Inside Queensland's Brutal Cattle Cull
The drought in Queensland has made grass so scarce that ranchers are felling trees. Not just any tree. Their tractors take down mulgas, a type of acacia found in the Australian outback, spreading the foliage on the ground for cows to graze on. The mulga’s leaves are soft and easy to digest. But sometimes the cows don’t have that luxury. To make sure the herds eat and keep their weight up, the ranchers have also set up blocks of minerals for the animals to lick. The chemicals are nutritious and act as an appetite stimulant, compelling the cows to feed on available vegetation they would normally not touch—bushes and spiny plants.
Australia emerged from the Great Millennium Drought in 2012, when it was officially declared over. That environmental catastrophe began in Queensland in the mid-1990s and, despite the end of the long, bad dry spell for the nation as a whole, there’s been no relief for much of the rural part of the immense northeastern state. About 80 percent of its territory remains affected by water shortages, putting particular stress on the center of Australia’s cattle industry.
Ranchers are changing nearly all aspects of their business. To keep their stock manageable, they’re culling herds, planning to slaughter a record number of cows this year. More than 9 million were slaughtered in 2014, and of that number almost half were killed in Queensland. That means ranchers must try to find new markets to sell the meat without driving down prices. Currently, Australia supplies more than a third of the beef imported by the U.S.
With rain a rarity over most of Queensland, ranchers have been pulling up water from the Great Artesian Basin—the world’s largest subterranean aquifer, which is increasingly regulated by drought-sensitive Australia. The small pools of groundwater pumped up from the basin have attracted kangaroos and wild dogs. The ranchers say the kangaroos—as many as 10,000 on a single property—compete with the cows for grass, and that the dogs—crossbreeds between the domesticated species and dingoes—attack the cattle. Ten kangaroos, they claim, eat as much grass as a single cow; and a cow wounded in a dog attack has less value when brought to market. So the ranchers have been killing kangaroos and dogs.
Sometimes the conditions can be too onerous for the cows to stay home in Queensland. Some cattlemen have been trucking their herds toward the coast or down south, where the drought is somewhat less acute. —Karen Weise
Life in Fresno, Calif., Under Mandatory Water Restrictions
In 1871, Leland Stanford was building his railroad across California’s Central Valley when he spotted a lush wheat field amid the dry prairie. “Wonderful!” he said, according to lore. “Here we must build the town!” Fresno was founded the next year and is now home to half a million people. The area, so lush it was first called Green Bush after a local spring, became the center of the country’s food production, irrigated with canals fed by the dense Sierra snowpack. “In Fresno, water has always been easy to find and cheap to get,” says city spokesman Mark Standriff. Four years into California’s record drought, however, that’s no longer the case.
In April, Governor Jerry Brown announced the first mandatory water restrictions in California’s history. Fresno’s goal was a 28 percent year-over-year reduction. By July the city’s homes and businesses had cut water use by 31 percent.
Fresno runs the Regional Water Reclamation facility, which processes 68 million gallons of wastewater a day. The liquid is treated in special ponds where it percolates through the soil to extract water that is safe for human contact but not for drinking. The city lets commercial and residential customers take the water to use on their properties for gardening and cleaning purposes. “It’s free,” says Standriff, and people can “come out and use it as much as they want.” Construction companies, he says, fill tankers a few thousand gallons at a time to dampen down building sites to meet regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce dust pollution.
Farmers have left land fallow and drilled deeper into the ground to pump up water. (Some of it, however, is contaminated by nitrate plumes seeping in from agriculture.) Don Wells, an aptly named conservation monitor with the city’s utility department, says businesses that depend on water for their core activities, like bottlers and golf courses, have wrung any excess out of their operations. Strip malls are tearing out decorative grass; restaurants are swapping out rinse nozzles; and “virtually every customer has a toilet issue,” Wells says. “We are in a dynamic change.” A local chocolatier has switched from washing its machines with buckets of water, using sanitizer spray and wipes instead. The city’s hospitals now use recycled water.
In 1994, Fresno introduced a three-days-a-week watering schedule for lawns. Last summer the rule became more stringent: two days a week. Says Standriff, “It is possible to do.” But what would Leland Stanford say? —Karen Weise
In São Paulo, Only Five Months of Water Left
Almost a year ago, a severe water shortage drove a neighborhood near São Paulo to burn tires in protest. The governor of São Paulo state, dominated by Brazil’s biggest city, had to send in 20 trucks of potable water to cool the situation. But the crisis hasn’t ended. In February of this year, the Cantareira, one of six reservoir systems that supply the city of 21 million people, was down to just 6 percent of its 1.3 billion-cubic-meter capacity. Even after seasonal rains, the level is still precariously low. The city’s utility, Sabesp, has about five months’ worth of water for its clients. “We burned through our reserves,” says Samuel Barreto, a specialist for water security at the Nature Conservancy of Brazil. “We’re still trying to get out of the eye of the hurricane.”
Sabesp has tried to ration water by reducing pipe pressure, which has often left taps dry in hilltop homes and faraway slums. São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin has started work on twin 7-mile pipelines to siphon water from a richer and nearly full reservoir south of the city. That is not going to be enough of a solution if Sabesp does little with its existing infrastructure. Its old pipes are in disrepair; the utility loses 18.2 percent of its water each year to leakage. Another 10 percent is lost to theft: fraudulent water meters, siphoning, and illegal connections that channel supplies to São Paulo’s squatter villages and the 2 million people who live there.
As it accelerates its infrastructure investment, Sabesp is both cutting back on some operations and planning to raise water prices. The utility is slashing by half spending on sewage collection and treatment, and seeking a third rate hike this year. All this comes at an already painful time: Brazil is facing its biggest economic contraction in 25 years.
The lack of water has led Solvay, the Belgian chemical corporation, to slow or shut its production in the São Paulo area. Other enterprises have curtailed their operations. Agriculture has suffered, too. Farmers who supply the city’s vegetables are leaving a growing proportion of their fields unplanted. “Rain used to come. Not anymore,” says Gervisio Massaki Worikoda, 52, a farmer in a rural part of São Paulo state. “We already reduced production by 40 percent.” Says Barreto: “We are missing mid-term and long-term solutions. The pipeline is important but we can’t expect it to solve all our problems.” —Blake Schmidt
