Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America
My own family&#x27;s dairy farm with 60 head of milking cows is currently set to go bust in the springtime. There&#x27;s always been a steady drip of family dairy farms going bust but the pace has really picked up over the last few years with milk prices being so low.<p>Meanwhile there&#x27;s a CAFO less than a mile down the road from them with over 5,000 head of milking cows that continues to grow and gobble up all the farmland in the area. They&#x27;ve had multiple manure spills, one of which ran down the hill onto my parents&#x27; land, into the creek that runs through their land and killed all the water life (that one they got a small fine from the EPA for).<p>They have literal manure lagoons that they don&#x27;t know what to do with. Right now they&#x27;re getting permits to put in pipelines to move it around.<p>I always wanted to move back near my folks but I worry about the drinking water quality due to this CAFO, with the probable high nitrates from spills and the high capacity wells sucking out all the drinking water. I shudder to think of what would happen if the planned manure pipeline burst somewhere and a large amount of manure seeped out underground before being noticed.<p>edit: I&#x27;m currently writing a blog post about this that I will post here next week; there is a lot of interesting tidbits to the story including the failure of farmer and dairy cooperatives. There is another post on the front page right now about Costco&#x27;s vertical integration with chicken farms; well Wal-Mart is doing the same thing with dairy.[1]<p>edit2: A commenter had asked why my folks didn&#x27;t go organic but deleted the comment before I could reply. We have some family friends who did that (organic crops as well), and it worked for a time, but the CAFOs have caught up on that as well.[2] Their story is very similar to this gentleman&#x27;s: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;outlook&#x2F;dairy-farming-is-dying-after-40-years-im-out&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;79cd63e4-0314-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;outlook&#x2F;dairy-farming-is-dyin...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dairyherd.com&#x2F;walmart" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dairyherd.com&#x2F;walmart</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;why-your-organic-milk-may-not-be-organic&#x2F;2017&#x2F;05&#x2F;01&#x2F;708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;economy&#x2F;why-your-org...</a>