The Castro County Sheriff’s Office confirmed with Fox News Digital that the cows were in a holding area before being brought in for milking when the blast occurred at the Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt.
Very few cows in the holding area survived, officials told local outlet KFDA.
“Your count probably is close to that. There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed,” Castro County Sherif Sal Rivera told KFDA.
“The speculation was probably what they call a honey badger, which is a vacuum that sucks the manure and water out and possibly that it got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded and the fire,”
I had a friend that lived on a Dairy Farm. His Dad had a small herd of meat cattle and he was also a Meat Cutter.
A relatively small herd of dairy cattle like 200-250 is an entire day of work for you, everyday, no breaks, butt busting labor.
When his Dad got sick or was out of town, so I would go down and help him, hard, hard work.
I’m struggling to imagine WTF could cause a large enough blast to kill 18k cows on a dairy farm. Not saying it isn’t possible but sheesh… musta been a hell of a mess.
Doesn’t read like they all died in a blast. Reads like they were all in miking pens, and something blew up which started a massive fire and the cows had no means of escaping the pens. Real tragedy all the way around. If these dairies didn’t seem to have them rigged up to milking machines most of the say they could have free ranged the rest and maybe only lost of few hundred.
I also think we need to go very far out of our way to treat our livestock better and give them the fullest live and most reasonable quality of life possible.
I got a big dairy producer about 12 miles down the road from me. They have a few hundred acres in grass and alfalfa and several BIG barns. Pretty rare to actually see a cow. I do see a semi dragging double tankers of milk twice a day, so I know they are in there. I’m guessing they don’t get out much. Big commercial operations ain’t like Green Acres, it’s industrial. I imagine living in Iowa you know that first hand.
I mean the cows on my place live outside and “free range”, but we ain’t even close to being big league.
Mark used to work at a beef factory and I remember him telling me they had small operation and they slaughtered some crazy number of cattle daily, maybe 500 or some shite. Like 500 and his concern was considered tiny. We all just go to the grocery and assume milk and meat will be there.
I would think they also had grail silos full of feed for the cows. Once the initial explosion took place it may have spread to the silos. Grain dust is highly explosive as well.
Wheat has a layer or cloud ignition temp of 220°C which can be easily achieved with a methane explosion. Barley and Corn at 250°C. Not really sure what they feed cows.
Mostly grass and alfalfa. I use some grain to finish if they are going in my freezer, but not much. Couldn’t tell you what the feed lot serves up before they cut em, I’ve never asked. Dairy might use more grain though, I don’t really know. Still gonna be mostly grass.