Whatcha Gonna Do (With All That Poo)? : Nitty-Gritty

America's meat consumption is at the top of the world, and we're eating more every year. At the same time, most Americans are moving further from their food—geographically and emotionally. When grilling a frozen burger patty, it might be hard to picture cows as living creatures that breath and eat and poop. But they do. And they doo-doo. To the tune of some thirteen million metric tons of livestock waste every year.

There are far too many ways to manage this manure to explore fully here, and frankly such an exploration sounds pretty off-putting. Instead, I'll give an overview of the two systems that (very generally speaking) produce most of the beef in the United States: the small, organic farm and the large feedlot. Both systems can and do inadvertently pollute our water supply, and both can and should be safer, smarter and cleaner.

Small organic farm

Bald Hill Farms, where my family gets most of its beef, occupies several dozen acres in the hills near my home in Oregon. They raise cattle, sheep, goats and one cat that thinks it's a goat. Cattle spend three to four years roaming the fields, growing bigger and fatter, until they are sent to a slaughterhouse where the meat is harvested and processed.

In many ways this style of farming looks much like the meat production of centuries past. In some ways it even looks like meat production millennia ago, when people had very little to do with the process. Food is right there where the cattle live. The sun makes the grass grow, the grass makes the cows grow and the cows fertilize their pastures with their own manure. It's a solar powered system.

But that doesn't mean it has no environmental impact. The heavy rains that drench my hometown wash manure right off of Bald Hill down into the valley, where creeks meet the Willamette River on its way to the Pacific Ocean. Manure collected from Bald Hill's barn and used in agriculture faces the same problem.

Feedlot

A steer whose life ends in a feedlot start outs just like the cattle that are born up at Bald Hill. It spends its first few months out on the range with its mother. But when it gains enough weight, the farmer sends it to a feedlot.

Here, its life changes drastically. Instead of grazing acres of grass, it is served up three heaping meals of corn and protein supplement a day. The corn is cheap (thanks to government subsidies of America's flagship crop) and fattening. Unfortunately, the rich diet doesn't agree with the steer's body chemistry, and the resulting acid slowly wears away its stomach. The manure accumulating in their stalls poses further health risks. The solution? Lots and lots of antibiotics.

In the end, the intense regimen of food and drugs—not to mention the regular addition of hormones to the steer's blood stream—is economically worth it. Instead of the three-plus years a grass-fed cow takes to grow, the feedlot steer is ready for slaughter in a mere 14 months.

It's not just time and economics that favors feedlots, but human development. As more and more fields are converted to housing projects, there is simply less room for livestock. America's current cattle population could not be supported by America's rangelands. Small farms like Bald Hill are disappearing, replaced by enormous feedlot operations. Today, 84 percent of America's beef comes from the largest 4 percent of feedlots, many of which can fatten 30,000 to 100,000 cattle at a time.

Feedlots cut costs, but they essentially decouple meat production from the rest of agriculture. Food must be transported to stores in fossil-fuel-burning trucks. Manure must be collected, processed, stored and either disposed of or transported back to the fields to be used as fertilizer. Every step of this process uses up fossil fuels, and creates another opportunity for manure to leach into the water supply.

Pollution

Hormones
Feedlot cattle are on so many hormones to bulk them up, it is no surprise that their manure has shown elevated hormone levels. One study showed that 50 percent of progesterone administered to a cow ends up in its manure. When that manure enters rivers, these hormones can interfere with the development of fish, causing altered sexual characteristics. (An organic farm that does not use hormones would not contribute to this problem.)

Pathogens
The antibiotics used on cattle are fairly successful at killing most bacteria, but those that survive can develop into resistant strains that are extremely hard to stop. A particularly virulent strain of E. coli is found in most feedlot cattle. Every year, 73,000 cases are reported in humans. The close quarters and intense conditions of a feedlot facilitate the spread of disease, so small farms are less effected by this issue.

Nutrients
In addition to carbohydrates, plants provide cattle with several essential nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus. However, cattle only absorb about a quarter of these nutrients. The rest ends up in the manure. This is why manure is such a successful fertilizer—it is recycled plant. Even in the age of synthetic fertilizer, manure is commonly used as soil amendment. This is all well and good when the manure stays in the soil. In clay or loamy soils, surface runoff and leaching can remove 10 to 40 percent of the nutrients. In sandy soils, this figure is closer to 60 percent. These lost nutrients end up in the watershed.

The Dead Zone
Once it is in the water, manure does what all good fertilizers do—it helps things grow. But in streams, rivers, estuaries and the ocean, an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus stimulates the exponential growth of algae. The algae dies, and microbes use up most of the dissolved oxygen during their decomposition. The nearly oxygen-less water cannot support life. It is a dead zone.

One of the largest dead zones in the world is in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi. It spans thousands of square miles and has crippled local fisheries. A study from the U.S. Geological Survey traced the nutrients responsible to America's meat-making heartland.

Watersheds responsible for the Gulf dead zone

Source of nutrients in Gulf dead zone

Solutions

Feed Management
The easiest way to reduce the nutrients in livestock manure is to reduce the nutrients in the feed. Farmers often overfeed to make sure every animal gets as much as they can possibly use.

• Dividing livestock into groups based on sex, weight or age and determining the optimal portions for each one could reduce manure nutrients by up to 40 percent.
• Grind up the feed before feeding to increase the likelihood that most of the nutrients will be absorbed by the animal.
• Enzyme additives similarly can make nutrients easier to absorb.

Facility and Pasture Management
Areas of high manure density have greater risk of runoff

• Place a barn uphill from an area of pasture that can act as a filter.
• Make sure feedlot gutters drain into areas of vegetation, not directly into the watershed.
• Protect manure storage facilities from rainfall and surface runoff.

Grazing Management
A healthy pasture retains more manure than a sparse one, and a pasture that retains manure will be healthier.

• Rotate livestock through several sections of pasture to allow the grass to grow back.
• Clip large shrubs and weeds that compete with grass.

Compost
Manure can be applied directly to fields, or combined with plant and food waste to form an even richer compost. Compost can often be an extra source of revenue. While composting makes the manure more valuable and a better soil supplement, an exposed compost pile can still be eroded by rain.

Agricultural Use
When used correctly, manure is a wonderful alternative to synthetic fertilizers and in fact a means to reduce water pollution. The organic matter improves soil structure, and the organic nitrogen can slowly cultivate plant growth.

• Careful monitoring of soil conditions will allow a farmer to apply the correct quantity of manure so excess manure does not leach into the water supply.
• Fertilizing with manure before or after heavy rain or irrigation should be avoided, to minimize runoff.
• Injection of the manure or incorporation within a day of distribution reduces the chance of runoff.

Storage
Manure must be stored in the time between its collection and its use or processing. If manure is in solid form, it may be stacked, but it is important (especially in areas with lots of rainfall) to have a roof and a cement floor to prevent runoff.

If manure is handled in a slurry or liquid form, nutrient loss is reduced in above-ground tanks. Unfortunately, these tanks usually cost about twice as much as earthen basins, which have greater risk of leaching.

Energy production
Manure can be burned to produce biogas and processed into a kind of oil. But by far the most promising technique for energy generation from manure is anaerobic digestion. Manure is washed out of the feedlot into a tank. There, microbes digest the manure in low-oxygen conditions and release methane that can be burned as fuel. This process reduces the amount of methane that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. This process is a very popular waste-management technique. The resulting sludge is still a nutrient-rich soil additive that must be handled with care, but the energy produced more than pays for the waste handling. Odors are also reduced up to 95 percent. In Hereford, Texas, an ethanol fuel plant saves 1,000 barrels of oil per day by using manure fuel. The farmers bring the plant the manure free of charge because it saves them the cost of disposal. In nearby Stephenville, Texas, a large anaerobic digestion facility with a capacity of 916,000 gallons was recently opened. Using the manure from a single cow, the plant can power an average Texas home. If all the tanks are filled, the facility can produce 650 million Btu of natural gas per year.

Money
Some of these measures will actually save farmers money—for example, grinding up feed reduces the nutrients in manure and the total amount of feed needed to nourish the cow. Some of them, like the anaerobic digester, have a high initial cost but eventually pay for themselves. Still, many of these strategies do come with a significant cost.

Luckily, there are government programs that will help farmers with more environmentally responsible manure management. (If you are against government subsidies, remember it was largely the subsidy of corn that made feedlots possible in the first place.)

Consumers: eat grass-fed meat, less meat, or no meat
The central reason that meat is produced in feedlots is economic. Grass-fed beef costs you more because it costs the farmer more. But if you buy grass-fed beef, you'll be supporting a more eco-friendly system, and investing in a healthier world.

But this investment might not be enough. The bottom line is that meat takes more energy and land to produce than any other food, and many of the environmental problems of the world (deforestation, erosion, ocean eutrophication, species loss, greenhouse gases—not to mention health problems) are strongly tied to our stubborn insistence to eat more meat than we need. If you really want to reduce manure pollution, skip the steak.

Whatcha Gonna Do (With All That Poo)

All across America there's people eatin' meat
'Cause they like the way that it tastes
But they don't know that a single pound of beef
Makes a hundred pounds of fecal waste
See the cows keep masticatin', and their stomachs keep digestin
And all this waste creation leaves me with one question. . .

CHORUS:
watcha gonna do,
watcha gonna do,
watcha gonna do with all that poo?

Cows ate grass in their home out on the range
Until the land got developed into towns
Now they're in the feedlot eating corn flakes
With some hormones to wash 'em down
And instead of fertilizin' the fields where they graze
Those big brown piles are risin' day after day

CHORUS

Each slice of cowpie has a pinch nitrogen
And phosphorus is the whipped cream
It leaks from the silos and the fields and then
Pollutes the rivers and streams
Now fish are growing tumors cause they drank too many hormones
And oceanic algal bloomers create anoxic dead zones

Our problem with manure has a simple cure:
Eat fewer moo-ers and the poo-ers will be fewer
Our water will be pure, our oceans will be bluer
Our planet will endure of that you can be sure. . .
But if demand for meat increases and the fields are over-nourished
And the farmers lose their leases so suburbia can flourish
And we're faced with all the waste of ten billion head of cattle. . .
We'll be up manure creek without the proverbial paddle

CHORUS

This whole rigamarole is full of bull, or my name isn't Adam Cole.