Another Voice / Environment
Farm law underwrites nauseous, large-scale pollution
The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a well-deserved tax on the greenhouse gas methane, produced by New York State’s 146,600 dairy cows. Industrial farm lobbyists seem to have gotten to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N. Y., because he calls such control “absurd.” The senator has stepped into something that smells.
We all favored “Right to Farm Laws.” Then corporations invented Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, known as CAFOs. These polluting profit machines flew in under the radar. Now they produce 80 percent of our milk and meat. We have 14 of them in Erie County. Wyoming County has the highest concentration of them in the state.
In 2003, 1,000 small New York farms closed, unable to compete with expensive, federally subsidized CAFOs. These factory farms can feed 7,500 cows jammed into tiny lots. The manure drains into lagoons to evaporate into the air and seep into the water.
In 1920, my dad was a 16-year-old farmhand on the Black River. Cows in his charge wandered in pastures. In a balanced cycle, they ate the grass that their manure fertilized.
Now oceans of cow manure produced by CAFOs are so far from crop lands that transporting it makes manure too expensive to use as fertilizer. It is loaded with bacteria: giardia, salmonella and E. coli. It is contaminated with hormones and antibiotics, fed the animals to keep them alive. Fumes given off are hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide. They are nauseating, irritating, flammable, explosive and potent contributors to global warming.
The United Nations warned in “Livestock’s Long Shadow — Environmental Issues and Options,” that livestock is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, “a bigger share than that of transportation.”
In “The Wasting of Rural New York State,” the Sierra Club quotes Greg Kaczmarczyk of Eden, who lives next to a 400-head factory cow farm on Church Street in the middle of that village. Kaczmarczyk says, “They are making me ill in my own house.” John Minick of Ransomville in Niagara County says, “You can sit in this house with the windows closed and taste it.” He lives a mile from a 3,000-head CAFO.
In the Finger Lakes region, the Mather family farm is near Willett Dairy’s 7,500-cow feed lot. Ground water and air pollution have forced the Mathers and neighbors to take Willett to court. They complained to me, “What about our freedom to farm? We can’t even go outside and breathe the air.”
The Freedom to Farm Law should protect farms, not factories and not CAFOs. It has tied the hands of local governments. In 2005, a huge CAFO manure lagoon spilled into 20 miles of the Black River, killing 375,000 fish. That disaster is a wake up-call to the DEC.
If Schumer has been to Eden lately, he did not inhale. I was at the Church Street Farm recently. It smells bad.
Larry Beahan is conservation chairman of the Sierra Club Niagara Group.
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