YOU JUST PAID FOR POOP BURIAL
Our local Headwaters Soil and Water Conservation District announced yesterday that local farmers can get cost share assistance to pump their poop into the ground. Who is the primary federal agency benefactor for this monstrosity? Our dear friends at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, of course, those great folks taking care of our environment.
In the industry this is called manure injection and the technology and infrastructure to do it was developed quite some time ago, but it's all extremely expensive. So now we taxpayers get to help pick up the tab.
Why is this necessary? Well, because spreading slurry (liquid manure) on the soil surface results in 70 percent nitrogen loss (we all know what that smells like) and soil injection drops that loss to 5 percent. Sounds pretty good, right?
But if we ask another couple of whys, we go back a few years to when these same environmentalists asked how to keep manure out of rivers and land grant universities like Virginia Tech advised liquid manure systems. And so in similar cost share programs, financed by the taxpayer, farmers began installing liquid systems.
At that time, perhaps 35 years ago, I mounted a one-man campaign in Virginia against the liquid systems. Why are we putting manure in water? Don't we want to keep it out of the water? My activism yielded a couple of visits from those administering the infant program and I introduced them to composting as a way to handle manure. In fact, I introduced them to an integrated approach between forest carbon and livestock manure. I had not yet created the phrase "carbonaceous diaper," but the concept was well underway.
From an environmental standpoint, composting is far superior to liquid systems. But in our culture, our whole mentality is liquid manure--flush it and all is well. Except it's not all well. And over the years all this money and infrastructure did not yield the expected benefits. People were intrigued by my idea of a carbon economy through composting, but the die was cast: manure is supposed to be handled in water. Virginia Tech decreed, after all.
Which brings us to today and injecting the liquid into the soil. This is a classic example of how heading down the wrong path creates additional problems. The progression follows like night the day. It starts with an anti-ecological assumption--manure handling is most efficient in liquid form. Of course, the only way you can get liquid manure is to concentrate animals on concrete. That creates a unique manure problem.
But housing livestock is not necessarily bad as long as you mimic nature's systems, which never use liquid manure distribution. In nature, manure goes on top of the soil in a semi-solid state in a context of grass and roots that offer carbon soak-up for the fertility-building material. If we place carbon under the cows in a housed situation, we mimic nature and can replicate the decomposition process even better through aerobic composting. But as soon as we go to housing without carbon, we have a disposal problem most easily solved in a liquid state. That distribution exacerbates the decomposition problem so we develop sophisticated high cost pig iron to rip slots in the soil to accept liquid manure. It's all hubris and spit.
Many people have died drowning in manure lagoons. Or being overcome with the ammonia. To my knowledge, nobody has ever drowned in a compost pile. Or been overcome with ammonia. From a safety standpoint, composting is far superior even without the environmental benefits.
So here we have yet another sincere-minded project promoted by environmentalists that solves a problem created years ago by the same people mis-directed by experts. How much of this must we tolerate?
Do you want poop-infused soil?