Milk Contamination Is Sinking China's Farmers

TONGYE, CHINA In the courtyard of Dong Lizhong's simple brick house, 20 black-and-white cows stand in the mud. Dong had hoped the cows would be his ticket out of a factory job in the nearby city of Shijiazhuang, 250 miles southwest of Beijing. Instead, he and his family now drink all the milk they can stomach and dump the rest in his cabbage fields. The problem: The dairy-collection station in his village, Tongye, stopped purchasing on Sept. 14. "Unless someone starts buying milk," Dong says, "a lot of cows will be slaughtered."

Dong is one of hundreds of thousands of small-time dairy farmers caught up in China's widening milk-contamination crisis. Since the summer, four infants have died and at least 53,000 have fallen ill from baby formula containing melamine, a chemical additive used to make plastic. The contaminant has since been found in a wide range of foods containing milk, and more than 20 countries have banned Chinese dairy products.