Valley offers elbow room to dairy operators squeezed out by encroaching development.
This empire is a Holstein blackbelt, situated atop a groundwater basin. Now that kingdom is under attack, facing complaints by new neighbors with dainty noses, criticism over cow waste muddying water supplies and a toughened set of environmental regulations. While some dairymen are blending in, others are moving on - sometimes to the central San Joaquin Valley, where critics of J.G. Boswell's dairy proposals whisper the Chino legacy like a warning. That talk echoes throughout California, the nation's biggest milk-producer, where new tension is brewing over dairies' environmental costs. The Chino basin illustrates the trouble with corraling cow waste in a growing region - a discussion bleeding into Valley debates about big dairy proposals such as Boswell's Chamberlain Ranch in Kings County.