The Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture (IARA) has serious concerns about Daisy Brand LLC’s plans to build a processing plant in Boone, Iowa. The Texas-based company is the largest cottage cheese and sour cream producer in the United States.

In an ideal world, the new plant could provide a needed boost for Iowa’s independent small-scale dairy farmers and the local Boone economy. But if CAFOs are built to accommodate production needs, the project could further degrade Iowa’s environment.

Given Iowa’s lax regulations of, and support for, industrial agriculture, IARA questions the impact the Daisy Dairy plant will have on neighbors and water quality.

Certain economic impacts are clear: the Boone facility is projected to create 106 jobs initially and hire up to another 149 people. In addition, Daisy Brand will need to expand Iowa’s dairy industry by 43,000 additional cows to meet production needs, an 18% increase in Iowa’s current dairy herd requiring an estimated 4,000 new dairy workers.

The Iowa Governor, Secretary of Agriculture, City of Boone, and Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) have all hailed Daisy Brand’s new plant which comes with a $67.2 million public investment.

However, that’s a lot of taxpayer money allocated to a company headquartered in Texas.

A plus for Iowa? The complex repercussions need to be examined closely.

Iowa’s independent dairy farmers are struggling, victims of the “get big or get out” agricultural trend, along with decreased demand and low prices. If 43,000 cows were spread among 100 farms and raised sustainably, they would provide a welcome boost to independent farmers and, therefore, their communities, schools, and environment. Cows with access to pasture distribute their manure where it can decompose naturally and build soil health.

IARA’s concern, however, is that the 43,000 cows will likely be raised in large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) with their resultant pollution of air and water.

In one year, 43,000 dairy cows can generate approximately 220 million gallons of manure, based on a Holstein’s daily production of 14 gallons/day. Due to the proliferation of hog and chicken CAFOs, Iowa already has a glut of manure which results in over-application on some fields. The inevitable runoff into streams and rivers pollutes 751 waterways in the state.

Currently, Boone County already has 41 CAFOs, and the six bordering counties (Story, Polk, Dallas, Greene, Webster, and Hamilton) have a total of 475 according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources database.

The need for approximately 4,000 workers to staff dairy operations for an additional 43,000 cows raises other questions. Dairy CAFOs frequently rely on large numbers of immigrants and refugees, documented and not, to staff the facilities. Finding enough documented immigrants is a challenge for farms throughout the country, and recent legislation through SF 2340 makes Iowa an especially risky place for undocumented workers for whom it’s also illegal to even hold a driver’s license.

Does Daisy Brand have a plan to help dairy operations fill these jobs? With the depressed dairy market, will they be able to purchase milk at price points that allow farm owners to operate at or above the cost of production and pay a living wage to their workers?

Finally, a concentration of 43,000 cows, many shipped in from other states, raises another concern: H5N1 highly pathogenic avian flu, which has already infected at least 79 herds in 9 states. Avian flu is increasingly jumping to other mammals, including now at least three cases in humans. With Iowa’s small dairy industry, our state has so far escaped infection, but will bringing in so many cows tempt fate?

If Daisy Brand can create an environment that supports the expansion of small-scale independent farms in Iowa, then it can be a boon for rural economies and a win/win situation that IARA welcomes.

However, if CAFOs will be the primary source of milk for the plant, then this “exciting new announcement” will create an additional blight in rural Iowa that IARA opposes. IARA believes that taxpayer money should support small farms that have a positive impact on the lives and environment of Iowans and not large-scale agribusiness.

The Iowa Alliance for Responsible Agriculture (IARA) is a diverse coalition of community, state, and national organizations and individuals who are concerned about the harmful impacts of factory farms and are each working to promote traditional and ethical agriculture in Iowa. IARA supports a statewide factory farm moratorium and a resurgence of traditional and humane livestock production.