Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America
My own family's dairy farm with 60 head of milking cows is currently set to go bust in the springtime. There'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'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've had multiple manure spills, one of which ran down the hill onto my parents' 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't know what to do with. Right now they'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'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'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'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's: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dairy-farming-is-dying-after-40-years-im-out/2018/12/21/79cd63e4-0314-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dairy-farming-is-dyin...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.dairyherd.com/walmart" rel="nofollow">https://www.dairyherd.com/walmart</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-organic-milk-may-not-be-organic/2017/05/01/708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-org...</a>