What is in the Fertilizer????

SEATTLE (AP) - Toxic heavy metals, chemicals and radioactive wastes are being recycled as fertilizer and spread over farmers' fields nationwide - and there is no federal law requiring that they be listed as ingredients, The Seattle Times reported.

The issue came to light in the central Washington town of Quincy, population 4,000, when Mayor Patty Martin led an investigation by local farmers concerned about poor yields and sickly cattle.

``It's really unbelievable what's happening, but it's true,'' Martin told the newspaper, which published a series about the practice on Thursday and Friday.

Until now, the state Department of Agriculture sampled fertilizers only to see if they contained advertised levels of beneficial substances. But the state is currently testing a cross-section of fertilizer products to see if they threaten crops, livestock or people, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday.

`The key question is what toxics are, as it were, along for the ride in fertilizers,'' said Tom Fitzsimmons, director of the state Department of Ecology.

Use of industrial waste as a fertilizer ingredient is a growing national >phenomenon, The Times reported.

In Gore, Okla., a uranium-processing plant gets rid of low-level radioactive waste by licensing it as a liquid fertilizer and spraying it over 9,000 acres of grazing land.

At Camas, Wash., lead-laced waste from a pulp mill is hauled to farms and spread over crops destined for livestock feed.

In Moxee City, Wash., dark powder from two Oregon steel mills is poured from rail cars into silos at Bay Zinc Co. under a federal hazardous waste storage permit. Then it is emptied from the silos for use as fertilizer. The newspaper called the powder a toxic byproduct of steel-making but did not identify it.

``When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste,'' said Bay Zinc's president, Dick Camp. ``When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material.''

Federal and state governments encourage the recycling, which saves money for industry and conserves space in hazardous-waste landfills.

The substances found in recycled fertilizers include cadmium, lead, arsenic, radioactive materials and dioxins, the Times reported. The wastes come from incineration of medical and municipal wastes, and from heavy industries including mining, smelting, cement kilns and wood products.

Mixed and handled correctly, some industrial wastes can help crops grow, but beneficial materials such as nitrogen and magnesium often are accompanied by dangerous heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, the Times said.

``Nowhere in the country has a law that says if certain levels of heavy metals are exceeded, it can't be a fertilizer,'' said Ali Kashani, who directs fertilizer regulation in Washington state.

Unlike many other industrialized nations, the United States does not regulate fertilizers. That makes it virtually impossible to figure out how much fertilizer contains recycled hazardous wastes. And laws in most states, including Washington, are far from stringent.

Canada's limit for heavy metals such as lead and cadmium in fertilizer is 10 to 90 times lower than the U.S. limit for metals in sewage sludge, while the United States has no limit for metals in fertilizer, the newspaper said.

``This is a definite problem,'' said Richard Loeppert, a soil scientist at Texas A&M University and author of several published papers on toxic elements in fertilizers. ``The public needs to know.''

AP-NY-07-06-97 1815EDT

Corparate Farming----Big Time Manure

It's more than chicken feed -- grain from

BY JOBY WARRICK,Staff Writer

Coming full circle with nitrogen  -- The News Observer, Raleigh N.C. 3/5/96

Nitrogen is the fuel in the carburetor of life. You need a little to make the engine run, but if you get too much you'll choke.

For some of North Carolina's farm counties, the system is already badly flooded -- and taking on more all the time.

The recent shift toward large-scale livestock production has turned the state's farm belt into a massive importer of both nitrogen and phosphorus, which come into the state as animal feed and are the key ingredients in the manure and fertilizer that help crops grow but also wreak havoc in rivers. Each day the task of keeping these nutrients from washing into the water gets harder.

"You can try to find places to put them, but sooner or later you overdose on nutrients," said Larry Schweiger, an environment policy expert who has studied pollution problems in East Coast estuaries.

Here's how it works: Each day, trainloads of nutrients arrive from the Midwest in the form of feed grains for livestock. The corn and soybeans are fed to pigs and poultry, and a little of the nitrogen and phosphorus is absorbed into the animals' bodies. The bulk of it is excreted as animal waste.

In the swine industry alone, the 8 million hogs in the state's eastern counties produce, conservatively, 10 billion pounds of manure a year, which includes about 70 million pounds of nitrogen. Even if farmers follow all the state's rules for handling the waste, between 3.5 million and 7 million pounds of the nitrogen will end up in the rivers as a result of runoff from fields, according to Doug Rader, senior scientist for the N.C. Environmental Defense Fund. Invariably, he says, some nitrogen is lost to the environment either by seeping into the groundwater or going into the air as ammonia gas.

In the Neuse River, according to Rader's estimates, about 10 percent of the excess nitrogen comes from animal waste, which is stored in open-air pits, spread or sprayed on cropland. If a proposed hog processing plant near Rocky Mount brings more hogs to the region, that figure will inevitably increase.

"These farms are a modest but critical part of the problem because they are a new part of the problem," he said. "The additional 10 percent moves you in a direction diametrically opposite from the way you want to go."

Rader and others believe regulators must begin to look at the nutrient problem holistically, with the goal of restoring a balance between the amount entering and exiting the system. To Schweiger, this means finding economical ways to ship excess nitrogen to other parts of the country where it can be used as fertilizer on crops.

"If we're importing grains from the Midwest, we ought to exporting waste to them," he said.

Hog Hell

Thursday, February 15, 1996

Well, Old MacDonald has been shoved out, as pig farming today falls under the control of a few massive pork conglomerates that don't have "here a pig, there a pig" . . . but some 12,000 animals at a time jammed onto their factory farms. And E-I-E-I-O! What an environmental mess they're making.

Hogs (how shall I put it?) . . . excrete. A lot. Pound-for-pound, they generate nearly twice as much manure as beef cattle do. Now, when 100 "Old MacDonalds" have 120 hogs each -- the manure of these 12,000 hogs is spread far apart and poses no danger. But when all 12,000 hogs wallow on one farm . . . well, you've got beaucoup stink and contamination.

Unfortunately, state and national laws do not even require these hog factories to treat their waste -- it's simply dammed-up in huge lagoons on their land, leaking and running-off into our water supplies. Last June, one of these lagoons in North Carolina burst, spilling 25-million gallons of hog feces and urine. That is twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez! This putrid tide contaminated soil for miles around and killed all aquatic life down a 17-mile stretch of a major river.

But even without spills, these unsustainable concentrations of hogs are a dangerous nightmare for people and communities in the surrounding areas: a plague of flies breeds in the lagoons; an acrid rain is created by the ammonia given-off by the hogs; and the odor . . . Oh, the odor! Never in your life have you smelled anything so awful -- it carries for miles downwind, permeating your clothes, carseats, carpeting, hair, skin and lungs causing widespread vomiting, headaches, depression, sleeplessness and -- need I say it? -- loss of appetite. Ironically, all in the name of "Modern Agriculture."

This is Jim Hightower saying . . . Bon Apetite, and welcome to Hog Hell.

Copyright 1996 - Hightower and Associates, Inc.

Source: "Hog heaven -- and hell" U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 22, 1996.

New U.S. Farm Bill Supports Sustainable Agriculture

After months of uncertainty over the fate of U.S. government farm programs, a 1996 Farm Bill was signed into law by President Clinton in April. According to the Pesticide Action Network, the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (FAIR) will dramatically impact the structure of agriculture across the U.S.

The impact of the new legislation on family farmers and the environment will be mixed. According to the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, despite early attempts to gut conservation programs, the conservation provisions in general are as good as in previous farm bills, and voluntary, incentive-based programs have been expanded. The new commodity provisions, known as "Freedom to Farm" will increase the flexibility for farmers who grow designated commodity crops, allowing them to plant what they want and thereby removing obstacles to crop rotation. However, "Freedom to Farm" also severs the link between market prices and federal program payments to farmers, and steadily decreases payments over the next seven years, both of which will make it harder for small family farmers to survive.

Through the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, hundreds of U.S. organizations worked together to advocate federal policies to support family farming, environmental protection and a just food system. Although the political climate in Congress was very difficult, says the Pesticide Action Network, the Campaign won some remarkable victories, thanks to an unprecedented and powerful combination of widespread grassroots action, coordination between regions and constituencies, and behind-the-scenes political work.

1996 Farm Bill provisions affecting family farming and sustainable agriculture that were supported by the Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture include:

• Fund for Rural America -- provides $100 million a year for three years for research projects and rural development, including farmworker housing, value added enterprises and marketing, and water and sewer projects.
• Farmland Preservation -- the Farmland Protection Fund provides $35 million in federal matching funds to qualified state or local farmland protection programs.
• Environmental Quality Incentives Program -- combines several conservation programs into a more comprehensive and streamlined program. It includes a program to reduce pollution from livestock operations with language prohibiting cost-share assistance to "large confined livestock operations."

The 1996 Farm Bill is currently on the fast track for implementation. The Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture is "working to help shape implementation of the bill to promote family farming and environmental stewardship."

-- Pesticide Action Network News, Summer 1996

Reproductive Health Concerns Spur International Talks on Pesticide Ban

Suspicions about the impacts of certain human-produced chemicals have governments around the globe considering restrictions on their use and release. Support for such restrictions is not universal, however.

The twelve persistent organic pollutants (POPs) which have been targeted for treaty restrictions include chemicals such as DDT and chlordane -- chemicals on which many developing countries are dependent. Although health concerns linked to these chemicals have resulted in a ban on their production in most developed nations, developing nations have a difficult time affording the pricier alternatives and continue to rely on these chemicals as effective tools (i.e. combatting malaria).

The Top 20 persistant chemicals
(Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services Public Health Service
Web Site: http://atsdr1.atsdr.cdc.gov:8080/cxcx3.html

A ban on many of these targeted POPs could mean financial strain as well as health threats in countries like India and China, which also produce substances such as DDT.

In the indutrialized nations, however, chemical firms stand to benefit from the ban. The majority of the POPs on the list are older chemicals with expired patents, and they reap little financial reward for their manufacturers. A ban on these chemicals would actually help boost sales of newer, more expensive alternative chemicals.

A key motivator behind the proposed treaty is the possible link between certain POPs and reduced sperm counts. More specifically, Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund says that the ban proposal has been jump-started by "white men concerned about their sperm counts," with the key support for the treaty coming from Canada, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Developing countries are not particularly sympathetic with this problem, however, given the ban's more severe implications for them if it goes into effect. They are, thus, expected to demand some sort of financial assistance from the wealthier countries during negotiations if the ban is to go forward. Notes the British weekly The Economist, "[T]hey will certainly not want to suffer more malaria just to protect white men's sperm."

-- The Economist, 8/3/96

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