In article ,
"Farm1" wrote:

"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.

"Twas that it were true, "From its American and West European heartland
factory farming became globalised in the later years of the twentieth
century and is still expanding and replacing traditional practices of
stock rearing in an increasing number of countries.[15] In 1990 factory
farming accounted for 30% of world meat production.[15] By 2005 this had
risen to 40%.[16]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming#History

I agree completely, we should eat the corn and pasture the steers. The
meat will cost more, but cleaning the environment will be cheaper.

Too often the Animal Factories just want to get the most money as
quickly as they can, and that means "privatizing the profits, and
socializing the costs". I have heard that factory farming can be
operated humanely and cleanly, but that requires someone who won't skin
the milk cow.

---

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

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 I 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. "It was worms‹
vermiculture, they call it." Lloyd devised a system that feeds waste
solids to worms on a continual basis. Inside a barn with dirt floors, he
had dug several rows of trenches‹three feet wide and about twenty-two
inches deep‹the entire length of the floor. A mix of worms and organic
matter were introduced into the trenches, and then specially designed
machinery deposited an inch of solids into each trench every morning. By
the end of the day, the worms had consumed the entire inch of food,
turning it into clean, odorless, disease-free castings. The worms
returned to the bottom of the trench, and another layer of solids was
applied to begin the process again.

"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.

"And because of the value added on the manure from those little worms,"
Chuck concluded with a big grin, "it brings our net costs down to about
fourteen


262 I ANIMAL FACTORY

dollars per thousandweight," or a penny and a half per pound. "But this
is still in its early stages. We're just a little Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang kinda outfit up here."

By the middle of George W. Bush's first presidential term, it became
apparent that scientists were being pressured to publish papers that
were uncritical of concentrated livestock operations and their impact on
the environment, rural communities, animal welfare, and human health. It
gave a brand-new meaning to the term "political science."

"University and government scientists studying health threats associated
with agricultural pollution say they are harassed by farmers and trade
groups and silenced by superiors afraid to offend the powerful
industry," said a lengthy investigative article in The Des Moines
Register that ran in April 2002 under the headline AC SCIENTISTS FEEL
THE HEAT.9

"Scientists say the pressure is stopping important work meant to protect
the taxpayers, who foot most of the bill," the article said. "Even when
the work gets done, they worry about efforts to manipulate or muffle the
results." Many researchers blamed the increasingly cozy relationship
between the USDA and the industry it was supposed to regulate, and
according to some scientists, the coercion was increasing.

The USDA had stifled many proposed controversial studies by driving
them through a lengthy approval process, critics alleged. The resulting
delays would dry up grant money and the research would often get
canceled. Some accused the USDA of collaborating outright with industry
to squelch data that did not meet desired results or expectations.
--

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.