Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

Insert [Image Plates]

Ray Moore sending the last of his herd to their new home. Kirk Kardashian. Mike Rosmann. Steve Kowalski/A Better Exposure Photography. Philip Ranney and Bridget. Kirk Kardashian. Paul Godin and the Lely Astronaut robotic milking machine. Kirk Kardashian. A typical dairy farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Kirk Kardashian. An advertisement from PETA’s “Unhappy Cow” campaign. Image courtesy of PETA, www.peta.org. Sam Simon. Kirk Kardashian. Cows grazing on Sam Simon’s Plankenhorn Farm. Sam Simon. The Environment 117 while accomplishingourgoal ofimprovingtheecologyofourlake,” Leahy said. “This is a win-win solution that achieves our purpose and skirts the symbolism.” Champlain might be a little cousin to the Great Lakes, but they have another connection: phosphorus pollution—most acutely, in Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. It happens to be at the terminus of the Fox River, which flows north from the dairy country of Brown County. People in the water quality field like to use numbers to describe phosphorus loading, but to the lay person, a picture does a better job. Thankfully, on April 14, 2011, photographer Steve Seilo wastakingaerialphotosofGreenBayandcapturedstunningimages ofunderwaterplumesofbrownmuckdumpingintoLakeMichigan; the sediment billows from the Fox River and penetrates deep into the body of the bay, like an ink stain slowly spreading across a sheet of paper. The Fox River is the largest contributor of phosphorus to Lake Michigan,andthethirdlargestcontributorofsediment.Wisconsin’s water qualitystandard forphosphorusconcentrationsis0.075parts per million (ppm), but in every creek draining into the lower Fox River,recentconcentrationshaverangedfrom0.12to0.4ppm.Some 70 percent of the agricultural fields mapped with more than 0.075 ppm of phosphorus had streams connected to them, and many of these fields are located close to livestock facilities. But, perhaps worse than polluting Lake Michigan, agriculture in this part of Wisconsin has poisoned the groundwater. There are a few things you should know about Brown County, Wisconsin. First and foremost,it’sthehomeoftheGreenBayPackers . And Packers fans don’t call themselves “cheeseheads” for nothing : this part of the state is a dairy powerhouse, with the industry generating$3billionofeconomicactivityeveryyear.Ithaseighteen CAFOs,farmswithatleastathousandanimalunitsorsevenhundred dairy cows, which is more than any other part of Wisconsin. These CAFOs are home to 41,000 cows that produce 260 million gallons 118 Milk Money of manure each year, equivalent to the annual waste from 250,000 humans. The town of Morrison, where the largest number of wells were rendered unusable, has fewer than 2,000 people. Oh,andithasalotofkarst.DerivedfromtheGermannamefora limestone-richregionofSlovenia,karstisageologicfeaturethat’sexemplifiedbyshallowbedrock ,sinkholes,fissures,andunderground towersofrock.BrownCountyisbisectedbyaswathofkarstknown as the Niagara Escarpment, a ridge of rock that arcs from the southwesttothenortheast ,shootingthroughWisconsinandOntarioand ending at Niagara Falls. By itself, karst is fairly harmless—though a nuisance if you’re trying to excavate a foundation. But don’t count on karst-addled terrain to clean your groundwater: since there’s so little soil betweenthesurfaceand theaquifer,there’snotimeforthe bacteria or nitrates to be filtered. In the case of sinkholes, a stream flows directly into the groundwater, with no filtering at all. The first time karst became a very public problem for Brown County was in January of 2006, when rain fell in January onto frozen fields that had been recently treated with manure. Shortly after that, Bill Hafs, the county conservationist and department head for the Land and Water Conservation Department, started getting calls from Morrison town officials saying that residents’ wells had a funny smell. But in fact, the problem dated back before 2006. Since at least 2004, various towns in the county had been issuing sporadic “boil water” advisories, when two or three households would report a manure smell coming from their faucets. The complaints piled higher than ever in 2006, so the University of Wisconsin commissioned a groundwater monitoring study, testing five hundred wells over four years for E. coli, coliform, and nitrates, the kind of contaminationthatusuallyflowsfrommanurerunoff.Theresultsof the study were scary: more than a hundred wells were found to be contaminated, and they remain so today, which means that a high percentageofthetownship—asix-by-six-milesquare—isdrinking andcookingwithbottledwater.Unfortunately,theylearnedthehard way. Scores of people suffered chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses, The Environment 119 and ear infections, all as a result of wells poisoned with coliform bacteria and E. coli. Itdoesn’ttakeageniustomaketheconnectionbetweenmanuresmelling water and the dozens of large dairy farms in the neighborhood . The question was the catalyst: what change precipitated this large-scalegroundwaterpoisoning...