In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
...
In my view whatever organic matter you can get locally and cheaply
(or free) is always superior to what you may buy or truck in.
if it is clean, sure. however, i'm wary
of taking anything from a farm these days.
things aren't the way they used to be.
animals are moved around a lot more now and
there are more resistant diseases.
To all those who say that it is essential to compost manure before
use, I ask why?
ever hear of E.coli O157:H7 ?
No but I am sure it's nasty
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1
(Available at a library near you, as long as they remain open.)
p.82
One of the bacteria that almost certainly resides in the manure I'm
standing in is particularly lethal to humans. Escherichia coli 0157:H7
is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal
bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle,
40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of
these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that
destroys human kidneys.
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their
way into our food get killed off by the strong acids in our stomachs,
since they evolved to live in the neutral pH environment of the rumen.
But the rumen of a corn-fed feedlot steer is nearly as acidic as our own
stomachs, and in this new, man-made environment new acid-resistant
strains of E. coli, of which 0157:H7 is one, have evolved‹yet another
creature recruited by nature to absorb the excess biomass coming off the
Farm Belt. The problem with these bugs is that they, can shake off the
acid bath in our stomachs‹and then go on to kill us. By acidifying the
rumen with corn we've broken down one of our food chain's most important
barriers to infection. Yet another solution turned into a problem.
We've recently discovered that this process of acidification can be
reversed, and that doing so can greatly diminish the threat from E. coli
0157:H7. Jim Russell, a USDA microbiologist on the faculty at Cornell,
has found that switching a cow's diet from corn to grass or hay for a
few days prior to slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157:H7 in
the animal's gut by as much as 80 percent. But such a solution (Grass?!)
is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry and (therefore)
by the USDA. Their preferred solution for dealing with bacterial
contamination is irradiation‹-essentially, to try to sterilize the
manure getting into the meat.
So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so
many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in pen 63 a dump truck
pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed.
The black mass of cowhide moved toward the trough for lunch. The
$1.60 a day I'm paying for three meals a day here is: a bargain only by
the narrowest of calculations. It doesn't take into account, for
example,
THE FEEDLOT: MAKING MEAT 83
the cost to the public health of, antibiotic resistance or food poisoning
by E.coli 0157:H7. It doesn't take into account the cost to taxpayers of
the farm subsidies that keep Poky's (feed lot) raw materials cheap. And
it certainly doesn't take into account all the many environmental costs
incurred by cheap corn.
for children and elderly there is 6%
chance of kidney failure if infected. for
the rest of us it can mean bloody poo,
vomiting and other fun stuff.
this bacteria can be found in even healthy
animals with no obvious sign it is there short
of testing each pile of poo. it can take as
little as 100 bacteria to cause an infection
(in my opinion 1 is enough if you happen to
be really unlucky or are immunologically
under the weather).
Can you give me a reference for these statements?
and then there are the flesh eating staph
bacterias going around now too. a friend
lost his foot and it's very likely it came
from horse manure.
How would you know that?
i'm sticking to green manures and worm
composting of green manures, that's about all
the risk i want to take.
songbird
There are some very nasty bugs around: what chance they are found in
manure, what chance you catch them from it (assuming you are not eating the
stuff) and will composting kill every one? Once you discount the yuck
factor what is the real risk? I don't know the answer to any of those
questions. I have been handling horse for years and never got poisoning.
You can get some terrible bugs from supermarket lettuce, it seems to happen
in the USA every other week. We live in a soup of gazillions of microbes,
in our air, soil and water, and on our skin and every surface in our
dwellings. Life is a lottery that we all play.
David
--
Billy
E Pluribus Unum
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.