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by David Malmquist, The College of William & Mary
Excess nitrogen is a major threat to water quality in coastal waters worldwide. Found in treated wastewater, farm and lawn fertilizers and combustion exhaust, it fuels blooms of algae that shade submerged grasses and suck oxygen from the water when they die and decay.
A new study by researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science provides additional evidence that wastewater from a poultry processing plant has a particularly significant impact on water quality and nutrient cycling. That's because it contains not only lots of nitrogen, but antibiotics and byproducts of the process the plants use to treat their wastewater. These byproducts are thought to inhibit the growth and activity of microbes that would otherwise help remove nitrogen from tidal creeks before it can enter coastal systems.
The researchers, VIMS Ph.D. student Miguel Semedo and Professor Bongkeun Song, say their study is the first to evaluate poultry-industry impacts on water quality and nutrient cycling using genetic, microbial and remote-sensing techniques. Results of their work appear in the January issue of Environmental Science & Technology. The study was supported through the Fulbright Program and Semedo's graduate fellowship from Virginia Sea Grant.
Microbes remove nitrogen from aquatic ecosystems through a process called denitrification. "Microbes perform a number of ecosystem functions," says Semedo, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Porto's Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR) in Matosinhos, Portugal. "Denitrification is one of the most vital, as it has the potential to remove excess nitrogen from the system."
Denitrifying microbes have unique genes that control the denitrification process, a series of steps that transforms nitrate and nitrite—inorganic forms of nitrogen found in wastewater—into gaseous forms such as nitric oxide, nitrous oxide and dinitrogen. The latter compounds are unusable by most organisms and thus contribute little or nothing to over-fertilization of coastal waters.
Semedo and Song conducted the study in two tidal creeks on Virginia's Eastern Shore—one with a poultry processing plant in its headwaters and one without. The creeks drain into the coastal lagoons that lie between the mainland of the Delmarva Peninsula and its offshore barrier islands.
The pair measured nitrogen levels in the headwaters, middle, and mouth of each creek on four occasions between November 2016 and September 2017. They also collected sediment samples for laboratory analysis at VIMS, as denitrifying microbes generally live in muds on the creek bottom. In the lab, they identified the species of microbes present, noted which contained the genes known to control denitrification and subjected microbes from the uncontaminated "control" creek to water from the creek impacted by poultry-plant effluent.
Their field results showed clear evidence that nitrogen levels were higher in the contaminated creek.
"The levels of nitrate in the bottom waters of the impacted creek were significantly higher than those in the reference creek across all stations in most seasons," says Song.
"On average," adds Semedo, "nitrate levels in the impacted creek were 34 times higher at the headwaters station, 47 times higher at midstream, and 23 times higher near the mouth."
Journal Reference:
More information: Miguel Semedo et al. From Genes to Nitrogen Removal: Determining the Impacts of Poultry Industry Wastewater on Tidal Creek Denitrification, Environmental Science & Technology (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.9b03560
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday January 21 2020, @05:45PM (5 children)
Here's an engineering summary of the problem, which makes more sense than the article itself:
We have the technology to very easily and very cheaply turn poop water into clean and safe wastewater.
Antibiotics, unfortunately, kill the bacteria.
It turns out that industrial livestock production, as currently regulated, more so than any other source at this time, mixes antibiotics and poop water in its sewage output. Whoops.
One substance in the sewage kills the only living thing that can get rid of the other substance.
That isn't going to end well. Either for the water or for the industry.
In the very long run, using antibiotics in industrial farming will likely be looked at like spraying dioxin to keep dust down, or spraying DDT to keep mosquitos down, or spraying chlorofluorocarbons in hairspray to keep hair up. People will look back in horror that we used stuff that way. The article goes into a ton of detailed "blah blah science blah blah" to avoid making the obvious point about chicken farming regulation.
Ironically, organic chicken as currently shipped is WAY cheaper than the most theoretical futuristic ways to possibly process a mix of antibiotics and poop. There'a a huge industry production for organic chicken and it costs about 50% more, sometimes less. Organic chicken is about 10% lower fat, sometimes more, compared to antibiotic chicken so there's a weird balance there where the protein cost is only maybe 30% more. And don't get me started on water injection of antibiotic chicken, so really you're only buying 90% chicken compared to usually 100% organic chicken anyway, etc. Sometimes people who don't know better or have a grindable axe will go on about the chicken they saw at the store once that was 200% or 300% more than antibiotic chicken; Yes that's correct in that it was not antibiotic chicken, but we're talking about antibiotic-free organic chicken, not the hyper expensive "free range" or "certified humane" chicken.
As a side issue, pretty weird how marketing makes people think "free range" is so humane, but it is not, such that we need a whole separate certification system for "certified humane" which is vastly more expensive than industrial chicken production. "free range" doesn't really amount to much other than huge profits, frankly. Most people who buy "free range" think they're buying "certified humane" but they aren't. Most "certified humane" will get advertised as also technically being "free range" further confusing the issue.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 21 2020, @08:05PM (1 child)
Well, that's quite a relief. Not only did your comment save me the hassle of reading the article, but it's also reassuring that the article didn't put the "eat the bugs, Goy" spin on the evils of consuming meat.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 22 2020, @01:01PM
The media has an infinite supply of (((ritual humiliation))) propaganda so I'm sure they'll make up for it elsewhere...
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 21 2020, @10:05PM
Old school chicken farming (like depicted in the claymation movie Chicken Run) was sort of "true free range," the only people I know who practice that kind of chicken keeping these days are hobbyists and small time egg operations.
Back when that kind of farming was the norm, chicken was f-ing expensive. Folks born back in the 20s and 30s remember chicken as being a rare treat, and the birds you got were scrawny things compared to the slabs of cross-bred steroid injected stuff they sell today for $1.99 per lb as breast fillets. Even in the 1970s, I remember my schoolteacher parents serving the whole chicken and talking up the drumsticks to the kids as "desirable" parts. I also remember the drumsticks being actual dark meat because the chicken had actually done some walking, as opposed to the fatty things Perdue sells today for $1.25 per lb ($0.19 per lb in 1970 dollars.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @10:21PM (1 child)
Well CFCs wouldn't be what "keeps hair up", rather it would be the propellant used in the aerosol spray mechanism.
In the case of CFCs I think this is an unfair assessment of past humans. The main problem with CFCs is that they deplete ozone in the upper atmosphere. I think this consequence was almost completely unforseeable, especially given that the equipment used to discover and measure this effect wasn't even invented until decades after the discovery and widespread use of CFCs.
On the other hand, CFCs have obvious and very useful practical applications because they are easily adjusted to have almost any freezing and boiling point required for your specific application. Without knowledge of ozone depletion, this pretty much makes them choice #1 for use as refrigerants, especially when you consider that refrigerants used previously were toxic gases like sulfur dioxide.
In the case of an aerosol can, you need something that is liquid in the can under its own vapour pressure but rapidly boils off when sprayed in order to atomize the remaining liquid. CFCs let you achieve this easily. Today, propane is typically used in these cans. If we didn't know about problems due to CFCs, we'd probably think you'd have to be crazy to use flammable gases for this application...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @12:00AM
>> hairspray to keep hair up
Or, you know, you could let your hair be. Just that. Nothing in a spray can is necessary for beauty (unless you believe the ads).