Two Guardian stories about dairies, consolidation, and water woes in the United States

The first is out of Greenwald, Minnesota, and the headline is "‘There are ghosts in the land’: how US mega-dairies are killing off small farms."  Here's the lede for Debbie Weingarten's story:  

In late January last year, ​dairy farmers filled ​a pub in the tiny town of Greenwald, Minnesota (population 238)​. Organisers ​from the Land Stewardship Project – a sustainable agriculture nonprofit – ​expected 50 people to attend, but ​​130 showed up from all corners of the state.

Dr Richard Levins, ​professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of Minnesota, addressed the event, which served as part elegy for the thousands of small family-owned dairies lost in recent years ​and part rallying cry for those remaining, despite the odds​.

Across the US, dairy farmers have struggled beneath the weight of an industry-wide economic crisis. T​he cause ​is the massive overproduction of milk by large dairy operations, which has​ ​saturated the market, ​driving prices ​down well below the cost of production.

The second story is out of Arizona, reported by Tony Davis. The headline is, "Mega-dairies, disappearing wells, and Arizona’s deepening water crisis."  Here's an excerpt: 

The Sunizona community, in the south-western US state of Arizona, is just a speck on the map. A few hundred homes dot the landscape along dirt roads and for a few miles along a state highway that leads to the foot of the Chiricahua mountains near the New Mexico border.

Cynthia Beltran moved to Sunizona with her seven-year-old son last autumn even though the area lacks functional drinking water wells, because it was all she could afford. She cannot afford the $15,000 (£10,000) cost of deepening her well, which dried up last year, and had been paying for a local firm to deliver water in a tanker. But at $100 a week it became too expensive, so now she will be relying on a friend to help her fetch water from her mother’s well.

“I have no place to go. I don’t have a job. I can’t afford to pay rent,” she says.

Beltran’s water woes are far from unique in the Willcox basin, an area of close to 2,000 sq miles (5,200 sq km) in Arizona’s south-east corner. Nearly 20 wells in Sunizona alone were deepened between 2015 and 2019, after they dried up. Seventy-five wells were deepened in that time across the Willcox basin, Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) records show.