Christopher Flavelle reported from Idaho and Somini Sengupta from Arkansas. Data analysis and graphics by Mira Rojanasakul.
Dec. 24, 2023 The New York Times
As dinner tables and snack menus feature far more chicken and cheese, farms are expanding where water is scarce.
America’s striking dietary shift in recent decades, toward far more chicken and cheese, has not only contributed to concerns about American health but has taken a major, undocumented toll on underground water supplies.
The effects are being felt in key agricultural regions nationwide as farmers have drained groundwater to grow animal feed.
In Arkansas for example, where cotton was once king, the land is now ruled by fields of soybeans to feed the chickens, a billion or so of them, that have come to dominate the region’s economy. And Idaho, long famous for potatoes, is now America’s largest producer of alfalfa to feed the cows that supply the state’s huge cheese factories.
Today alfalfa, a particularly water-intensive crop used largely for animal feed, covers 6 million acres of irrigated land, much of it in the driest parts of the American West.
These transformations are tied to the changing American diet. Since the early 1980s, America’s per-person cheese consumption has doubled, largely in the form of mozzarella-covered pizza pies. And last year, for the first time, the average American ate 100 pounds of chicken, twice the amount 40 years ago.
It’s not just Americans eating more American-made meat and cheese. Exports of poultry and dairy have risen more than tenfold since 1980, thanks to America’s farming efficiency, combined with government subsidies and rising demand from countries like China. Exports of animal feed itself have soared, too, industry data show.
Most of America’s irrigated farmland grows crops that don’t directly feed humans but instead are used to feed animals or to produce ethanol for fuel. And most of that irrigation water comes from aquifers.
Those crops have expanded into areas that don’t have enough water to sustain them, affecting some important aquifers across the country by contributing to groundwater overuse. Aquifer depletion for animal feed is occurring in places including Texas, the Central Valley of California, the High Plains in Kansas, Arizona and other areas that lack enough water from rivers and streams to irrigate the crops.
Irrigated acreage for corn, about half of which goes toward animal feed, jumped sixfold between 1964 and 2017, federal numbers show. Irrigated acres for soybean, mostly used for animals, has jumped eightfold.
“The seemingly simple task of deciding what to eat is, in reality, intricately woven into a complex tapestry of interconnected factors,” said Mesfin Mekonnen, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Alabama who studies the water footprint of food. While there’s been growing awareness of issues like greenhouse gas emissions from ranching and agriculture, he said, “water usage in food production is still an aspect that is not widely discussed.”
The toll on aquifers, which supply 90 percent of America’s water systems, has been devastating. A Times investigation this year revealed that many of those aquifers are being severely overtaxed by agriculture and industry, and that the federal government has left oversight to the states, where tangles of rules are failing to protect those aquifers.
Food choices have long led to debates not only about personal health, but also animal welfare, cultural expectations and the role of government regulations in shaping people’s diets. The damage that animal agriculture is doing to fragile aquifers, while less documented, is particularly important: The decline of the aquifers could affect what Americans eat, and potentially become a threat to America’s food supply.
DAIRY FARMERS HEAD TO THE DESERT
In the early 1990s, dairy farmers in California found themselves increasingly squeezed by suburban sprawl, rising costs and regulations. Some began looking for a new place to set up shop, and the criteria were simple: Cheap, wide open land. Fewer rules. And access to plenty of water.
For many farmers, the answer was easy.
“We liked Idaho,” said Arie Roeloffs, who left California. He opened a dairy farm with his in-laws a hundred miles from Boise and is now vice president of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.
Idaho now has about 700,000 dairy cattle, more than any other state save California and Wisconsin. That shift has transformed the countryside. Drive across the high desert of southern Idaho, a mostly barren landscape of pale-brown sagebrush, and you’ll find sprawling cattle yards and emerald-green fields of alfalfa, grown to support one of the largest collections of dairy farms and cheese factories in the United States.
The transformation is all the more striking for the harshness of the land. This part of Idaho, where the Snake River curves south and west around the Sawtooth Mountains, gets just 10 inches of rain a year. Pumping groundwater has helped Idaho accommodate the influx of dairy farms and feed crops. (Visit The New York Times for the full article)
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