The toxic truth about mega-farms: Chemical fumes, distressed animals and poisoned locals driven from their homes and worse
Filed Under: Health Issues, Susatainable Living on October 18, 2010
Aside from the times when he worried that his children might never wake up at all, Jeff Brouse remembers the worst nights as the ones when they woke up screaming. Hot nights were the most frightening.
That was when warm air would rise and the gas - hydrogen sulphide, heavier than air - would roll on down the hill to his pretty farmhouse as if heralding the arrival of some demon in a horror movie.
Then the smell would overpower them. The headaches and sickness would begin, the nausea and dizziness.
And, over and over again, Jeff and his wife Lesley would scoop up their little children, Brooklyn, then aged five, and Jackson, four, and, in Jeff’s words, get the hell out of there, far enough away as to be able to breathe.
‘Mega-farm’: Cows by the thousand live on concrete and rarely get to see the sun, they never actually graze and their lives are shortened by round-the-clock milking
‘There were times I was terrified for my kids,’ recalls Jeff, 40. ‘And towards the end, Lesley was pregnant and the doctor said the gas could affect the baby. We got away then, as much as we could, went down the road to my parents’ place and slept on the concrete floor.’
So what kind of ghastly chemical plant did the Brouses live next door to in Minnesota? in fact, the facility that was slowly poisoning this hapless family (and thousands like them across America) was a dairy farm. Not, however, a dairy farm as you might imagine, with cows chewing the cud or roaming freely in the fields.
This one was called a CAFO - a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation - a ‘mega-farm’ where cows by the thousand live on concrete and rarely get to see the sun, where they never actually graze, where their lives are shortened from round-the-clock milking.
This is a farm where huge quantities of hormones and antibiotics - administered because their miserable, cramped existences make the cattle prone to disease - are hosed away in the gallons of waste which they produce and stored in vast lagoons by the tens of millions of gallon, ready to be sprayed on to local farmland as fertiliser.
And, terrifyingly, this could soon be the future of farming in Britain.
Until now the British agricultural industry has steered clear of dairy farming on such an industrial scale. The average size of a dairy herd in the UK is somewhere between 70 and 100 animals. But all that could be about to change.
Many dairy farmers believe the drive towards larger dairies - and the economies of scale they bring - is inevitable as supermarkets try to force prices down. In 1998, there were 31,753 dairy farmers in the UK.
By 2008, this had shrunk to just 17,060, with many going into liquidation claiming that it cost more to produce milk than they could sell it for - recently as little as 25p per litre. A further 9 per cent are expected to leave the industry within the next two years.
