In article ,
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
Psst. Is he gone? When do you think he'll find out that you are just
another hemorrhoidal, fat, old man? Whups ;O) shussh.
Anyway, all I got for you is another ol' book report. To wit:
Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry
Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Factory...vironment/dp/B
004IK9EJQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310272843&sr=1-1
(Available at your local library, until they are closed.)
260 ANIMAL FACTORY
...
"I chose a type of worm that turns this stuff into some kind of superfood
for plants," Don said. "Farmers and gardeners can't get enough of it;
they pay top dollar for it." The worm barn could yield about three tons
of the coveted "black gold" each day, he said, adding that the state
department of transportation had told him they wanted to buy it for
roadside plantings.
...
it doesn't say what happens to
the wastewater...
I was trying to keep it short. You want waste water, you got waste
water. But remember, Chuck isn't your typical CAFO owner. He, according
to the book, is trying to play fair.
Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry
Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby
http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Factory...vironment/dp/B
004IK9EJQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310272843&sr=1-1
(Available at your local library, until they are closed.)
What irked Chuck most was that not all hog farmers were doing their part
to avoid pollution. "And it ticks me off," he said. "I spend so much
time and trouble and paperwork on all the things I do‹most of my
expenses, really ‹ for applying and monitoring the waste. And then some
guy somewhere just decides to let it go, and then that paints a bad
picture for all of us." But instead of confronting the bad apples, or
closing them down altogether, he said, the pork industry tried to keep
quiet and insist there were no problems. "The mistake in our industry
has been to shun people like you and run you out the door," he said to
Rick, "and give you some pamphlet saying everything's hunky dory on a
hog farm. And through the years that's created a frustration within the
environmental community‹and the media."
Chuck wanted to help develop and use an alternative technology to replace
lagoons, but he still defended the basins as safe and effective. "I
moved over 150,000 yards of clay to line various lagoons around my farm,
eighteen inches thick, compressed with a roller to over ninety-five
percent compaction, that I had to send off to a lab and get them to
certify before I could put the first drop of water in it," he explained.
"I've spent millions building these lagoons. They're not just holes
punched in the ground that leak manure into the water tables. That's
just ridiculous."
Even so, Chuck was personally involved in the hunt to make lagoons
obsolete. He and a small group of investor/hog farmers were developing
their own system for adoption by the state. One day. Chuck invited Rick
and Nicolette Hahn to see the prototype he was developing.
Chuck introduced them to the inventor, an old farmer named Don Lloyd.
Rick and Nicolette watched in wonderment as Chuck and Lloyd explained
how it worked.
"We take all the wastewater washed from the barns and pump it into this
underground holding tank, where heavy solids settle to the bottom," Chuck
said. "Now, this is all the stuff that would normally go into the
lagoon. So you see, we've already eliminated the need for a lagoon right
from the get-go." Rick liked what he was hearing so far.
Once the solids had settled out, Chuck and Lloyd siphoned water off the
top and ran it to a large above-ground tank. "Once there, we inject the
water with something called TCM, or trichloromelamine; it's a sanitizer,
attacks the
GOING NATIONAL 261
bad organics and stuff," Chuck said. "Makes it like pure water. The
United States uses it in Afghanistan for our troops."
After the microorganisms were killed, a polymer was then injected into
the water‹the tiny polymer beads bound with paniculate matter that got
through the separator and clumped them together, pulling them down to
the bottom of the tank. "You can actually see the liquid getting
clearer," Chuck marveled. When that process was finished, the water was
removed from the top and the residual matter was ejected through a
hopper at the bottom of the tank.
Some of the cleaned water was then recycled back to the barns‹to hose
down the floors and flush the manure pits back out into the underground
separator tank, starting the whole closed-circuit process over again.
The remaining liquid was mixed with fresh aquifer water, diluting its
particulate content to the point of human drinkability.
To prove it, Don gulped down a glass of the former hogwash. The guests
gasped. "Why, it tastes just fine" he said, smiling and wiping his
mouth. "But we don't usually drink it‹we give it to the pigs to drink.
It cuts down our groundwater use by about 40 percent."
That left the solids. Raw manure cannot be used on food crops because of
the harmful pathogens it contains, limiting its commercial value as a
fertilizer. Most of the germs can be killed through composting, though
that takes time and money to accomplish, without adding enough market
value to the manure to make the system economically feasible.
"Then we discovered an answer," Chuck said proudly.
---
The rest of this section I've already posted.
Chuck "appears" to be addressing the concerns that you raise.
As far as heavy metals are concerned, there shouldn't be any in the
system, because heavy metals would make animals sick, and hopefully lead
to a recall. Unlike humans, animals don't drop used iPod batteries down
toilets that flow into public water treatment plants, and contaminate
reclaimed solids.
Personally, I don't like CAFOs. I'd prefer to see animals free ranging
on pasture, but some people balk at paying $25 for a whole chicken.
oh geeze, an inch of pig poo solids a
day. that would be hell to me, pig poo
is way too stinky. the wormies are
probably doing a great job, but i sure
wouldn't want to feed that stuff to my
worms and then put it on any food plant.
pigs eat too much like people for me to
want to have stuff coming out their butts
to be anywhere near food crops.
roadside fertilizer? you means so the
wind can pick up the dust and have many
people breathing it as they drive by?
How would this be different than using composted manure, which will
still have some coliforms alive in it?
washed
by rain into the ditches and then streams,
rivers, etc. sure some of it is sterilized
by the sun and rain, but how many bacteria or
virus do you need for some infections? not
many. um, no thanks, bad idea.
i can't tell from the quote if the
guy is raising his pigs with or without
antibiotics and hormones. those i
certainly would not want going through
to the worms/plants/ground/groundwater.
You raise a fair question. I saw no mention of the use of antibiotics.
Lessening the density of (giving more space to) the herd reduces the
prophylactic need for antibiotics, but for some reason, animals given
antibiotics grow faster and larger.
I'm not proselytizing for CAFOs, but trying to point out there are some
people who are trying to improve them, and become better neighbors, but
in truth I'd be a NIMBY.
songbird
--
- Billy
Both the House and Senate budget plan would have cut Social Security and Medicare, while cutting taxes on the wealthy.
Kucinich noted that none of the government programs targeted for
elimination or severe cutback in House Republican spending plans
"appeared on the GAO's list of government programs at high risk of
waste, fraud and abuse."
http://www.politifact.com/ohio/state...is-kucinich/re
p-dennis-kucinich-says-gop-budget-cuts-dont-targ/
[W]e have the situation with the deficit and the debt and spending and jobs. And itąs not that difficult to get out of it. The first thing you do is you get rid of corporate welfare. Thatąs hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The second is you tax corporations so that they donąt get away with no taxation.
- Ralph Nader
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/19/ralph_naders_solution_to_debt_crisis