Roy Blunt knows manure

What’s that smell?

Insert your own Roy Blunt joke here:

Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-K Street) has filed legislation declaring that manure is not toxic.

What’s it all about? Doing favors for the agribusiness industry, as usual:

Southwest Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt is an original cosponsor, along with Congressman Ralph Hall, of a measure introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that removes manure from a classification of toxic substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund. The Hall-Blunt measure is designed to ensure that farms, ranches and other properties that apply manure will not become Superfund sites. Twenty-eight other members of Congress join in cosponsoring the bill.

It’s not likely that the family hog farmer needs to have environmental rules rewritten. Corporate hog farms, on the other hand, are no doubt delighted for Blunt’s intercession:

An average CAFO [corporate hog farm] will slaughter as many as 1 million or more hogs a year. One “plant” in Sioux Falls, SD, owned by Smithfield Foods, killed nearly 17,000 hogs a day in 2001. That’s more than 6 million a year! With the average adult hog excreting almost 3 gallons of waste in a day, many of these factories will generate hundreds of tons of waste every day. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources reported that one plant in Northern Missouri generated nearly five times more waste than the entire population of Kansas City.

Animal waste, called slurry, is discarded in huge uncapped lagoons or spread over farmland. This manure contains significant levels of heavy metals, such as copper, nickel and manganese, contained in growth supplements that are given to the hogs. These metals cannot be fully digested and are heavily concentrated in the animals waste.

More (with emphasis):

While cities and many home and land owners are required to treat their waste, factory farms are not. Untreated animal excrement is freely discarded on the land and in lagoons and carries with it all the health and environmental hazards as other waste. “Hog wastes contain parasites, bacteria and viruses, including salmonella, campylobacter, e. coli, cryptosporidium, giardia, cholera, streptococcus and chlamydia.”

Untreated waste that is disposed of in pits or over farmland easily contaminate water and air and leads to severe illness among the unfortunate neighbors of factory farms and many others who live down stream and or down wind. Home and land owners who use streams and wells for irrigations, watering animals and home water use find their water to be strong smelling, foul tasting and frequently undrinkable. Likewise, odor from factory farms and their lagoons can be intense many miles from their site. People living in the path of these fumes and toxic gases suffer from numerous physical and psychological symptoms such as nausea and frequent vomiting, headaches, blackouts, allergies and asthma and depression.

What could make a politician overlook the hazards inherent in waste derived from corporate hog farming? Well, here’s a possibility: parties connected with the National Pork Producers Council funneled $5,000 to Blunt during the 2005-2006 election cycle. One thousand dollars in like fashion during the 2004 cycle. Fifteen hundred dollars during the 2002 cycle. And so on. It’s steady income, and yet it’s just a fraction of the largesse gifted to Blunt by agribusiness since 1998: nearly $425,000. It certainly explains Blunt’s willingness to serve the industry in other ways, such as his successful efforts to defeat mandatory country of origin labeling for all meat products, substituting instead a weaker “voluntary” labeling scheme.

Something smells about Blunt’s latest attempt to shield agribusiness from regulation - and it’s not the manure.

Technorati Tags: Roy Blunt, Agribusiness, Hog Farming, Missouri