When I hear the words, ‘dairy farm’, the mental image from childhood is a green, wide-open pasture, white fences, blue sky, a red barn and some black and white cows scattered about. The news of the plan to build a new dairy farm in Cherry Creek was not objectionable, at first.

The proposed farm is to be built on 45 acres and support 7,000 cows, according to news reports. That seems like a lot of cows. I did a little research and found that a common planning guideline is that a cow typically requires about 1.5 to 2 acres of average-quality pasture for a full grazing season. To get 7,000 cows on 45 acres you would need to concentrate them to over 150 cows per acre, and that doesn’t leave any room for a barn. They will not be grazing the green grass. Technically, putting 7000 cows on 45 acres, could be called a dairy farm but it could also be called a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) that produces milk. In New York State, a dairy farm with over 700 cows is considered a CAFO. There are currently 27 CAFOs in Chautauqua County registered with the DEC. Cherry Creek Dairy will be 10 times the threshold size and one of the largest in the state.

I don’t drink much milk anymore, but do enjoy cheese, ice cream, and yogurt, so I’m not opposed to dairy farms, even large ones. CAFOs, however, give me pause.

I did a little more research and found that an average dairy cow produces about 70 pounds of milk and 150 pounds of excrement (urine and manure) daily. Producing almost half a million pounds of milk every day sounds like a good thing for Cherry Creek, but what do you do with the million pounds of manure produced daily? 1 million pounds is 500 tons of excrement every single day, day in and day out, even on Christmas. The people proposing this ‘farm’ suggest anaerobic digesters will come to the rescue to produce ‘renewable’ natural gas.

An anaerobic digester uses bacteria to ferment excrement to produce a form of methane called biogas. A cow that is producing milk eats about 100 pounds per day of Total Mixed Ration (TMR), a specially formulated mixture of grain, forage, and supplements to ensure high caloric intake. There will be no grazing. In fact, it is unlikely that any of these cows will see grass or feel the sun. The biogas produced from their excrement is renewable energy only if their feed is renewable. In the US it is not. Non-renewable fossil fuels are used to plant, fertilize, harvest, and transport the feed, so anything produced from it is not renewable. Another by-product not captured in the manure are the burps the cow releases daily. 7000 cows (that’s a lot of cows) will burp 1 to 2 tons of methane, a very potent planet-warming gas, per day. Using terms like dairy farm and renewable natural gas instead of CAFO and biogas makes me think they’re trying to slip something by us.

Five hundred tons of excrement daily will require some pretty big anaerobic digesters. Switching units of measure, a single dairy cow produces around 18 gallons of manure per day. Cherry Creek Dairy would produce 126,000 gallons per day. For 7,000 cows, multiple million-gallon tanks or larger, specialized systems are needed. to collect all the stuff. In a typical dairy operation, manure is collected in a reception pit. Cherry Creek Dairy would require a pit large enough to collect over 100,000 gallons per day. A mixer keeps it homogenized so it doesn’t settle. A timed pump moves a specific volume into the digesters at set intervals throughout the 24-hour day. Just like a cow, the digesters have an input and output (The Volume Rule:What Goes In, Must Come Out). If you pump 1,000 gallons of manure into a digester daily, you will produce roughly 950-1,000 gallons of liquid digestate daily. The rest, less than 5%, is biogas. In addition to collecting 100,000 gallons of manure per day you will also have to collect and dispose of 93,000 gallons of digestate in addition to the biogas. There was no mention of this in the article. Neither was there any mention of contingency plans for the constant flow of ‘input’ should the digesters break down or need maintenance. It will not be pretty putting all this on 45 acres.

Cherry Creek Dairy does have a nice ring to it. As I said, I’m not necessarily opposed to large dairy farms, though I may be eating less cheese after doing this research. This will not be a dairy farm with grazing cows and green pastures but a factory of living machines with TMR as the input and milk and manure as the output. Opening up the county to humongous CAFOs gives me pause.

Tom Meara is a Jamestown resident.