The Hidden Cost of Dairy

It sounds like a scene from a horror film….

On February 16, 2016, dairy worker Ruperto Vazquez-Carrera began his shift at Sunrise Organic Dairy Farm in Idaho. Ten hours later, his submerged body was found, after Ruperto drowned in a 20 acre manure pit.

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time that a dairy worker suffered such a gruesome death. In 2015, in a similar incident, Randy Vasquez drowned in a manure pit at a dairy in Washington. Once again, his body was not discovered for hours.

Consumer demand for dairy products has grown over the past decade, and the industry has responded by concentrating larger and larger numbers of cows on farms to accommodate increased demand. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 50% of milk in the United States is being produced by only 3% of farms.  These mass-producing dairies hold between 1,000 to over 15,000 cows each.

The consolidation of larger farms comes at the cost of worker safety, environmental concerns, and animal welfare. Dairy cows are confined in cramped, unsanitary conditions and forcibly impregnated over and over, only to have their calves torn away from them at birth over and over again in a relentless cycle of misery. As their milk production wanes, they are sent to noisy, nauseatingly filthy slaughterhouses to die terrifying and painful deaths years before their natural lifespan would be over.

Dairy workers face dangerous, isolated, and unhealthy conditions. When they are injured, often there is no one around to help them. In Washington State, a dairy worker is killed about every 16 months on the job, and the injury rate is 40% higher than other industries. With larger farms and increasing pressure to meet market demand, numbers of injuries are growing, from 362 injuries in 2009 to 444 in 2015.

Manure pits are a particular hazard, and are linked directly to large scale dairy farming. The average 2,000 cow farm produces 240,000 pounds of manure daily, or 90 million pounds per year. In addition to slipping and falling risks, workers can become overwhelmed by toxic fumes from the manure and pass out. Spills and runoff from manure pits threaten groundwater and cause environmental pollution. In 2010, 15 million gallons of manure spilled into Washington’s Snohomish River.

Eating a plant based diet can help decrease the demand for large dairy farms.

Learn more about plant based eating here

Read more about the plight of dairy workers here

Read about the environmental costs of dairy here