Low Plains Drifter Tales from the Road Chicken Feed: By the Numbers Lo, the Poor Farmer Factory Farm Readings

Report Days 3-5 Tell Some Friends About This Page! For a Few Dollars More … or, How Our Taxes Go To Clean Up After Big Chicken Day 3, Morning - Relatively boring trip from Paris to Waco -- sorta like Paris to Bordeaux, only totally different. Saw lots of cows. Also went through a little town called Birthright. I couldn't quite understand what being born there entitled you to -- boredom, maybe. Day 3, Afternoon - Arrived in Waco about mid-day, and set up a tour and meetings for the following. In late afternoon, unhitched bicycle from car rack and went exploring -- found a really good hiking/biking trail along the Brazos River, that continues as a gravelly, boulder-strewn mountain biking trail to where the Bosque enters the Brazos. Day 4, Morning - Justin Taylor, Water Sentinel for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, picked me up and we met Tom Conry, City of Waco Public Works staffer, at a work-in-progress wetlands just west of Waco. The purpose of the project is to remove the detritus from mega-dairy operations upstream. Specifically, what will be removed is euphemistically referred to as "nutrients" -- otherwise known as cow crap. The wetlands will partially cleanse the river waters before the river enters Lake Waco -- the drinking water supply for Waco and other towns. Understandably, the effort means a lot to folks in Waco. Justin Taylor and Tom Conry standing on the first phase of created wetlands. These are designed to filter our 'nutrients' and suspended solids from runoff from dairy cow plop. When completed, over 80% of the water flow in the Bosque River will run through these wetlands...just downstream is the drinking water supply lake for the City of Waco. Day 4, Afternoon - Justin and I travelled up Hwy 6 (and some County Roads too numerous to count) to visit Dairy Country, in the headwaters of the Bosque and Leon rivers. The photos tell the tale -- except for the stink. This is a fountain of cow manure and urine sprayed onto fields adjacent to a mega-dairy. This is just downstream of the manure cannon... the brown glop is runoff from the dairy waste overapplied to the fields. At some of the dairies in the Bosque R. area, the milking cows all have their tails cut off. Why? For sanitation reasons -- cows' tails are collectors of dung. Dead calf in the back of a pickup truck. Sign at Sundance Dairy (where cows have no tails and dead calves are thrown in the back of pickups) Large dairy operation. Unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately -- digital pictures don't have "smellavision," but take it from me, the odor was truly rank. Thousands of cows create a stench that is way beyond anything I experienced in my farm years (we had about 50 dairy cows when I was a kid). Day 5, entire day - Spent the day sitting through a boring, tedious, and downright frustrating meeting of the Brazos River Authority (BRA), whose members were all so happy they were in collective pants-pissing mode. The occasion was that the Fed’ral Gummint, aka Natural Resource Conservation Service of the US Dept of Agriculture, had just announced that the area covered by the BRA was to receive a grant of $502,000 to clean up poultry waste (can't these people say "crap"?). Sanderson 'Farms,' the big poultry producer in the area had most of its "headshed" employees and many of its "serfs" (contract growers) assembled for this thing, all of them smiling and happy for the TV cameras. Made my stomach turn. Jean Haggerbaumer, poultry watchdog, and I asked some pointed questions and got frowned at by the honchos. I just used the modifiers "boring, tedious, frustrating" in describing the meeting but it occurs to me now that it goes without saying: in my experience a meeting with any government entity -– and I’ve been to a lot of ‘em -– is bound to fit those descriptives. Oh well, … tomorrow I drive from Waco, TX, to Clovis, NM -- a distance of 420 miles. Time to get out the audio tapes. I know those Larry McMurtry cassettes are hiding in the backseat somewhere... Up to Top