It's getting later, day by day

Oh, Boy! What a Saturday morning this is turning out to be. I recently received a letter informing me that I’ve been selected to receive a nice recognition, to be announced in a couple of months. I thought of the letter after I’d been up for a while this morning, and it made me feel good. But a bit later I found that my printer was malfunctioning; it seems unable to print in simple black, though the cartridge is relatively new and properly HP-certified. OK, it's a short-term problem, I’m sure I can fix it. Little ups and downs such as these are not important in themselves, but they can get in the way of addressing larger concerns.

Such as flooding.  In America's heartland.

So, on to the hard stuff.

As I began looking through the day’s feeds, many having to do with climate change in one way or another, one of the first papers I ran across is a link to a paper by Daniel Rothman of MIT in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rothman is Co-Director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. We all know that the oceans are undergoing changes in temperate and acidity at unprecedented rates. If today’s human-induced emissions cross certain thresholds, as Rothman predicts they soon will, many marine ecosystems are likely to go extinct. The consequences may be just as severe as the Earth experienced during previous mass extinctions. We tend to lose track of the fact that 71 percent of the planet’s surface is covered with water. We should care about what goes on in those deeps.


 On the general subject of the oceanic environment, how about the runaway increases in Sargassum seaweed blooms along the coasts in Florida, the Caribbean and Mexico? The stuff stinks to high heaven and accumulates almost faster than it can be carted off. Check out the photo of a formerly pristine white sand beach in Cancun.   A likely driver of this massive new intrusion is an increase in nutrients flowing from the Amazon into the South Atlantic because more and more land in the Amazon is being converted to agriculture, with an attendant overuse of fertilizers. So we lose the carbon-sequestering power of the rainforest and gain a wholly new source of pollution. As they say, what goes around comes around…

My next read was a paper entitled "Sleepwalking Into Certan Catastrophe, or Awakening via Agroecology", by Steve McFadden. He referred to a UN report on the devastating consequences climate change could have for a large fraction of the world’s population. The looming threat of massive food shortages brought on by changing patterns of rainfall and temperatures all over the planet has food scientists thinking about agroecology, a stabilizing set of principles and practices for clean, just, and sustainable farms and food. Transformation of agriculture through agroecological techniques and principles could have profoundly beneficial impacts on land, workers, and food. But how do we get to actually making changes, to progressing beyond talking about what might be possible, to actually making the necessary moves? In the short term, large corporations such as BASF, Bayer, 3M, DowDupont, Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, Exxon, Chevron and many more stand to lose a great deal in making many of the needed changes. Corporations hold great political power in the global economy. It will be difficult to constrain them from using it to maintain their short-term business models. If they had wise, informed models that look ahead, the way forward might come to light. An article not long ago in Bloomberg Business News about Tom Hayes, the new CEO of Tyson Foods gives hope that enlightened leadership can be found in the corporate world, but is there enough of it?

The obstacles to change extend beyond just giant corporations. How many owners of large tracts of farmland who farm using monocropping methods, with high tillage and heavy reliance on fertilizers and pesticides are prepared to change from the practices that have made them rich? The feeds I read from the world of agriculture have a lot to do with the politics of maintaining government bailouts in the wake of massive flooding, wholesale losses of animals from hurricanes and tropical storms. Extreme weather events of the past few years don’t seem to have brought about an acknowledgment that the current models of industrialized farming must change. The solution could lie in employing regenerative agriculture. True, the ag feeds are sprinkled here and there with mentions of cover crops, low-till and no-till, permaculture and so on. Farmers such as Gabe Brown, who has successfully used regenerative agricultural practices for many years have garnered a lot of deserved attention. But climate change is coming fast, and moves to confront the changes afoot have been pitifully small in relation to the continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

 In addition to the problems associated with plant agriculture, modern methods of raising animals for food, referred to as Concentrated Farm Animal Operations, CFAOs, are a great bundle of harmful effects on land and water, to say nothing of spoilage of the environment for anyone unfortunate enough to live in the vicinity of a CFAO. Instead of recognizing the negative impacts of these operations and enacting tough laws to curtail their operations, state legislators in many farm states are enacting barriers to law suits from affected neighbors. And by the way, the resistance to effective change comes from both sides of the political divide. House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) has resisted the progressive push for dramatic action on climate change, reflecting the industry's aversion to change and its wariness of the climate movement. "I think a lot of them would like us to quit farming," Peterson told POLITICO in January. 'Peterson the unimaginative farmer' apparently has an edge over 'Peterson the people’s servant'.

Those who live citified lives can easily be unaware of the pollution of rivers and underground water resources resulting from CFAO operations; of a steady erosion of soil quality that comes with frequent tilling, eventually leaving land devoid of native soil organic matter, no longer capable of supporting sustainable food production; of deforestation operations that permanently strip out whole regions of plants that were soaking up CO2 and thus serving to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. They may not think of the huge quantities of CO2 that result from manufacturing fertilizers. Nor are they likely to dwell upon the folly of planting, harvesting and processing vast quantities of corn to produce ethanol as a gasoline additive. Ethanol is blended with petroleum gasoline in America in order to meet a federal government mandate known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and its updated version, RFS2. The original rationale was the desire to support U.S. agriculture. The RFS currently requires that about 10 percent of all gas-engine fuel sold in the United States be ethanol. There is virtually nothing left of the original rationale other than making some rich farm landowners even richer.

These examples call attention to the fact that agriculture is a leading source of greenhouse gas emissions and the cause of much ecological damage. And because of the slow pace at which this realization is penetrating into the public consciousness, it seems unlikely that reforms will come on a sufficiently broad and timely scale. I’ve frequently called attention to the great book Drawdown, which spells out a list of 80 or more feasible steps that could be enacted on a sufficiently large scale to go far toward mitigating climate change. Agriculture is at the heart of many of the most important ones. We need to find ways to make change happen. The alternative is described in David Wallace-Wells’s book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Check out this arresting interview with him.

The rapid-fire announcements of plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 are exemplary of an unfortunate expectation that new technologies will be enough to save us from global warming. Any realistic analysis leads to the conclusion that it will take a lot more than achieving net-zero emissions. It will require revolutionary new approaches to using the planet’s landmass to produce food and serve as a sink for CO2 by revitalizing currently depleted and desertified land. We will have to massively reduce global consumption of animals as a food source, learn to budget the ever more limited freshwater resources—and so much more. Small steps are being taken in the developed nations, but it’s a constant battle to educate the public and prevail politically against those who refuse to surrender their short-term interests. On this particular morning, it’s not easy to be optimistic.

From farm to dead zone

       

Before I delve into the subject of this blog, I should tell you that I maintain a vegetarian diet, aside from limited amounts of seafood.   I keep to the diet in part because I’m not confident that hogs, beef cattle, and chicken are raised to be free of additives that might be inimical to my long term health.  In addition, raising sentient creatures for the purpose of killing and eating them makes me uneasy. Thirdly, I believe that the animal food enterprise is bad news for the quality of our environment, a massively greater contributor to global climate change than plant-based food systems. That third point is the thrust of this blog.

My major focus here is on pig farming.  In some sense it’s an easy target; it’s hard to imagine how a system for producing food could be more destructive of the environment and more wasteful of energy than the modern Concentrated Farm Animal Operation (CFAO) involving pork. Let’s start with Smithfield Farms, a company founded in 1936 as Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph Luter and son.  The company had a rather rough first few decades, but they really got going from the 1970s onward.  However, the rapidly expanding company faced a series of lawsuits arising from the adverse environmental effects of intensely concentrating hog farming   For example, in 1985 a Richmond VA federal judge levied more than $2.2 million in fines for pollution of the Pagan River.  In the 1980s Smithfield had begun constructing a large network of its own hog farms. These produced such adverse effects on neighboring environments that many communities in Virginia and North Carolina set restrictions aimed at limiting environmental damage from the farms.

Here’s a bit of background on industrial pig farming: When female pigs reach maturity they are impregnated mostly through artificial insemination. Gestation runs about 115 days.  Weaning of the offspring, usually about 10 piglets, occurs at about three weeks.  The females, now referred to as sows, are bred again shortly after weaning their offspring. A sow is expected to produce approximately two litters per year. Sows are typically kept in the production cycle for 7 to 9 years. Animal rights groups have consistently called out Smithfield Farms for their inhumane treatment of sows.  Gestation pens are typically employed to confine sows for the period of their gestation.  A similarly confining sort of a pen is employed for farrowing of the litter. In either case, the sows can barely move in the small spaces.  Animal rights groups argue that the confinement is cruel, that some pens are so small that the animals cannot even turn around, as seems to be the case from the photo I’ve attached. 

Hog producers argue that confinement is needed to ensure that each pregnant sow gets enough nutrition, and to control the temperature of the environment. 

The industrial scale raising of hogs for food production is not a pretty business, but the environmental effects of hog production go way beyond pretty.  Hog farms create a horrible stench.  Many lawsuits have been brought by people living in proximity to hog farm operations.  The smells are intense and sickening, and there are typically clouds of flies.  People who had established their communities years before an industrial scale hog farm was brought in have seen their property values plummet, water supplies contaminated, onsets of respiratory illnesses such as asthma, and the general quality of their daily life brought low.  

Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest hog producer, has been sued repeatedly and has, until recently, most generally lost in the courts. But what have plaintiffs gained?  In March, 2019 Smithfield Farms was found guilty of being a major nuisance to the neighbors of its Duplin County North Carolina operation that raises about 5,000 animals.  The settlement was for $420,000.  This was a remarkably low settlement figure. Four previous juries had awarded penalties totaling nearly $550 million against Murphy Brown, a Smithfield subsidiary with an operation of similar size.   Even these larger penalties are not a big deal for giant producers.  North Carolina law limits the size of punitive awards, so large settlements are automatically capped.

Large producers such as Smithfield Foods have contractual relationships with many smaller hog farming operations. so it isn’t just the giant producers who conduct operations on a scale harmful to local communities. Agricultural interests have pushed for stronger “right to farm” laws that protect farmers from being sued by their neighbors for the “routine” smells and noise created by farming operations.  At the urgings of the Big Ag lobby, laws are under consideration or have been passed in several states, including Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Georgia, to prevent neighbors from suing farmers at all.  Those laws would also protect massive industrial livestock operations.  Many of the bills passed are of the monkey see-monkey do variety, even citing North Carolina provisions as precedent, though they may put their particular stamp on them—for example, in stipulating that the plaintiffs must live within a certain distance.  In Utah and West Virginia, the stipulated distance to have status as a plaintiff is a half-mile.  No one would want to live within a half-mile of an industrial scale hog facility. These laws, passed at the behest of agricultural interests, are effectively depriving affected citizens of any meaningful legal recourse.

Perhaps most importantly, the wastes from hog farm operations are wreaking environmental havoc. Manure isn’t all bad—applied in the right amounts, at the right times, it's a fine fertilizer. Yes, it smells awful, but it’s a useful soil additive, not only in regard to nutrient content, but in adding organic carbon to the soil.  But hog manure can be a health hazard when manure dried out after spreading produces harmful dust.  Another problem is that hogs produce so much shit!  Chris Jones, a Research Engineer and Adjunct Professor at Iowa State University writes on his blog that a feeder pig, one destined for the slaughterhouse, is about the size of a human being, but “it excretes about three times as much nitrogen (N), about five times as much phosphorus(P) and 3.5 times as much solid matter”.  Jones has calculated the amount of fecal waste from hogs on a state-by-state basis. Iowa is at the top of the list, with almost 24 million pigs, more than twice the second-place state, North Carolina, which comes in second with about 9.4 million pigs. 

Suppose we wanted to be as good stewards as possible of pig fecal matter, by putting it into sanitary systems that would digest the raw sewage, just as we do for human municipal sanitation systems.  Jones calculates that the quantity of pig fecal waste in Iowa would be the equivalent of about 84 million people.  He estimates that if we count in also the waste from beef cattle, dairy cattle, laying chickens, and throw in turkeys for good measure, the total fecal waste stream from food animal operations in Iowa would be the equivalent of 168 million humans.  Iowa has a population of 3.2 million humans.  To grasp the magnitude of our problem in disposing of waste from animal food operations, just think about those two numbers.  Granted, Iowa is a special case, but the numbers are big for all the agricultural states, as I’ll show below.   Jones has calculated the human equivalent of the animal wastes in each state on a per square mile basis.  For Iowa, the number is approximately 3000 fecal waste equivalents per person. Here’s a little table that shows the numbers for some other states, rounded off a bit:

                Wisconsin             1550                      North Carolina                   1400

                Minnesota            1050                       Georgia                                900

                Kansas                  1250                       Missouri                              1220

                Illinois                   930                        Iowa                                    3000

               

To be clear: for each state, the number listed is the ratio of the animal fecal waste volume to that of the humans living in that state.  You can see that it’s a lot of animal waste. It has to go somewhere.  Typically, waste from CFAOs goes into settling ponds, where it dries out to a degree. Eventually, some is spread onto agricultural fields as fertilizer, but managing animal wastes is not easy.  Much of it eventually ends up in runoff; into streams, aquifers and so on.  For smaller farm operations the disposal can be rather haphazard.  The wastes, by the way, may also contain the residues of pharmaceuticals--antibiotics, growth hormones, etc, administered to the animals from conception to slaughter.  Much of the waste ends up as runoff into the big rivers, and eventually into the Mississippi River. 

The nutrient-rich waters flow into the Gulf and stimulate the growth of harmful algal blooms. The algae eventually decompose, sink to the bottom and oxidize.  In the process they consume much of the available oxygen in the water, creating a “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that is unable to support fish and marine life. This year the dead zone in the Gulf is estimated to be 8,776 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey (see the figure at the top). That dead zone is a disaster for many who've fished in those waters for generations.  It is the largest measured since dead zone mapping began there in 1985.

 Millions of Americans are affected in one way or another by the environmental damage caused by CFAO’s. Why are they permitted to operate all over the country when the pollution problems described above are an inevitable consequence? It comes down to money, of course.  The methods used in CFAO operations are designed to produce the least expensive pork possible. But there's more to this story than just money. I'll dive into those matters in the next blog.  Many of you may be surprised.