New Mexico is the nation’s seventh largest producer of milk. More importantly, it is the fastest growing dairy state, and, as of this year, home to North America’s largest cheese plant, a facility that extrudes one truckload of processed cheese every hour.

In some ways the dairy industry is easy to forget about, even if you live here. Its activity is concentrated in the eastern and southern part of the state, sections of which are so remote that their only neighbors are Air Force bases and a weapons-testing range. But given the impact this industrial-scale production of nature’s “most perfect food” is having on human, animal, and environmental health, it’s worth keeping a close eye on.

Dirty Water

I have written on the subject of New Mexico’s dairy industry on other occasions, and will have a longer piece appearing in the Sierra Club magazine later this year. But it seems no matter which you way you turn these days in the so-called Land of Enchantment, you’re can’t help but step in some cow-related substance. For instance, groundwater contamination is so severe at approximately 100 factory dairy farms (about 60% of those monitored by state agencies) that the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has decided to take no more bull from the dairy industry. In early April, the agency sent letters to 15 factory dairy farms in the southern end of the state requiring them to clean up their contaminated groundwater.

I emphasized “requiring” because past efforts by the NMED to force Big Dairy to clean up its act have been more like a game of footsie than the real deal. One doesn’t have to speculate too deeply to surmise that the agency’s previous go-slow approach to groundwater enforcement had something to do with state politics. New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson, an obvious presidential candidate, wants to preserve his New Democrat ethos by not appearing hostile to the state’s agribusiness interests. Go to the dairy industry’s booth at any of the state’s agricultural expositions and you’ll see photographs of the Gov’s hardhat-adorned puss proudly displayed, shovel in hand, breaking ground at the cheese-plant construction site.

But what’s good for state politics may not be good for national politics. The political winds are finally picking up the fetid odor of manure lagoons and wafting them in the direction of more sensitive national noses, which may be why this NMED clampdown has some teeth. Each dairy will have to shell out anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million for clean-up costs. Since the contaminated groundwater plume emanating from these dairies now threatens homeowners’ wells, NMED feels obliged to give the dairy industry about as much wiggle room as their farmers give their confined Holsteins. One particularly egregious violator, Del Oro Dairy of Anthony, New Mexico, had recorded nitrate levels 19 times higher than the state’s allowable standard. Del Oro’s readings for additional contaminants, chloride and TDS (total dissolved solids), each exceeded the standard by six-fold. Excessive nitrates in human drinking water can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a condition that compromises the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain.

According to sources within NMED, these actions are only the beginning. The plan is to move systematically against sets of five or so dairies every six months until all the violators have cleaned up their s**t — a process that will take years.

No Water

Most of us never see the hundreds of small-town daily newspapers that dot America’s rural landscape. What passes for current events in these place can be dreadfully boring, and because everybody knows everybody, a small-town editor would be better off disarming suicide bombers in Baghdad than writing fiery editorials against the local business establishment. But occasionally those straightforward newspaper accounts of local commission meetings reveal a hair-raising truth.

Such was the case with a recent article from the Portales News-Tribune, located in eastern New Mexico’s Roosevelt County, home of 80,000 dairy cattle. Hydro-geologist Amy Ewing reported at a public meeting (attended by exactly nine people) that the Ogallala Aquifer, upon which the area depends for its water, will be at an all-time low by 2020. Over the last 60 years, reported Ewing, the water table has dropped from about 18 feet below ground to 110 feet. When the saturation thickness of the aquifer’s water (the amount of water from the aquifer’s bottom to its top) reaches 30 feet, it becomes essentially undrinkable. According to Portales Mayor Orlando Ortega, Jr., “there are already areas in [Roosevelt] county where the saturation thickness … is less than 40 feet.” Ewing concluded by saying, “water levels are falling, and they are not going back up.”

Who’s the culprit? Ewing said irrigation agriculture (this includes dairies and the neighboring cheese plant) is responsible for most of the area’s water usage. So that means the dairy industry’s growth will be curtailed and forced to conserve water, right? Not according to the News-Tribune story. There are no plans at present to require irrigation farmers to conserve water or to even meter how much they use. If conservation is mandated, it will apparently fall on the backs of homeowners and non-agricultural businesses. The issue was summed up Irene Jones, a member of a Roosevelt County farming family: “The bottom line is the water will run out …. The land is not sustainable as cropland.”

Dirty Air

Next to water, the story that should be getting the most attention is air. Geri Jaramillo, New Mexico’s Asthma Program Coordinator, told me recently that close to 99% of the requests she receives from around the state for asthma education come from southeastern New Mexico, particularly from home daycare providers. That’s not surprising, since this region’s asthma rate is three times the state average. It’s also home to the state’s highest concentration of factory dairy farms.

Coincidental? The New Mexico dairy industry thinks so. They say there’s no scientific evidence that the bacteria-laden dust churned up by the hooves of thousands of cows is responsible for the region’s asthma problems. Since the State of New Mexico has not deigned to sample air quality in much of the region, it has been difficult to determine the exact cause and effect. But reports from the Roosevelt County Public Health Council indicate that also may change. A member of the council advised me that a joint air-monitoring project involving Texas A&M and New Mexico State University may begin soon.

What can you do? Don’t drink milk (the evidence is mounting that, except for mother’s milk, it doesn’t do a body good, but I like it anyway). Buy dairy products whose labels you can trust (good luck deconstructing milk-carton prose). Harangue state and federal officials — elected and appointed — to ban, restrict, and regulate factory dairy farms. Get to know a dairy farmer or at least a dairy co-op (I like Organic Valley) whose representations you can believe.

But whatever you do, pay attention to where and how your milk is produced. There is always someone downwind and downstream from those cows.

The Union’s report — "Greener Pastures: How grass-fed beef and milk contribute to healthy eating" — finds that grass-fed cows produce meat and milk lower in unhealthy fats and higher in beneficial fatty acids, such as Omega-3 and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), than grain-fed livestock. The report also notes that grass-fed livestock farming methods do a better job of protecting water, air, and the communities that support family farms.

For those of us who routinely argue in favor of sustainable food production, the report doesn’t provide any shocking revelations. Smaller herds of animals that are treated humanely, allowed to move about freely, and eat what nature intended — grass, not grain — are naturally going to produce healthier food. So how is it that we’ve reached the point where we need a team of Ph.Ds and a respected research institution to prove it?

Carefully hidden from the view of the 99% of us who aren’t farmers lies the coiled serpent we call the industrial food system. In depopulated and increasingly desperate rural communities across America, remaining locals and immigrant workers have been forced into a kind of modern servitude to factory dairy, hog, cattle, and poultry farms. It is from these places that most of our food is produced today.

Slip past the security gate of Don Oppliger’s Land and Cattle Feedlot in eastern New Mexico and you’ll see 35,000 head of beef cattle. Confined to small dusty pens, they eat nothing but a rolled corn flake ration until they’re sent to the slaughterhouse. The constant shuffling of hooves raises a bacteria-laden dust cloud that’s carried by the prevailing winds into west Texas. At one end of the complex sits a giant lagoon which catches the operation’s wastewater, chemicals, urine, antibiotics, and other effluvia. A tour of the feedlot requires you to roll up the truck windows tightly to keep the flies out. In the narrow strip of ground that separates the fencing from the feedlot’s service roads lie the carcasses of dead cows (a.k.a. “downers”), their eyes bugged out, tongues dangling, bellies swollen in the summer heat.

While none of Oppliger’s cattle will taste a blade of grass, at least they are outdoors. By comparison, indoor factory hog farms confine their animals 20,000 at a time to low-ceilinged warehouses only 100 feet in length. They generate an odor so intense it would knock a buzzard off a crap wagon. According to Anita Poole, legal counsel for the Kerr Center, an Oklahoma organization that’s fought that state’s capitulation to the hog industry, “The average Joe Blow who might stumble into a hog facility would never want to eat pork again.”

Texas County, Oklahoma was home to 11,000 hogs in 1990, but thanks to the Seaboard Corporation and all-too-willing local officials, the county now hosts over a million hogs. Because of contaminated water run-off from the hog farms, both groundwater and surface water quality have declined. Even worse, the Ogallala Aquifer upon which the region depends for its water is being rapidly depleted. The Oklahoma Water Resource Board reported that water levels in many Texas County wells have dropped 50 to 100 feet over the last 30 years, due in large part to high water demand created by factory hog operations and the irrigated farm land that supports them.

Got Milk? Got Problems!

Got milk? Eat Taco Bell cheese? Slurp Yoplait Yogurt? Chances are increasing every day that the main ingredient for these products comes from New Mexico, now the nation’s seventh largest and fastest growing dairy state. Concentrated in the state’s southeast quadrant, New Mexico’ factory dairy farms have increased their herd size at least five-fold in the last 10 years. And along with this increase has come a severe rise in groundwater contamination (about 60% of the state’s dairy wells exceed allowable nitrate standards), air pollution (the asthma rate for this region of the state is nearly three times higher than the state average), and the cost of community services (expenses for schools, social services, police, and prisons have grown rapidly).

If you happen to be cruising down a New Mexico highway, you’re likely to encounter a billboard paid for by one of the state’s dairy associations that modestly proclaims the goodness of milk. The scene is of a small herd of black-and-white Holsteins grazing contentedly on very green grass with a lovely red barn in the background. If those cows were alive and really from New Mexico, they’d probably think they had died and gone to Vermont.

A real scene from one of the state’s factory dairy farms would be decidedly less pleasing. The picture would be of thousands of cows slithering about in steel pens, amidst dust and manure, without a stem of grazeable grass for miles around. No frolicking about on mellow pasture for these girls, no sir; it’s in and out of the 100-cow milking parlor two or three times per day until the age of 2, at most 3, when they are then sent off to the hamburger factory. In addition to regular doses of antibiotics, they will be given artificial bovine growth hormones that stimulate milk production beyond their natural limits.

When you pick up a gallon of organic or sustainably produced milk in the supermarket and say, “Zowee! This is $5.49; I can get the regular stuff for $2.89,” you should know what you’re paying for — and not paying for. Smaller herds of cows spending some if not all of their lives on grass, and not pumped up with growth hormones, produce a more costly milk than factory farms. And who pays for the asthma victim’s long-term health care, the contaminated water, and the escalating local school expenditures? Not the factory farm dairies that may be the cause, and not consumers who are simply grateful for cheap milk. When these costs are paid at some indefinable point in the future, they are paid by the victims, the taxpayers and, of course, the environment.

The End Game?

Dr. Charles Benbrook is a former executive director of the Board of Agriculture for the National Academy of Sciences. His professional work includes studies of the dairy industry, whose growth west of the Mississippi he finds “very perplexing.” Among his comments regarding large, western dairy farms: “If the dairy industry in the Southwest was forced to pay the real cost of water, it would quickly move to the Upper Midwest and Northeast.” When I asked him what he thought about the future of the Southwest dairy industry, he said that it was “patently unsustainable because in not less than five years, but surely no more than 20, the dairy waste stream will overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the local environment.”

The American Public Health Association (APHA) has said essentially the same thing. In a 2004 resolution, APHA said

Considering the health and economic impacts on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) workers … children and CAFO neighbors from exposure to large concentrations of manure … dust, toxins, microbes, antibiotics and pollutants … APHA urges federal, state and local governments to impose a moratorium on new CAFOs until additional scientific data … have been collected.

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report has brought us one step closer to understanding the human health benefits of a more traditional form of livestock raising that respects the land, water, air, and animals. At the same time, the form of agriculture proponents tout as “modern” but we critics scorn as “industrial" continues to demonstrate that it lives beyond the capacity of natural systems to support it.

As consumers who want what’s best for our bodies, we may have to spend a little more on food products that support smaller scale, sustainable farms. As citizens who want clean air and water, and can see the value of viable farming communities, we may need to raise a little hell with our policymakers. Shop like your life depends on it, but vote like the lives of others depend on it.