Animal waste

ANIMAL WASTE
Animal manure poses a national environmental risk. Amounting to 1.3 billion tons a year in the U.S., it exceeds the amount of human waste by 130 times, and there are no national standards for treating it. See Water. .

• Animal Waste Major Water Polluter - According to a report by the U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee, animal waste is the major water polluter in the U.S. For example, a single 50,000-acre hog farm in Utah creates more waste than the city of Los Angeles and has no sewage plant to treat it. Premium Standard Farms, the nation’s second largest hog producer, produces five times more waste than the city of St. Louis. The study found that 60 percent of the nation's rivers and streams were "impaired" by agricultural runoff. In 1996, for example, 40 animal waste spills killed 670,000 fish in Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, double the number of spills four years previously. Excess nutrients form agricultural runoff have flowed down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico where they have created a dead zone, in which no living organisms can survive, the size of New Jersey.
Source: "Large Amounts of Animal Manure Pose Environmental Risks," Associated Press, December 28, 1997; Stan Grossfeld, “Animal Waste Emerging as U.S. Problem,” Boston Globe, September 21, 1998.

• Animal Waste and Pollution of Chesapeake Bay - The outbreak of pfisteria piscida, a microorganism that has decimated fish populations in Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest and richest coastal estuary, has been linked with animal wastes along Maryland's rural Eastern Shore, site of one of the country's largest concentration of poultry farms. Physicians further confirmed that people who eat contaminated fish were at risk of coming down with a mysterious illness first observed by local fisherman that is characterized by chronic difficulties with learning and memory, as well as skin rashes and respiratory problems. Even young, vigorous men were unable to remember simple, basic things.
Excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous from the poultry farms have polluted rivers in the region and are believed to have turned the organisms, first identified in 1992, from a benign spore lying on the bottom of streambeds, into a powerful toxin. The Eastern Shore, encompassing part of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, has 625 million chickens, and the poultry industry is growing at a rate of 20 percent yearly. "When you've got such a huge concentration [of animals] with literally millions of tons of waste, the land is not going to be able to absorb it," Chad Smith a local environmentalist noted.
Source: David Lauter, "Livestock Wastes Pose Health Threat," Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1997.

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