
Farms, More Productive Than Ever, Are Poisoning Drinking Water in Rural America - mudil
https://www.wsj.com/articles/farms-more-productive-than-ever-are-poisoning-drinking-water-in-rural-america-11547826031
======
waffle_ss
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.

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).

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.

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.

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]

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:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dairy-farming-is-
dyin...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dairy-farming-is-dying-
after-40-years-im-
out/2018/12/21/79cd63e4-0314-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html)

[1]: [https://www.dairyherd.com/walmart](https://www.dairyherd.com/walmart)

[2]: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-
org...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-your-organic-milk-
may-not-be-organic/2017/05/01/708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6eedf1627882_story.html)

~~~
feistypharit
Wow, my uncle in the same boat. He actually now rents land back to the large
farmers and is making more than when he was farming it himself. The new farm
is massive, similar number of cattle, methane collectors, manure
pipelines...but the owners are far away and the people doing it are just your
rural farmhands doing the work because they like it and it's. All that's
available. The owners are making $$$$.

Modern farming is a mess from head to toe, been in the making for 40 years.

~~~
thaumaturgy
One of the benefits of living in a semi-rural area btw is that you can easily
participate in changing this situation. During the Spring, Summer, and Fall
months I can go and pick up fruits and veggies from a local grower -- just
show up on their property during regular business hours, go and pick it
yourself if you feel like or just pick up one of the boxes they've
prearranged. I can get meat from a good local ranch too. I don't think there's
any nearby dairy though.

Mega-agribusiness is one of the consequences of increasing urban living. To
support really large, dense cities, everything has to be scaled way up. A
dairy farm is no longer producing for the 100,000 people in a 20 mile radius,
it's producing for millions, and the waste it creates scales up too.

In an ideal world, these mega-producers would be less harmful to the
environment than the equivalent number of small producers, because there would
be some benefit from economies of scale. But in this world, the mega-producers
largely see regulation and environmental caretaking to be cost centers and
they pursue the cheapest solutions, which usually involve hiding the problem
or paying somebody off or buying themselves some legislation. Smaller
producers meanwhile have a harder time getting away with that.

~~~
wwweston
If there's an oversupply problem, that suggests that perhaps the point where
further industrialization was necessary in order to support the population is
somewhere in the rear view mirror.

And if the economics of megaproduction involve externalizing costs of dealing
with waste, then somewhere we've broken something about pricing and/or
regulation.

~~~
Latteland
There's been an oversupply of consumption in the US of most foods grown in the
US for decades of course (witness the endless media stories of giant stocks of
us govt cheese surplus). With exports we have soaked up much of that
oversupply. There are some years when there is less production but generally
we have too much; milk seems to be especially bad. My uncle is a farmer and
works for the us govt somehow administering crop price supports. A few years
ago, he told me that the price supports mostly guarantee that there is a
stable supply for food, almost pushing for greater production, thus keeping us
close to oversupply (which keeps the prices lower).

I'm not a farmer, I wonder if this idea that us govt price supports for
farming leads us to have constant oversupply? And then what if they went away?

------
rmason
Lots of times farmers, especially in the winter don't want to haul manure any
distance so it gets spread on fields nearest the barn. In Michigan over twenty
years ago farmers by law had to come up with manure management plans.

Composting became popular because it would eliminate the water so you needed
to make far fewer trips to those distant fields. Customers I worked with in
the late nineties realized the need for the law and accepted it.

However there were a few large farms that chose not to cooperate and were
fined pretty much out of existence. Sounds like this is what needs to be done
nationally.

~~~
pstuart
Bio-digesters and gasifiers would provide some energy independence and
drastically reduce pollution (think of all of those hog shit lagoons out
there...)

That is a perfect zero-interest funding opportunity.

~~~
waffle_ss
Interestingly, the CAFO I wrote about in another comment has a manure bio-
digester, and they ended up disconnecting it years ago because it broke down
so often / didn't work. I believe the thing costed over $1M, although I don't
know how much was paid for by the CAFO versus the electric company.

~~~
pstuart
That's disappointing to hear. I still think that it's probably the best
approach to deal with the problem if it worked properly; it would behoove us
all if the technology could become cheaper and more reliable.

------
DennisP
We hear about lab-grown meat but lab-grown dairy is actually easier, and at
least one company is starting to commercialize it this year, providing milk
proteins from yeast to food manufacturers. Milk and cheese for consumers would
still be easier than lab-grown meat, which requires actual cells instead of
just proteins, fats, and sugars.

The advantage of course is that lab-grown requires far less physical resources
than animals, thus helping to alleviate environmental problems. Prices may be
higher at first due to capital expenses but should drop significantly at
scale.

(The recent book _Clean Meat_ has a chapter on dairy.)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
What about broth? I think the lab meat market is missing a very valuable
ingredient. A lot of times, the collagen and the umami in meat is extracted in
the broth. It has amazing depth of flavour and texture. And the nutritional
benefits of bone broth is highly desirable. It’s not same as stock cubes or
vegetable broth. Having fish fumet or a rich pork trotter broth substitute
with just flakes of meat is a chef’s dream.

~~~
DennisP
Broth is an interesting idea. As a liquid it seems like it'd be a relatively
simple product.

The questions I can think of are (1) how big is the market, (2) how hard would
it be to get competitive, and (3) how much impact would it have? If broth
today is mostly made from byproducts of meat production, then it's probably
pretty cheap to produce and we might as well keep doing that until we get rid
of that meat production.

------
ForrestN
The Vox series on Netflix has an exceptionally good story about the water
crisis generally. I left with the impression that right now water is not
priced appropriately, and the solution is to impose more normal market pricing
on water market by market. If you live in a rural area where it's hard to get
access to water, or where your water usage requires elaborate cleanup to
maintain the water supply, you should have to pay way more.

~~~
LeanderK
this doesn't seem like fair thing to do at all. Clean water-acess is a basic
human right, market forces should not determine who pays how much. Think of
children of poor families born into areas where clean water is expensive...i
don't want to imagine the consequences.

~~~
ForrestN
I don't think the idea is to make individuals pay market rates for drinking
water, but rather commercial water users, especially industrial and
agricultural projects.

~~~
QML
This. It’s conflicting to see that people who use water for basic needs have a
higher water bill than farmers who use it for commercial purposes, and due to
the lack of market pricing for bulk water are not incentivized to conserve
water even in drought conditions.

------
spking
[https://outline.com/s8fvyz](https://outline.com/s8fvyz)

~~~
brendansafr
more props for this guy!

------
apacheCamel
Food availability is important, and productive farms help realize that but it
comes at a cost. As a society, we are pushing the boundaries in so many areas
with respect to the environment and we are really starting to see the
consequences for these actions. I feel like there are many possible solutions
to these problems but very few are actually viable and widely accepted. Big
farms aren't going to accept the limitations we want to place on them and
people aren't going to let them continue to destroy the environment around
them. In my own opinion, money means nothing if we can't live long enough to
use it.

~~~
onetimemanytime
This probably adds a cent or two to the gallon. Or a small number. They simply
want to cut as many corners as possible to squeeze the last penny. State has
to intervene.

~~~
rdlecler1
You make it sound like farmers make a lot of money. Most don’t. They have to
squeeze every penny to survive—and that’s in the good years. They often run in
the red in bad years.

------
jpm_sd
I've been wondering lately if there is a profitable business model to be made
out of this problem. Could you collect manure from giant dairies and hog
farms, and use solar-thermal-assisted pyrolysis to break down harmful
compounds and kill bacteria? Turn it into more generic chemical feedstock /
fertilizer?

Maybe once the Gates Foundation sorts out toilets they can work on this next.

------
mattdeboard
I have learned a lot about agriculture, sustainability of same, insights on &
analysis of family & corporate farming, I from following Dr. Sarah Taber on
Twitter.

She does a lot of threads discussing food & food production. Here's a link to
one I pulled basically at random from near the top of her feed.
[https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/108629576050794906...](https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1086295760507949063)

~~~
waffle_ss
Dr. Taber works with fruit and vegetable farms. She's extremely biased and
aggressive to the point of derangement when it comes to anything dairy-
related.

~~~
waffle_ss
Downvote away but it's true; she says as much herself:
[https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/105707517878883123...](https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1057075178788831232)

If you just read her Twitter feed[1] you'll get plenty of great hits, like
dismissing the farmer who farmed for 40 years and went bust I linked to
elsewhere because he was a) white (!) b) was planning on "cash[ing] out"
earlier (she somehow knows this after discussing the issue with "colleagues,"
nevermind the huge pattern backing up this story's vignette).

Her answer to the dairy crisis is just "grow something else,"[2] which I can
tell you with firsthand knowledge is beyond flippant. You don't think farmers
that are committing suicide at record levels perhaps considered this?

Scroll back and you'll see plenty of hyperbolic drivel.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=from%...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=from%3ASarahTaber_bww%20dairy)

[2]:
[https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/104693232563910246...](https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1046932325639102464)

~~~
mattdeboard
Who are you addressing? I actually upvoted you for your original response. I
got that you didn't agree from the first response though.

~~~
waffle_ss
I didn't intend to reply to you specifically and gave no thought whatsoever
about if you downvoted me or not - I was trying to address the folks who
didn't like my comment, whoever they may be.

It didn't even bother me that it was downvoted to -3 before I added the
follow-up. The comment was brief and quite negative, which I knew HN would
find a distasteful ad hominem without more supporting info, but I was busy
writing a lot of other comments at the time.

I assume Dr. Taber is knowledgeable about vegetable and fruit farming but I
stand by my original accusation that she is aggressively, unfairly negative
towards dairy farming, and I would gladly ride both comments past -3,000 karma
to let people know about my distaste for it.

~~~
mattdeboard
I think this is a really interesting distinction, to be honest. I am
definitely a big fan of her commentary but know nothing about agriculture. I
know she is very strident about communicating to people what "family farming"
actually means and stuff. But I totally get there must be a ton of nuance that
people in the biz can see that i can't.

I would really be interested, sincerely interested, in seeing some examples of
what you mean

~~~
waffle_ss
It's not like I keep a dossier on her that I can hand over, but from the time
that I followed her on Twitter, I recall several things that ticked me off:

* She mentioned several times this one anecdote where she worked with a produce farm where a neighboring dairy/livestock farm had bits of dried manure that wound up blowing over onto the produce farm's product. She repeatedly uses this one pathological case to color all livestock farming as dirty and irresponsible.

* She plays up the above case as a "turf war" between vegetable/fruit farmers and livestock farmers. Presumably the implication being that livestock farmers are to blame for all E. coli and other illness outbreaks from contaminated produce. A different comment in this very thread pointed out how ridiculous that is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945036) This whole "turf war" angle is just a way to sound edgy to get more Twitter followers.

* She trotted out some anecdote about when she lived in a small Wisconsin farming town how dairy farmers would not only routinely track cow shit through the grocery store, but do so purposefully, loudly and proudly. In my opinion as someone who grew up on a dairy farm in a small farming town in Wisconsin, this is a bald-faced lie. Every farmer I grew up around wears separate clothes and specifically cleans up before "going into town." Even if it's to the farm hardware store or cooperative. Farmers want to be respected members of their community and not ostracized for being dirty, just like anyone else. Obviously I can't disprove a personal story, I never, __ever __saw something remotely like this play out in my whole life.

* She mixes in identity politics where it isn't warranted. She is dismissive of the dairy farming crisis in whole as well as in specific instances because it disproportionately affects white people (because most dairy farmers are white). I shouldn't have to mention my mom's tribal membership to make my family worthy of sympathy.

* Her unsympathetic advice to dairy farmers is to "diversify." Meaning plant different things. Problem is she mostly works with produce farms in areas like California, where that kind of advice doesn't map to Wisconsin, which has a very different growing environment. It's also completely ignorant of the inelasticity of farming in general - there is so much specialized equipment/assets both for cattle and crops tied up in CAPEX, you can't just go "whelp, this year I'm gonna do something totally new!" and snap your fingers and make your cattle and barn transmogrify into a pile of money, and buy all new specialized equipment. She's not wrong that there's a perhaps foolhardy race-to-the-bottom in competing on milk price alone, but blaming individuals for not completely reconfiguring their business, knowledge and identity into a farming niche she's more comfortable with, and not giving a proper nod to the massive industry-wide shift towards vertical integration is unreasonable and tinged with an edge of cruelty.

To boil it all down, she's everything I despise in modern Twitter personas.
She's an elitist passing judgment on entire swathes of hardworking blue-collar
people with a sneer. And she does it dressed up in robes of faux wonkish
authority using her adjacent knowledge and niche experience in produce
farming. The excessive wokeness is just a shit cherry on top.

~~~
waffle_ss
Oh, and she also got caught out spinning complete fabrications about the
origins of organic, playing it up as some anti-Semitic cabal:

[https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/108419765521399398...](https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/1084197655213993986)

[https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/108419856336050585...](https://twitter.com/_MatthewDillon/status/1084198563360505857)

And if you want an example of why Taber's "diversify!" advice is misguided,
look at the USDA's own estimates of costs and returns for different crop
types: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-costs-
and-r...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/commodity-costs-and-
returns/interactive-visualization-us-commodity-costs-and-returns-by-region-
and-by-commodity/)

Click on "Difference between costs and returns," select a commodity (e.g.
Corn), then click on Northern Crescent. Now click through different crop types
and notice how many you'd be underwater on. Crops are a volatile crapshoot
like milk. Yes, you can "diversify" and plant more than one type, but you're
still placing bets on which ones are going to go underwater and cost you
money, and which are going to net you anything at all - you're still betting
on combined gains and losses.

------
jessaustin
I sympathize with this guy, but 123' is a really shallow well. If the
neighboring dairies were smart (little evidence of that in TFA), they would
have paid to get a 400-footer drilled (and grouted) for him 18 years ago when
the problem first showed up. Better yet, why don't they just set up a local
sewer and water district so they can have one professionally maintained (and
deep) well that serves the community?

In one sense this guy is lucky. Multiple parties at both the local and state
levels care about his situation. When we tried to get MO DNR to force a local
truck stop to cease pouring undiluted trucker shit downhill into the Gasconade
River, my neighbors and I struck out completely.

~~~
zdragnar
A 400 foot well? That'd be what, 15, 20 grand, including the casing to prevent
contamination? I can see that being a smart move for the dairy farm to offer
to neighbors, but that's a ton of money to do on your own initiative unless
you're mortgaging new construction. (Better than drinking contaminated water,
but still...)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Last time I had anything to do with a well it was "$5k no matter how deep I
go" (granted that was paid in cash) and it was 500ft or so.

~~~
zdragnar
That's pretty great pricing, though to add in protective piping to avoid
contamination from shallower waters is an added cost. Almost built a house
about 2 miles from an old garbage dump site, and the estimate for a shallower
well than that was around $12k

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This was in a low cost of living area in a low-regulation state. Paying cash
was what made the price fixed regardless of depth.

------
kickout
Nitrogen runoff is huge problem. Multi-billion dollar idea? Autonomous
tractors applying N only when the plant needs it (a couple small 2 week
windows).

Cant wait for the startup to bring this to market

~~~
breatheoften
Is it surprising that nitrogen runoff is a thing? Something like 7% of world
energy use goes into making nitrogen for farming — why is it that we don’t
have efficient methodology for adding it to soil at a rate which does not
exceed the soil uptake rate — is fertilizer cost not a pretty clear resource
cost that _someone_ would find value in reducing even without considering the
(non-priced) externalities ...?

------
theoh
Images of the landscape of intensive cattle farming:
[https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots](https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots)

------
Fomite
I moved to a rural area and the real estate agent was going on and on about
how, since this was farm country, you knew the air was clear and the water
pure.

It was all I could do not to laugh.

------
brooklyntribe
The majority of Americans have brain damage of some kind from toxic organic
pesticides. This is why people are so weird.

Look for the twitches and shakes, that the indicator. Especially facial
muscles around the eyes. We've all been poisoned. The organic chemists have
known this for years.

The upside? Cheap corn.

Now what?

Source: Former organic chemist who was exposed to toxic organic pesticides. [a
light dose]

~~~
kickout
Geez dude. Agree chemical are not ideal, but is $10 USD a gallon milk ideal?

Hope you dont use a cell phone because of the radiation.

~~~
timerol
If milk was $10 USD, it would encourage people to eat in ways that are cheaper
to produce. Cheaper to produce unsubsidized lines up reasonably well with good
for the environment (more vegetarian and vegan foods). I'm always surprised
that milk is cheaper than canned beans on a calories per dollar basis, given
the cows, pasteurization, and refrigeration needed.

~~~
linuxftw
This is correct. Additionally, many of the subsidies for agricultural
businesses go to the largest player. That's why your local diary farm's milk
is $8+/gallon versus the grocery store.

------
yholio
> Farmers can’t produce milk and cheese at the low prices American consumers
> have grown accustomed to without some effect on water, says [an industry
> mouthpiece]. “The alternative here,” he says, “is a society that depends
> upon other countries to feed us.”

What a crock of bullshit, if I may say so. US has a surplus of agricultural
products and is a massive exporter to the point where it perturbs world
markets, some 140 billions per year. This is true for many advanced economies
that subsidize agriculture in various ways to protect food security and rural
employment, for example the EU, and is frequently contested by poor economies
dependent on cash crop exports to finance healthcare, etc.

The typical reaction of any industry when an ecologic issue is reported is to
ignore it, then deny it, then lobby forcefully that tying to fix it will
destroy the national economy. And then they grudgingly comply and there is no
economic catastrophe.

~~~
sailfast
My understanding is that there is an oversupply of Dairy in the country right
now due to reduced demands for things like Milk and American cheese. The
stockpile of American Cheese is at an all-time high and they're converting to
this cheese to get their surplus into a more long-term store of value. Not
sure why we would continue to subsidize this:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/ameri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/28/americas-
cheese-stockpile-just-hit-an-all-time-high/?utm_term=.68abec4aab39)

~~~
vkou
We subsidize foods because most of the people in our government have read
their histories, and know that instability in food pricing and availability is
a great way to bring about a domestic regime change.

~~~
tomatotomato37
Don't forget this applies to those importing our food as well, giving the US a
large amount of influence on those countries

From a realpolitik perspective encouraging the vast overproduction of food is
probably one of the smartest things our government has done

~~~
mschuster91
> From a realpolitik perspective encouraging the vast overproduction of food
> is probably one of the smartest things our government has done

Not if you're in for the long haul. Dumping excess ag products and clothing on
Africa has trashed the local economies beyond repair, made the countries
depend on "foreign aid" and now China comes in and binds the countries to them
by rebuilding all the infrastructure... with the dollars they gained from
exporting to the US.

------
starpilot
Our planet is dying.

~~~
escherplex
Couple the above article with

 _Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America’s Largest Aquifer – the
Ogallala_

URL = [http://duwaterlawreview.com/crisis-on-the-high-plains-the-
lo...](http://duwaterlawreview.com/crisis-on-the-high-plains-the-loss-of-
americas-largest-aquifer-the-ogallala/)

Does seem like we're running on fumes.

~~~
kickout
Interesting, will read later. Odd that TX has the greatest depletion. As a NE
resident, was under impression Ogallala was back to 2010 levels after 2012
drought hit it bad.

------
rblion
What's the point of all this technological progress if our bodies grow sick
from the pollution?

Food for thought.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I agree. Farming for food is not an ideal way to get calories and nutrients
into the human body.

I really hope we can create a nutritional lab concoction like a broth which
has a baseline nutritional value. And can be customized for people with
deficiencies or special dietary requirements.

------
sedachv
Livestock feces runoff into irrigation water is also responsible for most
cases of fruit and vegetable E. Coli contamination (such as the recent one of
lettuce: [https://www.independent.com/news/2018/dec/14/adam-
brothers-f...](https://www.independent.com/news/2018/dec/14/adam-brothers-
farm-identified-e-coli-outbreak/))

E. Coli is not a normal plant pathogen (it does not infect a plant even if it
comes in contact with the roots), and is only able to survive in soil for a
couple of weeks. There are claims that E. Coli outbreaks have been caused by
wild animals such as deer ([https://www.ecoliblog.com/e-coli-outbreaks/deer-
poop-conclus...](https://www.ecoliblog.com/e-coli-outbreaks/deer-poop-
conclusively-linked-to-strawberry-e-coli-outbreak/)), however, no mention is
ever made of alternative hypotheses. What do you think is more likely:
dozens/hundreds of acres of crop being infected by a handful of deer strolling
through and leaving some droppings, or the deer drinking the infected
irrigation water and contracting the E. Coli, which shows up in their
droppings? How much do you think the likelihood changes if you know that the
E. Coli is antibiotic resistant (cows are continually fed antibiotics,
primarily because it makes them grow faster)? There are even more outlandish
claims about birds (apparently geese are now supposed to be tactical precision
bombers targeting our food supply with biological weapons). This wild-animals
theory also fails to explain why every single crop field is not continuously
infected with E. Coli from rodent droppings from the hundreds or even
thousands of mice, rats, and other rodents that live in and around the fields.

~~~
Fomite
At least one outbreak _was_ attributed to wild pigs.

Also, the outbreak investigators for these things are well aware of the
alternate hypotheses, and water and machine-driven contamination is often
investigated.

And no, geese aren't precise. But they do shit a lot.

