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 Friday March 29 2019, @11:16PM (18 children)
Why should there be a limit on how much practically free, readily available, all-natural fertilizer you can use? Sounds like big chem had a hand in writing that one.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:22PM (8 children)
No, there is a limit to how much fertilizer the soil needs. Exceed that and the excess runs off into rivers etc. If you have a country with lots of Indians, like India, the soil will already be well fertilized especially near streets.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:37PM
https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/new-fertilizer-regulation/ [fertilizerseurope.com]
Sounds like regulatory capture to me. Safety and labeling requirements for cow shit vs something developed in a lab?
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:57AM (5 children)
That and if you use too much it has an effect opposite the one you're after; it kills the plants.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:05AM (4 children)
You need a law to stop farmers from killing their own plants?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:07AM (2 children)
Nah, mate. It takes a law for the cattle farming to stop dropping excessive poo on plant farming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:13AM (1 child)
wat? cattle farming "drops poo"?
You mean the farmers are allowing the ranchers to let their livestock shit on their land?
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 31 2019, @05:16AM
Dairy farms around here, along with chicken farms and pig farms. The chicken shit in particular is strong shit with enough nitrogen to easily burn plants.
You go through the farming country here and you smell the shit as they're always spreading it on the fields.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:46AM
Not usually, no. You do occasionally need one to keep them from creating another dust bowl and killing everyone's plants years down the road but not so much on killing their own plants this year.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday March 31 2019, @04:20AM
Couldn't we ship the surplus to Fernando Poo? Sounds like it's made for it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:31AM (8 children)
Actually, at least in the U.S. most feedlot manure is recycled into nitrogen fertilizer. Fact is there's a shortage of manure, relative to modern farming's hunger for fertilizer -- which is why about half the nitrogen fertilizer used requires production of ammonia using natural gas.
And while CO2, sunlight, and water are the limiting factors for growth, and machinery is the limiting factor for efficiency -- nitrogen is the limiting factor for yields. Without it, our crop production ability would be back in the 1800s.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:47AM (7 children)
If only there were a large, free source of nitrogen somewhere...
Yes, I know. It's still funny though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday March 30 2019, @12:15PM
> If only there were a large, free source of nitrogen somewhere...
Now if you could somehow capture all the excess nitrogen here on SN using code...
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:02PM (4 children)
Notice the phrase in the grandparent
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:48PM (3 children)
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)
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)
So what? I don't feel bad for your industrial exploitation of nature.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 31 2019, @04:00AM
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.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:04PM
If only there were a large, free, and magically bio-available source.... I don't know why someone hasn't developed a way to plow in some atmosphere and make it usable by all. This legume supremacy needs to end..
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:28PM (1 child)
are now a public good?
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday March 29 2019, @11:46PM
Probably not [vice.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:31PM (2 children)
Anyone driving on I-5 past Coalinga, CA knows this to be a fact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Ranch [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 29 2019, @11:37PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:00AM
How unpatriotic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Ranch#Public_reception [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Friday March 29 2019, @11:35PM (18 children)
I suggest the best approach with this one is to either change the laws or figure out how to do it, if there really is a hard problem there. There's no way that animals are creating matter out of nothing. That means that whatever crops went in as food would need that much fertilizer. Might as well close the waste stream.
Which is an already solved problem in the developed world. China will figure it out without cramping anyone's brain.
Now, you might notice that I'm treating this story with a bit of caustic sarcasm. I find it suspicious that we're getting a green article where the obvious, green solution, recycling the waste stream by turning it back into fertilizer, is only perfunctorily mentioned. Instead, we get lots of talk about converting manure into fuel. For example, the side window:
And then, four paragraphs about how to do energy production. It sums up with:
No shit, Sherlock. When you gloss over the most valuable and energy efficient use of animal manure, fertilizing agricultural crops and other bits of agricultural recycling, then of course, you're going places that don't work out.
But then again, if they went with the sleeper conclusion that the most efficient use of the manure waste stream s to put it back into agriculture with appropriate regulation to keep the pollution (and other side effects like disease propagation) down, then they probably wouldn't get eyeballs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @11:50PM
FTFY.
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Friday March 29 2019, @11:53PM (12 children)
This breaks down because the industrial operations in question are not using free range animals, where there really is a cycle - they are instead bringing in feed from elsewhere and growing animals in very dense proximity, usually applying generous steroids to prompt muscle development.
In these cases it's actually rather easy to end up with an excess of waste.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:48AM (6 children)
The seemingly obvious solution to big agri problems, is to put an end to big agri farms. Or, force big agri to spread that manure out across America, where it will do the most good. Is there a cost to manur spreaders? Yes, of course there is. But we really can spread manure where it will to more good, then just running into the rivers, and then the oceans. Big agri could easily make a deal with other corporations like Weyerhauser, to spread manure on the millions of acres of tree farms. More of the manure can go right back to the millions of acres of farms which produce the feed that big agri feeds to their livestock. Again - it will cost to ship that manure back to it's source, but big agri will just pass that cost on to the consumer.
There are solutions, but we aren't willing to use those solutions.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:21AM (5 children)
Of course we aren't willing to use those solutions: Big agribusinesses own the governments at least as much as other big businesses, and storing the poo in giant toxic lagoons is cheaper in the short run, and the risks are incurred on everybody else, so it's what big agribusiness will do every single time.
Ultimately, we're going to have to get away from monoculture. The basic model of conventional agriculture as it stands today is to grow all the corn in one place, all the beans in another place, all the vegetables in yet another place, all the hogs in still another facility, etc, and the goal is to scale up each of those facilities' outputs as high as humanly possible. This makes it easier to use giant machines on them and create industrial processes around them, but what it costs you is the very real benefits to putting livestock alongside plants and different kinds of plants near each other. For instance, native Americans fed most of the Americas with the "Three Sisters" combination of corn, pole beans, and squash: The corn gave the beans something to climb, the beans fix nitrogen for the corn and the squash, and the squash is a natural pest and weed deterrent. The idea of having a farm with only one crop is a 20th century invention, because up until then humans hard learned from hard experience that single-crop farming just didn't work as well as mixed farming.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:51AM (4 children)
Thus crop rotation. Around here it's corn, cotton, and soy beans mostly. No industrial farming going on around here to speak of compared to the number of boring old farmers trying to make ends meet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:49PM (3 children)
Crop rotation sure beats not rotating crops. No argument there.
It's not the same effect as actual mixed agriculture though. For example, those boring old farmers probably spend a whole bunch on various chemical fertilizers for their field, while livestock operations hundreds of miles away spend a bunch dealing with all the manure that would be really useful as fertilizer and would be cost-effective to use for fertilizer if it didn't have to be moved all that distance. Compare that with a couple of my neighbors: 1 of them does small-scale vegetable farming, the folks across the road from them raise some livestock, so going from manure to fertilizer is a very easy operation.
I also know some Amish folks not to far away. They get very good results using traditional methods, and keep their soil extremely healthy in the process.
The techniques of commercial agriculture completely transformed in the first half of the 20th century. Before that, very mixed agriculture was the norm. I'm not convinced the new system is better in the long term.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 31 2019, @11:58AM (2 children)
It doesn't matter if it's better long-term or not because it's absolutely necessary immediate-term. Multi-crop farming does not scale. You can't use one machine to harvest all the crops at once and you can't harvest them individually without destroying all the other crops grown with the one you're harvesting. We can't even get enough welders/plumbers/hvac guys/etc... to keep prices low because everyone wants to sit on their ass at a desk instead of working for a living, so where are we to get the tens to hundreds of millions of crop pickers that would be necessary to do multi-crop farming? And, more importantly, are you willing to pay an order of magnitude more for food because it just became a shitload less efficient?
As for livestock being raised far from the farms, that's mostly because cattle are a lot less profitable than crops per acre on good farmland. Cattle do just as well in a large area of scrub grass that's useless for most anything else, so that's where the farmers have pushed them by way of planting crops anywhere crops will grow well. It's not like we don't have a couple handy systems of transportation at hand for relatively cheap.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday March 31 2019, @06:10PM (1 child)
Just because you can't conceive of another way of doing things doesn't make what you're doing "absolutely necessary".
First off, for a lot of crops, we're harvesting by hand right now. Obviously that's not the case with wheat, corn, soy, and cotton, but the idea that we couldn't hand-harvest simply isn't true. We don't hand-harvest because it would be more expensive in the short-term or involve employing people we don't currently employ in that kind of work, not because we couldn't do it.
1. Which job is easier to do? Weld, raise crops, raise livestock, do plumbing, HVAC work, etc, or sit at a desk doing nothing useful? I think we'd all agree it's the desk-sitters.
2. Which job pays better? Welding/raising crops/raising livestock/plumbing/HVAC/etc or sitting at a desk doing nothing useful? The desk-sitters, again, in a lot of cases.
You can't fault the desk-sitters for making a completely rational choice to prefer desk-sitting for often more money rather than working their butts off for less money or the same money.
You can, however, make agriculture jobs not suck so much that flipping burgers at McD's or driving for Uber is a more attractive option. This may involve advertising, hiring, transporting, training, etc people who haven't previously done the kind of work you're talking about, but I'm guessing that the 6 million or so officially unemployed people and the many adults who aren't part of the labor force might be up for doing farm work if it were something they knew about and was good enough to make it worth doing.
Farmers get about 1/8 of each dollar spent at the grocery store, so to make food cost 10 times as much ("an order of magnitude") you'd need to multiply farmers' costs by 80.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 01 2019, @12:26AM
Yes, it does. Unless you not only have an alternative way not only figured out but ready to put on farms tomorrow, it is absolutely necessary that things continue on the way they are until you do.
You'd be surprised. Pick most any industrial union shop. The electricians will bring home more than anyone but the plant manager and even he's not a given. Ditto welders if their welds need to pass x-ray rather than just hold for a while.
Not very easily you can't. Most people never even consider that hard work might actually be enjoyable than putting up with people's shit all day (it absolutely is). It is in fact a hell of a lot more enjoyable to put up with people's literal shit as a plumber than their figurative shit as someone whose job is talking to customers. The last generation or three of parents have done the nation a grave disservice by maligning hard physical work in favor of office jobs. That's going to take at least three more generations to undo and we haven't even started to try yet.
You're guessing wrong then. There are millions of excellently paying jobs out there right now in the skilled trades and people would rather draw unemployment or drop out all together than take them. Picking crops for low wages? You wouldn't get more than half a dozen volunteers nationwide.
I don't think you get how goods pricing works but compared to harvesting multiple fields in a day in an expensive machine, hand picking could very well do just that even if you could find all the millions of people wanting to do it. They're not going to take even minimum wage and we pay well below that for illegal pickers today on the crops that demand hand picking.
Look, man, it's an idea that might be fun studying but at the moment it's most assuredly nothing but pie in the sky.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:22AM
And they can bring out poo using the same general infrastructure. Sure, don't use semi trailers for both human quality food and animal manure, but these are problems of the same scale.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:34AM (3 children)
Bandini would like to have a word with you... know where feedlot manure winds up? In Bandini's processing facility, being turned into nitrogen fertilizer.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:52AM (2 children)
Mostly in congressional seats.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:08PM
True, tho it's clear most of 'em have no idea. Others invest in high waders.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:36PM
also found between your ears
(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.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 29 2019, @11:43PM
Kill the vegetarians, too. Feed teh high-fiber crops to the fish.
Every human eats meat and rice and deserts made of dark chocolate, while learning from their local politicians how to live a comfortable life when full of shit.
Problem solved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @12:45AM (10 children)
Will have a new meaning when Earths population hits 10 Billion in about 30 years.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:03AM (9 children)
Every last human on the planet could currently fit in Texas and it would be no more crowded than NYC is. We're not overpopulated. We're poor organizers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:49AM
You ruined your joke, no doubt an autospell correction:
We’re poo organizers
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:49AM (2 children)
But can we stand on Zanzibar [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:28AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:16AM
Yeah, but no one could lay down to sleep.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:06AM (4 children)
Which would make absolutely no difference to the problem in the article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:11AM
But would certainly solve our problem with texas.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:55AM (2 children)
I wasn't replying to the article. I was replying to the idiot who thinks we're overpopulated.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:46PM (1 child)
We are over populated, and mostly due to our food sources. Yes you could physically fit more humans on the planet but it would likely lead to massive ecological collapse.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 31 2019, @12:04PM
Bzzzt! With current methods we produce more than enough to feed the planet. Current methods are astoundingly inefficient compared to what we're already able to do but don't because why bother. Further efficiency advancements aren't really even being explored. Thus you are wrong.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:23AM (5 children)
The scare stories keep getting sillier at accelerating rate.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:42AM
Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughin' as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @01:51AM
Breaking news... A severe zero-day vulnerability affects all Etch A Sketch tablets that were made after 2001. The Ohio Art Company transferred manufacturing of the Etch A Sketch tablets from USA to China in 2001, and all tablets have infected aluminum powder which secretly uploads data to a Chinese server. It's recommended to install a firewall between the stylus and screen at any authorized Apple store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:27AM
I'm afraid I lost a binder full of women, uncertain about how many they were, I doubt I'll ever see it again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:11AM (1 child)
The solution is to tax the fertilizer tax.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday March 30 2019, @10:56AM
No tax necessary for fertilizer. It sticks fine without them when you throw it at the wall.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @02:08AM
And here I thought this was a story about the American media.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:07PM
It's a dirty job. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/boss-hog-the-dark-side-of-americas-top-pork-producer-68087/ [rollingstone.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday March 30 2019, @04:56PM
In 1875 someone remarked that in a hundred years there would be a terrible pollution problem from transportation. He predicted that we'd be up to our waists in horse shit by 1975. Coincidentally, it was the year the head of the patent office resigned, citing the "fact" that everything useful had already been invented.
But it looks like the futurist only got the animal wrong, it's pigs and cows that cause the problem today.
"Nobody knows everything about anything." — Dr Jerry Morton, Journey to Madness
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @05:11PM
where's my free fertilizer then?