Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tonnes of manure from some 900 large farms, of which only 6.2 per cent was applied to
cropland. 'Many of these substances were discharged directly, without any treatment', he
observed. 'Animal manure has been a major contributor to surface water contamination in
Zhejiang.'
23
The more hysterical brand of vegan delights in drawing attention to these muck heaps
and slurry tips as another stick to beat the livestock farmer with. Here is the comment of
Bruce Friedrich of PETA, speaking in
The Ecologist
's 1976 debate:
(Farm) animals produce far more excrement than humans do (130 times as much
in the US for example) … and this excrement is swimming with bacteria, antibiotics,
hormones, pesticides and other filth. It pollutes water and destroys topsoil. There
really can be no such thing as a meat-eating environmentalist.
The same statistic resurfaced twenty years later in a 1997 report. This is from a web art-
icle entitled 'Why Go Veg?':
In December 1997 the Senate Agricultural Committee released a report stating that
animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire human
population, roughly 68,000 pounds a second. A Scripps Howard synopsis of the report
stated: 'It's untreated and insanitary, bubbling with chemicals and disease-bearing or-
ganisms … It goes into the soil and into the water that many people will, ultimately,
bathe in and wash their clothes with and drink. It is poisoning rivers and killing fish
and sickening people … Catastrophic cases of pollution, sickness and death are oc-
curring in areas where livestock operations are concentrated … Every place where the
animal factories have located, neighbours have complained of falling sick.' This ex-
crement is also generally believed to be responsible for the 'cell from hell',
Pfiester-
ia
, a deadly microbe, the discovery of which is detailed in Rodney Barker's
And the
Waters Turned to Blood
.
24
The issue of whether or not the 'cell from hell' is even toxic, let alone deadly, is (unsur-
professor at the University of Maryland, came up with the same figure, and the same lan-
guage:
Livestock now produces 130 times the amount of waste that people do. The waste is untreated and unsanitary.
It bubbles with chemicals and disease-bearing organisms. It overpowers nature's ability to clean it up. It's poison-
ing rivers, killing fish and getting into human drinking water. 65 per cent of California's population is threatened
by pollution in water just from dairy cow manure.
26
All these authors talk about the 130 fold difference in volume between the performance
of mostly bovine and human bowels as though there was something wrong with the cow.
