In the parlance of climate change, the phenomenon is known as “leakage.”
Last month, Northview Dairy in Ontario, California, sold nearly 3,000 cows to a farmer with properties in Kansas and Colorado. During a recent lunch break — after tearing down the rows of cow sheds that have paralleled a stretch of Haven Avenue for three decades — Northview dairy manager German Cisneros said the sale was the result of a combination of increasing regulations, high prices for cows, and a great offer from an Irvine company to turn the land into housing.
It makes perfect sense from a business perspective. But those former California cows are now residents of states with different air quality laws. And in the global effort to combat climate change by cleaning up dairy farming, that matters.
