The Ukiah Brewing Company & Restaurant does cook up vegetarian and even vegan lunch and dinner plates, including a veggie burger on a scrumptious, fresh-baked sourdough bun, which I ate on a rainy Saturday visit. But the menu also offers patty melts, corned beef, and Flemish pot roast, meals that appeal to a crowd less likely to be spotted in the aisles of health food stores and organic farmers markets.

“Most people want cheap, fast food. They don’t care about the quality, or if it was grown here,” says co-owner Els Cooperrider. “It doesn’t say ‘organic’ in the windows because people equate organic with tofu and sprouts, not fish and chips and beer.”

Cooperrider opened the brew pub with her son Bret in May 2000 after three years of planning and filling out scores of pages of regulatory forms needed to secure local, state, and federal certification. “The idea came from Bret, a brewer for ten years,” she says. “He wanted to start his own brewery. He called up and asked, how about moving to Colorado to start a brewery? We said we’d help out, but he would have to come out here because we’re not leaving Mendocino.”

Cooperrider has been very active in local food politics and is known as “Mother H” for her work in support of the 2004 Mendocino County measure that bans growing genetically modified crops throughout the county. A biologist by training, she organized for GMO-free Mendocino and held meetings on the second floor balcony at the brew pub. She also helped cofound Mendocino Renegade, a countywide organic certifier, but she stepped down to avoid conflict of interest while seeking certification for the restaurant.

On the corner of South State and Perkins streets in downtown Ukiah, the restaurant is housed in an 1875 mercantile building that has been everything from a Greyhound bus station to a wedding dress emporium. The dining room is large and open, with a sustainably harvested tan oak wood floor and high red brick walls. The scratched, dark, wood tables and chairs came from a Disney World sale in Florida, and the 1600-pound bar is the original from the backroom watering hole of the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Bret Cooperrider had heard tales about this bar for over a year when a man walked in off the street and said he had an old bar stored in his barn that he wanted to sell.

The feel inside is warm and neighborly, like a pub rather than a novelty restaurant. In fact, there is scant evidence on display of the regulatory hoops, the higher costs, or the politics behind organic certification. Only the menu boasts that the diner is seated in “The Organic Brewpub, serving only certified organic ingredients and wild (never farmed) fish.”

The menu carries the Mendocino Renegade and California Certified Organic Farmers certification labels, but not the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) certified organic label. “I don’t like the USDA label,” explains Cooperrider. “It is totally susceptible to political pressure and lobby groups.”

Organics is the fastest growing market in produce and processed foods, and big companies want in on the political cachet of the USDA label. Companies like Kraft, Cargill, Tyson, and Coca Cola are buying up small organic companies to cash in on consumers’ trust in the concept. As they buy in, the very companies that the organics movement arose to fight are muscling the federal government to weaken standards.

Since there are no standards for restaurant certification, Cooperrider had to provide certification for every ingredient in the restaurant, from the salt and pepper to the beef and salad greens. Hence the 160 pages of forms. “Nobody had ever done it before,” she says. “We had to treat everything we serve as a processed product, so we had to present certificates of all ingredients. The costs are higher. Others pay $1 for a pack of pepper, we pay $9; a conventional chicken breast goes for $1.50, while we pay $6 for organic.”

The pub broke even in 2005, and Cooperrider hopes that 2006 will be the first year of profit. “People told us, ‘You know, you’re not gonna make it, you’re too idealistic,’ but somebody has to break new ground,” she says. “Our goal is to be small and local. We have turned down every offer to help us create a chain. We’re simply not interested.”

State Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) deleted the entire text of a bill to reduce air pollution in the San Joaquin Valley, SB1056, and replaced it with a draft law that would deny cities and counties the ability to regulate genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Both parties use this “gut-and-amend” tactic to get contentious issues up for votes without having to face organized opposition. An amended bill can be voted on even though the new language has not been made public.

Florez’s surprise attack, quickly labeled the “Monsanto Law,” was an end-run around Mendocino, Trinity, and Marin counties, where voters passed bans on GMO seeds in 2004, and Sonoma County, where voters will decide on a ban this November.

Gut-and-amends are often outrageous, but Florez’s attempt was spectacular. As word spread through the Capitol halls, enraged lobbyists came speed-walking to the meeting.

Two days earlier, Assembly members Juan Arambula (D-Fresno) and Simon Salinas (D-Salinas) gutted a bill on seed label requirements, amending it to prevent cities and counties from banning GMOs. They were scheduled to present the bill, AB1508, at the Senate Committee on Agriculture the following day. Their amendments had been posted to the Internet, and environmentalists, small farm groups, and county and city officials had rallied to oppose the bill. Arambula and Salinas pulled it from the committee hearing at the last minute.

Less than 24 hours later, Senator Florez gutted his air quality bill, amending it with the same language Arambula and Salinas used. Florez didn’t post his changes on the Internet, but simply presented them at the hearing.

It’s amazing that state legislators don’t get sued for whiplash.

Sacramento lobbyist Pete Price says the fireworks are less important than the issue. “People outside of the process portray it as a scandalous, tricky thing, but it’s really not. It’s just part of the process,” says Price. “I wouldn’t get too troubled about that, but you should be troubled by the content of the bill.”

Becky Tarbotton, campaign coordinator for Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, says the double-whammy is a premeditated attack on local democracy aimed at preempting the upcoming Sonoma County vote.

At the meeting, Florez, flanked by representatives of the California Seed Association and the California Association of Winegrape Growers, told the committee that it would be “disastrous if every county had their own definition of the rules for hauling and planting seeds.” This is an odd statement coming from Florez, whose SB 926 seeks to allow county jurisdictions to ban the dumping of human waste, or “sludge,” mostly from Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties.

Florez says if the legislature does not support SB926, he’ll take it straight to a countywide initiative—unless Los Angeles can gut-and-amend a bill to strip counties of the right to ban sludge first.

At the hearing, Pete Price, representing the Community League of Conservation Voters and the Community Alliance for Family Farmers, pointed out the hypocrisy of trying to eliminate the ability of counties to ban GMOs while pushing for a county ban on sludge. Florez countered that environmentalists were hypocritical for not supporting his sludge ban.

Actually, Florez’s sludge bill may be the first time that the Sierra Club, the Western Growers Association, and the City of Bakersfield have all supported the same law. Big agriculture lobby groups support both bills: they don’t want sludge in their soil, and they don’t want bans on their GE seeds.

Barbara Mathews (D-Tracy), chair of the Assembly Committee on Agriculture, held the bill from a vote. She said the committee must hold a special hearing on the bill, pointing to the people who had dashed into the hearing room to oppose it.

The special hearing for Florez’s Monsanto Law was never scheduled. On September 2, he again amended the bill— posting the amendments online this time—so that nursery stock and seeds would be regulated solely by the state. The newly amended bill did not make it to a floor vote, thus will be taken up again when the legislature reconvenes in January.

So after all the hocus-pocus with bill language, Florez’s bill will have to go through the lengthy process of committee hearings and public testimony next year. Get ready.

So when Pearson’s 82-year old father complained on a dry August day in 2004 that the road out to the shooting range was flooded, Pearson decided to check it out.

Pearson and his father drove about 17 miles south to the Buttonwillow State Ecological Reserve to find the state parkland submerged thigh-high in liquid cow manure. Across the road, the Goyenetche Dairy, with over 7,000 cows packed into open-air corrals, had run a drainpipe into a culvert that leads onto the ecological reserve. The dairy flooded 16 acres of the reserve with its wastewater before state inspectors—responding to a call from Pearson—arrived on the scene a few days later. By that time, the fetid water was teeming with mosquitoes. The Goyenetche dairy now faces over $250,000 in fines and fees for its illegal dumping.

The San Joaquin Valley—the birthplace of industrial agriculture—is now the largest dairy region in the world, with 2.5 million cows shoehorned onto small lots between irrigated orchards and row crops. Most of these cows are newcomers to the valley, arriving by the thousands from the industrial dairies of the Chino Basin in the flatlands of San Bernardino County, southeast of Los Angeles.

Albert Goyenetche is no stranger to fines. His dairy in Chino was forced to pay $9,000 to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 for routing its wastewater to nearby public land, shortly after the local water board issued mandatory orders that dairies manage their wastewater, mostly by paying to truck it out of the area.

With Southern California’s insatiable development crowding in on all sides of the Chino Basin, then the largest and most concentrated dairy region in the world, the water board came under pressure in the ’90s to stop the salts and nitrates leaching from dairy wastewater into the aquifer that provides drinking water to millions of people in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties. The water board adopted its “cease and desist order” on August 20, 1999.

Goyenetche found a very lucrative way to comply with the new rules. He sold out. Goyenetche and hundreds like him sold their land in San Bernardino County to housing developers and moved to the San Joaquin Valley, vastly expanding the size of their dairies in the process. “They did what a lot of polluting industries do: they raced to the bottom, moving to the land of least regulation,” says Brent Newell, an attorney for the San Francisco-based Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment who has represented groups fighting the influx of dairies. “Kern is close to LA. They could sell their land to developers in San Bernardino for $100,000 an acre and then buy into Kern for $3,500 an acre.”

Goyenetche left Chino, buying plots near Wasco and McFarland, and was soon back to business. In 2001, his Kern County dairies were cited for applying too much wastewater to their surrounding crop fields—leading to both air and water pollution—and were found exceeding the number of cows allowed on the property by nearly 2,000 cows.

By 1997 Kern County was home to 39 dairies with about 80,000 cows, comprising both milk cows and support stock. That number stepped up to 55 dairies with about 140,000 cows by 2002. In the past three years, the numbers did not step up, they shot up. “There are 58 existing dairies in Kern County, with 297,000 cows,” says Ted James, director of the county planning department. Then he points to a county map filled with clusters of orange and blue dots: “There are currently proposals for 19 more dairies totaling 173,000 cows,” most poised just beyond city limits where bulldozers eat more crop land than any beetle.

Some of the dairies that relocated from Chino to Kern paid for the move with state money earmarked for reducing air pollution. The Pollution Control Financing Authority gave out $65.8 million in low-interest, tax-exempt loans to 18 dairies from 2001 until 2004, until a Los Angeles Times expose led state regulators to suspend the funding. Each dairy also received a $250,000 grant to cover the administrative costs of applying for the loans.

James Borba received $8 million from the state fund to relocate to Kern and expand his dairy operation to 14,000 cows. Across the street, his cousin George Borba constructed his 14,000-cow dairy with $3.8 million from the state. State Treasurer Phil Angelides told the Times that the pollution control funds went to expanding mega-dairies due to a “staff error.”

The San Joaquin Valley has now surpassed Southern California as the largest dairy region in the world. While the total number of dairies in the nation has plummeted, the total number of cows in California has jumped from 1.6 million to over 2.5 million in just the last three years, and between Kern and Tulare, 600,000 more cows are in the proposal stage.

And with the cows—at least in these numbers—come a laundry-list of potential environmental hazards and nuisances. Nitrates and salts leach from cow manure to degrade the land and contaminate the groundwater. Cows belch smog-forming gases during the rumination process and toxic ammonia rises into the air from manure lagoons. Millions of pounds of manure also attract flies and mosquitoes, escalating the danger of West Nile virus. And, to state the obvious, thousands of cows producing millions of pounds of poop tend to smell really bad.

The San Joaquin Valley already has the worst air quality in the country. Levels of air pollution most often associated with the dense traffic and industrial smokestacks of the nation’s largest cities hover over the fields of the nation’s largest agribusinesses. The pollution in the valley consists of smog and particulate matter, those incredibly fine particles of dust, animal waste, exhaust, smoke, and toxic chemicals that lodge deep within the lungs of those who breathe it.

“Now we’re more polluted than Los Angeles,” Pearson tells me with a wry lift of his eyebrows. “Well, guess what happened? What’s the difference between when LA was the most polluted and we were second?” He pauses to let the question hang. “The dairies moved out of there to here, and now they’re number two.”

Dairies emit two main types of contaminants into the air: volatile organic compounds—such as methane, methanol, and acetic acid—and ammonia. The volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, react with oxides of nitrogen—in the valley, mostly produced by cars, trucks, and irrigation pumps—to form smog. Ammonia contributes to both smog and particulate matter contamination.

Agriculture in California was exempt from local air quality regulation until 2004, when a new state law lifted the exemption and required local air districts to create a definition for “large confined animal facility” and a plan for dairies to reduce “to the extent feasible, emissions of air contaminants from the facility.”

On August 1, 2005, the regional air district determined that San Joaquin Valley dairies emit 19.3 pounds of VOC gases per cow a year. The finding grabbed headlines across the country—cows pollute more than cars! Dairy owners say this is absurd. One suggests an experiment: lock a person in a closed room with a running car and another in a closed room with three cows, and see who comes out alive in the morning. While the proposed experiment confuses toxic and smog-forming gases, there is an interesting point: the San Joaquin Valley is a confined air basin; the pollution hanging in the air has nowhere to go. It is something of a closed room, if a very large one.

Supporters of the big dairies say that the district’s science is flawed. J.P. Cativiela, spokesman for the dairy advocacy group Community Alliance for Responsible Environmental Stewardship, or CARES, says he supports regulation, but done correctly. “Our big criticism with the state regulatory structure is that rather than doing the hard work [to find the amount of VOCs emitted by dairy cows] initially the state makes a guess, and based on that guess we were determined the number one source of VOCs in the valley.”

Frank Mitloehner, the UC Davis scientist on whose work the district based much of its report, thinks that VOCs are a red herring. “I don’t know if it makes sense to regulate these types of gases,” he says pointing out that most VOCs come from biogenic sources like oak trees. Even if we could cut VOC emissions generated from human activity in half, he says, we would not make a dent in the ozone.

“VOCs are very, very different in nature,” Mitloehner says. Certain VOCs are more reactive than others when binding with nitrogen oxide to form smog, and those found in dairies are less reactive than others. “They are just as different as beer and vodka with respect to their potential of giving you a buzz. Right now they are all being treated alike by the regulatory agencies, and I don’t think that should be the case.” But, he adds, “Don’t get me wrong: dairies definitely have an environmental impact, and there are certain compounds we should look at like reactive nitrogen, for example, going into ammonia.” The dairy industry is the largest source of ammonia in the valley.

The VOCs released by bacteria in a cow’s rumen are only a portion of the gases found on a mega-dairy. Cow feed, or silage, releases ethanol, also listed as a VOC. The manure lagoons release nitrogen and lesser amounts of VOCs. But the largest source of air pollution besides cows belching all day may be the application of dairy wastewater to crops and fallowed land.

The dairy industry likes to call the wastewater—cow manure and urine collected in a lagoon for days or weeks on end—their “product.” How they deal with this “product” is a sensitive issue. If improperly stored in a lagoon or dumped on uncultivated land, it can leach into the underlying aquifer, exactly what happened throughout the Chino Basin. To get around this, state regulators imposed rules forcing dairies to either pay to have the wastewater dumped or to apply it to crops. The idea is that crops—mostly alfalfa, corn, and other crops used in silage—will absorb the nitrogen from the manure, thus protecting the groundwater. This only works if the crops are not flooded with more manure than they can use—and if they are not given fertilizers in addition. When crops receive too much manure, the bacteria end up releasing most of the nitrogen into the air, just as if the “product” had stayed in a lagoon.

“They are using our air as a wastebasket,” says Tom Frantz, a Shafter high school math teacher and community activist who lives a few miles from both new and proposed Kern County dairies. “They were told by advisors how best to release gases into the air to avoid nitrate soil contamination, which is regulated. That was their strategy—pollute the air!”

Larry Pearson says that one of the big concerns in his community is the use of hormones and antibiotics on dairy cows. “We know that if the cow’s body doesn’t use them, they are simply passed on,” he says. “Well, that stuff doesn’t just break down; it goes down into the water. Every cow gets a shot a week, I’m sure, and they get it whether they need it or not. What happens when that stuff hits our water?”

In 2002, 17-year-old Ashley Mulroy demonstrated that antibiotics were present in the Ohio River. Her discovery won her an international science prize and grabbed headlines across the country. In 2004, scientists from Colorado State University found antibiotics used in the cattle industry in streams and nearby soils. Ken Carlson, an associate professor of civil engineering who worked on the study, said at the time that finding the antibiotics in the water supply raises major concerns: the dangers of the substances themselves and their potential for contributing to the development of resistant bacteria.

In interviews with workers on the dairies (see “Steady As It Goes,” page 16) I learned that Pearson’s estimate of weekly shots is too conservative. Auturo Torres from Michoacan has worked on a dairy in Kern County the past two years, giving antibiotics shots. He gives a shot every day—to every cow.

The landscape of the industrial dairy is stark and minimal. The open-air corrals are shaded with long, narrow tin roofs where mounted fans angle downward, producing a warm breeze in the 100-degree August heat. At the borders of the corral, the cows line up, wedging their heads through metal bars to graze on feed spread across the pavement just beyond the bars. The heavy odor of silage fermentation and manure hangs in the air. As the animals eat, their bodies are cooled by misters. Flies blacken the bars, keeping back from the thin veils of water. Beyond the roofs’ shade, mounds of dirt and dried manure bake in the sun. Thousands of cows fan out over the mounds, standing and lying in clumps, taking in the prospects of an expanse where nothing grows.

From a distance, most of the mega-dairies in the San Joaquin Valley look exactly alike. The line of the corral’s roof, the arrow-straight line of heads bending through bars, the surrounding fields of irrigated crops; the manure lagoon adjacent to the corrals; the solid brick milking facility at the center of the operation with deep tinted windows and a slanted roof; the lone palatial house set in the middle of a startlingly green mowed lawn.

Up close the sights vary considerably. At some the manure lagoons are so putrid they appear to boil. Several have piles of dead cows oozing and rotting by the side of the road. Some have continually raked mounds, others have mounds covered with wet manure and urine. You can tell how clean an operation you’re approaching by the stench.

When I mention to Cativiela from CARES that I’m going to visit a few Kern County dairies, he tells me: “Don’t get yourself shot.” He is joking, of course, but for the joke to work—especially coming from a dairy advocate—it has to play off a shared assumption, which in this case is that the new mega-dairies are not the most welcoming of places.

Western Sky Dairy on Old River Road, 17 miles south of Bakersfield, is the most agreeable I’ve seen yet. The driveway to the main barn is lined with green grass, and yellow and orange flowers. The house is several grades less grandiose than others I have observed, though it would still be a three-million-dollar home within 25 miles of the California coastline.

The front door of the two-story red brick milking facility opens into a high-ceilinged room where a man is spraying down the concrete floor. To the right and left huge steel tanks tower up to the ceiling. Past the tanks, through an open doorway, the room expands into a huge enclosed milking facility. The hum of machinery sounds like a construction site. The cows are lined up, each locked in a space not much bigger than her body. In front of every space is a hose and nozzle that, to the city eye, looks like what you find at a gas pump. Outside, behind the milking facility, two corrals stretch for about 20 yards back and 50 yards to the right and left, with cows lined up across the whole area.

Nothing about the scene could be described as pastoral, yet there is nothing horrifying either. It is highly mechanized, the milking facility looks like a spaceship, and the whole operation seems pretty brutal for the animals. But at least it’s clean. Uniformed workers constantly hose down, spray off, rake, and sweep. And for a compact plot of land with about 8,000 cows on it, the stench is not that bad.

Cal De Jager is a tall man with short blond hair and weather-worn eyes. He has been a dairyman for fifteen years, moving from Chino to Kern County in 2002 after spending a year and a half constructing the dairy here. His father-in-law bought the land in 1988 and leased it to farmers, who still grow much of the dairy’s feed. Jager milks about 4,500 cows, filling six milk trucks a day. (For every milk cow, a mega-dairy usually has one support cow, so a dairy that milks 4,000 cows will contain about 8,000 cows . Numbers mentioned in county and state cow counts are milk and support stock.)

“We think of it as a family farm; it is run that way,” Jager says, leaning back in his small, unassuming office, its walls lined with photos of his children. “I live in the house out front, and I think it’s a fine place to raise kids.”

When I ask about the cow/car pollution comparison, Jager says he doesn’t think it is true, but he adds, “The pollution thing is our biggest challenge. Air quality is a very difficult thing to determine, to say how much pollution we generate. Do we contribute that much? I don’t think so, but I don’t have any science.”

I ask Jager how he deals with the mass amounts of manure his cows generate, all 17 pounds a day per cow. “We reuse manure for bedding material,” he tells me. “We dry it out to keep it a soft place for cows to lie. If it’s dry manure, it’s good bedding material.” This sounds so innocent that it takes a second before it translates: the cows lie and sleep in their own feces. Jager describes other applications, such as spreading lagoon water over the crops he’ll later feed to his cows: “We like to think of it as a kind of product. It will enhance the land.”

Jager likes what he does. He employs 37 people year-round, and he offers tours to local schools. “Our goal is to be a positive thing for the community, to be a positive thing for Kern County,” he says. “We try to make it look nice, clean and neat. I don’t want a mess in my backyard.” Jager is a kind of reverse NIMBY: in his backyard he wants the type of operation that many San Joaquin Valley residents don’t want within miles of theirs.

Pearson and his fellow Wasco city councilmember Danny Espitia climb into Pearson’s truck for a tour of the new and proposed mega-dairies surrounding Wasco and nearby Shafter. It is about 6:30 in the evening, and the late afternoon light cuts through the valley’s curtain of smog, making us squint. In the evenings, as it cools off, the cows move around, strutting their stuff in the dirt and dried manure, lifting blankets of dust into the air. Espitia points out the window. “The cows like to play in the evening,” he says. “Boy, do they raise a mess.”

Pearson and Espitia worked together in 2004 to pass a Wasco city resolution, Measure U, calling for a 10-mile “buffer zone” between dairies and Wasco city limits. The resolution met with opposition from the dairy lobby and Kern County supervisor Raymond Watson, but passed on the November ballot in Wasco with a stunning 82 percent of the vote.

Espitia says that while county supervisors did not support the Wasco initiative, they have been more receptive to metropolitan Bakersfield. “The amazing thing is that when Bakersfield wanted a no-dairy zone,” he snaps his fingers, “they had it like that. But the houses out there where the dairy buffer zone is, those houses are tremendous. Those houses are castles.” The point? Wealthier people who don’t want to smell cow poop while they’re out barbequing get no-dairy zones via the county’s general plan, while poorer rural areas don’t.

Ted James, Kern County’s planning director, explains that there is no “buffer zone” per se for Bakersfield, but that the county “added a policy” to the general plan discouraging incoming dairies in the metropolitan area. “So if I got a proposal I wouldn’t be able to approve it,” James says.

Like most of the valley, Bakersfield is growing at break-neck speed. No edge of town has been neglected by the developer’s blade. In discussing potential conflicts between expanding Bakersfield and the continuing influx of large dairies, James makes an acute observation: “Dairies like to locate in the path of urbanization.” When the cities grow close and push for tougher regulation, dairies can sell their land to housing developers. The substantial profits made on land sales finance not only a dairy’s move, but also its expansion.

Espitia makes the same observation, and that’s what worries him. “A lot of these dairies coming from Chino and that area knew that their land was going to be valuable in Chino, purchased all this land up here, and now they want to use it. But then what happens when they decide to leave and all the contaminants are left to us? It reminds me of the movie Independence Day where all these aliens move from planet to planet taking everyone’s resources away.”

Pearson turns south on Magnolia off Highway 46 and drives by the Vemeer and Goehart Dairy, a sprawling operation of over 5,000 cows, built before the county required permits. “This is the guy who always piles his dead cows by the road,” Pearson says. He lowers the windows as we approach, and the odor wafts in. We round the corner and there, across the street from the industrial rows of irrigated almond trees, lies a stack of rotting cows.

Pearson turns around and heads east on Burbank toward the Vanderham Dairy, two miles outside of Shafter. Vanderham’s proposed dairy has been the subject of lawsuits and resolutions and inspired Wasco’s successful initiative, Measure U, in 2004. “I was driving by two weeks ago and I thought, oh my gosh, they put up a cement batching plant to build the dairy,” Pearson says as he pulls over to the flat dusty shoulder. “They don’t have an air permit! And they’re building it, and no one’s stopped them, no one’s shut them down yet.” He points to the construction equipment in the cleared area back from the road. Mega-dairy construction takes a couple years and a lot of cement, so owners often put up batching plants to make their own—but they still must jump through the permitting hoops.

“That is not how we do business,” he says. “Every cement company within city limits in the state of California has to have an air permit. And they have to have water and they have to catch the dust. These guys are out here doing what they want. They didn’t get the air permit that’s required to have that cement batching facility. They should be sprinkling down those areas, but there’s no water there. The pumps aren’t in and they don’t have the ability to do those things. So it goes right into the air. They don’t care.”

On September 20th, the Shafter-based Association of Irritated Residents, or AIR, filed a sixty-day notice of intent to sue the Vanderham Dairy for violation of the Clean Air Act. AIR alleges that the Vanderham Dairy does not have an air permit to operate the cement plant. “Our lungs are not subsidies for the dairy industry,” says AIR president and teacher Tom Frantz.

I ask if it is possible to have a good 6,000-cow dairy. “It’s too costly for them,” Espitia says, “The dairies don’t want to pay the fees to be in compliance. And who’s going to implement them? There is no enforcement.” Indeed, when one knows the state water board employs seven people to monitor 1,700 dairies in the entire Central Valley, it helps explain the Sacramento Bee’s discovery in December 2004 that Hilmar Cheese had committed at least 4,000 water quality violations over 16 years, all with impunity.

Pearson and Espitia don’t believe all dairies are bad. “The old-time dairies,” Pearson says, “they had 200 cows. It was so different, and it’s not fair to group those dairy guys with these new dairies.”

Advocates like UC Davis’s Mitloehner say that dairies have to expand to keep up with consolidation in the milk market—that it’s grow big or go out of business. But choosing between excess and nothing is a false choice presented by those addicted to excess. There is a limit to how much nitrate can leach into water before it makes people sick. There is a limit to how much dust, gases, and chemicals the air can contain before they root in people’s lungs and kill them.

Ours is a sickness of scale. We come to depend upon conveniences that require the destruction of land, air, and water—the very fundamentals of life. Everyone who drives a car, seeks out the cheapest head of lettuce, or puts cream in their coffee is implicated. But the flip side of our shared complicity is our shared involvement in the solution.

Californians don’t need to choose between allowing big dairies or not. Nor do dairy owners need to choose between expanding to 14,000 cows—as the Borba cousins have done—or going out of business. There is a middle ground, but sadly, it is not to be found in the San Joaquin Valley.

After touring the rows of industrial dairies with their evening plumes rising as if from a tangle of smokestacks, Pearson turns back to Wasco. “All we are is the dump,” he says.

In 2004, just months after the Goyenetche dairy flooded the Ecological Reserve at Buttonwillow, the California Labor Commissioner determined that Goyenetche was denying lunch breaks to workers on 10-hour shifts, leading to a $36,000 settlement. Still, the first thing that dairy workers express is their relief at being employed year round, as opposed to working in the fields on row crops, which require intensive labor for only a few months out of the year. Jorge Orelia* has been working at a dairy for 8 months, after 10 years picking cilantro, carrots, and broccoli in the valley. At the dairy he earns $1,200 a month working from 6 AM to 4 PM, with an hour off for lunch.

Another man, Jaime, is thin and speaks in a low, hushed voice. “In the field it’s hard in the winter when there’s no work,” he says, “but in the dairy there is work all the time.”

The men and women who labor in California’s industrial fields perform among the most dangerous, physically

exhausting, and wretchedly underpaid jobs in the nation. From the annual deaths due to heat exhaustion, and acute vomiting and rashes from pesticide exposure to the long-term effects of breathing the dirtiest air and drinking the dirtiest water in the state, California’s farm laborers—mostly undocumented migrants—are treated like cogs in a vast,

unwatched machine: when they wear out, replace them.

And while industrial dairies provide year-round work, they also adopt the same patterns of exploitation as the row crop industries. Several workers who were not warned, trained, or provided with required safety equipment drowned in manure lagoons after passing out from the gases. And many dairies have followed the old practice of firing injured workers and those who sympathize with union organizers by signing union cards.

In early 2004, Rafael Miranda hurt his back in a fall shortly after a union vote and was fired the next day. After

a year he has been unable to get the company to pay for

X-rays or hospital visits, and he has not been able to work since his accident. His legs cramp and at times go numb. “This got me really depressed,” he says. “I got mad easily.

I couldn’t play with my kids. I started to lose feeling in my hands. Once I was putting air in my son’s bike tire and I couldn’t pinch my fingers together to take the nozzle off the tire. I got so mad that I picked up the bike and threw it and made my kid cry.” Rafael had worked for the Goyenetche Dairy for 9 years.

But some dairies fit Herrera’s description of providing a respectful work environment. Jager’s workers, for example, are all clean and wearing sturdy boots and uniforms. Those I speak with—once they find out I am a reporter and not from a union—say they are content here. It gets muddy in the winter, but they are happy to have work year ’round.

Supporters say the program helps save endangered fish. Environmentalists charge that the program is a water-marketing ploy to pay businesses—with taxpayers’ money—to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Created as a four-year experiment in 2000 by the consortium of state and federal agencies known as CALFED, the Environmental Water Account is supposed to protect fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from being caught and killed in the gargantuan pumps that lift Delta water 244 feet up and into the California Aqueduct. It has not worked out that way.

Fishy figures

“The Environmental Water Account was the most controversial unit of CALFED,” says Michael Jackson, a water law attorney who has represented environmentalists, rural counties, and fishing groups. “Standing alone it is a nightmare of special interest graft.”

Here’s how the program works. When the massive State Water Project pumps near Tracy are killing too many Delta smelt or other threatened fish, the Department of Fish and Game orders the pumps to be slowed down—not stopped—so that the fish can escape their pull. Money—from state and to a much lesser extent federal tax revenues—from the Environmental Water Account is then used to buy water stored somewhere south of the delta.

I asked Jim White, a staff environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Game, if there were any studies on the effectiveness of the Environmental Water Account in protecting fish. “We are continuously monitoring the abundance and distribution of a variety of fish species in the estuary,” White says. “By that measure, considering the fact that the abundance of a number of those species has dropped off in the last few years, if that were our only measure, you’d have to wonder about the results.” Translation: since the Environmental Water Account has been in play more fish have been killed in the delta, and if the purpose of the program is to keep the fish alive, it is not working.

Christina Swanson, a staff scientist with the Bay Institute who has written two reports on the Environmental Water Account, is frustrated by the lack of evidence showing fish benefits. “The agencies have not done what they said they would in terms of collecting and analyzing good information,” she says. “There is no good data supporting the Environmental Water Account giving benefits for fish. There are hypotheses, people saying, ‘Well, I think it works.’ The only thing it has been shown to do is guarantee water supply for south of delta contractors at tremendous cost to the public.”

The Environmental Water Account’s failure can be traced to its early identity crisis. Since the program began in 2000 it has been presented—depending on the audience—as a species protection program or as a “water reliability program” for those thirsting for delta water. Again a translation: “water reliability” means any actions taken to protect threatened species will not result in less water pumped south. Now, with pressure on the state to increase pumping through the South Delta Improvement Program, the Environmental Water Account looks like a publicly funded mitigation plan for even more water to be pulled out of the delta.

Who gets the water?

When the state goes shopping for water, officials keep track of who they buy water from, but they cannot tell you who ends up getting it. This is because the Environmental Water Account uses a water marketing scheme that looks a lot like insider trading, where straight lines between buyers and sellers are a threatened resource. I asked Dean Reynolds of the Department of Water Resources Office of Water Transfers who gets the Environmental Water Account water.

“Water is purchased to make up for curtailments in pumping,” he says, “but then that water becomes part of state water project operations. No one requests Environmental Water Account water. Rather, slowing down the pumps creates debt within the State Water Project. For example, say Kern County Water Agency requests 20,000 acre-feet for a given month, but the project can’t pump that much out of the delta. The water is delivered from San Luis Reservoir. So now there is a debt in San Luis. The Environmental Water Account fills that hole.”

Does this mean that the water is somehow shipped from Bakersfield 200 miles north to the San Luis Reservoir near Gilroy? “The water obviously doesn’t turn around and go the other way,” Reynolds chides. “You can’t turn water around and move it the other direction, well I guess if we reversed the pumps we could, but& What happens is the water ends up getting exchanged. The water is exchanged for other water.”

A curious fact about the Environmental Water Account is that those making the demands for water that the account is meant to fill are the same ones selling the water to the account. In fact, the largest seller to the program south of the delta is none other than the largest privately owned agribusiness in California, Paramount Farming Company.

Privately owned by Los Angeles billionaire Stewart Resnick, Paramount created a paper company in the 1990s through which to buy and sell water. This company, Westside Mutual Water Company, is also the largest single owner—with 48 percent—of a 20,000-acre stretch outside of Bakersfield that overlies a once empty aquifer, formerly owned and developed by the state.

In1996, Paramount helped take over the state land and run its operation as a water bank. Paramount and others pump water into the empty aquifer in years with heavy rainfall and pump it back out again in drier years—the idea behind the state’s development of the area as a drought water bank. Since 2000, Paramount has been profiting from the rain by selling millions of dollars of water to the Environmental Water Account. The first year of the program alone Westside received $8 million in taxpayer funds for water, and the state cannot tell you whose garden hose or coffee mug was filled with that water.

So when the state turns down the pumps to supposedly keep from killing too many fish and then goes shopping south of the delta to make up for the slower water shipments in the California Aqueduct, it seems to be buying water from those who clamor in Sacramento for “water reliability.” This, says Michael Jackson, is essentially taxpayers paying businesses to comply with federal endangered species law. “There will be a day in which environmental laws are enforced again,” Jackson predicts, “and if this mockery that is the Environmental Water Account dies, that day will come a lot faster.” —John Gibler is a policy analyst with Public Citizen.

The plan increases the governor’s power and hands many state responsibilities over to private industry. “State government in California is broken, there’s no question about it,” says UCLA professor Stephanie Pincetl, author of Transforming California. “But is privatizing it the solution? ”

Interim director of the Department of Motor Vehicles Chon Gutierrez picked 275 state employees to put together over 1,200 recommendations, including eliminating 117 boards and commissions ranging from the Commission on the Status of Women to the air and water quality boards. The report boasts that its recommendations will save the state $34 billion yet make government more “customer-friendly.” The Legislative Analyst’s Office later moved the estimate down to between $10 and $15 billion.

While the report is undeniably mammoth, the voices of environmental advocates are nearly absent. “I haven’t heard people say the paper is imbalanced,” says Chris Reynolds, who oversaw its drafting. “I take issue with the characterization of the paper as imbalanced.”

When asked about the lack of consultation with environmentalists, Reynolds says that the CPR team met with about seven or eight environmentalists. “We called Bill Magavern from the Sierra Club and said ‘Can you help us? We want to reach out to the environmental community.’ Bill set up a meeting,” Reynolds reports.

“That is accurate only in the sense that their entire outreach to the environmental community was one phone call to me,” says Magavern, the Sierra Club’s legislative advocate.

Magavern says he received a call from Don Johnson of the CPR staff. “But Don never said ‘We’d like to meet with all the environmental community.’ He said, ‘I’d like to meet with you.’ I took it on my own initiative to invite colleagues. We never claimed to be speaking for the whole range of environmentalists. And the report itself was written in almost utter secrecy, and it is clear that industry lobbyists were consulted much more extensively than we were.”

J.J. Jelincic, a commission member charged with taking public comment, calls the report’s focus on savings misguided. “We asked the wrong question,” he says. “We asked, ‘How do we do things cheaper?’ when we should have asked, ‘What kind of world do we want to leave our kids?’ That’s the debate we should be having.”

The CPR review commission held seven public hearings across the state between mid-August and late-September. The hearings included presentations by CPR staff and several hours of comments by invited speakers. Public comment often was put off until the last hour. Some individuals who had waited for hours to make comments were turned away.

“As commissioners I think our function has been to create the illusion of openness,” says Jelincic. “In many ways our function was to identify those things that would have such high political costs as to be undoable.”

And they did just that. Although the decisions of regional air and water quality boards aren’t to everyone’s liking, most environmentalists believe the boards are the only bodies with local knowledge that conduct meetings in public. “If we lose those regional boards we’d lose the one way the public can impact regulatory decision-making,” says Juliet Lamont, vice-chair of the Sierra Club’s Bay Area Chapter. “We’d be trying to get the attention of a single individual in Sacramento, and that’s the kind of thing that leads to bad environmental decisions.”

The CPR’s proposal to ax California’s regional air and water quality control boards generated such vehement opposition that the commissioners agreed that the governor should back off. Schwarzenegger seems to have heeded their advice: he did not include the two in the list of nearly a hundred “unnecessary boards and commissions” slated for elimination.

The CPR report will still keep water policy wonks up at night. It suggests dissolving the Department of Water Resources and folding its activities into a newly created Department of Infrastructure. The California State Water Project, or SWP as it is known in water-speak, would be contracted out to a quasi-public agency—The State Water Project Contractors Authority—whose most powerful members, the Kern County Water Agency and the Metropolitan Water District, serve Central Valley agribusiness interests.

The contractors who want to manage the SWP make it seem as if they would simply be stepping in to aid the clumsy state bureaucracy in carrying out day-to-day operations. But the language of the CPR report and the State Water Project Contractors Authority grant them authority to make decisions such as “acquiring water and water rights.”

“It’s an ideology of government as management,” says Pincetl. “It’s post-Prop 13 privatization, privatizing assets. Government is not only cast as managerial, it erodes public participation. It really is the privatization of democracy.”

At his State of the State address on January 5, 2005, Schwarzenegger gave a blanket endorsement of the CPR. “A year ago, I told you that I wanted to blow up the boxes. Well, we have lit the fuse.”

“It’s a family event,” quips volunteer Shane Nichols as he collects the jugs. The sky-blue shed, called the water hole, is connected to a 5,000-gallon mobile tank that stores mountain spring water hauled in from sixty miles away. Angelica Martinez—a high school senior who volunteers here with Nichols every Saturday—places the boys’ plastic jugs under a row of spigots and turns on the water. The shed’s thin metal walls reverberate with the sound of water falling into plastic.

The citizens of this farming community, tucked into emerald fields of irrigated alfalfa in the southwestern corner of Tulare County, live in a reverse oasis, dry and thirsty in the midst of green. Their groundwater has high concentrations of arsenic and nitrates, and of three town wells, one is permanently defunct, another has a broken pump, and the third is still under construction. The water hole is Alpaugh’s sole source of safe drinking water. Three times a week volunteers unlock the shed door and help residents fill jugs to take back to their homes.

Arsenic occurs naturally in the alluvial sediment throughout much of the San Joaquin Valley. Among the most toxic substances commonly found in drinking water, it can lead to lung, bladder, and other forms of cancer. The California Environmental Protection Agency recently reset the state’s arsenic standards to four parts per trillion, 2,500 times more stringent than the federal standard of 10 parts per billion—a change to take effect in 2006. But the town well, which residents use for showering and other non-drinking needs, has an arsenic level of 74 parts per million.

Two years ago the long-corroded casing collapsed in the town’s main well. From that time until the spring of 2004, residents survived on water from an irrigation well. When the pump broke on that well, the community had to turn to the well still being built. Luckily by that time they were already filling up their jugs at the water hole.

“Now we’re surviving on a half-constructed well,” says Sandra Meraz, who has been advocating up and down the state to get water to the town. The community of 760 depends on the new well for showers and toilets, but until the well is completed—sealed from contamination and dug deep enough to reduce arsenic levels to state-mandated limits—residents are not supposed to drink its water. “If it stops we’re completely waterless,” Meraz says. “We’ve let school out at noon two days in a row because there was no water.”

“We use bottled water to brush our teeth,” Martinez adds, “but we shower with the tap water. Your skin gets dry, but you get used to it.” Still, when it gets desperately hot, as it does often in Alpaugh, some do drink the tap water.

Alpaugh’s situation is complicated by the bureaucratic structure that governs its water: the community operates within a bureaucratic tangle of three different water agencies. Meraz sits on the board of the Joint Powers Authority, the agency responsible for overseeing the town’s drinking water. The authority advises stubborn or desperate residents to boil their tap water or add 8 drops per gallon of “fresh liquid household bleach.”

“The boiled water order is a coliform bacteria order, but people don’t understand about the arsenic,” Meraz says. “If they boil the water for soup, coffee, or tea they’ll kill the bacteria, but they don’t know they’ll just concentrate the arsenic.”

Land of plenty

“Just don’t mind my truck,” Meraz tells me as I climb in the passenger seat. “It’s my home office.” Meraz, who moved from the Cabezon Reservation to Alpaugh 45 years ago, won the small white pickup in a bingo tournament in 1996 and uses it for a host of community activities such as delivering food donations and taking senior citizens to buy water in Delano. The dash and seat are covered with papers, files, pens and pencils, several inches thick in all directions. We drive through paved and unpaved streets, passing dilapidated trailers and the skeletal remains of mobile homes that eerily resemble jagged ribcages, pale and cracking under the sun.

Ironies abound in this land—although Alpaugh’s Tulare County is the number two ag-producing county in the country, its citizens face such levels of poverty that international famine relief charities like Feed the Children are choosing to start new projects here.

And in the oven-like heat of the San Joaquin Valley, no disparity is more immediate than between those who have water and those who do not. California sends eighty percent of its captured water to agriculture through a daunting collection of dams, canals, pipes, and pumps built to interrupt, hold, and redirect the flow of entire rivers. Yet a few miles from valley aqueducts that carry Sierra snowmelt to irrigate desert fields, small towns and unincorporated communities cannot drink their own water.

Two hundred years ago—a mere blink—the San Joaquin Valley was an expansive seasonal wetland that housed the largest inland body of fresh water in the western United States. Tulare Lake, once fed by the rivers running down from the central Sierra Nevada and covering nearly 800 square miles, now exists only in the ink of history texts. The herds of elk and antelope that once darkened the horizon have long been replaced by tractors and mechanical harvesters.

The valley’s metamorphosis from wetlands to agricultural semi-desert owes its transformation to the politics of profit. From the US takeover of the Spanish land grants in 1848 to the endemic abuse of federal flood policy, to the special grants to railroad corporations, land speculation fueled California’s carving up of millions of its best acres into vast private estates. With a firm control over land, speculators developed irrigation systems and policies explicitly designed to protect their land holdings and to thwart small family farms.

The creation of irrigation districts and later, water agencies as quasi-public authorities, cemented a system of landowner favoritism. These districts and agencies can issue bonds and levy taxes to fund irrigation projects. In most cases, only landowners can sit on the boards of directors and vote on policy issues affecting the district. Landowners benefited themselves while billing a broad base of taxpayers for the costs.

Early irrigation projects used pumps to pull water from the underlying aquifers. The pace of agricultural expansion in the first decades of the 20th century over-drafted these aquifers, causing the valley floor to sink as much as thirty feet in some areas. Aware that the groundwater resources would not fuel the dizzying rate of growth they desired, the area’s largest landowners—such as Southern Pacific Railroad and the Kern County Land Company—lobbied state and federal officials to fund projects to dam rivers deep within the northern and central Sierra Nevada and deliver water to their lands. The two projects that sprouted from these efforts—the federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project—now comprise nearly forty dams and about a thousand miles of aqueducts costing billions of dollars to taxpayers across the state and the country.

With funding secured and projects built, landowners sitting on the regional governing bodies were able to permit themselves exemptions to size restrictions to receive federally subsidized water. One hundred years of law-breaking, typically referred to as “noncompliance,” lies at the core of California’s gargantuan and vastly wealthy agricultural economy.

The projects were planned to serve agriculture—acres of lettuce and cotton, dairies, orchards—not the small rural communities that sprang up to provide labor for those fields and dairies. Residents in small towns like Alpaugh struggle for clean water amidst the pipes and canals of the largest and most expensive public water system in the world.

Heavy lifting

Shane Nichols has worked at the water hole in Alpaugh since November 2003. He is jovial and talkative, providing nonstop comic relief under the oppressive valley heat. He periodically takes up the hose connected to the well under construction to spray down the floor of the shed and the outside walls of the tank itself, cooling off the hot air in the shed.

“All the water’s bad,” he says. “All the water has arsenic, all over the county. But Alpaugh is the worst hit right now in terms of not having drinking water. That’s why we got the grants.” In 2002, United Farm Workers representative Martha Guzman brought Alpaugh’s plight to the attention of its state Assemblymember, Nicole Parra. Parra secured donations that resulted in the 5,000-gallon tank and water to fill it; she also managed to nail down long-sought-after grants from the California Department of Water Resources and the United States Department of Agriculture to begin construction on the new well.

Nichols does the heavy lifting for children and seniors. “A five-gallon jug weighs 38.7 pounds when full,” he says, adding, “I weighed it one day.”

By two o’clock twenty families had come to collect water. “Most people are still working at this time, even on Saturday,” says Angelica Martinez, who was born and raised in Alpaugh. Both of her parents are migrant farm workers from Michoacan, Mexico, who follow work in the fields, commuting up and down the valley. Before the water tank was parked a few blocks from her house, her family bought vended water from reverse osmosis machines twenty miles away: “On Sundays we’d drive to Delano and buy water at the store. We’d fill up about eight five-gallon jugs.”

Residents in small towns like Alpaugh and Earlimart, Lindsay and Tonyville purchase either bottled or vended water for drinking and cooking needs. Julio Villa, from the Peruvian Andes, has been in Alpaugh for about a year, working sixty hours for only $200 at a dairy. He used to spend $35 a month filling his water jugs in stores in Corcoran before the water hole was up and running. “Sometimes we didn’t have time to drive and pick up water for the week, so we’d drink from the tap after boiling it,” he says. At work they still sometimes drink the tap water: “When our bottled water runs out, we can’t take the heat.” As debates rage in cities like Stockton over municipal water privatization, the water supply for most residents in Tulare County has already effectively been privatized.

Yet the vended water from machines is often not tested by health officials. “It is appalling that tens of thousands of Latinos working in California’s agricultural industry have no choice but to buy bottled and vended water to drink at home and at work,” says Paola Ramos, a policy analyst with the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water in Oakland. “But it is totally unacceptable for the main source of drinking water for these communities to go without health inspections. It seems like discrimination to me when Latinos and other communities of color don’t receive the same quality water. It goes beyond discrimination, when cotton and alfalfa get better quality water than people.”

Blue Christmas

Several months later, the valley’s winter sky is thick with fog. Sandra Meraz steps from her truck at one o’clock sharp and walks through the mist to struggle with the bolt on the blue metal door for the last time. “We can’t do it any more,” she says as she enters the shed. “I’m proud of all I’ve done, but I’m exhausted. Seniors cannot carry their own food, much less five-gallon water jugs.”

A little more than a year after the opening of the water hole, Alpaugh residents face a New Year’s with no blue shed—and no new well, either. The money donated to pay for the spring water ran out in early November, and the new well, which should have been up and running, was improperly installed. George Anderson of the Mountain Springs Water Company personally donated 5,000 gallons to fill up the tank in mid-November so the community would have water for Thanksgiving. But December 15 was the last day for Alpaugh’s water hole.

Alpaugh was supposed to be a success story: community advocates hoped the attention to the town’s troubles would influence state lawmakers and water agencies to direct much-needed funding to other valley communities facing similar problems. Now it appears as if Alpaugh’s emergency grants may have gone to waste.

The irrigation district charged with building the well chose a local engineering firm—Whitten Pumps—that filed for bankruptcy only a few months after the contract was signed; the company is over a million dollars in debt. Whitten left the top of the Alpaugh well unsealed, vulnerable to tampering and contamination from animals. As a result, the state health department refuses to lift a boiled water order.

The irrigation district claimed that it would cost $4,600 to seal the well and pass state safety requirements. That was money the community didn’t have, at least until a Los Angeles Times reporter started calling around to find out why the well was not yet operable. Within days of the reporter’s calls, Steve Martin, irrigation district board member and owner of the land on which the wells are located, said that they found the money and that “No matter what, we’re going to go ahead and seal it.”

Caroline Farrell, an attorney with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment in Delano, says that incompetence is a major problem in rural water management. “People have not been trained for the positions they hold and they make decisions without knowing the consequences of those decisions.”

On the water hole’s last day, the residents begin to arrive a few minutes after one. Former US Marine and mechanic Asa Massey rolls in on an electric motor chair with two empty gallon jugs in the front basket. He has come to get water at the tanker “ever since they put it up.” Before, he would travel seventeen miles to Corcoran to buy bottled water. Jerry Calvert drives up on a flat-bed three-wheeler to fill up three five-gallon jugs to take home. Families arrive in pickups and dispatch their teenagers and older children to fill the jugs. Meraz and volunteers help cart the heavy containers while informing residents that after today, they’ll have to drive out of town to get drinking water.

At the end of the afternoon, Meraz takes down the “Open” sign and carries it to her truck to add to the stacks of papers and pens on the passenger seat. “Rural America is endangered,” she says. “We are the forgotten people.”