This morning on NPR there was a story about Saudi Dairy farms.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105381728 These  make the American CAFO seem like a quaint family farm. Prince Abdullah Bin Feisal (son of King Feisal) went to California in the 70s, and saw some of their biggest dairy operations and came back to establish two of them. In the desert. Stocking it with Holsteins from America, they now have buildings that house 1700 cows each, with up to 70,000 dairy cows in one operation.

Now we are talking Saudi Arabia, where there is not a blade of grass–that green stuff that most ruminants evolved to eat. But hey, thats no problem, because no one feeds them grass anymore anyway. We grow soybeans in Brazil (on jungle cleared with indentured workers) and ship it thousands of miles where it is fed to animals mixed with hormones so that they can digest it properly and not get sick from eating it.

grazing...the way life should be

But the much bigger problem is, um, heat. Its gets easily up to 120 degrees Farenheit in the Kingdom.

OK, you say. They must have drunk milk “traditionally” right? So it can’t be fucking crazy to have a dairy operation there.

Sure, but “traditionally” the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsular were tribal, nomadic herdsmen. With the exception of course of  a couple of cities like Medina and Mecca.  Their herds were mostly sheep and goats, bred over millenia to handle sparse grazing and intense heat, the herdsmen and their associates using the animals to generate nutrition from the desert for them, and they, in the great circle of life, ate them. This all made perfect sense, on a sustainable, small scale, with creatures evolved to their habitat.

Yeah. This beats an air-conditioned factory.

Apart from importing cows from the US, they get them these days from Australia, and they are shipped, thousands at a time, on giant freighters equipped with massive vents, de-salination plants, and an army of handlers. These poor cows, admittedly who were not brought up in a green field, but probably within sight of grass, have to endure 2 weeks at sea, then are consigned to an air conditioned building in the desert for the rest of their (thankfully) brief life.

These buildings manufacture rain. That’s right, to cool the cows it has to rain a fine mist pretty much all day long. Then the cows must drink. Then they must be kept scrupulously clean to avoid contaminiation and disease. This means 30 gallons of water a day per cow. For 38000 cows. You do the math. Actually I’ll do it for you: its one million, one hundred and forty thousand gallons. Every day. 

The water comes from an acquifer. One has already run dry since the plant’s inception. They have drilled another, one mile deep.

Clearly the einvironmental impact of this sort of thing is staggering. In fact it is insane on so many levels it is difficult to know where to start. Does the phrase “unsustainable” come to mind? Not only are the cows kept in a factory, but the scale of this thing is the most enormous drain of resources imaginable. 

these swiss cows don't know how good they've got it

What’s the alternative, you might ask? They have to feed their people.

Well, this gets into Michael Pollan’s crusade, the re-imagining of agriculture. Clearly the whole system we have built is…what’s the word? unsustainable? Yes, that’s it. We need to work our way back –or forward, really–to a new paradigm, one in which the mega facilities are dismantled, in favor of many smaller operations which service local (sometimes very local) areas.  Gene Lodgson has a vision in the Contrary Farmer, of the Eastern US being re-shaped into a patchwork of small farms, each producing food for a small number of families. This would take us back in many ways to pre-industrial times, but would only be feasable financially and socially with modern technology and financing and marketing, to enable farmers to escape the dirt-farm experience of pre-modern times, and pay them a living wage for their labor. It would also necessitate a new way of perceiveing “farming,” and an evolution of the farmer into something valuable and even attractive.

They would be environmentally friendly, like the old farms used to be before hedges were ripped out, livestock killed and mono-crops planted with government subsidies (Nixon’s solution to the threat of rising food prices, as described in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)  Animals would maintain their own pasture by grazing and fertilizing. And the GRASS would underpin the whole edifice: animals eat grass, we eat animals (see Lodgson’s All Flesh is Grass for more). No more need to have Brazil de-forested to be worked in soy beans by slaves. No need to use all those fossil fuels to transport it to other places.

Yes, this is a big deal, and one that probably will never come to pass, even though the urgency for world-wide reform seems to be growing under twin pressures of population growth and environmental collapse. China is instituting a centralized poultry processing facilities, because the risk of having fowl in densely populated areas is just too high. Argentina, apparently, once the shining light of sustainable beef, is looking to Iowa and beginning to copy our (CAFO)practices out of bottom line considerations. Didn’t they get the memo? Meanwhile, Middle Eastern states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as the US, are buying vast tracts of land in places like Ethiopia, Sudan and China, to grow food,  all places where, as the NPR reporter noted this morning, many of their own people can’t find enough to eat.

Here’s a YouTube piece of Almarai in Saudi Arabia.Its a company promo. Their tone is quite proud.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JAy-fmBqhQ

And this one is about cow transport to the Middle East from Australia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-epz3DTAG3Q