"swroot" wrote in message
...
ned wrote:

Janet Baraclough wrote:

[-]

At our old house on the mainland, the council sent sewage suction
tankers (not tractors and bowsers)on round trips of up to 70 miles
to
empty septic tanks and take the contents to sewage works. It cost
householders £27.

snip


I hear what you say Janet and I would not dream of questioning your
experience. But, believe me the practice of spreading the contents of
septic tanks on farmland is still current in my neighbourhood. Just as
you assumed from your experience that this no longer occurred, I, from
my experience, thought it to be a more 'widespread' practice than it
apparently is.

The sewage works merely concentrate the solids, they don't make the
stuff magically disappear. The resultant sludge may be burned, but this
is expensive and wasteful: the fertility is better returned to the soil.
So sewage companies are now (I understand) *paying* farmers to take the
sludge as agricultural fertiliser. It's more usual in truly rural areas,
as farmers spreading it near other people's houses are often inundated
with complaints about the smell (it's truly noxious).


In the 'good old days', there were sewage farms which were just that, i.e.
farms where the principal use was the disposal of sewage on the land. There
was one of these not far from the location of what is now the Toyota factory
south of Derby, which was the sewage farm for Burton on Trent. Sewage was
pumped there via a steam powered beam engine at Clay Mills sewage works just
outside Burton, and distributed around the fields via a quite complex ditch
and drainage system. I think it remained in use until the 1960s or 70s.