Big Dairy Farms are Ruining New Mexico's Water Supply

by Tara Lohan · 2010-05-13 09:00:00 UTC
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When I lived in New Mexico I knew a lot of people raising livestock, but thankfully none of my neighbors had several thousand head of anything on their property. However, not all New Mexicans are as lucky as I was. The state is now the ninth largest dairy-producing state in the country. That's quite a feat considering that just a decade ago, there weren't many dairy cows out there at all.

Elanor Starmer, Food and Water Watch's Western Region Director, writes that the state's 340,000 dairy cows produce 4 million tons of milk and 9 million tons of manure each year. Most of these cows are kept on giant feedlots averaging 2,000 cows at each operation, where it takes about 150 gallons of water a day to maintain each cow. That's a huge drain on a state that already teeters on the brink of drought from year to year. Plus, Cows' hundreds of thousands of tons of waste are left untreated in 'lagoons' until farmers can move it out to spray on cropland, a practice that causes huge problems for both the environment and human health.

Many cows eat a diet laced with antibiotics, so spraying manure on crops means many of those chemicals end up in our food. Plus, a lot of the untreated waste sinks into groundwater and contaminates drinking water -- a really big problem for a state where 90 percent of people rely on groundwater as their primary water source.

Starmer writes that the New Mexico Environment Department has estimated that almost two-thirds of the dairies in New Mexico have contaminated the groundwater from leaking lagoons or excess manure on fields. It's so bad that people in those areas are unable to safely drink their water. And while the department has proposed new regulations to protect groundwater, the industry is not surprisingly fighting tooth and nail against them.

New Mexico is a desert state, so water quality and quantity issues are equally important. If the dairy industry doesn't shape up, the state will continue to suffer huge hardships on both fronts.

Photo credit: karlfrankowski

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet.org where she heads up the environment, water, and food sections. Her work has appeared on the websites of The Nation, Mother Jones, the Huffington Post and in Yes! Magazine.
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