America is waking up to the fact that the unfathomable amounts of animal dung generated by our industrial agricultural system is poisoning our water and our air.  Those who live by waters polluted by the excesses of industrial agriculturae have long understood the grim connection between our cheap-food system and the slow death of rivers, lakes, streams, estuaries, and other coastal waters.  Now the mainstream media is bringing wider attention to this looming environmental disaster.

Exhibit A:  The Washington Post recently ran a prominent environmental expose under the headline “Manure becomes pollutant as volume grows” This excerpt explains the problem well:

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem,….The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.   That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones”

"Dead zones" are areas within waterbodies where oxygen becomes severely depleted when massive algae colonies--fed by nutrient-rich manure and other agricultural waste--die off. The oxygen-depleting algae decomposition process has disastrous results for fish and other aquatic life. This fishkill occured on the Neuse River in North Carolina an area of intensive factory farming.

Exhibit B: Popular talk radio host and TV personality Don Imus featured an unusually-sobering interview with investigative author David Kirby about his new book “Animal Factory.”  In vivid detail, the author explained the inhumane conditions in which thousands of hogs, cows, and chickens are often confined at these industrial meat and dairy operations that are much more akin to factories than “farms.”  Citing many gasp-inducing horror stories from the book, Kirby underscored the public health and environmental risks created by the oceans of excrement these operations release into the environment when they saturate spray fields with levels of liquid manure that runs off into nearby rivers, streams, and lakes.

Exhibit C: Through the international success of documentary film “Food, Inc.,” which is nominated for a “Best Documentary Feature” Academy Award millions of moviegoers were exposed to moving pictures of the environmental and social repercussions of industrial agriculture. 

Defenders of industrial agriculture will tell you that spraying liquid manure on to pastures and cropland helps to fertilize that land to grow crops to feed the animals.  In reality, spraying massive amounts of liquid manure on the land is a cheap way for these industrial farms to dump their wastes.  The rest of us bear the true costs in the form of water that is unsafe for drinking, swimming, and fishing among other public health risks and other pollution problems.

Liquid manure is spread to saturation levels on a farm on the shores of Lake Champlain's St. Albans Bay, a part of the lake that has long suffered from algae blooms. Though blooms have yet to cause fishkills on the scale pictured above, scientists have documented a growing "dead zone" in the Lake's Northeast Arm--an area where manure from thousands of dairy cows is spread on riverside and lakeside cropland during much of the year.

 This problem is coming to a head in Vermont, where lax regulation and poor management of industrial-scale dairy operations contributes pollution that feeds annual outbreaks of blue-green algae and nuisance weeds in Lake Champlain and is also responsible for bacteria contamination in the Lake and many other rivers and streams.  We would never allow unchecked pollution like this from any other industry, but the powerful agribusiness lobby has largely prevented the type of legislative and law-enforcement responses that this problem demands.  To learn more about CLF’s actions to document and force clean up and prevent a worsening of this dung disaster, read our report ”Failing Our Waters, Failing our Farms,” and the legal petition sent to EPA seeking stronger action under the Clean Water Act.   And check back here for a future post on other ways to get our society out of this dung dilemma.

In an insightful reaction to President Obama’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress, noted author Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) said something very provocative on the pages of the New York Times.  Unlike South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, he didn’t accuse the president of lying.  But he did make pretty clear that the health care debate thus far has ignored a very significant part of the problem: an acknowledgment that our transformation into a fast food nation is playing a huge role in making health care more costly and less accessible for all Americans.

In his Op-ed titled “Big Food vs. Big Insurance“, he writes:

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

He’s got a very compelling point, and it becomes even more compelling if you follow the “environmental costs” thread that he mentions only in passing.

Much of federal food policy is all about subsidies for corn, both as a feed crop for fatty meats raised under inhumane conditions on “factory farms” and for use in the ubiquitous sweetener high-fructose corn syrup found in calorie-laden soda and other processed foods throughout the supermarket.  Most of the corn grown in this country requires intensive application of nutrient-rich fertilizers, especially those with nitrogen.  A lot of the fertilizer gets dumped into rivers either through excess application onto the fields or through the mishandling of manure from the animals who eat all that corn without fully digesting the nutrients.

The water pollution problems caused by our heavily-subsidized fertilizer- intensive agriculture only serve to exacerbate our reliance on cheap and unhealthy food.  The result are seasonal “dead zones“: areas in polluted waterbodies like the Gulf of Mexico where algae blooms fed by the fertilizer runoff deplete waters of oxygen that fish need to live.  So to grow corn to fuel the increasing consumption of unhealthy process foods and soda related to the explosion of costly and increasingly-common health problems like Type 2 diabetes, we’re using fertilizers that destroy the capacity of fisheries to provide alternative sources of much healthier nutrition.  A vicious cycle if ever there was one.

Self-defeating food policies that poison and destroy fisheries aren’t the only link to rising health care costs.  As CLF reported in our “Conservation Matters” article on mercury pollution, “there is a high correlation between children with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and other neurological disorders and mothers who have ingested high amounts of methylmercury from poisoned fish and water.”  To prevent these costly, life-long health conditions Northeastern states warn pregnant women and young children not to eat freshwater fish from the over “10,000 lakes, ponds, and reservoirs, as well as more than 46,000 miles of river deemed too toxic for fish consumption.” The pollution comes from coal-fired power plants whose owners refuse to sacrifice a small part of their enormous profits to install readily-available mercury pollution controls. CLF is continuing to fight for tougher mercury standards in hopes that New England’s freshwater fisheries–a historical source of great sustenance for our region’s people–will once again provide safe, nutritious food rather than potential health hazards.

There’s no doubt that health insurance reform is desperately needed, but to succeed in controlling costs and making us healthier it must accompanied by reforms to our food and environmental policies.