2016-2017 Standing Rock-Prairie Nights hotel, there were “hired” DAPL infiltrators and instigators to target the most vulnerable with temptations of alcohol, drugs, gossip and rumors as well as money! Those with addictions struggled and toxicity excepted the distraction and intellectual manipulation. Many did not accept and continued to protect the sacred. But at the higher level, follow the money of “greed, desperation and division.
The Conquer and divide method is stil…
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‘It’s over’: Miami Beach tries to outrace climate change’s rising seas
David Knowles, Editor March 18, 2019
Louis Fernandez walks along a flooded Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Fla. in 2015. (Photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
MIAMI BEACH — Harold Wanless sits on a bench in Maurice Gibb Memorial Park beside a new concrete sea wall, the sound of hammers and drills emanating from Belle Isle across a cloudy, turquoise inlet of Biscayne Bay. Knowing what he does about how fast the water surrounding these porous barrier islands is rising, Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, marvels at the level of denial the latest building boom requires.
“Just using the U.S. government projections, we could be at 11 to over 13 feet [of sea level rise] by the end of century,” Wanless, 77, says. “There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level.”
Named after the Bee Gees bass player and keyboardist who lived the later years of his life in Miami Beach before his death there in 2003, the park is in Sunset Harbor, a neighborhood the city set about lifting 2 feet after regular flooding brought on by sea level rise made it increasingly uninhabitable. To Wanless, that amounted to little more than a short-term fix.
“With another 2 feet of sea level rise, I don’t think any of these barrier islands are inhabitable in the normal sense that we live on them today,” Wanless says.
Having spent nearly six decades studying the geologic impacts of rising seas on global coastlines since the last Ice Age, Wanless can foresee the disaster that will overtake his city as surely as critics predicted the death of the cocaine-fueled disco era 40 years ago.
Of late, what worries Wanless most are the “21 climate change feedback loops” that he says are now accelerating the melting of glaciers and the polar ice sheet. Those processes — such as the recent finding that more frequent rain in Greenland has doubled the rate the continent now contributes to sea level rise — have made Wanless increasingly pessimistic about South Florida’s future.
Geologist Harold Wanless looks out over Biscayne Bay. (Photo: Mary Beth Koeth for Yahoo News)
“With sea levels rising at over a foot per decade, it’s over,” Wanless, who owns a home in nearby Coral Gables, says as he glances at a trio of passing jet skiers.
Miami Beach’s existential math problem is all too easy to understand. On the bay side of the island, the elevation averages just 2.4 feet above sea level. Higher ground, 11.41 feet, is found along the island’s famous beachhead, where 9.2 million tourists flock annually to party like there’s no tomorrow.
The initial $500 million solution for Sunset Harbor and other low-lying sections now serves as a template for other parts of the city: Raise roads up to 2 feet, increase the height of the sea wall on city-owned shoreline, require new private construction to be one foot above base flood elevation and install permanent hydraulic pumping stations to protect existing buildings from flooding. That investment is just the start of what will likely be a multi-stage effort to buttress Miami Beach from the coming onslaught.
“We know the sea is rising. We know the climate is warming,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber says outside Barceloneta, a restaurant that still sits at the neighborhood’s former elevation, jarringly below the raised sidewalk and street. “We accept, obviously, those science propositions, but we’ve turned to scientists and engineers to say ‘Well, what can we do about it?’ And we’re following what they say. At no point has our city said, Uh-uh, we’re not going to do that because we know science better than you. We’re not going to do that because I’m a lawyer, I’m not a scientist.”
Gelber, whose father is former Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber, has taken on his share of challenging jobs over the course of his career. A former prosecutor, he led the U.S. Senate investigation into the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Okla. After stints in the Florida House of Representatives and the Florida Senate, Gelber ran for state attorney general in 2010, losing to Pam Bondi. Seven years later, he was elected mayor of Miami Beach, a city that had already begun spending millions to fortify itself from the rising sea.
Gelber, 58, knows the only real hope Miami Beach has is to join the elevational arms race that pits land against water, and build higher. To date, roughly 20 percent of the storm water/sea level mitigation plan has been completed. But when Gelber was elected, he hit pause on the ambitious policy, commissioning studies by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and the Urban Land Institute to make sure the lift was being done in the most cost-effective way possible. The new master plan incorporates more green spaces, living sea walls instead of concrete and a lot more talk of a future that includes “living with water.”
Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber. (Photo: Mary Beth Koeth for Yahoo News)
“These streets are all going to go under another transformation in the next 80 years — it may be a couple different transformations — so this will be a constant thing we’ll be addressing, like a lot of coastal communities,” Gelber says.
‘You’re going to get people upset’
On the short drive from Sunset Harbor to North Bay Road, a well-to-do, flood-prone enclave, for-sale signs dot the landscape. Last year, after learning that the city planned to raise the street 2 feet, many residents on North Bay Road rebelled, and now the project is on hold.
Jean Marie Echemendia, a realtor at Douglas Elliman who splits her time between Manhattan and Miami Beach and owns two houses on the street, opposes the construction.
“I think the city is approaching this mitigation in a haphazard way. For whatever reason, there were quite a few people in the government that wanted to raise the streets,” Echemendia, 42, says when reached by phone. “Now, I have a problem with that because, as everyone knows, water flows down, so if you raise the streets, and the crest is higher than your front stoop, the water is just going to run right into your house.”
Gelber contends that the installation of more pumps will take care of that problem and that homes and businesses at the original grade can connect to the hydraulic network for free. Making that case to the city’s skeptical residents, however, has become a big part of his job.
“The issue with residents is sort of a simple one,” Gelber says. “Any time you’re spending money and you’re creating a disruption, you’re going to get people upset.”
A new pumping station in Miami Beach. (Photo: Mary Beth Koeth for Yahoo News)
While Echemendia believes in climate change — she notes that she has purchased two Teslas to cut her carbon footprint — she also thinks that worries over sea level rise are overblown. She was among the residents who pushed back on the two-tiered plan.
“Am I afraid that water is going to totally engulf our streets like they’re picturing? No, I’m not. I don’t think it’s going to be in our lifetime,” Echmendia says.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, among others, disagree. In a 2018 study the group found that flooding exacerbated by sea level rise will, by the year 2045, threaten 12,095 homes in Miami Beach valued at $6.4 billion.
By the end of the century, nationwide losses are projected to top $1 trillion, including damage to an estimated 2.4 million homes. With the scale of the coming disruption almost too large to comprehend, NOAA has built a website that lets users glimpse the inundated future on coastal maps and toggle up a dystopian amount of sea level rise.
For Miami Beach, just 2 additional feet subsumes much of the west side of the island, including North Bay Road. Add another 4 feet and all but a sliver of the land where the city’s art deco masterpieces were built is covered in blue.
“That’s if we do nothing,” Gelber says, adding that there’s little time to waste. “If you wait for 10 or 15 years to start it, that’s a mistake.”
A new high-rise is being constructed to meet Miami Beach’s new building code. (Photo: Mary Beth Koeth for Yahoo News)
Doing nothing on North Bay Road is already problematic. “It floods just about every time it rains,” Kimberley Green, president of the Green Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving global health care services to the poor, says from the front steps of her single-story home.
“Because of climate change, everything is getting worse,” Green says, though, like Echemendia, she’s not in favor of the city’s fix. “The solution doesn’t seem to have worked in other neighborhoods, so I don’t know why that’s our only alternative.”
While Green says she isn’t sure what will happen if the city raises the level of her street, she is decidedly sour about what she has already seen.
“I was a property owner in the Sunset Harbor area, and my family owns some of the retail property there and it [raising the streets] destroyed all of the businesses,” Green says.
When asked whether any of her neighbors support the plain to raise the road, she gestures across the street to a fenced-off bay front lot with a for sale sign planted out front and says it once belonged to Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, a real-life “Scarface” whose property went derelict after his 1993 death in Medellín in a shootout with Colombian police.
“But that’s a whole other crazy Miami Beach story,” Green says.
‘Political will and money’
In some ways, Miami Beach is lucky. With high real estate prices and millions in tax revenue from a robust tourist trade, the city has been able to cobble together funds to wage its war with the sea in a way that poorer ones must envy. Under Gelber, it recently appropriated another $140 million, bringing the total program budget to $650 million.
Sunset Harbor Drive has been raised two feet, but Stiltsville Fish Bar, pictured here, remains at the former elevation. (Photo: Mary Beth Koeth for Yahoo News)
But everyone seems to understand that much, much more will be needed in the coming decades. While money isn’t the most pressing problem for now, what will happen when more banks decide 30-year mortgages are too risky for the island? What if government sea level rise projections are too conservative, as the 21 feedback loops Wanless cites seem to suggest? Even if Washington politicians surprise the world by finding common ground on climate change, 90 percent of global temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution has been stored in the world’s oceans, meaning sea level rise will continue unabated even if carbon emissions are miraculously slowed or reversed.
For his part, Gelber is doing his best to assure the public that investing in Miami Beach still makes sense.
“The sky is not falling down,” Gelber says. “These are manageable challenges. I don’t want anyone to think that one of their pieces of property is going to be under water. The plan works. There’s no question it works, it just takes political will and money.”
Back at Maurice Gibb Memorial Park, the sun is out and the grass is dry. Biscayne Bay still has another few feet to rise before it will top the aptly named Venetian Way Bridge that leads to Belle Isle and its luxury condos.
Nearing retirement, Wanless still hopes that the world will wake up to the fact that sea level rise isn’t some problem for generations not yet born.
“People have to understand how serious this is going to be quickly, in the next two or three decades,” Wanless says. “We’re just seeing the beginning of this accelerated ice melt.”
He closes with an anecdote that you certainly won’t find on a brochure at the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce.
“I had a Wall Street triathlete call me and ask, ‘Can I get 10 years out of a condo on Miami Beach?’ I said, Eh, probably. If you’re going to do it for 30 years, I’d be very careful,” Wanless says.
The worst agricultural downturn since the 1980’s is taking its toll on the emotional well-being of American farmers.
In Kentucky, Montana and Florida, operators at Farm Aid’s hotline have seen a doubling of contacts for everything from financial counseling to crisis assistance. In Wisconsin, Dale Meyer has started holding monthly forums in the basement of his Loganville church following the suicide of a fellow parishioner, a farmer who’d fallen on hard times. In Minnesota, rural counselor Ted Matthews says he’s getting more and more calls.
“Can you imagine doing your job and having your boss say ‘well you know things are bad this year, so not only are we not going to pay you, but you owe us’,” Matthews said by telephone. “That’s what’s happened with farmers.’’
Glutted grain markets have sparked a years-long price slump made worse by a trade war with top buyer China. As their revenues decline, farmers have piled on record debt — to the tune of $427 billion. The industry’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest since the mid 1980’s, when Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert.
So dire are conditions in farm country that Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed for mental-health provisions to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The legislation allocated $50 million over five years to address the shortfall of such services in rural areas.
Ernst said she spoke with a woman whose farmer husband died by suicide. While there’s been progress on a trade resolution, the ruckus “has been very, very hard on our farmers,” she said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had such a depressed farm economy.”
Few agricultural states have been hit harder than Baldwin’s Wisconsin, whose state license plates proclaim it as “America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin lost almost 1,200 dairy farms between 2016 and 2018, government data show.
Smaller operators have been the most affected, she said by telephone. The mental-health provisions in the farm bill aren’t for a “free trip to the psychiatrist,” but rather about “community looking out for each other.”
There was a similar legislative effort in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the program was never funded because prices recovered, said Jennifer Fahy, communications director for Farm Aid, which advocated for the measures.
Two-thirds of the calls to Farm Aid’s hotline originated from growers who have been farming for a decade or more. They were evenly distributed among fruit and vegetable producers, livestock, grain and oilseed and dairy, the data show.
In 2018, the number of calls rose 109 percent to 1,034, increasing in the last five months of the year. In November, crisis assistance accounted for 78 percent of contacts to the hotline.
“The peak of the crisis was in 1986,” said Allen Featherstone, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “It is the worst since then by far.”
Mike Rosmann, another of the few mental health counselors in rural America, echoed the sentiments. A partially retired fourth-generation farmer, Rosmann rents out his Iowa property and maintains land under the conservation reserve program.
During the 1980’s farm crisis, the hotlines, counseling and other services that he participated in became the template for the provisions in the farm bill that Baldwin and Ernst advocated for, he said.
“The retaliatory tariffs by China have hurt soybean exports,” Rosmann said. “They’ve hurt our relations with other countries as well to a lesser extent, partly just because of the skepticism that surrounds the reliability of what the U.S. is doing.”
Still, farmers support Trump, in part due to his public support for corn-based ethanol, Rosmann said. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency advanced a plan meant to expand the U.S. ethanol market, the first step in fulfilling a promise Trump made in Iowa last fall. About $8 billion in farmer aid has also taken some of the sting out of the trade war.
Some of that goodwill may be eroded by a 2020 budget proposal that would cut “overly generous” Department of Agriculture subsidies. The 35-day partial government shutdown earlier this year slowed implementation of the program.
Farmers have accrued so much debt because by nature they are optimistic, said Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Their fierce independence and deep connection with the land can become an economic disadvantage, Marlow said. “They can be driven far further than most of us would be before they would call it quits, to the point of getting off-farm jobs to be able to continue farming, subsidizing the farming operation with off-farm income, driving themselves extremely hard.”
Sue Judd in Wisconsin set up a suicide prevention group for farmers and those in the rural community after her brother, a hobby farmer, killed himself, she said. Her group’s aim is to convince farmers that it’s all right to seek help and that they’re not alone.
Meyer, 71, who retired from law enforcement, was on the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church dart team with the parishioner who died by suicide. He says another parishioner who’s a farmer confided to him that he also struggled with stress. Meyer says that his aim with the groups is to “give them some hope if we can.” In the last meeting, 59 people showed up to share food, stories and hear financial advice and how to deal with stress compared with 45 in January.
Farmers’ spirits may lift if U.S. negotiators can broker a favorable deal with China soon. For now though, they’re having to cope with soybean prices of about $9 a bushel, almost half of what they were getting in the heyday of 2012. Chicago corn futures have followed a similar path to be trading at about $3.70 from a peak of $8.49 in 2012.
“If the corn price went up $3 a bushel and beans went up $5 my phone would ring a fourth as much as it is now,” Matthews said during a road trip. “Prices are really low and they’re waiting for what are they are going to do. Are they going to lift the tariffs? And so all of those things they’re constantly looking at.”
With assistance from Reg Gale and Cynthia Koons.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Jeffrey Taylor
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
Wisconsinite Abe Voelker says his family’s farm is yet another in a long line going out of business because of low prices, overproduction, the rise of CAFOs, and more.
By Abe Voelker, Business, Farming March 14, 2019
This essay originally appeared on Abe Voelker’s Blog, and is reprinted with permission.
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on. As usual I took the opportunity to help my dad and younger brother with barn chores and milk cows. The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. I didn’t help out every shift but I worked more than enough to once again be humbled about the life I left behind and recalibrate my nostalgia.
Early morning walk to the barn
Speaking of which, I never had the work ethic to be a farmer. Ever since I was little and playing video games on our NES, I was enamored by electronics. By the time our family got a personal computer and dial-up internet for Christmas in 1997, when I was 11, I was completely and hopelessly sucked in. There followed many evenings where my dad would come flying in to the house to yell at me for being late for chores when I lost track of time on “that damn computer.”
Thankfully for all involved, my younger brother Noah inherited my dad’s insane work ethic and love of farming and took up the farm’s reins (he also picked up my slack when we were younger—thanks Brother). He loves the work and excels at it.
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and haven’t lived in my hometown since.
I also have two older brothers; neither of them got the farming gene either. My eldest brother Jerry lives near Madison and also works in the software field. My second-eldest brother, John, lives near my folks and helps out quite often, but he also does other work and has other obligations, so most of the daily farming work falls on my youngest brother Noah and my dad, who is now into his 70’s.
Sadly this year, I found out that it will have been my final Christmas coming home and milking cows, because they’ll be selling off the cows over the coming spring and fall.
My dad and brother Noah getting ready to milk
The End of a Long Battle
This probably shouldn’t be a huge shock. Ever since I can remember there has always been a steady drumbeat of family farms going bust. Sometimes the tempo would increase, when milk and/or crop prices would hit new lows, but the drum has always beat on as the industry never seemed to turn a corner.
American milk is a global commodity, with commensurate pricing volatility due to fluctuations in global supply and demand, futures market speculators, and other factors. Source: USDA. 2018 dollar calculation made using CPI values.
Our family farm was subjected to the same ups and downs as every other farm but had always managed to weather every storm. I recall my dad saying how farming was a series of upturns and downturns in pretty much everything, and how it was important to save money from the good years so you can survive the bad years.
The cost of production has exceeded the value of production for dairy farms of my family’s size since the USDA began collecting these statistics in 2010. Source: USDA, “Milk cost of production by size of operation”
One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late ’90’s—I was in elementary school—when milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At that time, my mom got involved in dairy activism and became a lead organizer of a group of area farmers who worked together to try to improve their lot and raise public awareness of their struggles.
In December 1995, they met with Wisconsin progressive legend Ed Garvey, a labor attorney who successfully helped form the NFL player’s union, to talk about forming a union for farmers.
The following year, after being rebuffed by a state representative for being a negligible percent of his constituency and told to come back when they had more support, they rallied farmers across the state to voluntarily close off their land to all recreational activity such as hunting, fishing, snowmobiling,4 and four-wheeling (snowmobile and ATV trails often cross farmers’ private land in Wisconsin).
They also blockaded a creamery cooperative’s weighing scales to protest the low prices.
In 1997, they founded an organization called Save Our Family Farms with the objective of getting farmers across the country to respond to a non-binding referendum on pricing mechanisms and supply management. I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canada’s family farms’ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies.
Later, in 1998, they succeeded in establishing their union (technically a guild due to federal labor laws) as a branch of OPEIU, which in turn is affiliated with the AFL – CIO.
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didn’t have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
For our family at that time, the milk price situation combined with my dad needing knee surgery (from repeated stress of kneeling on concrete to milk cows) resulted in us having a dispersal sale and selling off most of the herd.
I remember it being an emotional day. After spending a week thoroughly cleaning up the barn and cattle, we set up a fenced-off show area outside the barn where on the day of the auction, the cattle were paraded out one-by-one to display to bidders and the auctioneer.
Milk prices being low also lowers the value of milking cows themselves, so we got less money than we had hoped for. To a kid it felt like vultures were paying a pittance to carry away a piece of my identity. By the end of the day, looking down the alleyway at mostly-empty cow stalls bedded with fresh sawdust, that anger turned to sadness and a sense of loss.
In time, my dad recovered from his surgery, my older brothers graduated from high school and moved out, and as my younger brother and I aged into our early teens, the herd was slowly built up to near-previous levels again.
‘Get Big or Get Out’
It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (what’s now considered small, anyway). In 1981, my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsin’s 22 counties for average milk production. This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away you were from here.
While not a scientific poll, it’s an interesting sample. If you look at the herd sizes listed you can see that they’re all what would now be considered small, with only two herds just barely over 100 head.
From what I can tell, the farming landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s when President Nixon promoted agribusiness lobbyist Earl “Rusty” Buty to USDA secretary. Butz had a reputation going back to at least the 1950’s for lobbying for dramatic modernizations to farming at the expense of small farms. “Adapt or die; resist and perish…Agriculture is now big business” he would say. By the 1970’s, before his USDA nomination, he was a director of three large agribusiness corporations.
Before Butz, farming practices were ruled by FDR New Deal-era controls on production, when memories of the Dust Bowl and destruction of the land through overproduction were still vivid. These production controls aimed to smooth out volatility by paying farmers to keep fields fallow in times of overproduction, and to release grain from storage in times of shortages. Farming production was geared toward American consumption, but even with the production controls there was always a surplus of grain to deal with.
Nixon brought Butz in with a mandate to get rid of the grain surpluses. Butz architected this by selling off the grain surpluses to the Soviets in “the largest grain deal so far as we [knew] in the history of the world” in 1972 for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, the deal didn’t come with an upper limit on how much grain the Soviets could buy (“because it did not occur to [them] that the Russians could ever buy too much”), and the Soviets bought up one – forth of the U.S. wheat harvest that year. The following year, American supermarket prices for bread and other goods shot up by 20%, of which some estimates attribute at least 15% of the rise directly on the export deal. Butz and the other deal-makers were dragged before a furious Congress to testify on what happened.
The grain shortages were a windfall for grain farmers, who were getting a higher price for their grain, but bad news for dairy farmers and other livestock farmers who fed their animals with grain.
To make up for the grain shortfall, Butz removed all production limits on grain and fervently encouraged farmers to go wild with production, to plant “from fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out.”.
The effects were quickly apparent, as before his USDA tenure was finished Butz became a pariah to everyone but the big farmers, as small farmers went bust under the continual tightening of the efficiency noose (Butz of course had no sympathy for these “inefficient” farms).
While not the whole story, Butz’s era was undoubtedly a major turning point in orienting our food economy towards consolidation and concentration of production in fewer and fewer hands.
Rise of the CAFOs
The consolidation of dairy and the continual shrinking of profit margins have led to drastic changes to the industry over the years. One change is that through selective breeding, improved nutrition, increased milking frequency, and other factors, the amount of milk that a single cow yields per year has more than doubled since the 1970’s:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
This has allowed overall milk production to increase, even while the total number of cows has shrank:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
While the overall number of cows have decreased a bit, the number of herds of cows, i.e. the number of farming operations, have decreased dramatically (and continues to do so—the latest count on the rate of change is two dairy farms per day closing):
Source: USDA Quick Stats
What this means is that the average number of cows on a given dairy operation has greatly risen, i.e., dairy farms have become much denser in terms of livestock. Looking at government statistics on dairy farm profitability, the reason this is happening (and the reason the trend will only continue) seems to be obvious—only farms with thousands of cows, that can use their size to cut costs, are able to operate in the black:
The only dairy farms that have been able to turn a profit (net value above zero) since the USDA began collecting statistics on dairy production in 2010 are the very largest. Source: USDA Milk Cost of Production Estimates by size of operation.
These changes have given rise to a whole new type of livestock farm: the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. CAFOs are defined by the EPA as “an AFO [Animal Feeding Operation] with more than 1000 animal units” (which for dairy, is 700 dairy cows, either milking or dry) or “any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway.”
Cows on a CAFO operation. Public domain image courtesy Danny Hart/PICRYL
In Wisconsin, the number of dairy CAFOs and the total number of cows on these operations continues to rise rapidly:
Source: Wisconsin DNR CAFO Permitees. (Note: These numbers only cover the latest CAFO permit issued to each operation. I have a FOIA request in progress with the WI DNR to get the historical permit data in order to improve this chart’s accuracy.)
The concentration of livestock on small plots of land and the large-scale industrialization of these farming operations have given rise to new negative externalities. CAFO livestock produce literal manure lagoons. There is so much manure produced that a huge pit must be dug, fitted with a liner, and the manure is dumped in, forming an artificial lake made of animal waste.
These manure lagoons are open-air, and the toxic fumes elevate rates of asthma in children living nearby. The liquid itself contains toxic chemicals, pathogens, and bacteria, and if it leaks out (say during heavy rainfall), is devastating to nearby communities as it contaminates the local water table, where people draw their well water from, and destroys local bodies of water where wildlife live and people recreate.
Due to the number of cows on these operations, high capacity wells that draw over 100,000 gallons of water per day are required in order to draw enough water for all the livestock. In rural Wisconsin, our natural water supply is beginning to be destroyed through a combination of manure and fertilizer spills contaminating our well water, and high capacity wells sucking out so much water that it’s disrupting the water table.
The agriculture sector, including CAFOs, is the leading contributor of pollutants to lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. It has been found that states with high concentrations of CAFOs experience on average 20 to 30 serious water quality problems per year as a result of manure management problems (EPA, 2001).
The report goes on to describe the long-term damage from even a single manure spill:
When groundwater is contaminated by pathogenic organisms, a serious threat to drinking water can occur. Pathogens survive longer in groundwater than surface water due to lower temperatures and protection from the sun.
…
Even if the contamination appears to be a single episode, viruses could become attached to sediment near groundwater and continue to leach slowly into groundwater. One pollution event by a CAFO could become a lingering source of viral contamination for groundwater (EPA, 2005).
…
Groundwater can still be at risk for contamination after a CAFO has closed and its lagoons are empty. When given increased air exposure, ammonia in soil transforms into nitrates. Nitrates are highly mobile in soil, and will reach groundwater quicker than ammonia. It can be dangerous to ignore contaminated soil.
…
If a CAFO has contaminated a water system, community members should be concerned about nitrates and nitrate poisoning. Elevated nitrates in drinking water can be especially harmful to infants, leading to blue baby syndrome and possible death.
For some real-world examples, in Wisconsin in 2017, a baby died from blue baby syndrome, a condition linked to high nitrates, in a community in Armenia, WI which had been experiencing a spike in private well nitrate levels after a 6,000-head dairy CAFO set up shop there. In the central sands region of Wisconsin, rivers such as the Little Plover, which was a notably good trout stream, have nearly dried up entirely from the substantial use of high capacity wells.
In Kewaunee County in northeast Wisconsin, more than one-third (!) of 320 wells tested were found to be unsafe to use due to unsafe levels of coliform bacteria or nitrates. In 2004, in that region, a six-month-old became violently ill after taking a bath in water poisoned by manure runoff. A state representative called the situation there a “public health crisis.”
A shower in rural Kewaunee County runs brown, contaminated by manure after a rainfall. Courtesy Erika and Rob Balza.
In 2014, in Juneau County, a man was forced to sell the home he had lived in for 20 years after a CAFO began repurposing water irrigation systems to spray manure, and the liquid soaked into the walls of his home (“It was an ammonia smell. It hurt so bad even to breathe,” he said).
An irrigation system is repurposed to spray manure on a Wisconsin field. Public domain image courtesy Wisconsin DNR
Besides environmental externalities, it’s also an open secret that these CAFOs heavily rely on undocumented immigrants for their day-to-day labor, particularly the parlor milking setups. In a recent news story, Congressman Devin Nunes’s family’s large dairy farm in Iowa got busted for such practices.
A dairy CAFO located in a tiny Wisconsin village pins an ad for workers written in Spanish to their Facebook page. There’s no ad in English. 🤔 That’s not a dig towards the immigrants—I married a Mexican woman and I love my inlaws and their culture dearly.
However, it’s important to remember that farms are in competition with each other for labor, land, and other resources. In this case, my brother and other family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else, not unlike externalizing the costs of their pollution. It’s not a fair playing field to compete on.
Those are the federally-documented violations, anyway. My mom took some video of a leak about a month after the EPA-documented CWA violation which traveled down the hill into a creek that runs through my parents’ property, killing the wildlife there for God knows how long. This CAFO is now going through the process of installing a manure pipeline to move waste around to various fields—so far through private lands, but apparently they are also pursuing public right-of-ways.
It’s terrifying to consider how rapidly and how severely the water table and nearby wetlands could be damaged if this pipeline were to burst or leak, and how much manure could be pumped out below the topsoil before being detected.
So I spoke to the county’s conservation officer who had nothing but good things to say about the pipeline and how it will get tanker trucks off the roads, how a pipeline is safer for the environment, and how leaks would be stopped by shutoff valves. That may be true, but yet you can easily find news reports of manure pipeline leaks. When I asked my mom her thoughts, she told me there was allegedly a pipeline break already which sprayed manure across a neighbor’s yard and house, and showed me some pictures she took of the cleanup.
A skid steer cleans up an alleged manure spill at a neighbor’s house. Picture courtesy my mom.
For my brother Noah, who is taking over the farm, having the county’s biggest CAFO nearby unfortunately puts a competetive strain on his already-difficult situation. Because Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit requirements require these CAFOs to own or rent enough land to spread manure on proportional to the amount of cows they have, this multi-million dollar corporation down the road is under land-pressure, and gobbles up all farming land in the area often before it’s even on the market. This makes it harder for my brother to find farmland to buy or rent nearby.
Failure of the Cooperatives
One last thing I’d like to touch on is the failure of the farmer cooperatives in this era.It’s probably well-known that there have been periods where farmers have went through tough times, and going back to at least the 1920’s, farmers have formed voluntary cooperatives (co-ops) to help one another out by pooling resources.
Check out this quaint 1940’s-era video for an explainer:
Unfortunately, the modern reality is that through repeated mergers, farming cooperatives have conglomerated into corporate behemoths. The co-op’s presence in a farming community today is as a local outpost that belongs to a sprawling empire.For example, in my family’s farm area the co-op conglomerate is Cenex, a.k.a. CHS Inc., which is a Fortune 100 company (!). And they’re not the only Fortune 100 farmer co-op either—there was once Farmland Industries, which imploded from the kind of financial stupidity that can only happen when you grow too large.
Anyway, for all the mergers and supposed efficiency gained by the local cooperative turning into a corporate dragon, my brother gets cheaper seeds by buying them from one dude starting up his own business out of the back of his truck, compared to the local co-op’s prices.
I’ve been told other services provided by the co-op suffer from massive inefficiencies as well—too many managers and idle workers at the headquarters, too many trucks show up concurrently at job sites leading to idle workers, inefficient truck routes, etc. The types of issues that crop up when there aren’t any farmers in the mix at the co-op any more—there’s no “skin in the game,” and no connection to the farmers being served.
The same kind of stuff happens with the cooperative creameries—the place where dairy farmers send their milk to be processed. You wouldn’t know there was a crisis going on looking at this creamery’s newsletter, with puff pieces about cheese curds showing up on the QVC channel, or about a director’s jetsetting trips to China and how impressed the locals were he could use chopsticks. Meanwhile member farmers (patrons) are getting the lowest milk checks from the creamery they’ve ever gotten. Yet somehow the board of this creamery had enough cash to allegedly buy another creamery to the tune of $6 million without bringing it up for a patron vote nor mentioning their intention at their annual meeting.
Farmers are generally scared to speak up about this kind of stuff for fear of getting dumped by their creamery and having nowhere to send their milk (because creameries serve limited geographic areas, a farmer may have very few—perhaps even just one—options for where to send their milk). With the overabundance of milk supply, the feeling is that creameries are on the lookout for ways to lower their supply burden by getting rid of patrons.7 Not being able to sell their milk is obviously a death knell for a dairy farmer.
Point being, farmer cooperatives were once local institutions bootstrapped by the farmers themselves, but now they too have fallen into the trap of corporate consolidation and become disconnected from the people they were meant to serve. Now, in hard times, these institutions have become a source of anxiety—at best an indifferent, inefficient use of resources, and at worst a potential hostile actor that could destroy you. Something unthinkable compared to their founding principles.
No Solution in Sight
What’s now happening in the final stages to the American family dairy farm has already happened to other food and livestock industries in this country. Notably poultry, as poultry farmers nowadays are more or less serfs to a handful of huge corporations.
Sunset harvest on the farm
For a time some thought it would be possible for small dairy farms to escape to a niche like organic, but even those farms are going bust as the large corporate farms have penetrated that market and flooded it with product (even if they probably aren’t following the already-lax USDA regulations).
I do think it may have been possible to save the family dairy farm at some point, probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has. There are all sorts of arguments to be made for or against such a system but by all accounts Canadian farmers and consumers are generally happy with their setup up there. The 2014 Farm Bill would’ve been a good start; it included an oversupply management mechanism, but CAFO lobbyist groups like the Dairy Business Association pushed a last-minute amendment to remove it.
But at this point for America, the cow is out of the barn so to speak and it’s too late for our family dairy farmers. As dairy farms continue to close at record levels, the consolidation into large corporate farms will continue unabated.
For a taste of what the near future looks like, Wal-Mart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process. As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. I already mentioned poultry farming, but also look at hog farming: the largest hog producer in the country, Smithfield Foods, is now owned by a Chinese corporation, and which is responsible for staggering amounts of damage to rural American communities due to the concentrated waste it produces.
In the name of efficiency, profits will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while waste gets concentrated into more and more toxic forms to be dumped on rural communities.
Final Thoughts
Growing up on a dairy farm is a unique experience that I was fortunate to have. The farm was woven through all aspects of our family’s life, and the success of our family depended on everyone’s contribution to the farm. Family bonds were tempered by working with each other every day, and together overcoming the minor crises that arose (cows getting out, equipment breaking down, etc.). That’s why I used “death” in this article’s title; while it may seem melodramatic to some, that is what it feels like to me—like a piece of the family is dying.
Brother John coming back from spreading fertilizer, holding his daughter
You get a little taste of many things working on a farm, from agricultural, to construction (e.g., building and fixing up areas of the barn), to engineering (e.g., designing ad-hoc fixes to broken implements in the field), to mechanical and engine repair (e.g., fixing tractors and welding implements).
It saddens me that my brother Noah won’t be able to pass that legacy on to his daughter, and I can’t give my own kids a glimmer of it by having them work on the farm over the summers (and neither can my nieces or nephews).
It’s also a loss for Wisconsin’s culture—“America’s Dairyland”—that we aren’t going to have farm kids coming up any more, and our rural pastoral landscape that was dotted with barns, silos, and pastures with grazing cattle is being replaced by an industrial one with huge buildings, heavy machine traffic, and artificial lakes made of animal waste. Those of us who grew up in these rural areas and moved out but longed to return can’t even bear to do so any longer because the land has been blighted.
While the future is still uncertain for my kid brother Noah, I have no doubt he will succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. He’s got brains, talent, and a god-tier work ethic.
If there’s anything good to come of the situation, I am glad at least that he’ll be freed from the burden of having cows, which require one to be out in the barn every single day without end. It will also be a relief to my dad, who I mentioned earlier is now in his seventies and still has to work out in the barn every day because of the difficulty in hiring legal farmhands.
Whatever happens, these family bonds that were forged on the farm remain, and we will take care of each other.
Brother Noah getting in the skid steer
What You Can Do
As I said, I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that would save family dairy farms, save for a supply management program suddenly appearing like a deus ex machina and solving the overproduction problem. I suggest lobbying your representatives for supporting such a measure in a future Farm Bill, and/or supporting family farm organizations who are fighting for that and other measures such as:
If you live in a rural or semi-rural area, it’s critical you pay attention to what’s going on in your local area. CAFOs will continue to grow and spread, and through organizations like the Dairy Business Association lobby for laws giving them freer ability to pollute the air, water, and land that we all need in order to survive. I suggest proactively lobbying your city or township to pass ordinances banning polluting activities in your area and restrictions that prevent CAFOs from operating in your area (otherwise you might end up on the defensive, which is nearly impossible to win). Some organizations that defend Wisconsin’s water you can support are:
Everyone, including cityfolk, must get educated on what is going on with our food economy, and the dangerous direction it has taken. I’m still getting educated myself so am open to suggestions, but the Food and Environment Reporting Network seems to do good work here.
Finally, I also recommend everyone, but especially rural folks support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as they work hard on several fronts (including another issue dear to my heart, improving broadband access) to empower local communities.
Addendum
This article is based solely on my own reflection and attempts to understand the systemic changes that affected my family’s dairy farm. Any mistakes I made are solely my own and do not reflect upon anyone else mentioned in the article.
I spent a lot of time writing this post but there are so many other issues that I wasn’t able to even get to. For example, the startling rate of farmers committing suicide (more than double that of veterans), which hit close to home when the man who visited our farm my entire life in his familiar white truck and sold my dad farm equipment killed himself (RIP Marty); to creamery cooperative mismanagement and ineffectiveness and the farmers doing battle with their own creameries, and the general failure of the Capper-Volstead Act; to the consolidation of the farm implement industry; to John Deere doing some shady things (here and here); to statistical changes of the price spread from farm to consumer (i.e., the amount of money farmers get from a gallon of milk or other dairy products compared to their retail cost); to digging into the nasty things CAFO lobbyists are doing; to rural communities fighting against CAFOs in their area; to Trump’s tariffs and a certain political anger people direct at farmers; and so many more I regret I wasn’t able to do justice to.
Foraging at Forest Schools, Where Nature is the Classroom
Research shows that kids who spend time outside benefit long-term. Forest schools offer foraging and more as part of the curriculum.
By Stephanie Parker, Environment, Local Eats, March 18, 2019
At the Flying Deer Nature Center, the local forest is the playground for students. (Photo credit: Flying Deer Nature Center)
The Wild Roots Forest School kicks off the school year with the same ritual every fall. First, the children and teachers crack open foraged, dried acorns and then grind and sift them into a fine flour. Then, all the families come together to bake a giant communal loaf of bread in the shape of a dragon.
“The children are not only having the experience of eating; they have to engage in a relationship with it to eat it,” says Lia Grippo, director of the school, which has locations in both Santa Barbara and Bishop, California. Students at Wild Roots range in age from two-and-a-half to seven years old.
Forest schools, also sometimes known as nature schools, come in a number of shapes, sizes, and iterations, but the essential idea is that young children spend the majority of their days outside in nature. The original forest schools began in Denmark in the 1950’s and Sweden soon followed.
Parents who choose forest schools do so because they believe in the positive effects nature has on children. And there’s research to back this up. A recent study from Denmark showed that children who grow up surrounded by nature have up to a 55 percent lower risk of developing mental illnesses later in life. Another study out of Barcelona found that children whose schools have more green space had higher cognitive development. And there are many other tangible benefits for children when they spend time in nature, such as better physical health and social relationships with one another and a greater sense of independence.
Nathan Clay, whose seven-year-old Leo was a student for two years at Wild Roots, says they chose a forest school because “we knew he needed more time outside, playing freely, and moving his body.”
There are currently around 100 forest schools in the U.S. Some offer a combination of indoor and outdoor spaces, while others take place entirely outside, whatever the weather. Most of these are for young children of pre-school and kindergarten age, although there are programs for older, home-schooled children as well. A day at forest school may include a hike, cooking lunch over an open fire, collecting leaves, identifying plants, or picking berries. And many are now teaching kids to forage for wild edibles.
A Wild Roots student holding a basket of foraged elderberries. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
“If you’re going to have an intimate relationship with nature, that requires all of the senses, and it requires knowing that our very survival and sustenance is completely interwoven with the land that we live on,” says Grippo. She grew up in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union and says her family foraged as a way to connect with nature and to supplement their diets when food was hard to come by.
Kit Harrington, co-founder of Fiddleheads Forest School and founder of the Washington Nature Preschool Association, says foraging comes naturally to children. “It’s something children are drawn to almost immediately within the outdoor classroom,” she says.
Foraging Teaches Life Lessons
Foraging has seen an upswing in popularity in recent years. It has been shown to be a tool in the larger effort to stem food insecurity and an unlikely source of safe food in urban environments. But it’s not without its challenges. In some cities, it is actually illegal to pick wild plants. And of course, when it comes to kids putting things in their mouths, it is vital that they understand that some wild plants are poisonous.
A student at Wild Roots Forest School in California grinds acorns. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
Harrington sees foraging as an important part of outdoor education, but recommends that teachers do a risk-benefit analysis to determine whether it makes sense in a particular outdoor classroom. “We need to make sure that there’s enough structure around the activity so that children aren’t likely to engage with it in an unsafe way,” she says. And adult supervision is key.
Grippo believes in modeling safe behavior. She doesn’t only focus on edible plants in her interactions with the kids, but on poisonous plants as well.
Janine Coates, a forest school researcher at Loughborough University in England who is training to become a forest school instructor, also sees foraging as an important part of the forest school experience. “Eating is quite a big part of forest school,” she says. “Being able to cook food over an open fire in a woodland environment and thinking along the lines of a sustainable food system.”
But Coates promotes caution. “Tensions come in when you think about edible plants, like fungi, where there’s a risk,” she says. The students she’s seen learn never to eat fungi or put them near their mouths, because it’s just too hard to be sure. And Coates says that teachers make sure to use the word “fungi” instead of mushrooms, to prevent children from becoming afraid of the edible mushrooms at the grocery store.
An Education in Sustainability
At the Secret Forest Playschool in Duluth, Minnesota, students, who are between three and six years old, set around 100 taps on maple trees every March and then learn how to turn sap into syrup. Not only does it teach them where maple syrup comes from, but they also learn how not to over-tap the trees. And when the wild raspberries in the area get eaten by local wildlife before they can pick them, Secret Forest’s founder and director Meghan Morrow says it offers an important lesson, too. “It teaches them that it’s a shared forest,” she says.
The Flying Deer Nature Center, which has locations in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, also makes sustainability a key part of the lesson plan. They have programs for children from ages four to 17.
Julie Kunz, one of the instructors who teaches four, five, and six year-olds, will sometimes plan a lesson around a specific plant to forage, such as the autumn olive, a little berry that grows on a shrub. Although they are an invasive species in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, they’ve become part of the local landscape—and they’re packed with vitamin C. So Kunz makes sure the children harvest them consciously, both so that they keep growing back in the area they are in, but also so that they are not taking seed and spreading into new areas.
Trying New Things
Autumn olives are sour and, like many wild edibles, can be off-putting to children initially. “Our palates are not necessarily used to the flavors that nature gives us,” says Kunz. However, she adds, most kids will try new things when doing so is modeled for them by adults they trust, and when other kids are partaking as well.
Children collect leaves at Wild Roots Forest School in California. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
Sometimes it’s the parents that need more convincing than the kids themselves. Kunz remembers one day being out with a group of kids and finding an insect on a plant called golden rod. The larva of this insect, she says, tastes like butter and can be eaten alive. A few of the kids wanted to try it.
“I was so impressed!” she says. But shortly after, she realized that one of the kids who had eaten one was a vegetarian. “I told the dad and he was like ‘uh, we don’t eat animals,’” she said.
Overall though, parents appreciate the unique outdoor experiences their children have at their forest schools. Nathan Clay, the father of Leo who spent two years at Wild Roots, says his son’s time there helped make Leo self-assured and has given him a deep appreciation of and wonder about the natural world.
When it comes to wild edibles, Clay says that Leo knows which common plants to avoid and can identify the differences between edible and non-edible ones. “Just a few days ago we want for a walk and Leo began gathering chickenweed, mallow, nasturtium, and plantain for a healing tea. I made myself a salad for lunch,” Clay says. “I ask him all the time what the weeds and grasses are growing in our yard or on hikes.”
And Loughborough University’s Janine Coates, who also has a four-year-old in a forest school in England, says that her daughter loves nothing better than going out and picking wild blackberries or wild garlic, and that when it comes to identifying plants, Coates says of her daughter, “sometimes she is better than me.”
Congratulations to all the young people participating in the Youth Climate Strike all over the world today. Their message is simple: We must come together to take bold and aggressive action to solve the existential crisis of climate change. We will fight the greed of Trump and the fossil fuel executives who are more worried about their short term profits than the well-being of the planet. We will fight to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We will fight to create millions of new jobs in sustainable energy and make this country and world a habitable place for our kids and grandchildren to live.
Early morning walk to the barn
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and haven’t lived in my hometown since.
My dad and brother Noah getting ready to milk
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didn’t have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
Cows on a CAFO operation. Public domain image courtesy Danny Hart/PICRYL
A student at Wild Roots Forest School in California grinds acorns. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
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