OKEECHOBEE, Fla.— Wearing a baseball cap and a long-sleeved button down, the patriarch of Florida’s largest family-owned dairy steers a pickup truck over bumpy earth. As the truck lurches forward, a bleak, brown pond comes into view.
The water’s low. Two alligator snouts break its surface.
This corner of Woody Larson’s property doesn’t have the endearing charm of its sand-floored cow stalls or the mechanical sleekness of its milking shed. It’s quiet, far enough from cow barns that you don’t hear the moos.
And it was once Larson’s biggest headache.
Lake Okeechobee is the largest lake in Florida and, by some measures, the most polluted in the nation. When Florida regulators pledged to start cleaning it up, in the 1970s, they singled out dairies as prime polluters.
The state bought out some dairies and required the rest to make big changes, including digging ponds like Larson’s for cow poop.
Facing growing scrutiny, “our mantra became stay and do,” Larson said.
Others left.
A few relocated to North Florida’s Suwannee River region where land was cheaper and pollution rules less onerous. New dairies opened there, too. Around the turn of the millennium, the dairy cow population in counties north of Orlando rivaled that south of it, according to census data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Dairies joined an established farming hotbed in north central Florida, growing its value but also its footprint.
Now, the pollution problems that plagued Lake Okeechobee are bubbling up in Suwannee River springs. Slimy, green algae darken turquoise swimming holes, feasting on nitrogen contamination that’s grown despite a state plan to shrink it.
Regulators overwhelmingly call out farm fertilizers as the main culprit. Groundwater pumping and low oxygen levels play a role, too. But scientists attribute a quarter of contamination to dairies, drawing familiar scrutiny.
Updated state plans – caught in a legal battle – are now calling for all polluters in the Suwannee, dairies included, to slash their nitrogen pollution 85% by 2038, the most ambitious goal set for any Florida waterway. But if Okeechobee’s dairy history offers any lessons, it’s that regulating pollution after the fact is less effective than preventing it in the first place.
Cow country
About two hours south of Orlando, the City of Okeechobee seems to appear out of empty pastures. Quiet backroads fill up with semis, pickup trucks and minivans, causing a traffic jam between Eli’s Western Wear and its neighbor, Eli’s Trailer Sales. A right turn just after the city’s park leads visitors to its biggest landmark: Lake Okeechobee.
Okeechobee is the only city in a county that has more cows than people.
It drew Woody Larson’s late father, Red, in the 1960s.
Known by many as the “dean of dairymen” in Florida, Red started his dairy dynasty in Broward County in 1947 before moving to Palm Beach County and finally Okeechobee.
“Traditionally milk has been produced pretty close to the people,” Larson said, sitting at a wooden conference table in the family’s office downtown. “As the population pressures moved up the state, a lot of the dairies started relocating over here to the central part.”
Okeechobee County was home to about 200 dairy cows in 1950, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. By 1963, it led the state with 21,651 dairy cows.
Growing herds brought growing scrutiny.
“The first time I remember environmental pressure was in the middle to late sixties,” Larson said. “I was a teenager, but I remember my dad coming home from a meeting and saying, ‘We're going to have to dig a lagoon.’”
The dairy needed a place to put its poop.
Before regulators decided dairies should move cows inside and funnel their waste into ponds for treatment, the standard was to leave it where it landed. Cows grazed in open pastures and came into barns twice per day to be milked, dropping about 100 pounds of manure per day.
Rain storms and barn washouts shuttled manure, about 90% water itself, into creeks and streams that then flowed into Lake Okeechobee, loading the lake with phosphorus. A core component of fertilizer alongside nitrogen, phosphorus occurs naturally in the plants cows eat. It’s a boon to plant growth and – unfortunately for the lake – to algal growth, too.
By the 1960s, dairies north of the lake dumped 2,000 metric tons of phosphorus, about the weight of NASA’s Space Shuttle, into the watershed each year. Farm fertilizers, septic tanks and other human sources piled on contaminants, too, spurring toxic algal blooms that poisoned wildlife.
“You had lots of people that were sampling water and telling you how bad it was,” Larson recalled. “But nobody told us how to fix it.”
The compromise
In 1987, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection gave Okeechobee dairy farmers an ultimatum: clean up or get out.
State agencies bought them out for $602 per cow, about $1,600 today. Larson, who helped negotiate the price tag, called the deal “the best we could do.”
“There was Eagle Bay Dairy right here. Wolf Brothers dairy was right in here somewhere,” he said, pointing on a wall map to an area immediately bordering Lake Okeechobee. “They told them ‘You do not have a choice. You have to go out.’”
Of the region’s 48 dairies, 18 took the buyout by 1992. Thirty stayed.
FDEP helped pay for upgrades, but it took regulators a while to figure out what those should be.
From the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s, “there was a meeting once a week somewhere,” Larson recalled. Some were tense. Dairy farmers felt their livelihoods were on the line while regulators faced intense public pressure to fix an environmental problem they didn’t yet fully understand.
The late Okeechobee rancher and agroecologist Frank "Sonny" Williamson Jr. emerged as mediator between environmental and agricultural interests. He encouraged science-based practices and, in a later role on the South Florida Water Management District Governing Board, advocated for research funding.
“You can only do what we know to do,” Larson, Williamson and other farmers repeated to regulators.
So agencies invested millions in learning what to do and helping dairies do it.
Researchers learned cows pooped close to where they ate. By feeding cows in a concrete-floored barn instead of a pasture, herd managers could wash out manure and pipe it into storage ponds. “That worked great, except that we found out cows and concrete don't go together so well,” Larson said. “You’ve got to give them some comfort.” So, producers lined the cows’ quarters with sand that could be washed, recycled and replaced.
Storage ponds, too, had challenges. They produced earth-warming greenhouse gases as bacteria ate away at the manure. Cracks or spills leaked polluted water. Dairy farmers began lining their ponds with thick tarps and building them bigger to prevent overflow.
Water couldn’t stay in the ponds forever. Researchers tested which crops farmers could plant to suck the nutrients out of wastewater and feed back to their cows.
It worked.
Phosphorus declines in runoff “were immediate and, in most cases, dramatic,” the South Florida Water Management District reported in 1996. The improvements slashed phosphorus levels 60% in one part of the lake’s watershed and more than 85% in the other.
They boosted milk production, too, helping to offset sales losses that came from the buyouts.
“It was somewhat gratifying to know that all the work and all the money you spent was making a difference,” Larson said.
But, to the disappointment of regulators and dairy producers alike, the improvements didn’t translate to a cleaner Lake Okeechobee. Algae blooms continue to choke the lake and its tributaries today.
Neighbors up North
On a Friday night in Cross City in April 1951, V. E. Gillespie announced plans to develop a dairy industry in north central Florida. Gillespie, chairman of the dairy committee of the Suwannee River Valley Development Association, called the region’s opportunity “limitless.”
Sure enough, cow numbers grew in the decades that followed and, by 1987, the Jacksonville Journal reported: “Lafayette County has become to North Florida what Okeechobee County is to South Florida, a center for dairy farming.”
Suwannee Valley dairy farmers hoped the similarities ended there.
They feared an Okeechobee-like crackdown on pollution and, to get ahead of the problem, asked the state for help managing their waste. In 1987, a six-county collaborative requested $4.8 million to help cover the cost of ponds and pumps at 46 area dairies.
It didn’t make the state’s next budget.
“People who were already in the dairy industry in North Florida at that time did not have that infrastructure in place,” said Emily Beach, an extension agent in Lafayette County who grew up on a Suwannee Valley dairy.
It started to show.
The state announced plans to test water quality around North Florida dairies in 1990. It found high levels of nutrients at nine area dairies in June and, by September, required all new dairies to install waste management systems that protected groundwater.
Environmental requirements “became more and more stringent and infrastructure became more and more expensive,” even after state-sponsored cost shares, Beach said.
Beach remembers watching her dad and uncle grapple with the decision to leave the dairy industry. They each started their dairy farms in North Florida in 1978 and, as pollution restrictions tightened, installed waste ponds and pipe systems.
“Because milk prices had been so good before, they didn't have a lot of debt,” Beach said. “Not everybody was that fortunate.”
But profit margins shrunk through the 2000s. Beach’s dad leased out his land and milking machinery to stay afloat. In 2011, he sold his herd.
“They tried to make it work as long as they could,” Beach said of her dad and uncle. “As of today, both of those farms are vacant.”
About 85 to 90% of Florida dairies have gone out of business in the past 30 years, according to Ray Hodge, executive director of the industry group United Dairy Farmers of Florida.
Today, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services reports 43 operational dairies, down from 64 in 2022.
Yet closed doesn’t always mean clean.
A dairy legacy
Pyramidal and covered with green grass, the Herbert Hoover Dike blocks drivers from seeing Lake Okeechobee from city roads. But steer over the hump, through the parking lot and onto the pier and the lake stretches out in every direction.
Water quality researchers studying Lake Okeechobee at the turn of the millennium faced a puzzling paradox. The water leaving dairy farms had lower phosphorus levels than before, but the lake’s waters didn’t proportionally reflect that reduction.
“Indeed, total loads to the lake are no longer declining,” a consultant for the South Florida Water Management District reported in 2003.
Through a series of studies, researchers traced the problem back to the ground.
“The soils have been saturated with nutrients, they've sucked it up,” said Rachael Cooper, a private consulting firm water resources engineer who studied the Lake Okeechobee watershed in her graduate work at the University of South Florida.
Rainfall can wash older, so-called “legacy” phosphorus out of soils, carrying it toward Lake Okeechobee. Mud at the bottom of the lake itself stores phosphorus, too.
Tested more than a decade after its closure, one dairy farm raised phosphorus levels in a nearby creek almost 80 times above the region’s current legal limit.
Other former dairy farms, cattle pastures and fertilized fields had similar legacies. Water management district researchers estimated in 2007 that the soils in and around Lake Okeechobee could be storing more than 380 million pounds of legacy phosphorus that could enter the lake.
Modern-day loading was still a problem, too. A dairy farm that opened near the lake in the late 1980s raised phosphorus levels in surface water even though it used the agencies’ new practices.
So, agencies invested in both pollutant control and cleanup.
As of November 2024, the FDEP reported 302 projects aimed at improving water quality in Lake Okeechobee as completed or ongoing and another 84 as underway or planned. The agency estimated that, combined, the projects would keep about 300,000 pounds of phosphorus out of the lake in subsequent years.
The reduction was significant, but well below what the agency had hoped.
Awareness and improvement
Back in the Suwannee Valley, pollution problems have worsened steadily since the dairy farmers’ call for help went unanswered in the 1980s.
Nitrogen levels increased at Suwannee springs between 2018 and 2023 despite a state plan that promised to reduce them. The region’s sandy soils and hole-riddled karst geology fast-tracks contaminants to the Floridan Aquifer, the state’s largest source of drinking water. There, nitrogen acts similarly to phosphorus in Lake Okeechobee, fueling algae blooms that suffocate water and everything living in it.
Robert Knight, president of the Florida Springs Institute, set out to quantify dairies’ contributions to this problem last year after measuring, “very scary levels of nitrate nitrogen,” at a spring near a dairy in Gilchrist County.
Using data from 2011, he calculated, “the waste coming out of these cows is roughly equivalent to the waste coming from the total human population in the four largest cities in Florida: Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville.”
That’s no longer the case, said Troy Roberts, communications director for the Suwannee River Water Management District. “Many of the smaller dairies included in the Florida Springs Institute study are no longer operational, which inaccurately reflects current conditions,” Roberts wrote to WUFT.
Still, the state’s own water quality plans point to dairies as the second-largest culprits for nitrogen pollution in the Suwannee basin following farm fertilizers, sending about 1.8 million pounds of the stuff into groundwater each year.
Nitrogen from past pollution worsens current dairy loads, too. Nitrate doesn’t stick around in soils like Okeechobee’s legacy phosphorus, but it dissolves easily into groundwater, spending an average of 20 to 30 years underground before bubbling out at a spring.
“ If you did widespread changes across the entire landscape, you still have a median travel time of decades before it might change the concentration at a spring,” said UF agricultural and biological engineering professor Wendy Graham. “We need to get better at monitoring and tracking.”
The region lags behind Okeechobee in terms of environmental protections.
About 57% of ag acres in the Suwannee basin reported using “best management practices” to control their pollution in 2024 compared to 84% of acres in the Lake Okeechobee basin.
For dairies, those include measures like lining waste ponds and not spraying wastewater onto crops when soils are soggy. Boosting best management practices in the Suwannee basin could cut some pollution but won’t solve the problem, Graham said.
“You won't get an 85% reduction by just improving management practices on any type of land system that I know of,” she said. “That entails more aggressive projects or land-use changes.”
The high-tech end of the spectrum means more systems like giant, methane-burning digesters or Larson’s brown pond in Okeechobee County. Despite its bleak appearance, the pond is actually a high-tech treatment wetland. Preliminary results suggest it cuts phosphorus levels 95%.
The other end could entail cutting back on cows or relocating them to clay-lined soils outside of the Suwannee Valley, Knight said, a solution he recognizes is unpopular. “I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime,” he said.
In the middle are the projects Hodge, the dairy lobbyist, calls “proven” but “not sexy”.
In 2025, Florida agriculture commissioner Wilton Simpson announced some such projects at three North Florida dairies that would dig waste storage ponds, move pasture-based herds into barns and spray wastewater onto feed crops. FDACS estimated the projects would slash about 46,000 pounds of nitrogen pollution and save about 35 million gallons of groundwater annually.
It may take awhile to see those improvements.
A growing body of research shows tackling nitrogen alone may not solve the problem either, because oxygen levels in water – and water flow rates themselves – can also influence what dies or thrives in springs.
“I don’t think these ecosystems are responding to a single driver,” said Graham.
Its humans aren’t, either.
It’s what one north central Florida dairy farmer said back in 1989 as he weighed the economic and environmental costs of upgrading his facilities. He spent $20,000 to upgrade his waste system, saying dairymen drink groundwater, too.
“If I’m creating my own problem, I would be the first to put a stop to it.”
