FERN’s livestock series turned to the Southwest this week, where we investigated the “fecal dust” storms in the Texas Panhandle arising from cattle feedlots holding tens of thousands of animals. If you’ve eaten a hamburger, there’s a good chance it came from this region, which supplies one-fifth of the nation’s beef.
FERN partnered with The Texas Observer, on the story, which was written by its rural reporter Chris Collins. The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed the citizen complaint data that drove the reporting. George Steinmetz, a photojournalist renowned for his aerial shots, produced the images. The result – a strong story with an award-winning Texas outlet.
What Collins found was a community engulfed in manure. In fact, he experienced this unpleasant reality firsthand when he was reporting the story and hoped to take a picture of a dust storm (it coated his phone and he couldn’t get a shot). Although citizens have been fighting to contain the expansion of CAFOs in their community, the story makes clear that the industry holds sway. In the past five years, state environmental authorities have not levied any fines or imposed sanctions against large beef feedlots in the Panhandle.
This echoes what we’ve already reported in North Carolina, where mostly African-American rural residents, who live near the huge hog CAFOs that dominate the southeastern part of the state, turned to the courts to get relief and won multimillion-dollar judgments from Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer. State environmental authorities had done little to address their complaints about odors from nearby hog producers.
In another recent story, we reported on the saga of the Salton Sea in California, a man-made lake now filled with agro-chemical runoff and increasing levels of salt, making it toxic to wildlife. With its water source dwindling in the face of rising Southern California demand, the rapidly shrinking lake now faces another challenge – climate change. “In the coming years these two factors are expected to dramatically increase the pace at which the lake shrinks, exposing more lake bed and the agricultural toxins trapped in the mud,” Lindsay Fendt wrote in the story, produced in collaboration with The Weather Channel.
These stories fit into two of our initiatives, one on the challenges rural communities face from the livestock industry, the other on the relationship between climate change and agriculture. Please consider supporting our work as we roll out more stories in these focal areas this year.