This post isn’t actually related to the first Post About Poop, except that they both do happen to be about, well, poop.
In the past 40 years, the US has effectively reduced the manmade pollutants that left our waterways dead, discolored, and occasionally flammable. But sadly, we’ve managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world: manure.
According to scientists and environmentalists, animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become a modern pollution problem. The country simply has more dung than it can handle.
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, air pollutants that cause acid rain have been cut by 56 percent. The outputs from sewage plants have gotten 45 percent cleaner. But, according to Cornell University researchers, the amount of one key pollutant – nitrogen – entering the environment in manure has increased by at least 60 percent since the 1970s.
The reason for manure’s rise as a pollutant is the shift in agriculture. In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a small number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs, or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the traditional, self-contained cycle of farming (manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals) is completely broken. The result is too much manure and too little to do with it.
Crowded together in megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields. That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. It washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones” that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about 1/4th of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced back to the rear ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.
Air
In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a “brown fog.” It can emit substances that contribute to climate change (methane and nitrogen). And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach (ever been to Lubbock, TX?).
“You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car,” said Lynn Henning, a farmer in rural Clayton, MI, who said she became an environmental activist after fumes from huge new dairies gave her family headaches and burning sinuses. The way that modern megafarms produce it, Henning said, “Manure is no longer manure. Manure is a toxic waste now.”
Water
In the water, the chemicals in manure don’t poison life, like pesticides or spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, but the wrong kind. The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms that drain away oxygen as they decompose.
Scientists say the number of suffocating dead zones (oxygen-depleted areas where even worms and clams climb out of the mud, desperate to breathe) has grown from 16 in the 1950s to at least 230 today. The Chesapeake’s is usually the country’s third largest, after the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie.
Laws
Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as other pollution problems have, like human sewage, acid rain, or industrial waste.
The Obama administration has made moves to try to change this but has already found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the politics of poop. Around the country, agricultural interests have fought back against moves like these, saying that new rules on manure could mean crushing new costs for farmers.
The Environmental Proection Agency (EPA) does not set strict rules, but instead issues “guidelines” that apply only to the largest operations. The guidelines might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter manure-laden runoff, but do not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off of farms. These guidelines have only been in place since the 1990s.
Last fall, the US Department of Agriculture considered a change to its guidelines, to limit the amount of manure farmers could apply to their fields, but they scrapped the idea, saying the issue needed “more study.”
This month, the EPA announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of its six national enforcement initiatives. We can only hope that this will result in stricter regulations.
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Breakfast: Oatmeal
Lunch: Large spinach salad and hummus with pretzels
Dinner: A steamed artichoke (my favorite food EVER) with a side of red potato, chopped and cooked with onion and garlic
