Did You Know?
One Dairy Cow Produces 120 pounds of wet manure A DAY. This is equivalent to the amount of waste produced by 20-40 HUMAN BEINGS.
Industrialized Dairies and CAFO’s Contribute
to Water Depletion and Pollution:
The increasing number of dairies or CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations with over 1000 “animal units”) raise very real concerns about groundwater pollution and depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer in eastern New Mexico and West Texas.
Dairy Water Consumption:
According to the USDA, an average dairy cow drinks 25-50 gallons of water per day. Did you know that it takes 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of milk? Huge amounts of water are required daily to clean pens and milking parlors to remove waste. If flush tanks are used, 30 gallons of water per cow are required each day for washing milking equipment and the milking parlor.
The average dairy cow on a dry lot in New Mexico uses 115 gallons of water per day. [Dr. Jack Van Horn, University of Florida Cooperative Extension Service]. This means that a 3,000 head dairy will use 345,000 gallons of water per day, JUST FOR THE COWS. And, as CAFO's move into these areas, farmers are encouraged to use more and more water to grow feed crops like corn (which requires massive amounts of water).
A proposed local 3000-head dairy applied for a wastewater permit that seems to be typical for a dairy of this size; it plans to discharge 75,000 gallons of wastewater PER DAY, drained into a clay-lined lagoon. Massive amounts of water will be used on the spray field to distribute dairy waste onto the land.
Waste Production:
According to the EPA, a single dairy cow produces 120 pounds of wet manure a day (that's about 14 gallons). This is equivalent to the waste produced by 20-40 humans per day.
Using a conservative figure of 30 humans as a multiplier, this means that a 3,000 head dairy will produce the same amount of waste per day as 90,000 humans. Think about it: this is more than TWICE the human population of Curry County, New Mexico, produced just by ONE 3,000 head dairy!
So a conservative estimate of daily wet manure production for a 3,000 head dry-lot dairy would be a whopping 180 tons PER DAY. That's 1,260 tons of wet manure a week! And this does not take into account washwater and wastewater that would be added to this manure to "clean it up."
And, according to the Alabama Cooperative Extension System: "The total excrement for cows housed in freestall total confinement, along with milking wash wastes would bring the total [of excreted solids] to more than 2.5 cubic feet per cow per day. This is nearly 9 tons and more than 9 cubic yards of manure per day PER 100 COWS." Do the math: for a 3,000 head dairy, that would amount to waste production of 270 tons per day, 1,890 tons per week, and approximately 98,280 tons a year!
And these figures, stunning as they are, tell only part of the story. “As opposed to assumptions about its natural and thus, harmless, nature, livestock manure creates pollution WITH A STRENGTH THAT FAR EXCEEDS RAW MUNICIPAL SEWAGE.”
“The BOD [Biochemical Oxygen Demand] concentration in undiluted livestock waste is 160 times more powerful than raw municipal sewage and ammonia is 200 times more concentrated. . . Even after it has been flushed to lagoons, manure effluent is still 57 times more powerful than raw sewage.” Dr. William Weida, “A Citizen's Guide to the Regional Economic and Environmental Effects of Large Concentrated Dairy Operations,” November 2000.
Click Here to find out what happens to this waste.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CAFO's
(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations):
GRACE Factory Farm Project: This site offers facts, statistics, and reports about CAFO's nationwide.The Sierra Club's Clean Water Project: Learn more about factory farms and their impact on our nation's water supply.
Click Here for a Flash Presentation (make sure your speakers are on!) that will teach you more about CAFO's
