What Your Obsession With Cheese Has to Do With the Death of 60,000 Fish in Iowa

Industrialized animal agriculture is not only incredibly cruel to animals, but factory farms also pose an undeniable risk to our planet’s environment, contaminating our air and water, and animal waste, in particular, is known for being especially harmful to people and even wildlife. And we have yet another example to prove it: last month 60,000 fish were killed because of the manure runoff from an Iowa-based dairy farm, New Vienna.

After the thousands of fish, including stonerollers, white suckers, minnows and creek chubs were found dead after a leak from an open lot dairy farm, an investigation by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was opened and the Pollution was traced back to New Vienna, a dairy farm that holds about 300 cows. New Vienna has since been issued a notice of violation by the DNR, with DNR senior environmental specialist said that they will, “seek fish restitution and additional administrative penalties.”

So, what exactly led to this horrific tragedy? Well, plain and simple, a lot of poop. The standard dairy operation uses around 150 gallons of water per cow, per day just to flush all of the waste off their parlor floors. Unfortunately, that polluted water doesn’t always stay in the designated cesspools, which are giant lagoons where factory farms store the excrement produced by the animals who live in their facilities, but it can manage to make its way into local streams and rivers – causing dead zones and posing a serious threat to public health. In fact, according to the EPA, a single dairy cow produces about 120 pounds of wet manure per day, which is equivalent to the waste produced by 20–40 people … now just imagine how much waste that would be for the 300 dairy cows on the farm found responsible for this Pollution.

Considering how dangerous manure has been found to be, along with the fact that the substances produced on these farms – meat and dairy – have their own myriad of negative impacts to human health, the environment, and animal welfare, we should be looking into more sustainable ways to satisfy people’s craving for meat, dairy, and cheese.

That is why the solution is not to try to “improve” the dairy and meat industry, it’s to evolve past it. The problems that these industries face are no issue to the plant-based food sector. You can now find dairy-free alternatives for nearly every product you can imagine – and as CEO of Ripple Foods, Adam Lowry, recently said on an episode of #EatForThePlanet with Nil Zacharias, cows are an inefficient way to turn plants into milk. If we want to see the end of horrific fish-kills and other public health disasters caused by animal agriculture mishaps, we have to start choosing differently. To learn more about how you can start, join One Green Planet’s #EatForThePlanet movement.

Image Source: Klaus Stiefel/Flickr