This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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