Milk Money by Kirk Kardashian

Author:Kirk Kardashian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press

CLEARING THE AIR

In 1997, at around the same time that Tom Frantz was discovering his new megadairy neighbors, Brent Newell, a summer intern at the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment (CRPE), was poring over a proposal by J. G. Boswell Co. to build a 55,000-cow suite of dairies in the Kings County, California, town of Hanford, in the Central Valley. Newell’s work basically formed the beginning of CRPE’S dairy campaign, a series of lawsuits designed to both raise awareness about the sudden influx of megadairies, and to change the policies and laws that regulate them.

Today, Newell is general counsel at CRPE, a nonprofit organization that provides legal representation and community organizing on things like the siting of hazardous waste dumps and pesticide drift—classic environmental justice and civil rights issues. And the dairy campaign he began in 1997 is still going, it’s just tied up in a legal limbo of massive proportions. For Newell, the heart of the issue hasn’t changed. The lax regulation of dairy farms in the Central Valley is a bona fide environmental justice issue: the more affluent parts of the country are benefiting from low milk prices, but not bearing the environmental and health costs occasioned by the industrial way of dairy farming.

This brings us back to the 55,000-cow farm complex J. G. Boswell had planned. You may have heard of J. G. Boswell: it’s one of the largest cotton producers in the world, and owns about 150,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley. The story of the company and its namesake was recounted in stunning detail in The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, a book that paints a picture of a guy unapologetic about the size and influence of his business. “I’m the bad guy because I’m big,” Boswell once said to the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not going to try to fight it. I can’t change an image and say, ‘Well, I’m righteous and good and all that.’ But I’m telling you … I’m not going to apologize for our size.”

One example of that size is the story of how in 1949 the company used its clout to encourage the construction of the Pine Flat Dam, which stopped the water from flowing into Tulare Lake. Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, Tulare was drained at Boswell’s urging and the bed is now farmland, owned by Boswell.

J. G. Boswell Co. tried to use that power to construct five dairies with 11,000 cows each. The plan wasn’t actually Boswell’s idea, but that of R. Sherman Railsback, the company’s chief of operations. Given the expertise in obtaining land use permits J. G. Boswell Co. had gained over the years, Railsback figured that he would market seven thousand acres of Boswell land with all the permissions necessary to run the dairy farms, and try to sell them to the dairy farmers escaping the sprawl of Southern California—the same cohort that was invading Frantz’s neighborhood.

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