Pounds of Meat
The meatpacking industry sets water policy on the High Plains, and a childhood spent on a private well downstream of it.
A chilling account of the slaughterhouse: "I enjoy eating meat, and I know cows must be killed... A laborer clamps a chain around the hind leg of each steer and heifer. Another places a foot-long cylinder against each of their heads and fires a steel rod into the skull. A huge chain sweeps down from an overhead trolley line. It swings the cattle upside down and sends them clanging a couple of feet apart down a long chute... And the disassembly process begins. Man and machine merge to separate the various parts in stages. The workers use electric knives... No chaps or spurs necessary, just ear plugs, rubber boots, belly guards, and chain-mesh gloves... within fifteen minutes, 1,200 pounds of corn-fed steer has been reduced to tenderloins and ribeyes."
Tyson Fresh Meats Located In Garden City, Kansas, is one of the largest factory slaughter operations in the world, employing 3,000 workers at its plant and slaughtering roughly 42,000 head of cattle a week, or 2.2 million head of cattle a year. This information was pulled from a Kansas travel website and is a 17 percent increase in productivity from when John Opie wrote about it in the 1980s while covering Iowa Beef Packers and its required six hundred million gallons of aquifer water. All for this one plant. A fair assessment that today the Tyson Fresh Meats plant uses 17 percent more water... So just a little more than SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION GALLONS OF OGALLALA WATER ANNUALLY. In researching this piece of writing, I am left unclear and without the imagination to conceptualize this volume of water. It is complicated to measure the true extent of the water that lies beneath the High Plains. Firstly, the agriculture and livestock industry is not transparent with the public.
A myriad of Ag-Gag laws exist to limit an informed response to the levels of consumption of meat and water that are processed and consumed in the region. Three trillion gallons of water is a rough estimate that the cattle that are processed at the Tyson Fresh Meats slaughter operation consume annually. Within the Lubbock, Texas region alone, the aquifer has been over debited on the magnitude of 325 billion gallons a year for the past 40 years.
To put this into perspective, of the roughly one million acre-feet that have been consumed during this time, just one acre-foot, or 326,000 gallons is what the entire municipality of Lubbock would need running through its pipes to carry on a comfortable life for a year. The problem with an attempt to map water is not consumption. t is that it is not a lake or river surging underneath the earth, rather it is water that is saturated in the loose gravel of the earth, in the way that water would fill in the uneven gaps around ice cubes in a glass. Pumps are drilled into the earth and pipes suck the moisture out of the earth like a straw, periodically drying out and being forced deeper to attempt to collect more water. Imagine millions of mosquito pricks in the earth, all pumping away volumes of water unevenly across the aquifer.
The water table drops unevenly in periods of drought specifically where the water table will drop many more acre-feet than normal. Consumption is usually managed by a hodgepodge of municipal water districts across multiple states with diverse business or political agendas. Reporting data is fairly easy to misreport. So there could be more or less water still left untapped in the aquifer and usage could be greater than stated. At the time of writing this piece, I am left with more questions than answers.
The meatpacking business is the policy-setter concerning water consumption. The livestock industry operates at a much higher profit margin than cereal grain farming ever could. Grain farmers are relegated to being a cog within a vertically integrated factory livestock production. As water becomes more scarce in the region, the political consensus will be towards using/selling the remaining water at market prices. It will provide a greater pressure for irrigation farmers to embed within the factory industrial meat industry. Who controls the profits controls the chain of integration and it is towards a small number of companies who can manage the astronomical debts and low-profit margins.
Cattle aren't the only livestock that are concentrated out on the plains, but hogs and chickens as well. Hogs are prolific waste producers, with one pig producing a volume of waste equivalent to 1.7 people. Since the 1970s,the pork industry followed cattle, consolidating to Kansas. The Gigot Family, as well as many others during that time, adopted the standard farming system in states like North Carolina. The animals are housed in a series of metal sheds on a higher part of the property, their waste is flushed with water downhill to a low part of the property where holes are dug and lined with plastic, forming outdoor, open pit waste lagoons. A farmer noted, "I sure hate to see them start down there. That's the best place in the world to contaminate everything. That's pretty fragile geology." (2798)
"Better end use should be the plains farmer objective. Irsik became a premier example of vertical integration when he moved into the cattle feedlot business, supplied in large part by grains from his own fields. He moved cautiously into the industrial hog business after watching both local produces, and multinational corporations profitably enter the business. He believed that most efficient, sustainable, and profitable farming on the plains must have the features of agribusiness, especially using the latest technologies, management techniques, and factory like output. Feed grains on the plains are inexpensive, and instead of selling low as a grain farmer, why not use the grains for more profitable steers, dairy cows, pigs, and chickens." (2820)
Steve Irsik had a hog farm that was the 12th largest in the united states, in the 1990s he said to a reporter, "With people pressure in California and the Midwest, these industries need somewhere to go, and they are looking very seriously at the high plains" because of the dry climate, excellent soils, available groundwater, and low human population. 2828
By the 1980s, irrigation manufacturing companies were combating the lowering aquifer by developing technologies like LEPA or Low Energy Precision Application, which consisted of sprinkler heads that applied water at a much slower flow rate and with much less energy consumption than conventional sprinkler heads, irrigating crops with fewer gallons per minute of water flow and fuel consumption. LEPA systems deliver water to 8 to 18 inches above the ground to combat wind drive, preventing evaporation loss. This technology allowed greater retention of pumped water, with 20 percent more water reaching the soil. Of course, to implement this new technology required new debts for farmers, so each technological jump from innovation leads to a cost that farmers have to adapt to use and pay for. Because of this, by the 1980s Plains states still used cheaper and more wasteful flood irrigation methods like trench-style irrigation. In the eighties, Steve Frost, director of the Southwestern Kansas Groundwater Management District notably stated."I don't see any reason to save the aquifer if it means devastating the economy."(2836) This was the prevailing attitude of many of the water management districts across the plains during this time, a balancing act between the economics of agriculture vs. the seemingly unlimited resources of the Ogallala.
During that time, many believed the late nineteenth-century mythology that the aquifer was an unconfined rechargeable aquifer that vast flows of glacial melt from Canada swept underneath the region and out to sea. The opposite is the case. It does not recharge from any source, in fact it was cut off from its recharging sources millions of years ago and only receives additional recharge from the paltry rain from the region. It is a vastly over-debited water source and is falling by many acre-feet a year. The mounting costs of water and fuel eventually led farmers into the expensive technology and forced vertical integration strategy to get better "end-use" from the land, which means feeding most of the crops produced on the land to livestock to slaughter, selling us more ever more meat at the supermarket.
In the late 1990s, high-density hog production became the norm on the plains. Production sites of 10-50 acres with highly concentrated pigs in populations approaching 100,000 animals in rectangular metal sheds. The profit was moved into the construction of larger and larger confinement sheds that dotted the sparsely inhabited plains region. The concrete floors of the buildings were hosed off with tremendous amounts of water to clean the floor from the constant production of waste. The liquefied shit or effluent was drained into plastic lined holding lagoons. The effluent is allowed to sit in the sun, rotting into the nutrient-rich nitrogen compounds that make it an essential fertilizer on overused plains farmland.
Pig-based fertilizers have the added benefit of being liquidized, allowing for easy spraying through center pivot irrigators for precise application on crops on a mass scale. It is not a 100 percent perfect arrangement, because if the composting process has not sufficiently processed the pig manure, digestive illnesses like E.coli and salmonella can make a massive entry in the food supply, as many can attest to given the common occurrence of supermarket factory recalls of vegetables. The effluent retention ponds are a highly concentrated chemical waste comprised of the collection of hundreds of thousands of animal waste in a single open pit, left in the open air. There is no special collection system similar to human municipal infrastructure, whose cities of flushed effluent are collected into very expensive water treatment facilities, leveraging communities across the country to collect and reclaim the water from our movements.
These systems are responsible for plummeting child mortality levels, greatly benefiting humanity. Factory farming has no such infrastructure and as a result is not a factor in the cost of our pork tenderloins and butterfly chops at the supermarket. We would most likely rethink our dependence on meat if those costs were factored in. It just sits out in the open air, as this is the cheapest solution and the most profitable. The factory hog farm is largely computerized, flushing away the effluent every twelve hours, like clockwork, disposing of 1.6 million gallons of waste a day from a standard hog plant and as of 2013 there are more than 6,000 hog operations in the Great Plains, with Americans spending 22 billion dollars annually consuming more than 115 million hogs.
A notable piece of advice was given to the half a million Americans that are employed in the factory hog industry by the trade publication Hog Farm Management Magazine; "Forget the pig as an animal. Test him just like any other machine in a factory. Schedule treatments like you would lubrication. Breeding season is the first step in an assembly line" 2913. These closed sheds are nasty on the psychology of these sociable animals, not to mention the bacteria that these enclosed buildings harbor. The breaking down of shit into ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, phosphates, and bacteria harm the animal that we ultimately eat. "Animals have died, and workers have become seriously ill in confinement buildings when hydrogen sulfide rises from agitated pits underneath."
"Several workers have died when entering a pit during or soon after the emptying process to repair pumping equipment" 2922. A problem from the volume of hog production is the consistent need for heavy groundwater pumping to aid and process the meat. Transnational hog producer Seaboard stated that each of its farms consumes 900,000 gallons of water a day, or 329 million gallons a year. They have 150 farms, which one company's operation requires nearly 50 billion gallons of water to process their pork.
Another pig factory run by National Hog Farms in Colorado produces 350,000 pigs annually, requiring two million gallons of water daily. A key problem is that the volume of waste a hog produces is staggering. One full-sized hog produces 1.7 times as much waste as one human being and drinks 30 gallons of water a day, so a relatively small factory that produces 100,000 hogs is creating the equivalent footprint of a city of 170,000 people consuming water, not to mention shitting and pissing in the toilet as it flushes to the water treatment plant. Except there aren't water treatment plants for hogs, just open effluent pits.
Throughout the Great Plains, a large company like Seaboard process 4.5 million hogs, placing the waste and water stress on the great plains as if a city the size of 7.6 million people (or a metropolitan area the size of the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex) lived and went to the bathroom there. This set of numbers is just factoring in hogs, not cows or chickens, which produce their own waste on top of the Ogallala as well.
The bottom line is that pounds of meat make more profit than bushels of cereal grains. It is debt and profit. In much the same way as it is more profitable to sell a farm for a real estate development out in the exurbs somewhere, it is speculatively a better business move to boost the cost of the product. It is just not profitable to grow grain, and water is the resource that is at the center of it between the farmer, the meat producer, and the municipality. Anaerobic lagoons were the least efficient means of waste management and are in operation because they are the cheapest, lowest maintenance, and lowest operation solution to the problem. Contamination of the groundwater easily happens on large scales.
A plastic liner is usually placed along the bottom of a waste lagoon, and it ages in the elements, with the plastic ripping or wearing down. Despite their best efforts, leakage is impossible to prevent, and regulations allow the lagoons to seep at a rate of a one-quarter inch per day into the earth or 91 inches a year. State regulatory agencies monitor the lagoons and will force a hog farm to fix a waste lagoon if its seepage is more than the rate. Sensors similar to those which monitor the dispersion of gasoline into a car tank at a gas station can be used to detect leaks, informing a hog farm of a breach of a plastic liner.
A key risk to the waste leakage of a lagoon is the groundwater becoming contaminated by the nitrates from the effluent sludge. At best, the liners can slow the rate of seepage to 91 inches a year, or 7.5 feet. The Ogallala water table can start as shallow as 30 feet below the soil so contaminations can and do happen regularly. One of the most common contaminants in rural drinking water is through nitrate contamination, caused by leaking waste lagoons. A map that was off-putting was a nitrate contamination map of the Ogallala that showed levels of nitrate and uranium contamination levels. Areas above 10 mg per liter is a maximum standard. Much of the water is above this maximum standard and is not safe for consumption.
Both uranium and nitrate exposure is linked to cancer, kidney damage, and blue baby syndrome, which starves the developing brain of oxygen causing brain and cardiovascular issues. These two contaminants are in high levels throughout the Ogallala. A University of Nebraska study placed an elevated exposure risk in 78% of the samples taken in the Ogallala aquifer. The study found nitrate and uranium contamination were linked as the nitrates quickly broke down naturally occurring uranium in the soil, making it easily extracted by pumping the water out. It has been estimated that about 15 million families in the United States receive their drinking water from private wells.
As a child, I lived on a property that received water from a private well and had a septic tank, a common set-up in rural and exurban areas. A fair estimate by the Center for Disease Control speculates an estimated two million households in the United States have water supplies that exceed the federal standard of nitrates in their drinking water, or greater than 10 mg/L NO3-N. Studies found that 40 thousand children aged newborn to six months are living in homes with high nitrate drinking water. A common rural illness, methemoglobinemia or blue baby syndrome, is a treatable condition caused by the reduction of nitrate consumption. The condition impedes the ability of oxygen absorption in the body, and in its mild form hinders brain development, robbing oxygen from a developing body by limiting the blood's ability to release oxygen to body tissue. In adults, it manifests itself in symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue to asthma and cardiac conditions. Once high levels of nitrate is found in the drinking water, it is advised that a household replaces all drinking and cooking water with bottled water, or else installs an ion exchange unit -- which uses an electric current to separate metallic and mineral impurities like nitrates and uranium -- for all drinking and cooking functions. A typical household ion exchange unit costs about $3,500.