At the bottom of the signs is a phone number for the State Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC). Why did these warnings suddenly appear on a site that had sat vacant—and apparently unloved—for so long? For years, say neighbors, the only signs of life on the lot (other than weeds) were visible on Saturdays. Heidi Spanier, owner of a nearby vintage clothing store, says, “There would be kids playing there. They’d be in there and the gates would be closed.”

The records of the City of Berkeley’s Toxics Management Division (TMD) and the DTSC tell an unsettling tale. In 1939, Julius Chase purchased the site, which extended to 10th Street and then contained an auto-wrecking yard. Chase later sold the western side of the property for housing. Then he built an A&W restaurant, and when it closed, the graffiti-covered cinderblock building became Ali Baba’s restaurant, a tiny Persian burger joint. The small white brick building in back housed auto repair shops until the mid-1990s.

In December 27, 1985, a neighbor in the western residential area complained that waste oil poured on the ground by auto repair shop employees was running onto his property. A team from the Department of Health Services investigated. Next to the shop—Berkeley Auto Repair—they found a one-foot square hole approximately 4 feet deep, filled with black oily liquid. A pile of auto batteries sat nearby, and drums filled with waste oil and antifreeze were stored behind the restaurant.

Subsequent inspections by DTSC, the TMD, and environmental consultants retained by Chase revealed unsafe levels of lead, methylene chloride (used for cleaning auto parts), oil, and grease on many parts of the property. In 1990, DTSC oversaw yet another investigation and found that levels of these contaminants were still above EPA standards for industrial properties.

When Chase died in the early 1990s his heirs inherited liability for cleanup under a section of the Clean Water Act that states that whoever owns property can be held fully responsible for remediating contamination. That made Droubi Nahla liable when the heirs sold him the property in April of 1999. Nahla should have been made aware of the contamination—once property owners become aware that their land is contaminated, they are legally bound to disclose this information to prospective buyers. (The seller must disclose anything s/he knows, and the new owner is responsible for remediating any contamination that becomes apparent whether s/he knew about it or not. Clearly it is in the seller’s best interests not to know more than is absolutely required and in the buyer’s interest to know everything.)

Nahla retained Sequoia Environmental Consulting Services to evaluate the scope of the contamination and devise a plan for cleaning it. On August 16, 1999, TMD approved an assessment and cleanup work plan submitted by the firm. Prior to the plan’s approval, Geoff Fiedler from the TMD had inspected water samples from test drilling on the property and seen that some of the shallower groundwater had black oily bubbles floating in it. Fiedler expected to hear from Nahla or his representatives within three months, but years later the property still sat there, full of lead, oil, grease, and possibly methylene chloride.

Finally, in January 2005, the DTSC issued an Imminent and Substantial Endangerment Order and Remedial Action Order to compel Nahla to address the hazard. The order’s first requirement was that within 30 days Nahla would erect fences and signs according to DTSC specifications. Hence, the sudden appearance of Hazardous Materials warnings where children played on sunny Saturdays.

Failure to comply with the detailed specifications and timelines of the DTSC could cost Nahla up to $25,000 a day plus punitive damages of up to three times the amount of any costs incurred by DTSC. The DTSC’s Angela Blanchette explains that the first step is to again reassess the property. “Petroleum products break down over time, so the site might be less contaminated,” she says. “Methylene chloride can also break down, but lead doesn’t go away.” Fiedler, too, is worried about the lead. “Lead is particularly bad for children,” he says, and adds that in high concentrations, methylene chloride is a potent carcinogen. By year’s end, Nahla is expected to submit a cleanup plan. The scope of the remediation will depend on future use—cleanup standards are more stringent for residential properties than for commercial use. The DTSC says he will be required to excavate some lead-contaminated soil. After that, Nahla’s most affordable option might be to “seal” the rest of the contamination by paving it and using the land for parking.

The lead-contaminated soil must be moved to a hazardous waste landfill. Since there is only one such landfill in California, soil is often trucked out-of-state. Owners are liable for the expense of excavation and disposal—as well as for assessing contamination. New owners can sometimes offset the expense by suing previous owners or businesses that pollute.

If Nahla’s plan meets DTSC requirements, the agency will send fact sheets to a number of residences and businesses within two to three blocks of the contaminated site and to some public officials, opening the plan to a 30-day public review. After the plan is modified, DTSC anticipates that the cleanup excavation of the lead will take a day or two in February of 2006.

Why did 20 years go by before any action was taken to clean up the site once it was known to be toxic? And why were children allowed to play on property where lead had been detected?

Neither the city nor DTSC could answer these questions. Nor could they say how many similar situations exist in Berkeley. Fiedler is concerned that there are many more severely contaminated vacant or underdeveloped lots, and notes, “Lead is all over West Berkeley.” He explains that the problem is particularly severe there because industrial and commercial activity has always been concentrated west of San Pablo. Large factories once spewed out toxic waste. The area is still dotted with auto repair shops that used to keep underground gasoline tanks to top off their customers’ cars, and Fiedler says the shops cleaned greasy floors and auto parts by hosing them off with leaded gasoline.

The scope of the hazardous contamination in West Berkeley may not become evident until more property is sold for redevelopment. Many prospective buyers will want environmental assessments because they know they may become liable for cleanup. If state or federal funds are used to develop property, environmental assessments are mandatory.

Decades ago, when regulations on underground tanks were much less stringent, small gas stations and repair shops were scattered everywhere, even in residential areas.

“In Berkeley,” Fiedler says, “we recommend that people use raised beds, that they do not garden in the soil.” The neglected lot on San Pablo Avenue may be small, but it exemplifies a far larger problem: the legacy of toxins used so carelessly in the past.

Earlier this summer, scientists became alarmed when they couldn’t find much of the marine life normally present on the coast, including birds, fish, and marine mammals. On the North Coast, naturalists and fishermen waited in vain for the spring salmon run to start. And wildlife watchers in the Sacramento Delta discovered that many fish counts, particularly salmon, weren’t nearly as high as expected, particularly in light of efforts to revive those populations.

Worse, the spring winds that normally generate the marine upwelling of nutrients upon which plankton feed did not appear, an alarming event which could devastate the entire marine food chain. Scientists noticed declines in common murres, Brandt’s cormorants, and Cassin’s auklets. Biologists also found unusually small numbers of juvenile salmon and rockfish.

The winds came back in mid-July, bringing the long-overdue upwelling months later than usual, leaving biologists puzzled. Perhaps most ominous, even though the upwelling has come back, the plankton still are not recovering, and scientists aren’t sure why.

“There hasn’t been a lot of response,” says Bill Peterson, an oceanographer at the National Marine Fisheries Service, based in the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. “There’s been plenty of time for recovery, but it hasn’t happened yet. The upwelling is really strong, but the plankton just aren’t there. It might be that the upwelling is too strong, and it’s pushing the nutrients away from shore, so wildlife doesn’t have a chance to grow, but we just don’t know yet.”

For some species, the nutrients didn’t come at the right time in marine life cycles, so populations might not recover this season. “The damage has already been done, and a lot of animals are dead and gone,” Peterson says. ” About the best we can hope for is that it will stay cold into the winter, which might be a good sign for next year.”

Freshwater ecologists, too, are seeing huge declines in fish and other wildlife in the Sacramento Delta. “We’re noticing big declines in smelt, bass, and others, and zooplankton have plummeted to record low levels,” says Tina Swanson, senior scientist with the Bay Institute in Novato.

Salmon stocks are much lower than expected. “Since salmon fishing was curtailed three years ago in the wake of the Klamath die-off, and we had a good count three years ago [of young salmon who are now maturing], there should have been huge numbers, maybe even too much for the rivers to support,” she says. “Instead, there are far fewer than we expected, which suggests that maybe something is going on in the oceans.” She hastens to point out that so far, research has not proven the link.

“I would say that [trouble in the Pacific marine system] is likely to have an effect on the salmon,” says Peterson. “Right now, it doesn’t look good. It’s possible the salmon went to cooler places, but that’s not likely.” And in a recurring theme, “We just don’t know yet.”

CALFED, a research organization composed of state and federal scientists, is studying the decline. It should be releasing its data over the next few years, says Swanson, but, “They’ve done an appallingly bad job of monitoring and explaining their results,” she adds.

Lack of public awareness—and the activist outrage it would engender—has handicapped efforts to restore wildlife in the Delta and all along the coast, says Swanson. “The level of interest has declined& People wonder why they should care about the Delta smelt. That kind of thinking nearly did in the bay during the last drought. That’s when I like to remind people that the Delta provides water to two-thirds of the people in California.”

Scientists looking for explanations offer a number of culprits: global climate change, toxic contamination, invasive species, and in the case of the Delta, water exports from Northern California to Southern California. Swanson speaks for many when she says that while she believes further research is needed before anyone can give a definitive answer, “It’s probably a combination of those factors.”

“The bill removes all protection for habitat and any mandate to move toward recovery,” says Brian Nowicki, Endangered Species Policy Coordinator with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It deletes the critical habitat section of the act and makes all recovery plans voluntary.” Endangered species that now have critical habitat would lose it; those listed but without designated critical habitat would never get it. Protected species could be de-listed on a state-by-state basis. The Pombo measure increases payoffs to land owners, green-lights destructive projects, gives the Secretary of the Interior final say on what constitutes “best science,” and exempts pesticides from environmental review.

On September 29, the bill passed the House of Representatives 220—193, largely along party lines, although 36 Democrats voted for it and 34 Republicans voted against it. Opponents hope to stop the bill in the Senate.

What species would be affected? In Northern California alone, the roster of potential victims includes the Antioch Dunes evening primrose, yellow larkspur, Bay checkerspot butterfly, coho and Chinook salmon, California red-legged frog, Alameda whipsnake, western snowy plover, marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl, and Steller sea lion—all currently with federal endangered or threatened status and with critical habitat either designated or in litigation. That’s not even considering animals and plants still in the listing pipeline, like the fisher, greater sage grouse, Yosemite toad, and Siskiyou mariposa lily.

Kieran Suckling, CBD’s Policy Director, sums up: “Pombo’s bill would reverse thirty years of progress. It would rip the heart out of America’s most important wildlife law.”

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.

“This rider is an overhaul, a detour, and it really weakens the board’s role,” says Craig Minowa, environmental scientist with the Organic Consumers Association. “You can see where big biotech and agribusiness interests could step in and dilute organic standards.”

The Organic Trade Association represents many organic producers—from the large to the small. Kraft and Dean Foods, which owns Horizon, define “large”—and it was large producers that supported the rider. The OTA ended up lobbying members of Congress to pass the amendment. But not all trade association members agreed. “The conventional big food processors are the ones flexing their muscles and driving this,” says Joe Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety. “The Organic Trade Association is facing a problem internally. A lot of their members are not happy with what’s going on. It’s a split trade association at this point.”

The Senate voted against the rider but added an amendment requesting that the USDA study the issues and report its findings within 90 days. Trying to make peace, the Senate decided to convene negotiations between the Organic Trade Association and public interest groups such as the Organic Consumers Association and the Center for Food Safety. The groups were deliberating about appropriate language until the OTA generated its own wording and sneaked the rider in.

Now the organics community has another chance to influence how standards are regulated. But so far the outlook for alliance-building isn’t good. Says Mendelson about his counterparts at the OTA, “[they] certainly have not been cooperative in discussing the issue with us.”

Woolbert took a community nutrition class offered by the center and learned the basics of exercise and proper diet. Before her diagnosis, Woolbert didn’t put much thought into what she ate. “I was just working and going on with my life, not taking care of my health. I ate just about everything,” she says, mentioning sweets and sodas in particular. “I’ve really changed since I went to that class. Now I watch what I put into my body, and I feel a lot better.”

Woolbert wasn’t aware that her diet could contribute to disease—and she is not alone. Even those who have progressed to diabetes may not understand its management. “Patients may have had diabetes for a long time. They see a doctor who says, ‘Here, take these pills,’ but they don’t receive any education,” says the NAHC’s Cristina Weahunt, a registered dietician and health educator. “This happens a lot, especially for the lower socioeconomic population, to which all services are not available.”

Two-thirds of the US population is overweight or obese. This epidemic, which leads to a host of ills such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, has the medical industry scrambling for solutions. Quick fixes such as gastric bypass surgery and medication are becoming common. But critics distinguish between abatement of the symptoms and stopping the disease: instead of treating the outcomes of poor food choices, shouldn’t we be addressing the fact that the food industry, in concert with federal dietary guidelines, is adversely affecting our health?

Today, sugary beverages and processed foods are available in schools, libraries, and everywhere in between. With no voice for independent nutrition education in this country, many, like Mindy Woolbert, believe these products are part of a healthy diet. After all, they’re FDA-approved. They may even display the American Heart Association’s stamp of approval, or better yet, be included among the USDA food pyramid’s recommended daily servings. But America’s spare tire illustrates that these guidelines are not working—and they may actually be contributing to disease.

In the early 1900s, when the typical diet consisted of unprocessed foods, organic-by-default meats, fresh produce, and natural fats, heart disease rates were about 1 in 20, and obesity was uncommon. These rates have skyrocketed over the century: obesity has increased by 75 percent, with the average person growing 25 pounds heavier. Today, heart disease kills 1 in 3 people. These startling stats coincide with the appearance of sodas, fast food, and the ubiquitous USDA food pyramid, a familiar sight with its dancing food groups and colorful stripes.

The USDA’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) guidelines have been a blueprint for calorie and nutrient intake since the ’40s, when it also issued its National Wartime Nutrition Guide, encouraging Americans to be strong (and eat more) by choosing from seven food groups. To avoid complexity, dietary guidelines were later condensed to the Basic Four, which included meat, milk, grains, and fruits and vegetables. In the face of expanding waistlines and disease rates, a different graphic image was needed to convey variety, proportionality, and moderation. The USDA shaped nutritional guidelines into architecture, and the food pyramid was born. The food industry pounced on the opportunity to use the pyramid to promote their products as part of a healthy diet, and they planted the image squarely where most people gaze first thing in the morning: the back of their Cheerios boxes.

“The pyramid is being used as a marketing tool,” says public health attorney Michele Simon, who is director of Oakland’s Center for Informed Food Choices. “The government has abdicated its role to promote its guidelines,” instead, she says, allowing the food industry to take on its popularization. And in fact, surveys demonstrate that most people get information about nutrition through advertising by food companies. “Now it’s up to General Mills to put the pyramid on their cereal boxes, and the food industry gets to take credit for educating the public,” says Simon. Since 93 percent of American households read their cereal boxes—on average 2.6 times over—that space is, according to an April General Mills press release, “the best real estate there is.”

And there are problems with the guidelines themselves. In her book Food Politics, author Marion Nestle states, “dietary guidelines are political compromises between what science tells us about nutrition and health and what is good for the food industry& advice issued by the government never has been based purely on considerations of public health.” The 1992 food pyramid’s one-size-fits-all message tells everyone—from active children to sedentary adults—to get 6-11 daily servings of “grains,” including bread, rice, cereal, and pasta, the majority of which, when processed into Lucky Charms and Wonder Bread, is made with unhealthful, refined “simple” carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar. Simple carbs are broken down rapidly by the body and turned into glucose, which causes a sharp spike in blood sugar, followed by a crash that leaves the eater fatigued, cranky, and craving more sugar. The result is often a cycle of over-eating and weight gain.

“The pyramid has had a huge impact on weight because its fundamental message is that all fat is bad and all carbs are good,” says the Harvard School of Public Health’s Dr. Walter Willett, author of the best-selling book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. Willett says other questionable guidelines include three daily servings of dairy and the suggestion to “eat fats sparingly” by choosing margarine over butter in order to reduce saturated fat consumption—advice that can put us at risk for certain cancers and other diseases.

The food industry has responded to our fat phobia by manufacturing and distributing products high in refined carbohydrates and low in fat. Fat-free products exploded onto the grocery store shelves as Kraft and Nabisco cashed in on emerging health trends. Hydrogenated vegetable oils and margarine replaced saturated fats, but are these products healthier? Any product containing hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils—made by hardening normally liquid vegetable oil to give it the solid consistency of a saturated fat—contains artery-clogging trans-fatty acids. Nutrition experts currently agree that these are the real disease-causing agents. Refined carbs and trans-fats give our bodies a double whammy, and they’re directly linked to obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Both are extremely cheap to produce, making them popular in snack food items, but we’re paying a staggering $78 billion per year to treat diseases associated with diet.

Yesterday’s fat phobia is becoming today’s trans-fat phobia as the government and food industry scramble to correct their mistake. “The food industry is good at taking criticism about some element in their food and turning it into marketing opportunity,” says Simon. “If fat’s not good for you, OK, we’ll make fat-free cookies. Now we see that trans fat isn’t good for you, so we’ll make trans-fat-free cookies.’ The public gets the message that industry cares about them since they’ve changed Oreos to trans-fat-free. The fact is, it’s still an artificial product loaded with sugar and refined ingredients.”

Meanwhile, we are food industry guinea pigs. The public receives so much conflicting nutrition info because it is not developed through independent research. Often we don’t hear about the hazards of previously approved foods until they begin causing problems. “People are not given the right information,” says Willett. “They’re not getting information from proper sources, and everyone’s needs are different.” Furthermore, according to a 1996 USDA phone survey almost half of the population agrees that there is so much information about “healthy eating” that it’s hard to know what to believe.

And as it does so well, the food industry also profits from our confusion. According to Simon, “Industry perpetuates the ‘nutrition is confusing’ myth, because as long as people remain confused, they’ll throw up their hands and keep on eating their Twinkies. Why bother trying to figure it out today when scientists will just say something new tomorrow?” In the meantime, portion sizes are growing, snacking is increasing, and it’s becoming ever more efficient to get a meal on the go or in a box. While we eat our Whoppers in front of the TV (the at-home meal!), we’re bombarded with punchy ads for green ketchup and Twizzlers.

This year, the government decided it was time to get people off their couches and reaching for whole wheat instead of Wonder Bread, so in January, it remodeled the pyramid again. Now it’s three-dimensional, with a stick figure bounding up the side steps: it is called “my pyramid,” presumably to increase consumer buy-in. A stop by www.mypyramid.gov reveals an interactive web site where the user can type in personal information to receive detailed guidelines. Updated recommendations include exercise and incorporating whole grains and a colorful variety of vegetables into one’s diet. Surely this is better?

“It’s laughable and totally bogus,” says Harvard’s Willett. “It’s sad because this was a lost opportunity to portray useful and updated information. It conveys that every food can be part of a healthy diet, when this is not the case, as with trans fats.” The personalized food portion information, which gives quantities down to the ounces, can be confusing to follow and difficult to measure. “It gives highly specific recs that are way off,” Willett says.

“The pyramid has never been a good tool for information,” says Simon. But corporations such as General Mills wasted no time climbing up the new version, releasing a line of whole and multi-grain products and launching “healthy initiative” nutrition and weight management campaigns. “Food companies are tripping over each other to jump on the ‘healthy bandwagon’ and pile on as much nonsense health information on their packaging as possible, but it’s just more noise in the marketplace,” she says. Like trans-fat-free Oreos, whole grain Cocoa Puffs are still a refined product with high sugar content. “Desserts in disguise,” Nestle calls them.

So how can anybody uncover honest and accurate information? “This is a very important role for health care providers that is not always being assumed in the community,” says Willett. “We need nutrition education in schools and on worksites, and we need clarity and honesty about what’s really in products.”

Healthy living requires lifestyle adjustment, usually not popular among Americans unless it involves a quick fix. “We have a skewed value system in this country that says it’s OK to be working 24 hours a day,” says Simon. “If you want to make living healthfully a priority in your life, you have to take a look at how you’re living.” People need to be reminded to make time for themselves, including spending time exercising and preparing healthy food, says Simon.

By taking charge, Woolbert found a path through the confusion. “I’m now able to control my diabetes through diet, and everything has changed for the best,” she says. “My class taught me that you that you can beat your disease if you take care of yourself, and that was inspiring. There should be more nutrition classes available in the community.”

Mary Vance: How can we convince people to eat right?

Michele Simon: I connect corporate influence over food policy and the information people receive about how to eat. I’m very interested in how we’re not even being told the correct information based on science on how to eat because it’s so obscured by government. In the last couple of years especially, this topic has really heated up with the government finally admitting that we have a public health crisis on our hands. In my monthly newsletter, in which I track the goings-on of the food industry and government policy around nutrition, I poke holes through anything they say because you can’t believe anything they say. I really get people to understand that corporate motivations and goals are completely in conflict with public health.

But how can we educate people about nutrition?

People need to be told how to eat right, but we cannot do that without addressing the cause of the problem: that we have an economic system—an engine—that is furthered by corporations and government policies designed to keep that engine going. That isn’t going away, and no matter how many five-a-day fruits and vegetables posters we print, the engine that keeps corporate profits coming is a primary priority over public health. We can’t trust the food industry because it’s profit-driven, and government is in industry’s pocket. Nutrition criteria, like Kraft’s “Sensible Solutions,” are classic industry strategy. The companies influence the government process for setting nutrition guidelines and then rely on the same guidelines for their own marketing. They say, “This is healthy because the FDA said it was.” Well, really it’s because they influenced the process by which the FDA said it was healthy.

So it’s all about profit, not people?

We have an understanding that this is a market-based economy, and capitalism is the system that drives that, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that we have a populace that understands that corporate profit is inimical to public health. Corporations have done a very good job of pulling the wool over our eyes, at making us believe they are part of the solution. There are all kinds of ways the industry positions itself as “educating consumers,” and we have been fooled, because in fact all they are doing at any given moment is promoting their own products. The media is not good at seeing through a lot of it, so the public gets messages that now industry cares about them with their whole grain cocoa puffs and trans-fat-free cookies.

Is litigation an effective strategy?

I have mixed feelings about it. I do think it should remain an available strategy, but it’s not something I am out there promoting as the way to go. Given that our government is such a failure at protecting us, litigation is all that’s left. When food companies have deceived the public and manufactured foods in a way that is dangerous, why shouldn’t they be held accountable just like any industry? But to me, getting industry to change is not the primary way to go because it’s not preventive; it’s too late. People are already sick.

So where do we start?

The first step is to get government out of the pockets of the industry. It means taking a very hard look at what’s going on and admitting that the whole system is a failure. And this is not just about nutrition; it’s a whole set of social ills that corporations have caused—from the environment to you name it. There’s something wrong with the system, and we need to present that evidence and let the public draw its own conclusions. The message should be clear: it’s not up to Kraft or Coca-Cola to feed people, so it’s not up to them to “solve” the obesity epidemic. It’s not in their interest. But nutrition education is not rocket science. We’ve turned it into this big mystery because that’s how people get research dollars. Here’s the answer: eat a plant-based diet, a good variety of foods that come from nature, and avoid anything that comes in a box. Eating well can be convenient with planning. We’ve really twisted the meaning of convenience foods. I was just hungry and I had a peach. What could be more convenient than that?

We imagine free-range chickens and turkeys wandering about the countryside, grazing, taking dust baths, socializing. But “free-range” birds (and the eggs they produce) can be reared in the same unsavory conditions we expect from the largest broiler producers. Consumers are spending more money for labeled products that don’t deliver what the label promises.

Chickens and turkeys are exempt from many of the protective federal and state provisions that monitor the treatment of animals. The federal Animal Welfare Act excludes all farm animals (including horses), and chickens and turkeys fall outside many state regulations and the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. Nora Kramer, director of the San Francisco chapter of the Empathy Project, says, “Nine billion chickens and turkeys are killed each year, with no laws protecting them.” Because farm animals are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act, factory farms have no motivation to clean up their practices.

USDA regulations require that animals labeled free-range be given access to the outdoors. There is no limit to the number that can be held in an enclosed area and no guarantee that the animals spend time outside. A pitch-black, feces-ridden warehouse stuffed to the brim with chickens would be considered an honest-to-goodness free-range farm if, at the far end of the enclosure, there was a small opening through which a few brave hens could break free. Still, most free-range poultry farmers defend the label, arguing that there is a considerable difference between free-range and factory-farmed poultry. Rick Pitman of Mary’s Free Range Turkey in Madera says, “We are very careful in the way we treat the birds. It is definitely a less crowded atmosphere.”

Some argue that access to lush fields is irrelevant because chickens and turkeys bred to be consumed are over-fed until they become too crippled to walk. Fifty years ago, raising a five-pound chicken took 84 days. Now, because of “advances” in nutrition and breeding, a five-pound chicken can be reared in only 45 days. Prone to heart failure and stroke, these birds can hardly stand due to their speedy growth.

Free-range and other labels say nothing about the common practice of de-beaking, which involves slicing off the upper beak of a chick with a hot blade. “The vast majority of chickens that are raised for food are de-beaked” says Kramer. “We can either give them more room or cut their beaks off, and it’s cheaper to cut their beaks off.”

Then there’s another reality of an industry that raises 245 million laying hens every year. “250 to 300 million male chicks die at birth because they are useless, meaning not profitable,” Kramer says. These male chicks are destroyed in machines called macerators or just tossed in bins to die. The result is turned into pet food or fed to chickens, pigs, and cattle.

There still may be hope for those of us hoping to purchase eggs, dairy, and poultry products from humanely raised animals. The American Humane Association has designed a Free Farmed seal for farms that do not use cages, antibiotics, hormones, or employ forced molting—starving hens to bring on a molt and another cycle of egg production. The program includes rigorous inspections of participating farms. The Free Farmed seal does not mean access to pasture, but it ensures that the birds are not raised in high-density battery cages.

The welfare of animals, particularly of livestock, always founders on money—the industry’s and our own. An overwhelming majority of Americans support humane treatment, but in a 1999 survey by the Animal Industry Foundation, respondents said they are willing to pay only 5 percent more for a product from a humanely treated animal. Says Kramer, “You’re voting with your dollar every time you buy something.”