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  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Tiny super-plant can clean up animal waste and be used for...
  • Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:55:46 EDT

"BUT, BUT do we want to continue having large areas of animal waste
water?!"

"And the answer is emphatically not! These are tortured animals living in
disgusting conditions and the people who attend them are exposed to filth and
disease as well."

etcetera

All well and good to take a high moral stance. But the fact is, factory
farming of meat animals in the service of our basic diet is an entrenched
fact
of American life. The basic outline of the system is hardly about to change.

I would suggest a two track approach. First, write articles at a
professional level and have them inserted in the media (that is, quickly,
while
newspapers are still in existence) as op-eds-- to the effect that we have to
change our diet. That way, sentiments that are now shared by a miniscule
portion
of the public can be put before the general reader's eyes. And maybe sway a
few of them.

Second, in the sure knowledge that factory farms and their attendant large
waste lagoons are likely to still exist in the near to medium term, support
this newly proposed wise use of those lagoons! Every gallon of duckweed
ethanol replaces a gallon of corn ethanol that doesn't have to be diverted
from
the world food and feed market-- driving up food and feed corn prices and
putting added strains on our ag acreage. Plus, the duckweed crop is likely to
mitigate the more noxious aspects of waste lagoons-- that is, the ammonia
and the effluvia.

As an aside, I attended a 1993 conference held in Wilmington, by NCSU in
consortium with Smithfield Foods Inc., on strategies for reducing or
eliminating the problems created by hog waste lagoons. About a dozen
different
strategies were presented. All were theoretically workable, several were
practical
and could be put in place at a conceivably affordable cost, and a couple of
them looked like they might even make the hog farmer some money-- the holy
grail, of course, in this whole exercise.

Smithfield Foods entered into this study program under some pressure from
the state of North Carolina to do something about the hog lagoons before the
state legislated an answer-- probably ruling the lagoons out of existence
without proposing any method of replacing them. So it was an exercise
designed
to buy everybody a few years, without having to actually act.

At the end of the presentation session, a couple of months went by. And
then it was announced that NONE of the mitigation methods that had been
presented had any merit. The fix, as they say, had seemingly been in from the
start.

I knew different. At least one of the proposals was brilliant, workable and
a real money maker. But it's a sad fact of good ole boy politics that the
conclusion to take no action was never challenged by anyone-- at least loudly
enough to be heard in public.

So if someone has figured out the obvious-- that duckweed will grow in hog
poop and that some pretty good corn likker, or duck likker, can be brewed
from it-- and if the good hog farmers of North Carolina can be pressed into
the service of actually growing this value-added product-- why, that's
PROGRESS! I'm all for it.

Whoever's behind this program will have done far better for the environment
than anyone else in the history of factory farmed hogs has done. Hurrah and
bravo!

Michael



  • Re: [permaculture] Tiny super-plant can clean up animal waste and be used for..., Marimike6, 04/10/2009

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