REGION
Thursday, May 13, 2021
East Oregonian
A7
Mega-dairies are piping water onto Oregon’s shrub-steppe
By DAWN STOVER
Columbia Insight
BOARDMAN — Cody
Easterday is still waiting
for the Oregon Department
of Agriculture to approve
his application, submitted
in June 2019, for a Confined
Animal Feeding Operation
near the city of Boardman.
Easterday, a 49-year-old
rancher whose family owns a
huge agricultural operation in
Washington state, proposes
to open a mega-dairy that
would be the second-larg-
est in Oregon. The Easter-
day Dairy would have up to
28,300 animals and use more
water than most cities in the
state.
The future of Easterday
Dairy is in doubt, however.
On March 31, Cody Easter-
day pleaded guilty to a “ghost
cattle scam” that defrauded
Tyson Foods and another
company out of more than
$244 million by charging for
the purchase and feeding of
animals that never existed.
The following day, a coali-
tion of activists testified at
an Oregon Senate Commit-
tee on Energy and Environ-
ment public hearing, voicing
support for a moratorium on
new or expanded mega-dair-
ies in the state. Many of
them pointed to the Easter-
day Dairy proposal, as well
as an earlier dairy cited for
hundreds of environmental
violations at the same loca-
tion, as reasons to hit the
pause button on dairies hous-
ing 2,500 animals or more.
At least four other
mega-dairies have settled in
the area around Boardman
and nearby Hermiston over
the past two decades. They
include Threemile Canyon
Farms, which has about
70,000 Jersey cows and
supplies 2.2 million pounds
of milk daily for the manufac-
turing of Tillamook products
familiar to all Oregonians
and an expanding national
consumer base. Threemile is
Oregon’s largest dairy opera-
tion and one of the two largest
in the United States.
This part of Northeast
Oregon, known to water
managers as the Lower
Umatilla Basin, is a region
that sees less than 9 inches
of precipitation annually.
It’s a desert that’s home to
four of Oregon’s seven Crit-
ical Groundwater Areas, so
designated because of water
supply problems.
The Lower Umatilla
Basin is also a state-desig-
nated Groundwater Manage-
ment Area, because of nitrate
contamination typically
associated with agricultural
wastes and fertilizers.
W hy are thirst y
mega-dairies, many from
out of state, drawn to a region
where both water quantity
and quality are threatened?
Using more water than
cities
Surprisingly, mega-dairy
farmers see the arid part
of Oregon’s environment
as a feature, not a bug. The
Umatilla Basin is a place
where enormous volumes
of liquid manure and waste-
water can not only be spread
on flat, dry land with little
danger of running off into
nearby streams, but also used
to grow profitable vegetable
crops as well as feed for cows.
“Mega-dairies put enor-
mous, concentrated demands
on Oregon’s water resources,”
says Brian Posewitz, a staff
attorney at the Portland-based
conservation group Water-
Watch, who testified at the
recent hearing.
The proposed Easterday
Dairy “would use about 20
million gallons of water per
day on an annual average, and
that’s by their own estimates,”
Posewitz says. “To put that in
perspective, the city of Bend’s
(population 100,000) munici-
pal water supply system uses
about 12 million gallons of
water a day.”
Dairies require drink-
ing water for cows — about
3 gallons of water for every
gallon of milk produced — as
well as water for operations
such as washing barns, clean-
ing equipment and misting
cows to keep them cool.
But the biggest water
demand at the mega-dairies
in the Boardman area is for
NASHCO/Contributed Photo
Despite being home to four of Oregon’s seven Critical Groundwater Areas, the Lower Uma-
tilla Basin has become a magnet for mega-dairies, such as Meenderinck Dairy, which began
operations here in 2012.
NASHCO/Contributed Photo
The Columbia River Processing manufacturing facility in Boardman makes a variety of Til-
lamook brand cheeses. For its milk supply, the factory relies on the mega-dairies that have
sprung up in the Lower Umatilla Basin.
day Dairy suggest
water to irrigate crop-
lands surrounding
that water levels
the dairies. This land
there have contin-
produces high-value
ued to drop over the
vegetable crops,
past five years, even
such as potatoes and
in wells that are not
onions, as well as
being used. “There is
Posewitz
alfalfa and triticale
not good news in the
for cows.
water level trend,”
The land also plays an wrote a hydrogeologist with
essential role as a waste the state’s Water Resources
disposal site. Easterday Dairy Department in a September
expects to generate more than 2020 internal memo.
40 million gallons of liquid
“There is a massive
manure and more than 88 amount of agricultural devel-
million gallons of wastewa- opment out there,” says John
ter annually — enough to DeVoe, executive director
fill almost 200 Olympic-size of WaterWatch. “They’re
mining water that is 20,000
swimming pools.
Dairies in the Lower years old or more.”
Umatilla Basin get their
Tillamook transplant
water from one or both of
Despite its water woes,
two sources: groundwater
pumped from wells drilled the Lower Umatilla Basin
into the desert floor, and has become a magnet for
surface water piped from mega-dairies. Stand Up to
local creeks and rivers, Factory Farms — a coalition
namely the Columbia River. of local, state and national
Both face constraints.
organizations concerned
The damming and diver- about the impacts of these
sion of rivers has been detri- dairies — alleges that’s
mental to salmon and other because Oregon has lax regu-
fish throughout the Pacific lation compared with states,
Northwest, and the Lower such as California, Washing-
Umatilla Basin is no different. ton and Idaho.
But the Lower Umatilla
Mega-dairies also exploit
stands out for its history of a loophole in Oregon’s
over-pumping groundwater. water laws. A water right is
In the absence of groundwa- required for most water uses,
ter studies, the state contin- but the law has an exemption
ued to issue groundwater
rights in the basin until the
early 1990s, when it became
obvious that those rights
could not be satisfied.
The aquifers in the basin
had become so depleted that
the state had to create four
Critical Groundwater Areas
that are now tightly regulated.
Some wells have been
drawn down 500 feet or more.
Most tap into basalt aquifers
formed by ancient lava flows,
which are productive for a
while but recharge slowly if
at all.
Data from nine obser-
vation wells in the deep
basalt aquifer near Easter-
for stock watering, and there
are no limits on the amount
of groundwater dairies can
pump for animals to drink.
A bill introduced this
year in the Oregon Senate
proposes to limit the exemp-
tion for livestock watering to
5,000 gallons a day, but it is
stalled.
There’s another reason
mega-dairies have come to
the Lower Umatilla: a cheese
factory.
The Willamette Valley
and the state’s coastal area
dominated Oregon’s dairy
market until about 20 years
ago.
That’s when the Tillamook
County Creamery Associa-
tion — a cooperative owned
by about 80 families that
operates a well-known cheese
factory in coastal Tillamook
County — built a second
manufacturing facility at the
Port of Morrow in Board-
man. Called Columbia River
Processing, the unmarked,
windowless plant would not
be recognizable as a Tilla-
mook factory except for its
stainless-steel milk silos and
the double-tanker Milky Way
trucks parked outside.
Milk is Oregon’s offi-
cial beverage and the
state’s fourth most valuable
commodity, worth about
$552 million in 2019. Amer-
icans are drinking less milk
than they once did, but eating
more cheese and yogurt made
from milk.
The Tillamook factory
relies on mega-dairies for its
milk supply. Foremost among
them is Threemile Canyon
Farms, which sprawls across
approximately 145 square
miles — an area the size of
Portland — southwest of
Boardman. The farm, which
sells all of its milk to Tilla-
mook, also grows alfalfa,
potatoes, onions, corn, peas,
blueberries and other crops.
The farm is owned by the
Fargo-based R.D. Offutt Co.
— founded by Ron Offutt,
the richest person in North
Dakota. It uses a “closed-loop
system” to recycle its own
wastes — fertilizing fields
with liquid and composted
manure, feeding potato peels
and other food-process-
ing waste to cows, heating
manure slurry in a digester
tank to capture biogas that
can be used for transportation
fuel and using the digester’s
dried leftovers as livestock
bedding.
What makes all this possi-
ble is a partnership with
Tillamook, which opened its
Boardman cheese factory in
2001.
Threemile Canyon Farms
established its dairy that
same year. Other mega-dair-
ies followed: Sage Hollow
Ranch, permitted for up to
8,700 cows, started building
a dairy southeast of Board-
man in 2009. The nearby
Meenderinck Dairy, permit-
ted for 3,000 cows, got up and
running in 2012.
Meanwhile, many smaller
dairies around the state have
closed their doors, reflecting
a national trend of consolida-
tion in the industry. In 1974,
there were more than 4,200
dairies in Oregon, with an
average of 21 cows each.
Today, Oregon has 247 dair-
ies, with an average of 877
cows each. Four large dair-
ies in Morrow and Umatilla
counties account for almost
40 percent of Oregon’s
216,614 dairy cattle.
“Unchecked consolidation
has led to geographical clus-
tering,” says Tarah Heinzen, a
senior staff attorney at Wash-
ington, D.C.-based Food &
Water Watch.
Problem or
poster child?
The Stand Up to Factory
Farms coalition is now lobby-
ing for a moratorium on
mega-dairies.
The coalition fears the
Easterday Dairy doesn’t
have the resources to run a
responsible dairy. They’re
asking the state to deny East-
erday’s application on the
basis that it failed to disclose
all relevant facts — specifi-
cally, that Cody Easterday
has admitted to perpetrating
a massive fraud and using
the proceeds to cover his
commodity futures trading
losses, and that two other
Easterday family enterprises,
Easterday Farms and Easter-
day Ranches, have declared
bankruptcy.
“It’s a serious concern that
an applicant would withhold
information,” says Heinzen.
The application is still
under state review.
Although proponents have
repeatedly proposed legisla-
tion to block permits for new
or expanded mega-dairies,
and the most recent Senate
bill got a public hearing, there
will be no further movement
in the 2021 legislative session.
Opponents of the bill say
a moratorium on mega-dair-
ies would have a negative
effect on what Paul Snyder,
executive vice president of
stewardship at the Tillamook
County Creamery Associa-
tion, describes as an industry
“success story.”
As far as the industry
is concerned, Threemile
Canyon Farms (TMCF) is
the poster child for best prac-
tices. The Innovation Center
for U.S. Dairy named TMCF
as one of three dairy farms
nationwide to receive its
2020 award for Outstanding
Dairy Sustainability, citing
TMCF’s closed-loop system
and high standards of animal
care. The farm has set aside
25% of its land as a wildlife
conservation area, managed
by The Nature Conservancy,
along with the water rights for
that land.
TCMF says it adheres
strictly to its goal of wasting
nothing. The farm’s wastewa-
ter is collected and injected
into the irrigation system.
The amount of water deliv-
ered to crops is tailored to
each field, and soil moisture
is monitored in real time to
prevent overwatering. Hoses
hanging from the center-pivot
irrigation system deliver
low-pressure water through
nozzles close to the ground,
minimizing evaporation
losses.
“What we’re able to offer
is a level of sophistication of
water management that not
every farm is able to bring
to bear, just because of the
scale that we have and the
resources that we have,”
says Tara May, spokesperson
for Offutt, the farm’s parent
company.
Threemile Canyon Farms
has two groundwater wells,
each permitted to produce
2.7 cubic feet per second;
this water is used for drinking
water, flushing manure and
other dairy operations. Irriga-
tion water is pumped from the
Columbia River through 231
miles of pipeline at rates up
to 482 cubic feet per second.
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