The Meaty Truth (5 page)

According to the National Resources Defense Council, “from 1995 to 1998, one thousand spills or pollution incidents occurred at livestock feedlots in ten states and two hundred manure-related fish kills resulted in the death of thirteen million fish.”
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Not much has changed since that time.

In 2001, an Illinois contract farmer refused to lower his lagoon by at least a million gallons of manure. Instead, the owner, Dave Inskeep, decided to fill a nearby ravine that was dammed with a ten-foot berm with two million gallons of the manure. The lagoon didn’t hold and sent millions of gallons of feces rushing into the Kickapoo Creek, which joins the Illinois River. It was one of the worst avoidable spills in Illinois history.
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Fast forward to today, and we can see that for some reason we are not taking lessons from the past when it comes to manure spills. For example, did anyone hear about two three-hundred-thousand-gallon manure spills in Wisconsin in 2013? One of these massive spills, while an “accident,” produced a mile-long trail of animal waste.
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Why did this accident happen? There weren’t proper berms in the holding tank and pipes. Apparently it just wasn’t cost effective to install them, even though manure spills create devastating and sometimes-irreversible environmental damage. What is even more frustrating is that the corporation responsible for this mess only received a slap on the wrist and a thank you for alerting the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to the problem, despite the fact that this spill was illegal.

If only the cycle of spilled crap would end. But the trouble is manure spills are becoming ever more frequent. In fact, there were a total of seventy-six manure spills in 2013 alone in Wisconsin, totaling more than one million gallons of manure.
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This is a 65 percent increase in manure spills from 2012. In an attempt to provide some assurance, Kevin Erb, the manure specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, proudly claimed that the volume of manure spilled “is minute compared to the amount of manure cows produce. The spill total for 2013 is less than 1
percent of all the waste produced by dairy cattle in Wisconsin.”
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This news somehow isn’t as consoling to us as Mr. Erb probably hoped.

Worse is the industry’s attitude to the manure spills. According to Tom Bauman, the Coordinator of Agriculture Runoff at the DNR, “Spills are going to happen.”
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We don’t agree with this laissez-faire attitude when CAFOs do not have to exist at all. Spills have lasting consequences. After a manure spill in Pennsylvania in 2013, the city had to close down a children’s playground indefinitely because
salmonella
and other pathogens were simply not decreasing.
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Since we would never allow children to play in a playground of crap, why are we okay with eating it in our food?

Fortunately, a coalition in Iowa, sick of constant manure spills, decided to take a stand and sue The Maschhoffs, one of the largest pork-owning networks in the country. The coalition filed the suit for violating the Clean Water Act after the fifth manure spill since 2007. Already Iowa has 630 polluted waterways from manure and climbing.
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While The Maschhoffs claims innocence and states it is a “good neighbor,” its multiplicity of spills speaks otherwise. Its Keosauqua Sow Unit has dumped more than twenty thousand gallons of manure into the Des Moines River and surrounding tributaries.
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The Maschhoffs has provided the typical-industry response by stating that this claim filed in November 2013 is without merit. And yet as Lori Nelson, the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund board president, stated, “Every factory farm in Iowa is a ticking time bomb that could have a spill at any time, and the DNR needs to start holding them accountable for polluting our waterways by issuing them Clean Water Act permits so they have to follow stronger environmental standards.” Why are we not regulating “ticking time bombs?”
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Instead of accepting the fate of manure spills, is it such a novel idea to prevent them or even find real solutions?

Swimming in the Slurry

It might seem laughable that we are concentrating on animal crap, but the truth is that this overload of sh!t is causing us some stinking problems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that factory farming has so
severely damaged over 170,000 miles of rivers and streams, 2,500 miles of lakes, and 2,900 miles of estuaries that they are no longer safe for hosting recreational activities or sustaining the surrounding wildlife.
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In California alone, the National Resources Defense Council found that animal crap is responsible for polluting more than one hundred thousand square miles with nitrates and pathogens. Untreated manure waste from factory farms is responsible for polluting thirty-five thousand miles of rivers in twenty-two states and additionally contaminating our groundwater supply in seventeen states, according to the EPA.
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The scary part is these numbers do not reflect all the waterways in the United States. The extent of the damage is unknown. Maybe it is time we begin crying over spilled manure.

The primary pollutants of concern for water quality are nitrogen and phosphorus, the most abundant nutrients in animal manure. The United Nations (UN) study, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” indicates that livestock is the largest contributor to increased nitrogen and phosphorus levels.

Whoever thought that tons of nutrients could be bad? Nitrogen and phosphorus are actually essential nutrients to life. But the abundant quantities that manure produces prove deadly. The impacts of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients are enormous, from “drinking water contamination, toxic and non-toxic algae blooms that impair recreational waters and kill fish, changes to coastal-marine fisheries, acidification of soils and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and increases in ozone and particulate matter that can harm human health and damaged productivity of crops and forests.”
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Nutrient pollution is such a serious threat to our streams, lakes, and rivers that “farms have now replaced factories as the biggest polluters of America’s waterways.”
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Nitrogen and phosphorus from manure are forever changing our landscape as they kill off our waterways and all the life in them. Let’s look at what happens when too much nitrogen and phosphorus get into our waterways from manure. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus deplete the biological oxygen demand, or BOD, in the water, which causes more plants and algae to grow.
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This is called eutrophication. When eutrophication happens, desirable fish species are replaced by less desirable species and algae, which feed on the oxygen, causing economic costs to fisherman,
shifts and drastic changes in aquatic habitats, production of toxins that cause harmful algae, clogged irrigation canals, and death—both for aquatic habitats and fish.
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The Pagan River in North Carolina, which runs by a Smithfield Foods hog facility, provides a chilling picture of the water damage from manure and nutrient pollution. The “Pagan had no living marsh grass, a tiny and toxic population of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious black mud coating its bed. The hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch-thick coats of greasy muck.”
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This is in addition to the river turning shocking colors of red, orange, and pink from the high contamination levels.

Aside from the grim picture, the most significant consequences from nutrient pollution are the creation of dead zones and the ignition of the presence of a deadly “cell from hell” that also poses human-health risks.

The “Cell from Hell”

During the massive lagoon leaks and spills in North Carolina in the mid to late 1990s that sent millions of tons of manure into the rivers, residents were noticing fish belly-up in the rivers with strange marks on them—open sores that were oozing with pus. Fishermen who spent their lives in the water and came into contact with the river water began to develop the same pus-filled sores that wouldn’t go away. No matter what antibiotics were used, the sores stayed open. Then these fishermen began to experience memory loss, forgetting simple things like how to get home; some even had trouble breathing. No one could explain these mysterious human-health effects or what was killing the fish.

Dr. JoAnn Buckholder, a researcher at North Carolina University, uncovered the silent killer named
Pfisteria piscicida
.
Pfisteria
is an odorless, invisible, silent, fish-killing dinoflagellate, which, like any good assassin, only leaves its trail of dead as the mark of its presence. In this case,
Pfisteria’s
mark is a trail of dead fish
. Pfiesteria
“degrades a fish’s skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish’s body—leaving open sores as the main tell-tale factor.”
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Dr. Buckholder found that
Pfisteria’s
presence is directly linked to manure’s presence in the water from nutrient contamination. Nutrient
overload causes the perfect conditions for toxic algae growth or
Pfisteria
. This “cell from hell” has been seen at factory-farm hot spots such as the Chesapeake Bay and particularly in North Carolina after massive lagoon spills.
Pfisteria
left nearly twenty million fish dying with open sores from this massive disaster.

While the species of
Pfisteria
still continue to stir up debate among scientists, one thing is very clear:
Pfisteria
is a killer that has been shown to eat human blood cells. Humans exposed to
Pfisteria
develop the same bloody lesions on their skin that fish do, but also experience neurological problems such as memory loss as well as “severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision, and logical impairment.”
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Other problems include immunological and musculoskeletal conditions as well as an acute burning sensation on the skin.
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When manure starts producing a “cell from hell,” one that can potentially mutate into a deadly monster, it is a strong indication that something needs to change.

Graveyards in the Oceans

Imagine an ocean without life in it. This is where we are heading, and fast. The pollutants and contamination from manure spills and dumping into our waterways is killing whole aquatic ecosystems by creating dead zones, areas where life cannot be sustained. As we mentioned earlier, eutrophication contributes to and is a leading cause of dead zones, which are typified by the decay of algae that depletes oxygen levels. This may lead to hypoxia (low oxygen) conditions that make it impossible for living creatures to survive, as they cannot support the oxygen demand for aquatic life.
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Dead zones are currently lining the coasts of America’s once-pristine shores. Dead zones are a direct example of the impairment of waterways by nutrient overloads that are a result of agricultural wastewater runoff. The most notorious 22,126-square-kilometer dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey, is the dumping ground for the Mississippi River, which passes through the heart of agribusiness in the Midwest.
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While the Mississippi River is historically a dumping ground for industrial waste as well, the Council on Environmental
Quality of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that animal manure alone contributes 15 percent of the nitrogen to the Gulf of Mexico, while industrial and municipal waste only contribute about 11 percent.
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The number of dead zones in the United States has increased from twelve in 1960 to three hundred today. According to a 2010 White House Report, this rapid devastation of our marine life “poses both economic and environmental hazards.”
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The increasing number of skeletal remains of once-abundant and unique aquatic life is a precursor to the further destruction of our marine life if positive steps are not immediately implemented from agribusiness.

This Water Tastes like Sh!t

The quintessential summer days of jumping into the river out back or drinking the water from your own well are long gone. Manure is so pervasive that we can catch
salmonella
poisoning from swimming in a river or merely ingesting some of the water! Manure carries pathogens and antibiotics that threaten our health as they contribute to antibiotic resistance and the spread of waterborne diseases. The presence of fecal-coliform bacteria in the water indicates the presence of
E. coli
and manure in the water.

Research by the USDA Agricultural Research Service reveals that
E. coli
is not only alive and well, but also living in a streambed near you. How comforting. Agricultural runoff causes
E. coli
to leech into surface water, as well as set up a home in streambed sediments. Since
E. coli
can live for months and years in these sediments, longer than it can on surface water, it poses a latent human-health risk of waterborne diseases when these sediments are disturbed.
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This means swimming in your local stream during the summer could land you or your kids in the hospital with
E. coli
poisoning. For the record,
E. coli
and
salmonella
are polite euphemisms for crap. These pathogens strike fast and hard; they kill thousands of people every year and permanently disable thousands of others, shutting down and liquefying vital organs.

What Happened to the Clean Water Act?

It would seem that with the growing concern and increasing number of troubled waters that the EPA would act. The Clean Water Act is the primary piece of legislation that monitors factory farms.
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It was passed by Congress in 1972 with the intent to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” Under this act, CAFOs are designated as point-source pollutants, meaning they are operations that discharge pollutants “directly into waters of the United States.”
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Yet the industry has failed time and again to enforce the Clean Water Act. Up until 2003, it was not a federal requirement that factory farms obtain permits to pollute the waterways. The EPA and Department of Agriculture only issued regulatory guidelines for the first time in 1998 due to the public outcry from the infamous North Carolina lagoon spill.
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