Terrorism? Dairy Farm Explosion Kills 18,000 Cows

... After subduing the fire at the west Texas dairy farm Monday evening, officials were stunned at the scale of livestock death left behind: 18,000 head of cattle perished in the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas – or about 20% of the cattle slaughtered in America on any given day....

... Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera spoke to local media outlet KSAT-TV about the explosion and subsequent fire, saying that speculation centered around “what they call a honey badger, which is a vacuum that sucks the manure and water out and possibly that it got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded and the fire.”...

I mean, what the hell?! What kind of explosion could possibly cause the death of 18,000 cattle?! This is a bovine Hiroshima or Nagasaki! I’m not buying the theory that a vacuum exploded, killing 18,000 dairy cows, whose average weight is over 1,500 pounds. Over how vast an area were the cows dispersed, even if in a pen? At 8 feet long and like 5 feet wide, even if they were all standing nearly nose-to-tail and shoulder-to-shoulder they would cover an area of roughly 26 football fields. And this was on essentially open prairie, with not much fuel for a fire...

After a boiler explosion at Shearer’s Foods in Hermiston, Oregon in February, the company laid off its employees. In March, there was a large fire at the Penobscot McCrum potato processing plant in Maine. In April, a private plane crashed into Gem State Processing, a potato processing plant in Idaho. A week later, another private plane crashed into the General Mills plant in Covington, Georgia.

Meanwhile, an April fire at the port of Benicia, California hampered gasoline production. A natural gas pipeline exploded in Michigan in March.

That same month, there was a massive fire at the Taylor Farms food processing plant in Salinas, California. Also in April, the Dufur, Oregon headquarters of Azure Standard, a leading organic food distributor, was destroyed by fire, and another fire destroyed the East Conway Beef & Pork Meat Market in Conway, New Hampshire. Early in May, a chicken farm in Jones County, Mississippi was destroyed by fire. Saladino’s food processing plant in Fresno, California caught fire around the same time. A Walmart Fulfillment Center in Indiana caught fire in late May. Also in late May, a fire at Forsman Farms in Howard Lake, Minnesota killed tens of thousands of chickens. In mid-June, there was a huge fire at the Festive Foods pizza plant in Belmont, Wisconsin.

In Iowa in April, five million chickens were killed after discovery of a single case of avian flu. 22 million chickens have been killed nationwide in an attempt to contain the outbreak. Thousands of cattle died in Kansas in June; their deaths were blamed on the heat, but it was not an unusually hot month, and numerous people with farming experience were skeptical of the official explanation.

Meanwhile, on May 26, a coal train derailed near Gothenburg, Nebraska. On June 1, a train derailed near Lansing, Iowa, with ten coal cars leaving the tracks; the contents of one spilled into the Mississippi River. Another train derailed in Shiner, Texas on June 3, spilling coal in the center of the town. In British Columbia, yet another coal train derailed on June 18, spilling coal from fifteen rail cars. That same day, one more coal train derailed in Lawrence, Kansas, spilling a “large amount” of coal...