A handful of dairy farms sprawl across the valley floor, ringed by the spikey, copper-colored San Jacinto mountains. This is the very edge of California’s dairy country—and so far, the cows here are safe.
But everyone worries that the potentially lethal bird flu is on the way. “I hope not,” says Clemente Jimenez, as he fixes a hose at Pastime Lakes, a 1,500-head dairy farm. “It’s a lot of trouble.”
Further north and west, in the San Joaquin Valley—the heart of the state’s dairy industry—the H5N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, has rippled through the massive herds that provide most of the country’s milk. Farmworkers have piled carcasses into black and white heaps. This week the state reported 19 new confirmed cases in cows and more than 240,000 in chickens. Another 50,000 cases were confirmed at a chicken breeding facility in Oklahoma.