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The planet's prodigious poo problem
How much poo is generated by the world’s farms?
Recent research has estimated that by 2030, the planet will be generating at least 5bn tonnes of poo each year, with the vast majority being deposited by livestock. With 80% of farms in the Netherlands already producing more cow dung than they can legally use as fertiliser, and China resorting to drastic measures to try to reduce the amount of manure being discharged into rivers, scientists say this is a major environment and health challenge.
“It’s a huge problem,” says Joe Brown, professor of environmental engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. “Animal waste is going up because as populations and wealth increase, there’s a bigger demand for protein. But while we’ve seen lots of initiatives to safely manage human waste, nobody is talking about this.” [...]
What are the knock-on environmental risks?
Because most first world farming systems are highly concentrated, industrial operations, this produces very concentrated streams of waste. Unless these are dealt with rapidly, they can pollute the air with large amounts of harmful gases such as ammonia, nitrous oxide and hydrogen sulphide.
Inhaling these toxic fumes can be lethal in large quantities, and studies have repeatedly shown that people who live near industrial farms have a much greater risk of chronic asthma, respiratory irritation, immune suppression, and even mood disorders.
Water pollution and climate change are also issues.
[Ed's notes: My first thoughts are on how this might be mirroring Victorian-era poolution in cities before cars took over, and from there to how many other times too much poo from too many nearby animals has deleteriously affected the humans who were encouraging the growth of the problem. Feel free to fling other examples at me if you can think of them! -- FP]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @12:57AM (3 children)
You can use the manure to produce energy/gas and still get fertilizer out of it - anaerobic digesters are build for this exact purpose in places without reliable energy. It's probably not economically viable to ship mountains of shit when competing with concentrated nutrients though, so I don't know if they can compete with fertilizer companies.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:23AM
I knew a guy who started his own fertilizer business by offering his services to farmers, for free, to remove the bullshit from the farmers' pastures and feedlots and then resell that bullshit as fertilizer. Now he runs a multi million-dollar empire with a yacht and 8-seat plane and negotiated a successful business marriage merging his bullshit operation with the heiress of a competitors' chickenshit operation. Together, they are the king and queen of shit, and they are unstoppable.
And these smart folks are trucking piles of manure 15 miles down the highway, they are constantly conducting science experiments for the optimal ratio of mixture and additives, researching and earning new patents, and then processing the best mixtures into pellets to be shipped worldwide.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:24AM (1 child)
You're probably not going to get nutrients more concentrated than dehydrated animal manure unless you're talking low mass nutrients like iron.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:11PM
And iron is a micronutrient; you don't need it in mass quantities. However, plant crops do need nitrogen in mass quantities, especially those crops that produce proteins that primates (that would be us) can use.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.