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Manure management: Getting the smell out of farm policy
by Wylie Harris (Thursday, June 10, 2004 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- Staying clear of the manure can be as tricky in the nation's capitol as
it is in a feedlot. As the line from the play goes, we are up to our
necks in it – which is why we walk with our heads held high. In our barn there's an old manure spreader that's been rusting away
since my grandparents' time. Back then, animal manure was a valuable
source of fertilizer, and single farms commonly produced both livestock
and crops. But with the postwar push to feed the world, "efficient" and
specialized industrial-style production approaches, aided by farm
policy, segregated crops and livestock on separate farms. With the livestock gone, fertilizer had to be bought off the farm.
Conveniently enough, the same factories that had spent the war turning
nitrogen into explosives could switch easily to making cheap synthetic
fertilizers. Livestock, meanwhile, could be grown fatter and quicker by
feeding them grain in confined feedlots, instead of grass in open
pastures. The manure, with no pastures or fields nearby to absorb it,
just piled up in holding lagoons. Synthetic fertilizers are lighter and easier to handle than manure, but
they're also more mobile in the soil. They percolate quickly into
groundwater, making it toxic. They wash overland into streams, poisoning
them for fish and people alike. And they volatilize into the air, adding
to the atmosphere's growing load of greenhouse gases. Synthetic
fertilizer is produced in an energy-intensive process that burns natural
gas, contributing further to the greenhouse effect. Natural gas, by the
way, is most of the rising cost of the once-cheap fertilizers. During
the 1990s, its climbing price turned the U.S. from the world's largest
exporter of nitrogen fertilizer to the largest importer. Meanwhile, the livestock manure, an ideal domestically produced organic
fertilizer, sits unused in big factory feedlot holding lagoons – just
waiting for a heavy rain to turn it into a toxic spill. The City of Waco
is engaged in litigation against several upstream confined-animal
dairy-feeding operations over just such spills. But the problem of
nitrogen contamination isn't just a local one. Excess nitrogen draining
off the continent's fields through the Mississippi River is the cause of
the 8,000 square mile "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the rhetoric about saving family farms, federal farm payments go
disproportionately to the biggest operations, whose environmental
offenses are the worst. Government support for corn – which sucks up
both the most fertilizer and federal dollars of any crop – totaled $2
billion in 2002, with the largest 10 % of growers capturing 61 % of the
take. Livestock producers received another $1 billion, with 53 % of that
going to the biggest 10 %. That same $3 billion, incidentally, could
have bought, and converted to wetlands, enough acres of Mississippi
River basin cornfields to filter excess nitrogen out of the runoff water
– and absorb the 1993 floodwaters that did $10 billion worth of property
damage. Our political operators and their corporate agribusiness sponsors have
their heads too high to notice the smell of their own misguided farm
policies. That means it's up to taxpayers to raise enough of a stink to
get them to manage their manure – both the agricultural and political
kind – more responsibly. About the Author - Wylie Harris ranches with his family on their fifth generation cow-calf operation in Texas. At Texas A &M, he is working on range ecology. He is also a member of the 2003-2005 class of Food and Society Policy Fellows, a national program funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation, administered by the Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute and the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy. This piece aired on Touchstone Radio on April 16, 2004 | |
