The fiflth of corporate farms and megafarms

[Guest guest]

Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

By A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, March 1, 2010; A01

Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has

reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and

occasionally flammable.

But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff

in the world.

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern

pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has

more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of 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.

And 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

one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back

ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar

pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama

administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing

off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

In recent months, Oklahoma has battled poultry companies from Arkansas in court,

blaming their birds' waste for slimy and deadened rivers downstream. In Florida,

the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed first-of-their-kind limits on

pollutants found in manure.

In the Senate, L. Cardin (D-Md.) has proposed a bill that would allow

farmers in the Chesapeake watershed to cut pollution more than required and sell

the extra " credits " to other polluters. The EPA, in the middle of an overhaul

for the failed Chesapeake cleanup, also has threatened to tighten rules on large

farms.

" We now know that we have more nutrient pollution from animals in the Chesapeake

Bay watershed " than from human sewage, said J. Fox, the EPA's new

Chesapeake czar. " Nutrients " is the scientific word for the main pollutants

found in manure, treated sewage, and runoff from fertilized lawns. They are the

bay's chief evil, feeding unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones.

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.

" It's clearly going to put a squeeze on people that they've always said they

didn't want to squeeze, " including family-run farms, said Don Parrish of the

American Farm Bureau Federation.

The story of manure is already a gloomy counterpoint to the triumphs in fighting

pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970. An air pollutant that causes acid

rain has been cut by 56 percent. By one measure, the output from sewage plants

got 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.

" We've dealt with the kind of conventional pollutants, " that helped spark the

first Earth Day, said F. Boesch, president of the University of land

Center for Environmental Science. " Now, we see the things that are eating our

lunch, if you will, are natural products . . . that are just overloading the

system. "

The reasons for manure's rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say,

with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law.

In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large

farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of

chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming -- manure feeds the crops,

then the crops feed the animals -- is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste.

The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do

with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a " brown fog. "

It can emit substances that contribute to climate change.

And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach.

" You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car, " said Lynn

Henning, 52, a farmer in rural Clayton, Mich., 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. "

In the water, the chemicals in manure don't poison life, like pesticides or

spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, and the wrong kinds.

" You get Miracle-Gro for your water, " said Guest, a lawyer for the group

Earthjustice who has fought for tougher limits on pollution in Florida.

The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms. They

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 respire -- 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.

The law, however, has treated manure and other agricultural pollutants

differently than pollutants from smokestacks and sewer pipes.

The EPA does not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off farms, instead

issuing guidelines that apply only to the largest operations. There, the rules

might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, for

instance, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter

manure-laden runoff. Even that level of regulation has only been in place since

the 1990s.

But now, the EPA has signaled an intent to tighten its grip.

Last Monday, the agency announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of

its six " national enforcement initiatives. " New rules went into effect in

December that will impose even tighter restrictions on large farms.

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also considered a change to its

guidelines, which would have limited the amount of manure farmers could apply to

their fields. But then it scrapped that idea, saying the issue needed more

study.

Last week on the Eastern Shore, where farmers raised 568 million chickens last

year, the problem of excess manure was still big enough to see from the road.

" See how dark that one pile is? That's chicken manure, " said Kathy , 61,

an environmental activist who patrols the peninsula for piles of manure stored

outdoors. As a steady rain fell, she said that pollutants were probably leaching

off that mound -- as tall as a van and the color of dark-roast coffee-- and into

ditch water that would eventually reach the Pocomoke River, then the Chesapeake.

usually surveys these piles from the air. She has a mental map of

dozens of these off-smelling mounds.

" I don't want to be the Poop Lady, " said , who got into environmentalism

because she loved to surf Ocean City's beaches. " But, you know, somebody had to

talk about this. It's like this dirty little secret. "

A few miles north, the poultry giant Perdue has come up with one way to dispose

of excess manure. At a $13 million plant outside Seaford, Del., tons of poultry

manure are dried, heated to kill off bacteria and compressed into pellets of

organic fertilizer that is sold to golf courses or homeowners.

" This is sort of a reverse chicken, " said Perdue spokesman Luna, as

bulldozers moved manure below. " In a chicken, the food goes in and the poop goes

out. Here, the poop comes in and the plant food goes out. "

That helps Chesapeake's manure problem, but it isn't the whole solution. Luna

said there is enough manure on the Shore to keep more plants like this running--

but Perdue isn't planning to build more yet. So far, the fertilizer doesn't sell

well enough to make that cost-effective.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803978.\

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