CHAPTER 2

America the Beautiful: From Cesspool to Shining Cesspool

Factory farming is turning America into a land of crap. It produces 1.3 billion tons of animal crap each year.¹ That is eighty-seven thousand pounds of manure produced per second.² This is the equivalent of 130 times the amount of crap per person in the United States, or five tons per person.³ We have a colossal manure-management problem that is very inefficient and downright destructive. We know manure is by no means a sexy topic, but we have to address factory farms’ overflowing cesspools that are creating mountains of manure that devastate our health and environment across the nation every day.

Imagine if all of our bathroom activities were flushed into our backyard pools for storage and just left there to evaporate. This is obviously disgusting to even think about and, at minimum, extremely unsanitary. But this is what is happening all across America on animal-factory farms. We are turning our beautiful homeland into a fetid swamp as thousands of cesspools the size of football fields, filled to the brim with animal manure, now cover the American landscape.

While hard to believe, this animal crap is the primary culprit in decimating our waterways: by wiping out our streams and our oceans, producing dangerous, toxic organisms that are killing off our fish, and causing major manure spills that make oil spills pale in comparison. Rivers once blue are turning brown and even unnatural colors, such as orange, yellow, and red. Our waterways are running red with blood from the billions of dead fish lining the banks of the rivers with open, oozing, bloody lesions caused by the virus Pfiesteria, which comes from animal crap dumped into our water.

Why is manure degrading our waterways such a problem? Well, the United States is already in a water crisis, and spilling crap into freshwater streams is only making matters worse. Major water wars are being fought from north to south and east to west for access to water. At a minimum, we should regulate to keep remaining water bodies as clean as possible. Yet there is little to no regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and agribusiness is getting away with dumping crap into our most precious resource. Ask yourself: what happens when all of our clean water turns to sh!t?

A Sh!tty Situation

Altogether, if the amount of animal crap from factory farms were packed into boxcars, there would be enough cars filled with manure to go around the whole world fourteen times!4 In terms of weight, that’s over one billion tons of animal crap.⁵ This is some heavy sh!t! This is more than five times the amount of waste produced by all of the people in the United States. Just one Smithfield pig farm in Utah that houses five hundred thousand pigs produces more sh!t than the 1.5 million people crowding the streets in Manhattan. The questions are where is all of this crap going and how damaging is it to our environment and our health?

Welcome to Cesspool Paradise

As the number of independent family farms has decreased in size, the number of animals per factory farm has substantially increased and so has the amount of manure in concentrated areas. For example, in 1975, there were more than 660,000 pig farms that produced about sixty-nine million pigs every year. By 2004, 90 percent of those farms had disappeared, but the number of pigs produced had risen to 103 million per year.⁶ Today, the EPA estimates that there are about twenty thousand large-scale factory farms in the United States.⁷ This means massive volumes of manure on a few farms.

The meat and dairy industries overlooked one very important detail when making the decision to house thousands of animals in one place—where do they put all of the mounds of untreated animal crap? Outside, pools of animal crap now line our beautiful countryside. The animal manure is stored in thirty feet deep, football field-sized holes in the ground. One factory farm can have hundreds of these so-called “waste disposals.” The corporations call these holes in the ground lagoons, giving off the image of a tropical paradise. This is quite a misnomer. The animal manure is so toxic and densely concentrated in these holes that the crap turns from brown to a salami-pink color.

Let’s be honest. Sticking liquid manure into holes in the ground seems like a primitive form of getting rid of waste. This is the type of sanitation, or lack thereof, that organizations work to remedy in countries without first-class infrastructures. The underlying rationale for this disposal method is to allow the manure to sit there and evaporate. No, we aren’t making this up.

One of the many problems with this “logic” is that manure contains ammonia, which is a toxic type of nitrogen that is released as a gas when the manure is left to decompose in the open-air lagoons. About 70 to 80 percent of the nitrogen in the liquid lagoons changes into ammonia. As a gas, ammonia can travel more than three hundred miles through the air before it is dumped back onto the ground and into water sources. Let’s put this into perspective: it takes about five to six hours to drive three hundred miles. That means ammonia emissions in New York can be in Massachusetts in half that time. Since ammonia is the most potent form of nitrogen, it triggers eutrophication, which causes harmful algae blooms that wipe out marine habitats.8

This gas is just the beginning of our problems. Manure contains 160 noxious gases, including deadly hydrogen sulfide.⁹ As air pollution, and especially ammonia, can travel for hundreds of miles, this is no longer a local problem; anyone can be affected. Health concerns associated with ammonia include chemical burns to the respiratory tract and chronic lung disease. Just two minutes of exposure to ammonia “may result in chronic lung disease, and massive exposure to ammonia can be fatal.”¹⁰ Air pollution was apparently not a high concern when deciding upon this disposal method.

Imagine a major city of more than twenty thousand people without sewage-treatment plants. It seems ironic that we would spend so much money on sanitation methods for human waste and yet nothing on animal waste when there is three times as much coming from these factories. In contrast to human sewage, which is carefully treated and highly regulated, manure from factory farms is not. Think about this: there are 160 volatile organic compounds emitted in liquid pig crap. Unlike industrial waste and pollutants, for some peculiar reason the vast quantities of animal manure is not regulated. This means the animal waste remains in its highly toxic form.11 The biological oxygen demand, or BOD, of liquid manure is 160 times that of raw, municipal sewage. So not only is the manure not treated, but it is also more toxic. Logically, this does not make sense.

Not to mention, animal manure is densely polluted with lethal toxins, blood, heavy metals, bacteria, and oxygen-depleting nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from animal feed, hormone injections, and antibiotics that are given to the animals.¹² This turns into a deadly combination for us and our environment.

Did you know we can get more than forty different (and many deadly) diseases from animal manure? These anaerobic lagoons that dot our landscape are terrible at eliminating any sort of pathogens, heavy metals, or the BOD that severely affects our waterways.¹³ Fifteen percent of viruses and 55 percent of bacteria survive in the lagoons and easily leak into water sources.¹⁴ Foodborne illnesses currently affect about one-third of our population. These foodborne pathogens are up to one hundred times more concentrated in animal manure than in human waste.¹⁵ For the very reason that just one gram of hog sh!t can carry up to one hundred million fecal coliform bacteria, where and how manure is stored directly impacts our personal health, biodiversity, and the health of the environment. We can’t put off dealing with this stinkin’ problem any longer.

Sh!t Sprinkler Systems

Back in the days of small, family farms, we applied manure to the land to fertilize it. This natural recycling process is impossible now because there is simply so much sh!t we cannot put it all on the land. Now we house the crap in man-made slurry lagoons. Each one of these lagoons holds about twenty to forty-five million gallons of liquid, animal manure.16 But the volume of manure even exceeds these massive holding capacities. In fact, a study by the University of Northern Iowa found that “if farm workers had applied manure at the rate at which the crops could have absorbed phosphorus, the CAFOs would need more than nine times the field area used for manure application by these CAFOs.”¹⁷ The problem is that manure contains too much nitrogen and phosphorus for the land to absorb.

Overapplying manure to the land turns not only our farmland but also our waterways into crap, as manure runoff contaminates nearby rivers and streams, creating dead zones that kill marine life. An EPA investigation in Yakima Valley found “brown streams of manure running directly into ditches and creeks.”¹⁸ Kendall Thu, a noted researcher, found that at any CAFO where there is more wastewater than the surrounding land can absorb, water contamination from overapplication is almost guaranteed.¹⁹ Mr. Thu found that there was a direct relationship between water-quality problems and the dairy operations in the area. Water pollution from overapplication is exacerbated during the winter. When the land is frozen, it cannot absorb any manure, which all becomes runoff. This runoff causes severe problems. For example, in 2009, twenty-five thousand gallons of manure that were overapplied on a farm field in Mitchell County, Iowa, produced runoff that killed 150,000 fish in a four-mile stretch of a local stream.²⁰

Overapplication and the resulting water contamination is a common practice with poultry production. For example, in 2009, the Waterkeeper Alliance sued a Perdue farm in Eastern Shore, Maryland that allowed an uncovered pile of chicken manure to drain into a tributary of the Potomac River. The manure not only increased the nitrogen levels, but also the E. coli and fecal-coliform levels—bacteria that cause human-health problems and may be fatal.²¹ The Delmarva Peninsula is home to the highest production of boiler chickens and eggs in the nation. The over application and runoff of manure is considered one of the main contributors to the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and the degradation of its waters.22 The Chesapeake Bay is an American landmark and vital waterway. It is time to stop factory farms from sh!tting in it!

Amazingly, between football field-sized cesspools and over-application of crap to the land, there is still a problem of keeping the crap levels in lagoons down. So what do the corporations do? They came up with a brilliant idea. When the lagoons are full and the land is similar to a swamp, factory farmers will illegally spray the manure straight into the air, without a care as to where the manure falls. That’s right: they created sh!t sprinklers.

Local families have come back to find their homes covered in the sticky, brownish mist of crap and their trees dripping with feces. Helen Reddout, a cherry farmer in Yakima Valley, surrounded by eighty-five mega-dairy farms, provided a devastating image of how our land is going from green to brown and even black. She states that “when you go to bed at night the grass is green. When you wake up there is just black slime everywhere.” There is zero retribution for the destruction of property. Families in California have had to fill in and remove their swimming pools because they too frequently turned into mini cesspools. The stench is so severe that it permeates everything—from clothes and bed sheets to car interiors. People drive to work dry heaving, with eyes watering from the stench of sh!t. As one farmer proudly stated, this reeking odor is “the smell of money.”²³

On the other US coast, in North Carolina, the Tar Heel State, the Waterkeeper Alliance sampled and measured water near pig farms and found that the muddy-colored water was in fact animal crap that had been sprayed into the air. This is happening across America.

Aside from the blatant destruction of property, shooting manure into the air is a public-health hazard. One woman surrounded by dairy factories in Yakima Valley walked out of her house one morning and inhaled sharply due to the horrible stench. The ammonia in the air permanently burned her vocal chords, and her voice is now just a rasp. The Yakima Valley also boasts some of the highest rates of asthma and cancer compared to the other counties in the state. We doubt this is just mere coincidence. In fact, four comparative studies of asthma in children living near and farther away from factory farms clearly indicate that those children living near factory farms have higher asthma rates.24

Repeated exposure to the particulate matter in manure can cause chronic bronchitis, decreased lung function, and even heart attacks. However, the EPA doesn’t seem interested in the obvious health concerns associated with factory farming. Although factory farms are supposed to be regulated under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, also known as the Superfund Act), the EPA decided to exempt factory farms from reporting their emissions. Instead the EPA instituted a voluntary Air Quality Compliance Agreement where factory farms monitor their own emissions. The catch is that the EPA doesn’t suspend or sue offenders, but merely slaps on a small fine that doesn’t even dent the corporations’ pocketbooks. This whole process seems a little backwards.²⁵

Needless to say, these current “solutions” are crappy. It is just plain wrong to allow these corporations to pollute our air, land, water, and private property without any retribution or accountability for turning America into a land of deadly, smelly cesspools.

Leaky Lagoons

Factory farms’ cesspool paradise is seeping into just about everyone’s backyard. On top of manure being illegally sprayed and over applied on the land, lagoons are notorious for leaking, spilling, and flowing into every stream, river, and groundwater source. Families across the country are turning on their taps to find brown, disgusting, foul liquid pouring out instead of the clear water they were anticipating from their private wells.

While the corporations will advise that the lagoons are perfectly safe and have a lining to prevent seepage, their statements remain completely unsupported. Many of the cesspools are not lined, but even if they were, lining becomes weak as it deteriorates over time. The average life span of a lagoon is only about twenty years, if kept in optimal shape.²⁶ The majority of the lagoons, however, are around much longer, because, again, there is the problem of where to put all the crap if the lagoons are no longer used.

While seepages and leaks can be reduced by using clay liners in the lagoons, studies have found that even clay-lined lagoons can leak anywhere from “several hundred to several thousand gallons per acre per day.”27 Lagoons with lining can seep about one million gallons of manure. One reason is due to decomposition. The gases produced from decomposing manure cause the liners in the lagoons to swell, which forces tons of feces out of the lagoons and into our land and waterways. Liners are not foolproof. Polyethylene liners, which are commonly used to house pig crap, are easily punctured by rocks in the ground, providing an open door for the animal manure to seep into your groundwater.

A famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning, in-depth 2006 study, “Boss Hog,” found that nearly half of all lagoons leaked enough to pollute wells, aquifers, and nearby springs.²⁸ “Boss Hog” first called attention to the issue of leaking lagoons in its exposé of North Carolina’s industrial swine production. One corporation, Carroll Farms in North Carolina, tested nearby wells next to three of its factory farms. It found that the ammonia levels were “ten times more than the normal level of two parts per million” and continued to increase over time, but Carroll Farms dismissed this obvious level of toxicity.²⁹ Carroll Farms’s dismissive behavior is not the exception but the norm. Corporation after corporation today continues to throw their hands in the air and fail to act on the blatant evidence of their lagoons poisoning the surrounding environment and putting the lives of thousands of Americans at risk.

We have to hand it to agribusiness for the superb placement of these lagoons right above aquifers or in flood plains surrounding local, family homes. Over four and a half million families in the United States are at risk of nitrate pollution because they get their drinking water from groundwater, whose purity is threatened by leaking lagoons. When nitrogen breaks down in manure it forms nitrate, which can leach into groundwater and drinking water.³⁰ Nitrate pollution is a serious public-health risk. Since “today, over one million people are estimated to take their drinking water from groundwater that shows moderate or severe contamination with nitrogen-containing pollutants, mostly due to the heavy use of agricultural fertilizers and high rates of application of animal waste,” the continuous, nutrient pollution from animal crap poses a serious public-health risk.31 When nitrate gets into drinking water, traditional forms of cleaning the water do not work. It requires a special treatment that costs about $4.6 billion and comes out of your tax dollars.

In 2005, the Illinois River watershed, which provides drinking water for twenty-two public-water systems in Oklahoma, contained a phosphorus load from poultry productions nearby equivalent to the waste from 10.7 million people. This level is more than the entire populations’ of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas combined.³² In California, officials have identified agriculture, specifically the dairy operations, as the main source of nitrate pollution in more than one hundred thousand square miles of polluted groundwater for drinking.³³

More than making the water taste bad, 2012 studies confirmed that nitrate contamination in our drinking water is associated with increased risk and incidence of thyroid cancer.³⁴ Nitrate exposure in drinking water nearly doubled the risk of cancer in men. However, even disinfecting the water produces a catch-22 situation. The disinfectants that get the nitrate out of our water have been consistently linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer.³⁵ Think about this: about forty-five million Americans get their drinking water from private wells.³⁶ More likely than not, the majority of this population is located in rural areas more susceptible to factory-farm contamination.

Nitrate contamination is known for causing blue baby syndrome, among other health problems.³⁷ When Gordon Kelly, the head of the Yakima Valley County Health Department, was informed of the high nitrate levels and manure water coming out of private wells in the California area, his response was, ‘well, the nitrates just affect infants.’ Reassured by Mr. Kelly, we can all sleep soundly knowing that just the health of our babies and next generation is in jeopardy from these consistently leaky lagoons.

Manure and Oil Spills

In 2010, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made the front pages of newspapers for weeks, as images of the disaster took over the nightly news. The CEO of BP was put under tremendous scrutiny for the accident that sent 4.9 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. There was a public outcry, and hundreds of groups helped to clean up the spill. The BP oil spill was larger than the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which impacted 1,300 miles of ocean and killed an astounding 250,000 birds. Why are we talking about oil spills?

While oil spills receive nationwide coverage and public outcry, consistent lagoon spills occur all the time with zero nationwide and limited, if any, local coverage. Some of the lagoon spills are comparable to, if not bigger than, the Exxon Valdez spill. For instance, in 1995 a 120,000 square-foot lagoon at Oceanview Farms in North Carolina burst, sending twenty-five million gallons of feces and wastewater into the New River.38 The spill killed at least ten million fish and polluted 350,000 coastal acres of shellfish habitat. Dead fish began lining the banks of the river within two hours of the spill. The manure sludge was so dense it took two months for the sludge to make the sixteen-mile stretch down the New River to the ocean.

While the Oceanview Farms spill is double the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and considered the largest environmental spill, we are pretty sure most Americans have never heard of it. Neither, at the time, did citizens who were swimming in the river downstream. The government officials failed to warn them of the hog crap contaminated with E. coli heading their way. We highly doubt the same protocol would have been followed if it had been an oil spill. The Oceanview Farms spill has gone down in history as one of the greatest environmental disasters, which killed every living creature in its path in the North Carolina waterways.³⁹The Oceanview spill was bad enough, but that same year, three lagoons in North Carolina burst within two weeks of each other.⁴⁰ One smaller lagoon spill occurred on the same day as the Oceanview spill in Sampson County. The other spill in Duplin County released nine million gallons of chicken waste into Limestone Creek, which is a tributary of the Northeast Cape Fear River.41 In comparison to oil spills, which rarely happen at the level of the BP and Exxon Valdez spills, lagoon spills are consistent, frequent, and pose comparable environmental damage with less coverage and support.

According to the National Resources Defense Council, “from 1995 to 1998, one thousand spills or pollution incidents occurred at livestock feedlots in ten states and two hundred manure-related fish kills resulted in the death of thirteen million fish.”⁴² Not much has changed since that time.

In 2001, an Illinois contract farmer refused to lower his lagoon by at least a million gallons of manure. Instead, the owner, Dave Inskeep, decided to fill a nearby ravine that was dammed with a ten-foot berm with two million gallons of the manure. The lagoon didn’t hold and sent millions of gallons of feces rushing into the Kickapoo Creek, which joins the Illinois River. It was one of the worst avoidable spills in Illinois history.⁴³ Fast forward to today, and we can see that for some reason we are not taking lessons from the past when it comes to manure spills. For example, did anyone hear about two three-hundred-thousand-gallon manure spills in Wisconsin in 2013? One of these massive spills, while an “accident,” produced a mile-long trail of animal waste.⁴⁴ Why did this accident happen? There weren’t proper berms in the holding tank and pipes. Apparently it just wasn’t cost effective to install them, even though manure spills create devastating and sometimes-irreversible environmental damage. What is even more frustrating is that the corporation responsible for this mess only received a slap on the wrist and a thank you for alerting the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to the problem, despite the fact that this spill was illegal.

If only the cycle of spilled crap would end. But the trouble is manure spills are becoming ever more frequent. In fact, there were a total of seventy-six manure spills in 2013 alone in Wisconsin, totaling more than one million gallons of manure.⁴⁵ This is a 65 percent increase in manure spills from 2012. In an attempt to provide some assurance, Kevin Erb, the manure specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, proudly claimed that the volume of manure spilled “is minute compared to the amount of manure cows produce. The spill total for 2013 is less than 1 percent of all the waste produced by dairy cattle in Wisconsin.”46 This news somehow isn’t as consoling to us as Mr. Erb probably hoped.

Worse is the industry’s attitude to the manure spills. According to Tom Bauman, the Coordinator of Agriculture Runoff at the DNR, “Spills are going to happen.”⁴⁷ We don’t agree with this laissez-faire attitude when CAFOs do not have to exist at all. Spills have lasting consequences. After a manure spill in Pennsylvania in 2013, the city had to close down a children’s playground indefinitely because salmonella and other pathogens were simply not decreasing.⁴⁸ Since we would never allow children to play in a playground of crap, why are we okay with eating it in our food?

Fortunately, a coalition in Iowa, sick of constant manure spills, decided to take a stand and sue The Maschhoffs, one of the largest pork-owning networks in the country. The coalition filed the suit for violating the Clean Water Act after the fifth manure spill since 2007. Already Iowa has 630 polluted waterways from manure and climbing.⁴⁹ While The Maschhoffs claims innocence and states it is a “good neighbor,” its multiplicity of spills speaks otherwise. Its Keosauqua Sow Unit has dumped more than twenty thousand gallons of manure into the Des Moines River and surrounding tributaries.⁵⁰

The Maschhoffs has provided the typical-industry response by stating that this claim filed in November 2013 is without merit. And yet as Lori Nelson, the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund board president, stated, “Every factory farm in Iowa is a ticking time bomb that could have a spill at any time, and the DNR needs to start holding them accountable for polluting our waterways by issuing them Clean Water Act permits so they have to follow stronger environmental standards.” Why are we not regulating “ticking time bombs?”⁵¹ Instead of accepting the fate of manure spills, is it such a novel idea to prevent them or even find real solutions?

Swimming in the Slurry

It might seem laughable that we are concentrating on animal crap, but the truth is that this overload of sh!t is causing us some stinking problems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that factory farming has so severely damaged over 170,000 miles of rivers and streams, 2,500 miles of lakes, and 2,900 miles of estuaries that they are no longer safe for hosting recreational activities or sustaining the surrounding wildlife.52 In California alone, the National Resources Defense Council found that animal crap is responsible for polluting more than one hundred thousand square miles with nitrates and pathogens. Untreated manure waste from factory farms is responsible for polluting thirty-five thousand miles of rivers in twenty-two states and additionally contaminating our groundwater supply in seventeen states, according to the EPA.⁵³ The scary part is these numbers do not reflect all the waterways in the United States. The extent of the damage is unknown. Maybe it is time we begin crying over spilled manure.

The primary pollutants of concern for water quality are nitrogen and phosphorus, the most abundant nutrients in animal manure. The United Nations (UN) study, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” indicates that livestock is the largest contributor to increased nitrogen and phosphorus levels.

Whoever thought that tons of nutrients could be bad? Nitrogen and phosphorus are actually essential nutrients to life. But the abundant quantities that manure produces prove deadly. The impacts of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients are enormous, from “drinking water contamination, toxic and non-toxic algae blooms that impair recreational waters and kill fish, changes to coastal-marine fisheries, acidification of soils and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and increases in ozone and particulate matter that can harm human health and damaged productivity of crops and forests.”⁵⁴ Nutrient pollution is such a serious threat to our streams, lakes, and rivers that “farms have now replaced factories as the biggest polluters of America’s waterways.”⁵⁵

Nitrogen and phosphorus from manure are forever changing our landscape as they kill off our waterways and all the life in them. Let’s look at what happens when too much nitrogen and phosphorus get into our waterways from manure. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus deplete the biological oxygen demand, or BOD, in the water, which causes more plants and algae to grow.⁵⁶ This is called eutrophication. When eutrophication happens, desirable fish species are replaced by less desirable species and algae, which feed on the oxygen, causing economic costs to fisherman, shifts and drastic changes in aquatic habitats, production of toxins that cause harmful algae, clogged irrigation canals, and death—both for aquatic habitats and fish.57 The Pagan River in North Carolina, which runs by a Smithfield Foods hog facility, provides a chilling picture of the water damage from manure and nutrient pollution. The “Pagan had no living marsh grass, a tiny and toxic population of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious black mud coating its bed. The hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch-thick coats of greasy muck.”⁵⁸ This is in addition to the river turning shocking colors of red, orange, and pink from the high contamination levels.

Aside from the grim picture, the most significant consequences from nutrient pollution are the creation of dead zones and the ignition of the presence of a deadly “cell from hell” that also poses human-health risks.

The “Cell from Hell”

During the massive lagoon leaks and spills in North Carolina in the mid to late 1990s that sent millions of tons of manure into the rivers, residents were noticing fish belly-up in the rivers with strange marks on them—open sores that were oozing with pus. Fishermen who spent their lives in the water and came into contact with the river water began to develop the same pus-filled sores that wouldn’t go away. No matter what antibiotics were used, the sores stayed open. Then these fishermen began to experience memory loss, forgetting simple things like how to get home; some even had trouble breathing. No one could explain these mysterious human-health effects or what was killing the fish.

Dr. JoAnn Buckholder, a researcher at North Carolina University, uncovered the silent killer named Pfisteria piscicida. Pfisteria is an odorless, invisible, silent, fish-killing dinoflagellate, which, like any good assa­ssin, only leaves its trail of dead as the mark of its presence. In this case, Pfisteria’s mark is a trail of dead fish. Pfiesteria “degrades a fish’s skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish’s body—leaving open sores as the main tell-tale factor.”⁵⁹

Dr. Buckholder found that Pfisteria’s presence is directly linked to manure’s presence in the water from nutrient contamination. Nutrient overload causes the perfect conditions for toxic algae growth or Pfisteria. This “cell from hell” has been seen at factory-farm hot spots such as the Chesapeake Bay and particularly in North Carolina after massive lagoon spills. Pfisteria left nearly twenty million fish dying with open sores from this massive disaster.

While the species of Pfisteria still continue to stir up debate among scientists, one thing is very clear: Pfisteria is a killer that has been shown to eat human blood cells. Humans exposed to Pfisteria develop the same bloody lesions on their skin that fish do, but also experience neurological problems such as memory loss as well as “severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision, and logical impairment.”60 Other problems include immunological and musculoskeletal conditions as well as an acute burning sensation on the skin.⁶¹ When manure starts producing a “cell from hell,” one that can potentially mutate into a deadly monster, it is a strong indication that something needs to change.

Graveyards in the Oceans

Imagine an ocean without life in it. This is where we are heading, and fast. The pollutants and contamination from manure spills and dumping into our waterways is killing whole aquatic ecosystems by creating dead zones, areas where life cannot be sustained. As we mentioned earlier, eutrophication contributes to and is a leading cause of dead zones, which are typified by the decay of algae that depletes oxygen levels. This may lead to hypoxia (low oxygen) conditions that make it impossible for living creatures to survive, as they cannot support the oxygen demand for aquatic life.⁶²

Dead zones are currently lining the coasts of America’s once-pristine shores. Dead zones are a direct example of the impairment of waterways by nutrient overloads that are a result of agricultural wastewater runoff. The most notorious 22,126-square-kilometer dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey, is the dumping ground for the Mississippi River, which passes through the heart of agribusiness in the Midwest.⁶³ While the Mississippi River is historically a dumping ground for industrial waste as well, the Council on Environmental Quality of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that animal manure alone contributes 15 percent of the nitrogen to the Gulf of Mexico, while industrial and municipal waste only contribute about 11 percent.64

The number of dead zones in the United States has increased from twelve in 1960 to three hundred today. According to a 2010 White House Report, this rapid devastation of our marine life “poses both economic and environmental hazards.”⁶⁵ The increasing number of skeletal remains of once-abundant and unique aquatic life is a precursor to the further destruction of our marine life if positive steps are not immediately implemented from agribusiness.

This Water Tastes like Sh!t

The quintessential summer days of jumping into the river out back or drinking the water from your own well are long gone. Manure is so pervasive that we can catch salmonella poisoning from swimming in a river or merely ingesting some of the water! Manure carries pathogens and antibiotics that threaten our health as they contribute to antibiotic resistance and the spread of waterborne diseases. The presence of fecal-coliform bacteria in the water indicates the presence of E. coli and manure in the water.

Research by the USDA Agricultural Research Service reveals that E. coli is not only alive and well, but also living in a streambed near you. How comforting. Agricultural runoff causes E. coli to leech into surface water, as well as set up a home in streambed sediments. Since E. coli can live for months and years in these sediments, longer than it can on surface water, it poses a latent human-health risk of waterborne diseases when these sediments are disturbed.⁶⁶ This means swimming in your local stream during the summer could land you or your kids in the hospital with E. coli poisoning. For the record, E. coli and salmonella are polite euphemisms for crap. These pathogens strike fast and hard; they kill thousands of people every year and permanently disable thousands of others, shutting down and liquefying vital organs.

What Happened to the Clean Water Act?

It would seem that with the growing concern and increasing number of troubled waters that the EPA would act. The Clean Water Act is the primary piece of legislation that monitors factory farms.67 It was passed by Congress in 1972 with the intent to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters.” Under this act, CAFOs are designated as point-source pollutants, meaning they are operations that discharge pollutants “directly into waters of the United States.”⁶⁸ Yet the industry has failed time and again to enforce the Clean Water Act. Up until 2003, it was not a federal requirement that factory farms obtain permits to pollute the waterways. The EPA and Department of Agriculture only issued regulatory guidelines for the first time in 1998 due to the public outcry from the infamous North Carolina lagoon spill.⁶⁹

Currently, most CAFOs remain unregulated, and even if they are regulated, discharge permits serve little to no purpose. Under the EPA’s rules, if a factory farm plans to discharge crap into nearby streams, it has to have a permit. Let’s be clear: factory farms are allowed to pollute as long as they have a piece of paper that says they can. This is probably why the EPA has failed to curb pollution. In addition, the EPA does not set hard-and-fast rules for how much CAFOs can discharge.⁷⁰ This voluntary “polluters’ permit” strategy does very little to mediate current pollution or deal with the underlying problem—the massive amounts of manure.⁷¹ When it comes to corporations adhering to environmental standards, a voluntary approach is just not going to cut it.

The EPA’s Office of Water reported that approximately nineteen thousand CAFOs require permits, but only 8,300, or 43 percent, have discharge permits.⁷² Given these numbers, there are about eleven thousand factory farms that are discharging waste unregulated. Clearly, this system is completely unsustainable. Fortunately, the EPA recognized its lack of progress and declared factory farms a “national priority.” However, the EPA is still stuck focusing on compliance for discharge permits, not on providing actual penalties that would force compliance. Compounding this problem, the Clean Water Act only provides a federal foundation for establishing rules; it is up to the states to enforce them. As each state has varying rules, our nation’s current approach to remedying our water and environmental crisis from factory farms has proven haphazard and ineffective. Friends, the giant corporations keep raking in money while we, the taxpayers, are left footing the bill for cleaning our water sources. More importantly, we are running out of time to act.

All hope is not lost. Favorably, there have been instances where citizens have been able to push through state regulations that better protect our water sources and curb agribusiness’s extensive political clout. Consider New Mexico: Jerry Nivens, a concerned citizen who could no longer stand to see his waterways polluted, organized a petition that ended in New Mexico passing some of the most progressive dairy-water regulations to date. The dairy industry is the largest agricultural sector in New Mexico and has a strong influence in Congress. Yet, it also is responsible for polluting 60 percent of the state’s groundwater, where 90 percent of the people in the area get their water.73 Although the dairy industry put up a four-year fight against the regulations, Nivens and his team forever changed New Mexico law—showcasing that everyday citizens do make a difference.

Get Ready for Water Wars

Leading international organizations predict that the wars of the future will not be over oil, but clean water. Already there are hundreds of legal suits in the United States over rights to freshwater use. These water wars are just the beginning, because visibly clean water is a foundational necessity for all living beings to survive. Currently aquifers are being drawn at extreme rates—250 times their ability to refill. Already the twelve-million-year-old Ogallala Aquifer is predicted to run dry within in the next twenty years from overuse and abuse by the livestock industry.⁷⁴ With only 1 percent of freshwater available and a growing population of over seven billion, our water resources are strained at best, without having manure destroy what we have left.

As excessive amounts of liquid animal manure can easily access our waterways and drinking water, we stand to bankrupt not only our health but also one of the Earth’s most valuable and cherished resources—clean water. Waterways are a core component of the life cycle, and without our aquatic habitats, our whole ecosystem is doomed to fail. The frequency with which manure is contaminating our water sources and poisoning our groundwater that millions of us use for drinking water is now a nationwide problem. We need to deliver immediate and swift remediation and force agribusiness once and for all to clean up their sh!t.

Know your Sh!t Solutions:

1) Animal crap is now in everyone’s kitchens and backyards. Clean your fruits and veggies.

2) Filter your water. Beware of swimming in rivers, lakes, and streams.

3) Speak out against factory farms in your area! Each voice counts. Don’t want to be living next to a cesspool? Sign a petition! Raising our voices in unity can make these corporations liable for their messes.