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posted by FatPhil on Friday March 29 2019, @11:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-on-your-best-shitposts dept.

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]


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:02PM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:02PM (#822321) Journal

    If only there were a large, free source of nitrogen somewhere...

    Notice the phrase in the grandparent

    which is why about half the nitrogen fertilizer used requires production of ammonia using natural gas.

    There's a lot of nitrogen in the air for free, but it's not free to turn it into a form that plants can use.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:48PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:48PM (#822335)

    It is not like we have an entire category of plants that can bind nitrogen in the soil.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legume#Nitrogen_fixation [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:01PM (2 children)

      by Reziac (2489) on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:01PM (#822338) Homepage

      But to keep up with the needs of crops, you need 3 years of legumes for every year of high-production crops, and even then you'll slowly lose enough nitrogen that your yields will drop. And legumes that produce edible crops tend to both require a lot of water, and to be sensitive to temperature (frex, peas will only grow in cool weather).

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:55PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @06:55PM (#822442)

        So what? I don't feel bad for your industrial exploitation of nature.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 31 2019, @04:00AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 31 2019, @04:00AM (#822622) Journal

          So what?

          The grandparent stated that three years of growing legumes were required per year of cash crop. Just taken at face value, growing one good crop every four years is not free, but rather a very high cost operation.