"Billy" wrote in message
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.

Very US centric Billy - Feedlot, corn diet for humans, put cattle on grass
feed. No wonder David's not heard of it.