I live in a rural farm community, although I’m not really part of it. I don’t want to farm, I couldn’t do the work, but I respect it. Last night, we attended a meeting about farming anyway, because there are plans afoot that could dramatically affect everyone‘s way of life, and it has to do with water and massive amounts of cow manure. Riverview Dairy, already the largest dairy operation in the state (and busily expanding into the Dakotas), wants to massively increase the number of cows they raise, and they want to create the single largest dairy farm in the whole damn state, right here in little ol’ Stevens County, population 10,000.
Riverview’s proposed expansion would add 15,400 animal units, require 250 million gallons of liquid manure storage, and consume 319 million gallons of water every single year. The scale of this project — if it goes forward, it will be the largest concentrated animal feeding operation in the state — is exactly why Stevens County must not rubber-stamp this permit. We need to pack the room and show local officials that we do not want this mega-operation in Minnesota.
So pack the room we did last night. Unfortunately, Riverview also packed the room with their employees and advocates, and the Stevens County Planning Commission didn’t know how to do their job. This was a session where residents were invited to express their opinion, which meant we had a long line of people coming up to microphones to say what they think, and at the end, the commissioners were visibly befuddled and had no plan for what they would do, and were sitting up at the front of the room asking each other what to do next. It was kind of a fiasco.
The issue at hand was that Riverview wants to do a huge expansion of their business, and somehow managed to convince the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to not require an environmental impact statement. The side I was on was primarily arguing for caution, that we need to address potential impacts, while the other side was mainly a horde of dairy workers urging Riverview to go full steam ahead right now. The community fell into two camps with some interesting conflicts.
One side would just say jobs, jobs, jobs, and growth, growth, growth. Riverview Dairy is a great company that contributes so much to the community, and this expansion will help so many businesses. One unexpected twist on a traditional Republican position is that a lot of the speakers on this side had Hispanic accents, and told stories of how they migrated to the USA to take advantage of what Riverview offered, and had become American citizens. Fascinating stories: we don’t often hear about the benefits of immigration on the news. I only heard one person say that they wanted jobs for real American citizens, not Mexicans, and I don’t want that person on my side. One argument I heard was that having this mega-dairy will help grow church congregations, which I didn’t consider a positive effect.
The other side was concerned that draining several hundred million gallons of water per year from our aquifers could lead to long term consequences. Spraying a few hundred million gallons of cow poop into large fields could pollute an already polluted region, and wreak havoc on our rivers. There were concerns about the ongoing consolidation of small farms into this one mega-farm. The question on my mind was “who benefits?” and why do we need to produce so much milk; one person did ask what the need for all this output was. The debate wasn’t on whether Riverview was a good company that would benefit the community, but why we’re foregoing investigating deeply into what the long-term consequences were.
In the end, a small group of old white men, the planning commission, will retreat into a meeting room and make the decision, and I predict that they will decide that Riverview doesn’t need any more studies of their environmental impact. The county has a total population of 10,000, and this one dairy operation will be pumping out waste equivalent to the output of a city of 750,00 people, but we’ll just let them do their thing and then find out the consequences. Short-sightedness will win again.
Where would this 319 million gallons of water annually come from?
Wells. They’re digging deep to suck out water from our aquifers.
The first comment was also my question.
Where are they going to get 319 million gallons of water every year?
That is a lot.
In most places, the local governments treat the aquifers like they are endless.
They just keep pumping water until there isn’t any water left.
The water table goes down. And down.
All the residential household wells go dry.
They drill deeper and deeper until it becomes uneconomic to pump from deep wells.
This happens everywhere but it has happened a lot in California.
In California’s Central Valley, they’ve been drawing down the water table for decades for agriculture.
In some places, the ground has sunk down dozens of feet.
Thousands of wells have since gone dry.
These are mostly low income rural household wells.
Because, poor people can’t afford to sink a tube well down a 1,000 feet for water.
“Animal units” says it all. It’s MBAs and CPAs, not farmers.
And what’s the story with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency not requiring Riverview LLP to do a full environmental impact statement? Maybe the MPCA was just being “Minnesota Nice”.
Here’s a UK equivalent on the river Wye. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrj4qqqy7po
Here’s a UK equivalent on the river Wye. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrj4qqqy7po
Whoops!
In Sweden, cows are required to have access to outdoor exercise at least during summer. The legislation for better animal conditions is named after Astrid Lindgren, the children’s author who wrote- among other things – Pippa Longstocking .
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If Sweden can do it, so can you. If you are not doing it , it is because of lobbying + bribes (campaign donations).
The unsustainable agribusiness drainong of groundwater is a thing in places like Australia too.
Think of all the portraits of Donald you could make with all that poo.
BTW Trumpolini keeps mocking Californias’ coastal/water regulations, because idiots do not understand biology.
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In Creepshow # 1 Leslie Nielsen buried two people up to the neck in mud in a tidal zone. We should do the same with people that do not show enough interest for long-term water management.
Suggested message to local politicians:
“In lieu of studies of the environmental impact, you have just offered your kneecaps as collateral for any bad outcome”.
I have a strong suspicion that the majority of Riverview Dairy’s political contributions for the 2024 federal election, at a minimum, went to supporting the party of Schmuck a la Orange. If so, I imagine that knowing that specific detail might encourage more people of the Democratic leaning Missouri, to complain to the ones who got voted in last time.
Kudos to you, PZ, for showing up!
It sounds exactly like what’s getting rammed through in my area, except here it’s data centers.
At least the cows don’t moo all night.
@chigau #11: You would still need more poo than that to capture his essence.
Anyone who knows anything about about CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) knows they are an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. There are a lot of dairy farms around here, but they are mostly small family farms. Even at that scale, some of them spread liquefied manure on their fields. That stuff is absolutely vile and no one should ever be caught downwind of it.
PZ:
Connecticut dairy farmers say the once-thriving industry is now unsustainable (2026-03)
The Conversation – America’s dairy farms are disappearing, down 95% since the 1970s—milk price rules are one reason why (2024)
Question for submoron. What inspired you to name your pseudonym after Trump?
From CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain‘s 2nd link:
I haven’t consumed dairy milk in decades. I do eat cheese and greek yogurt though. So I guess I match this quote to an extent.
I do use soy milk for my oatmeal. I don’t really drink it as a beverage. If I did I might consider producing my own soy milk, but soybean nipples are so tiny that milking them seems too tedious a process to be worth the hassle.
Funny how long term consequences are often brushed aside for quarterly gains.
I see you’re using the shift key, PZ. I hope that’s a sign your arm is feeling better.
It so very hard to think of all the possibilities for disaster when people with sharp sticks are pushing you forward for short term gains.
It’s my understanding there are no vaccine exemptions for milk cows.
Cag @19
There were people who told me that I was clever when I knew that I wasn’t so I reacted accordingly. Otherwise Eric Pode of Croydon. I wasn’t aware of or couldn’t believe that anything as bizarre as Trump could happen.
I just saw this article about aquifer depletion in California; due to subsidence, the depletion is now irreversible.
Count me against this obscene plan. The Red River is already polluted enough by the time it gets to Canada. Adding all of the runoff from this cow manure…just makes a bad problem that much worse. And same problem, different state in North Dakota, unfortunately, with Riverview’s planned farm there. I think this is a clear violation of the Boundary Waters Treaty, but who knows how the international diplomacy will shake out (prediction: the farms get built, the watershed gets more polluted, and nobody cares).
Big problems with salinity when watertables are overdrawn.
Water resources are worth managing properly.
Well, I don’t eat meat, and as my financial situation improves, I’ll definitely look again into going vegan. Meat has a huge environmental impact. True, I had massive difficulties with getting all the adenosylcobalamin that I needed, but now that I know that this specific sub-form of vitamin B12 exists and my body can’t synthesize it properly, I can substitute it, which leaves me confident to declare that it is possible to forego meat consumption in favour of adequate vitamin substitution (which should also include creatine, omega 3 fatty acids, and other vitamins of the B family).
Also, wouldn’t it be nice if the agricultural produce of our planet could feed all its inhabitants?
@2. PZ Myers : “Wells. They’re digging deep to suck out water from our aquifers.”
Then when those wells run dry or / & the water from them becomes too contaminated or toxic to safely use? Do they ever think or plan ahead for that?
Do they care about that at all?
Will anyone ever make them?
@6 & 7. submoron : The Danube in Europe is dryng up fast and very much causing problems because of that too FWIW.
See France news24 – yt clip – Hungary: Successive heatwaves drain Danube river used to cool nuclear plant running for 1 min 23 secs.
Sure many (most? all?) other European rivers are also in very serious trouble and things are now going to keep getting ever worse and worse each Summer thanks to Global Overheating and our decades of denial and inaction on that.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by greed.
I’m not exactly late to this conversation, but I wanted to see what other people suggested. Okay then…
I’ve been on the other side of the table a few times in my life with this sort of thing crops up. I’ll tell you what I learned, although I’m not going to say that it’s necessarily applicable in this situation.
First, citizen complaints at a planning commission hearing will not change their decision. It’s good that the citizens complained, but it’s not going to factor into the decision of the planning commission or whichever local board approves/rejects the planning commission recommendation. Why? Because they will have been briefed by the municipal lawyers, and will be told they do not have a case to reject the permit application. That is, if the planning commission rejects the permit, the agribusiness will file a lawsuit against the municipality because the planning commision rejected the petition on insufficient grounds. This will be the action the agribusiness will take regardless of any other evidence, because it it likely to win in court and the cost of their lawyers is less than the profits they would make. The approving board at the municipal level will get the same advice from their lawyers, unless there is some evidence to support the position of the planning commision or the board of trustees, the court will see that decision as arbitrary and force the municipality to allow the development. The lawyers for your municipality will advise to not waste the taxpayers money defending a lawsuit which is certain to fail. The public participation at the planning commission meeting will not be evidence that the public is against the development, only that a small fraction of the public is against it. Morris has a population of about 5,000 permanent residents, say 200 showed up at the planning commission meeting (you can be certain that someone from the agribusiness was there, counting), that’s 4% of the population. A court will not consider that to be enough of the population to justify a decision from the planning commission or the board of trustees to justify stopping the development.
So how does a community get something they don’t want in their backyard stopped? The community HAS to give the planning commission or the board of trustees some evidence that a court would accept as showing what the community desires. These boards are sympathetic to the citizen’s desires (usually), but they have to be able to defend their decision in a courtroom. They are also hamstrung in that they cannot suggest to community leaders officially what evidence they could use, because a good opposition lawyer could use such a suggestion to argue that the evidence is tainted by the personal beliefs of the board members, and throw that evidence out. So any approving board is caught in a cleft stick of wanting to deny development based on the community’s desires, but not having any evidence which would hold up in a court case to deny a development. Trust me, I’ve been in that situation, and it’s not one I like.
What evidence would a court accept? There are actually a number of options, but just citizens showing up to say “no” is not one.
Option 1: A registered community action group. If the community forms a group, registers it with the state as a community group (or PAC, or whatever), that gives the group standing in court. The first community I lived in had a housing association which was formed in the 1960’s to protest the proposed building a federal penitentiary in that community. Because they were a group which represented the entire community (not just a few citizens at a meeting), they were accepted at court hearing as representing the community. Courts do not give much weight to the complaints of a single person, but they will give weight to a community advocate who is shown to represent the community as a whole, especially if they are not an elected official.
Option 2: Community petitions. Again, 200 people showing up a meeting to complain is not sufficient evidence for a court to believe that the entire community is against some development. However, 2,000 people out of a community of 5,000 signing a petition to halt development is evidence the court would accept. I can imagine two types of petitions, either a petition to halt development completely or one to put the development proposal on a ballot.
There are other options, but let’s consider the impact of these types of actions. In both cases what is really happening is that the citizens are giving the municipal officials a leg to stand on to oppose the development. They can point to a registered community group and say, “20% of the Morris community have joined this group which was created to stop this development, the citizens have spoken.” And this registered community will be given standing in a court of law should the agribusiness start a lawsuit. At the same time if the municipal officials can say, “A community group has circulated a petition to disallow the development which garnered 2,000 signatures of approval, so we are denying your permit.” Again, a court of law will accept that petition as evidence that the community does not want that development.
If both occur, it is very likely that the agribusiness won’t even both to try to take it to court because they will have a chance of losing, and wasting all their money.
Now I could also write about master development plans and legal defence funds and how every municipality should have them, but this is a long enough comment as it is.
One point I hope I made clear is that your municipal officials, even though they are representing the citizens who elected them, still need the support of those citizens. Even if they cannot say it because that could potentially taint a future court case. If your municipal officials cannot defend, or do not have the evidence to defend, some heinous development, they will be forced to approve it. Either by court order, or because their lawyers will tell them they have no evidence to defend in a court case so they might as well capitulate and save the citizen’s tax money for things they can do.
Now, in this case I don’t know how organized the farmers in Morris are. I hope they are organized and are already doing what I suggested above. Nothing I wrote is a secret, and everyone who has worked for municipal governments should know this. I’m not, in any way, suggesting that I’m a better political operative than so many activists. But I have sat on the other side of that table, and I’ve had conversations with municipal lawyers, and I know that your municipal officials may be forced to decide against the wishes of the citizens. Regardless of their personal beliefs, they may allow a development to occur without a fight in order to avoid a multi-million dollar court battle which they are 99% likely to lose.