Re: 6.7 million boxcars of manure
Greg & Lei Gunthorp (hey4hogs@kuntrynet.com)
Thu, 11 Jun 1998 12:15:08 -0500
I just thought I would mention that I live in that Indiana county that
supposedly had
the problem. It started out as only 3 miscarriages when it first hit the
wires. Its grown in the media(and not actual cases) since then. They were
all in an area of the county with an old landfill(I think they used to call
them dumps) and only one was proven to be from nitrates--only it was from
their own septic tank. And the only livestock operations around these
people would definitely be classified as family farms in my opinion. They
are confinement operations and they do have pits and lagoons.
"Public Officials" was in reality one person who continues to report
so-called "facts" that vary greatly from the report ut out by the CDC.
Before this report there had been no known lagoon spills in LaGrange County.
Since the report there has been one, and it was from pigs owned by a
wonderful North Carolina firm raised in a building owned by someone who
didn't believe there was a future in independent hog production.
I'm as big of a fan of alternative livestock production as there is, but I
question the idea of moratoriums without correcting the problems of why
large scale, industrialised, capital intensive livestock production is so
common.
I think in a capitalistic free society we should look beyond regulations
and look for causes and then to solutions. Telling somebody that "no, you
can't raise confinement hogs/chickens in LaGrange County or Indiana or even
the US" isn't going to stop hog production. It might move it too developing
countries with absolutely no manure regulations. Is that a better course?
Or is our goal to stop people from eating meat?
I think we need to level the playing felid to encourage sustainable
livestock production.
I see some serious problems with the current system that is strongly
encouraging large scale confinement production. The biggest factor in my
opinion is government funded research encouraging confinement production
while almost no research is done on low cost alternative approaches such as
pasture or hoop houses. Market access is also a factor. There are
basically no independent poultry markets in the US. There are portions of
the country that sales of less than semi loads of cattle and hogs are
difficult.
This is huge driving force behind contract production. And then how many
legitimate alternative markets for sustainably produced livestock are there.
How much would the
livestock industry change if a portion of the regulation efforts were put
into establishing
infrastructure for organic or sustainable livestock production? I don't see
a legitimate
infrastructure. Most producers I know see no alternative but getting
bigger or quitting. And they also don't see any legitimate alternatives to
pits and lagoons.
How many members are there in the Sierra club? And how many eat meat?
Does anyone know of who to contact within the Sierra Club to help to develop
an Eco label for or promote marketing of sustainable livestock ? It seems
to me that helping to develop the needed infrastructure for sustainable
livestock production would do as much to help the environment and the
livestock producer as anything.
Best wishes,
Greg
Gunthorp's Pasture-ized Pork
LaGrange, Indiana (a stones throw from Ohio & Michigan)
hey4hogs@kuntrynet.com
visit our farm at www.grassfarmer.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Snow <sksnow@1stnet.com>
To: sanet-mg-digest@shasta.ces.ncsu.edu
<sanet-mg-digest@shasta.ces.ncsu.edu>
Date: Thursday, June 11, 1998 12:40 AM
Subject: 6.7 million boxcars of manure
Kathryn Hohmann, director of the Sierra Club's environmental quality
program, told a news conference, "In one Indiana town public health
officials confirmed that water contaminated by livestock units resulted
in six women experiencing miscarriages."
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