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Turkey Manure Used to Save the Environment 32

Posted by michael from the gobble-gobble dept.
Cheeko writes "CNN has an article about how 30,000 tons of manure is going to be used to create a wetland in Indiana. The thinking is that a wetland will neutralize the acidic run-off from old coal mines and the manure is being used as a basis for the formation of the wetland. Apparently you can smell the site from up to a quarter mile away."
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Turkey Manure Used to Save the Environment More

Turkey Manure Used to Save the Environment

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  • I will be the first to say that, this idea stinks!!! ;)
    • My girlfriend grew up in the country and attributes her large feet to having walked in chicken manure as a child. Her Grandmother told her that was why her feet are so big.
  • Try going to a college in the cornfields, where there are cows nearby. Trust me when I say that 5 miles is not too far away from 50 cows with far less than 30000 tons of manure among them.

    Turkey manure must be on the mild side.
    • Turkey manure must be on the mild side.

      Speaking as a country boy, I must take issue with your statement. Cow manure is by far the mildest of the common manure odors. You do not want to be downwind of a poultry or hog farm on a warm summer day...

      Country fresh my ass.
      • The problem is that the farms leave this stuff in huge piles or (if liquid) open lagoons, where it stinks to high heaven. I wonder why so few farms are using anaerobic digesters on the manure? Bacteria in the environment convert a lot of the organic matter to methane and carbon dioxide; the methane can be burned for fuel, or potentially processed for some other use. The CO2 is pretty harmless unless you need a hot flame, and the traces of H2S and the like can be removed pretty easily (a pass through a column of iron filings supposedly converts H2S to FeS and H2). Do that, and you get rid of the stink too.

        Still, this is a very uncommon procedure. It is so rare that the new energy bill has specific tax incentives to do it. Why has it taken so long? This technology has been the subject of experiments since the 60's and 70's; it's not like nobody knew.

      • They say the reason plants grow so well when fertilized with chicken manure is because the plants are trying to get away from the smell

  • Once more my friends at /. have brought me to another fine visual place I need never have gone. They have brought new meaning to the word Muck....
  • Great, they're cleaning up an industrial waste site by dumping a (pardon the pun) shitload of agricultural waste.

    Turkeys are mostly fed cheap corn and soy. But they're also pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. Because we demand more white meat and less outbreaks of disease (such as Avian Flu which has struck a number of farms here in Virginia recently).

    Now, the farmers will swear left and right that this is safe and it doesn't show up in the food we eat, and they may be right. But the one place it certainly does show up is in the waste from the turkeys. No studies have been done on the environmental impact of most of these chemicals, though I expect we'll be finding out soon. (http://sierraactivist.org/article.php?sid=7491 [sierraactivist.org]) But common sense should tell you that hormones and antibiotics can't be harmless.

    • You are more right than you imagined. I just finished an environmental law class, and this was one of the issues we looked at. For the human body, more than 60% of drugs ingested are not absorbed by the body. Nor can these drugs be filtered out of the waste water at the sewage treatment plant. Tests of water downstream of these plants show high levels of virtually every drug on the market, from antibiotics to tylenol and birth control. Now, just ignoring the environmental effects of that, one of the biggest problems is that this low concentration of antibiotics in the water makes it much easier for bacteria in the water to develop resistance to the drugs that form out mainline defense against thousands of disease.

      Best case scenario, drug costs go up as Pharmaceutical companies have to invest more in R+D to develop new drugs to replace a growing number of useless ones. Worst case, they can't, and simple infections, and other illnesses once easily treatable through antibiotics start to become deadly again.

      Agricultural waste containing these hormones and antibiotics is far worse because this waste is often not treated at all, unlike human sewage, and ends up straight in the water supply.

    • You have a good point there; the various chemicals in livestock waste need to be kept on the farm. The problem is that these huge feedlot operations are of totally unprecedented size, regardless of how "natural" they claim they are. Perhaps we'd be best served by not allowing the beef, turkey and pork operations to run off more waste than would be made by the number of animals they could raise on feed grown on the farm itself; they should have to treat, reclaim and recycle everything else.

      That's going to be a mighty tough thing to ram past the factory-farm lobby, and I doubt it can be done this decade. However, if it does, I think we'll see some huge advances in technologies like manure digestion, ozone treatment and/or carbon filtering (I haven't heard of the steroid or antibiotic which can survive a heavy ozone assault). If such treatment systems also yield enough gaseous fuel to run the rest of the farm, they might pay for themselves. The ideal future is one where the farmers can't see themselves doing it any other way, because "we respect the environment on which our farms depend".

      • The problem is an easy one to solve: sell the shit as fertilizer to farmers that grow crops. I have a brother-in-law that has a dairy farm. Anything that he pumps out of the pit under the milk barn or the hog confinement building goes into a 'honey wagon' and gets distributed across his fields. They could even put it in smaller plastic jugs and sell it to urban gardeners.

        In some ways, the confinement systems are better for the environment than normal feedlots. I know of one big farm that had a big feedlot that was used for hogs. Unfortunately it was near a river, so when it rained hard, all the crap washed down into the river. If they had been in a confinement building, all of the waste can be handled properly.

        • The problem is an easy one to solve: sell the shit as fertilizer to farmers that grow crops.
          Transportation isn't free. Given that the nutrients are carried by a very large amount of water, I expect that such fertilizer would quickly become more expensive than e.g. phosphate rock and anhydrous ammonia by the time it gets to the point of use.
          In some ways, the confinement systems are better for the environment than normal feedlots.
          Maybe. I think the problem is more related to scale; the bigger the operation, the more distance the feed has to travel to the operation and the further you'd have to pump effluent to use it as fertilizer.

          Changing the subject slightly, one of the reasons we have problems with E. Coli in our beef is because we are feeding the cattle a human-like food supply (corn) rather than what they are evolved to eat (grasses). What I understand is that this causes the cattle to acidify their digestive systems to compensate, making them fit hosts for the same pathogenic bugs which infect people. One way to get rid of most of this is to feed the cattle on a more normal diet (hay) for a week before sending them off, which changes their GI tract environment towards normal (for them) and makes them inhospitable for human pathogens; apparently this reduces levels of bugs like E. Coli by 90%. However, the bulk of feeds like hay and the scale of modern feedlot operations makes this utterly impractical. I don't see a way to fix this other than to split up the big feedlots into many more smaller ones, which would help solve many of the nutrient recycling issues at the same time.

          • The big feedlots aren't that big to make the transportation an issue. It's not like they _only_ exist in one area and the grain farmers only exist hundreds of miles away. The grain farmers actually welcome such an operation into an area because it gives them a big local customer instead of having it put on a train to be shipped someplace else. Also the waste products do not have to be shipped as slurry. There are some that spread it out over a hard clay packed area where it dries out and then can be scooped up and used in conventional manure spreaders. There are municipalities that even used to do this.

            You are also incorrect about the usage of hay and other roughage in feedlots. Feeding cattle primarily ground corn is very expensive. In addition to that, soybean meal, hay, and silage are fed in some ways to provide filler. Those big concrete silos you see on farms and ranches aren't full of grain. They are usually full of silage or other form of roughage. Mechanized transport and distribution to troughs from such storage facilities have been around for decades. The 6' round or large square hay bales aren't difficult to move around with 30-40 yr old equipment either.

            The amount of corn in the diet may affect acidty levels in their stomachs, but I'm guessing the reason E. Coli is becoming more of a problem has more to do with the slaughter houses employing mainly retards and/or illegal aliens.

    • But common sense should tell you that hormones and antibiotics can't be harmless.

      That argument is highly subjective to the hormones, antibiotics, and bacteria in question. Although there are harmful bacteria that live part of their lifecycle in livestock waste, applying a general argument that hormones and antibiotics are "bad" is to ignore the nature and building-blocks of these treatements.

      Proteins, in general, do not survive well in the digestive tracks of animals. Even viruses, with their highly protective protein shells, are subjective to deconstruction in the digestive system. The same is true for hormones and antibiotics, which are protein structures.

      When you injest an antibiotic pill, you are counting on absorbing enough of the antibiotic in your stomach before the remainder travels to your intestines, where the more dangerous peptidases and enzymes "live".

      If the antibiotic or hormone were introduced subcutaneously or directly into the blood stream, your liver and kidneys are in charge of filtering out excess chemicals and toxins. If a hormone or antibiotic survives past the urea present in your urine, it would certainly be considered one "bad ass" of a protein. Urea is a very powerful denaturant. The carefully constructed and folded protein that is an antibody or hormone is hopelessly twisted out of shape and effectiveness. Associative chemical bonds are broken, and are usually unrecoverable. Only the simplest of protein structures are able to fold back into their original forms. The longer the peptide chain, the less likely the protein will re-fold w/o the help of the "scaffolding", helper proteins, that was used to create them.

      Although it is possible that hormones or antibodies could survive an animal's many physiological obstacles, it's not likely. That they would survive unscathed, even more so improbable. So, don't get your dungarees all in a bind over this. Worry, instead, about the over prescription of drugs on living animals, not their waste product.

    • This is a growing problem. In Europe we're not allowed to pump our livestock full of these chemicals for health reasons. BUT the WTO is backing down to US pressure - and is likely to foce the EU to drop these laws and start accepting US orginated products which are full of hormones.

      The fact that you get more virulent and antibiotic resistant forms of Avian Flu developing more quickly with the routine use of anti-biotics should be enough reason to ban their use - but the almighty dollar wins again!

      This wetland is a seriously BAD idea for the reasons you outline. Shouldn't /. have a green category for news of this nature - where science and tech is stepping over the line.
  • Volastanite.

    It's the secret to creating wetlands. A waste byproduct of mining.

  • What if it is found that skunk scent gland extracts can protect skin from UV rays? Will we lather ourselves in the stuff? I can't imagine the stink of the place...the odor probably sticks to your clothes too.

  • yeah, it used to... (Score:3, Funny)

    by msouth ( 10321 ) on Saturday April 27, 2002 @11:19AM (#3421062) Homepage Journal
    ...until it got tired of being treated like shit.

    (PS I have a patent on out of context pun-shots at slashdot headlines, contact me for licensing terms)
  • And all along I thought tht "Turkey Manure" was what the /. editors practised in 'running' this site...
  • Every time I've driven through Indiana, the smell of industry has hit me like a kick in the crotch. I remember it smelling like a mix of cheese, exhaust, burning motors and rubber. I'm morbidly interested if this big poop dump is going to somehow interact with the current stink in a positive way (lemons, roses, cookies) neutral (fresh air, paper, nothing) or some new form of stench that kills you upon sniffing.

    I wonder also if it will seem anything like the bog of eternal stench from labyrinth.
  • Where does one GET 30,000 tons of turkey manure anyway????

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