Standing in Their Own Urine and Feces
That phrase (taken from Tana Butler’s comment a week or so ago), or something close to it, has become one of the slogans that food activists use to suggest that large scale modern livestock farming is a disaster.
And it does sound pretty horrid, doesn’t it? We wouldn’t want to stand in our feces and urine. We don’t want the cattle, pigs and chicken that provide us with our meat and milk to be up to their hocks in shit either.
So what can we say about this? As anyone who has ever kept a dog or a cat knows, urine and feces are a damned nuisance. An animal produces an amazing amount for its size and rarely when it suits you. Luckily we can put our kitty litter or the dog feces we’ve scooped into a plastic bag and get rid of them with the trash.No trash pick up for the farmer.
Good husbandry means keeping the animals as clean as possible and, if you can, using their waste as fertilizer. Animals will be animals and they don’t necessarily have our aversion to stepping in dung.
It’s not true that in the past this was not a problem. Until a hundred years ago in the north of Scotland (and lots of other places too) cattle and people shared the same house during the winter, a low dividing wall between them. On the cattle side a hole in the wall allowed the urine to run out. The dung stayed. And the human waste?
It’s not true that small organic farms don’t have a problem. Want to see a small organic dairy farm with cows up to their hocks in urine and feces? Drive ten miles south of me in Guanajuato Mexico. Twelve miserable cows in miserable conditions. Should be shot. I would not buy milk from them for loving nor money.
So farmers have put lots of effort for centuries into trying to deal with this problem. It’s not so easy. Take dairies. If you are to have any kind of machine milking, dairy cattle have to be assembled twice a day so that they can go to the milking machines.
If the herd is kept in the yard (and in most parts of the world this is necessary in winter when grass is not growing, cold winds are blowing, and fields will be trampled to mud if the cattle get on them), then you have to have some system to handle the dung and urine.
In my youth, it was spreading straw every day to give a clean bed. The bed got higher and higher until in Spring the heads of the cows were almost touching the roof. But it was dry underfoot, not too hard, and warm. In early summer the compacted mass was cut out and put in the dung spreader and distributed over the fields.
Just today I had a note from my nephew, earning money to support his college, one-day-eventing and saxophone costs. One line. “Shoveling shit all day, welcome to the country.”
Aha, you may say, but why don’t we keep the beef or dairy cattle pastured (out to grass)? Well, it is one thing to be running beef cattle on arid lands. There the dung and urine is not really a problem.
It’s also not the solution. In most parts of the world, dairy cattle can’t be kept out all year. Even when they can in the summer, they need good grass close to the milking parlor. The grass is quickly covered with cowpats. You have to (or had to) go over the field with a harrow to spread the pats out or you ended up with patches of rank grass that the cattle would not eat.
And when the cattle go in to milk , if the gateway is not concrete, it will get muddy with the urine and cow dung will get mixed in as the cows trample through.
(Of course in poor arid countries cow dung is collected for fuel, without which the poor could not cook, but which unleashes a whole other series of consequences).
And, it is not at all clear, that we can meet the demand for meat and milk with extensive animal operations.
Not surprisingly farmers and ag schools spend lots of time talking about how to deal with manure.
- Here’s a spreadsheet that allows you to calculate what manure is worth.
- Here’s the beginning of an excerpt from an exercise given in the Ag School at Purdue, hog farming this time.
A serious concern facing many livestock producers is the selection of a waste handling system that best fits their specific situation. The following problem is intended to provide an opportunity to learn how to assist producers in making this decision. The example farm is based loosely on an existing farm in Montgomery County, Indiana.
Assume that a farmer (age 59) and his son (age 27) farm 630 acres in Montgomery County, Indiana and raise hogs. These farmers have hired you to evaluate waste disposal options and make a recommendation. Your job is to recommend a specific waste handling system for the farm. Support your decision with a brief written report and show appropriate calculations. You may work in groups of 2 in completing this problem – in the report indicate responsibilities in completing the effort. Note there is no one “right” solution, but you must be able to provide a convincing argument for your recommendation.
Read the rest here.
- And here are details on Smithfield’s (of swine flu fame) $15 million agreement with North Carolina on ways of dealing with pig manure. http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/waste_mgt/smithfield_projects/smithfieldsite.htm Definitely needs doing.
- Gluttons for more? Google “animal waste management.”
So to wrap up. It’s a problem. Everyone knows it’s a problem. You can’t bottle up the animals.
I would bet dollars to donuts that with some exceptions (the pork waste lagoons perhaps, though I need to read more about this) we have better ways of dealing with large quantities of manure than any time in history. Give me big farmers with buildings designed to deal with this, spread sheets to work out optimal spreading rates, machinery, and money.
That’s not to say there isn’t always room for improvement.
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I can have lots to say about this topic (as usual)… But briefly, in regions that are biomass poor, manure is at a premium. Here and Rwanda, for example, where population to land ratio demands increasinly intensive farming practices. A couple of days ago, for example, I sold 21 sacks of goat manure from our multiplication herd for about $1.00 a sack. That’s a lot to pay but indicates value of the product.
diana.
Yes, here in Mexico abono de chivo (goat manure) is highly valued and sells at a good price. And I’ve read interesting studies on the conflict between using cow dung for fuel and for manure in India.
Even in England when I was growing up, we used all the dung from about 150 cattle for about the same number of acres. And even that was not enough to keep the mixed farming rotation going. We needed “a bit of the old artificial” to keep the whole system going.
Rachel, you mention “running beef cattle on arid lands…. dung and urine is not really a problem.”
As a kid in southern Idaho (8″ to 15″ annual average percip.) I saw this differently. Cattle cannot be left on the open range in the winter. They can’t find patches of dry grass that is covered by a few inches of snow AND they scatter and freeze to death. That is what the Fall Round-up is all about — bringing the herd into close pastures where they can huddle together behind wind shelters for warmth and can be fed by tossing hay from a wagon or pickup bed twice a day, even in blizzard conditions. Also, when the calves start coming the cow is taken into a barn or shed where she can be watched and helped if necessary. Birthing is dangerous for mother and for child in any mammal and even if the cow survived on the range, the calf would be likely to freeze or be eaten by predators. The winter pastures can be pretty rank by spring when the herd is back on the range. Means are used to scoop&spread fertilizer on the irrigated hay fields that will provide food for the herd for the next winter. Usually, extra hay must also be bought. This is not romantic. People are maimed and die young. Feed lots are a much safer, more risk free way to get beef.
Thanks for that corrective and the vivid account of beef cattle in Idaho, Kay. More grist for the mill.
here’s my modern day greek experience if dung and manure
my husband is an avid gardener – he goes to great lengths to acquire sheep and goat dung for the garden. when he brings it home in his pick up truck, he smells, the car smells, the area around our garden smells and the dung smell wont go away until it is spread in the garden, it rains, and the soil absorbs it
then there’s the children’s shcool, which is located in a village area known for sheep and goat farming. i smell the dung every day for nine months of the year when i take the children to school, and we’re not even walking in it – it isn;t even visible to us!
Are that smell is penetrating, isn’t it? I always try to spread goat dung before we go away for a few days, preferably when huge rain clouds are threatening.
Another fertilizer experience:
Some years ago I lived in Austria near the Bavarian border. There was quite a bit of dairy farming and the milking barns would be washed out daily. (no water shortage in that area) The muck went down a drain into underground holding tanks and in the spring the slurry was pumped into tanks on trailers behind tractors which, in turn, had pumps that forced it through a giant whirlygig contraption 20+ feet in diameter which swung round&round in a horizontal arc covering everything in the path of the tractor with this nutritious brown smelly rain.
Yup, my father just loved watching this. It lifted his heart.
hello this really touched my heart. This book, atleast I think it is a book, tells about us……… basicly. Thank you, goodbye
and my teacher is a dairy cow farmer and he showed us how different dairy cows and beef cows are treated and how they look. dairy cows are much much leaner, more like a athlete. yet beef cows look pudgy and fat. PICKLES!
My Boyfriend is a truck driver and I ride with him ,we drive up the I 5 north twice a week and we pass bye a dairy there must be about 500to 800 cows lying in there poop we feel so sorry for them .that we talked about going to the farm and letting them know what they are doing is bad and to see.