Seems like there have been an awful lot of fires at food processing plants lately. I can't tell if there really has been a significant increase in the number of incidents or whether our communications channels have improved so much that we are hearing about them more often. Or maybe conspiracy theories sell, so more people are writing reports about these kind of incidents.
I suspect that food processing, like grocery stores, run on very thin margins, so some operators might be inclined to skimp on safety items like fire prevention. I mean, nobody's going to care very much if a bunch of animals get killed, they were all going to be killed anyway.
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| South Fork Dairy, Dimmitt, Texas |
But this dairy farm fire that Bayou Renaissance Man reports on is pretty phenomenal: 18,000 dairy cattle killed in a barn fire. How can you get that many cattle in one barn? It must be pretty big barn. It is. Using Google Maps distance measuring feature I find that the barn is 800 feet by 2,400 feet. This thing is half a mile long and covers 44 acres.
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| South Fork Dairy - West Texas Farmland |
What's even weirder (from my point of view) is that it is all by its lonesome in the midst of a huge expanse of agricultural fields. Dimmitt, Texas must be a very strange place.
18,000 cattle. Butchered you could get about 500 pounds of meat from each animal. At a half pound of meat per day, that would be enough to feed everyone in Dimmitt for a dozen years. Or enough to make 36 million quarter pounders.
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