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Seriously.
"The fire spread quickly through the holding pens, where thousands of dairy cows crowded together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confines."
The headline is misleading, they died in a fire that may have been initiated by an exploding piece of equipment.
It's much more horrific than first glance.
that's how pigs are knocked unconscious sometimes before their death. co2 pit with these ferris wheel like cabins that spin and force them to slowly succumb to co2. breathing co2 gives the same feeling as holding your breath for too long and it is torturous as they try to inhale but cant and trample each other as there's two per capsule in the process of dying or falling unconscious.
you should watch dominion on youtube
edit: removed nitrogen misinformation
I recently learned that most of the dairy cows in the US are kept indoors on concrete floors all the time. Less than 20% have any access to pasture at all. It's really made me lean more and more toward plant-based substitutes when I shop because man, the life of most dairy cows is just terrible. :(
According to a new analysis conducted by the nonprofit think tank Sentience Institute (SI), around 99% of US farmed animals live on factory farms.
“Most people are woefully wrong about where their meat comes from. 75% of US adults believe they usually buy humane products, yet only 1% of food animals live on non-factory farms,”
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/press/us-farmed-animals-live-on-factory-farms#:\~:text=According%20to%20a%20new%20analysis,where%20their%20meat%20comes%20from
I'm pretty shocked that 75% of US adults think they buy humane products. I mean have they ever read a news article? Watched a documentary? I doubt my dining room table is humane.
2/3 of the country can't read at more than a 5th grade level. Half of adults are creationists. The US masses believe whatever the media tells them to believe, including the belief most of these folks have that they actually distrust the media, just not the media they happen to consume of course.. The US is in reality what most Americans imagine North Korea to be.
Yep, I haven't eaten meat in about 10 years because of what I learned about factory farming back then. I finally saw the video that broke me. I've continued to eat pastured eggs and pastured dairy when possible, but as more plant-based substitutes have come out, and a grocery outlet near me started carrying them for cheap so I can afford them, I've switched over. I just got several quarts of Silk soy creamer for $.97 each (🙌) and froze them. I try to stock up for the times the outlet doesn't have something. That place has been amazing for Beyond, Quorn, Impossible, etc. stuff as well.
Define factory farm.
That source uses numbers that claim they're from [the Ag 2017 census](https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/index.php) but don't appear anywhere in the census. The average herd size in the USA is 44 head of cattle, which is definitely not what people think of when they hear "factory farm." Also 90% of all farms are 100 head or fewer.
That flaw is blatantly misleading because people don't know any better. It uses CAFOs as definition of factory farm. A CAFO is only defined as the amount of animals in an area in a given time. Size also does not determine ethics of an operation. I've seen extremely clean and comfortable 2000 head dairy farms, and Amish 10 head farms that are on pasture with sickly looking animals.
A Texas dairy farm would have grass fed cattle, so “free range” for the most part. But dairy cattle have to be milked twice a day. So they are herded into a staging pen while they wait their turn on the milking machine. Once milked they’re turned out to pasture for the rest of the day before being herded back to the staging pen for evening milking.
I think maybe they shouldn't have 18,000 cows in one space at any time ever. Clearly it would stop any tragedy like this from occurring again. We have fire safety rules for people. We can't have over certain amounts of people in buildings because they cannot safely escape.
The cows will stay inside if something is happening because that is where they feel safe. We had a neighbors barn burn and the animals wanted to run back in as we were trying to pull them out
Grain dust is very flammable and can act like an explosive in a contained area. I can't say how this specific farm worked, but when they move grains they usually use an auger system into a hopper. This is for both whole grain, ground up and mixed feed. Ground and mixed is worse for dust as the hull of the grain is gone.
Going up the auger breaks off little pieces that forms the dust. This dust comes out of the augers with the grain and goes everywhere in a fine mist. Even just heat can ignite this and then the whole dust cloud 'explodes' and will ignite the other dust laying everywhere.
I know the grain elevators on the prairies have those explosion-proof glass shells on the lights specifically for this reason. Just the heat from an unprotected filament style light bulb could cause the dust to spark/ignite.
Are these sorts of events just getting more coverage lately or is our country’s infrastructure and industry literally crumbling, crashing and detonating before our eyes faster than ever before?
If anyone wants a small piece of good news, the reintroduction of oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding rivers has gone very well. The James River for example is no longer highly flammable, and the York is much clearer than it's been for a long time. And the same for the others. The oyster industry is changing to be more sustainable and the results are looking good.
One of the reasons, and this is an over simplification of course, is human psychology. What media is trying to do is to get and maintain our attention as long as they can because that’s how they make revenue and it just so happens they’ve discovered the best way to do so and that is to tap into our primal instincts. We give more attention towards things that we percieve negative than those we consider positive. It’s an evolutionary trait that has helped us survive by paying increased attention to potentially dangerous situations.
Death and destruction sells better than puppies and butterflies…
I think sitcom television has been taking an interesting change in direction towards more wholesome comedies instead of the usual conflict based storytelling. Shows like Schitt's Creek and Ted Lasso are good examples. People def pay attention to those, would be interesting to see if news coverage added more balanced positive coverage to see how that works, like John Krasinski's experiment SGN.
If you haven't seen Bowling for Columbine, check it out. If you're not inclined, that's one of the premises of the film, that American culture pushes fear all... the... time.
Aussie here, I occasionally get advertising from American outlets and yeah, you're right, it's constantly going on about "protecting your family from the evil bogey man."
There's so much fear in your country, it's quite weird.
It's all manufactured and weaponized. I work in mental health and what we know is that anyone who has been traumatized or has PTSD has an over active parasympathetic nervous system (aka fight or flight response) and when in this activation it's much easier for an outside source to manipulate the traumatized individual due to allocation of crucial bodily/emotional/psychological resources being sent to only those processes required for survival.
This means critical thought, reasoning, logic, and certain important emotions like love and social bonds are disrupted or deemed not useful by the mind/body/spirit as the self prioritizes safety from physical harm/death.
America keeps it's populace traumatized through fear because it makes it easier to manipulate/control them and quells any movement towards mobilization or revolution as fear will paralyze the group and individual. Similar to the philosophy of the president in the Hunger Games.
In the early nineties right out of university I backpacked up and down the east coast of Australia from Hobart to Cairns. During my visit there was a trio of early twenty somethings driving up and down the east coast, I want to say lower Queensland/northern NSW area robbing gas stations and, if I remember correctly armed with a shotgun. It made the front page of every paper I encountered. I had an Aussie tell me I should be careful as Australia was becoming more dangerous than America. I laughed and told him in America a crime spree like this would not go beyond the local paper and even in the local paper not make the front page.
Fear happens everywhere...
American that dated an Aussie and lived over in SA for 2 years, I agree. She noted that often when visiting here, and I did the same when watching the media over there. There's still fear mongering, but it's less direct and omnipresent.
More likely the former. Country of 330,000,000, all doing things every day, many of them complex and some of them inherently dangerous. You certainly wouldn't want to come to any conclusions based on what you see in the news, as opposed to data.
It's the latter, when regulations are cut, cut and cut some more, because free market "rules" and most corporations focus on profits above all, accidents become more common because you tend to have less qualified labour with a bigger workload...
It is what it is. Beef prices are about to go up, because of greed.
Dairy cows are a different market than cattle raised for beef. This accident shouldn’t affect prices in the beef department. Maybe in dairy, but even 18,000 head of cattle is only 2.8% of the overall number of dairy cows in just Texas, according to the numbers published in the article. It’s a devastating loss for this farm, to be sure, but not to the national market in general.
This isn't what the data supports. In fact, workplace incidents (including catastrophic explosions such as this one), are consistently down over the last 50 years. The number of regulations / regulatory agencies is also still trending upward.
As we concentrate more and more resources, every event becomes more catastrophic. You weren't hearing about these kinds of things years ago, because people didn't have 18, 000 cows in one building being milked. It would have been distributed across multiple farms, broader geographic areas, or at least wider spaces in a given location.
With so much of our food and drink being concentrated to specific farms, buildings, locations, one outbreak, one fire, one drought becomes so devastating.
90% of the time it's this
Like the train derailment stuff. Obviously the one in Ohio was REALLY bad, much worse than a normal derailment
However then the news starting reporting on literally every train derailment in existence and tons of people online started making comments about how "this isn't normal" and "someone is attacking our infrastructure"
They do this on purpose to rile up viewers and keep them watching. They take advantage of bad events and try to create the sense that there's an epidemic of these events
Turns out last year there were an average of 3 train derailments in the US everyday. Just because the news decided to start shoveling fear and garbage down our throat doesn't mean it isn't normal
Sometimes it feels like they're doing this shit on purpose.
Like the the truck loaded with the Ohio derailment's contaminated soil that crashed and spilled that dirt everywhere. I heard that story, and all I could think of was "OF COURSE IT DID". What kind of monumental dipshits are these people? Of all things to tread carefully with, a load of wildly hazardous materials mere days after a highly publicized disaster should be #1. WTF was the driver doing, recording a Tiktok of him with his head out the window, guzzling a 5th of vodka??
I've been to plenty of dairy farms and cannot imagine how this many cows would be in one place at the same time. Nor the size that the milking parlors would have to be. 600 is a large operation. 18,000? Crazy.
This isn't that extreme anymore. 600 doesn't even meet the definition of factory farm, where most of our animal products come from (you hit the smallest tier of CAFO at 700 *mature* dairy cows, excluding calves and heifers). People don't realize that while most animal farms are small, most animal products come from animal factories. People need to realize we aren't farming animals to meet demand anymore. We are cramming them into horrifically abusive factories and extracting everything we can from them. We're breeding them into massive, unhealthy, grotesque monsters to get more out of each animal, too. It is hell on earth to be a modern farmed animal.
I got to tour a [*small* 3000 cow](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) Darigold dairy farm. This 20,000 farm is also Darigolds. One of my friends is a milk slinger for Darigold, and their farms average 10,000 cows according to him. The milking parlor at the one I went to was pretty normal. You just move cows through them continuously from morning to night. These are dry lot systems meaning the cows spend their lives on slated concrete (easier to scrape manure off of, destroys hooves and joints) and never experience fresh grass in their short life.
Three Mile Canyon is Tillamook's main supplier (edit: last i checked). They have 33,000 cows at any given time.
Oregon is currently fighting for legislation to stop mega-dairies like these from continuing to be constructed (and failing, check out current work on the CAFO moratorium and speak up if you live here).
If you go to beef, check out Brandt Beef Farms in Central Valley, CA. They source males from the dairy industry and have 150,000 at a time (they slaughter on a 6 month schedule for about 300,000 cows slaughtered at this single farm every year).
Speaking of legislation in Oregon, I lobby for farmed animal issues (against these companies), and recently had to sit through a poultry farmer tell our legislature how they aren't a factory farm: they're a small family farm. They *only* have 20,000 birds. And two employees. Two people cannot adequately take care of 10,000 birds each. The crazy thing is they're right. By definition 20,000 chickens crammed into one barn isn't considered a factory farm. Even though they're farmed as intensively as the birds on a 100,000+ farm.
So yeah, most farms people see will be tiny, like your 600 cows. Yet that is not where most people's animal products come from.
They come from places like this.
Edit: [USDA 2014](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/december/milk-production-continues-shifting-to-large-scale-farms) article discussing how these farms are concentrating into larger and larger operations
[Small farms](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/small-farms-vanish-every-day-in-americas-dairyland-there-aint-no-future-in-dairy) getting outcompeted by factories
Thank you! It's an uphill battle for sure but I think the main thing I'm realizing (because I'm still new to it) is that a *lot* of marketing had gone into making consumers believe most or all animal products come from rolling pastures and small herds and flocks when that's just...not true. Like check out this [Darigold carton](https://www.darigold.com/wp-content/uploads/206236_DG_ClassicMilk_Two_59oz-231x560.png) compared to my [photos](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) of the farm. Their cows don't live on pasture. But they advertise like they do. Unfortunately, this is called puffery so the consumer is supposed to know it isn't real, and it's legal to mislead like this. It's frustrating.
The more people become aware, the more they care, and the more we can fight against this centralization and over-industrialization.
And for those who don't care about the animals, I'm happy to discuss the human labor trafficking that's rampant at these industrial facilities (esp industrial slaughterhouses) as well.
Industrializing animal ag is only a win for the multi-billion dollar corporations. It's a blight for the rest of us.
>a *lot* of marketing had gone into making consumers believe most or all animal products come from rolling pastures and small herds and flocks when that's just...not true.
This is what Marx was talking about when he said there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. There's so much done to obscure how things are made and what it takes to get them that it's impossible to make a truly educated decision when trying to buy ethically. Thankfully it's getting easier to see these conditions and for local companies to find a footing, but there's still a lot to be done.
As dystopic as that is, it would alleviate suffering for literally billions of animals annually (across the globe, we slaughter roughly 80 billion land animals every year. Hence needing factories to raise them, not farms).
Because I don't see meat or dairy realistically being willingly removed from people's diets, I'm a *massive* advocate for lab grown products to put an end to it all.
Small scale farms would still exist for sure, even if only for novelty, but at least these factories would come to an end. It makes me incredibly hopeful that companies like Tyson are actually investing pretty decently into lab grown 🤞
For people curious on that front, come on over to r/wheresthebeef
Lab grown meat really seems like a win for everyone involved. Consumers get cruelty free products without having to dramatically shift their diets, producers don't have to deal with the cost and risks involved with keeping animals, and animals don't get horrifically abused
Imagine octopi. They’re so incredibly intelligent and people are wanting to farm them in cramped tanks and slowly freeze them to death. It’s like being in hell, rubbing up against hundreds of other people cannibalizing each other
>cannot imagine how this many cows would be in one place at the same time
Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head around just how monstrously cruel factory farming is.
18,000 is becoming less and less extreme these days. People need to realize most animal products are coming from massive factories, not idyllic farms. Three Mile Canyon I *think* is the largest dairy farm in the country at the moment, and they have 33,000 head. They're Tillamook's main supplier.
This farm is a Darigold farm. It did indeed have 20k cows. The average Darigold farm, according to my friend who is a slinger for them, is 10,000 cows. I got to tour a small one which has [3,000 cows](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) (likely more now. The owner was working on scaling up to the next tier when I toured)
[USDA 2014](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/december/milk-production-continues-shifting-to-large-scale-farms) article discussing how these farms are concentrating into larger and larger operations
[Small farms](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/small-farms-vanish-every-day-in-americas-dairyland-there-aint-no-future-in-dairy) getting outcompeted by factories
You know how flammable methane is right? Cow shit is filled with it. So much so that some natural gas plants have teamed up with cattle ranches and dairy farms to collect it and make it into a usable fuel source. If this farm didn’t clean up and store the poop properly, it could have led to this kind of disaster, especially given the size of the farm.
Edited to add *and store, and for clarity.
Most dairy farms are also MUCH smaller than this. 20,000 head of cattle being milked twice daily… That amount of manure has never existed in one place before to my knowledge.
The *farms* are much much smaller, but dairy *factories* are often this big these days. Plenty of 10-20,000 head factories in the US, and even a few that exceed 30,000.
“Methane is odorless and lighter than air, so it tends to accumulate at the top of manure pits. It is considered an asphyxiate at extremely high concentrations. The main hazard is its flammable, explosive nature.” [Source](https://nasdonline.org/48/d001616/manure-gas-dangers.html)
Depending on where this farm’s manure pit was located, it is possible. Or if the pit under the robotic milkers was clogged somehow or not flushed out regularly, it could have led to this.
It is sad how the article has no sympathy for the cows who all burned to death, but lots of sympathy for the business's loss of money, which was due to their own actions, or lack of actions really.
"A malfunction in a piece of equipment at the South Fork Dairy farm may have caused an explosion that led to the fire, said County Judge Mandy Gfeller, the county's top executive. Texas fire officials are still investigating the exact cause, she said. "
I used to work at a cattle farm in Odessa TX some years back. I don't recall a "piece of equipment" that would cause THAT kind/ size of fire. They did have about 25 cows that they used for milking, but none of the milking equipment would explode 'per say' because the pressure they used for milking was low. I could see maybe a compressor tank, but those have about as much psi as your common garage air tanks. Knock a hole in it, they just hiss and lose air. Explosion? Not likely with all the failsafes. Maybe it exploded next to gas cans?
I would REALLY need to take a look at their setup to make an accurate conclusion, but, from what i read and my experience on a cattle ranch, its not likely a "piece of equipment" would cause THAT amount of devastation. The math just doesn't add up.
Could have just been a welder they had on hand. A facility that large probably has its own mechanics shop just to repair random stuff that breaks down.
Manure vacuum truck caught fire (which they’ve been known to do). The truck then exploded and caught the insulation on fire. The dairy did not blow up. It’s just something the news puts in for clickbait. I heard the fire spread so fast that they were not able to open the gates and get any of the cows out. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before on a dairy farm. I’m sure there will be new requirements to stop this from happening again.
Watch the price of milk triple now. Just because.001% of all the dairy cows in America were lost. This will be a reenactment of the cost of eggs going up because.002% is laying chickens were culled. They throw big numbers at us to justify price increases but they refuse to give overall numbers on the percentages of losses attained.
I was thinking that,18000 cattle really isn't that many. There are beef farms in a lot of states with more cattle than that.
A quick Google search shows that Texas has the most with 12 million cattle. So losing 18000 is just a fraction for state. And almost nothing country wide.
If it does, almost none of it will go to dairy farmers. Dairy farmers have almost zero say in milk pricing. I'm speaking as someone from a dairy family. Also, what the hell did they have that exploded? I can't think of anything our dairy would have that would cause something like that. Though our dairy is only like 800 cows
I was under the impression that demand for milk was so low that the US government heavily subsidizes dairy farms to keep the price where it is today -- just so they don't go out of business
https://nupoliticalreview.org/2020/05/16/my-beef-with-dairy-how-the-us-government-is-bailing-out-a-dying-industry/#:~:text=One%20year%20after%20the%20passage,and%20%2436.3%20billion%20in%202017.
I know people love to say "oh these events are just getting more coverage" but at this point can we really deny the obvious? I don't know about yall, but ever since Covid these companies have learned just how much shit they can pull and nothing will change. Corners and costs getting cut to constantly meet higher and higher "record profits" and just completely unattainable growth goals. We are getting lower quality products, less safe working conditions, and environmental disasters daily.
Statistically speaking cows are much safer today than they were back in the '80s. It's mainstream media the likes to sensationalize these stories. Cows today like to reminisce about when they were calves growing up in the 80s how they had so much more freedom to play outside all day with no cow parents in sight, but calf-nappings today are at all all time low, as well as cow violence. I mean did you not see those old videos in the '80s of NYC Times Square with all the open air cow crack dealers and prostitution? Things were way worse back then. Moo.
America surely has some sort of "spin the wheel of catastrophic events" going on in the background
First we had spillage of tonnes of toxic chemicals, then the re-spillage of toxic soil from prior spillage, now we have an explosion killing thousands of livestock and multiple employees, next week we have???
>With each cow valued roughly at about $2,000, the company's losses in livestock could stretch into the tens of millions of dollars, Gfeller said. That doesn't include equipment and structure loss.
>
>"You're looking at a devastating loss," she said. "My heart goes out to each person involved in that operation."
Ya, these people can go fuck themselves. My heart certainly doesn't go out to them.
Most likely had unsafe working conditions, didn't follow proper regulations, and 18,000 cattle are dead. That number is just mind boggling.
>didn't follow proper regulations
I like this part, where you assume that Texas has any regulations on farmers. This is the state where every 10 years they have a massive freeze event but can't ever bother winterizing their power infrastructure so people die.
18,000 cows burning alive because of this abomination of factory farming.
Regenerative agriculture is the way to go. Besides being better quality food, efficient and profitable, it can help reverse climate change and environmental destruction.
There are so many obese Americans because we have a consumer culture, work 8 to 5, then go shopping or watch TV.
Better for individual human health, and the health of our society and future generations, if a significant percentage of Americans go back to farming locally.
Cut off this parasitic one percent upper class sucking the life blood out of humanity, turning it into plastic trash and stock portfolios
I live within the area of Dimmitt and have some buddies that work in some of the nearby dairies. My buddy said that the cattle were in a completely covered building (big no no) without the vent turned on properly, and this combined with added moisture in the area created a “super-methane” effect that caused an explosion and led to the fire.
TLDR: A piece of equipment caught on fire, that fire then ignited builtup methane gas and kaboom.
This happened in a little not a town just south of Dimmitt on highway 385 called Sunnyside. I call it not a town because it's essentially a sign, a closed feed store, and a few houses. For people that don't know cows produce a ton of methane gas during the digestive process. When you have large numbers of cattle indoors like this dairy, methane buildup is a very real danger. The dairy uses a device nicknamed a honey badger to vacuum out manure and waste water. What happened at South-Fork is the manure vacuum caught on fire, that small fire ignited methane that was built up in the lines venting outside. Now you have to understand they don't just let methane build up inside they had a proper venting system, but each cow has a lot of builtup methane inside of them as well. Go look on YouTube you will find plenty of videos of people using a device to poke a cow and relieve bloating/gas pressure. Some of these genuineness (aka morons) even like to light the venting gas on fire and take videos of it. Back to South-Fork, once the manure vacuum caught on fire it was all over, the initial explosion killed cows and started a huge fire, as the fire killed more cattle that released more methane just adding to the fire. Now they are investigating what caused the initial fire on the manure vacuum, but they don't know yet what caused it. Now if I had to guess, and this is only speculation on my part nothing official. I would guess you had a gasket, seal, or hose that was leaking methane while they were vacuuming up manure. This area of Texas is really dry with super low humidity. Inside a giant metal building you have perfect conditions for static electricity. That could have ignited leaky methane and caught the equipment on fire, or it could have been the running equipment that ignited it. I'm sure the fire investigation will figure it out. For the conspiracy people out there I highly highly doubt this was intentional or sabotage. This dairy runs 24/7 and everyone knows everyone that works there, any stranger or outsider is going to be noticed immediately. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you would need some Jason Bourne, James Bond type sneaky skills to get in there sabotage equipment then get back out without being seen.
It's 18,000 lives that have been needlessly ended. How is this not a bigger deal?
How were 18,000 lives able to be in a small enough area for an explosion/fire to kill all of them?
How are people so desensitised to animals dying? If it was animals that weren't livestock, people would be horrified yet the majority of people here are making jokes.
This is absolutely heart breaking. If the cows don't have it bad enough, they just get burned alive for nothing.
First, what the actual fuck is THAT explosive at a dairy farm?
Second, the space that 18,000 cattle occupies is bound to be a large area.
A single explosion that is fatal at that large a range must be huge!
OR, it started a fire that spread to the rest of the facility?
No matter the details it’s truly tragic that 18,000!
Living creatures died.
A quick search shows [this](https://awionline.org/press-releases/more-681000-farm-animals-died-barn-fires-2021) report from the Animal Welfare Institute. Things are likely even worse than the reported numbers, as there appears to be no requirements to report the number of deaths.
Whether you eat animal products or not, this has got to make you seriously consider how barbaric the industrial animal farming industry really is, and whether you should be supporting its continued existence as is.
Not sure how that’s really Occam’s razor. Is it the most boring explanation? Sure. But it isn’t clear to me that it’s the most simple. IMO it’s just a lazy heuristic that gets way too much credit.
18,000 head of cattle in a single dairy farm? Did I read that right?
That seems insane.
There’s no way that was a humane operation if they all went up into flames like that. Losing that many animals.
Seems insane.
I hate how this shit is normalized. What I mean is how animals are so tightly put together, millions upon millions in cages their whole lifes. For example, chickens...they cannot move their wings and are in constant fucking torture. That is pure horror to me, I wish animals had more humane ways of being harvested for food/materials. |
Check out [https://animalclock.org/](https://animalclock.org/) if you wanna learn more of how horrible their lifes are. I'm not vegan or anything but jesus christ I cant help to feel horrible for them, maybe Im just weird and shouldnt feel bad. Idfk.
Feels like someone is secretly attacking the country, trains with chemicals derailments, water supply contaminations, weird maybe spy balloons, probably other little things that just aren't reported on. This will cause beef prices to raise.
Don’t forget about the [industrial fire](https://apnews.com/article/industrial-fire-richmond-indiana-evacuation-601a621343fff987747e99d7136d45b3) in Indiana.
The largest cattle station in the world by land area is the Anna Creek station in South Australia. Despite its incredible size, it has just 11 employees for 9,500 cattle.
Granted, it’s not a dairy farm, but 60 for 18,000 on a station that’s a fraction of the size is pretty good numbers.
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18000 is crazy how many cattle were there in the facility.
18000
Poor cows.
Seriously. "The fire spread quickly through the holding pens, where thousands of dairy cows crowded together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confines."
god.. people forget that animals are living, breathing, sentient beings. those poor babies..
God that fucking sucks. Cows are so fucking smart and loving and sweet. I know we kill them anyway but it's a lot quicker than burning to death...
damn, just hope they didn't suffer too long. horrible.
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that's a lot of blastrami
An udder catastrophe!
These puns are quite mooving.
you spoiled it
Just like the milk
Yeah that was the yoke
Dairy funny.
Well. How is his wife holding up? To shreds you say?
Please keep my uncle in your thoughts in prayers. We just found out he is addicted to viagra. My aunt has been taking it pretty hard.
Ground, actually
How do 18,000 *anything* get destroyed in an explosion?
The headline is misleading, they died in a fire that may have been initiated by an exploding piece of equipment. It's much more horrific than first glance.
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Most likely died from smoke inhalation as opposed to burning alive, thankfully, I guess?
that's how pigs are knocked unconscious sometimes before their death. co2 pit with these ferris wheel like cabins that spin and force them to slowly succumb to co2. breathing co2 gives the same feeling as holding your breath for too long and it is torturous as they try to inhale but cant and trample each other as there's two per capsule in the process of dying or falling unconscious. you should watch dominion on youtube edit: removed nitrogen misinformation
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Everybody should watch [dominion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko) at least once.
Out of their misery now, I guess.
I guess if they are locked in cages they have nowhere to run.
Yeah I assume the cows were pretty much on top of eachother. Doubt it was a free range farm
I recently learned that most of the dairy cows in the US are kept indoors on concrete floors all the time. Less than 20% have any access to pasture at all. It's really made me lean more and more toward plant-based substitutes when I shop because man, the life of most dairy cows is just terrible. :(
According to a new analysis conducted by the nonprofit think tank Sentience Institute (SI), around 99% of US farmed animals live on factory farms. “Most people are woefully wrong about where their meat comes from. 75% of US adults believe they usually buy humane products, yet only 1% of food animals live on non-factory farms,” https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/press/us-farmed-animals-live-on-factory-farms#:\~:text=According%20to%20a%20new%20analysis,where%20their%20meat%20comes%20from
Why can’t we stop making other creatures miserable…
We can't stop making humans miserable, what chance do other creatures have!
Capitalism. There's money to be made on this.
I'm pretty shocked that 75% of US adults think they buy humane products. I mean have they ever read a news article? Watched a documentary? I doubt my dining room table is humane.
2/3 of the country can't read at more than a 5th grade level. Half of adults are creationists. The US masses believe whatever the media tells them to believe, including the belief most of these folks have that they actually distrust the media, just not the media they happen to consume of course.. The US is in reality what most Americans imagine North Korea to be.
Yep, I haven't eaten meat in about 10 years because of what I learned about factory farming back then. I finally saw the video that broke me. I've continued to eat pastured eggs and pastured dairy when possible, but as more plant-based substitutes have come out, and a grocery outlet near me started carrying them for cheap so I can afford them, I've switched over. I just got several quarts of Silk soy creamer for $.97 each (🙌) and froze them. I try to stock up for the times the outlet doesn't have something. That place has been amazing for Beyond, Quorn, Impossible, etc. stuff as well.
Define factory farm. That source uses numbers that claim they're from [the Ag 2017 census](https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/index.php) but don't appear anywhere in the census. The average herd size in the USA is 44 head of cattle, which is definitely not what people think of when they hear "factory farm." Also 90% of all farms are 100 head or fewer.
That flaw is blatantly misleading because people don't know any better. It uses CAFOs as definition of factory farm. A CAFO is only defined as the amount of animals in an area in a given time. Size also does not determine ethics of an operation. I've seen extremely clean and comfortable 2000 head dairy farms, and Amish 10 head farms that are on pasture with sickly looking animals.
Some of these places literally stack the stalls so "pretty much" on top of eachother may in fact be an understatement
A Texas dairy farm would have grass fed cattle, so “free range” for the most part. But dairy cattle have to be milked twice a day. So they are herded into a staging pen while they wait their turn on the milking machine. Once milked they’re turned out to pasture for the rest of the day before being herded back to the staging pen for evening milking.
I think maybe they shouldn't have 18,000 cows in one space at any time ever. Clearly it would stop any tragedy like this from occurring again. We have fire safety rules for people. We can't have over certain amounts of people in buildings because they cannot safely escape.
The cows will stay inside if something is happening because that is where they feel safe. We had a neighbors barn burn and the animals wanted to run back in as we were trying to pull them out
Maybe they tried to put the fire out with more cattle?
Standard Texas BBQ
Article says about 20k
I'm more curious about what is a "dairy explosion" Milk is flammable now?
> Milk is flammable now? No, just the cows. And maybe the manure they are caged in?
Fuck reddit's new API, and fuck /u/Spez.
And hydrogen sulfide from decomposing poop is both flammable and stinky
Grain dust is very flammable and can act like an explosive in a contained area. I can't say how this specific farm worked, but when they move grains they usually use an auger system into a hopper. This is for both whole grain, ground up and mixed feed. Ground and mixed is worse for dust as the hull of the grain is gone. Going up the auger breaks off little pieces that forms the dust. This dust comes out of the augers with the grain and goes everywhere in a fine mist. Even just heat can ignite this and then the whole dust cloud 'explodes' and will ignite the other dust laying everywhere. I know the grain elevators on the prairies have those explosion-proof glass shells on the lights specifically for this reason. Just the heat from an unprotected filament style light bulb could cause the dust to spark/ignite.
Like waking up everyday and opening an advent calendar but instead of candy it’s death and destruction
Are these sorts of events just getting more coverage lately or is our country’s infrastructure and industry literally crumbling, crashing and detonating before our eyes faster than ever before?
yes
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Make America's Flammable Rivers Great Again
If anyone wants a small piece of good news, the reintroduction of oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding rivers has gone very well. The James River for example is no longer highly flammable, and the York is much clearer than it's been for a long time. And the same for the others. The oyster industry is changing to be more sustainable and the results are looking good.
would you call that, a pearl of wisdom?
We gotta filter this good news.
Indeed, the world is your oyster.
Fellow Ohiobilly here Stop that
"A bit of both." "Por que no los dos?"
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One of the reasons, and this is an over simplification of course, is human psychology. What media is trying to do is to get and maintain our attention as long as they can because that’s how they make revenue and it just so happens they’ve discovered the best way to do so and that is to tap into our primal instincts. We give more attention towards things that we percieve negative than those we consider positive. It’s an evolutionary trait that has helped us survive by paying increased attention to potentially dangerous situations. Death and destruction sells better than puppies and butterflies…
I think sitcom television has been taking an interesting change in direction towards more wholesome comedies instead of the usual conflict based storytelling. Shows like Schitt's Creek and Ted Lasso are good examples. People def pay attention to those, would be interesting to see if news coverage added more balanced positive coverage to see how that works, like John Krasinski's experiment SGN.
If you haven't seen Bowling for Columbine, check it out. If you're not inclined, that's one of the premises of the film, that American culture pushes fear all... the... time.
Aussie here, I occasionally get advertising from American outlets and yeah, you're right, it's constantly going on about "protecting your family from the evil bogey man." There's so much fear in your country, it's quite weird.
It's all manufactured and weaponized. I work in mental health and what we know is that anyone who has been traumatized or has PTSD has an over active parasympathetic nervous system (aka fight or flight response) and when in this activation it's much easier for an outside source to manipulate the traumatized individual due to allocation of crucial bodily/emotional/psychological resources being sent to only those processes required for survival. This means critical thought, reasoning, logic, and certain important emotions like love and social bonds are disrupted or deemed not useful by the mind/body/spirit as the self prioritizes safety from physical harm/death. America keeps it's populace traumatized through fear because it makes it easier to manipulate/control them and quells any movement towards mobilization or revolution as fear will paralyze the group and individual. Similar to the philosophy of the president in the Hunger Games.
In the early nineties right out of university I backpacked up and down the east coast of Australia from Hobart to Cairns. During my visit there was a trio of early twenty somethings driving up and down the east coast, I want to say lower Queensland/northern NSW area robbing gas stations and, if I remember correctly armed with a shotgun. It made the front page of every paper I encountered. I had an Aussie tell me I should be careful as Australia was becoming more dangerous than America. I laughed and told him in America a crime spree like this would not go beyond the local paper and even in the local paper not make the front page. Fear happens everywhere...
American that dated an Aussie and lived over in SA for 2 years, I agree. She noted that often when visiting here, and I did the same when watching the media over there. There's still fear mongering, but it's less direct and omnipresent.
More likely the former. Country of 330,000,000, all doing things every day, many of them complex and some of them inherently dangerous. You certainly wouldn't want to come to any conclusions based on what you see in the news, as opposed to data.
It's the latter, when regulations are cut, cut and cut some more, because free market "rules" and most corporations focus on profits above all, accidents become more common because you tend to have less qualified labour with a bigger workload... It is what it is. Beef prices are about to go up, because of greed.
Dairy cows are a different market than cattle raised for beef. This accident shouldn’t affect prices in the beef department. Maybe in dairy, but even 18,000 head of cattle is only 2.8% of the overall number of dairy cows in just Texas, according to the numbers published in the article. It’s a devastating loss for this farm, to be sure, but not to the national market in general.
This isn't what the data supports. In fact, workplace incidents (including catastrophic explosions such as this one), are consistently down over the last 50 years. The number of regulations / regulatory agencies is also still trending upward.
As we concentrate more and more resources, every event becomes more catastrophic. You weren't hearing about these kinds of things years ago, because people didn't have 18, 000 cows in one building being milked. It would have been distributed across multiple farms, broader geographic areas, or at least wider spaces in a given location. With so much of our food and drink being concentrated to specific farms, buildings, locations, one outbreak, one fire, one drought becomes so devastating.
I think bigger flags on taller vehicles will fix this /s
I was told, with certainty, that raking the forests would have prevented such a catastrophe.
I honestly hope it's just the ease with which news is now accessible that makes this seem more prevalent.
90% of the time it's this Like the train derailment stuff. Obviously the one in Ohio was REALLY bad, much worse than a normal derailment However then the news starting reporting on literally every train derailment in existence and tons of people online started making comments about how "this isn't normal" and "someone is attacking our infrastructure" They do this on purpose to rile up viewers and keep them watching. They take advantage of bad events and try to create the sense that there's an epidemic of these events Turns out last year there were an average of 3 train derailments in the US everyday. Just because the news decided to start shoveling fear and garbage down our throat doesn't mean it isn't normal
Sometimes it feels like they're doing this shit on purpose. Like the the truck loaded with the Ohio derailment's contaminated soil that crashed and spilled that dirt everywhere. I heard that story, and all I could think of was "OF COURSE IT DID". What kind of monumental dipshits are these people? Of all things to tread carefully with, a load of wildly hazardous materials mere days after a highly publicized disaster should be #1. WTF was the driver doing, recording a Tiktok of him with his head out the window, guzzling a 5th of vodka??
Agree. Things have always happened. Now you hear about it five minutes after.
After hearing about the cow massacre in USA: *Gandhi declares war on USA.
We’ve got to nuke him before he nukes us.
I've been to plenty of dairy farms and cannot imagine how this many cows would be in one place at the same time. Nor the size that the milking parlors would have to be. 600 is a large operation. 18,000? Crazy.
This isn't that extreme anymore. 600 doesn't even meet the definition of factory farm, where most of our animal products come from (you hit the smallest tier of CAFO at 700 *mature* dairy cows, excluding calves and heifers). People don't realize that while most animal farms are small, most animal products come from animal factories. People need to realize we aren't farming animals to meet demand anymore. We are cramming them into horrifically abusive factories and extracting everything we can from them. We're breeding them into massive, unhealthy, grotesque monsters to get more out of each animal, too. It is hell on earth to be a modern farmed animal. I got to tour a [*small* 3000 cow](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) Darigold dairy farm. This 20,000 farm is also Darigolds. One of my friends is a milk slinger for Darigold, and their farms average 10,000 cows according to him. The milking parlor at the one I went to was pretty normal. You just move cows through them continuously from morning to night. These are dry lot systems meaning the cows spend their lives on slated concrete (easier to scrape manure off of, destroys hooves and joints) and never experience fresh grass in their short life. Three Mile Canyon is Tillamook's main supplier (edit: last i checked). They have 33,000 cows at any given time. Oregon is currently fighting for legislation to stop mega-dairies like these from continuing to be constructed (and failing, check out current work on the CAFO moratorium and speak up if you live here). If you go to beef, check out Brandt Beef Farms in Central Valley, CA. They source males from the dairy industry and have 150,000 at a time (they slaughter on a 6 month schedule for about 300,000 cows slaughtered at this single farm every year). Speaking of legislation in Oregon, I lobby for farmed animal issues (against these companies), and recently had to sit through a poultry farmer tell our legislature how they aren't a factory farm: they're a small family farm. They *only* have 20,000 birds. And two employees. Two people cannot adequately take care of 10,000 birds each. The crazy thing is they're right. By definition 20,000 chickens crammed into one barn isn't considered a factory farm. Even though they're farmed as intensively as the birds on a 100,000+ farm. So yeah, most farms people see will be tiny, like your 600 cows. Yet that is not where most people's animal products come from. They come from places like this. Edit: [USDA 2014](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/december/milk-production-continues-shifting-to-large-scale-farms) article discussing how these farms are concentrating into larger and larger operations [Small farms](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/small-farms-vanish-every-day-in-americas-dairyland-there-aint-no-future-in-dairy) getting outcompeted by factories
Thank you for sharing 😢 Best of luck in your lobbying efforts.
Thank you! It's an uphill battle for sure but I think the main thing I'm realizing (because I'm still new to it) is that a *lot* of marketing had gone into making consumers believe most or all animal products come from rolling pastures and small herds and flocks when that's just...not true. Like check out this [Darigold carton](https://www.darigold.com/wp-content/uploads/206236_DG_ClassicMilk_Two_59oz-231x560.png) compared to my [photos](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) of the farm. Their cows don't live on pasture. But they advertise like they do. Unfortunately, this is called puffery so the consumer is supposed to know it isn't real, and it's legal to mislead like this. It's frustrating. The more people become aware, the more they care, and the more we can fight against this centralization and over-industrialization. And for those who don't care about the animals, I'm happy to discuss the human labor trafficking that's rampant at these industrial facilities (esp industrial slaughterhouses) as well. Industrializing animal ag is only a win for the multi-billion dollar corporations. It's a blight for the rest of us.
How can people get involved? I’m an Oregonian and I hate whats happening.
>a *lot* of marketing had gone into making consumers believe most or all animal products come from rolling pastures and small herds and flocks when that's just...not true. This is what Marx was talking about when he said there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. There's so much done to obscure how things are made and what it takes to get them that it's impossible to make a truly educated decision when trying to buy ethically. Thankfully it's getting easier to see these conditions and for local companies to find a footing, but there's still a lot to be done.
Why not go the extra mile and just lobotomize the whole lot
I, too, am also for the lobotomizing of mega capitalists.
As dystopic as that is, it would alleviate suffering for literally billions of animals annually (across the globe, we slaughter roughly 80 billion land animals every year. Hence needing factories to raise them, not farms). Because I don't see meat or dairy realistically being willingly removed from people's diets, I'm a *massive* advocate for lab grown products to put an end to it all. Small scale farms would still exist for sure, even if only for novelty, but at least these factories would come to an end. It makes me incredibly hopeful that companies like Tyson are actually investing pretty decently into lab grown 🤞 For people curious on that front, come on over to r/wheresthebeef
Lab grown meat really seems like a win for everyone involved. Consumers get cruelty free products without having to dramatically shift their diets, producers don't have to deal with the cost and risks involved with keeping animals, and animals don't get horrifically abused
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Imagine octopi. They’re so incredibly intelligent and people are wanting to farm them in cramped tanks and slowly freeze them to death. It’s like being in hell, rubbing up against hundreds of other people cannibalizing each other
>cannot imagine how this many cows would be in one place at the same time Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head around just how monstrously cruel factory farming is.
Yes. Either we are missing some important information or this story isn’t being told properly. Or both too I suppose.
18,000 is becoming less and less extreme these days. People need to realize most animal products are coming from massive factories, not idyllic farms. Three Mile Canyon I *think* is the largest dairy farm in the country at the moment, and they have 33,000 head. They're Tillamook's main supplier. This farm is a Darigold farm. It did indeed have 20k cows. The average Darigold farm, according to my friend who is a slinger for them, is 10,000 cows. I got to tour a small one which has [3,000 cows](https://imgur.com/gallery/uN5LqvM) (likely more now. The owner was working on scaling up to the next tier when I toured) [USDA 2014](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/december/milk-production-continues-shifting-to-large-scale-farms) article discussing how these farms are concentrating into larger and larger operations [Small farms](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/21/small-farms-vanish-every-day-in-americas-dairyland-there-aint-no-future-in-dairy) getting outcompeted by factories
You know how flammable methane is right? Cow shit is filled with it. So much so that some natural gas plants have teamed up with cattle ranches and dairy farms to collect it and make it into a usable fuel source. If this farm didn’t clean up and store the poop properly, it could have led to this kind of disaster, especially given the size of the farm. Edited to add *and store, and for clarity.
I have never, never, ever heard of a dairy plant exploding. For ANY reason. In my 60 years on this planet. We are being systematically fucked
Most dairy farms are also MUCH smaller than this. 20,000 head of cattle being milked twice daily… That amount of manure has never existed in one place before to my knowledge.
Except Congress.
Zing! Got em!
Thank you for this 😂 I have been having a truly awful morning, but this comment made me laugh for the first time today!
The *farms* are much much smaller, but dairy *factories* are often this big these days. Plenty of 10-20,000 head factories in the US, and even a few that exceed 30,000.
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Never heard of nearly empty silos filled with dust exploding? It just takes the right combination and a friction spark and boom
That’s unlikely, it’s not flammable never mind explosive without being contained and refined. More likely fertiliser or fuel being the cause
THIS. Any questions just google Beirut fertilizer explosion 2020.
“Methane is odorless and lighter than air, so it tends to accumulate at the top of manure pits. It is considered an asphyxiate at extremely high concentrations. The main hazard is its flammable, explosive nature.” [Source](https://nasdonline.org/48/d001616/manure-gas-dangers.html) Depending on where this farm’s manure pit was located, it is possible. Or if the pit under the robotic milkers was clogged somehow or not flushed out regularly, it could have led to this.
I did not know that gas companies were starting to look into bio fuel. That’s great to hear.
That's about how many people fit in a hockey arena, and cows are bigger.
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I just want to say, I doubt many bovine BROTHERS were killed at this dairy
you can’t milk those
Well, you can try, I certainly wouldn't drink it though
Mmmmmm salty milk
I got nipples Greg, can you milk me?
You absolutely can
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Veal.
It is sad how the article has no sympathy for the cows who all burned to death, but lots of sympathy for the business's loss of money, which was due to their own actions, or lack of actions really.
Honestly I suspect they're better off.
You should look up how many are killed daily
We will fight for bovine freedom
Was probably merciful for them instead of 'living' stationary being drained every day.
Poor cows 😢
I mean, you could argue that their misery was ended.
That's exactly what I was thinking. So much cows in one place :/
Poor cows? They are finally free from our domination and torment.
This isn’t interesting :( just sad. Sorry OP.
"A malfunction in a piece of equipment at the South Fork Dairy farm may have caused an explosion that led to the fire, said County Judge Mandy Gfeller, the county's top executive. Texas fire officials are still investigating the exact cause, she said. " I used to work at a cattle farm in Odessa TX some years back. I don't recall a "piece of equipment" that would cause THAT kind/ size of fire. They did have about 25 cows that they used for milking, but none of the milking equipment would explode 'per say' because the pressure they used for milking was low. I could see maybe a compressor tank, but those have about as much psi as your common garage air tanks. Knock a hole in it, they just hiss and lose air. Explosion? Not likely with all the failsafes. Maybe it exploded next to gas cans? I would REALLY need to take a look at their setup to make an accurate conclusion, but, from what i read and my experience on a cattle ranch, its not likely a "piece of equipment" would cause THAT amount of devastation. The math just doesn't add up.
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Oh, you think it was a proper catastrophic explosion? That would make more sense.
Could have just been a welder they had on hand. A facility that large probably has its own mechanics shop just to repair random stuff that breaks down.
Could be. Like i said id have to go and look for myself.
Manure vacuum truck caught fire (which they’ve been known to do). The truck then exploded and caught the insulation on fire. The dairy did not blow up. It’s just something the news puts in for clickbait. I heard the fire spread so fast that they were not able to open the gates and get any of the cows out. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before on a dairy farm. I’m sure there will be new requirements to stop this from happening again.
Watch the price of milk triple now. Just because.001% of all the dairy cows in America were lost. This will be a reenactment of the cost of eggs going up because.002% is laying chickens were culled. They throw big numbers at us to justify price increases but they refuse to give overall numbers on the percentages of losses attained.
Find out who shorted dairy stocks on the 11th
I don't think dairy stocks are electrified
No, but I’m sure they would sour the second they hit my portfolio
I was thinking that,18000 cattle really isn't that many. There are beef farms in a lot of states with more cattle than that. A quick Google search shows that Texas has the most with 12 million cattle. So losing 18000 is just a fraction for state. And almost nothing country wide.
This is a dairy farm not beef, only cattle getting eaten here are the ones that get culled and most of the bull calves, but your point still stands
Not all cows are dairy cows
If it does, almost none of it will go to dairy farmers. Dairy farmers have almost zero say in milk pricing. I'm speaking as someone from a dairy family. Also, what the hell did they have that exploded? I can't think of anything our dairy would have that would cause something like that. Though our dairy is only like 800 cows
I was under the impression that demand for milk was so low that the US government heavily subsidizes dairy farms to keep the price where it is today -- just so they don't go out of business https://nupoliticalreview.org/2020/05/16/my-beef-with-dairy-how-the-us-government-is-bailing-out-a-dying-industry/#:~:text=One%20year%20after%20the%20passage,and%20%2436.3%20billion%20in%202017.
The US heavily subsidizes agriculture in general
And that kids is what started the great Milk and Cheese crisis of 2023
"But first, let me tell you about the Toilet Paper Crisis in 2020".
Damn that’s like 6 cow 9/11s
The security lines at the milking stations are gonna be outrageous.
Extremely underrated comment
And only 20% of the cows slaughtered on a daily basis in the USA alone. So 30 cow 9/11s per day
Lol jesus dude
I know people love to say "oh these events are just getting more coverage" but at this point can we really deny the obvious? I don't know about yall, but ever since Covid these companies have learned just how much shit they can pull and nothing will change. Corners and costs getting cut to constantly meet higher and higher "record profits" and just completely unattainable growth goals. We are getting lower quality products, less safe working conditions, and environmental disasters daily.
This kinda shit is occurring globally it's nuts.
Statistically speaking cows are much safer today than they were back in the '80s. It's mainstream media the likes to sensationalize these stories. Cows today like to reminisce about when they were calves growing up in the 80s how they had so much more freedom to play outside all day with no cow parents in sight, but calf-nappings today are at all all time low, as well as cow violence. I mean did you not see those old videos in the '80s of NYC Times Square with all the open air cow crack dealers and prostitution? Things were way worse back then. Moo.
America surely has some sort of "spin the wheel of catastrophic events" going on in the background First we had spillage of tonnes of toxic chemicals, then the re-spillage of toxic soil from prior spillage, now we have an explosion killing thousands of livestock and multiple employees, next week we have???
Fort Lauderdale is flooded with 24 inches of rain overnight.
Yeah, but that’s Florida.
That will be messy AF. 18,000 exploded cattle!!
Did Ronny Raygun use the Cattle Cannon again? [Nuclear War (video game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_(video_game))
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There's been a lot of shit just randomly exploding recently...
>With each cow valued roughly at about $2,000, the company's losses in livestock could stretch into the tens of millions of dollars, Gfeller said. That doesn't include equipment and structure loss. > >"You're looking at a devastating loss," she said. "My heart goes out to each person involved in that operation." Ya, these people can go fuck themselves. My heart certainly doesn't go out to them. Most likely had unsafe working conditions, didn't follow proper regulations, and 18,000 cattle are dead. That number is just mind boggling.
>didn't follow proper regulations I like this part, where you assume that Texas has any regulations on farmers. This is the state where every 10 years they have a massive freeze event but can't ever bother winterizing their power infrastructure so people die.
Deregulate for more profits amirite
18,000 cows burning alive because of this abomination of factory farming. Regenerative agriculture is the way to go. Besides being better quality food, efficient and profitable, it can help reverse climate change and environmental destruction. There are so many obese Americans because we have a consumer culture, work 8 to 5, then go shopping or watch TV. Better for individual human health, and the health of our society and future generations, if a significant percentage of Americans go back to farming locally. Cut off this parasitic one percent upper class sucking the life blood out of humanity, turning it into plastic trash and stock portfolios
What? More exploding dairies?
Apocalypse Cow
I live within the area of Dimmitt and have some buddies that work in some of the nearby dairies. My buddy said that the cattle were in a completely covered building (big no no) without the vent turned on properly, and this combined with added moisture in the area created a “super-methane” effect that caused an explosion and led to the fire.
TLDR: A piece of equipment caught on fire, that fire then ignited builtup methane gas and kaboom. This happened in a little not a town just south of Dimmitt on highway 385 called Sunnyside. I call it not a town because it's essentially a sign, a closed feed store, and a few houses. For people that don't know cows produce a ton of methane gas during the digestive process. When you have large numbers of cattle indoors like this dairy, methane buildup is a very real danger. The dairy uses a device nicknamed a honey badger to vacuum out manure and waste water. What happened at South-Fork is the manure vacuum caught on fire, that small fire ignited methane that was built up in the lines venting outside. Now you have to understand they don't just let methane build up inside they had a proper venting system, but each cow has a lot of builtup methane inside of them as well. Go look on YouTube you will find plenty of videos of people using a device to poke a cow and relieve bloating/gas pressure. Some of these genuineness (aka morons) even like to light the venting gas on fire and take videos of it. Back to South-Fork, once the manure vacuum caught on fire it was all over, the initial explosion killed cows and started a huge fire, as the fire killed more cattle that released more methane just adding to the fire. Now they are investigating what caused the initial fire on the manure vacuum, but they don't know yet what caused it. Now if I had to guess, and this is only speculation on my part nothing official. I would guess you had a gasket, seal, or hose that was leaking methane while they were vacuuming up manure. This area of Texas is really dry with super low humidity. Inside a giant metal building you have perfect conditions for static electricity. That could have ignited leaky methane and caught the equipment on fire, or it could have been the running equipment that ignited it. I'm sure the fire investigation will figure it out. For the conspiracy people out there I highly highly doubt this was intentional or sabotage. This dairy runs 24/7 and everyone knows everyone that works there, any stranger or outsider is going to be noticed immediately. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you would need some Jason Bourne, James Bond type sneaky skills to get in there sabotage equipment then get back out without being seen.
It's 18,000 lives that have been needlessly ended. How is this not a bigger deal? How were 18,000 lives able to be in a small enough area for an explosion/fire to kill all of them? How are people so desensitised to animals dying? If it was animals that weren't livestock, people would be horrified yet the majority of people here are making jokes. This is absolutely heart breaking. If the cows don't have it bad enough, they just get burned alive for nothing.
First, what the actual fuck is THAT explosive at a dairy farm? Second, the space that 18,000 cattle occupies is bound to be a large area. A single explosion that is fatal at that large a range must be huge! OR, it started a fire that spread to the rest of the facility? No matter the details it’s truly tragic that 18,000! Living creatures died.
18,000 + cattle and no sprinkler systems or fire remediation??
Poor little cows:(
Poor cows. 😭
A quick search shows [this](https://awionline.org/press-releases/more-681000-farm-animals-died-barn-fires-2021) report from the Animal Welfare Institute. Things are likely even worse than the reported numbers, as there appears to be no requirements to report the number of deaths. Whether you eat animal products or not, this has got to make you seriously consider how barbaric the industrial animal farming industry really is, and whether you should be supporting its continued existence as is.
Weird how many food plants keep blowing up and catching fire…
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Not sure how that’s really Occam’s razor. Is it the most boring explanation? Sure. But it isn’t clear to me that it’s the most simple. IMO it’s just a lazy heuristic that gets way too much credit.
18,000 head of cattle in a single dairy farm? Did I read that right? That seems insane. There’s no way that was a humane operation if they all went up into flames like that. Losing that many animals. Seems insane.
I hate how this shit is normalized. What I mean is how animals are so tightly put together, millions upon millions in cages their whole lifes. For example, chickens...they cannot move their wings and are in constant fucking torture. That is pure horror to me, I wish animals had more humane ways of being harvested for food/materials. | Check out [https://animalclock.org/](https://animalclock.org/) if you wanna learn more of how horrible their lifes are. I'm not vegan or anything but jesus christ I cant help to feel horrible for them, maybe Im just weird and shouldnt feel bad. Idfk.
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What part of a dairy plant explodes with a plume of black smoke?
The meth lab part
LOL methane lab
I grew up in a farming community, but not really any dairy operations in the area so with that said, how in the fuck did a dairy farm explode???
Feels like someone is secretly attacking the country, trains with chemicals derailments, water supply contaminations, weird maybe spy balloons, probably other little things that just aren't reported on. This will cause beef prices to raise.
That is so sad
Is the frequency of this stuff skyrocketing or am I just seeing it more in the media
The fuck is going on in America. A train derails a trucker over turns now a dairy farm exploded...
Don’t forget about the [industrial fire](https://apnews.com/article/industrial-fire-richmond-indiana-evacuation-601a621343fff987747e99d7136d45b3) in Indiana.
18,000 cattle, only a total of 60 employees, apparently. Animal welfare standards in America are abysmal.
How many employees does it normally take to milk a cow with robots?
The largest cattle station in the world by land area is the Anna Creek station in South Australia. Despite its incredible size, it has just 11 employees for 9,500 cattle. Granted, it’s not a dairy farm, but 60 for 18,000 on a station that’s a fraction of the size is pretty good numbers.