Some skeptics scoff at the notion of environmental controls on the waste of livestock on huge farms and what are known as CAFOs — Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. The skeptics obviously haven’t done the math. Consider the waste produced at a large dairy farm.
Take Frank Volleman’s Wildcat Dairy in Central Texas. His 3,000 lactating Holstein milk cows produce 150 pounds of waste each day. That amounts to a cumulative total of 200 million pounds of manure in a year. That’s right: 200 million pounds.
Such a volume of waste generated at just one CAFO should persuade reasonable citizens that EPA regulations are vital to protecting adjacent water aquifers, wetlands, wells, streams and rivers from the pathogens and bacteria that infect animal waste, and that easily pollutes essential water sources if not properly handled.
A recent report by New York Times reporter Henry Fountain described Mr. Volleman’s dairy as an industry model for environmentally safe waste-disposal operations at CAFOs. The dairyman keeps a huge tractor-like machine — equipped with a 3,000-gallon tank and heavy-duty vacuum pumps, hoses and scraper blades — busy around the clock collecting cow manure and urine from his barns and paddocks for safe handling.
Typical safe-handling procedures include composting waste to make high quality fertilizer, or using it fresh to be spread as fertilizer on farm land. But it is Mr. Volleman’s attention to building-construction methods and efficient collection that makes his system a model. His huge, open-sided barns, milking carousels, sand bedding and concrete waste-channels are all constructed for efficient drainage and collection and waste, and are constantly tended and cleaned.
Many CAFOs — including a significant number in the Southeast — are not nearly as conscientious, or well-regulated. Southern hog, poultry, beef and dairy CAFOs have become notorious in recent decades for overloading sewage ponds and for spraying excessive waste on land and in forests, where it runs off into streams and wetlands.
Indeed, some CAFOs have built and overloaded such huge latrine ponds that waste leakage, and occasional major ruptures in the earth berms that contain them, discharge vast amounts of sewage into streams, aquifers and wetlands. Heavy rains generated a catastrophic flood of huge CAFO sewage ponds a few years in North Carolina, creating massive fish kills and miles of contaminated streams and rivers.
The public health consequences of mishandled animal sewage obviously can be immense. Pathogens in animal waste can contaminate food products. Bacterial seepage can infect aquifers. Nutrient-laden runoff ruins water quality in streams and rivers by depleting oxygen and causing pollution. The methane and ammonia gases that big CAFOs generate give off significant air pollution, as well as create an unbearable stench, often for miles.
Some rural homeowners in surrounding areas, from Sand Mountain in nearby North Alabama, to north Georgia to southeast Tennessee generally, have organized to combat CAFOs that handle their wastes negligently and degrade the quality of life in surrounding communities.
Without effective environmental regulation, rural areas on the periphery of virtually any city, and certainly many small towns, can be harmed. The notion of gentle and orderly farms doesn’t match what we know about huge corporate CAFOs. They all should abide by firm rules, those rules should be enforced by stiff regulatory oversight.