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CRPE's CAMPAIGNS
The Dairy Project:
Protecting Valley Residents from Mega-dairy Pollution
 Since 1998, San Joaquin Valley residents and grassroots community organizations have stood up and fought the largest and most polluting animal factories taking over rural communities. CRPE represents those communities struggling against the powerful and well-financed California dairy industry. Acting on numerous requests from client communities facing dairies – and their associated flies, water pollution, air pollution and of course pleasant manure odors – CRPE set up its Dairy Project in 1998.
The Dairy Project’s first major victory came when Corcoran residents, represented by CRPE, forced the agri-business giant J.G. Boswell Co. to abandon plans to build a four-dairy complex that would have housed 45,000 cows and produced the equivalent waste of a city with 900,000 people. (The average California dairy has only about 700 cows.)
Residents of the farmworker community of Arvin, represented by CRPE, forced Kern County to prepare California’s first-ever Environmental Impact Report for an animal factory. The Borba cousins from Chino got the green light from an accommodating Kern County Board of Supervisors to build a 28,000 cow, two-dairy development about five miles southwest of Bakersfield. The Board of Supervisors claimed these animal factories would create no impact on the environment or the health of local residents. A CRPE lawsuit put an end to the Borba’s fast-track permit process and, together with allies at the Sierra Club, a subsequent lawsuit forced a total of three environmental impact reports that disclosed massive environmental impacts, imposed protective measures for air and water quality impacts, and provided Kern County residents an opportunity to participate in the permit process.
A lawsuit by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer compelled Tulare County to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Report that analyzed all dairy development in the nation’s leading milk-producing county. CRPE subsequently sued Tulare County in 2000 for failing to prepare an adequate Environmental Impact Report. The County quickly settled and has yet to prepare a sufficient analysis of the industry’s environmental effects, a failure that has stopped nearly ninety permit applications totaling 550,000 cows.
San Joaquin Valley residents, by participating in these and other local land use decisions with the help of CRPE, have significantly altered the good ol’ boy dairy permit process. Since the project began, only a handful of projects have proceeded to construction, some enduring years of community and legal opposition. Now, more than 100 land use permit applications totaling more than 750,000 cows for new and expanded factory dairies are being processed while even more applications continue to be filed with Valley Counties.
The strategic victory CRPE won means that all of these delayed dairy projects must comply with the far more stringent requirements of SB 700.
Since the effective date of SB 700, January 1, 2004, the dairy project has entered a new stage: forcing dairies’ compliance with the New Source Review and Title V permit programs under the Clean Air Act and ensuring that the Air Resources Board and Air Districts lawfully implement the new Large Confined Animal Facility permit program. CRPE has already intervened in a dairy industry lawsuit that sought to prevent the Valley Air District from permitting dairies. Although the industry and the District entered into a cozy back-room deal, CRPE prevented the industry from obtaining an injunction that would have prevented the District from permitting dairies.
Caroline Farrell, directing attorney in Delano, and Susana De Anda, our Delano-based organizer, staff the dairy project in the Valley, while Brent Newell and Avinash Kar provide litigation support from San Francisco. The Dairy Project has been able to achieve significant victories for public health in the Valley with funding from the California Endowment and Equal Justice Works (formerly the National Association for Public Interest Law).
Selected Cases
CRPE v. Tulare County:
Getting the country’s #1 dairy county to clean up its act »
Association of Irritated
Residents v. Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control
Board:
Forcing the Water Board to
do its job » Save Our Shafter
v. Kern County:
Protecting Shafter from the
Vanderham Dairy »
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