Dairy farmers can’t catch a break from EPA

 

The US EPA wants US dairy farmers to regard the milk their cows produce as a hazardous substance. What's next: Haz-Mat placards on milk tankers? Photo © Todd Fitchette.

At the same time the US EPA is causing food prices around the globe to skyrocket as a result of policies to use corn as a fuel additive instead of an international food staple, one of the victims of the federal agency is in the cross hairs because of — what else — the food they create!

US dairy farmers are now being tasked to construct hazardous materials containment facilities and create disaster preparedness plans equivalent to those required by refineries and companies that store bulk hazardous materials. The premise: spilled milk could wind up in navigable water ways and cause an environmental disaster that millions of moms across America address in their kitchens on a daily basis with a few paper towels.

This falls on the heels of the EPA’s ruling that more ethanol needs to be in our gas tanks, rather than simply eating corn, which for centuries has been predominantly used for human and animal food. Because of federal policies aimed at converting corn into a fuel additive for America’s automobiles, dairy farmers in America are paying nearly $300 a ton for corn that just a few years ago was less than half that price and consumers all over the globe are paying double and triple the amount they once paid for corn-based food staples such as bread and tortillas.

What’s next from the EPA: Haz-Mat placards on milk tanker trucks? Or maybe the EPA could provide grants to American dairy farmers to help them raise more cats as a means of cleaning up the next environmental disaster when the milk tank ruptures and spews raw milk on the floor of the dairy parlor.

Related Articles

• EPA to Regulate Dairy Milk Spills as per Oil Spills (hotair.com)
• Ethanol’s ROI not just bad for MPG’s (Across the Back Fence)

Overstepping sovereign bounds

Image via Wikipedia

The US taxpayer will fund the cleanup of uranium on the sovereign lands of the Navajo and Hopi Indians, according to a story in the Farmington Daily Times newspaper.

Why?

The Navajo and Hopi nations are sovereign lands, run by sovereign governments. What purpose does the US taxpayer, through our environmental protection agency, have in cleaning up their mess?

Why is it that every time someone comes out against an Indian casino, the Indians espouse their sovereign right to control their own destiny and their own lands? If these uranium mines need to be cleaned up, and they exist on the lands of the Hopi’s and Navajo’s, then let them clean them up!

It’s not the responsibility of the US taxpayer or the government we employ!

More E. Coli sprouts in Salinas Valley: Could sludge be the cause?

The Associated Press is reporting that the Salinas-based company Fresh Express is recalling some of its bagged lettuce because of a positive test for E. Coli.

What the AP and others continue to ignore is any possible connection between the use of treated sewage sludge and municipal waste water on farms in the Salinas Valley. Certainly consumers would want to know if the food they are buying is being poisoned by cities looking for a cheap way to dispose of their sewage sludge.

Kudos to those who have banned the use of sewage sludge on farmland in other parts of California. With much of the nation’s salad coming out of the Salinas Valley it would be prudent at best to thoroughly investigate all sources of E. Coli in the Salinas Valley. It’s doubtful though that any connection to sludge will be determined given the politics behind the use of sewage sludge on farmland by cities, and the explicit suggestion by the EPA that this is safe, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Al Gore is a liar

Recently on the Tonight Show Al Gore told Conan and his audience that the temperature two kilometers (approximately 1.2 miles) below the surface of the earth is several million degrees. Of course we all know that Algore is trying to sell some snake oil potion (carbon credits) and the idea that man is causing the planet to heat up at such a rapid rate that we’ll all be dead in 10 years.

All this should be laughable at the very best since these clowns have been saying stuff like this with a straight face for decades now, and every 10 years after one of their doom-and-gloom predictions the Earth keeps spinning on its axis and it keeps revolving around the sun. The seasons change with regularity and the animals that were once predicted to be on the brink of extinction continue to exist without the help of mankind.

Let’s see here… a quick search on the Internet (Algore claims to have invented this as well) reveals that we can’t truly know what the temperature at the center of the Earth is, although we do have miners a couple kilometers down and they seem to be doing just fine in the cool conditions underground. But, if scientists were to venture a guess, the Web site Physlink.com reports that the center of the earth is approximately 4,000 degrees Celsius, or about 7,200 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take a couple degrees. For reference, we’ve estimated that the surface of the sun is approximately 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with an inner core temperature of our sun at about 15 million degrees Celsius, again, give or take a few hundred degrees.

This little bit of inconvenient truth apparently escaped Algore’s recent movie and his speeches that no sane person would pay to see, much less volunteer to attend even if paid.

So, if Algore is lying, and he’s using the so-called scientific data to support his claims, then shouldn’t it follow suit that the so-called scientific data that he claims is also invalid? Never mind the terabytes of e-mails and information recently released earlier this month that suggests the entire global-warming-is-man-caused community has pretty much ginned up everything in order to sell their scientific theories.

Which brings up another question: what do these so-called scientists and the political movement they support have to gain from these lies? I’d love an honest answer to that one.

Meanwhile, tonight’s temperatures in western Nevada and other parts of the Great Basin will fall to between 20 below and 40 below zero while blizzards continue to plague parts of the United States.

Dangerous staph on West Coast beaches… is there a link to sewage sludge and e coli

The reported discovery of dangerous staph germs on West Coast beaches bears considerable investigation given how, over recent years, reported outbreaks of e coli bacteria have made nationwide headlines.

On the surface this may not seem to be linked, but with reports of sewage effluent being dumped by coastal cities, including municipalities in California’s Bay area, it makes me wonder if there could be a connection between some of these dangerous strains of bacteria, and the growing discovery of e coli in America’s food supply. Could there be a link between the growing discovery of e-coli in vegetables and the latest discovery of staph on West Coast beaches?

Treated sewage sludge is said to be too dangerous to dump in the world’s oceans, but it’s perfectly acceptable, according to the EPA, to dispose of on farms, which still happens on a daily basis in California’s Central Valley as Los Angeles and Orange counties truck 25 tons of treated sewage at a time over the Grapevine and into California’s agricultural heartland. Not all of California’s agricultural counties accept this stuff. Some counties, such as Stanislaus and San Joaquin, have total bans on the land application of sewage sludge, but in Kern and Kings counties a dark black, smelly substance can be seen spewing from the backs of spreader trucks on thousands of acres of land used to grow all sorts of crops.

While America still produces the safest food supply on the planet, connecting the dots between some of these seemingly isolated stories, may be worth more than a cursory look.

Sewage sludge issue reaches White House garden with discovery of toxic levels of lead

I had to chuckle when I read the story, but the news isn’t funny.

It seems for years during the Clinton Administration that officials poured industrial waste, euphemistically called “sewage sludge,” onto the White House lawn and other areas around the White House in an attempt by the EPA to show that sewage sludge — “biosolids” as the industry likes to call it — is a safe soil amendment for the home gardener and the commercial farmer who feeds this nation and the world.

Fast-forward through two administrations and now it appears that the sludge that was poured onto the grounds of the White House is now responsible for the contamination of Michelle Obama’s “organic” garden. Well… it’s not “organic” anymore.

According to stories published by Mother Jones — http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/07/more-thoughts-sludge-and-white-house-garden — and — http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/06/did-sludge-lace-obamas-veggie-garden-lead — sewage sludge has poisoned the First Lady’s garden with toxic levels of lead well in excess of government standards, based on soil sample studies performed by the National Park Service. According to one story published by Mother Jones: “Starting in the late 1980s and continuing for at least a decade, the South Lawn was fertilized by ComPRO, a compost made from a nearby wastewater plant’s solid effluent.”

The danger with sludge is that it contains traces of almost anything that gets poured down sewer drains.

This was one of the arguments used against EPA officials who were regularly ferried at taxpayer expense to California in the late 1990s when the Stanislaus County Farm Bureau, based in Modesto, was pushing for an all-out ban on the application of sewage sludge on farmland in Stanislaus County. Stanislaus County is one of the top-10 ag-producing counties in the United States, with ag receipts in excess of $2 billion.

The issue not only pitted Farm Bureau against the government, a common occurrence, but it pitted farmers from various regions of California against the other as farmers in Kern County, California were regularly accepting loads of sewage sludge from Orange County, California. Not all farmers in Kern County were happy to see the stuff come into their county; vegetable farmers were rightfully concerned of the public relations nightmare that would ensue if people across the United States got wind that their vegetables might be tainted with the toxic substance. Even if it could be proved safe, the perception of sludge was enough to frighten farmers and keep them from wanting this stuff anywhere near their lands.

While this is not one of those hot-button topics of discussion around the water cooler or on the evening news, a story published online at http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92869 reminded me of just why this issue is so important; our government spent untold millions of dollars trying to convince people in California that the land-application of sewage sludge was safe, while out of the other side of their mouth, stating with certainty that the ocean-dumping of sewage sludge, which was previously practiced, was now too dangerous to aquatic life. This point was not lost on those pushing for the sludge ban in Stanislaus County, as it was argued in testimony before the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors in Modesto, CA during the sludge debate, if sewage sludge is too dangerous to dump in the oceans, it’s certainly too dangerous to dump on the nations farmland, where it can’t be diluted like it would be in the ocean.

I’m not necessarily arguing that we go back to ocean-dumping of sewage sludge, but we need to come up with a solution of safely disposing of this toxic stuff, rather than dumping it onto farmlands and pouring it into bags of composted materials that are sold at local home improvement stores and then dumped into backyard gardens and flower pots.