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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, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 21 2020, @07:25PM (6 children)
We were looking at a 50 acre tract of land in East Texas, pretty place, trees, hills, quiet, clean air, but... there was this faint unpleasant smell. Noticed on the drive out, the neighbors have a couple of chicken sheds - weren't gated or locked so we drove up to check 'em out. First remarkable thing was the intensity of the smell as you approach, owners say "that's the smell of money" - yeah, money we won't be paying for the neighboring land, for one. Next remarkable thing was the absolutely green road - they had laid down some kind of rock on the road, but whatever they were spilling on it grew the most uniform coating of green algae I've ever seen on a driveway. Didn't get up the nerve to open the car doors and get out, we had seen and smelled enough for what we needed to know.
The thing about those operations is: they're optimized. Year after year, across many thousands of individual chicken sheds, they study costs, yields, etc. and they tweak the operations with more antibiotics, specific growing temperatures, optimized ventilation, density of animals inside, and the ONLY thing they're concerned with is net yield.
Until the externalized costs of these operations are put back on the owner/operators, we'll continue to have $0.99 chicken nuggets that are costing the negatively impacted people more than the chicken farmers make.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 21 2020, @09:09PM (5 children)
Chicken farmers are just indentured labour. [theatlantic.com]
The people who work in the slaughterhouses have it even worse.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 21 2020, @09:51PM (4 children)
Chicken farm owners that I know about (the ones that buy their chicks in a box from Tyson and sell the mature meat back to Tyson a few months later) are generally pretty happy with the ROI. Oftentimes they're putting the sheds on family land that they inherited and didn't care much about in the first place, and they're hiring local labor dirt cheap to do all the work. The ag operation generally keeps the property taxes low, the company tells them how to run the shed to make the most money - all in all, as compared to selling the land and investing the money in the market, they've got a healthy multiple better ROI.
Now, I have heard tell of farmers who don't have the access to capital to modernize their sheds - they run older operations that make less and less profit because the modernized optimized sheds continue to drive market prices down. If you've got the money to upgrade the shed, you get a good ROI including the cost of upgrade, but if you're running an outdated operation profits dwindle until you eventually are working for break-even. At least that's how the market was progressing from the '80s up through the '00s.
Modern sheds are powered, and have big onsite backup generators because even a 12 hour power outage from the utility can kill all the animals in the shed. I'd rather not know much more of the detail about what all has been changing inside the shed, but I do know that animal density inside has increased rather dramatically over the years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 21 2020, @10:23PM (3 children)
The key point there seems to be
Farmers who have chosen their parents poorly don't have that advantage. I am guessing that is most of them.
Being in the position of having one customer also makes you vulnerable, which seems to be the point of the piece I linked to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 22 2020, @02:20AM (2 children)
Not so much, the key point is: access to working capital.
If they're already financially disadvantaged enough that they can't get a loan to update their equipment, then they're on greased skids to bankruptcy court, but the system will milk 'em dry for 5-10 years before they get there.
The "farmers" who were so stupid as to let themselves be born into families without land, they're the ones working for sub-minimum wage tending the chicken sheds on other people's land. /s (sad but true)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday January 22 2020, @10:23PM (1 child)
According to this piece, that's not how the industry works. [theatlantic.com]
That is how business works if you have one customer.
I suppose you happen to know some of the one quarter who can make a living.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 23 2020, @03:42AM
These are the luckier ones:
Basically, I know a guy who knows a guy who runs a profitable hog operation, I walked the land with him once - chickens are much the same, and I've made even more superficial contact with chicken growers over the years. His hog operation is profitable because he's got the money to see that it's done right, and invests in it like he's told to by the latest research, plus a little extra to make sure things like the backup generators work every time. He's not going to be the next Jeff Bezos, but his ROI on his investments, including use of the land, after all concerns runs around the 10-15% CAGR rate and he mostly hires out the dirty work, though he does a lot of his own construction and handling of the mechanical bits (you know, the ones that get expensive in a hurry when you do something stupid with them, like the hired help tends to do...)
Now this guy knows plenty of other guys who run sub-standard operations, skimping on the modernization investments - which are considerable and frequent, and they lose money most years like the article is describing - and that may be the norm in the population, because country folk, particularly those who like "honest work" and don't mind breathing aerosolized chicken shit, are notoriously penny wise and pound foolish. It also reminds me of my friend who got into truck driving in his early 20s and got out because, in his words: "truckers are all idiots, underbidding each other until they're just breaking even on most jobs and losing money when anything goes wrong."
I do believe that with Tyson as your sole customer, it will be hard to bid them up. The guy my guy knows doesn't grow pork as his sole source of income, so if he ever gets tired of it he can tell them to take their business elsewhere, and I bet his buyers know that very well. Same thing applies in almost all labor markets - in college I bid myself up from $3.35/hr starting wage to $6.00/hr because: a) I knew they needed people and that the difference in hourly wasn't a big factor for them, b) I wasn't so desperate that I just had to have work at any rate. When I started, most of the crew (grocery) had been working for 2+ years and had nickel and dime raised themselves up to the mid 4s, when word got around that I walked on at 6 there was a flurry of raises that went around; I was very popular with / well liked by the old crew. The Asst. Manager also threw down with me one day "Maybe you don't need this job?" my response "Maybe I don't." the result: he stormed off to the General Manager's office like he was going to fire me, and the next day the General manager met me on the floor and I got every thing I had ever asked for: more hours, better schedule, etc. and best of all, I never had to talk to the Asst. Mgr. again. Something similar happened a couple of years later in my first "real job," and a few years after that I got promoted to VP (small place), while the VP who took my firing papers into the CEO's office got "lateraled" to Senior Scientist. The keys were: I was providing something of value to them, and just as importantly: I could get the same, perhaps better, money just down the road, and they knew it.
It starts to read a lot like the voting public, who can't seem to stand up for themselves in the ballot box and continue to vote for people who are going to abuse them. A broke ass simple laborer I talked to wasn't going to vote for Obama in '08 because "if Obama wins, boss-man will be pissed off because his business won't make as much money and he'll fire us all - he told us so." I don't get it, but it's a repeating pattern everywhere I look: the majority of people don't seem to have the ability to make themselves independent enough to stand up and say: "your deal sucks, improve it or I won't take it." Incidentally, of course Obama did win, and boss-man didn't actually follow through and fire anybody, his business grew and he hired more people, but still pissed and moaned when the '12 election came around, and I think the line workers still mostly listened to him and voted like boss man told them to.
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