Close up, a feedlot cow is a sight to behold: It’s a hulking, broad-shouldered eating machine with a three-foot-long tongue and a jaw that never seems to stop chewing. At just 20 months old, one of them can weigh 1,300 pounds. And where you find one, you’re bound to find others. In Deaf Smith County, a cluster of communities 45 minutes west of Amarillo, 720,000 cattle each year are packed side by side like sardines at feedlots—the sprawling, treeless expanses where the penned animals are fattened en masse before being shipped to slaughterhouses.
This part of the western Panhandle, stretching from the Oklahoma border into West Texas, is a national cattle feeding powerhouse that supplies one-fifth of the country’s beef. It’s also home to mountains of manure. Each year the region’s feedlot cattle produce millions of tons of waste (just one large feedlot produces roughly 1.1 million tons of manure), which is dried by the sun, stomped by hooves, and carried by the wind to nearby communities.
The resulting “fecal dust” storms, some so thick they blot out the sun, make it difficult to breathe, residents say. Some people have reported persistent bouts of bronchitis and other respiratory problems as a result of living in close proximity to feedlots. A growing body of research indicates that living near concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, is associated with myriad health risks including increased infant mortality due to respiratory disease and a greater risk of developing asthma in children and adults. In the Panhandle, the fecal dust from cattle feedlots appears to present an important public health problem that has spent little time in the public eye.
