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Residents of some farming communities are being forced to put up with serious airborne bullshit.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reports on the growth of the revolting practice of using water irrigation systems to squirt manure over farmland.
So far, 14 of Wisconsin’s 258 dairy factory farms, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, are using the practice, which involves spraying fine mists of dung out of commercial sprinklers. Nearly all of North Carolina’s hog farms do likewise. The practice is also used in Iowa, Michigan, and other Midwestern farming states. From the Wisconsin Watch report:
Applying liquid manure to fields using pipelines and farm irrigation systems is less expensive than trucking manure and applying it with traditional land-spreading rigs. …
The issue is tied inextricably to the controversial spread of CAFOs across the Wisconsin landscape. The farms produce overwhelming amounts of manure and have angered and frustrated nearby residents who feel they have little control over the growth and operations of the industrial farms. Cattle on Wisconsin farms produce as much waste each year as the combined populations of Tokyo and Mexico City, according to calculations by Gordon Stevenson, a retired former chief of the [Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s] runoff management section. …
Spraying manure doesn’t just sound gross. It poses real human health risks:
Some research suggests that the plethora of chemicals and pathogens found in liquid manure can have serious health impacts, ranging from respiratory disease to potentially lethal antibiotic resistant infections. Opponents fear wider use of manure irrigation will increase the risk of human illness …
[C]ritics and even some proponents of manure irrigation say the practice can threaten water supplies.
Backers defend the spraying by saying it helps farms more precisely place their manure on their land. But try selling that crap to Wisconsinite Scott Murray, who sold his home several years ago after he and his family could no longer stand the manure mist drifting over from a neighboring CAFO. “It even got into the walls of our home,” Murray said. “It hurt so bad even to breathe.”
Source
Manure spraying under scrutiny, Wisconsin Watch
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Mother Jones
Over at The Upshot, a crack team of researchers has put together an interactive map showing which baseball teams are preferred in which regions of the country. The overall results are pretty predictable, of course, but the authors make a few interesting points about exactly where the geographical dividing lines are between traditional rivalries. I thought the most interesting part was which teams were left out completely. Here’s the map:
There is not a single zip code in the entire country that favors the New York Mets. Even in 11368, the home of Citi Field, fans prefer the Yankees by 53 to 25 percent.
And the Oakland A’s have it even worse. In 94501, the home of the Oakland Coliseum, fans prefer the San Francisco Giants by a whopping 59 to 18 percent. This is spectacularly embarrassing. The Mets, after all, are at least in the same city as the Yankees, so divided loyalties are natural. The A’s are in Oakland, a different city with a culture of its own. Sure, maybe there’s no there there, but that’s a culture! And yet, even the working-class East Bay has apparently been so taken over by yuppified San Franciscans escaping sky-high rents that the A’s can’t get any love even after being canonized by Michael Lewis and Brad Pitt as the champions of Moneyball. Sad.
(The Toronto Blue Jays aren’t on the map either, but I assume that’s because the map doesn’t include Canada. I draw no conclusions about Toronto’s fan base, though I suspect we can assume it’s pretty minimal too.)
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