Destroying Lake Erie

By JACK LESSENBERRY • JUL 6, 2016 

You might remember two years ago, when people in Toledo couldn’t drink the water for a couple days because it had been poisoned by toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie.

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Jack Lessenberry for July 6, 2016

That was terrifying, and we were told all sorts of precautions were being taken so that this would never happen again. Well, guess what. According to a number of respected environmental activists I interviewed last week, we are allowing so-called factory farms to dump hundreds of millions of untreated manure and liquid waste on land not far from Lake Erie, often when the ground is still frozen. 

That means a lot of it eventually flows into the lake.  More ...

Toledo panic shows Great Lakes at risk

August 7, 2014 at 1:00 am
THE GREAT LAKES
Toledo panic shows Great Lakes at risk
Gail Philbin

Toledo’s recent bout with poisoned drinking water should serve as a huge wake-up call to Michigan to take seriously the link between factory farming, water pollution and public health.

The story of how dangerous levels of a toxin ended up in the water supply of Ohio’s fourth-largest city is in large part the story of how we grow our food today and who decides what are considered good farming practices. The impetus for Toledo’s weekend water ban was microcystin, a toxin experts say can cause diarrhea, vomiting or abnormal liver function that probably formed in a recent algae bloom in Lake Erie. The soupy, pea-green growth in one of our Great Lakes is an increasingly common occurrence fed in part by phosphorus run-off from southern Michigan fields applied with commercial fertilizer or factory farm waste.

Why all the fertilizer and animal waste in our water? Because we eat lots of meat, dairy, poultry and eggs. The United States is the largest producer of corn in the world. Eighty percent of what we grow is consumed not by people but by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry and fish production, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Vast monocultures of corn require large amounts of fertilizer to grow.

We also like cheap food and buy products that come from industrial-scale, concentrated livestock facilities, many of which have been constructed in the last decade in western Lake Erie watersheds that include southern Michigan.

Such operations are favored by federal Farm Bill subsidies that keep their product prices artificially low. This taxpayer-funded support often goes to help construct manure lagoons and other systems for handling the huge amount of waste factory farms generate. Even so, it can end up polluting nearby waterways, as shown in the 2013 report, Restoring the Balance to Michigan’s Farming Landscape. The current subsidy system rewards polluters, giving an unfair advantage over healthy, sustainable livestock farms.

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Lake Erie algal bloom, photo by Tom Archer.

Thaw threatens water supplies with manure runoff

 


By Lee Bergquist of the Journal Sentinel                                  March 30, 201With warmer weather finally on the way, state officials are warning farmers and the public that there is a potentially high risk across most of Wisconsin for manure to pollute groundwater, streams, rivers and lakes.

Following the highest number of manure spills in seven years in 2013, this year's threat is due to melting snow and rainfall that could send soil and animal waste into streams.

Under the right conditions, manure also could soak into aquifers, from which drinking water is drawn.

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Michigan rivers polluted by human, animal waste more than double previous estimates

22 January 2014

by Jeff Alexander
Bridge Magazine contributor

Sign warns swimmers of pathogen pollution at a northern Michigan beach.

Pathogen pollution in Michigan’s lakes and rivers – caused by human and animal waste draining into surface waters – is far more widespread than previously documented, according to new state data.

The identification of rivers impaired by potentially harmful pathogens has more than doubled in recent years – from 3,359 miles in 2008 to 7,232 miles in 2012, according to a draft of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s 2014 impaired waters report obtained by Bridge.

Kevin Goodwin, a DEQ senior aquatic biologist, attributed the increase in pathogen pollution to local and state agencies testing more rivers for fecal matter.

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Water Hogs: Smithfield Pork Deal Trades US Water for Waste

From GRACE Communications Foundation
gracelinks.org | programs@gracelinks.org

This is the first of three posts about the possible limits to global meat production as resources are strained by growing populations, prosperity and meat consumption. (Part 2 and Part 3.)

Ultimately, the buyout of the world’s biggest pork producer, US-based Smithfield Food, by its giant Chinese counterpart, Shuanghui International, was a foregone conclusion. It was evident by the media’s muted response to both the merger approved by Smithfield shareholders late last month as well as the earlier announcement by the US federal government to grant the deal national security clearance. For China, by far the world’s largest pork market, this eagerly anticipated decision further assures their pork supply, already bolstered by a demand-stabilizing strategic pork reserve. This occurred despite the apprehensive tone of a mid-July Senate hearing in the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry that cast a bit of doubt over this monumental deal, the largest ever Chinese takeover by a US corporation. In the end, doubt was not involved.

Yet the hearing did air numerous important concerns about the transaction. Smithfield CEO, Larry Pope, and others were peppered with questions about the deal’s potential effect on food safety, foreign corporate ownership vis-à-vis American food security, the transfer of intellectual property and technology, the potential of pork price volatility for US consumers and China’s strength in the global food trade. All this is wrapped in the context of China as the biggest meat consumer in absolute terms, where the hunger for meat, and pork in particular, is expected to grow with its huge and rapidly expanding middle class.

But one big question mark that received little attention was implications of this huge merger for American water supplies. More importantly, just how much water does water-stressed China save in the Smithfield deal?

Even if the merger hasn’t been discussed as a massive water transfer, in essence it is, because the water requirements to raise livestock for meat production are enormous with pork one of the highest in the water department, although beef remains king. Consider the global average water footprint for one pound of pork is 576 gallons (while one pound of beef takes 1,799 gallons). Then consider the water inputs necessary for Smithfield in 2012 to process about 27.7 million hogs and package and distribute approximately 3.8 billion pounds of pork. The reason for meat’s tremendous water requirements is cumulative and due to the large quantity of feed consumed by animals over the course of their lifetimes. To cultivate the crops for feed in turn requires tremendous volumes of water.

Yet the water impacts don’t end with what’s coming in.

As sure as the hogs eat the feed they excrete manure, and a lot of it—approximately 1,200 pounds of manure per hog over its time on the “farm.” The manure generated by hogs and livestock is a valuable fertilizer in moderate quantities, yet in the US manure is an immense polluter of water, soil and air. The overabundance of manure stems from the system in which most animals are raised, that being industrialized facilities called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where many thousands of animals are intensively raised. While CAFOs offer certain benefits to a producer’s bottom line, they have negative costs for the health and well-being of the surrounding communities and natural environment. Besides the pollution caused by so much animal waste, other problems abound like disease outbreak risks from overcrowding, overreliance on chemicals and antibiotics (the latter was recently shown to increase antibiotic resistance near hog CAFOs), as well as poor animal welfare, to name a few. (For a full account of CAFOs many downsides, visit GRACE’s Sustainable Table.) In the case of the Shuanghui-Smithfield deal, not only has pork been purchased, but also the technical CAFO know-how.

To be sure, Shanghui and the Chinese government wanted to purchase Smithfield to supplement their pork supplies and improve their production methods, among other advantages. I’m not the first to note that the highest objective might have been to achieve these benefits without the harm to water (and other natural) resources. Rather than have Shuanghui simply ramp up production, the deal allows for China to avoid water withdrawals from dwindling supplies, on the one hand, and avoid water contamination from excessive manure loading, on the other. This is a pressing concern for China since most of its population lives in regions where surface water and groundwater are seriously polluted, plus it might prevent more distressing events like the 6,000 pig carcasses floating in the Huangpu River. At root, the Shuanghui-Smithfield deal cannot merely be viewed as exchange of pork, technology and revenue, but as a trade of water for waste, or, perhaps more aptly, Smithfield sold something that belongs to all of us—unpolluted water supplies.

Smithfield Foods must have recognized the value they provided to Shuanghui even if issues arose stateside. As Andrew Gunther of Animal Welfare Approved wrote in a sharply worded blog post a few months ago:

Despite the ever-growing concern among U.S. consumers about the impact of intensive livestock operations on our health and the local environment, the nation's largest pork producer has sold out to meet the growing Chinese demand for cheap pork—and it is more than happy to pollute our environment and harm our health in doing so.

As meat consumption and production grow in the coming years, such transactions as the Shuanghui-Smithfield must be understood within a much broader scope of natural resource use and abuse, as well as the potential costs and benefits exacted on people, animals and the environment. For all the talk in the Senate hearing, on these three important issues, what spoke the loudest is what went undiscussed.

Want to learn more about the impact of CAFOs? Watch the animated video short and worldwide hit, The Meatrix, which has been translated into 20 languages including Chinese. For more in-depth content, check out Sustainable Table's Industrial Agriculture section.

Spring Rain, Then Foul Algae in Ailing Lake Erie

Algae blooms, like this one in 2011, are threatening Lake Erie.

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: March 14, 2013

TOLEDO, Ohio — For those who live and play on the shores of Lake Erie, the spring rains that will begin falling here soon are less a blessing than a portent. They could threaten the very future of the lake itself.

Lake Erie is sick. A thick and growing coat of toxic algae appears each summer, so vast that in 2011 it covered a sixth of its waters, contributing to an expanding dead zone on its bottom, reducing fish populations, fouling beaches and crippling a tourism industry that generates more than $10 billion in revenue annually.

The spring rains reliably predict how serious the summer algae bloom will be: the more frequent and heavy the downpours, the worse the outbreak. And this year the National Weather Service says there is a higher probability than elsewhere of above-normal spring rains along the lake’s west end, where the algae first appear. The private forecaster Accuweather predicts a wetter than usual March and April throughout the region.

It is perhaps the greatest peril the lake has faced since the 1960s, when relentless and unregulated dumping of sewage and industrial pollutants spawned similar algae blooms and earned it the nickname “North America’s Dead Sea.” Erie recovered then, thanks to a multibillion-dollar cleanup by the United States and Canada that became a legendary environmental success story.

But while the sewage and pollutants are vastly reduced, the blooms have returned, bigger than ever.

Once, fisheries and sports anglers pulled five million walleye from the rejuvenated lake every year. Today the catch is roughly one-fifth that, the Environmental Protection Agency says. Commercial fisheries’ smelt catch is three-fifths of past levels. The number of charter fishing companies has dropped 40 percent. Sport fish like walleye and yellow perch are deserting the lake’s center and moving shoreward in search of oxygen and food.

“We’ve seen this lake go from the poster child for pollution problems to the best example in the world of ecosystem recovery. Now it’s headed back again,” said Jeffrey M. Reutter, who directs the Sea Grant College Program at Ohio State University.

The algae problem is hardly isolated. Similar blooms are strangling other lakes in North America and elsewhere, including Lake Winnipeg, one of Canada’s largest, and some bays in Lake Huron.

The algae are fed by phosphorus, the same chemical that American and Canadian authorities spent billions to reduce — for good, they believed — in the 1970s and ‘80s. This time, new farming techniques, climate change and even a change in Lake Erie’s ecosystem make phosphorus pollution more intractable.

Like plants, algae thrive on a phosphorus diet. Decades ago, some 64 million pounds of phosphorus flowed into Lake Erie each year from industrial and sewer outfalls, leaky septic tanks and runoff from fertilized lawns and farms.

The United States and Canadian governments responded by capping household detergent phosphates, reining in factory pollutants and spending $8 billion to upgrade lakeside sewage plants. Phosphorus levels plunged by two thirds, and the algae subsided. But in the mid-1990s, it began creeping back.

“2002 was the last year that we didn’t have much of a bloom,” said Thomas Bridgeman, a professor at the Lake Erie Center at the University of Toledo. “2008, ’09 and ’10 were really bad years for algal blooms.

“And then we got 2011.”

2011 was the wettest spring on record. That summer’s algae bloom, mostly poisonous blue-green algae called Microcystis, sprawled nearly 120 miles, from Toledo to past Cleveland. It produced lake-water concentrations of microcystin, a liver toxin, that were 1,200 times World Health Organization limits, tainting the drinking water for 2.8 million consumers.

Dead algae sink to the lake bed, where bacteria that decompose the algae consume most of the oxygen. In central Lake Erie, a dead zone now covers up to a third of the entire lake bottom in bad years.

“The fact that it’s bigger and longer in duration is a bad thing,” said Peter Richards, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University in Ohio. “Fish that like to live in cold bottom waters have to move up in the thermocline, where it’s too warm for them. They get eaten, and that tends to decrease the growth rates of a lot of the fish.”

Last spring, the rains arrived amid a record drought, and the algae retreated to waters near Toledo. “We had two extremes in two years,” Mr. Bridgeman said. “The lake responded exactly the way we thought it would.”

But no one hopes for a drought. To cut phosphorus levels this time, scientists say, the habits — and the expensive equipment — of 70,000 farmers along the Erie shore must change. Most of the phosphorus that feeds algae these days comes from farmland.

Much of the phosphorus originates near Toledo, where the Maumee River completes a 137-mile journey and empties into the lake’s shallow western basin.

The Maumee watershed is Ohio’s breadbasket, two-thirds farmland, mostly corn and soybeans. Farming there is changing radically, said Steve Davis, a watershed specialist with the United States Agriculture Department’s Natural Resource Conservation Service.

Plowing is declining; 55 percent of farmland is planted using anti-erosion methods promoted by the Resource Conservation Service, like no-till farming, in which seeds are inserted into small holes in unplowed ground. Fertilizing is now contracted to companies that cast pellets onto the bare ground from trucks, or to “factory farms” that spray liquefied animal waste on their cropland.

Mr. Davis has analyzed his watershed almost to the last cornstalk. Animal waste makes up 14 percent of all fertilizer. The rest is fertilizer pellets, 48 pounds per acre. In past days, most pellets sank into plowed soil and stayed there. Now, rain and snowmelt wash an average 1.1 of those 48 pounds off unplowed soil. Much winds up in the Maumee, then in Lake Erie.

The Maumee supplies only about 5 percent of Erie’s water, but half its phosphorus. And while algae struggle to digest ordinary phosphorus — only about 30 percent gets taken up — fertilizer phosphorus is designed for plants to use instantly.

Two other recent changes make matters still worse.

One is the zebra mussel, a foreign invader that has dominated Erie since its discovery in 1988. Millions of mussels feast on nontoxic green algae, removing competitors to the toxic Microcystis algae and decimating the base of the food chain that supports Erie’s fish. Then in a vicious cycle, mussels excrete the algae’s phosphorus, providing the Microcystis a ready-made meal.

The other is climate change. Only heavy rains wash fertilizer off farmland, and since 1940, Mr. Richards said, heavy spring rainstorms have increased by 13 percent.

The Maumee’s phosphorus can be limited, Mr. Davis says, but only if farmers change their approach. More soil testing and new G.P.S.-guided machinery can ensure that crops receive the minimum fertilizer they need. Other new equipment can put fertilizer in the ground during planting instead of pellets being broadcast in the winter. Leaving land fallow beside streams reduces runoff.

The catch is that fertilizing is already efficient: that wasted 1.1 pounds is but 2 percent of all pellets spread on Maumee-area farms. “When you’re only losing a pound per acre,” Mr. Davis said, “how do you cut it to a half?”