“Fires at livestock and poultry production and storage properties are quite common and have been for years,” the National Fire Protection Association reported earlier this year. From 1992 to 2017, the number of US farms with 1,000 or more dairy cows has more than tripled, even as the total number of dairy cows has remained about the same. High death tolls could be more likely in the future as mega-factory farms proliferate, packing ever more animals into cramped warehouse-sized sheds. “What’s so striking about this incident in Texas is just the sheer number of animals that were on the operation in one building to begin with,” said Allie Granger, a policy associate with AWI.įrank Brand, who operates the South Fork farm, said he couldn’t provide comment when he was reached by phone Thursday. For context, the largest number of cows killed in a single fire between 20 in the US was 548. Because the farm was enormous - with reportedly 19,000 cattle, it was among the biggest dairy farms in the country - it killed an order of magnitude more cows than are typically killed in fires, enough to fill 26 football fields, according to a USA Today analysis. The Dimmitt fire, however, was unusual in its scale.

Disease outbreaks, too, result in mass death or culling on farms. Some are the result of human or mechanical error, but many stem from natural disasters, such as hurricanes, blizzards, and extreme temperatures, like last summer’s scorching heat wave in Kansas that killed thousands of cows who were subsequently dumped in a landfill. The fires are part of a broader pattern of mass casualty events on factory farms, where 99 percent of America’s meat, dairy, and eggs are produced. Over the last decade, at least 6.5 million farmed animals, mostly chickens, perished in barn fires in the US, according to Washington, DC-based nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI). “It is possible that it overheated and the methane and things like that might have ignited and spread out with an explosion and a fire,” he said.įires on large-scale animal farms, or factory farms, are surprisingly common. In an interview with a local news station, Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said it may have been caused by the facility’s manure management equipment. The cause of the fire, which occurred at South Fork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt, 75 miles northwest of Lubbock, is still under investigation by the state fire marshal. An explosion and fire at a dairy farm on Monday in the Texas panhandle has been called the deadliest cattle barn fire ever recorded: it left one worker in critical condition and killed 18,000 cows.

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