Climate change is decimating the environment, but so is unrestricted agri-business. In both cases, the Cancer is Capitalism. If you love pizza and chicken wings, you better read this post!
Americans eat more chicken and cheese than in the past, mostly because of snack foods like pizza and chicken wings. Over the last fifty years, American per-person cheese and chicken consumption has doubled. In the same time period, chicken and cheese exports have increased by ten times and the export of animal feed has also soared, partly because of increased productive efficiency and partly because of government loan subsidies.
What no one paid attention to as agri-business met increasing demand with more dairy cows and chickens, was the impact on underground available water as non-renewable groundwater was drained to grow animal feed.
Arkansas is home to Tyson, the world’s biggest chicken company, and the state produces over $6 billion worth of chicken, chicken breasts, thighs, nuggets, and wings, which is double what was produced only a decade ago. In Arkansas, farming is dominated by soybean production to feed factory-raised chickens. Soybean production in the United States increase by eight times since the 1960s. In Arkansas, irrigated farmland is also used to grow corn that is largely used as animal feed to produce cows, pigs, and chickens for the meat industry. Corn production increased by six times in the last six decades. Arkansas’ industrially grown chicken also produces enormous amounts of chicken waste that that pollutes local rivers.
Idaho has largely abandoned potato farming to grow alfalfa to feed dairy cows that supply milk for cheese factories that produce over a billion tons of cheese a year, mostly mozzarella. Alfalfa is a water-intensive crop being produced in one of the driest areas of the American West and the United States.
Since the 1990s, major international cheese producers have bought or built cheese processing plants in Idaho. An Irish company, Glanbia, has four cheese factories in the state using over a half a billion gallons of milk annually. Chobani, taking advantage of the glut of milk, also operates one of the country’s largest yogurt factories in Idaho.
Because farming has expanded into dryer regions of the country, agri-business depends on underground water in the aquifers that supply an estimated 90% of water for irrigation. This is water that built up over the centuries, perhaps over thousands of years, water that is not renewed because of inadequate rainfall. The depletion of underground water reserves is now creating crises situations in Texas, the Central Valley of California, the High Plains in Kansas, and Arizona. Wells pumping water out of the aquifer in Idaho to irrigate alfalfa fields are measuring the lowest water levels ever recorded.
The historical record shows us what can happen when underground aquifers dry up. The Mayans were a sophisticated urban and agricultural civilization on the Yucatan peninsula in present day Mexico and Central America with more than 19 million people. They developed a “River Valley Civilization” without a river valley, relying on water in underground limestone caves. Mayan civilization collapsed relatively rapidly during the 8th or 9th centuries as water levels dropped and the water was no longer accessible. Food shortages led to wars between Mayan city-states. To escape war and starvation, much of the Mayan population abandoned urban centers, leaving behind magnificent ruins like the Chichen Itza pyramid.