Coronado Dairy Beef Builder Orientation 2018

In the winter of 2018 ,Lauralynn Cornelsenmoved out of her mobile home in Sunizona, an unincorporated community in southeast Arizona. After more than vi years, she was tired of hauling h2o for drinking and bathing, and she couldn't afford to drill a well — certainly not one deep plenty to survive the impending squeeze once a nearby mega-dairy began to operate.

Cornelsen's story epitomizes the challenges local residents are facing over the ongoing water crisis in this rural community, a problem that worsens every yr and that no person or agency has figured out how to solve. She is i of hundreds of people, mostly low- to heart-income, living in a high-desert landscape whose groundwater is speedily disappearing every bit water is pumped to grow alfalfa, corn, nuts, wheat and barley.

Merely the greatest pressure on the region'southward aquifer comes from Riverview LLP, a Minnesota-based dairy company whose groundwater pumping is seen by many equally the primary cause of their drying wells.

Linda Rieke, James Kanne's daughter, feeds calves as her sons, Connor, 6, and Kobe, 3, wait on at the family dairy farm in Franklin, Minnesota.

Far abroad in Kerkhoven, Minnesota, farmers Jim and LeeAnn VanDerPol have watched as their community lost many of its residents post-obit decades of shrinking agricultural margins and increased corporate consolidation in the livestock sectors. Their former neighbors have been replaced by the five huge Riverview facilities within x miles of their business firm. In Chokio, Minnesota, about an hour away, locals successfully fought to keep Riverview from building a nine,200-cow dairy, citing concerns near pollution and groundwater turn down.

Smaller dairy farmers nationwide have weathered years of milk prices below the cost of production that culminated in an industry-broad economic crisis. Now they face up a new antagonist: mega-dairies, or dairy CAFOs (concentrated fauna feeding operations). In Franklin, southwest of Minneapolis, James Kanne struggles to hang onto his small family dairy even every bit mega-dairies similar Riverview compete for the few remaining milk processors.

This investigation follows Riverview'due south rapid expansion in 2 of the five states it operates in, linking the ecology and economic consequences — and the lives of those who are impacted.

The people nosotros spoke with in Minnesota and Arizona are ane,500 miles apart, continued only by the ever-growing presence and power of Riverview. But their communities have much in common: The local industry and resources have been monopolized by a deep-pocketed entity. The groundwater is existence depleted and polluted. Incessant traffic, dust, lights and the stench of livestock cause home values to plummet and strain the emotional ties locals have to the places they call domicile.

Thousands of dairy cows oversupply the Coronado Dairy'south feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area most Sunizona, Arizona.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High Land News

SUNIZONA, ARIZONA — On a winter evening in 2020,Lauralynn stood behind the counter of the Days Inn in Willcox, Arizona, where she worked equally a desk clerk. Within the quiet lobby — the walls busy with paintings of cowboys, the continental breakfast bar closed for the night — she spoke resolutely nigh the previous decade, during which she had tried badly to make a life for her family unit in an increasingly parched mural.

Cornelsen and her six children moved to Sunizona in 2011 from St. David, about 55 miles away. They needed to detect someplace cheap,Cornelsen said, then they bought 2.five acres for $3,600. "I liked the rural atmosphere, merely our master thing was that it was an emergency, and it was inexpensive," recalledCornelsen. "Information technology was what we could beget with our tax refund."

In Sunizona, population 212, tract, manufactured and mobile homes border clay roads and the state highway that leads to the Chiricahua Mountains. Sunizona has a mini-mall, a café, an simple school, a laundromat and a couple of churches, merely no mail office — not even a convenience shop.

TheCornelsens start moved two RVs and a van, then a mobile home, onto their land, but the holding lacked electricity and had no well. Years afterwards, the family managed to get electricity, but h2o remained a trouble. Near every day for six years,Cornelsen and her children walked to a church a mile and a half away, where they, and 12 other families, filled i-gallon jugs with water from a hose.

"It was a real hassle, just y'all gotta do what y'all had to do,"Cornelsen said. "I had kids and I had to make sure they were watered."

The family wanted their own well. But information technology wouldn't be cheap:Cornelsen said the well drillers told her it would cost near $40,000. H2o was already deficient and need was growing: Riverview would soon begin construction on Turkey Creek Dairy, its second dairy in Arizona, merely downwards the road, and it would be drilling deep, she said.

At the fourth dimension,Cornelsen was earning minimum wage as a home-intendance aide for elderly and disabled patients. She was living paycheck to paycheck, and far from alone: In 2019, co-ordinate to the census, Sunizona's almanac median household income was $22,500 — but over 61% of the median household income in Willcox, xxx minutes north, and just 38% of the state'due south.

Cornelsen could non beget a new well. She was also worried about the new mega-dairy and the traffic and other problems she thought information technology might bring. Ultimately, it was all just too much; she decided to get out. In 2018, she gave the property to a close friend from church and moved to Willcox, where she got the job at the Days Inn. Her new holding has two wells.

Though several years have passed since she left Sunizona,Cornelsen is still angry about what happened. She said Riverview sucking up the water was a major factor in driving her and many of her neighbors abroad. "Too many people are afraid of proverb annihilation," she said, her voice taking on a passionate edge. "I believe business runs America, and when the big guy is taking a precious resource similar water — that I'm against."

"I believe business runs America, and when the big guy is taking a precious resource like water — that I'm against."

Cows at the Coronado Dairy's feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area near Sunizona in southeastern Arizona. The feedlot is amongst the subcontract backdrop recently caused by the Minnesota-based mega-dairy Riverview LLP.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/Loftier Country News

NOBODY KNOWS HOW MANY WELLS  have dried upwardly in Sunizona, let alone the unabridged Willcox Basin, which covers i,911 square miles in Arizona's southeast corner, almost the New Mexico border. But between 2014 and 2019, records from the Arizona Section of Water Resources (ADWR) evidence that effectually 20 wells in the Sunizona area were deepened afterwards drying up. In the entire basin during that time, records show that 57 wells were deepened, just interviews and anecdotal accounts place the number at more than 100.

While pinning the turn down of whatsoever individual well on a neighboring well or wells is adjacent to impossible, bear witness is mounting that the reject of the undercover aquifer here has accelerated since Riverview's arrival. The company has drilled nigh 80 wells in the Willcox Basin since Jan 2015, and added six more in the Douglas Basin, just to the due south, since it started ownership land there in October 2020. About of the wells are at least ane,000 feet deep, and three are close to one-half a mile deep — deeper than any other well in the area. Many of them lie most Sunizona'due south barren wells.

Kevin Wulf, a spokesperson for Riverview, acknowledges that the dairy's water use is a factor, but he insists it's hardly the just i to blame.

"I get information technology," Wulf said as he led reporters on a bout of the dairy in early 2020. "We're the big target." Wulf, a clean-cut former simple school instructor, looked out at the 90-cow milk carousel, which turned slowly like a merry-get-round. "The rumor is: You're hither to suck the valley dry. And then yous're going to leave. We don't desire to do that."

In the spring of 2018, Wulf and his wife, who are members of the Apostolic Christian Church in Morris, Minnesota, relocated to Arizona. The Apostolic Christian Church in Tucson had put out a telephone call for new members, and Riverview'southward Arizona operations were expanding. The landscape is very unlike, he said, but "if you're doing what you know God wants you to do, anywhere is swell and tin can exist an awesome identify."

In just a few years, Riverview has utterly transformed the appearance and economy of the Willcox Basin. The company bought out nearly xxx local farmers and easily became the bowl's biggest grower. It employs 200 people in Arizona and has fifty-fifty built on-site housing for the foreign workers amid them.

In January 2015, Riverview paid $38 million in cash to purchase the Coronado Dairy, a locally owned operation in the Kansas Settlement area, well-nigh 10 miles n of Sunizona. It too bought half-dozen,474 acres of surrounding land.

As of publication, the company has purchased nigh 51,000 acres in the Willcox and Douglas basins, according to Cochise County land records, spending more than $180 one thousand thousand, nearly all in cash. Much of the belongings was existing farmland the dairy visitor bought to grow feed for its cows.

The Coronado Dairy is now home to lxx,000 Bailiwick of jersey-cross heifers, immature cows that have non notwithstanding lactated. To drive downward Kansas Settlement Road is to watch an entire mile of them tick by like a flipbook: dearest-brownish ears, big doe-eyes, flicking tails. In a barn set back from the road, another seven,000 dairy cows are milked twice daily.

When night falls, high-powered floodlights illuminate the feedlot. It is the merely such lighting in a identify known for its dark skies and glittering stars, and members of the local astronomy club say that it has impacted stargazing. When asked about the light pollution, though, Wulf said Riverview uses significantly fewer lights hither than it does in the Midwest.

In 2019, the company built the Turkey Creek Dairy, a few miles north of Sunizona. Information technology's fifty-fifty larger, with 17,000 small white hutches housing calves from ii to 90 days old. At full capacity, it will hold 9,000 dairy cows and 120,000 heifers.

Riverview's critics say the Minnesota corporation was drawn hither by the same freewheeling political climate that has brought so many pistachio and pecan farmers to the valley from California and other states. In Arizona, in that location are no regulations apropos how much water farmers tin can pump in rural areas. The groundwater pumping in five urban areas in the state'due south midsection, including Phoenix and Tucson, is controlled and metered under the Arizona Groundwater Management Act, a pioneering state law passed 40 years agone. But that law bypassed rural areas entirely; it doesn't even crave water-use metering.

"The only reason the h2o tables are dropping is considering more entities are pumping — because in that location are no rules," Kristine Uhlman, a retired University of Arizona hydrologist, said. "Besides many entities take moved in to pump the gratis water. Have what y'all want; all you need is the money to drill a well, the deeper the better."

According to Wulf, yet, Riverview didn't come to Arizona because of the lack of water regulations; information technology was attracted by the dry climate and the big amount of available farmland. "Because h2o usage and conservation is of import to the states, no matter where we're located, the h2o use regulation in Willcox was not a determining gene," he said. "Nosotros recollect nearly water and talk about water everywhere we're at."

"Take what y'all desire; all you need is the money to drill a well, the deeper the better."

An aerial view of Riverview's flagship dairy exterior of Morris, Minnesota. Riverview has iii divisions — dairy, beef and ingather — and owns at least 25 facilities in five states.

MORRIS, MINNESOTA — The sunrise bled orange over the icy Pomme de Terre River and farm fields glittering with new Feb snow. Inside Riverview LLP'south flagship dairy, 10,000 cows waited for the feed truck. Some curled their long black tongues around the railings of their pens, simply mostly they idled quietly, something that Natasha Mortenson — who works in customs outreach and educational activity for Riverview — cited every bit evidence of their delectation.

At one terminate of the barn, pregnant cows stood in isolated birthing pens; a placenta lay in the bedding almost 1 postpartum moo-cow, glistening the red-purple of mammalian birth. In the "nursery," 1 withal-moisture calf, its umbilical cord dangling, wobbled against a worker, who tilted dorsum its small brownish head to insert a tube of colostrum that would reach all the way to its breadbasket.

At just a day sometime, the calves will be strapped into tiny vests, automobile-lifted into a semi-truck, and transported ten miles away to the visitor'southward dogie facility. A few days later on, they are trucked more than than i,000 miles to New Mexico (if bound for the beef marketplace) or Arizona (if destined for dairy).

The Riverview company was started by the Fehr family, who began a crop and beef subcontract in 1939. In 1995, seeing opportunity in the dairy manufacture, they established their first 800-cow dairy and became an LLP, a condition that allowed for multiple owner/investors. Ane of those investors was the Wulf family, some of whose members attended the same church building — the Churchly Christian Church — and owned a beef cattle operation. In 2012, Riverview officially merged with Wulf Cattle. Today, Riverview has 3 linked only separate divisions — dairy, beefiness and crop — and at least 25 facilities beyond five states: Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico and Arizona.

Throughout the Morris dairy, laminated posters remind employees to BE KIND and Exist Condom — referring to animal treatment and workplace safe — and listing the company's cadre values: Candor, Integrity, Keep it Uncomplicated, Spirit of Humility, and Strong Work Ethic. Riverview's Kevin Wulf said each core value is biblically inspired. "Candor, for example, ways being open with one some other, not talking about each other, but talking to each other for better understanding," he said. "Integrity is about doing the right thing. Knowing that God is always watching."

But Riverview was at the center of a 2019 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation into the trend of U.S. dairy farms abusing the TN visa program past recruiting college-trained Mexican veterinarians for high-skilled jobs as animal scientists — only to give them various low-skilled jobs, such equally milking cows or cleaning. And, according to OSHA documents, three of Riverview's foreign workers have been killed in work-related accidents; in each case, the company was fined for safety violations. (According to Wulf, Riverview has reduced its OSHA-recordable incident rate to 0.98%.)

Mortenson said that the Fehrs were specially intrigued by dairy operations in the South, which were much larger than traditional Midwestern dairy farms. The Morris dairy lone produces approximately 390,000 pounds of milk per solar day, enough to fill half dozen tanker trucks. The company said that all of its milk goes to make cheese. "We're really bullish with the marketplace," Mortenson said.

In the U.South., a handful of companies produce the vast majority of beefiness, pork and poultry. For those studying consolidation trends, information technology seems clear that dairy is next.

In the past four decades, the livestock industry has undergone an enormous transformation. Farms have become larger, more mechanized and more consolidated. In the U.S., a handful of companies produce the vast majority of beef, pork and poultry. For those studying consolidation trends, information technology seems clear that dairy is next.

Modern U.Due south. agronomics was hugely influenced past Earl Butz, secretary of Agriculture nether Presidents Nixon and Ford, who championed corporate agriculture and consign-oriented commodity product. He famously encouraged farmers to "establish fencerow to fencerow" and "get large or get out."

Donald Trump'southward secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue, echoed these sentiments at the 2019 World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wisconsin, a state that lost 10% — more than than 800 — of its dairy farms that year. "In America, the large get bigger and the small become out," said Perdue. "It's very hard on economies of scale with the capital needs and all the environmental regulations and everything else today to survive milking forty, 50, sixty or even 100 cows."

Despite a 55% nationwide decrease in dairy farms betwixt 2002 and 2019, moo-cow numbers have held steady while fluid milk volume has increased, the upshot of fewer farms operating on larger scales. Between 2012 and 2017, Minnesota lost 1,100 dairy farms. Meanwhile, during those five years, Riverview congenital iii Minnesota mega-dairies, a feedlot in South Dakota, and started calf and dairy operations in New Mexico and Arizona.

At outset glance, it seems reckless for a dairy company to expand during a dairy crisis. But experts point to what happened in the grunter and poultry industries in the 1990s, maxim it's a tried-and-true strategy to capture the market when it's depressed.

James Kanne on his family farm in Franklin, Minnesota.

"Whether it'southward pork or chickens or turkeys in the by, that's how they all took over," James Kanne, a sixth-generation modest dairy farmer in Franklin, Minnesota, said. "They expanded when the marketplace was downwardly. And so when the market came back up, none of the little guys could go back in again."

And Riverview is not washed growing. A crop farmer in Dumont, Minnesota, who asked to remain anonymous because of the small customs, said that a Riverview official visited his dwelling house and shared plans to build a 24,000-cow dairy one mile away. The official offered to purchase the farmer's corn for feed, and to sell manure to him as fertilizer, merely the farmer declined. "I said, 'I'm non very interested in that, because you're not paying plenty for the production, and you're charging too much for the manure.' "

The farmer was likewise horrified by the thought of so many cows then shut to his domicile: the odor and air quality, wear and tear on the roads, manure leaching into the streams and rivers, and the demand on the groundwater supply. "It's scary they're going to come in here and suck that much water from the basis," he said.

According to research past Dara Meredith Fedrow, a graduate student at the University of Montana, Riverview used more 570 million gallons of water in 2017 — almost 1-quarter of the full consumption by sus scrofa and dairy CAFOs in Minnesota.

The Dumont-surface area farmer also questioned Riverview's "never-ending supply of money" at a fourth dimension when so many dairy farmers are going out of business.

The 24,000-cow dairy has not yet been congenital but, according to state records, the company practical for a let to build a 10,500-cow dairy approximately 130 miles due north of Dumont. Additionally, an application for another 10,500-cow dairy approximately 100 miles due east is up for state approval.

"They never seem to stop," the farmer said.

During the summer of 2014, nevertheless, one Minnesota community did fight back, organizing confronting Baker Dairy, a 9,000-cow operation proposed by Riverview. "I never was one of those that took on a cause and became song, only I didn't have a choice," said Chokio resident Kathy DeBuhr, who was shocked to learn that the huge dairy would be congenital just a mile from her house.

DeBuhr had many concerns — milk tankers chewing up the roads, increased grit, air and water pollution, and the strain on the aquifer — just the biggest one was existence downwind of so many cows. "I don't recollect I would take been able to sell my business firm."

The Baker Dairy proposal was slated for an August public hearing before the Citizens' Board, the controlling arm of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Since 1967, eight members of the public and the MPCA commissioner take been tasked with reviewing industry proposals and determining whether to require additional environmental affect studies.

"No 1 thought we had a take a chance at all of influencing the Citizens' Lath," said DeBuhr.

Just Jim Riddle, who served 2 years on the lath, wrote in an op-ed that Riverview's proposal had multiple unresolved problems. Among other things, it lacked data on how its "massive water drawdown would impact existing crop and livestock farms in the area." The lath voted unanimously to require a full environmental impact statement.

After the EIS was ordered, Riverview withdrew its proposal, and the Baker Dairy was never built. For DeBuhr, the outcome was bloodshot. While it marked a rare win for ordinary people fighting big business, there were consequences for the Citizens' Board.

Equally reported in the Minnesota Star Tribune, Riverview'south Brad Fehr "said the ruling prompted him to spend two weeks airing his concerns" with industry trade groups. In plough, Riddle said, corporate agricultural interests pressured land legislators to eliminate the Citizens' Board.

"Presently after voting to require an EIS on Riverview, in the night of night, at the end of a session on a beak unrelated, without any hearings or public debate, the Citizens' Board was abolished," Riddle said. "So that told me that Riverview has tremendous political influence over both parties."

Kevin Wulf said that while the deprival of the Baker permit was the catalyst for the emptying of the board, Riverview was "non involved in that pressure or in that procedure."

"Soon later on voting to require an EIS on Riverview, in the nighttime of night, at the stop of a session on a bill unrelated, without whatsoever hearings or public contend, the Citizens' Board was abolished."

SUNSITES, ARIZONA — At the Sunsites Community Center, 12 miles east of Sunizona, approximately 50 people sat in folding chairs, their eyes trained on Kristine Uhlman, the hydrologist, as she flipped through a PowerPoint presentation. The workshop, in February 2020, was about a topic of intimate business organisation to attendees: The health and future of the aquifer below their anxiety.

Like about southern Arizona aquifers, the Willcox Basin aquifer is basically a big tub, composed of fill eroded from the surrounding mountain ranges, Ulhman said. With every monsoon tempest, the fill material is reworked, carrying finer grains of silts and clays toward the center of the bowl, and leaving coarser sands and gravels at the edge.

To explain the aquifer's rapid decline, Uhlman used an everyday metaphor — a savings business relationship.

"If your water is old, and it's not being recharged on a regular footing, that'due south a savings business relationship," Uhlman said, scanning the room. "Yous're taking water out of a savings account that's non being recharged with routine input."

Ideally, your monthly salary recharges your checking account, enabling you to plan with the predictability of a reliable income, she said. This permits a specific kind of spending, including depositing funds into a savings account. But "when you live off your savings account, you manage your money differently," she said. "Similar in retirement, you are always aware that your savings account is nonrenewable, and you lot spend with care."

Surrounded by five mountain ranges, the Willcox Basin's aquifer amounts to a bountiful savings account. Before large-scale agricultural pumping began effectually 1940, upward to 97 1000000 acre-anxiety of groundwater was stored there, co-ordinate to a 2018 ADWR report — enough to supply Tucson, the nearest major metropolis, for 970 years and and then some.

The abundant groundwater has long attracted farmers and ranchers, as has the unique composition of the aquifer itself. Unlike most groundwater basins in Arizona and throughout the Southwest, the Willcox Basin's aquifer is largely fresh beneath the beginning, salty 100 feet, said Uhlman. At that place may exist several thousand feet of fresh groundwater underneath.

Only between 1940 and 2015, all-encompassing pumping by farmers seriously depleted the savings account of the Willcox Basin, removing half-dozen.ii meg acre-feet of groundwater and lowering the aquifer past 200 to 300 feet, the ADWR study said.

The Coronado Dairy on Kansas Settlement Road in the southeast corner of Arizona. Riverview LLP, a Minnesota-based dairy, has been buying up land and drilling new wells to grow feed for its cattle.

The sharpest declines were in the Kansas Settlement area, where Riverview's Coronado Dairy at present lies, although they were recorded earlier Riverview arrived. No comprehensive analysis of h2o-level declines has been done since 2015. But a former ADWR official said that the charge per unit of reject appears to accept increased since and then, to 3 to 5 feet per yr in the unabridged Willcox Basin, compared to 2 to four feet per year from 2010 to 2015. The Sunizona area is likewise seeing significant declines.

In 2015, bowl water users pumped about 240,000 acre-anxiety, about four times more than the aquifer gets in recharge, said Keith Nelson, an ADWR hydrologist who oversaw the department's 2018 study. Boosted wells have since been drilled, so the overdraft could at present exist bigger, he said.

"Overpumping, or overspending from a savings account, means you don't requite a damn," Uhlman said. "Or perhaps you take six months to live, and you don't want anyone to inherit what you lot worked hard for."

The overpumping has driven out a few farmers. As Riverview drilled deeper, they feared they'd also have to drill deeper — something they couldn't afford. And then they sold out to the dairy.

For 25 years, Glenn Schmidt farmed cotton and alfalfa on 166 acres, a mile south of Coronado Dairy. 4 years agone, he and his wife, Linda, sold the state to the dairy colossus for $1.3 one thousand thousand.

"They were drilling deep wells right abreast me," Schmidt, who is 65, said. "At my age, I didn't run into how I could spend $2 million on new wells and endeavour to compete. I had (a well) that was 600 feet. The rest of them were 400- to 500-feet wells. Theirs are one,200."

"At my age, I didn't run into how I could spend $ii one thousand thousand on new wells and try to compete. I had (a well) that was 600 feet. The rest of them were 400- to 500-feet wells. Theirs are 1,200."

Before Riverview's arrival, Schmidt's profits and yields rose for 10 years after he started planting new cotton varieties. "Nosotros weren't set to quit," he said. "We'd merely got new equipment. When they started drilling those deep wells, information technology ruined my dream." He had imagined renting his farm to his two sons and living off the rent money. Simply, he said, "The boys had to leave, to go find jobs. One of them landed in Kansas, one in Oregon."

Joe Salvail too felt he had no choice in 2015 only to sell his land after farming alfalfa for xix years. His well was dropping more than 7 feet a yr, and the water level hovered at 480 feet deep. A new well would have price him $125 per foot. "I knew I was going to take to eventually put in a new well," he said. "I didn't have the money to do information technology."

Shortly before Salvail sold almost all of his 320 acres to Riverview for just over $1 million, the company drilled a new well just a half-mile north of his country. "They went downwardly 1,300 feet, and they're pumping 1,800 gallons a minute out of that well now," he said. "They're irrigating with (multiple) centre pivots pulling water from that well, and I was having trouble to get enough water to irrigate one."

But Salvail and Schmidt harbor no bitterness. "I'yard glad (Riverview) came by," Salvail said. "It helped me. I have no problems with them. They gave me a decent offer."

Schmidt said that the sale allowed him to get out earlier things inevitably became worse. "If they wouldn't have bought my farm, and they kept drilling the wells, I'd have been out of business organisation," Schmidt said.

In Arizona, fifty-fifty the farmers who praise Riverview as a good neighbor and job creator say they're worried because the local economy now depends and then heavily on it. John Hart, who farms 10 miles due north of the Coronado Dairy, estimates that 70% of the basin's economy is tied to agriculture, and that Riverview owns one-tertiary of the sixty,000 to 70,000 acres farmed in the bowl. Riverview is by far the biggest employer in the area.

"It's kind of similar Walmart moving into town," Richard Searle, a former county supervisor who grows pistachios 15 miles from the Coronado Dairy, said. "If y'all have 20 farmers and 1 goes broke, it'southward not a huge bear upon. You have one entity like the dairy, and if they have a problem, information technology will take a huge economic impact on the valley."

Jim VanDerPol on the family farm in Kerkhoven, Minnesota.

KERKHOVEN, MINNESOTA — Afternoon sunlight spilled into the living room through a window even so ringed in Christmas garlands, across a pianoforte, a smattering of books and the suspender-clad shoulders of Jim VanDerPol. Exterior, a few beef cows ambled across a snowy pasture. VanDerPol, 73, grew upwards in this farmhouse, and returned to it in the 1970s with his wife, LeeAnn. They raised their children here, and then began their own small subcontract business, Pastures A Plenty, which today sells grass-fed beef and pork to restaurants and customers beyond Minnesota.

The VanDerPols used to be surrounded past working family farms, merely the 1980s subcontract crisis drove many of them out of business concern. And then came the ruinous drought of 1988. And the 1990s brought corporate consolidation of the hog industry, which drove prices downwards to 8 cents a pound. Those years were "a confirmation of my politics," Jim said. "And I got that from my dad, who ever figured that anybody that wore a suit was on the other side (and) they're all out to get you."

"I sometimes recollect the right way to say it is that in that location are ghosts in the state. It's a lot lonelier than it was."

Today, the VanDerPols tin can drive for miles in any direction and remember the people who used to live and farm at that place. "I sometimes recollect the right way to say it is that there are ghosts in the land," Jim said. "It's a lot lonelier than it was."

The new farm crisis has roiled farmers nationwide, and dairy farmers arguably take been hit the hardest. Yet there are five giant Riverview operations within ten miles of the VanDerPols' house and another within xv miles.

Riverview's Louriston Dairy, home to x,000 cows, is just 2 miles away. The Star Tribune reports that its cows "drinkable enough h2o to drain an Olympic-sized swimming puddle in but over 2 days, and produce plenty manure to fill one every three days."

"What impacts people doesn't count for very much" in our society, Jim said. That makes it hard to fight operations like Riverview. You can point out that people are being pushed out of business organization, schools are under stress, communities are struggling, he said, "but those are all people arguments, and they get discounted."

He has more faith in the country itself fighting back. "It seems to me that the thing that's apt to tear Riverview apart … (is) the demand to pay more particular and more than individual attending to every square pes of the globe as nosotros're using it." Ane mean solar day, he said, we'll realize that: "No, we can't milk dairy cows that style, because information technology costs the globe besides much."

As they sat at their kitchen table, the VanDerPols talked almost the tangible and intangible costs of Riverview'southward arrival: the loss of neighbors, the however-unknown environmental impacts, and the already-noticeable modify to the night heaven due to the 24/seven lights from the facilities.

"In the wintertime here, particularly when information technology's still or quiet, (the stars) are so brilliant at dark … I mean, it just goes on forever," said Jim. Merely at present, he said, "That place is lit up like a Christmas tree."

Jim lifted his spoon and paused. "If people looked at the stars more, they'd probably be able to see their way through to some real solutions."

Cattle graze in a pasture on the VanDerPol family farm in Kerkhoven, Minnesota. The family unit grows organic crops, hogs, grass-fed cattle and free-range laying hens.

A few days earlier, a thick fog froze lace-like into the copse as dairy farmers gathered in a pub in Greenwald, Minnesota, population 238. The occasion was a dairy crisis coming together, co-hosted by the Land Stewardship Projection (LSP), a nearly 40-year-old nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture and an "ethic of stewardship." Effect organizers expected 50 farmers, but nigh 130 showed up.

Every seat was taken, so farmers leaned against a wall hung with paintings of ducks and spilled into an overflow room. They signed postcards asking state legislators to place a moratorium on new dairies with more 1,000 animal units — "until the water pollution threat posed past these large operations and the price-depressing effects of overproduction are both addressed," Matthew Sheets, LSP's farm crisis coordinator, said.

A state bill was introduced in the Minnesota House of Representatives in March 2020, but stalled in committee. If passed, it would accept prevented new or expanded dairies with more than than 1,000 animate being units until June 2024.

The meeting served as a somber eulogy for the family unit-owned dairies lost in recent years — and a rallying cry on behalf of those still hanging on. Mega-dairies are partly to arraign for the industry-wide economic crisis; their massive overproduction of milk has saturated the marketplace, driving down prices well below the cost of production.

Richard Levins, professor emeritus of applied economics at the Academy of Minnesota, addressed the room in a soft voice. "Unfortunately, the 'there'due south room for everybody' argument doesn't piece of work then well in dairy," he said. "Information technology's a matter of unproblematic mathematics." Bringing in a 5,000-cow dairy doesn't increment the demand for milk, he explained — it simply replaces 50 100-cow dairies. "We're playing musical chairs."

Some see the loss of small dairy operations as inevitable. In February 2018, Marin Bozic, a dairy economist at the University of Minnesota, testified before the state agriculture committee on behalf of Minnesota Milk, an industry trade grouping. "I anticipate out of 3,000 dairy farms left in the land, probably over lxxx% are last generation dairies," Bozic said. "Nosotros are going to see a number of dairy farmers that are no longer competitive." He cited Riverview every bit a "prime instance" of a competitive concern model.

Merely expanding isn't an pick for most dairies, Levins said in a phone call. "That'south like telling a local hardware store to become a Walmart. You can't do information technology." The story isn't about small dairies getting bigger, he said. "Information technology's about enormous operations coming in and putting everyone else out of business (because) there'southward only then much business organization to go around."

"That's like telling a local hardware store to become a Walmart. You can't exercise it."

And communities change when agriculture consolidates, Levins said. It decreases "the economical activeness on Main Street. And of course, it decreases the number of people that go to church, go to schoolhouse, go to the hospital, that sort of affair. So the consolidation in the dairy leads to consolidation in all of those services as well."

At the meeting, dairy farmer James Kanne described himself as a "survivor," the concluding of the dairies still operating from his childhood. He said mega-dairies compete straight with small dairy farmers for the few remaining processors. And while processors accuse pocket-sized dairies to pick up their milk, they pay premiums to mega-dairies that deliver tankers' worth of product.

Kanne is hanging on, only information technology's not easy. His girl and son-in-law recently returned to the farm to help. "This morning, I was brushing my granddaughter's hair before she was getting ready to become on the coach, and tonight nosotros volition accept supper together." He paused. "And that is what we demand. We demand family unit. Nosotros need customs."

Heads nodded beyond the packed room.

Anastasia Rabin looks at a new quarter-mile center pivot on land that Riverview recently purchased in Elfrida, Arizona.

Roberto (Behave) Guerra/Loftier State News

AGRICULTURAL WATER USE JUMPED  in the Willcox Basin through the 1960s into the eye 1970s, peaking at over 300,000 acre-feet a twelvemonth. Then, water use crashed through the 1980s and 1990s to every bit low as 110,000 acre-feet per year, as farming went into a national economic decline. Meanwhile, well levels in the basin vicious so far that for many farmers it was no longer economical to pay for pumping.

Starting around 2000, h2o use started rising again. It hitting 172,000 acre-feet past 2014, U.S. Geological Survey statistics show. From 2015 through 2017, the most contempo year statistics are available, agricultural water use rose xviii.2%, compared to an 8.vii% increase from 2012 to 2015.

Riverview's inflow and land purchases could have been a contributing cistron in the increase in water apply. Betwixt January 2015 and the terminate of 2020, 407 new wells were drilled in the basin; 19.half dozen% of these were Riverview'due south. The visitor also inherited hundreds of existing wells through land purchases and at present owns about xix% of the 799 wells registered in the basin from 2014 through 2019.

Some private wells in the Kansas Settlement and Sunizona areas have shown some of the worst declines in Arizona, Frank Corkhill, ADWR'southward now-retired master hydrologist, said. One Kansas Settlement well dropped xxx anxiety between 2015 and 2017, while another dropped 45 feet between 2014 and 2017. Two wells each vicious 17 anxiety in 2017 alone — ane in Kansas Settlement and one in Sunizona, Corkhill said.

Records show that the aquifer has dropped faster since Riverview'due south arrival. The Arizona Section of Water Resources monitors 49 "alphabetize" wells in the Willcox Basin annually. Of these, 37 declined faster from 2015 to 2020 than from 2010 to 2015, while 12 declined at a slower rate or rose during the more recent period.

At High State News' request, Thomas Meixner, the University of Arizona'south hydrology and atmospheric sciences department caput, reviewed the alphabetize well data and said that, in general, "The decline in h2o levels appears to exist accelerating (since 2015). It'south not uniform. Dissimilar wells do bear differently. But on average, they are going downwardly at about half dozen feet a year now, compared to a picayune less than 4 feet in 2015."

In that location's no doubt that the Southwest's protracted drought, aggravated by climatic change, has also played a role, he said.

Altogether, southern Arizona's aquifers lost more than than 5.vii one thousand thousand acre-feet of water from 2002 to 2017, with both drought and agricultural pumping playing a role, according to a report published last November in the journal H2o Resources Inquiry.

But since pumping in the Willcox Bowl has far exceeded the level of recharge, Meixner suspects that it'southward a bigger factor in the reject than drought and climate alter.

Riverview, even so, said its water use is 25% less than that of the farmers who previously farmed the same land, due to more efficient irrigation methods. The company has installed two types of nozzles on each of its 200 irrigation center-pivots. Wulf said they manually switch them out throughout the growing flavour. "That takes a lot of work," he said. "It's labor-intensive."

Riverview works with a third-party hydrologist to monitor its wells to amend understand what is happening in the aquifer, he said.

"Nosotros recognize the value of water in Arizona and continually search for new innovations to reduce water usage per acre."

Even so, the company refuses to disclose its bodily water utilise. Wulf calls it "our private business."

He also said Riverview favors more than regulation, including state legislation that would require metering of all rural wells — legislation that so far has gone nowhere.

And some question Riverview's assertion of a 25% driblet in water utilize. Ii longtime farmers in the surface area, Salvail and Hart, say that while many farmers who sold to Riverview generally grew ane crop per yr, Riverview has switched to growing summer and winter crops, boosting its water employ.

"They'll put in a wheat crop and follow it with corn," Hart said. Only Riverview isn't the only grower adding crop cycles; other local farmers are following suit, due to declining crop prices and the increasingly popular practice of "cover-cropping" — planting non-food crops to enhance soil health and foreclose erosion, he said.

Many Sunizona residents say Riverview'south conversion of thousands of acres of vacant land to farmland has also boosted its water use. Wulf said that the state Riverview purchased was destined for tree or crop production. "Nosotros will continue seeking ways to conserve water on the state we subcontract," he said.

Water pipes are piled near a new pivot irrigation system on land recently acquired by Riverview LLP in Elfrida, Arizona.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High State News

AT A MARCH 2020 GROUNDWATER PRESENTATION in Sunsites, Bruce Babbitt, former Arizona governor and secretary of the Interior under Bill Clinton, was the keynote speaker. He regretted that rural areas, including the Willcox Basin, were left out of the 1980 Groundwater Management Act when it passed under his management.

The root of that problem lies in the deed's drawn-out, highly complex creation — a process that took years.

"That deed didn't just fall out of the sky. There was equally much controversy so equally there is now," Babbitt said.

A groundwater report commission spent three years trying to compromise among the land's warring mining, farming and urban interests, simply got nowhere. In agony, Babbitt recalled, he gathered vii people representing all factions backside airtight doors, where "we met twice a week, went through this line past bloody line, and concluded the impasse."

"We met twice a week, went through this line by bloody line, and ended the impasse."

They split up five areas of urbanized central and southern Arizona into land-run active management areas, each with authority to impose conservation rules on residents, businesses and farmers living in the path of urban growth.

Once the group finished with that, "nosotros were then exhausted" that rural areas were left out of the constabulary, Babbitt said.

This was just fine for many rural leaders, including those from the Willcox surface area, who didn't want to be regulated. As well, at the time "rural Arizona didn't announced to exist in any immediate crisis," Babbitt recalled.

"We thought that eventually, we will authorize ADWR to exercise the same affair, in rural Arizona. We could not have been more mistaken. The statutes we passed take proven to be unworkable for the rest of the country."

The Willcox Basin's agricultural economic system was so volatile for the next iii decades that the lack of regulation didn't seem to matter. Only by the middle 2010s, California tree-nut and alfalfa farmers were relocating to the area, and many homeowners' wells were drying up. In 2014, the state water agency held a public meeting in Willcox, where more than 50 people complained about well problems. At least 40 homeowners completed questionnaires, describing how their wells had dried up or appeared in danger.

A group of farmers, ranchers, rural residents and government officials and then formed a working group that spent months producing a carefully negotiated compromise proposal to create a groundwater conservation area for the basin.

Under the program, those who had pumped groundwater within the last five years would be grandfathered in, while new landowners would face strict limits on future pumping. Most new wells would be reviewed to ensure that they wouldn't dry upwards surrounding wells. All well owners would be required to install water meters and study their use to the land. Those using more 35 gallons per minute would have had to pay an annual fee, to exist used for water conservation programs.

But the proposal ruptured the community, dividing neighbors and friends, and it was ignored when it reached the Legislature.

"Today there is non much consensus to practice anything," Hart, the farmer, said. "The guys leading that endeavor in 2015 got so beat up amidst their peers, nobody wants to talk about it anymore. If anything is going to happen on the water issue, it has to come up from the state."

Kevin Wulf agrees. "We support state regulation," he said in a phone call. "We experience similar it is more fact-based and less emotional. Nosotros feel like if everyone is reporting water usage, nosotros would have a lot more accurate flick of what is happening around water."

When Babbitt spoke in Sunsites last March, even so, he urged the Legislature to give county governments potency to develop their own water management plans.

A sign in southeast Arizona warns of the deep crevasses that can occur as the water table drops.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High Country News

While the 1980 Groundwater Deed was a top-down mandate, "nigh of the things we do in this state, in this country, in communities, kickoff the other way," Babbitt said. "We tend to accost problems from local governments on upwardly, to try to detect consensus and a path forrad. It's your futurity, your community, your economic system and your neighbors."

Merely in both 2020 and 2021, Arizona'due south Legislature not only spurned bills similar those that Babbitt suggested; it even refused to grant them commission hearings. The same fate awaited bills that would take required water metering in rural areas or fabricated it easier for the state to shut off a water-imperiled expanse to new farmers.

The water forum at which Babbitt spoke was organized by Peggy Judd, a Cochise Canton supervisor representing the Willcox Basin. Judd, a longtime supporter of Riverview who lauds its economic benefits, opposed new regulations for years, calling them an intrusion on holding rights. She now supports them, because the well declines are growing more severe.

She has formed a new working group to hammer out a water plan behind airtight doors. Meanwhile, three Sunizona residents who take had to haul water or else deepen their wells are trying to course a h2o district to tax homeowners to pay for a well organisation for the community.

For now, though, the h2o outlook for the expanse where Riverview operates is gloomy at best. According to ADWR'due south 2018 groundwater study, which is based on a computer model, upward to 24 meg acre-feet of water volition be pumped out of the entire basin by 2115, and water levels could autumn by as much as 917 feet in the Kansas Settlement area from 1940 to 2115. Even though equally much as 78 1000000 acre-feet may remain, much of it will exist and so deep that it may not exist practical to remove it.

Big farmers like Riverview will exist able to get water for a long time because they accept the money to keep drilling deeper, Uhlman, the hydrologist, said. Homeowners and smaller farmers won't be as fortunate.

"These companies have the deep pockets to have longer straws that go down deeper in the aquifer," she said. "The individual family farmers who originally homesteaded the country — they tin can only go as deep equally their pocketbooks."

Anastasia Rabin lives in Elfrida, Arizona, where her farm is now almost completely surrounded by Riverview LLP-owned properties.

Roberto (Comport) Guerra/Loftier State News

ELFRIDA, ARIZONA — In May 2021, a rare storm obscured the Dragoon Mountains behind a wall of rain. Afterwards a twelvemonth of scant precipitation — simply eight.35 inches of rainfall in Willcox in 2020, compared to 12.18 inches in an average twelvemonth — the roadside grass remained gilded-dark-brown.

Thirty miles southwest of Riverview's Coronado Dairy, Anastasia Rabin stood in the yard side by side to her small herd of goats and scanned the horizon. She has lived in Elfrida for near a decade, and watched as industrial farming appeared in the valley. Commencement it was corn, so the California-owned nut operations — and now, Riverview.

In belatedly October 2020, Riverview purchased its first Elfrida property — nearly 4,700 acres for $20 meg. Since and so, Riverview has clustered a total of just over ix,100 Elfrida acres for close to $36 million. Kevin Wulf said Riverview plans to subcontract corn and wheat to feed its cows, but "there are no current plans to build a third dairy in the Elfrida expanse."

A few months agone, Rabin started noticing land-use changes in the immediate area. Many neighboring farms have sold to new operations, most recently Riverview. The dairy now owns the grain bins towering in the distance and the gravel quarry next door. Across the road, newly assembled irrigation pipes sprawled across one of Riverview'south recently purchased fields. When Rabin looks westward across the valley, she can meet a flurry of action: mesquite cleared, wells drilled, pivots installed and fields scraped bare. Loose sand and dirt take been pushed into enormous piles.

Recently, Rabin woke to a grit storm. She stood in her yard and took a phone video of a wall of dust and then thick that information technology blocked the mesquite trees and mountains. "This spring, the dust storms were a full-scale natural disaster," Rabin said, adding that such storms have go more frequent since the arrival of larger farms and the massive state immigration. She kicked at the ground, covered in several inches of beach-like sand, whorled in patterns past the air current. In some places on her belongings, as much as two feet of sand has accumulated.

"This is desertification in action," Rabin said — the transformation of a one time-biologically diverse landscape into a hotter, drier and much less hospitable surroundings.

"This is desertification in activeness."

Anastasia Rabin walks through a section of her property that she said has been desertifying even more than quickly since the arrival of industrial agriculture in the surface area.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High State News

KRISTINE UHLMAN RECALLED  that after she gave her water talk in Sunsites, Gary Fehr, Riverview's lath president, left her a telephone message. He said that Riverview has a 30-year investment in the surface area and wondered if the water would run out sooner than that.

"I told him no; as long as you accept the money to keep the deep wells, y'all won't run out of water," Uhlman said.

Wulf, however, said that Fehr was asking nigh the current wells that Riverview is replacing, not hinting that the visitor would exit the area in xxx years. "The new wells we are drilling today volition likely take a similar xxx-year lifespan, which prompted the question," Wulf said.

Wulf insists that in both Arizona and Minnesota, Riverview "wants to be adept neighbors."

"We sit at kitchen tables at every single neighbor's business firm," Riverview'due south Natasha Mortenson said. "We practise community meetings and allow people to come up ask questions. We feed people burgers and have a sit-down. Does that mean that every single neighbor loves the states? No, it does not mean that. But that's life."

Merely dairy farmer James Kanne said that Arizona and Minnesota are connected by a set of hidden costs, imposed by Riverview. "Whether it'south groundwater in Arizona, or freshwater that'due south beingness compromised, or our roads being abused ... it's a matter of the cost beingness put onto people who don't fifty-fifty realize they're paying the price," he said. "It's a very insidious way of doing business."

In both places, residents are pleading with state and local officials to do something — enact groundwater pumping restrictions, or identify a moratorium on large livestock operations. So far, though, no one appears to be listening.

Anastasia Rabin on her small farm in Elfrida, Arizona, where contempo dust storms accept left deposits of embankment-like sand up to two feet deep.

Roberto (Bear) Guerra/High Land News

Tony Davis is the environmental reporter for the Arizona Daily Star and a longtime contributor to High State News . Follow @tonydavis987

Debbie Weingarten is a freelance writer. Follow @cactuswrenwrite

Electronic mail High Land News at [email protected] or submit a letter of the alphabet to the editor.

This coverage was supported by contributors to the Loftier Country News Research Fund and by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Note: This story was updated to right LauralynnCornelsen's name.

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Source: https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.8/agriculture-a-mega-dairy-is-transforming-arizonas-aquifer-and-farming-lifestyles