Dairy cow pollution is now a public health crisis: Cows pass cars as polluters

On August 2, the Los Angeles Times ran an article headed, "In San Joaquin Valley, Cows Pass Cars as Polluters. Air district says bovines on the region's booming dairy farms are the biggest single source of smog-forming gases." It includes a great quote from Brent Newell an attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment: "This is not some arcane dispute about cow gases. We are talking about a public health crisis. It's not funny to joke about cow burps and farts when one in six children in Fresno schools is carrying an inhaler."
You can read that article on line at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cows2aug02,1,6393711.story

The Sunday, August 7, New York Times includes an editorial (the newspaper's official opinion) headed, "A Malodorous Fog." (Section 4, Pg 11.) It is short, and I will paste it below. It suggests that we need new rules that would improve air quality. Neither the August 2 Los Angeles Times article or today's New York Times editorial question the role of cow's milk in the human diet. We can do that with letters to the editor! A good source of information is http://www.milksucks.com/

Here's the editorial:

August 7, 2005
A Malodorous Fog
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/opinion/07sun4.html?th&emc=th

Here is an axiom for farmers and consumers: Crowding animals together in large numbers always leads to problems. It turns hog manure, for instance, from a source of fertility into toxic waste. It creates enormous opportunities for disease, which tends to be warded off by inappropriate use of antibiotics. And in central California, it turns dairies, which are environmentally benign on a small scale, into major sources of air pollution - perhaps as bad as automobiles.

One of the smoggiest places in the country is the San Joaquin Valley, where one-fifth of the country's dairy cattle live - some 2.5 million animals and still growing. Local environmentalists and some local legislators argue that cow emissions - which come mostly from the front end of the animal rather than the tailpipe - have gotten out of control. There is a growing call to impose new rules that would improve air quality. The best way to do this isn't completely clear. But few, if any, of the proposed solutions would be palatable to the dairy farmers.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District estimates that at present each cow emits 19.3 pounds of pollutants a year in the form of gases from manure, from regurgitation and from flatulence. Defenders of the dairy farms - a large and powerful California industry - say that number is a wild overestimation. But behind the debate over the emissions measurements and their regulatory implications, there is a simple fact to contend with: the eye-stinging, nose-burning smell of cattle congestion in rural California (End of New York Times piece.)
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The New York Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com. Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.


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