Dairy farms are often portrayed as quaint and bucolic. But on the ground, the dairy industry is among the most hazardous to work in — the combination of heavy machinery, thousands of large animals, and the millions of tons of toxic manure that they produce creates a perfect environment for injuries, and even death.
This was made painfully, tragically clear when last week, six workers — five adults and one teenager — were killed at a Colorado dairy farm 45 miles northeast of Denver. Four were part of an extended family, including a father and two sons.
Local officials haven’t said much about the deaths, other than confirming the victims died from “gas exposure in a confined space.” The source of the gas? Cow manure.
According to two unnamed dairy industry sources who spoke with Denver’s ABC affiliate, a contractor working on an underground manure pit accidentally turned on a valve or pump that released hydrogen sulfide, a gas that is formed by decomposing animal manure. Exposure to the gas caused the worker to collapse “almost instantly,” according to a dairy industry publication.
In an attempt to rescue him, five other workers at the farm, called Prospect Valley Dairy, entered the underground manure pit and met the same fate (a supervisor had reportedly warned them against doing so).
Breathing in high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide can cause rapid unconsciousness and “nearly instant death,” according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is now investigating the Colorado deaths.
Agriculture is already one of the most dangerous industries to work in, OSHA reports, and dairy work ranks among the most dangerous jobs within that sector. Yet farms aren’t held to the same labor safety standards as other industries.
The danger of America’s massive amounts of animal manure
Incidents like the recent Colorado tragedy aren’t exactly uncommon on farms. Livestock release nearly 1 trillion pounds of feces and urine annually, and on dairy and pig farms, it’s typically stored in huge manure pits that resemble ponds. Sometimes workers or farm family members fall into a manure pit, and others jump in to save them, creating a deadly and horrifying chain reaction, similar to what happened in Colorado.
Earlier this year, a man at a New York dairy died after trying to retrieve a tool that fell into a manure tanker; his colleague attempted to rescue him and also died. In 2021, three Ohio brothers died in a manure pit. In 2007, methane — another toxic gas, separate from hydrogen sulfide — emanating from a pipe in a manure pit at a Virginia dairy killed four family members and one worker.
These deaths are often described by law enforcement and the media as “accidents,” which obscures the danger of the enormous volumes of manure produced on America’s factory farms and the toxic gases it produces. Earlier this year, one agricultural safety specialist told a dairy publication that a manure pit is “a chemical weapon” and said, “Manage it with the same respect you’d give a live grenade.”
The gaps in labor law and enforcement that make agricultural work so dangerous
Manure pits aren’t the only way for farms to store manure — they’re just the cheapest, and seemingly, the most dangerous (and the worst for the environment). And carveouts in labor regulations designed to benefit agribusiness make incidents like what happened in Colorado and elsewhere more likely to occur.
OSHA’s standards for “confined spaces” — spaces where workers perform certain tasks, sometimes dangerous ones, and have limited entries and exits — do not cover agriculture. And farms are exempt from requirements to train workers on air monitoring, emergency response, and safe rescue, according to Jordan Barab, a former OSHA official.
A dairy industry veteran who’s worked on a number of farms for almost two decades and spoke with me on condition of anonymity told me there are “no rules” on the big dairies he’s worked, and little concern for safety.
“OSHA goes on farms very rarely, they hardly do any inspections,” Debbie Berkowitz, who served as a chief of staff and senior policy adviser at OSHA under President Obama, told me. It’s “a very small agency — it doesn’t really have the staff.”
Plus, Berkowitz said, most farmworkers are Latino and “they’re very scared about speaking up, because they themselves might have some immigration issues, or they know people that do, and they fear retaliation.”
These regulatory gaps amount to “agricultural exceptionalism” — a doctrine that characterizes US farming policy, allowing the agricultural industry to play by a different set of rules than other industries. Another example: In the US, you must be 18 years old to work a job deemed hazardous, but on farms, 16-year-olds are permitted to work these jobs; the teenager who died at the Colorado farm was just 17 years old. And because of exceptions passed by Congress, small farms are exempt from OSHA enforcement altogether.
“The farm industry — through Big Ag, through their trade associations like the Farm Bureau — lobby extensively to prevent any worker safety requirements imposed to them by the government,” Berkowitz said. “They are incredibly powerful.”
Until Congress recognizes these operations as highly dangerous workplaces and closes the agricultural industry’s labor law exemptions — and better funds OSHA — more tragedies like what took place in Colorado are inevitable.
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