UnFairlife: How Buckeye factory dairy farming can trigger bird flu pandemic

A calf born into the dairy industry stands separated from its mother. It struggles to take its first steps in the hot Arizona sun before it is wrangled by its hooves and thrown into a wooden crate.

Its mother chases after it briefly.

However, it’ll never know a mother's love, even if it survives in the desert heat.

That’s the life newborn calves experienced daily at Butterfield Dairy and Rainbow Valley Dairy in Buckeye, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit.

Established in 2008, Butterfield now houses over 25,000 cows.

Its purpose was to farm dairy for a large corporation, Coca-Cola-based Fairlife. Before corporate mega-farms, the U.S. dairy industry was mainly a low-profile, family-based operation in the Midwest.

Over half of the farms in the 90’s were 200 cows or less and operated by farming families. That number shrank to approximately 20% a mere two decades later, according to USDA data.

These newer mega diaries, mainly in the warmer southwest, are no longer labored by families and choice farmhands but a plentiful supply of underpaid, unvetted migrant workers, often unsupervised on Phoenix’s sweltering summer days.

Average-sized farms have struggled mightily compared to large farms, only turning profits thrice in the past 20 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The end sum, according to experts, is a convergence of corporate greed that manifests itself into large-scale animal abuse, corporate or ‘checkoff’ asset collusion, the demise of family farms and the spread of biological or potentially infectious pollution, all to line the coffers of mega farmers and corporate dairy executives.

InBuckeye sourced data and spoke with animal rights, agricultural and antitrust policy experts to illuminate issues, paint a picture of dairy in Arizona and explore tactics by corporations used to exploit communities at a severe cost.

Blood in the water

Animal Recovery Mission, an investigative animal welfare organization, released an undercover video investigation into two dairy farms in Buckeye in late February.

The videos allegedly illustrate a criminal violation of animal cruelty laws, according to ARM in their federal suit. The footage shows cows or calves being pulverized, stabbed or shot, carcasses being discarded in the desert and bones intentionally being broken as punishment, all by workers of Buckeye-based Butterfield and Rainbow Valley Dairies.

ARM contends the careless and illegal discarding of carcasses caused an environmental catastrophe.

The suit claims farm workers dumped off carcasses near waterways abutting a suburban subdivision and state trust land, “causing algae blooms indicating water pollution from the calf carcasses.”

Richard 'Kudo' Couto, founder of ARM, told InBuckeye the toxic wastewater that allegedly came from dairy farm pollution may have mixed into waterways and wastewater around Phoenix or the valley.

“These waterways obviously fill up and go straight into the greater Phoenix areas -- the more populated areas,” Kudo said. “And these go right by all of these farms, where these babies and carcasses are being dumped, as well as the sludge.”

October reports in California highlight similar circumstances with cows, who died from bird flu and were left baking in dairy farms. Kudo believes there may be a connection between his investigation and the spread of bird flu in some positive Buckeye farms.

“There are a few farms in the greater Buckeye area that just went positive for the bird flu,” he said. “I believe the first traces of bird flu came from sewage areas, but I don't know if it was either with chickens or with dairies. I would imagine dairies with the amount of dairies in the greater Buckeye area.”

The bird flu can spread through contaminated water, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Contaminated sewage water is regularly tested by the CDC and was found positive around the time of the ARM investigation, according to CDC data. Birds can be seen basking in the standing algae water in a video ARM shared with InBuckeye.

Investment researchers have long speculated factory farming to be a risky venture for a variety of reasons.

Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return, a collaborative investor network that raises awareness of risks in the global food sector, has outlined at least 28 environmental, social and governance risks associated with these mega-farms, with bird flu being the chief concern.

Kudo also told InBuckeye that the unvetted workers who were abusive and in first contact with the animals, left the state in fear of prosecution.

The price of milk

Bullet holes pepper the rusted sign of Rainbow Valley dairy farm. The old sign stands and an ominous warning of danger.

That and maybe the few other signs with bullets holes behind them.

Down the road, dozens of frenzied birds fly from the state trust land's recreation area and dive onto the feed of cows on a De Jong farm. Lined shoulder to shoulder, dozens of cows feed alongside birds who perch on their meal. Huddled in mass they breathe the same air and compete for the same sustenance.

Experts at the Center for Biological Diversity claim these huddled cow populations feeding alongside birds at farms similar to ones in Buckeye is prime breeding ground for virus spread. Despite this, factory farms like Rainbow Valley or Butterfield continue to remain and thrive.

Eliminating a few mega farms could sway milk prices drastically, causing instability.

The owner of the Butterfield mega farm, Thomas De Jong, bought his farmland in 2003 and established his first dairy in 2008. He claims the family name has been in the dairy business since 1620, according to reports.

Kudo is familiar with that family name.

Donald De Jong, a Texas-based mega-dairy farmer, was the subject of one of his 2019 ARM investigations. His farm, Natural Prairie Dairy in Texas, was also accused of animal abuse.

At that time, Donald was a member of the Board of Directors of Fairlife, the Coca-Cola-based milk brand and the chairman of Select Milk Producers, a dairy cooperative that participated in the national dairy “checkoff” program, which funds milk interests.

A checkoff is an entity that extracts money from all dairy farmers as a mandatory payment. This checkoff is essentially a corporate lobby, and their financials are opaque, according to antitrust authorities.

Austin Frerick, one such expert on agricultural and antitrust policy and the author of Barons: Money, Power and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, asserts the lobby, in turn, works to consolidate power to mega farmers in the dairy industry.

“There's just no oversight of the money, especially dairy. It's a $600 million pot of money yearly, and there's no oversight,” Frerick said in an interview with InBuckeye. “It’s just kind of an open secret slush fund.”

Arizona dairy farmers contribute 15 cents for every 100 pounds of milk sold. This payment often squeezes smaller farms with less cushion, according to Frerick.

Kudo believes most of the Fairlife suppliers are De Jong-associated dairies that have amassed various incremental advantages, larger market shares, kickbacks and preferential treatment.

“The De Jong family is very good at hiding and embedding different corporations under different LLC names,” Kudo said. “It's very hard to track everything that this family owns, but what I can say is it's the majority.”

Kudo told InBuckeye Donald and Mike McCloskey, Fairlife’s founder, are longtime friends who are co-dependent for success.

Frerick likens these farmers to dairy-based capital asset managers.

“The goal of corporate executives is monopoly, and that's how you can gouge,” Frerick said.

A warm, bad smell

Phoenix in 2023 had its hottest summer on record, which was surpassed a year later, according to news reports.

News organizations also reported in 2023, that De Jong, the owner of Butterfield in Buckeye, built an innovative system to capture methane from decomposing cow manure, which would otherwise be released as atmospheric gas on his farm.

According to scientists, methane is a leading contributor to global warming.

De Jong claimed much of the methane would be captured and pushed into a profitable energy pipeline, making his operation clean. Reporters from the hottest city in America, Phoenix, trusted his word and published a story on his deeds.

Others argue, however, that biogas capture systems seen in mega-farms like De Jong’s is bad news.

Nature published a 2019 study indicating that manure digesters showed significant leaks and that proponents overestimated their benefits. Experts also claim that pulling together methane and manure resources often leads to higher release rates and more instances of harm.

Methane pipeline leaks, for example, contribute to the loss of soil viability and smother vegetation that may help lower heat island effects, according to the Conservation Law Foundation.

Research published in 2023 through the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute also outlines some correlations between methane emission and localized temperature, claiming that “as the average methane emission per day increases, the yearly average temperature is likely to increase as well.”

On grass-based farms, manure is often broken into carbon dioxide and, to a much lesser degree, methane, according to Food and Water Watch.

Despite this, milk lobbyists have convinced the government that methane capture devices are worth funding, essentially building a capture pipeline upwind and westward from Arizona.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $200 million in 2021 alone on digester subsidies in the form of green payments. This coordinated a strategy to give milk barons even more revenue over the family farmer, Frerick claims in Barons.

The biogas system’s feasibility is being challenged in ARM’s federal court case. ARM claims Fairlife deceptively establishes a brand based on its environmental sustainability accolades which are simply false or misleading, according to the filing.

The suck

Lawmakers have long accused major corporations of anti-competitive practices and collusion to siphon money out of consumers and enrich stockholders or executives year after year.

Patterns of corporate wrongdoing are met with meager fines despite clear intent to defraud or pollute.

Particular economic theory suggests that CEOs are graded on continual growth by their stockholders, which manifests an unsustainable incentive to grow at any cost.

Coca-Cola and its counterpart Pepsi, for instance, were criticized in October for reducing the size of their products but not the prices. Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean claimed in a letter to both that their actions are a sleight of hand called shrinkflation, used to garner more profits and avoid higher taxes during COVID-era inflation.

Some additionally believe that migrant labor may be another example of Coke's incremental advantage over family farms.

Most milk workers are reported to be illegal migrants in corporate-connected dairy farms, according to CBS News. They’re often underpaid, inconsequential and unsafe, according to Frerick.

“I covered that a worker died. He got sucked into one of those manure digesters,” he said. “Here's the thing, I didn't file a FOIA. This wasn't me knocking on doors. The records were right there in OSHA. Nothing was ever reported.”

The incident happened at one of the most visited tourist attractions in the state of Indiana, Fairlife and McCloskey-based Fair Oaks Farms, according to Frerick.

Barons outlines a $10,500 fine for the worker’s death. No civil suits, outrage, or calls for action from advocacy organizations. Barons also details instances of underage labor at some slaughterhouses, with one worker being as young as 13 years old.

One of many things he believes corporate fines do no justice for.

“Whatever you think of immigration and this other stuff, nothing will change until executives do a perp walk,” Frerick said.

Coca-Cola, Fairlife, the Arizona Department of Agriculture, Butterfield Dairy and Rainbow Valley Dairy all did not respond to a request for comment or interview when informed of the nature of the report.

Michael McDaniel can be reached at [email protected]. We invite our readers to submit their civil comments or opinions on this or any issue. Email [email protected].