Messing with Maps: Factory Farm Edition

Plus: The expensive West

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭 + 📈 Data Dump 📊

My ice cream and cheese habit just keeps taking the hits.

Food and Water Watch just released the 2024 edition of its Factory Farm Nation report and it is, well, full of manure — in a sort of literal sense, that is. The report, which covers dairy, beef, chicken, and pork, found that small-scale family farms continue to get gobbled up by corporate, industrial-scale ones that guzzle massive volumes of water and produce huge amounts of manure and other waste. 

And while that’s true with all types of factory farms, the dairy industry has industrialized faster than other agricultural sectors, according to the report. California has lost half of its small-scale dairy farms since 2017, but the number of milk cows has grown, with an average of 2,300 head crammed into each mega-dairy. The factory farms tend to be concentrated in low-income rural areas with a high percentage of people of color, meaning they’re the ones who are bearing the brunt of these factories’ impacts. 

One might expect that scaling up operations like this would bring down meat and dairy prices. It doesn’t. Beef prices have shot up significantly over the past two decades as consolidation has given a small handful of meatpackers the power to set prices. Milk and egg prices fluctuate more, and don’t follow the same, clear-cut trend lines as beef, but are also near all-time highs.

The industrialization of agriculture also affects the character of the landscape and culture of the rural West. As small-scale dairy farms and ranches are gobbled up and displaced by milk and beef factories, the old farms are likely to be taken over by residential development. While a row of houses may use less water than an alfalfa field, it’s also less pleasing to the senses and the soul than a row of hay bales lined up and casting long shadows on a midsummer’s eve.

Luckily, this problem has solutions. Policymakers can stand up to the corporations and stop subsidizing industrial-scale agriculture, while crafting policies that encourage and incentivize small-scale farming. They can support nonprofits that organize farmers markets and otherwise help farmers market their products. They can support small-scale meat processing plants like Sunnyside Meats outside of Durango, Colorado, which has saved local ranchers from hauling cattle long distances for processing. And the consumers can seek out locally produced, small-scale meat and dairy and produce.

Now for the maps and a few alarming data points, all from the report:

The maps below follow this legend.

The Midwest is pretty much blanketed with factory farms, but the West has its share, too, concentrated in a handful of counties across the region. Most of the Western factory farms house dairy or beef cattle, but there are also a fair number of chicken-egg factories (some 464,000 layers in Montrose County, Colorado). Beaver County, Utah, was home to several giant hog farms as of 2022, but Smithfield began pulling out of the area that year, and has continued to cut contracts there, throwing the county’s pork industry and biggest employer into a freefall.

As of 2022 …

• Beaver County, Utah, had 16 factory farms that housed 46,991 animal units, most of which were hogs grown for Smithfield. They produced 1.38 billion pounds of manure. For the last couple of years the pork processor has been canceling contracts and pulling out of the county, throwing the hog-producing economy for a loop.

• Weld County, Colorado, was home to 60 factory farms housing 359,625 animal units — mostly beef and dairy cattle — that cranked out 10.17 billion pounds of manure. It has nearly 90 animals per square mile, which is why it kinda stinks up there.

• Jerome County, Idaho, had 125,946 animal units (a whopping 254 animals per square-mile) in 25 factory farms that pooped some 4.6 billion pounds of manure.

• Tulare County, California’s 663,200 animal units on 181 factory farms produced 20.2 billion pounds of manure.

Eastern New Mexico, California’s Central Valley, central Arizona, southern Idaho, and parts of western Oregon are the industrial dairy centers of the West.

• I’ve written here before about the vast volumes of water milk cows consume via alfalfa grown in the Colorado River Basin. It’s a lot. But that’s not all: Milk cows also drink a lot of water and use it for washing, too. The Food and Water Watch report estimates California mega-dairies together use about 152 million gallons of water each day for watering and washing. And the dairies in that state, as well as in Arizona and New Mexico, are in water-stressed areas.

• The 102,000 milk cows on Maricopa County, Arizona’s factory farms kick out 4.2 billion pounds of manure each year.

• Eastern New Mexico has become an industrial dairy hot spot in recent decades and is now home to about 241,000 milk cows.

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The Environmental Protection Agency released its water quality indicators mapping tool recently, and I figured it might just pair nicely with the factory farms report. It allows users to select a pollutant and a time frame, and the map color codes the water monitoring stations according to the level of “concern” for that pollutant. You can then click on a specific site to get actual concentrations of the pollutant and a few other details.

At first I thought: Holy cow, this means we can get a full water quality profile for just about any stream segment in the nation! But alas, it’s not quite that comprehensive. It only covers phosphorous, nitrogen, e. coli, enterococcus, and fecal coliform.

Still, that’s interesting in the context of the factory farms because manure and agricultural runoff can be a source of these pollutants. I thought: Perhaps the factory farm hotspots would align with the water quality areas of high concern. Perhaps, but also, not really. Yes, there are some areas of concern near factory farms, but there are just as many where there are no factory farms. Also, there are broad swaths of land that don’t have any water quality monitors, apparently, so there’s no way of knowing whether there’s correlation.

It’s still a useful tool, though, especially if you’re considering going swimming in a local stream and want to know whether there’s a bunch of e. coli in the water. Check it out here.

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🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

A little over a year ago, The Atlantic published an article titled, “The Anti-California: How Montana performed a housing miracle.” The premise was that the state’s Republican legislature and governor had loosened a bunch of land-use regulations, which had made it easier to build more housing, which would then bring down home prices — you know, the whole supply-demand thing. The article got a lot of pushback, including from me, because housing — especially in desirable amenities economies in the Western U.S. — does not follow simple rules of supply and demand, so the effort wasn’t likely to be very effective.

So how’s that “miracle” working out a year later? Well, a National Association of Realtors report found that the least affordable housing in the nation was in … Montana! Whoops. So much for that miracle. The least affordable states (meaning the home prices are too high for incomes) are all in the West. And while California has fairly strict land-use rules, Idaho is generally quite a bit more lax.

The report has some interesting interactive graphics showing how many of the state’s real estate listings are within reach of different income categories. They look like this:

It just gets worse. The Lending Tree, an online mortgage provider, recently put out a report on the nation’s most expensive micropolitan housing markets, which have a population between 10,000 and 50,000. And guess what? Western communities topped the list: In fact, 16 of the top 20 most expensive were in Western states.

The Martha’s Vineyard area was deemed the most expensive, but when I cross-checked their numbers against Redfin’s data, I found that the median sales price in Jackson, Wyoming, is far higher. Whether that’s because they used old data or because they use a different metric to determine home value is not clear. Here’s their top 10:

It might even look worse for the West if the parameters were stretched a bit: Aspen, Telluride, Park City, and Crested Butte are all below 10,000 in population, so aren’t included, and the Durango, Bend, and Truckee metro areas are all greater than 50,000 in population (keep in mind that this is the metro area, not the city itself, so can include a lot of the surrounding area. Durango’s population, for example, is only about 19,000).

The long and short of it? The West’s housing affordability crisis continues.