Diary of a Permaculturalist 3

Follow-up to Diary of a Permaculturalist 2 from George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

Scarier discussions I've been having lately involve sewage. How do we process animal waste in mass scale farming operations?

Once more from Paul Roberts' The End of Food:

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make the air quality in the agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is in Los Angeles. And cows are relatively benign crappers: the typical hog produces three gallons of feces and urine every twenty-four hours, and the typical hog CAFO, or concentrated animal feeding operation, generates as much sewage as a midsize city; this outflow is stored in enormous lagoons that not taint the local breezes with unwholesome miasmas but also can pose serious threats to surrounding people and property. On June 21, 1995, an eight-acre hog lagoon in North Carolina gave way, unleashing twenty-five million gallons of excrement in what one account described as a "two-hour, knee-deep stream that destroyed the cotton and tobacco crops of a neighbours fields, crossed the highway, and drained into the New River, where it killed all aquatic life for 17 miles." Even absent such spectacular failures, livestock CAFOs represent such a concentrated source of nitrogen and other nutrients that, paradoxically, they actually cause harm: if nitrogen in particular escapes into the surrounding water systems, its presence in drinking water can contribute to human cancers, while its potent fertilising powers so disrupt ecological systems that most fish and other animals die off.

(77)

(I hope I'm not alone in appreciating the use of the word 'crappers' in an otherwise bleak paragraph.)

It seems obvious these days that too much of a good thing, or anything, can be bad for you, but we're talking about basic mammalian needs: eating and shitting. Why don't they build pipes from the hog lagoons to the arable farms? I guess because it costs too much and with the already tiny profit margins farmers are given, who can afford to maintain a project of that cost and scale?

Most, if not all, rich capitalist societies now operate on the idea of mass scale farming - CAFOs and vast acreages of monoculture crops. They're thereby dependent on oil-based energy, farming tools, pesticides and fertilisers to maintain their production, which in turn maintains their shaky hold on the miniscule profit margins that the consolidated global retail giants allow them. Without oil these systems are going to collapse. And with oil prices rocketing (and Gordon 'Waste of Time' Brown's dumbland response being to say, 'We must get oil prices down!' and not 'We need to stop using so much oil!'), all these essential farming tools are putting pressure on the growers and suppliers to raise prices, which retailers don't want.

And yet, the retailers still manage to increase their profits from this game. Food shortages have seen potato prices and the price of grain-based products go up in shops. They have the suppliers by the short and curlies, with one hand, keeping their buying prices down, but they're quick enough to ride up their selling prices when the media put out a public wave of articles on the subject. Ditto with the oil and energy companies: despite the fearful noises made by BP, Shell, British Gas, eon, etc. etc. about the cost per barrel of oil being at its highest, they still manage to turn out record profits. The retailers are over-hiking their prices and keeping shtum when the raw costs drop back down.

Once again, going vegetarian and living local seems to be a sensible option. But that will force the hog farmers out of business. Cattle farmers might switch to dairy, for a while, until they realise they're flooding the market with milk and cheese to the point it's no longer profitable for any except for the largest farms. At which point there'll be mountains of burning livestock, like in the foot and mouth epidemics. That or a  lot of wild cattle and a campaign to turn cows into domestic pets. And needless to say, a lot more innocent workers are going to end up laid off from factories.

The scariest part of the discussions I've had tends to come at the end: we're better off doing nothing and allowing total societal collapse. Gradual change will merely spread the damage over a longer time period, making the impact less visible until it is totally catastrophic - i.e. worse than if we'd carried on and let nature pull the plug on us suddenly. If we're to be utilitarian about it, that's the better option; it provides a greater chance of survival for a minority, lower chance of total human extinction, supposedly; and more fun for the damned before we're wiped out.

George Ttoouli : 26 Jun 2008 20:28 |  Tags: Permaculture |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (2) |  Report a problem