USA TODAY International Edition
Concerns growing over industrial dairy farms
US ag secretary seeing ‘ big get bigger and small go out’
ELLISVILLE, Wis. – Arlin Karnopp doesn't drink the water in his house.
Taped to the refrigerator is a sign that says, “Do Not Use.” He's afraid his grandchildren will fill their cups from the ice dispenser on the door.
Since 2015, results of his well tests show potentially harmful bacteria and nitrates. Karnopp blames manure spread by large dairy farms on a ridge next to his property.
“Everything rolls downhill,” said Karnopp, 67, a retired over- the- road truck driver. He lives in dairy- intensive Kewaunee County, where cattle exceed people by about 5 to 1.
“I'm very disgusted,” he said. “If we could only turn back the clock.”
Turning it back even five years would take Karnopp to a time when Wisconsin boasted more than 10,000 farms – most of them small, family operations passed down for generations.
Since then, a drawn- out assault of low milk prices has pummeled America's Dairyland. More than 2,700 Wisconsin dairy farms have gone out of business. Many more face tough decisions this winter as a poor fall harvest has led to soaring prices for cattle feed.
Large- scale dairy farming, however, is on a different trajectory. Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are growing rapidly and taking over an increasing share of the state's milk production.
Often referred to as industrial or mega- farms, they can house thousands of cows in massive metal buildings. Cows are milked three times a day in an operation that runs around the clock and tankers full of milk head in and out at all hours.
Some newer industrial buildings run the length of a half- dozen football fields; farmers have been known to fly drones inside to get a bird’s- eye view of their operations.
Farms qualify as CAFOs when their milk- producing herds reach 700. The average size of a Wisconsin dairy farm is about 150 cows.
The number of these industrial dairy farms in the state has jumped 55% in less than a decade, to 279 farms, Department of Natural Resources figures show.
Their massive milking operations, popularized in California, shatter the traditional model of Wisconsin farms. With so many cattle, they run the risk of contaminating groundwater and overwhelming lakes, rivers and streams with runoff pollution while making it harder for smaller farms to compete.
The question is whether Wisconsin is suited for dairy farming on a grand scale and whether dairy farming as we have known it has a future.
The coming decade could tell us.
Manure: Beneficial, problematic
Manure has been a dependable and potent fertilizer for as long as cows have grazed the land.
But when it runs off a farm field or seeps into groundwater, manure pollutes. Bacteria and nitrates can poison drinking water, and too much phosphorus from manure and fertilizer can supercharge aquatic plant growth and upend water systems, eventually sucking out oxygen.
Dairy cows are veritable waste machines; on average they excrete nearly 17 gallons of manure and urine a day. While cities use sewage treatment systems to remove contaminants, most farmers store a mix of manure, urine and water in lagoons and typically spread it across crop fields in spring and fall.
A single farm with 500 cows produces as much daily waste as South Milwaukee, based on Cornell University research. A 1,000- cow herd? Think of the 42,000 residents of Fond du Lac.
The largest Wisconsin CAFOs — those with 6,000 cows — generate as much manure and urine as 252,000 people, on par with Madison.
They are required to have six months of manure storage capacity, and their owners must write plans detailing how and where they’ll spread their waste. About 37% of the 9 million acres of Wisconsin cropland are covered by such plans, state figures show. Smaller farms are not required to use spreading plans.
“No question, CAFOs are more regulated,” said Jim VandenBrook, executive director of the Wisconsin Land and Water Conservation Association from 2012 to 2018 and a former state agriculture department regulator. “But we don’t have a handle on whether those practices are being followed because there is so little oversight on spreading.”
The most extensive audit of spreading practices in recent years, done in 2017 by the state DNR, found that more than a quarter of CAFO inspections turned up some violations of manure application requirements.
Large- scale farms dominate
More than half of the milk cows in the U. S. were on dairies with more than 1,000 cows as of 2017, according to the USDA’s agricultural census. They accounted for 58% of the nation’s milk. Two decades earlier, those operations had less than 20% of the milk cows, according to USDA data.
On average, dairy farms with 2,000 or more cows have 12% lower feed costs and 20% lower operating costs – per hundred pounds of milk produced – than farms with 100 or 200 cows.
The big farms also produce more milk per cow.
“The large- scale operations are making a lot of milk, and they’re doing it efficiently at low cost. It does put a lot of pressure on some of the smaller, often multigeneration, farms,” said Ben Laine, a dairy industry analyst with Rabo AgriFinance in St. Louis.
The largest concentration of big dairy farms was in California and Idaho, followed by Texas, according to U. S. farm census data.
Most Wisconsin industrial farms are family- owned, although there are outside investors in some operations.
Some large retail chains are bottling their own milk and contracting directly with farmers to get it. In June 2018, Walmart opened a 250,000- square- foot processing plant near Fort Wayne, Indiana, acquiring milk from 30 farms in Indiana and Michigan. The plant was built to supply milk to hundreds of Walmart stores.
In the 1970s, U. S. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz famously told farmers to “get big or get out” and plant “fence row to fence row.” He championed industrial farming.
This fall at World Dairy Expo in Madison, U. S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue drew sharp criticism for essentially reprising that message specifically to dairy farmers.
“Now what we see, obviously, is economies of scale having happened in America – big get bigger and small go out,” Perdue said.
The message disheartened some family farmers.
“I went to Madison feeling financially scared and emotionally depressed, but hopeful,” said Paul Adams, who has a 500- cow organic dairy farm near Eleva in Trempealeau County. “I came home feeling financially scared, emotionally depressed, unwanted and unneeded.”
The mindset that’s been pushed on farmers — to continually grow — is one reason for the overproduction that’s suppressed milk prices and forced people out of business, said Darin Von Ruden, a dairy farmer from Westby in Vernon County and president of Wisconsin Farmers Union.
“We need to look at something that will benefit all of rural America, not just corporate rural America,” he said.
‘ No one should have to go through what we went through’
Many of those who live near industrial farms would argue the consequences go far beyond local spending.
In Juneau County, a lawsuit filed in November 2018 alleges that Central Sands Dairy, an industrial farm that milks more than 4,100 cows, and Wysocki Produce Farm Inc., a vegetable grower, knew that monitored wells showed high nitrate levels dating to 2008 but failed to tell neighbors or state authorities.
The case is still being litigated and involves more than 300 plaintiffs – including a Nekoosa mother who lost a baby at 23 weeks to a severe birth defect.
Nitrate has been associated with a condition called blue baby syndrome, which reduces the amount of oxygen in a baby’s blood.
“They don’t turn blue, but grayish purple,” toxicologist Sarah Yang of the state Department of Health Services told a group of citizens this fall in Amherst at a meeting about high nitrate levels in Portage County.
According to Yang, infants, pregnant women and women planning to become pregnant, are at the most risk from high nitrates. Some studies suggest it may cause birth defects, thyroid problems and colon cancer.
Officials in Juneau and Wood counties found that 42% of 104 residential wells exceeded the nitrate drinking water standard.
Celina Stewart, one of the litigants in the lawsuit, has blogged about the anguish of losing a baby. She also has urged the DNR not to renew a five- year permit for Central Sands — something it has not yet done.
“No one should have to go through what we went through because of water,” Stewart wrote. “We should be able to go to our faucet and turn it on and safely drink water from our well and not worry about getting sick or dying.”