Factory Farms, Dirty Water and the Bible

By Mark Winne, Beacon Broadside. Posted October 29, 2008.

Just an hour west of Texas, the gentle swells of New Mexico's high plains calm to a pancake flat sea of grass. Crossing into Curry and Roosevelt counties at the state's eastern edge, the empty landscape, broken only by the occasional grain elevator and abandoned village, quickly gives way to a discomfiting motion. Strung out along the highway's edge in a nearly unbroken chain are cow pens filled with thousands of black and white Holsteins slithering in the summer heat like giant schools of beached eels.

Got milk? Eat Taco Bell cheese? Slurp Yoplait yogurt? Chances are pretty good this is where the main ingredient comes from. Curry and Roosevelt counties now enjoy the dubious distinction of being at the heart of the Great American West's dairy industrial complex. With barely 20,000 dairy animals in 1992, the two counties now feed, milk, and clean up after 120,000 cows at 58 operating dairy farms, a number that by all accounts will double in a few short years. And to sop up all this milk (only 30% is used for fluid consumption), Curry County is now home to North America's largest cheese plant, which extrudes a Velveeta-like product at the rate of one truckload per hour.

What do these many farms do to a place? At four tons of manure per cow annually, 120,000 cows produce as much excrement as the city of Los Angeles. The odor in the surrounding communities is bad enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon, and the hordes of flies stop outdoor picnics before the potato salad is uncovered. Besides being a nuisance, the winged insects are also disease vectors for a variety of bacteria-related illnesses. They may be one reason why Curry County's asthma rate is three times higher than New Mexico's statewide average.

But the dairy industry's most problematic contribution is not easily seen or sniffed. Since large dairy farms -- labeled by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) -- and milk processing facilities use more of the region's limited water supply than other users, they present a serious threat to the counties' main water source, the Ogallala Aquifer. And at the same time that the industry is sucking the ground dry, nitrates from the manure are finding their way back into the ground water in such concentrations as to alarm public health workers and state officials.

Pass the Bible and the Bucks

"Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well (Matthew 6:33)." These are the simple lines of scripture that Otis Davis and his family live by since they started their Matthew 6:33 Academy to bring the teachings of Christ to families across the Southwest. Before this time, according to Otis, he had "built his house on the shifting sands of the world rather than the rock of Christ." And it was during this earlier period, before he was born again, that Otis was the designated pitchman for Roosevelt County's bid to become the dairy capitol of the world.

As a successful real estate developer, broker, and Roosevelt County Republican Chairman, Otis was at the vanguard of the recruiting drive to bring the dairy industry to his region. "In the early 1990s," he told me, "I was a member of the Roosevelt County Economic Development Committee. Me and Ken Fusey, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, decided this would be a great dairy area. We have the right climate for cows, land was cheap, taxes were low, there's little regulation, and we already had a few 100-head dairy farms. So we placed ads in farm magazines and went to trade shows in Chino Valley, California, where the dairy farms were getting pressure from environmental regulators. I have a college degree in marketing, so I know what hot buttons to push to sell somebody something. But believe me, it wasn't a hard sell to get those dairies to come here."

To make the area even more attractive to dairy farmers, Otis and other community leaders spearheaded a drive to raise money to buy land for a new milk processing plant. "We had a meeting of banks and business people and told them we had to raise $300,000 in one day because we had a chance to bring this company to town. The banks and the big businesses were putting up $25,000 each. We wrote the pledges up on the chalkboard and had the money in no time. I put up $10,000 myself. We bought the land and just gave it to Dairy Farmers of America to build their plant."

The plant was built and the dairies came. Farms of 5,000-head pushed aside the small ones, and the new dairymen, many of whom had left the Netherlands one or two generations back when that small country couldn't handle the water polluting farms anymore, sank tens of millions of dollars into their new operations. Their capital came from the sale of their farms in Chino Valley, which went for as much as $200,000 per acre. They bought land in Curry and Roosevelt counties for $1,000 per acre. And before he knew it, Otis and his team of economic development boosters had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

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Mark Winne is a freelance writer from Santa Fe, New Mexico and author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

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