| Chesapeake Bay at Heart of Lawsuit Over Manure Handling |
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| Written by Heather McKee | |||||
| Thursday, 14 February 2008 | |||||
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Last week, the Waterkeeper’s Alliance, troubled over the health of the Chesapeake Bay, sued the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA) to obtain access to farmers’ manure handling plans. What’s the beef with manure, you ask? Animal manure has high levels of both nitrogren and phosphorous. As explained in our Gulf of Mexico dead zone post, run-off of these nutrients feed algae blooms, which decay and produce low oxygen, or hypoxic, zones in the water. Declining crab populations in the Chesapeake Bay are being chalked up to overloading of nutrients as well as overfishing. Because algae decay occurs mainly on the ocean floor, hypoxic zones are concentrated where crustaceans (like the crabs) and mollusks (oysters, clams) live. The east side of Chesapeake Bay is home to a number of large scale chicken operations (Tyson), and nitrogen and phosphorous from grain fertilizer and animal manure are running off into the Bay. Maryland’s Nutrient Management Initiative requires farmers with more than 8,000 pounds of livestock to submit a nutrient management plan to the MDA - but what those plans are remains a mystery - hence the Waterkeeper Alliance’s lawsuit. The issues with phosphorous and nitrogen are serious for the Bay – the Virginia senate is currently mulling over a bill to ban dishwashing detergents and industrial cleaners with higher than a 0.5% concentration of phosphates.
But what can be done about chicken wastes? Well, Maryland has provided funding to ship some chicken waste out of the region, but this sort of seems like a non-solution to us.
Chicken nutritionists say that farmers can provide a reduced protein diet to decrease the amount of nitrogen in their waste. And the chicken manure could be fed to dairy cows, as is done in many places. The chicken manure could also be fermented for a methane power source. China’s already doing it with cows.
I mean, if we’re looking for energy independence, there are 19.5 million tons of chicken and turkey poop produced here in the U.S.A every year.
Of course, the unfortunate assumption here is that the chickens continue to be raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) - whose sheer, unapologetic animal volumes are what really underlie the animal waste and its associated water quality problems in Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere.
Via NPR
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