BUSH AGRICULTURE

"The cows, held in open pens and milked three times a day, never graze on open pasture. In return for free room and board, each cow produces 75 pounds of milk a day and four tons of manure a year. For now, the milk is shipped to processing plants all over the Southwest, but when the cheese plant is operational in late 2005, the milk will travel only a few miles. There it will be turned into Velveeta-style cheese at the rate of one truckload per hour. When the 200,000 black and white Holstein cows are past their prime—about two to three years — they are sent off to a large slaughterhouse in Texas where they are ground up into beef patties for guess who: McDonald's, America's largest buyer of spent dairy cows."

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