, Arnold didn't equivocate: "Absolutely. You can't tell me that if you put 30,000 cows along a 14-mile stretch of land, that after many years it doesn't have an impact."

One red flag is eastern New Mexico's asthma rate. Hospital discharge figures for asthma in the years 1998 through 2002 show that New Mexico's Health Region 4, which includes Roosevelt and Curry counties as well as most of the state's other major dairy counties, has a rate of 19, almost two and a half times higher than the next highest region, Region 2, which has a rate of 8. Curry County's rate of 28 is three times higher than the state average of 9.3.

Antibiotic resistance is another airborne problem with connections to concentrated animal feeding operations. Since cows in confined dairy farms are subject to higher levels of stress than cows in more open, pasture-based dairy operations, they have a greater risk of infection. This is why CAFOs have relied heavily on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics administered routinely to cows through their feed. Many public health people worry that the overuse of antibiotics in livestock production could have consequences for antibiotic resistance in humans. A recent study of soil samples taken from Roosevelt County dairy farms by Dr. Manuel Varela, assistant professor of biology at Eastern New Mexico University, has found evidence to validate this concern. To quote from his summary, "The study . . . implicates dairy soil as a potential reservoir of multi-drug resistant bacteria in the transmission of infectious disease from dairy farm animals to humans."

Threats to the public health from the dairy industry are not lost on the citizens of Curry and Roosevelt counties. "You could ask anyone in town if they thought air quality and water pollution were concerns and they'd say 'yes,'" confessed David Stevens, editor of the Clovis News Journal. The Roosevelt County Health Planning Council, which administered an environmental assessment questionnaire in May 2005, confirmed Stevens' assumption. A mail-out survey that was part of the council's assessment found that 75 percent of the 125 respondents felt that the area's dairies were the "biggest air-quality problem," and 33 percent felt that they were the "biggest water-quality problem." On both counts, respondents identified dairies as the leading cause of air and water problems.

The (un)Happy Cow
Driving along New Mexico's highways, you may encounter one of those billboards that modestly proclaims the goodness of milk. The scene is of a small herd of black-and-white Holsteins grazing contentedly on very green grass with a lovely red barn and silo in the background. If those cows were alive and from New Mexico, they'd probably think they had died and gone to Vermont.

A real scene from one of the state's factory dairy farms would not only be less pleasing, but decidedly unappetizing. It would picture thousands of cows slithering about in steel pens, amidst dust and manure, and without a stem of grazeable grass for miles around. No frolicking about on mellow pasture for these girls, no sir; it's in and out of the 100-cow milking parlor two or three times per day until the age of 2, at most 3, when they are then sent off to the hamburger factory. In addition to regular doses of antibiotics, they will be given artificial bovine growth hormones that stimulate milk production beyond their natural limits.

When you pick up a gallon of organic or sustainably produced milk in the supermarket and say, "Zowee! This is $5.49 - I can get the regular stuff for $2.89," you should know what you're paying for - and not paying for. Smaller herds of cows spending some, if not all, of their lives on grass, not pumped up with growth hormones, and possibly being fed organic grain produces a more costly milk than does the factory farm. And who pays for the asthma victim's long-term health care, the contaminated water and the escalating local school expenditures? Not the factory farm dairies that may be the cause, and not the consumers, who are simply grateful that their milk is produced so cheaply. When these costs are paid at some indefinable point in the future, they are paid by the victims, the taxpayers and, of course, the environment.

While he certainly has a vested interest in selling more organic milk, Whole Foods corporate chairman, John Mackey, told the New York Times (September 14, 2005) that "25 years from now, I believe that factory farming in the U.S. will probably be illegal. . . . Our descendents will probably look back at this time with horror at the way we treated livestock animals just as we can look back with horror to the way our ancestors exploited the Native Americans, blacks, and women." Strong words, but they are gaining resonance with consumers who are buying organic or sustainably produced milk in such volume that its production cannot keep pace with demand. And in spite of New Mexico's meteoric rise in the dairy world, the state does not have a single organic dairy producer. The organic and sustainably produced milk that you will ordinarily find on area grocery shelves is produced in such places as the Upper Midwest, Texas and Colorado.

Water on the Wane
While air and water pollution pose a menace to human health, a more ominous threat is the loss of water altogether. Both Roosevelt and Curry counties draw most of their water from the Ogallala Aquifer. The area's single biggest water users are the dairy industry. When the aquifer will become unfit for human consumption is not known (though even the dairy industry agrees the aquifer's water will eventually become undrinkable). Most estimates, however, put that point at somewhere between five and 30 years. But residents are already paying the price of declining water tables. Many people report their wells running dry, forcing them to drill deeper. The deeper the well, the greater the pumping costs - which are borne by households, businesses and public institutions. According to Dr. Neil Nuttal, former superintendent of the Clovis School District, the school system's annual water bill has climbed over three years from $50,000 to $250,000 due to the higher extraction costs. "That's money we won't be able to spend on education," he anguished.

With preliminary research and public opinion leaning heavily in the direction of caution, does the state of New Mexico have any plans to assess and possibly limit the growth of dairy? The short answer appears to be no. Air quality in eastern New Mexico is not currently monitored, and according to a New Mexico Environment Department spokesperson, the state has no plans to do so. When a proposal was brought to the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council to conduct an assessment of the impact of the dairy industry on the well-being of communities, representatives from the dairy and cattle industry successfully squashed all debate. The council dropped the proposal when the industry made it clear that it would actively oppose the council's efforts to pass any state legislation should any questions about the dairy and cattle industries even be discussed. While state agency officials privately state that they are concerned about various aspects of the dairy industry, they caution against any entanglement with it.

From the grass roots to the head of state institutions, fear of the dairy industry is palpable, and faith in government's ability to find solutions is faltering. "Government is in the pocket of the dairy industry," was the remark of one Roosevelt County resident. This cynicism was backed up by the results of the county's health council survey, which also asked residents if anything could be done to improve air and water quality. Almost 93 percent of the respondents answered "no."

The End Game?
Dr. Charles Benbrook is a former executive director of the Board of Agriculture for the National Academy of Sciences. His professional work includes studies of the dairy industry, whose growth west of the Mississippi he finds "very perplexing." Among his comments regarding large, western dairy farms he has said, "If the dairy industry in the Southwest was forced to pay the real cost of water, it would quickly move to the Upper Midwest and Northeast." When I asked what he thought about the future of the Southwest dairy industry, he said that it was "patently unsustainable because in not less than five years, but surely no more than 20, the dairy waste stream will overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the local environment."

The American Public Health Association has said essentially the same thing by acknowledging that industry, policy-makers and the scientific community need to learn much more about the impact of factory farms before they proliferate further. In a 2004 resolution, APHA said, "Considering the health and economic impacts on CAFO workers . . . children and CAFO neighbors from exposure to large concentrations of manure . . . dust, toxins, microbes, antibiotics and pollutants . . . APHA urges federal, state and local governments to impose a moratorium on new CAFOs until additional scientific data . . . have been collected."

Do we wait for Benbrook's doomsday scenario to play out? Do we ignore the collective wisdom of the public health community? When the last dairy farmer has packed up his last cow and hit the road for greener pastures, do we just walk away and turn out the lights on our rural communities? Informed consumer action is one response. Understanding where and how dairy products are produced and then using your food dollar accordingly is already promoting more responsible farming practices. But as citizens, it is just as important to hold public institutions accountable. Their reluctance to conduct effective research and to take a more aggressive approach to monitoring and regulation will only aid and abet long-term harm and hasten the day when the region's environment gives forth with its final gasp. The public's voice and the public's interest should not be eclipsed by the need for economic growth or by the efforts of one industry to stifle debate.

To learn more about this issue, you can contact Mark Winne at Win5M@aol.com or visit http://www.animalcompassionfoundation.org; http://www.familyfarmdefenders.org; the New Mexico Public Health Association's website, http://www.nmpha.org; and http://www.factoryfarm.org.