The Meaty Truth (4 page)

Not to mention, animal manure is densely polluted with lethal toxins, blood, heavy metals, bacteria, and oxygen-depleting nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from animal feed, hormone injections, and antibiotics that are given to the animals.
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This turns into a deadly combination for us and our environment.

Did you know we can get more than forty different (and many deadly) diseases from animal manure? These anaerobic lagoons that dot our landscape are terrible at eliminating any sort of pathogens, heavy metals, or the BOD that severely affects our waterways.
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Fifteen percent of viruses and 55 percent of bacteria survive in the lagoons and easily leak into water sources.
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Foodborne illnesses currently affect about one-third of our population. These foodborne pathogens are up to one hundred times more concentrated in animal manure than in human waste.
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For the very reason that just
one
gram of hog sh!t can carry up to one hundred million fecal coliform bacteria, where and how manure is stored directly impacts our personal health, biodiversity, and the health of the environment. We can’t put off dealing with this stinkin’ problem any longer.

Sh!t Sprinkler Systems

Back in the days of small, family farms, we applied manure to the land to fertilize it. This natural recycling process is impossible now because
there is simply so much sh!t we cannot put it all on the land. Now we house the crap in man-made slurry lagoons. Each one of these lagoons holds about twenty to forty-five million gallons of liquid, animal manure.
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But the volume of manure even exceeds these massive holding capacities. In fact, a study by the University of Northern Iowa found that “if farm workers had applied manure at the rate at which the crops could have absorbed phosphorus, the CAFOs would need more than nine times the field area used for manure application by these CAFOs.”
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The problem is that manure contains too much nitrogen and phosphorus for the land to absorb.

Overapplying manure to the land turns not only our farmland but also our waterways into crap, as manure runoff contaminates nearby rivers and streams, creating dead zones that kill marine life. An EPA investigation in Yakima Valley found “brown streams of manure running directly into ditches and creeks.”
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Kendall Thu, a noted researcher, found that at any CAFO where there is more wastewater than the surrounding land can absorb, water contamination from overapplication is almost guaranteed.
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Mr. Thu found that there was a direct relationship between water-quality problems and the dairy operations in the area. Water pollution from overapplication is exacerbated during the winter. When the land is frozen, it cannot absorb any manure, which all becomes runoff. This runoff causes severe problems. For example, in 2009, twenty-five thousand gallons of manure that were overapplied on a farm field in Mitchell County, Iowa, produced runoff that killed 150,000 fish in a four-mile stretch of a local stream.
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Overapplication and the resulting water contamination is a common practice with poultry production. For example, in 2009, the Waterkeeper Alliance sued a Perdue farm in Eastern Shore, Maryland that allowed an uncovered pile of chicken manure to drain into a tributary of the Potomac River. The manure not only increased the nitrogen levels, but also the
E. coli
and fecal-coliform levels—bacteria that cause human-health problems and may be fatal.
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The Delmarva Peninsula is home to the highest production of boiler chickens and eggs in the nation. The over application and runoff of
manure is considered one of the main contributors to the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and the degradation of its waters.
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The Chesapeake Bay is an American landmark and vital waterway. It is time to stop factory farms from sh!tting in it!

Amazingly, between football field-sized cesspools and over-application of crap to the land, there is still a problem of keeping the crap levels in lagoons down. So what do the corporations do? They came up with a brilliant idea. When the lagoons are full and the land is similar to a swamp, factory farmers will illegally spray the manure straight into the air, without a care as to where the manure falls. That’s right: they created sh!t sprinklers.

Local families have come back to find their homes covered in the sticky, brownish mist of crap and their trees dripping with feces. Helen Reddout, a cherry farmer in Yakima Valley, surrounded by eighty-five mega-dairy farms, provided a devastating image of how our land is going from green to brown and even black. She states that “when you go to bed at night the grass is green. When you wake up there is just black slime everywhere.” There is zero retribution for the destruction of property. Families in California have had to fill in and remove their swimming pools because they too frequently turned into mini cesspools. The stench is so severe that it permeates everything—from clothes and bed sheets to car interiors. People drive to work dry heaving, with eyes watering from the stench of sh!t. As one farmer proudly stated, this reeking odor is “the smell of money.”
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On the other US coast, in North Carolina, the Tar Heel State, the Waterkeeper Alliance sampled and measured water near pig farms and found that the muddy-colored water was in fact animal crap that had been sprayed into the air. This is happening across America.

Aside from the blatant destruction of property, shooting manure into the air is a public-health hazard. One woman surrounded by dairy factories in Yakima Valley walked out of her house one morning and inhaled sharply due to the horrible stench. The ammonia in the air permanently burned her vocal chords, and her voice is now just a rasp. The Yakima Valley also boasts some of the highest rates of asthma and cancer compared
to the other counties in the state. We doubt this is just mere coincidence. In fact, four comparative studies of asthma in children living near and farther away from factory farms clearly indicate that those children living near factory farms have higher asthma rates.
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Repeated exposure to the particulate matter in manure can cause chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function, and even heart attacks. However, the EPA doesn’t seem interested in the obvious health concerns associated with factory farming. Although factory farms are supposed to be regulated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, also known as the Superfund Act), the EPA decided to exempt factory farms from reporting their emissions. Instead the EPA instituted a voluntary Air Quality Compliance Agreement where factory farms monitor their own emissions. The catch is that the EPA doesn’t suspend or sue offenders, but merely slaps on a small fine that doesn’t even dent the corporations’ pocketbooks. This whole process seems a little backwards.
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Needless to say, these current “solutions” are crappy. It is just plain wrong to allow these corporations to pollute our air, land, water, and private property without any retribution or accountability for turning America into a land of deadly, smelly cesspools.

Leaky Lagoons

Factory farms’ cesspool paradise is seeping into just about everyone’s backyard. On top of manure being illegally sprayed and over applied on the land, lagoons are notorious for leaking, spilling, and flowing into every stream, river, and groundwater source. Families across the country are turning on their taps to find brown, disgusting, foul liquid pouring out instead of the clear water they were anticipating from their private wells.

While the corporations will advise that the lagoons are perfectly safe and have a lining to prevent seepage, their statements remain completely unsupported. Many of the cesspools are not lined, but even if they were, lining becomes weak as it deteriorates over time. The average life span of a lagoon is only about twenty years, if kept in optimal shape.
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The
majority of the lagoons, however, are around much longer, because, again, there is the problem of where to put all the crap if the lagoons are no longer used.

While seepages and leaks can be reduced by using clay liners in the lagoons, studies have found that even clay-lined lagoons can leak anywhere from “several hundred to several thousand gallons per acre per day.”
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Lagoons with lining can seep about one million gallons of manure. One reason is due to decomposition. The gases produced from decomposing manure cause the liners in the lagoons to swell, which forces tons of feces out of the lagoons and into our land and waterways. Liners are not foolproof. Polyethylene liners, which are commonly used to house pig crap, are easily punctured by rocks in the ground, providing an open door for the animal manure to seep into your groundwater.

A famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning, in-depth 2006 study, “Boss Hog,” found that nearly half of all lagoons leaked enough to pollute wells, aquifers, and nearby springs.
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“Boss Hog” first called attention to the issue of leaking lagoons in its exposé of North Carolina’s industrial swine production. One corporation, Carroll Farms in North Carolina, tested nearby wells next to three of its factory farms. It found that the ammonia levels were “ten times more than the normal level of two parts per million” and continued to increase over time, but Carroll Farms dismissed this obvious level of toxicity.
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Carroll Farms’s dismissive behavior is not the exception but the norm. Corporation after corporation today continues to throw their hands in the air and fail to act on the blatant evidence of their lagoons poisoning the surrounding environment and putting the lives of thousands of Americans at risk.

We have to hand it to agribusiness for the superb placement of these lagoons right above aquifers or in flood plains surrounding local, family homes. Over four and a half million families in the United States are at risk of nitrate pollution because they get their drinking water from groundwater, whose purity is threatened by leaking lagoons. When nitrogen breaks down in manure it forms nitrate, which can leach into groundwater and drinking water.
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Nitrate pollution is a serious public-health risk.
Since “today, over one million people are estimated to take their drinking water from groundwater that shows moderate or severe contamination with nitrogen-containing pollutants, mostly due to the heavy use of agricultural fertilizers and high rates of application of animal waste,” the continuous, nutrient pollution from animal crap poses a serious public-health risk.
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When nitrate gets into drinking water, traditional forms of cleaning the water do not work. It requires a special treatment that costs about $4.6 billion and comes out of your tax dollars.

In 2005, the Illinois River watershed, which provides drinking water for twenty-two public-water systems in Oklahoma, contained a phosphorus load from poultry productions nearby equivalent to the waste from 10.7 million people. This level is more than the entire populations’ of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas combined.
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In California, officials have identified agriculture, specifically the dairy operations, as the main source of nitrate pollution in more than one hundred thousand square miles of polluted groundwater for drinking.
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More than making the water taste bad, 2012 studies confirmed that nitrate contamination in our drinking water is associated with increased risk and incidence of thyroid cancer.
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Nitrate exposure in drinking water nearly doubled the risk of cancer in men. However, even disinfecting the water produces a catch-22 situation. The disinfectants that get the nitrate out of our water have been consistently linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer.
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Think about this: about forty-five million Americans get their drinking water from private wells.
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More likely than not, the majority of this population is located in rural areas more susceptible to factory-farm contamination.

Nitrate contamination is known for causing blue baby syndrome, among other health problems.
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When Gordon Kelly, the head of the Yakima Valley County Health Department, was informed of the high nitrate levels and manure water coming out of private wells in the California area, his response was, ‘well, the nitrates just affect infants.’ Reassured by Mr. Kelly, we can all sleep soundly knowing that just the health of our babies and next generation is in jeopardy from these consistently leaky lagoons.

Manure and Oil Spills

In 2010, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made the front pages of newspapers for weeks, as images of the disaster took over the nightly news. The CEO of BP was put under tremendous scrutiny for the accident that sent 4.9 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. There was a public outcry, and hundreds of groups helped to clean up the spill. The BP oil spill was larger than the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which impacted 1,300 miles of ocean and killed an astounding 250,000 birds. Why are we talking about oil spills?

While oil spills receive nationwide coverage and public outcry, consistent lagoon spills occur all the time with zero nationwide and limited, if any, local coverage. Some of the lagoon spills are comparable to, if not bigger than, the Exxon Valdez spill. For instance, in 1995 a 120,000 square-foot lagoon at Oceanview Farms in North Carolina burst, sending twenty-five million gallons of feces and wastewater into the New River.
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The spill killed at least ten million fish and polluted 350,000 coastal acres of shellfish habitat. Dead fish began lining the banks of the river within two hours of the spill. The manure sludge was so dense it took two months for the sludge to make the sixteen-mile stretch down the New River to the ocean.

While the Oceanview Farms spill is
double
the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and considered the largest environmental spill, we are pretty sure most Americans have never heard of it. Neither, at the time, did citizens who were swimming in the river downstream. The government officials failed to warn them of the hog crap contaminated with
E. coli
heading their way. We highly doubt the same protocol would have been followed if it had been an oil spill. The Oceanview Farms spill has gone down in history as one of the greatest environmental disasters, which killed every living creature in its path in the North Carolina waterways.
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The Oceanview spill was bad enough, but that same year, three lagoons in North Carolina burst within two weeks of each other.
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One smaller lagoon spill occurred on the same day as the Oceanview spill in Sampson County. The other spill in Duplin County released nine million gallons of chicken waste into Limestone Creek, which is a tributary of the Northeast
Cape Fear River.
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In comparison to oil spills, which rarely happen at the level of the BP and Exxon Valdez spills, lagoon spills are consistent, frequent, and pose comparable environmental damage with less coverage and support.